Medici & Chill
This Italian city turned banking profits into an artistic glow-up, with the Medici family calling many of the shots.
Florence
Europeans wanted a direct sea route to Asia partly because these pricey seasonings were the luxury goods everyone had to have.
Spices
This English queen stayed unmarried during her 45-year reign and famously presented herself as married to her kingdom. Talk about commitment issues.
This French 'Sun King' kept his nobles close at Versailles and treated absolute monarchy as a full-time personality trait.
King Louis XIV
This 14th-century catastrophe killed roughly one-third of Europe's population, but gave surviving peasants some unexpected bargaining power.
The Black Death
Before celebrity brand deals, this Florentine banking family sponsored artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo to polish its public image.
Medici Family
Before GPS, sailors used this instrument to estimate latitude by measuring the angle of the Sun or stars.
Astrolabe
Linked to the Babington Plot against Elizabeth I, this Scottish queen spent years in English custody before her execution. Family reunions were complicated.
Mary, Queen of Scots
This Russian tsar tried to westernize his country, built St. Petersburg, and even told nobles to trim their beards. A very intense makeover show.
Tzar Peter the Great
Europeans wanted spices and riches. Instead, their voyages helped unleash this massive exchange of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old and New Worlds.
Columbian Exchange
Renaissance painters used this trick to make a flat canvas look three-dimensional. Medieval art could never.
Linear Perspective
DAILY DOUBLE
This Portuguese explorer sailed around southern Africa and reached India, proving that the ocean route was more than a very expensive theory.
Vasco da Gama
Philip II's 1588 invasion project sent this massive Spanish fleet toward England, where English naval tactics and rough weather ruined the itinerary.
Kings who believed this doctrine claimed their authority came from God, not from voters, legislators, or the king's very tired subjects.
Divine Right of Kings
The Church's promotion of these spiritual benefits helped convince a German monk to write 95 complaints and accidentally become a historical celebrity.
Indulgences
Ancient Greek and Roman writers got a second career thanks to this movement, which emphasized human potential, civic life, and classical learning.
Renaissance Humanism
Spanish colonists claimed they would protect and Christianize Indigenous communities while demanding their labor or tribute under this coercive colonial system.
Encomienda System
In Prague in 1618, Protestant nobles threw Habsburg officials out a window. This extremely literal event helped spark the Thirty Years' War.
Defenestration of Prague
During the English Civil War, Parliament's supporters used this haircut-inspired nickname; their royalist enemies were the Cavaliers.
Roundheads
Who created the Act of Supremancy and made himself the head of the church?
King Henry VIII
In The Prince, this former Florentine diplomat argued that successful rulers sometimes had to use force or deception. A terrible life coach, perhaps; an influential political thinker, definitely.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Europe's sixteenth-century inflation surge got this two-word nickname. Rising demand drove prices higher, while huge silver imports helped intensify the problem.
Price Revolution
This 1648 settlement helped end the Thirty Years' War, officially recognized Calvinism within the empire, and affirmed Dutch and Swiss independence.
Peace of Westphalia
In 1688-1689, Parliament's invitation to William and Mary helped push James II off the throne in this event that strengthened constitutional monarchy.
Glorious Revolution
In 1685, Louis XIV decided France had enjoyed enough religious tolerance and revoked this 1598 decree, stripping French Protestants of important protections.
Edict of Nantes