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Unit 1
10–15% of examAround 1450, Europe started changing fast. Italian scholars and artists revived ancient Greek and Roman ideas, the printing press spread them, and kings built stronger states. You'll also follow Portuguese and Spanish ships to Asia and the Americas, which started a global exchange of goods, people and diseases that reshaped Europe and the world.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
Before 1450, Europe had been battered by the Black Death (1347–1351), the Hundred Years' War and a split in the Church called the Great Schism (1378–1417). This topic sets the stage: a recovering, competitive Europe with growing trade cities was ready for new ideas and long-distance voyages.
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In rich, competing city-states like Florence and Venice, humanists such as Petrarch and Lorenzo Valla studied ancient texts closely and celebrated human talent, and Machiavelli wrote about politics in practical, secular terms. Patrons like the Medici family and the popes paid artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael for realistic, classical-style works that showed off their wealth and power.
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As Renaissance ideas spread north to the Low Countries, Germany, France and England, they took a more religious turn. Christian humanists like Erasmus used classical learning to call for Church reform, and painters like Albrecht Dürer worked in sharp, realistic detail, while Pieter Bruegel the Elder made peasants and village life worthy subjects.
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Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing press, built in Mainz around 1450, made books much cheaper and faster to produce. Printing carried Renaissance ideas beyond Italy, encouraged writing in vernacular (everyday) languages instead of Latin, and later helped the Reformation spread.
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Rulers like Henry VII of England, Louis XI of France, and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain built stronger central governments by collecting taxes directly, raising royal armies and running their own courts. They also took more control of religion in their lands, through tools like the Spanish Inquisition and the Concordat of Bologna (1516), which let the French king pick bishops, and in England Henry VIII and Elizabeth I reshaped the church from the top down.
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Europeans explored for "God, gold and glory": spices and precious metals, spreading Christianity, and fame for themselves and their rulers. Ships like the caravel, tools like the magnetic compass and astrolabe, better maps and guns let sailors such as Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus reach Asia and the Americas.
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In the 1500s, Spain conquered a huge American empire, and silver from mines like Potosí made it Europe's leading power. In the 1600s, the Dutch, English and French built their own colonies and trading companies to challenge Spain and Portugal, and the race for trade led to wars between them.
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Portugal built a chain of trading posts along the African coast and into Asia, and also colonized Brazil, while Spain conquered much of the Americas. The Columbian Exchange moved crops, animals and diseases between the hemispheres: potatoes and maize helped feed Europe, horses and cattle came to the Americas, and diseases like smallpox killed huge numbers of Indigenous people.
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As Indigenous populations collapsed and sugar plantations spread in Brazil and the Caribbean, Europeans turned to enslaved Africans for labor. Millions of people were forced across the Atlantic on the deadly Middle Passage, part of a trade that linked Europe, Africa and the Americas.
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New business tools like double-entry bookkeeping, banks like the Bank of Amsterdam (1609) and joint-stock companies helped a money economy grow, while rising population and American silver pushed prices up faster than wages in a long "price revolution." In western Europe, more peasants became free tenants farming for the market, while in eastern Europe landowners bound peasants more tightly as serfs on large estates.
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This wrap-up topic asks you to explain causes and effects across the unit: why the Renaissance started in Italy, how printing spread it, and why Europeans sailed overseas. Practice linking a specific cause, like rich patrons or the search for a sea route to Asian spices, to a specific result.
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