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The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups.
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The second great pandemic of Bubonic Plague, that became known as the Black Death. It was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Its symptoms were painfully swollen lymph glands that form buboes. Sufferers also face fever, chills, headaches, and shortness of breath.
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Age of Exploration is a term given to the period of European exploration in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Driven by a desire for inexpensive spices, gold, and other sources of wealth. Europeans traveled the world and sparked a global exchange of goods that changed the world forever.
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Ancient art was revered, not only as an inspiring model but also as a record of trial and error that could reveal the successes of former great artists. Intending to retrace the creative process rather than to merely imitate the final achievements of antiquity, Early Renaissance artists sought to create art forms consistent with the appearance of the natural world and with their experience of human personality and behavior.
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Johann Gutenberg’s Bible is probably the most famous Bible in the world. It is the earliest full-scale work printed in Europe using moveable type. Gutenberg's invention allowed the mass production of books for the first time and changed the world.
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The High Renaissance time period was the peak of artistic genius and talent, and, believed to have started when Leonardo da Vinci created The Last Supper during the 1490s, it lasted until around 1527.
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On August 3, 1492, Columbus and his crew set sail from Spain in three ships. On October 12, the ships made landfall—not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador.
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Vasco da Gama was best known for being the first to sail from Europe to India by rounding Africa's Cape of Good Hope. Over the course of two voyages, beginning in 1497 and 1502, da Gama landed and traded in locales along the coast of southern Africa before reaching India on May 20, 1498. -
The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world". -
A religious movement in the 1500's that split the Christian church in western Europe and led to the establishment of a number of new churches.
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The Late Renaissance, often also called the Mannerist, period, is characterized by artworks that typically took other works of art as models. Their primary subject was the human body often elongated, exaggerated, elegant, and arranged in twisted poses.
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Scientific Revolution is the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, human anatomy and chemistry transformed views of society and nature.
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After his initial success, Galileo focused on refining the instrument. The initial telescope he created (and the Dutch ones it was based on) magnified objects three diameters. It made things look three times larger than they did. Through refining the design of the telescope he developed an instrument that could magnify eight times, and eventually thirty times.
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Galileo discovered moons around Jupiter after building an advanced telescope.