 The city-states of Italy expanded greatly during this period and grew in power to become de facto fully independent of the Holy Roman Empire.The Black Death in 1348 inflicted a terrible blow to Italy, killing perhaps one third of the population.The recovery from the demographic and economic disaster led to a resurgence of cities, trade and economy which greatly stimulated the successive phase of the Humanism and Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) when Italy again returned to be the center of Western civilization, strongly influencing the other European countries with Courts like Este in Ferrara and De Medici in Florence.