European History

Unit 4Covering Standards:SS6H6 The student will analyze the impact of European exploration and colonization on various world regions. a. Identify the causes of European exploration and colonization; include religion, natural resources, a market for goods, and the contributions of Prince Henry the Navigator.

First a Little Background…

• Ancient Greece• Ancient Rome• The Middle Ages

– Also known as:•The Dark Ages•Medieval Times

Ancient Greece

• On the Northeastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea lies a jagged, mountain covered peninsula where a people, divided by the rugged landscape, were tied to each other by their traditions and their beliefs in a mythical world.

• It was about 2000 B.C. when the Greeks first settled on this, the Balkan peninsula. Due to the mountainous terrain, which made it difficult to farm, and the great sea that surrounded them, they became great fishermen and sailors.

• In Spite of the landscape that divided the Greek people, they created a brilliant civilization. It was an ancient civilization that would become one of the foundations for modern Western civilization.

• The Ancient Greeks studied astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics. They wanted to learn as much as they could about the world around them. One of the most well known philosophers of this time was Pythagoras who said that everything could be explained by numbers and the relationship between them.

Knowledge ~

• What they couldn’t explain with math, philosophy, or science – they explained with myths

Religion ~

• From how the world was created, to what caused the weather patterns, even where they went after death, or in death as they saw it, there was a story ~ a myth ~ that explained the unexplainable. They all involved the Greek gods who, according to Greek mythology, were responsible for all things unexplainable.

• Their beliefs in these gods and the works that they did were a part of everyday life as well as the center of all their celebrations. The most famous of these were held every four years at Olympia in honor of Zeus, king of the gods.

Art and Architecture

• The Greeks were both great artists ~sculptors (The Discus Thrower), painters (Greek vases), as well as great architects (The Parthenon).

Government

• In certain city-states of Greece (Athens in particular) they practiced one of the earliest forms of democracy recorded – direct democracy. In direct democracy all citizens participate directly in making government decisions.

• For hundreds of years the landscape that divided the Greek people physically divided them as a people as well. The Greek city-states were constantly battling against each other for land, power and trading rights in the Mediterranean.

Alexander the Great

• The Greek city-states were finally united in 300 B.C. Alexander the Great created the Greek Empire which would spread to Egypt and to Asia. As this empire grew, Greek customs, traditions, and knowledge spread with it.

• The empire Alexander created however, would not survive his death. His generals murdered his family and divided the empire between themselves.

Ancient Rome

• On another, less mountainous peninsula, on the Northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, a people settled along the Tiber River. Here they found fertile land and easy access to water for farming, things that made staying in one place much easier than wandering the land.

• These people called themselves Romans after Romulus who, according to Roman myth, founded

Rome with his twin brother Remus.

According to this myth they had been

abandoned as babies and were raised by a wolf.

Religion

• They were like the Greeks in their desire to learn. They too studied math, philosophy, and astronomy –trying to learn as much about the world around them as they could.

• They also explained the unknown with mythology. They had many of the same gods as the Greeks (some actually borrowed from Greek mythology itself), only with different names

• The Romans were also similar to the Greeks in their love of art and architecture. The Coliseum is one of the most famous buildings from Ancient Rome. The engineering of the Roman aqueducts and roads was so good that many still stand today, some of the roads are even still used.

Art & Architecture

• Unlike the Greeks however, the land they lived on was not mountainous, so they were able to farm as well as fish. Their land did not separate their people either - the way the mountains of the Balkan peninsula had separated the Greeks. They became a stronger and, eventually, much more powerful civilization.

Government

• The Romans did have a democratic type of government, although it was not direct like the Greeks. The Roman citizens elected their leaders and representatives to handle the day-to-day running of the Roman government. It was a republic.

The Roman Senate:

Changes in Government

• However, in 44 B.C. Julius Caesar became dictator for life. Shortly after he was stabbed to death by the members of the senate. Upon Caesar’s death the Roman world was split into east and west.

• In 31 B.C., the Western ruler – Octavian, beat the eastern ruler – Marc Antony, and the Roman world was reunited. Historians mark Octavian’s (who renamed himself Augustus) rule as the end of the republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

• The fertile land, the easy transportation offered by the Mediterranean Sea as well as their abundant knowledge and standing army allowed the Roman empire to grow and grow and grow…

• The Roman Empire had grown so large that it could no longer protect all of its borders. At the same time the empire was suffering civil wars and outside attacks from Northern barbarians. The western empire finally fell in 476.

• Leaders of the barbarian tribes took pieces of the broken empire for themselves dividing it into hundreds of parcels of land. No longer connected by the empire that controlled them, all of Europe was thrown into a dark period of time.

• They no longer practiced the civilized government of the Romans, they no longer valued art and architecture, they no longer had time to bother with learning about math, or the stars or really anything for that matter. They were focused on survival.

The Middle Ages

• As Europe spiraled down to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, those with power and money ruled absolute over those who did not. It was the age castles and kings, princesses and princes – but it was no fairy tale.

• First, there was the constant fighting because that’s the only way you were ever going to work your way up the ladder to become king – you had to get rid of everyone else in your way.

• You had to be able to pay a lot of men a lot of money in order to get them to risk their lives fighting for you. More often than not, instead of money these knights were given large pieces of land from the vast kingdom.

• And if you think being a knight was a great job…the armor was so heavy that they often times had to be hoisted onto their oversized horses – good luck staying on once you got there. And even with the heavy armor they weren’t protected very well, what with all the gaps between the joints and not being able to see very well out of their helmet. It was a very dangerous job. Especially once gun powder showed up.

• However, being a king and constantly having to fight off invaders so you could live in a cold dreary castle and being a knight, who had to risk his life to own land was certainly better than being a serf.

• If we lived during the Middle Ages, all of us would be serfs. Yes, you would. There was no upper middle class or lower middle class, or any middle class. You were either royalty and their family (which pretty much covers all of your knights) or you were a serf which meant you had nothing.

• You worked on the land owned by the knight who allowed you to grow a small amount of food to feed your family, but your home, your tools, your clothing all belonged to the knight who owned the land you worked.

• There was no way to work your way into a better life. You couldn’t go to school to better educate yourself because there weren’t any at this time, and you didn’t belong to the right blood lines or have money or power, so you and your sons and daughters after you were stuck living the lives of serfs.

• The only way to escape this life was to join the church and even then there would be limitations to who they would take and how far up they could actually go in the church. Sadly, the king had power in the church too and he often appointed family to high positions – if you were lucky you might become a monk.

• You might be asking yourself why. Why would these people stay living in these conditions? Why would these serfs allow this obvious misbalance between them and their ruling class when they were doing all the work? Weren’t there enough of them to overthrow the tyrants?

• Because they didn’t know any better, any different. No one remembered what it was like hundreds of years before and there were no history books Even if there were, none of the serfs could read – it was the Dark Ages.

• Europe would remain under this cloud that darkened their knowledge, their art, their government and their people for a very long time. It wouldn’t begin to change until the 1300’s and this change would come from a foreign people.

Crusades• During the Middle Ages the

only thing that did work to hold the people of Europe together, the only unifying thing, was the Catholic church. Being the only Christian church in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, it was the church that all people belonged to and believed in. Because of this it held absolute power, even over kings.

• During this time period many European Christians made a pilgrimage (a religious journey) to the holy land – where the Christian religion began.

• However, the Seljuk Turks (Muslims) had taken control of this area and the Christians who traveled through this land were under constant assault from their attacks.

• So Pope Urban II (the head of the Catholic church and thus at this time all of Europe) went to the kings and the people of Europe asking for their help.

• The European powers resisted at first but finally caved to the greater power and influence of the church and the first Crusade began in 1096. Knights, and kings and even ordinary men joined in the fight wearing red crosses against white tunics.

• The first Crusade proved to be a success as the European Christians were able to take back the Jerusalem in the name of the church and pilgrims were once again safe to visit the holy city.

• The European Christians, however, were not content with just Jerusalem. They wanted to control all of the Holy Land and so they began another Crusade.

• The second Crusade proved disastrous as they not only failed to gain new land but also lost Jerusalem back to the Turks. Following Crusades would also prove to be just as futile as they never again regained any part of the Holy Lands.

Benefits of the Crusades

• While the Crusades ended up being a failure in the religious sense as well as in the enormous loss of life, they did prove to be beneficial in other ways.

• While ships were bringing men and supplies to southwestern Asia to help the Crusade efforts, they were bringing back new merchandise from this land and lands to the east as well.

• The people of Europe, especially those with plenty of money to spend, wanted more of these Asian treasures – the silk, the spices, etc. And now that the lands needed to travel through were once again controlled by the Turks, this was no easy task.

• Europeans knew they needed to find a new and easier way to the orient ~ and so began the age of exploration and the beginning of an new era called the Renaissance.