Indian History Quiz: World History: Renaissance, Reformation and Geographical Discoveries

Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire, was captured by the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed the Second in 1453.

Francesco Petrarch, an Italian poet and scholar of the fourteenth century, collected and studied classical Latin manuscripts and placed human life, reason and the individual at the centre of learning, which is why he is remembered as the father of humanism.

Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat, wrote the Prince as advice to a ruler on how to win and keep power, judging actions by their results rather than by religious morality, and the word Machiavellian comes from this book.

Gutenberg of Mainz in Germany built the first European printing press with movable metal type about the middle of the fifteenth century and printed the Bible that carries his name.

An indulgence was a pardon for sin sold for money, and the campaign to sell indulgences in Germany to pay for building work at Rome was the immediate provocation for Martin Luther, who nailed or posted his Ninety Five Theses at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 arguing that no payment…

Calvin set out his theology, including the doctrine of predestination, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and built a reformed church order at Geneva that spread to Scotland, the Netherlands and France.

When the Pope refused to annul the marriage of Henry the Eighth to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, which declared the king the supreme head of the Church of England and cut the English church off from Rome.

The Council of Trent, summoned by the Pope, sat in several sessions between 1545 and 1563, abolished the worst abuses such as the sale of indulgences, imposed discipline and training on the clergy and restated Catholic doctrine against the Protestants.

The Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488. He called it the Cape of Storms, and the king of Portugal renamed it the Cape of Good Hope because the way to India now lay open.

The expedition left Spain in 1519 under Magellan, who crossed the strait now named after him and named the Pacific Ocean for its calm waters.

The two Iberian kingdoms were the pioneers of oceanic voyages, and after the first voyage of Columbus they agreed by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, with the Pope as arbiter, to divide the non Christian world along a line in the Atlantic: lands to the west of it for…

The potato is native to the Andes of South America and reached Europe only after the Spanish conquest of Peru, after which it became a staple that supported a rising population; maize, tomato, chilli, tobacco, groundnut and cocoa travelled the same way, and Indian cooking took the chilli and the…