Part A: Short-Answer Terms
Feudalism: A combination of legal and military customs in Europe that flourished during the
Middle Ages. During this time, rather than relying on the imperial hierarchy, local vassals served
local lords in return for favour and protection.
Charlemagne: the Medieval emperor who ruled most of Western Europe from 768-814. After the
Romans fell. he went on a mission to unite all Germanic people into one kingdom so he could
convert them to Christianity, doing so through war and chivalry. In 800 A.D., he was crowned the
first Holy Roman Emperor.
Vassalage (lord and vassal): The granting of a fief, or landed estate, in exchange for providing
military services to the lord and fulfilling certain other obligations such as appearing at the lord’s
court when summoned and making a payment on the knighting of the lord’s eldest son.
A vassal is a person who has a mutual obligation to a lord, in the context of a feudal system in
Medieval Europe, with their obligations including military support and mutual protection, in
exchange for certain privileges. A lord is a person who held land directly from the king. They
occupied a position of status and power within medieval society as a result of their economic
relationship with the king.
Chivalry: The idea of civilized behaviour that emerged among the nobility in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries under the influence of the church; a code of ethics knights were expected to
uphold.
Reconquista
Renaissance: the “rebirth” of Classical culture that occurred in Italy between ca. 1350 and ca.
1550; also, the earlier revivals of Classical culture that occurred under Charlemagne and in the
twelfth century.
Humanism: an intellectual movement in Renaissance Italy based on the study of the Greek and
Roman classics.
Leonardo da Vinci: (1452-1519) Represented a traditional figure in the shift to High Renaissance
principles. He stressed the need to advance beyond the mere realistic representation of nature
and initiated the High Renaissance attempt to generalize from a realistic portrayal to an ideal
form.
Michelangelo: (1475–1564, Florence) He was a painter, sculptor, and architect. Fiercely driven by
his desire to create, and was influenced by Neoplatonism, and was often referred to as “Il
Divino”-the divine one.
Niccolo Machiavelli: (1469-1527, Florence) He was an Italian Renaissance political philosopher
who wrote The Prince. Machiavelli believed as a ruler, it was better to be widely feared than to be
greatly loved; A loved ruler retains authority by obligation while a feared leader rules by fear of
punishment.
Erasmus: (1466-1536, Netherlands) A Christian humanist, who said that Christianity should be a
guiding philosophy rather than the system of dogmatic beliefs that the medieval church seemed
to stress. Although he did not achieve the reform of the church he desired, it is often said that
Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. He was also a prolific translator of scripture.
Ferdinand and Isabella: (1452-1516, 1451-1504, Spain) The two rulers worked to strengthen the
royal control of the government, specifically in Castille. They sought to replace feudalism with a
professional royal army. Furthermore, due to its vast power and wealth, they also recognized the
importance of the Catholic Church, where it became an instrument for the extension of royal
power.
Martin Luther (1483-, Germany) A monk who focused on his major concern of the assurance of
salvation. Catholic doctrine emphasized that both faith and good works were required to achieve
personal salvation, but in Luther’s eyes, human beings could never do enough good works to
merit salvation. He further discovered that humans weren’t saved through good works, but faith
in the promises of God. This doctrine of salvation became the primary doctrine for the Protestant
Reformation. He issued an indictment known as the Ninety-Five Theses, in which he argued over
the Church’s abuses in the sale of indulgences. He called for the reform of monasticism, where
he was then summoned to appear before the court in The Diet of the Worms, convened then by
Charles V.
Indulgences: in Christian theology, the remission of part or all of the temporal punishment in
purgatory due to sin; granted for charitable contributions and other good deeds. Indulgences
become a regular practice of the Catholic Church in the High Middle Ages, and their use was
instrumental in sparking Luther’s reform movement in the sixteenth century.
Charles V
Holy Roman Empire
Protestants
The Social Contract
Absolutism: a form of government in which the sovereign power or ultimate authority rested in
the hands of a monarch who claimed to rule by divine right and was therefore responsible only to
God.
The Thirty Years War: (1618-1648) Power struggles between the Church and national rulers fueled
the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation brought Protestant versus
Catholic military struggles, the biggest being the Thirty Years’ War. It started in 1618 when
Protestants in Bohemia, part of the Holy Roman Empire, tried to appoint a Protestant king. Spain
plunged into that war on the Catholic side, but as if to show that religious wars are often about
things other than religion, Catholic France joined the fight on the Protestant side.
The Witchcraft Craze: Witchcraft trials were held in England, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany,
France and even New England in America during the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. It came
to be viewed as both sinister and dangerous when the medieval church began to connect
witches to the activities of the Devil, thereby transforming witchcraft into a heresy that had to be
wiped out. The accused witches usually confessed to a number of practices, most often after
intense torture. Many said they had sworn allegiance to the Devil and used special ointments and
powders to wreak havoc on neighbours by killing their livestock, injuring their children, or raising
storms to destroy their crops. Religious uncertainty clearly played some part in this. Many
witchcraft trials occurred in areas where Protestantism had been recently victorious or in regions
where Protestant-Catholic controversies still raged. As religious passions become inflamed,
accusations of being in the league with the Devil become common on both sides. Furthermore,
there is an emphasis on the importance of social conditions, especially the problems of a society
in turmoil. At a time when the old communal values that stressed working together for the good
of the community were disintegrating before the onslaught of a new economic thetic that
emphasized looking out for oneself, property owners became more fearful of the growing
numbers of poor in their midst and transformed them psychologically into agents of the Devil. Old
women were particularly susceptible to suspicion, as they were the handy scapegoats when a
problem arose. By the mid-seventeenth century, the witchcraft hysteria began to subside.
Christopher Columbus: (1451-1506, Italy) An explorer who worked for the queen of Spain. He
convinced the queen to finance his exploratory expedition to sail to Asia by going directly west
instead of around Africa. With three ships and a two month expedition, in 1492 Columbus
reached the Bahamas and the coastline of Cuba, where he believed that he has reached Asia,
and in his reports back to the queen, he assured them that he would not only find gold, but also a
golden opportunity to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity.
Hernan Cortes: (1485–1547, Spain) A Spanish expeditionist who in 1519, landed on the Gulf of
Mexico. While marching to the city of Tenochtitlan, he made alliances with city-states that were
tired of the oppressive rule of the Aztecs. Once finally arriving at the city, he received a friendly
welcome from the Aztec monarch, where the monarch believed that Cortes was a representation
of the god who had departed from his homeland centuries before and had promised to
somebody return. But the Spaniards quickly wore out their welcome, as they took the monarch
hostage and proceeded to pillage the city, as the Aztecs had no immunity to European diseases
and many fell sick to smallpox. Between 1531 and 1550, the Spanish gained control of northern
Mexico.
Aztec (Mexica) Empire
Inca Empire
Atlantic Slave Trade: Although the main objective of the Portuguese in sailing around Africa was
to find a route to the Spice Islands, they along with the Europeans, discovered that profits could
be made in Africa itself. During the second half of the fifteenth century, about 1000 slaves were
taken to Portugal each year. Most wound up serving as domestic servants for affluent families in
Europe. But the discovery of the Americas in the 1490s and the planting of sugarcane in South
America and on the islands of the Caribbean changed the situation drastically. During the
sixteenth century, sugarcane plantations were set up along the eastern coast of Brazil and along
several islands in the Caribbean, and because the growing of sugarcane demands both skill and
large quantities of labour, the new plantations required more workers than could be provided by
the small American Indian populations in the New World, Slaves began being shipped to Brazil
and the Caribbean to work on the plantations. During the next two centuries, the trade in slaves
grew dramatically and became part of the triangular trade connecting Europe, Africa and the
American continents, that characterized the new Atlantic economy.
The geocentric concept of the universe (Ptolemaic): the belief that the earth was at the center
of the universe and that the sun and other celestial objects revolve around the earth.
The heliocentric conception of the universe: the belief that the sun, not the earth, is at the
center of the universe.
Galileo Galilei: (1564-1642, Italy) The first European to make systematic observations of the
heavens means f a telescope, thereby inaugurating a new part of astronomy. His revelations
stunned his contemporaries, but his newfound acclaim brought him under the increasing scrutiny
of the Catholic Church. The Roman Inquisition of the church condemned Copernicanism and
ordered Galileo to reject the Copernican thesis, insisting that the doctrine that the sun was the
center of the world and immovable was false and absurd, contrary to Scripture, whereas the
doctrine that the earth was not the center of the world but moved, and has further a dailymotion
philosophically false. Thus, the church attacked the Copernican system because it threatened not
only the Scripture but also the entire prevailing conception of the universe. In 1633, Galileo was
found guilty of teaching the condemned Copernican system and was forced to recant his “errors”.
Isaac Newton: (1642-1727, England) English mathematician who spelled out the mathematical
proofs demonstrating his universal law of gravitation, which was the culmination of the theories of
Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. He further invented calculus, proved Galileo’s law of inertia, and
elaborated on his own realization of the three laws of motion.
The Scientific Method: a method of seeking knowledge through inductive principles, using
experiments and observations to develop generalizations.
The Enlightenment: an eighteenth-century intellectual movement, led by the philosophes, that
stressed the application of reason and the scientific method to all aspects of life.
Montesquieu
Voltaire
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Part B: Primary Source Analysis
Erasmus and Machiavelli: The renaissance means “rebirth.” Many people who lived in Italy
between 1350 and 1550 believed they were witnessing a rebirth of Greco-Roman civilization,
marking a new age. To them, the thousand or so years between the end of the Roman Empire
and their own era was a middle period (the “Middle Ages”), characterized by darkness because of
the lack of classical culture. During this period, a very powerful and prevalent movement
emerged, the intellectual movement based on the study of Greek and Roman classics, called
humanism. Within humanism, there were two opposing perspectives, those of an idealist’s
perspective and those of a realist’s perspective. In Erasmus’ “Education of a Christian Prince,”
Erasmus, a Dutch Christian-humanist shares idealistic views on humanism, saying that humans
are inherently good. Au contraire, Machiavelli shares an opposing viewpoint, as seen in “The
Prince,” where he argues that through his realistic humanism perspective, humans are inherently
bad and selfish. Through these two opposing viewpoints, the two different views on how a prince
should rule stretched further than political system. Through humanism and the study of ancient
classics, people began to study texts including the Bible. This newly gained knowledge of the
humanists showed them the life there was prior to the dark ages and the Renaissance, causing
them to try and change the ways of the feudal system, which they eventually did.
Hernan Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico: In 1519, a Spanish expedition under the command
of Hernan Cortes landed on the Gulf of Mexico. He marched to the city central, at the head of a
small group of troops, on the way making alliances with city-states that had tired of the
oppressive rule of the Aztecs. In November, Cortes arrived to the city central, where he received
a friendly welcome from the Aztec monarch. At first, this monarch believed that his visitor was a
representative of a god who had departed from his homeland centuries before and had promised
someday to return. But the Spaniards quickly wore out their welcome, as they took the monarch
hostage and proceeded to pillage the city, as the Aztecs had no immunity to European diseases
and many fell sick to smallpox. Between 1531 and 1550, the Spanish gained control of northern
Mexico.
To the north of the Mayan cities in the highlands of central Mexico, the Spanish military
commander Hernan Cortés found a great city in 1519 that was at its peak: the Aztec capital of
Tenochtitlán. Spanish soldiers said that Tenochtitlán, with its brightly painted pyramids and broad
causeways linking the island city to the mainland, was as magnificent as Rome or Constantinople.
The Spaniards went on to wreck it, of course, but nobody ever said conquest is pretty.
Part C: Essay
Why did Europeans explore the Atlantic world and why was this essential for Europe coming
to dominating the new global economy?
The Age of Discovery was a period in the fifteenth century, lasting for over 200 years, and was
conceived by the Portuguese and Spanish explorers. This was an important era in the discovery
and development of lands yet unknown to the Europeans. During this period, Spain set out to find
sea routes to Asia in pursuit of economic gain, increased glory, and opportunities to spread
Christianity. The head of this expedition towards great success for Spain was Christopher
Columbus, an Italian explorer. In the early months of 1492, Columbus signed a contract with
Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Spain, where he would sail the westward route to Asia to
find luxury items of the east (i.e. spices, silk). In return, he would be named admiral of Ocean Sea,
governor of any lands, he’d receive one tenth of the gold he found and return on an eighth of any
investments. Although Columbus didn’t find what he sought, but he changed world history in a
fundamental way by landing upon populated islands in the Caribbean Sea and later on the
mainland of South America. Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, a part of the
world unknown to his European contemporaries, opened the way for colonization and trade,
bringing great wealth to Spain, the nation that sponsored his four voyages to the Caribbean Sea,
and to other imperial European powers.
How can we explain the fall of the Mexica Empire without resorting to negative stereotypes
about Europeans or indigenous people?
When Hernan Cortes went on an expedition in 1519 and landed in the Gulf of Mexico, the Mayan
cities were not as we think they were.
1. Thickly populated, sedentary indigenous civilizations
2. Indigenous allies: Allies of the Mexica join siege of Tenochtitlan, they were known as The
Triple Alliance.
3. Old World diseases: Europeans brought diseases that hadn’t crossed the ocean before.
The Indians had no biological defenses against them. Specifically,
4. Conflicting perspectives on strength, war, & victory:
& marriage alliances
—Ritualized war, political negotiation,