1.1 Contextualizing Renaissance and Discovery

The Black Death was an outbreak of bubonic plague that swept Europe from 1347 to 1351. It killed somewhere between a third and a half of Europe's people, and the plague kept returning for centuries. With so many workers dead, survivors could often demand higher wages and better terms, which weakened the old manor system in western Europe.

The Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) was a long series of wars between the kings of England and France over French land and the French crown. It ended with England pushed out of nearly all of France. The war helped both monarchies build up royal taxes and armies, and it showed the power of the English longbow and, by its end, of gunpowder cannon.

The Church had its own crisis. From 1309 to 1377 the popes lived in Avignon, in southern France, where many people thought they were controlled by the French king. Right after the papacy returned to Rome, the Great Schism (1378–1417) began: two, and for a time three, men claimed to be pope at once. The Council of Constance finally ended it in 1417. The schism damaged respect for the papacy and encouraged critics like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus (see 2.1).

Italy was not one country. It was a patchwork of city-states, meaning independent cities that ruled the countryside around them. The big ones were Florence, Venice, Milan, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples. Venice and Genoa controlled much of the Mediterranean trade in spices and silk from Asia, and Florence was a center of banking and wool cloth.

That trade and banking created rich merchant families who wanted to show off their wealth and taste. Italy was also full of Roman ruins and old manuscripts, so the ancient past was easy to see. Rivalry between city-states pushed each one to outdo the others with buildings, art and scholars.

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire. Greek scholars and manuscripts had already been coming to Italy for decades, and the fall added to that flow. It also put the Ottomans in control of key trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean.

Europeans wanted Asian spices, silk and other luxury goods, but they bought them through Venetian, Arab and Ottoman middlemen, who raised the price at every step. Finding a direct sea route to Asia promised huge profits. In Iberia (Spain and Portugal), the Reconquista, the centuries-long Christian campaign to take back land from Muslim rulers, gave nobles and kings a crusading habit. It ended when Granada fell in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed.

Put these together and you get the setting for Unit 1: population recovering after the plague, stronger kings, rich and competitive Italian cities, new interest in ancient learning, and strong reasons to find new trade routes.