Transition to the Modern World The transition from the medieval
to the modern world was foreshadowed by economic expansion,
political centralization, and secularization. A money economy
weakened serfdom, and an inquiring spirit stimulated the age of
exploration. Banking, the bourgeois class, and secular ideals
flourished in the growing towns and lent support to the
expanding monarchies. The church was weakened by internal
conflicts as well as by quarrels between church and state. As
feudal strength was sapped, notably by the the Hundred Years War
and the Wars of the Roses, there emerged in France and England
the modern nation state. A forerunner of intellectual modernity
was the new humanism of the Renaissance. Finally, the great
medieval unity of Christianity was shattered by the religious
theories that culminated in the Protestant Reformation. Sections
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