Western Civilization I / Unit 14 WC1 1322 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Why States Got Stronger: Guns, Money, Officials, and the Church's Wealth
The idea
The exam's questions on the new monarchies and on the Habsburg and Ottoman rivalry come from one chapter, and the anchor's chain runs through it. Begin with the Italian Wars. When France invaded in fourteen ninety-four, the balance of Lodi broke, and for forty years France, Spain and the Empire fought over Italy with the new weapons; Italy lost its independence, and its Renaissance went north in the baggage of bureaucrats and painters. Next, the weapons. Gunpowder let a peasant kill a knight, pike and musket stopped cavalry, and cannon ended the castle, so kings needed mercenaries and rebuilt fortresses, and those needed money. Next, the money. Kings levied territory-wide taxes for the first time since Rome, with the consent of parliaments and estates, and staffed the offices with humanist-trained townsmen, the new men, who owed everything to the crown and took aim at the nobles' privileges and the Church's wealth. Then the three kingdoms. Spain united by marriage and Granada and expelled its Jews and Muslims; England came out of the War of the Roses under a Tudor who broke the great lords and ruled with the gentry; France kept the army and taxes the Hundred Years' War had made and gave them to a Spider king. The Empire went the other way, elective under the Golden Bull, Habsburg by bribery and frontier, unable to tax its princes, so that Charles V, who inherited more than any ruler in Europe, could not govern it and divided it in fifteen fifty-six. And east of all of them stood the state the anchor calls the model of the age, the Ottoman Empire, which had taken Constantinople in fourteen fifty-three, Egypt and Hungary after, honored merchants, ruled its minorities as millets, and stopped only at Vienna, while Safavid Iran became a Shia rival and American silver ran through both toward India.
In practice
Wars, guns, taxes, officials, three kingdoms, one empire that could not follow, and the Ottoman model beside them.
Where people slip
The exam does not ask whether the gunpowder revolution was a revolution, and the anchor says many historians reject the term; the course gives the pattern and the doubt. It asks what the Golden Bull did, who the seven electors were, what the taille was, what happened in fourteen ninety-two and fifteen twenty-six and fifteen twenty-nine, what a Janissary was, what a millet was. Learn those as facts and use the chain to hold them. The anchor's figures, twenty thousand executions, seven hundred thousand people, are its own and attributed; its errors on Louis XI's dates and deeds, the marriage of fourteen sixty-nine and Charles V's abdication are corrected; and Bosworth, Chaldiran and the Star Chamber, which the course cannot source, are named only as disclosures.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
- 13011494: The Italian Wars End Italian Independence
- 1304Gunpowder: Pike, Musket, Cannon, and the End of the Castle
- 1305The Financial Revolution: New Men and New Taxes
- 1306Spain United: Isabella, Ferdinand, Granada, 1492
- 1308England: The War of the Roses and Henry VII's Council Courts
- 1310France: Charles VII's Army, the Taille, and Louis XI the Spider
- 1311The Holy Roman Empire: Golden Bull, Seven Electors, Habsburgs
- 1312Charles V: The Inheritance Too Big to Govern
- 1313The Ottomans to 1453: Osman to Mehmed II
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