Chapter 8 - Old Stuff: Approximately 1450 to around 1750 C.E.

The Renaissance literally means "rebirth," and this was nowhere more apparent than in the arts. In Italy, where powerful families in city-states such as Florence, Venice, and Milan became rich on trade, art was financed on a scale not seen since the classical sivilizations and beyond, but turned it into a showcase of architecture and beauty by acting as patron for some of the greatest artists of the time, including Michelangelo and Brunelleschi.

Althought printing was developed in China centuries earlier (Song Dynasty), moveble type wasn't invented in Europe until the mid-1400s, when Johannes Gutenburg invented the printing press. Prior to Gutenburg's invention, the creation of books was such a long and laborious task that few were made. Those that were made were usually printed in Latin, the language of scholars and the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, the typical person didn't read.
With the invention of the printing press, all that changed. Books became easy to produce and thus were far more affordable. The growing middle class fueled demand for books on a variety of subjects that were written in their own vernacular, or native language, such as German or French, The book industry flourished, as did related industries such as papermaking, a craft that was learned from the Arabs. More books led to more literate and educated people. The newly literate people desired more books, which continued to make them more educated, which again increased their desire for books, and so on.

While political power was diffused under the fuedal system, and while the various European princes and political powers frequently clashed with the pope, emperors and princes knew that their power increased if the Church blessed their reign. As a consequence, the pope weilded considerable political power.
The Protestant Reformation was a huge deal in world history. Its significance went well beyond the religious arena. While previous skirmishes between the pope and the nobles had been about political authority, Luther's challenges were theologically based and directed at the pope's religious role. Luther asserted that the people did not need the Catholic Church, or its priests, in order to interact with God; they only needed their Bibles. If the religious authority of the pope could be so openlu and brazenly challenged, and commonly accepted understandings of God's relationship to man could be re-evaluated as well. Put simply, by challenging the pope, Luther made it acceptable to question the conventional wisdom of the church. With newly printed Bibles available in theor own languages, lay people could learn how to read and form their own relationships with God. As the common massses became literate and better educated, more and more Europeans began to question both the world around them and the authority of the Church. Europeans desired to search for their own answers to the questions of the universe. In short, the Protestant Reformation paved the way for revolutions in education, politics, and science.
A group of church officials known as the Council of Trent presided over the counter-reform period from 1545 to 1563, dictating and defining the Catholic interpretation of religious doctrince and clarifying the Catholic Church's position on important religious questions, such as the nature of salvation. During this period, "heretics" were once again tried and punished, and the Catholic Chruch re-established Latin as the language to be used in worship.
The result? The Catholic Church staged an amazing comebacl. THe counter-reformation proved successful in containgin the southward spread of Protestantism. By 1600, southern Europe, France, and southern Germany were heavily Catholic. Northern Germany and Scandinavia were mostly Lutheran. Scotland was Calvinist, as were pockets within central Europe and France. As England was Angelican.

in 1632, Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chei Systems of the World. He wrote the work in Italian in order to reach a wide audience and hopefully the defenders of Ptolemy. One by one, Galileo answered objections. He showed how the rotation of the Earth on its axis produced the apparent roation of the heavens, and how the stars' great distance from the Earth prevented man from being able to see their changed position as the Earth moved around the sun. His proofs made it difficult to continue accepting the Ptolemaic model, which just so happened to be the model sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. THe chrch quickly summoned Galileo befor the Inquisition in Rom for teaching doctrince contrary to Holy Scripture and he was forcefully compelled to recant. His book was placed on The Index. a list of banned heretical works, where astonishingly it remained until 1822. Nevertheless, while under house arrest, Galileo continued to research and document his findings.
While the scientists put forth revolutionary ideas, the philosophers and social critics had a revolution of their own. The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eigthteenth centuries focused on the role of mankind in relation to government, ideas which greatly influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Because of the U.S. Constitution has since been a model for so many others across the globe, so for this reasion alone, it's safe to say the writers of the Enlightenment period changed the world.

Eager to eliminate Muslim middlemen and discover more efficient trade routes to Asia, the Protuguese and their Iberian rivals, the Spanish, set out to sea. Advances in navigation, ship-building and the development of gunpowder weapons allowed for increased sea travel. These "floating empires of the wind" soon controlled major shipping routes in the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and the Atlantic Ocean.
By 1494, Portugal and Spain were already fighting over land in the mewly found Americas. To resolve their differences, the two countries drew up the Treaty of Tordesillas, which established a lone of demarcation on a longitudinal (north-south) line that runes through the western Atlantic Ocean. They agreed that everything to the east of the linebelong to Portugal; everything to the west belonged to to Spain. The western side was enormous (they had no idea how enormous at the time) so Spain became a mega-power quickly. Brazil happened to lie to the east of the line, which is why modern-day Brazilians speak Portuguese instead of Spanish.
In 1519, Hernan Cortes landed on the coast of Mexico with a small force of 600 men. He found himself at the heart of the Aztec Empire. As you might recall, the Aztecs used the conquest of neighboring communities to secure humans for religious sacrifices. These neighboring states loathed the Aztecs, and were more than willing to cooperate with the Spaniards.
Although the Aztecs resisted the occupation and fought to free their leader, the Spanish had incredibly powerful weapons on their side: namely, diseased such as smallpox. These diseases were completely new to the Americas, and quickly drcimated the Aztecs, who had no resistance to them. The combination of disease, superior weapons, and assistance from Aztec enemies reduced the native population of the region from well over 20 million in 1520 to fewer than 2 million by 1580. Because so many of the deaths occured in the first few years, the Spaniards were able to seize control of the empire by around 1525.

Even before the transatlantic voyages began, Europeans were taking slaves from Africa. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese captured slaves while exploring the coasts of Africa. When the plantations of the New World demanded more labor, the money-hungry empire builders knew were to go to get it for free. And so began a forced migration of people that would forever change the fate of millions of lives and the history of the New World.

It shoulden't be surprising that mercantilism fostered resentment in colonies. The colonial resoursed were shipped back to Europe while the colonists were forced to pay for products from Europe. Add taxes, and you've got mafor resentment. You already know that the American Revolution was in part due to colonial fury over this arrangement. One-by-one, beginning with America, European colonies revolted against the abuses by the unforgiving mercantilist economies of the European powers.

Asian colonization didn't really get rolling until the nineteenth century. For the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuris, however, the EUropeans managed to establish trade with the Asian empires, wlthough it was more limited than they would have liked due to Asian protectionist policies and difficulty of travel.
As for China and Japan, bot empires severely limited trade with the Europeans. Throughout this time period, the two Asian empires couldn't have been more unlike their European counterparts. They were highly isolantionist. Not only did they not go out and try to find the rest of the world, they also pushed the rest of the world away when it came to them.