Contextualizing Renaissance and Discovery

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Identify and describe the late medieval European world from which the Italian Renaissance, the printing press, the new monarchies, and the Age of Discovery emerged (Skill 4.A; LO A).
• Account for how the demographic recovery from the Black Death reshaped European agriculture, labor, and the relationship between rural workers and landlords (KC-1.4, KC-1.4.II).
• Account for the political fragmentation of Europe around 1450 — the emerging western kingdoms, the Holy Roman Empire's hundreds of units, the Italian city-states, the closing Spanish Reconquista — and explain how that fragmentation shaped the cultural and political innovations of Unit 1 (KC-1.5, KC-1.5.I).
• Account for the role of the Catholic Church as the dominant transnational institution of late medieval Europe and the pressures it faced on the eve of the Renaissance.
• Preview the four CED key concept clusters that organize Unit 1 (recovery of classical learning, overseas exploration and trade, commercial and agricultural change, the struggle for sovereignty) and connect each cluster to one or two specific Unit 1 topics.

Unit 1 of AP European History opens not with a single event but with a world that already had centuries of history behind it. The College Board groups the Unit 1 story under the heading Renaissance and Exploration, but those are outcomes, not starting points. To make sense of why Italian humanists in the fifteenth century became obsessed with classical Latin, why Iberian sailors were willing to spend months out of sight of land, why the Holy Roman Emperor in 1517 found it so difficult to suppress a German monk named Luther — all questions that come up in the rest of Unit 1 and into Unit 2 — we have to start with the situation Europe was actually in around 1450 (KC-1.1, KC-1.3, KC-1.4, KC-1.5).

The single most important demographic fact of late medieval Europe is the Black Death. The plague that swept across Europe between 1347 and 1352 killed somewhere between a third and half of the population, with wide regional variation: Florence and Venice each lost roughly half their inhabitants, parts of England saw mortality rates above forty percent, while some isolated valleys escaped almost untouched. Recurring plague outbreaks across the rest of the fourteenth century kept the population suppressed. By the middle of the fifteenth century the worst was over, and a slow demographic recovery was beginning. The recovery did not undo the change. Surviving peasants and laborers found themselves bargaining with landlords from a position of relative scarcity, wages rose, serfdom continued to weaken in western Europe (even as it began to harden in the east, a divergence Topic 1.10 returns to), and a new commercial elite of merchants, bankers, and financiers became visible in the Italian and Flemish cities (KC-1.4.I, KC-1.4.II).

The political map of Europe in 1450 also looked very different from the modern one. Western Europe contained the kingdoms of France and England, just emerging from the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) and beginning the slow process of internal consolidation that Topic 1.5 describes as the New Monarchies. The Iberian peninsula was nearly finished reconquering itself: the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon would unite under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, and the last Muslim emirate of Granada would fall to them in 1492. Central Europe was dominated by the Holy Roman Empire, a loose patchwork of more than three hundred German principalities, free imperial cities, prince-bishoprics, and ecclesiastical territories under an elected emperor whose power was real but limited. The Italian peninsula was fractured into the city-state system that the Renaissance grew out of: the republic of Florence, the maritime republic of Venice, the duchy of Milan, the kingdom of Naples, and the Papal States, each with its own diplomacy, currency, and competing humanist court (KC-1.5, KC-1.5.I).

One geopolitical fact of the mid fifteenth century deserves separate emphasis: the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The fall of the Byzantine capital ended the eastern Roman Empire as a political entity and pushed Greek scholars and manuscripts westward into Italy, where they fed directly into the humanist recovery that Topic 1.2 describes. The Ottoman expansion also closed off the eastern overland trade routes that had carried spices and luxury goods from Asia into European markets, providing one of several economic motivations for the Iberian voyages that begin Topic 1.6. The same year, 1453, marked the conventional end of the Hundred Years' War in western Europe. Late medieval Europe was a system in transition, and 1450 sits near the middle of that transition rather than at its start.

The institutional landscape was dominated by the Catholic Church. In 1450 the Church owned roughly a quarter of the cultivable land of Latin Christendom; it controlled the universities (Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Padua, Salamanca) and the scholastic theology that ran through them; it administered parish, sacramental, and ritual life from baptism to last rites; and it raised funds across Europe through indulgences, tithes, and benefices. The Renaissance papacy, especially under Julius II (1503-1513) and Leo X (1513-1521), was also one of the leading patrons of Italian humanism and Renaissance art. At the same time the Church faced an emerging set of pressures. The Avignon papacy (1309-1377) and the Western Schism (1378-1417) had shaken its prestige; the Conciliar Movement had argued that a general council, not the pope, was the highest authority in the Church; the Hussite movement in Bohemia had already produced a national religious dissent in the early fifteenth century; and humanist textual criticism was beginning to question received translations of Scripture. The Reformation of Unit 2 will not arrive out of nowhere.

The cultural and intellectual world of 1450 was already in motion. Italian humanism had begun with Petrarch in the 1330s and had matured by the early fifteenth century into a coherent movement: a curriculum, the studia humanitatis, built around classical Latin grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy; a set of techniques, especially philology, for reading ancient texts on their own terms; and a set of values that emphasized individual achievement, secular learning, and the dignity of the human person. Florentine civic humanism was making the case that participating in the public life of a free republic was the highest human calling. Italian rulers, popes, and merchant families were beginning to commission paintings, sculpture, and architecture built on classical models. None of this was yet a European phenomenon — that would come in Topics 1.3 and 1.4, after the printing press was perfected — but the Italian engine was already running (KC-1.1, KC-1.1.I, KC-1.1.III).

Finally, the late medieval European world was beginning to look outward. The Portuguese had been creeping down the West African coast for several decades by 1450; by the 1480s they would round the southern tip of Africa, and by 1498 Vasco da Gama would reach India. Castile would fund Columbus's first transatlantic voyage in 1492, six months after the fall of Granada freed the Spanish crown to look westward. The motives that drove these voyages — gold, spices, the desire to bypass the Ottoman-controlled overland trade, the missionary impulse — are the subject of Topic 1.6 and beyond, but the conditions that made them possible were already in place around 1450 (KC-1.3, KC-1.3.I).

That is the world Unit 1 inherits. Each remaining topic in this unit picks up one strand: humanist scholarship and the Italian Renaissance (1.2), its diffusion north (1.3), the printing press that did the carrying (1.4), the New Monarchies that consolidated state power (1.5), the navigational and military technologies that made overseas voyages possible (1.6), the Iberian rivalries on the world stage (1.7), the Columbian Exchange (1.8), the slave trade (1.9), and the commercial revolution (1.10). Topic 1.11 ties them together with a synthesis on causation. Use Lesson 1 to plant the four key concept clusters (KC-1.1, KC-1.3, KC-1.4, KC-1.5) firmly in students' minds; the rest of Unit 1 reads as variations on those four themes.

Three contextualizing sources, each documenting a different part of the late medieval starting point: the plague experience, Italian civic life, and the late medieval European voyage outlook.

1. (Causation) Account for how the Black Death of 1347-1352 reshaped the labor and rural economic life of fifteenth century Europe. Identify at least two specific changes that connect directly to a topic later in Unit 1.
2. (Causation) Boccaccio's Florence and the Ciompi Revolt happened in the same generation. Account for how the demographic and political conditions of post-plague Florence produced both an artistic and literary explosion (Boccaccio) and a major urban labor revolt (the Ciompi). What does each tell us about the world the Italian Renaissance grew out of?
3. (Causation) Account for the specific role of the Italian city-state system in producing the Italian Renaissance. Why did Renaissance humanism arise in Florence and Venice rather than in Paris or Cologne, even though all four cities had universities and wealthy elites?
4. (Causation) Account for how the Catholic Church functioned as the dominant institution of late medieval Europe and identify two specific pressures it faced on the eve of the Renaissance that anticipate the Reformation of Unit 2.
5. (Causation) Marco Polo's account was written around 1300, two centuries before Columbus sailed. Account for why that interval of two hundred years matters: what changed in European technology, economics, and politics between 1300 and 1492 that made the Iberian voyages possible when earlier projects had not been?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.