ABSTRACT
In the sixteenth century there was a steady assimilation over the whole continent of Italian artistic and educational programmes, and the moral values of the civic humanists of Florence, as translated by the courts of Italy in the later fifteenth century, were to be acclimatized in the north. The steady traffic in eastern commodities had done little to disperse the fog of incomprehension, though it might have done if the direct trading of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries had not come to an abrupt end with the advent of the Ming dynasty in China. The full development of the Atlantic route to the East by the Portuguese and to the Americas by the Castilians lay ahead, although some of the elements in later Spanish colonization and commerce were firmly established by earlier Italian and Catalan involvement in trade and political settlement in the Mediterranean.
