On this technology question, one surprising contributor to the European technological surge was the Plague.
That may be counter-intuitive but hear me out:
The Black Death killed around one third of Europe's population. That is obviously horrific and devastating but a major unappreciated side effect was that the remaining people were each, on average, 33% wealthier than each pre-plague person had been.
Consider a modern example: There are three of us and between us we own two cars. Thus each person owns an average of 0.67 cars. Now one person dies so two of us each own an average of 1 car. The two survivors are wealthier than the three were before the death.
The assets then were generally more agriculture related (plows, farmland, draft animals, barns,etc) but the same ratios apply.
Additionally, the remaining population had 1/3 less mouths to feed. Furthermore, if you need 1/3 less food you can probably reduce the tilled land by 1/2 because you are, of course, going to take the least productive land out of tillage first.
Effectively this left the remaining 2/3 of the population vastly better off than they had been just a few years before. Some of their newfound freetime was used to think about ways to build better mousetrap and thus technology saw a significant surge.
