The print revolution spreads across Europe
- Date
- by 1500
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Europe
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
Within fifty years of Gutenberg's movable-type press (c. 1455), printing spread explosively across Europe.
By 1500 presses operated in some 282 cities, and the books printed before that year, called incunabula, survive in around 30,000 distinct editions representing an estimated 8 to 20 million volumes, vastly exceeding all the manuscript books produced in Western history up to that point. The technology reached Italy within a decade of Gutenberg, then France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Spain, Hungary and Poland by 1475, and England, Austria, Denmark and Sweden by 1485. Cheaper, faster reproduction of texts drove down book prices, widened literacy, standardised texts and accelerated the circulation of ideas. The press transformed scholarship, devotion, administration and commerce, and proved decisive for the Reformation, allowing Luther's tracts and vernacular Bibles to reach mass audiences with unprecedented speed. The print revolution is often counted among the foundational developments of the modern world, reshaping how knowledge was created, preserved and shared.
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Empires active in by 1500
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Holy Roman Empire962 CE – 1806 CE
- Malacca Sultanate1400 CE – 1511 CE
- Aztec Empire1428 CE – 1521 CE
- Inca Empire1438 CE – 1533 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Gutenberg's printing press and the first printed Biblec. 1440–1455 CE
- Ulugh Beg's Samarkand Observatory and the Zij-i Sultani Star Cataloguec. 1428 (observatory); Zij-i Sultani completed 1438-1439
- Madhava and the Kerala School develop infinite seriesc. 1400
- Jikji printed in Korea, oldest extant book made with movable metal typeJuly 1377
- Ibn al-Nafis Describes the Pulmonary Circulation of the Bloodc. 1242 CE
- Al-Jazari Completes the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices1206 CE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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