Unit 1: Renaissance and Exploration
AP European History: 43 practice questions with detailed explanations.
Unit Study Guide
Executive Summary
Italy's city-states revived classical learning and art; new technology and motives pushed Europeans onto the oceans; states consolidated power.
The Renaissance
Began in Italian city-states (Florence, Venice) where trade wealth funded patrons like the Medici. Humanism revived Greco-Roman texts and celebrated individual achievement. Key figures: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael in art; Machiavelli (The Prince — amoral statecraft), Castiglione (The Courtier), Erasmus in the north. Civic humanism applied learning to public life.
The printing press
Gutenberg's movable type (c. 1450) made books cheap, spread ideas and vernacular languages, and raised literacy — it later supercharged the Reformation.
The Age of Exploration
Motives: gold, God, glory, and new routes to Asia after 1453. Technology: compass, astrolabe, caravel. Portugal (Henry the Navigator, da Gama) reached India; Spain (Columbus, Magellan's circumnavigation) crossed the Atlantic. The Treaty of Tordesillas split claims; the Columbian Exchange moved crops, animals, and diseases (smallpox devastated native populations); the encomienda exploited native labor; Las Casas defended the natives.
New Monarchs and state expansion
Ferdinand & Isabella (Spain), Henry VII (England), and the Habsburgs built centralized power through taxation, bureaucracies, and standing armies — often via strategic marriage, as with Charles V's vast inheritance.
Exam traps
The Renaissance is a rebirth of CLASSICAL learning, not anti-religion. The Columbian Exchange is a two-way transfer. Italy stayed politically fragmented throughout this period.