5 Steps to a 5TM AP European History

(^50) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
order and fought on behalf of their lords as necessary. Merchants worked for the feudal
lords. They held trade fairs and paid fees and taxes. That is, they paid to gain access to towns
where they could sell their goods, a fee to set up booths, and a “tax” of sorts on everything
sold. Serfs (peasants) worked the land to the benefit of everyone higher in the social pyramid
and in return received protection, initially from barbarian raiders (including the Vikings),
and then from other feudal lords intent on expanding their fiefdoms. Two events, or series
of events, in particular would introduce irreparable cracks in this pyramidal structure: the
Crusades and the Black Plague.
The Crusades included eight major and several minor wars that began in 1095 and
continued until nearly the end of the fifteenth century. They did not simply extend the
reach of Christianity. Neither did they enrich solely the Roman Church. The Crusades
resulted in an exchange of scientific and cultural ideas, goods, traditions, and even diseases,
and they led to the establishment of transportation and trade networks across continents.
Manufacture of goods, from weaponry to foodstuffs, and an increase in industry (for exam-
ple, shipbuilding) were equally noteworthy. As goods made their way between Asia and
Europe, the merchant class began to expand. It held expanded trade fairs and promoted
the growth of cities.
The Black Plague weakened the pyramidal structure by empowering the serfs. The
plague did not discriminate, wiping out as much as 50 percent of Europe’s population at
all levels. As a result, some feudal lords lost their labor pool and had to recruit workers
from elsewhere. For the first time, serfs could bargain and get paid for their labor. Control
was no longer absolutely in the hands of feudal lords. A middle class began to form, led by
merchants and artisans and guilds, and sustained by the peasant class.
These changes should sound familiar. They echo what had happened millennia before
when the domestication of animals and agriculture led to settlement, which led to differ-
entiated social roles, division and specialization of labor, and to some standardization of
produced goods.
One of the great ironies of history is that during the Middle Ages, when the Crusades
represented the Christian attempt to reclaim the Holy Land from the “infidel” Muslim, a
sort of proto-Renaissance was taking place on the Muslim-dominated Iberian Peninsula.
Between 711 and 1492, the Peninsula was under the control of the Umayyad Dynasty.
The Muslim government established hospitals (open to all), public libraries, and schools
of translation, these last providing alternate versions of classical science and philosophy,
rescuing a great deal of classical literature from oblivion, and provoking new directions of
scholarship. It established universities. It introduced chess and irrigation systems, some still
in use today. Literature flourished in the form of the first multicultural poetry, primarily
love poetry written in Arabic and Ibero-Romance. The attempts by Christians to retake
the peninsula gave us the chansons de geste, epics that told the history of the Reconquest
of the Iberian Peninsula. As had the epics of classical times, they continued the tradition of
teaching history to the general public. Literature and artwork often revealed or re-created
historical events and frequently stressed the importance of the heroic individual. Emphasis
on the individual would in turn lead to a less theocentric, more human-centered vision of
the universe, a decidedly Renaissance trait. Architecture, however, perhaps most reflects
the changes in attitude between medieval and renaissance thought. The secular Alhambra
in Granada and the religious Great Mosque of Córdoba both made use of ancient archi-
tectural elements—like the arch—that would enable Europe’s medieval architecture to
produce Gothic wonders. Besides physical changes reflected in such architecture, the
resurgence of a belief in man’s ability to contemplate the divine through human endeavor
characterized the modernizing world. It allowed people to explore potential and possibility
instead of resigning themselves to their position in the social hierarchy.
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