Europe at a Crossroads.

In the 1400s and 1500s the major states of Europe took their first steps toward imperialistic domination of much of the globe by exploring, conquering, and colonizing various regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The motives of these nations and the technological innovations that made possible their imperial expansion grew largely from the transformation of European thought and society during the period that historians call the Renaissance (1350-1600). For Europeans the Renaissance was above all a period of recovery. The 1300s had been a particularly disastrous era in European history. Millions had died as a result of successive waves of famine on the one hand and the appearance of the bubonic plague, or Black Death, on the other. Besides causing immeasurable human suffering, these disasters also threw Europe's economy into turmoil and crisis. Moreover, Christian Europe in the early and mid 1400s increasingly...