Tesch Talks European History

In the beginning of the 1500s, hundreds of thousands of regular people rose up in an armed, bloody revolt that shook central Europe to its foundations. Why were they so furious? Because the very ground beneath their feet was shifting. For generations, European life was simple: you farmed the land, and you gave your loyalty to a local lord. But by the 1500s, a massive wave of global trade, skyrocke...

It boggles the mind to think that when the Taino people walked out onto the beaches of San Salvador and looked at Christopher Columbus, they weren’t just looking at men from another country; they were looking across a 15,000-year-old canyon of human separation. Columbus’s men brought weapons, clothes, and concepts forged by thousands of years of European, Asian, and African collision. But they als...

When the news reached Venice that Vasco da Gama had made it all the way to India and back by ship, the Venetians knew that their monopoly on selling luxury goods from Asia was over. The task of breaking the news to the Doge of Venice fell to Piero Pasqualigo, the Venetian diplomat stationed in Lisbon. Throughout the 1400s, European states like Portugal, Castile, and Venice were locked in a battle...

This was a century when European explorers were traveling farther than they had ever gone before from their own shores. Ferdinand and Isabella were competing with the Portuguese to find routes to travel to Southern Asia. These routes were incredibly valuable, as merchants could buy large quantities of luxury goods such as spices like pepper and cinnamon, porcelain, ivory, cotton, or even silk, the...

By the end of the sixteenth century, the New Monarchs had left the European continent transformed. New monarchs found ways to raise taxes and fill their states’ treasuries. New monarchs also sought to create a more unified national identity in their kingdoms. By centralizing power, professionalizing war, and tethering the Church to the crown, they did more than just expand their borders—they inven...

Printing had been invented in the city of Mainz by the craftsman Johannes Gutenberg. In a few short decades, its invention nearly brought down the institutional Christian church, allowed for the foundations of modern science and medicine, and led to the discovery of about half of the planet. In this episode, we will look at the history of how Europeans recorded human knowledge, and how an inventor...

Last week, we learned about the rekindling of classical learning, science, and the arts that was fueled by tremendous economic growth and trade that historians call the “Renaissance.” Today, we head to Northern Europe, where a similar Renaissance was taking place. Like the artists, architects, and scientists of the Italian Renaissance that we talked about in our last episode, the Renaissance in No...

In this episode, we explore the Italian Renaissance. We’ll look at the economic factors that made the Renaissance possible, the patrons who became sponsors of art and scientific breakthroughs, and the accomplishments that visitors from all around the world travel to Italy and marvel at.