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[BLANK-1] was a China-based maritime exchange that helped to power the Medieval Chinese Economic Revolution. It began in the 7th century, with the discovery of a valuable new luxury good and China dominated the industry, though Japan, Korea, and India would found their own industries in the following centuries. It continued to be a major, lucrative, global exchange through the nineteenth century. By that point, India had surpassed China as the world’s leader in this business.

Religious violence between Catholics and Protestants was commonplace following the Protestant Reformation. One of the most notable examples came at the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, which occurred following the wedding of the Catholic sister of the King of France, Margaret de Valois, to a Protestant groom: [BLANK-1]. The bridegroom was a pragmatist and recognized that converting to Catholicism would ultimately allow him to serve as King of France himself; he was said to have cynically stated “Paris is worth a mass.” The wedding itself began in a bizarre fashion. As a Protestant, the groom was not allowed inside the cathedral where the wedding was being held, so his brother had to stand in for him with the groom yelling his vows out from across the threshold of the door. Following the ceremony, the Catholic Queen, Catherine de’ Medici, ordered troops to kill the thousands of unarmed French Huguenots (Protestants) who had traveled to Paris for the wedding and who had been assured of the safety of the event as wedding guests. The number of dead within Paris likely numbered at a few thousand; however, violence spread throughout the countryside as Catholics surprised Protestants and massacred as many as 30,000 over the course of several weeks. The bridegroom escaped the religious violence from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and did ultimately convert to Catholicism and become King of France; however, he would ultimately be a victim of later religious violence as he was assassinated by a Catholic extremist in 1610.

[BLANK-1] is the Sahara Desert’s southern fringe. It is a sub-desert climate that served as a path by which early African agriculture transferred westward out of the Nile River Valley. Islam, as well, spread across this subdesert region westward, before stopping its spread in the forested regions of West Africa and the grasslands south of this climatic zone.

The Frankish historian [BLANK-1] recorded Pope Urban II’s Sermon at Clermont – the event that led to the crusades. He recounted Urban’s motivations for the call for a crusade: the Turkish invasion of Christian Roman (Byzantine) lands. He also noted that Urban promised an indulgence – the complete remission of sins – to all who would take up arms against the infidels. This historian would travel with the first group of crusaders and record their exploits in A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem: The Call for Crusade.

During the Kamakura Shogunate, Buddhism was spread to ordinary Japanese people by energetic preachers. One new sect of Buddhism was [BLANK-1] named for the preacher who lived from 1173-1263 and who taught that monks should not marry and father children, but rather live in monasteries, shut off from the world.

Asian Migration Theory – the idea that North America (and later South America) came to be settled by people as hunters followed large game animals across a land bridge between Asia and North America known as Beringia around 15000-13000 B.C.E. – was first proposed by a Spanish priest named [BLANK-1]. His theory is now widely accepted by historians, archaeologists, and scientists to explain how the majority (but not all) of Native Americans came to settle North and South America.

Part 3 Essay Question (40%): Your essay should have an introduction with a clear and specific thesis, a body with evidence, and a conclusion that reinforces your central argument. Select the option you feel the most comfortable with and answer it to the best of your ability. You may find it helpful to write out a brief outline of the essay before you begin writing.Choose ONE (1):What was the impact of the Renaissance on European civilization? Identify and explain the key legacies of the Renaissance. How did social and ideological changes enacted in the Renaissance lead to a larger gap between elites and commoners? Why do some historians select the Renaissance as the founding moment of modern Europe?What issues led ordinary Christians and church reformers to come to question the Catholic Church around the fourteenth century? Which problems with the church continued in the lead-up to Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic Church in 1517? How did the Protestant Reformation seek to address these issues with the church? How did the Catholic Reformation attempt to correct these problems?Who were the dominant economic powers in the Afroeurasian trade? Who were relatively minor players in the trade? Why? What were the prized trading goods and how did trade occur between 1450 and 1600? What ultimately led to the declining importance of the Afroeurasian trade?

[BLANK-1] was an Austrian-based dynastic family that used marriage ties and wealth to strengthen their power across Europe. This family dynasty reached its height under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and extended its territory well beyond the Holy Roman Empire, with lands in Austria, Netherlands, Spain, Northern Italy, and elsewhere. This group was among the staunchest defenders of Catholicism in the period of religious turmoil brought on by the Protestant Reformation. They engaged in frequent wars against the Ottoman Empire, and also the French (despite the shared Catholic religion between them). They were among the groups to suffer the greatest loss of political power following the results of the Thirty Years’ War.

In Medieval Europe, [BLANK-1] were commoners who worked the land of a noble lord’s manorial estate. They were given the use of the land and the lord’s protection in exchange for a portion of the crop (called a rent) and other labor services. They lived in small villages near a church and the lord’s manor house and ate a meager diet of bread with a few vegetables – meat was reserved for only a few days a year such as great feast days like Christmas or Easter. While these people were sometimes connected to their lord’s land by legal and financial arrangements, they were technically free and could leave the land. They were not bound to the lord’s land.

[BLANK-1] was caused by a bacterium, Yersinia Pestis, and devastated Europe in its initial outbreak from 1346-1350, and periodically returned (with somewhat less devastating results) for centuries afterward. Death tolls from this plague vary wildly, but range from 100-200 million dead and between one-half and two-thirds of Europe’s populace dying from the disease. In large cities and university towns, such as Florence in Northern Italy and Cairo in North Africa, as much as 90% of the populace were killed. The disease spread along maritime trade routes initially, and the vector for the disease were fleas housed on Black Rats that stowed away on trading vessels. The Catholic Church’s ineffective approach to the disease sent many Christians into spiritual disarray and contributed to the institution’s crisis.