Unit 1: Renaissance and Exploration

Examples of the Columbian Exchange after 1492 (original summary)

Items carried across the Atlantic after 1492, where they came from, and one effect of each.

Bartolomé de las Casas, Spanish Dominican friar, account of Spanish conduct in the Caribbean, published 1552

Now this infinite multitude of Men are by the Creation of God innocently simple, altogether void of and averse to all manner of Craft, Subtlety and Malice, and most Obedient and Loyal Subjects to their Native Sovereigns; . . . The natives tractable, and capable of Morality or Goodness, very apt to receive the instill'd principles of Catholick Religion; . . .

The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv'd, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher'd and harass'd with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard . . . that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.

An account of the new monarchies, c. 1450 to c. 1550 (original summary)

Between about 1450 and 1550, rulers in Spain, France and England built stronger central governments, and historians call them the new monarchs. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile brought the nobles' private armies under royal control and used the Spanish Inquisition to enforce religious unity. In France, the Concordat of Bologna (1516) gave King Francis I the right to name the kingdom's bishops and abbots. In England, Henry VII used the royal council sitting in the Star Chamber to discipline powerful nobles. Everywhere, kings relied on lawyers and men of the middle ranks who owed their position to royal favor rather than to noble birth.

Historian 1 and Historian 2

Historian 1: In the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century, Europeans began to think of themselves as individuals rather than mainly as members of a guild, a family or a church. Humanists read ancient texts with new critical methods, artists signed their work and sought fame, and writers praised human talent and achievement. The Renaissance marks the moment when a recognizably modern, secular outlook first appeared in Europe.

Historian 2: The Renaissance looks less like a break with the Middle Ages once we ask who took part in it. Its patrons were mostly popes, princes and rich merchants, and most of the art they paid for was religious. Humanist schools trained a small elite, while the great majority of Europeans, who farmed the land, lived much as their grandparents had. Renaissance culture was a change in the tastes of a few, built on medieval foundations.

A historian's interpretation

In the sixteenth century, prices across Europe rose to several times their earlier level, and food prices climbed faster than wages. Contemporaries blamed greedy merchants, but two forces mattered more: a population that had at last recovered from the Black Death, and the silver that poured into Spain from the mines of Mexico and Peru and then spread across the continent. Inflation rewarded those who had grain to sell. In England and the Netherlands, landowners and farmers producing for the market prospered, while many wage earners grew poorer. In Prussia, Poland and other lands east of the Elbe River, nobles answered the same rising demand for grain by tying peasants more firmly to their estates and increasing the labor services they owed.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Portuguese royal chronicler, on the division of African captives at Lagos, Portugal, in 1444, written 1453

But to increase their sufferings still more, there now arrived those who had charge of the division of the captives, and who began to separate one from another, in order to make an equal partition of the fifths; and then was it needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers. . . .

The Infant was there, mounted upon a powerful steed, and accompanied by his retinue, making distribution of his favours, as a man who sought to gain but small treasure from his share; for of the forty-six souls that fell to him as his fifth, he made a very speedy partition of these; . . . for he reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost.