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[BLANK-1] was one of the most celebrated artists and thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. He was known as a Renaissance Man because he excelled in multiple artistic forms: painting, drawing, and engineering. He worked in Florence (the center of Renaissance genius) and effectively established a unique style in his artwork. He proposed a number of engineering models (including a flying machine similar to the helicopter – an invention that wouldn’t exist for another 600 years) and expressed a fascination with anatomy and anatomical perspective (his sketches of human organs suggest that either he or an assistant resorted to grave robbing in order to effectively understand the human body and his sketch, “Vitruvian Man” is celebrated for creating “perfect proportions” for the human body in artwork). He is known for his celebrated paintings, “The Mona Lisa,” “The Last Supper,” “Madonna of the Rocks,” and “Lady with an Ermine.”

Joan of Arc was a vassal to the Dauphin, the uncrowned king of France known as [BLANK-1], during the Hundred Years’ War. The Dauphin gave Joan command of armies that led to the liberation of Orléans and Reims. These victories allowed the Dauphin to be crowned King of France and paved the way for French victory in the lengthy war. This king, however, sacrificed Joan of Arc like a pawn. When she was captured by Burgundians, they offered to ransom her to the king. Despite all she had done for the king, he did not want to pay the money for her ransom – a decision that led to her death. As king, this man revived the monarchy and France after the dreadful 116-year long Hundred Years’ War. He reorganized the royal council, strengthened royal finances, and created the first permanent royal army anywhere in Europe.

Pre-Columbian American civilizations had no draft animals, so there were limitations to agriculture, however, [BLANK-1] were used as important pack animals in the mountainous regions of Andean societies.

During the Kamakura Shogunate, Buddhism was spread to ordinary Japanese people by energetic preachers. One new sect of Buddhism was [BLANK-1] named after the preacher who lived from 1133-1212 and who argued that paradise could be reached through simple faith in the Buddha and repeating the name of the Buddha Amitabha. This was also known as Pure Land Buddhism.

The Black Death was a destabilizing event in Europe and significantly altered the social behavior of the people it affected. The Florentine Humanist Giovanni Boccaccio the crisis in his Effects of the Black Death in Florence (ca. 1352). His account of the plague described a sense of normlessness or lack of social mores among the populace and a complete collapse of social structures – an effect that later historians and social scientists would term [BLANK-1]. Boccaccio described husbands abandoning wives, parents abandoning their children, strangers wandering into random houses, people fleeing into the hillsides, merrymaking and bacchanalia in some corners of the city and cloistered shut-ins in other corners. Women laughing at funerals and losing all modesty in regard to exposing their bodies were among the social mores broken during the time of the plague.

After Temujin’s death, the Mongol Empire was divided into smaller states ruled by his heirs. These states were loosely connected to one another and were known as [BLANK-1].

One of the preconditions for the success of the Printing Press and the Printing Revolution was the prevalence of [BLANK-1] in Europe. From the mid-fourteenth century onward, these industries were common in Europe and produced massive amounts of cheap products necessary for printing. These industries had originated in China and were spread to Europe from Muslim Spain, but became commonplace in the continent.

At the end of the twelfth century, the Muslim scholar Maulana Burhān ud-dīn Marghīnānī wrote [BLANK-1]. In this text, he discussed the rules regarding Muslim marriage and stated that Muslim men could practice polygamy and marry as many as four wives, as that number was explicitly expressed in the Qur’an. The wives could be free women or slaves and he argued against an older Muslim scholar named Shāfi’ī, who claimed that only one of the wives could be a slave. According to Marghīnānī, any number of the four wives could be slaves or free women.

Literally named after university professors, [BLANK-1] was an intellectual movement that was part of the Twelfth Century Renaissance in Europe. Universities, such as the University of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Bologna, were hotbeds of this intellectual movement that sought to apply logic and reason to faith. The two most famous practitioners of this intellectual movement were Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas.

The Plantagenet Dynasty came to an end during the War of the Roses in 1485, when Henry Tudor defeated [BLANK-1] (the last of his line) at Bosworth Field. Henry would reestablish a strong monarchical line and begin the Tudor line of kings (including notable monarchs like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I).