The question should be...what made Europeans privileged? The simple answer....the age of enlightenment, which I’d say it started in 1625 with the printing press, and continued on through the end of the 1700s.
printing press was invented around 1440 by Gutenberg. It helped fuel the Enlightenment movements.
Gutenbergs workshop was set up at Hof Humbrecht, a property belonging to a distant relative. It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but for this he borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust, and work commenced in 1452. At the same time, the press was also printing other, more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars). There is also some speculation that there may have been two presses, one for the pedestrian texts, and one for the Bible. One of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454 to 1455.