Deck 16: Calamities and Recoveries Across Afroeurasia, 1300-1500

Question 1

Which region was spared from the population and economic slump of the fourteenth century?

A) Europe
B) Subsaharan Africa
C) Inner Eurasia
D) central Muslim lands

Answer 1

Subsaharan Africa

Question 2

What was the world's most important gold-supplying state as of 1300?

A) China
B) the Ilkhanate
C) Mali
D) Egypt

Answer 2

Mali

Question 3

Climatologists labeled the cooling cycle that ended in the mid-1800s the

A) North Atlantic Cool Period.
B) Second Post-C.E. Cold Cycle.
C) Era of Global Temperature Decline.
D) Little Ice Age.

Answer 3

Little Ice Age.

Question 4

Which of the following was NOT a result of the cooling cycle in the fourteenth century?

A) political riots
B) famine
C) increased food prices
D) economic upheaval

Question 5

Next to the American Indian die-off, the most deadly disease crisis before modern times was the

A) Black Death.
B) leprosy epidemic.
C) Seven Plagues.
D) Mongol epidemic.

Question 6

Infections associated with the Black Death were thought to be caused by a

A) virus.
B) vector.
C) bacterium.
D) fungus.

Question 7

The principal vector of Y. pestis was

A) rodents.
B) domesticated animals.
C) cockroaches.
D) fleas.

Question 8

The dominant theory concerning the origin of the Black Death contends that it started somewhere in

A) Europe.
B) Subsaharan Africa.
C) Inner Eurasia.
D) central Muslim lands.

Question 9

Which religious community, at least in some regions, was blamed for the pandemic?

A) Jewish
B) Islamic
C) Christian
D) Pagan

Question 10

Among the structural shifts undermining the Mongol state in the 1300s was

A) food overproduction.
B) a population increase.
C) an extended warming period and drought.
D) price inflation caused by excess paper money.

Question 11

The rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang took control of Beijing and proclaimed a new ________ dynasty.

A) Liao
B) Ming
C) Sui
D) Yuan

Question 12

Why did the Mongol khanate of Iran-Iraq fall?

A) internal feuding over supreme command
B) popular revolt
C) unrest caused by the Black Death
D) pressures of a soaring population

Question 13

In the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria in the wake of the Black Death, income ________ for rural peasants and ________ for skilled urban workers.

A) grew; fell
B) fell; fell
C) fell; grew
D) grew; grew

Question 14

Who was the last of the great Inner Eurasian steppe conquerors?

A) Chingis Khan
B) the Delhi sultanate
C) Tamerlane
D) Kubilai Khan

Question 15

The condition of legal bondage that forced an individual to live and work on a particular estate is known as

A) serfdom.
B) penance.
C) peasantry.
D) servitude.

Question 16

Why did serfdom virtually disappear in western Europe in the fifteenth century?

A) successful rural revolts
B) agrarian reforms following the Peasant Revolt of 1399
C) the crushing of the Jacquerie rebellion
D) the discovery by landowners that other labor practices made better economic sense

Question 17

Who were the principle actors of the Hundred Years' War?

A) England and France
B) peasants and the ruling class
C) France and Spain
D) the houses of Lancaster and York

Question 18

Where were most of the battles of the Hundred Years' War fought?

A) France
B) England
C) Spain
D) Lancaster

Question 19

In the fourteenth century, the political authority and moral prestige of the Catholic Church

A) was rising.
B) was falling.
C) remained about the same.
D) was exceptionally strong.

Question 20

Why was the seat of the church moved from Rome to Avignon in southern France?

A) to escape the extreme pestilence of the Black Plague in Rome
B) so the church could more easily influence the French crown
C) so the French crown could more easily influence the church
D) so the Vatican could be extensively remodeled

Question 21

What prompted urban manufacturers to improve the technology of textile production between 1300 and 1500?

A) labor shortages
B) rising land values
C) abundance of cheap labor
D) expanding markets

Question 22

How did gunpowder and recipes for making it become known in Europe?

A) through the writings of Marco Polo
B) by diffusion across Inner Eurasia during the Mongol era
C) from artillery corps during the Hundred Years' War
D) through exchange with the native populations of North and South America

Question 23

Who formed Europe's first artillery corps to transport and maintain guns?

A) England
B) Prussia
C) France
D) Spain

Question 24

Since printing didn't take hold in India or in the central Muslim lands until the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, how did colleges and wealthy families possess libraries?

A) The books were imported and were primarily written in English.
B) Colleges and wealthy families did not have libraries.
C) The books were hand-copied, mainly in Arabic or Persian.
D) None of these answers is correct.

Question 25

Where was movable type made of wood invented?

A) Germany
B) Korea
C) China
D) Europe

Question 26

In the 1440s a team of German craftsman led by ________ invented movable metal type for the Latin alphabet.

A) Petrarch
B) Dante Alighieri
C) Martin Luther
D) Johannes Gutenberg

Question 27

When the Ming era ended, approximately how much of the world's population lived in China?

A) an eighth
B) a quarter
C) a third
D) half

Question 28

On which previous empire did Taizu model the Ming government?

A) Tang
B) Song
C) Yuan
D) Qing

Question 29

The Ming government's policies favored

A) private entrepreneurs.
B) an agrarian society.
C) merchants.
D) urban living.

Question 30

The Korean Choson dynasty had a formal tributary relationship with China. Governing decisions for Korea were made

A) independently of China.
B) by the Chinese provincial governor.
C) by the Choson but were subject to a veto by the Chinese emperor.
D) in consultation with the Chinese provincial governor.

Question 31

The extension of frontier defensive fortifications known as the Great Wall was in response to

A) a military humiliation at the hands of the Mongols.
B) military pressures in the subtropical hill country of the far southwest.
C) the need to employ landless peasants and discharged soldiers.
D) combined political pressures from Korea and Annam.

Question 32

Who led the naval show of Ming imperial power in the Indian Ocean?

A) Zheng He
B) Taizu
C) Yongle
D) Guizhou

Question 33

Zheng He and the ship captains serving under him navigated using all of the following EXCEPT

A) a compass.
B) a sextant.
C) star charts.
D) coastline maps.

Question 34

The cost of building more ocean-going ships became prohibitive because of

A) labor shortages.
B) government corruption.
C) factional fighting in the royal court.
D) deforestation.

Question 35

Who ruled the North Indian sultanate of Delhi?

A) a local potentate
B) a military governor appointed by Timur
C) Sufi Muslim clerics
D) Muslim Turkic military lords

Question 36

What monarchy was founded by a warrior band in south central India?

A) Calicut
B) New Delhi
C) Vijayanagar
D) Kathmandu

Question 37

What city in what is now western Afghanistan was one of the main urban centers of the Timurid sultanate in the fifteenth century?

A) Samarkand
B) Herat
C) Indus
D) Buhkara

Question 38

Timurid scholars produced the most advanced gazetteer of ________ produced anywhere in the world to that point.

A) the heavens
B) the Caucus Mountains
C) the coastlines of the Indian Ocean
D) Afroeurasia

Question 39

How did Murad I ensure his army was not concerned with Ottoman politics or factional feuding, but was loyal to the ruler?

A) by conscripting orphaned boys from the empire's frontiers
B) by establishing a professional military training cadre
C) by drafting healthy Christian boys from the Balkans
D) by having new recruits make blood loyalty oaths

Question 40

Members of the Ottoman professional standing army were known as

A) ghazi.
B) janissaries.
C) madrasas.
D) flagellants.

Question 41

Who finally captured the great Byzantine bastion of Constantinople?

A) Osman
B) Orkhan
C) Murad I
D) Mehmed II

Question 42

The non-aristocratic propertied class were known as the

A) proletariat.
B) bourgeoisie.
C) first "middle class."
D) second estate.

Question 43

Why did women in the fifteenth century enjoy somewhat greater freedom to earn money?

A) reforms in the Catholic Church
B) severe labor shortages
C) necessity in the face of a severe economic depression
D) a general realization of the value of women's homemaking

Question 44

Who was the first king of the Tudor dynasty?

A) Edward III
B) George II
C) Ferdinand of Aragon
D) Henry VII

Question 45

Which dynasty held sovereignty over the Holy Roman Empire of central Europe?

A) Habsburg
B) Tudor
C) Windsor
D) Hohenzollern

Question 46

Following the Black Death, what city emerged as Europe's liveliest hub of cultural genius?

A) Milan
B) Venice
C) Florence
D) Rome

Question 47

How was the Renaissance, with its ambitious artistic and literary projects, financed?

A) profits from the sale of works of art
B) patronage from the wealthy elite
C) stipends from city governments and the church
D) loans from the Medici banking family

Question 48

The Renaissance philosophy that was fundamentally a project to retrieve the surviving literary and aesthetic achievements of ancient Rome was

A) secularism.
B) individualism.
C) fideism.
D) humanism.

Question 49

The Renaissance spread from Italy to the rest of Europe in tandem with the spread of

A) Catholicism.
B) the Bible.
C) printing technology.
D) neo-classicism.

Question 50

Describe the events that led to the population decline that started in the mid-fourteenth century. Was there one cause? Were there any geographical areas that were essentially unaffected?

Question 51

What dominant theory explains the Black Death? What was the Black Death's primary vector and how did it spread?

Question 52

Discuss the labor system known as serfdom and compare it to slavery. Why did serfdom end in western Europe?

Question 53

Compare and contrast printing methods used in East Asia and Europe. Why was block printing more popular in East Asia? Why was moveable type better suited to Europe?

Question 54

Describe the maritime mission Yongle chose Zheng He to lead. What was its purpose? What ultimately came of the imperial fleet?

Question 55

Recount the consolidation of political power in Anatolia (modern Turkey) that resulted in the Ottoman Turkish state. What areas encompassed the Ottoman empire?

Question 56

Discuss the intellectual and artistic "rebirth"
that began in Italy that today is known as the Renaissance. What conditions in Italy made this "rebirth"
possible?