Major Players
Portugal Spain Papacy
Venetian-Mameluk(Turkish) Ming China Ottoman Empire
Who's Who
Prince Henry “the Navigator” (1394-1460) – responsible for the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the systematic exploration of Western Africa, the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, and the search for new routes.
Martin Behaim (1440-1507) – Nuremberg geographer and creator of the first spherical globe of the earth, the “Globe Apple.”
John Cabot (c.1450-c.1499) – was an Italian navigator and explorer whose 1497 discovery of parts of North America under the commission of Henry VII of England is commonly held to have been the first European encounter with the mainland of North America since the Norse Vikings visits to Vinland in the eleventh century.
Christopher Columbus (c.1451-1506) – under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. Those voyages, and his efforts to establish permanent settlements on the island of Hispaniola, initiated the Spanish colonization of the New World.
Bartholomew Dias (1451-1500) – a Portuguese explorer. He sailed around the southernmost tip of Africa in 1488, the first European known to have done so.
Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) – first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as initially conjectured from Columbus' voyages, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass.
Vasco da Gama (c.1460s-1524) – the first European to reach India by sea, linking Europe and Asia for the first time by ocean route, as well as the Atlantic and the Indian oceans entirely and definitively, and in this way, the West and the Orient.
Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) – organized the Spanish expedition to the East Indies that resulted in the first circumnavigation of the Earth, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano.
Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) – was a French explorer of Breton origin who claimed what is now Canada for France. Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River
European Expansion
Western Europeans had weak stance in the East where Muslims dominated
Europeans went west to search for trade routes to the East Indies
Exploited New World resources and natives spurred economic boom in Europe
The Reformation
Major Players
Humanists Trade Guilds German Princes
Catholic Clergy & Papacy Printers Martin Luther Charles V
Who's Who
Pope Clement VI (r.1342-1352) – most notable as the Pope who reigned during the time of the Black Death (1348–1350), during which he granted remission of sins to all who died of the plague. Proclaimed the existence of a “treasury of merit,” an infinite reservoir of good works in the churchs' possession that could be dispensed at the pope's discretion.
Johann Gutenberg (c.1398-1468) – His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period.
Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros (1437-1517) – a confessor to Queen Isabella, and after 1508 Grand Inquisitor – a position from which he was able to enforce the strictest religious orthodoxy. Greatest achievement was the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a six-volume work that placed the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the Bible in parallel columns.
Pope Sixtus IV (r.1471-1484) – extended indulgences also to sinners in purgatory
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) – "Prince of the Humanists" – a classical scholar using humanist techniques to prepare important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament. These raised questions that would be