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Renaissance & Exploration: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
The Renaissance
The Renaissance, meaning “rebirth”, began in Italy in the 1300s. Artists and thinkers revived ideas from ancient Greece and Rome.
Key fact
Florence, ruled by the Medici family, was an early centre.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, engineer and scientist. His notebooks are full of flying machines, anatomy and inventions far ahead of their time.
Key fact
He wrote many of his notes in mirror writing, right to left.
Printing Spreads Ideas
Printing with movable type spread fast across Europe after 1450. Books got cheaper, more people learned to read, and new ideas travelled quickly.
Key fact
By 1500, European printers had produced millions of books.
The Age of Exploration
In the 1400s and 1500s, European sailors searched for sea routes to Asia. Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498.
Key fact
Columbus believed he had reached Asia.
Around the World
Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition set out in 1519 and was the first to sail around the world. Magellan died on the way; only 18 of about 270 men made it back in 1522.
Key fact
Juan Sebastián Elcano captained the last ship home.
The Columbian Exchange
After 1492, plants, animals, people and diseases crossed the Atlantic in both directions. Potatoes and tomatoes went to Europe; horses and wheat to the Americas.
Key fact
Diseases like smallpox devastated the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The Scientific Revolution
In 1543, Copernicus argued that Earth orbits the Sun. Galileo’s telescope backed him up, and Galileo was put under house arrest for it.
Key fact
Galileo spotted Jupiter’s four largest moons in 1610.
Fun facts
Brunelleschi built Florence’s great cathedral dome, finished in 1436, without a wooden frame to hold it up.
Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa for years and never handed it over to the man who ordered it.
Gutenberg’s press was adapted from the screw presses used to make wine and olive oil.
Bartolomeu Dias rounded Africa’s southern tip in 1488 and named it the Cape of Storms. It was later renamed the Cape of Good Hope.
Magellan’s survivors came home to find they’d lost a day: sailing west around the globe had cost them a date.
Horses had died out in the Americas about 10,000 years before Europeans brought them back.
The Catholic Church only formally admitted it had wronged Galileo in 1992.
Story: The Missing Day
The Missing Day
July 1522. The last survivors of Magellan’s voyage stop at the Cape Verde islands on their way home. They’ve kept a careful log every single day.
Ashore, they’re told it’s Thursday. By their log, it’s Wednesday. The expedition’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, can’t work out where the day went.
Sailing west around the world, they had followed the Sun and lost a whole day. Today the International Date Line sorts that out.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 10
The Renaissance began in Italy.
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True. In cities like Florence, Venice and Rome.
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Question 2 of 10
Leonardo filled notebooks with designs for flying machines.
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True. Centuries before planes existed.
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Question 3 of 10
Movable-type printing made copies of texts much faster to produce.
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True. A press could print far faster than scribes could copy.
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Question 4 of 10
Columbus reached the Americas in 1492.
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True. Landing in the Caribbean.
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Question 5 of 10
Magellan’s expedition was the first to sail around the world.
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True. Returning to Spain in 1522.
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Question 6 of 10
The Columbian Exchange moved crops, animals and diseases between continents.
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True. Across the Atlantic, in both directions.
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Question 7 of 10
Copernicus said that Earth orbits the Sun.
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True. Not the other way round.
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Question 8 of 10
“Renaissance” means “the end”.
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False. It means “rebirth”.
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Question 9 of 10
Leonardo was only a painter.
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False. He was also an engineer, inventor and anatomist.
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Question 10 of 10
Gutenberg invented paper as well as the printing press.
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False. Paper came from China over a thousand years earlier.
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KnowSoda learns what you know and brings back what you’re about to forget. Renaissance & Exploration has 6 more ideas at the Advanced and Expert levels.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Renaissance, Age of Discovery, Magellan, Copernicus, Galileo
- Smithsonian — The Columbian Exchange
- The British Library — Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
- World History Encyclopedia — Renaissance
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Zheng He, caravel, Tenochtitlán, Treaty of Tordesillas, Medici family
- Slave Voyages — Trans-Atlantic slave trade database
