Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Black Death occurred in the year 1348 and killed nearly half of Florence's population. This demographic catastrophe created an economic windfall for survivors who inherited property and found food prices dropping by thirty to forty percent across Europe between 1350 and 1400.
Coluccio Salutati invited the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek in Florence during the year 1396. This event marked the beginning of a new phase where Western European scholars recovered ancient Greek literary and historical works that had been lost to the West since late antiquity.
Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective formally between 1377 and 1446 before Leon Battista Alberti wrote about the technique in 1404. The dome of Florence Cathedral stands as Brunelleschi's major feat of engineering combining rediscovered knowledge from the writer Vitruvius with mathematical discipline.
Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain in 1492 seeking a direct route to India but accidentally stumbled upon the Americas. Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium positing that the Earth moved around the Sun instead of remaining stationary at the center of the universe.
King Charles VIII brought the Italian Renaissance to France in 1495 after his invasion of Italy. Francis I imported artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò dell'Abbate to build ornate palaces like Fontainebleau and Chambord.