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Chapter 15 Study Guide
European Exploration & Conquest, 1450-1650
Identify and explain the significance of the following people and terms.
- Malacca
- entrepot
- Marco Polo
- Zheng He
- Mameluke Empire
- Mansa Musa
- Turkish Ottomans & Persian Safavids
- Constantinople
- Spice Trade
- Prince Henry the Navigator
11. General History of the Indies
- Caravel
13. Ptolemy’s Geography
- Vasco da Gama
- Christopher Columbus
- Santa Fe Capitulations
- Treaty of Tordesillas
- Ferdinand Magellan
- Dutch East India Company
- Hernando Cortez
- Tenochtitlan
- Virocha
- Francisco Pizarro
- Encomienda system
- Sugar
- Juan de Pareja
- Columbian Exchange
- Price revolution
- Philip II
- Mary Queen of Scots
- Spanish Armada
- Michel de Montaigne
- skepticism
- Elizabethan/Jacobean
- William Shakespeare
- King James Bible
Review Questions
1. What role did the Indian Ocean play in the world trade system prior to Columbus’s famous voyages? What about Africa?
2. Describe the rise of Venice as a trading superpower. What accounts for the city’s decline in the early sixteenth century?
3. What role did Genoa play in the slave trade?
4. What were the most important causes of European expansion?
5. What role did technology play in European expansion?
6. What role did the growth of government power play in the European voyages of exploration and conquest?
7. How should we view Columbus? Was he a hero, a villain, or neither?
8. Why was Portugal so successful overseas?
9. Why does the indigenous population decline under the Spaniards?
10. Describe the commercial relationship between sugar and slavery.
11. What were the affects of the Columbian Exchange?
12. Describe the problems of the Spanish economy in the sixteenth century. Why did a state that extracted such wealth from the Americas have such a poor domestic economy?
13. In what ways did Philip II combat Protestantism?
14. What were the origins of North American racism?
15. Why did faith and religious certainty begin to decline in the first part of the seventeenth century?
16. What were the major literary masterpieces of this age? What were the themes of Shakespeare’s plays?
17. How did new ideas about race and the works of Montaigne and Shakespeare reflect the encounter with new peoples and places?