Renaissance, Exploration, and Global Encounters
Key people, ideas, technologies, and consequences of European expansion from 1350 to the 1500s.
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Questions Covered in This Set
10 cards to master
Humanism
Renaissance idea that studying human beings — history, languages, ethics, and the body — is a noble pursuit; it shifted focus without rejecting religion.
Why did the Renaissance begin in the Italian city-states?
Merchants in Florence, Venice, and Genoa grew rich from Mediterranean trade and spent their wealth patronizing art, architecture, and learning.
What did Gutenberg's printing press (c. 1450) change?
It cut book costs by roughly 95% and spread identical texts widely — helping Luther's 1517 critique ignite the Protestant Reformation in weeks.
Name three navigational tools that made ocean voyages possible.
The magnetic compass, the astrolabe, and the lateen-sailed caravel (plus improved cartography and cannon-armed ships), borrowed from Chinese and Arab sailors.
What does 'God, Gold, and Glory' stand for?
Religion (converting others, outflanking Muslim powers), economics (spices and gold without middlemen), and politics (prestige and revenue for new monarchies).
Why did Portugal and Spain seek new routes to Asia after 1453?
The Ottoman Empire controlled overland routes and Venice monopolized Mediterranean trade, so they wanted direct access to spices, silk, and gold.
Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama
Portuguese explorers: Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; da Gama reached Calicut, India, in 1498 by sailing around Africa.
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)
Agreement in which Spain and Portugal divided the entire non-Christian world along a line in the Atlantic.
Columbian Exchange
The transfer of crops, animals, people, and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492, fusing two long-separated biospheres.
What were the unequal consequences of the Columbian Exchange?
Potatoes and maize fueled population booms in Europe, China, and Africa, while smallpox and other diseases killed an estimated 80–95% of Indigenous Americans in a century.
