The Renaissance is typically recognised as having formally ‘begun’ in the 1300s, but it peaked during the 1500s and 1600s with the work of legends like Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo setting a new high standard for the arts. This period of Italia’s history saw art, culture, and cultural art massively proliferate throughout the peninsula and the world. Completed circa 1472-1475, this painting is one of Leonardo’s earliest works and roughly contemporary with the time period of the game. By 1454, the major players of our tale had been proliferated: Florence, Milan, and Venice signed the Peace of Lodi in that year, bringing something resembling peace to the peninsula – peace which would last throughout the burgeoning decades of the glorious Italian Renaissance.Ībove: Leonardo’s Annunciation. The condottieri were usually from other parts of Europe such as Germany or Switzerland, but leadership roles among them typically fell to Italian captains. Few of these city-states had formal sovereign armies, instead opting to do battle with companies of mercenaries known as condottieri. Strong city-states absorbed the lands around them, leading wealthy merchant states to take a front seat in regional politics and form de facto dynasties. Colleoni was a prominent condittiero of the 1400s.īut what’s this! Trouble in paradise! In the 1300s and 1400s, these city-states were constantly feuding and warring, and the Papal States grew to control significant chunks of the Italian Peninsula. Right: Statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni by Andrea del Verrocchio. This allowed the Italian city-states to prosper, with a powerful merchant class allowing increased political freedom and by extension thriving arts and academia. By 1180, independent city-states had formed and joined together in the Lombard League to drive out the forces of the German Holy Roman Empire. The invasion of the Lombards set the peninsula on course for roughly 1,000 years of successive invading kingdoms, with the Lombards being absorbed into the Kingdom of the Franks (Francia, or the Frankish Empire) by the year 900. Italia fell to the Ostrogoths during this period, after which it was then briefly reconquered by Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in the Gothic War of 535-554. The Roman Empire’s de facto split into the Western Roman Empire and the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire, followed by the dissolution of the Western Empire altogether in 476 CE gave way to the Middle Ages – a period that continued onto a hazy finish around the time of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The nation’s modern-day capital city of Rome once served as the heart of the Roman Republic, followed by the mighty Roman Empire. In fact, the land that was historically called ‘ Italia’ has a long and storied history before, during, and after the Middle Ages. The Italian Peninsula (also known as the Apennine Peninsula) wasn’t always the unified Italian Republic that it is today. Left: The major locations of Assassin’s Creed 2 imposed on a modern-day map of northern Italy.
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