Renaissance Basics
This Italian city is considered the birthplace of the Renaissance due to its wealth, banking industry, and patronage of the arts.
What is Florence?
This devastating pandemic killed an estimated one-third of Europe’s population in the 14th century.
What is the Black Death?
A machine that was used to mass print books.
What is the printing press?
This body of water separates the Italian Peninsula from the Balkan Peninsula and was a key trade route during the Renaissance.
What is the Adriatic Sea?
This ocean helped connect Europe, Africa, and Asia for trade before modern ships.
What is the Indian Ocean?
This type of wealthy Renaissance support system allowed artists, writers, and architects to create their work in exchange for financial backing and protection.
What is patronage?
This series of religious wars from 1096 to 1291 aimed to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim control.
What are the Crusades?
Observing of the world and collecting evidence in order to find a conclusion.
What is the scientific method?
This mountain range forms a natural border between France and Spain and has historically influenced military campaigns and trade routes.
What are the Pyrenees?
This land-based trade network connected China and Europe and allowed silk and spices to be traded.
What is the Silk Road?
This intellectual movement focused on the study of classical texts and emphasized human potential and achievement.
What is humanism?
These disputes over whether kings or popes held ultimate authority often caused political and religious instability in medieval Europe.
What is the conflict between secular and papal authority?
The science of making maps.
What is cartography?
This series of wars in the late Middle Ages was fought over control of trade routes and wealthy port cities in northern Italy.
What are the Italian city-state wars?
This 15th-century exchange involved moving plants, animals, and people between the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
This artistic technique, perfected during the Renaissance, creates the illusion of depth on a flat surface using a vanishing point.
What is linear perspective?
This type of medieval economy, which replaced subsistence farming in many regions, relied on towns, trade, and the growth of a merchant class.
What is a commercial or market economy?
Triangular sails that allowed ships to make tighter turns and tack against wind.
What are lateen sails?
This eastern European empire fought frequent wars with Austria and Russia as it tried to control territory in the Balkans during the 16th and 17th centuries.
What is the Ottoman Empire?
This animal, originally from Asia, was introduced to the Americas and helped transport goods.
What is the horse?
This Renaissance artistic approach emphasized realistic representation of the human body and nature by closely observing the natural world.
What is naturalism?
These 14th- and 15th-century conflicts between England and France weakened both nations and led to new forms of warfare, like the longbow and gunpowder.
What is the Hundred Years’ War?
Medieval maps that showed detailed coastlines, harbors, and distances.
What are portolani?
This central European region was devastated during the Thirty Years’ War as armies repeatedly marched through and fought over its territory.
What is the Holy Roman Empire?
Merchants often traveled in these groups for safety while crossing deserts or long trade routes.
What are caravans?