It boggles the mind to think that when the Taino people walked out onto the beaches of San Salvador and looked at Christopher Columbus, they weren’t just looking at men from another country; they were…
In the beginning of the 1500s, hundreds of thousands of regular people rose up in an armed, bloody revolt that shook central Europe to its foundations. Why were they so furious? Because the very…
When the news reached Venice that Vasco da Gama had made it all the way to India and back by ship, the Venetians knew that their monopoly on selling luxury goods from Asia was over. The task of…
This was a century when European explorers were traveling farther than they had ever gone before from their own shores. Ferdinand and Isabella were competing with the Portuguese to find routes to…
By the end of the sixteenth century, the New Monarchs had left the European continent transformed. New monarchs found ways to raise taxes and fill their states’ treasuries. New monarchs also sought to…
Printing had been invented in the city of Mainz by the craftsman Johannes Gutenberg. In a few short decades, its invention nearly brought down the institutional Christian church, allowed for the…
Last week, we learned about the rekindling of classical learning, science, and the arts that was fueled by tremendous economic growth and trade that historians call the “Renaissance.” Today, we head…
In this episode, we explore the Italian Renaissance. We’ll look at the economic factors that made the Renaissance possible, the patrons who became sponsors of art and scientific breakthroughs, and the…
