From the 8th century until the 15th century, the Republic of Venice and neighboring maritime republics held the monopoly of European trade with the Middle East. The silk and spice trade, involving spi ...
A prelude to the Age of Discovery was a series of European expeditions crossing Eurasia by land in the late Middle Ages. Although the Mongols had threatened Europe with pillage and destruction, Mongol ...
European medieval knowledge about Asia beyond the reach of Byzantine Empire was sourced in partial reports, often obscured by legends, dating back from the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great ...
The Portuguese began systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa from 1418, under the sponsorship of Prince Henry. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias reached the Indian Ocean by this route. In 1492 the ...
The Age of Discovery is a historical period of European global exploration that started in the early 15th century with the first Portuguese expeditions to Africa and India, as well as the Discovery of ...
The medieval period is frequently caricatured as a "time of ignorance and superstition" that placed "the word of religious authorities over personal experience and rational activity." This is a legacy ...
The Late Middle Ages in Europe as a whole correspond to the Trecento and Early Renaissance cultural periods in Italy, although Northern Europe and Spain continued to use Gothic styles, increasingly el ...
One of the major developments in the military sphere during the Late Middle Ages was the increasing use of infantry and light cavalry. The English also employed longbowmen, but other countries were un ...
he Later Middle Ages saw a reaction against scholasticism led by John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William of Ockham (d. c. 1348), both of whom objected to the application of reason to faith. Their effor ...
The troubled 14th century saw the Avignon Papacy of 1305–78, also called the "Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy" (a reference to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews), and then the Great Schism that ...
Although the Palaeologi emperors recaptured Constantinople from the Western Europeans in 1261, they were never able to regain control of much of the former imperial lands. They usually controlled only ...
The Late Middle Ages witnessed the rise of strong, royalty-based nation states throughout Europe, particularly in England, France, and the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula: Aragon, Castile, ...
Society throughout Europe was disturbed by the dislocations caused by the Black Death. Lands that had been marginally productive were abandoned, as the survivors were able to acquire more fertile area ...
The first years of the 14th century were marked by famines, culminating in the Great Famine of 1315–17. The causes of the Great Famine included the slow transition from the Medieval Warm Period to th ...
Monastic reform became an important issue during the 11th century, as elites began to worry that monks were not adhering to the rules binding them to a strictly religious life. Cluny Abbey, founded in ...
