The proto-Renaissance that was the Gothic High Middle Ages starting in the 12th Century, centered on France, and the Renaissance proper was concentrated in certain of the Italian city-states circa 1500, but it strikes me that civilization since the Fall of Rome owes more to a newer and more peripheral nation, without so long or deep a pedigree in painting and sculpture and the fine but less practical arts.
There is no England before the Fall of Rome, and for centuries thereafter it's a fledgling proposition. But from 793 with the sack of Lindisfarne, to the Battle of Stamford Bridge a quarter of a millennium thereafter in 1066, England performs its first great service to civilization, by absorbing the worst of the the forces of destruction and darkness that were the Vikings, and ultimately killing them or driving them out or converting them. Which is not to say that England volunteered for Viking duty: England's outsized part in that story was a function of its geography, being as it was the first lush and rich land on the route westward from Scandinavia. And it's not to say either that the Vikings never got around to the rest of Christendom: the Norsemen terrorized the edges of the Continent along the coasts and rivers, and colonized corners of Scotland and Ireland and France. But with the Muslim menace corralled by Byzantium to the east, and in the west turned back by the Franks at Tours in 732, the last enemies to Western Civilization were the last pagans in Europe, and it was England that those Vikings battered against hardest and longest.
Now for this next chapter I take for granted that the Protestant Reformation was the first of three great leaps to modernity. The Reformation was not conceived in England, although England claims some formidable antecedents to it, not least the Lollards and John Wycliffe. But with England's break from Rome in the middle-16th Century, the Reformation is harnessed to a great power, and half a century hence, after the Armada, a transatlantic and imperial power.
In the next century it was England alone that took the second of my three great leaps to modernity, in the English Civil War. The English Civil War made a democracy of England, and England -- directly and otherwise -- made democracies of the world. It is of course true that some Greek city-states before Philip and Alexander, and Rome before Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus -- the city-state and not the empire -- were democratic, and some of the city-states of Italy in the centuries before the English Civil War were republics, even if only in name. But the first true and enduring national democracy is England. And the democracies of the world today overwhelmingly were instituted or guaranteed by English-speaking power, or inspired by English-speaking democracy or influenced by it. Democracy speaks English.
But the third great leap to modernity, is modernity; it is altogether new, and was altogether English: the Industrial Revolution. The machine and automation, mechanized transit, mass production, availability and affordability, etc., etc. -- these are among a relative few altogether novel developments since the dawn of civilization, their gift is the easiest and richest and longest life since the Garden of Eden, and they owe to an explosion in thinking in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, in England.
And that's to say nothing of the language and literature of England which are without rival in the world and in history, or the British Empire which was the greatest the world has known, or Britain's part in the happy endings to the world wars and the Napoleonic Wars and the War of Spanish Succession, or the Magna Carta and the rule of law, or England's great universities, and much else besides. I bow to no man in my appreciation for Renaissance frescoes or Gothic flying buttresses, but since the Fall of Rome, to my way of thinking, civilization has owed more to that funny little country of Viking-slayers and reformers and Parliament and machines.
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