📅Weekly Schedule and Objectives: Europe and the World

Summary:

A series of crises assailed the west in the fourteenth century. Poor harvests led to famine; worker unrest exploded into revolts and conflict; the perception of ecclesiastical corruption led to a crisis of confidence in the church and its leadership; the Hundred Year's War devastated parts of the continent; worst of all, the Black Death, traveling with Italian merchants from Asia, struck Europe beginning in 1348. The papacy moved from Rome to Avignon, where the French king exerted considerable influence over it. Attempts to reform the papacy led to the Great Schism. These crises, however, spurred new movements in philosophy, art, and literature. The Renaissance, seen by contemporary intellectuals as different from the previous age, was characterized by humanism, an increased appreciation of the individual, a sense of human beings as having been created in God's image, realism in art, and activism in life. Though faithful Christians, Renaissance intellectuals valued human experience and achievement, lending the Renaissance a secular spirit. The focus of Renaissance learning, in which elite women too participated, was the humanist curriculum, based on the liberal arts and imparting a reverence for classical learning. The invention of an efficient printing press, which made books cheaper, encouraged literacy. Education did not, however, promote greater tolerance, as anti-Semitism rose and slavery was revived.

East Asia, with its spices and luxury products, fired the imaginations of Europeans seeking new sea routes when warfare closed overland routes. Hoping to obtain wealth and to spread Christianity, monarchs encouraged the voyages of exploration. The voyage of the Portuguese Vasco da Gama (1498) proved India could be reached by sea, while the expeditions of Columbus (1492-1502), sailing under Spanish royal patronage, opened a route to what turned out to be the Americas. This European presence meant serious clashes with original peoples and the eventual destruction of ancient ways of life and powerful native empires. Looking for sources of labor as death took a devastating toll on native peoples, Europeans introduced African slavery to the New World, importing 30,000 or more slaves a year by 1700. As they colonized, Europeans promoted religious conversion often forcibly of native peoples.

The end results of discovery and colonization were a new commercial revolution, the development of commercial capitalism, increasing worldwide economic interdependence, large-scale migration of colonists, and material changes in the European lifestyle, and a dramatic change in the populations of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the Columbian Exchange.

Added to the dynamic forces of the period was the rising call for religious reform in Europe. The significant differences in theology, especially regarding salvation, led to Christianity's split into branches that remain separate today. Protestants disagreed with Catholics over sacraments, religious hierarchy, translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, and the usefulness of the monastic vocation. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 allowed each German state to choose Lutheranism or Catholicism, but did not grant individuals freedom of conscience or make accommodation for other faiths. The Catholic Church underwent self-examination that culminated in the Council of Trent, which affirmed traditional church doctrines while attempting to eradicate corruption. The wars that afflicted Europe from 1559-1648 were often tied to religious antagonisms, but also involved political issues. With the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the wars drew to a close.