The reason why Italy took the lead in the Renaissance was, that Italy possessed a language, a favorable climate, political freedom, and commercial prosperity, at a time when other nations were still semi-barbarous.

Where the human spirit had been buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins of that Empire; and the Papacy, called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, seated, throned and crowned, upon the ashes thereof, to some extent bridged over the gulf between the two periods.
Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the Renaissance was intellectual, that it was the emancipation of the reason for the modern world, we may inquire how feudalism was related to it.
The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration before the idols of the Church--dogma and authority and scholasticism.
Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by the brute weight of material necessities.

Without the power over the outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate, without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult hold upon existence.

To depreciate the work achieved during the Middle Ages would be ridiculous.

Yet we may point out that it was done unconsciously--that it was a gradual and instinctive process of becoming.