Several factors created a climate in fifteenth-century Europe that made typography feasible: an insatiable demand for books, an emerging literate middle class, students in the rapidly expanding universities who had seized the monopoly on literacy from the clergy and created a vast new market for reading material, and the slow, expensive, process of bookmaking, which had changed little in one thousand years. However, without , which reached Europe by way of a six-hundred-year journey, the speed and efficiency of printing would have been useless.