The first figure in Renaissance humanism is Petrarch (1304–1374). It was Petrarch’s achievement to be the first person to recognise the ‘dark ages’, that the thousand years more or less before he lived had been a period of decline, since the grandeur of ancient Rome and, before that, classical Greece. Petrarch’s poem on Scipio Africanus, in looking back, also forecast a turning point in history.
