AP European History — Unit 1: Renaissance and Age of Exploration (c.1450–1648)
Practice questions, answers, and key terms for Unit 1, aligned to the College Board CED.
Exam weighting: Unit 1 is 10% of the AP European History exam.
What AP European History Unit 1 covers
The College Board Course and Exam Description breaks Unit 1 into 7 topics:
- 1.1 Contextualizing Renaissance and Discovery
- 1.2 Italian Renaissance
- 1.3 Printing
- 1.4 New Monarchies
- 1.5 Age of Exploration
- 1.6 Columbian Exchange and Spanish Empire
- 1.7 Causation in the Renaissance and Age of Discovery
AP European History Unit 1 practice questions
Europeans called it a "rebirth" — but nothing new was being born. What was actually coming back to life?
Ancient Greek and Roman texts and ideas, lost during the Middle Ages. The whole movement revived classical antiquity rather than inventing something new.
The Black Death killed a third of Europe — yet historians tie it to the Renaissance taking off. Trace the connection.
Mass death concentrated wealth, freeing surviving elites to fund classical learning. Fewer people meant more wealth per survivor to bankroll humanist scholarship.
One man dug through dusty Latin manuscripts before this course even begins (pre-1450) — yet he's called the father of an entire movement. Who, and what did he start?
Petrarch — he revived classical texts and developed humanism. His focus on human potential and earthly achievement laid the groundwork for the whole movement.
Your study group insists Renaissance "secularism" means people stopped believing in God. They're wrong. So what does it actually mean?
Separating worldly affairs from religious authority, not atheism. Most humanists stayed Christian but valued earthly life alongside faith.
A scholar proves a famous Church document is a forgery just by studying how its Latin is written. How did that quietly shake the Church's authority?
Valla exposed the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. His philology showed it couldn't be from the 4th century, undermining Church authority.
Italian humanists started arguing that an educated man owed his talents to the city — not just to himself or to God. What's the name for this turn?
Civic humanism — applying learning to active public life. It pushed scholars out of the study and into the city's politics.
Everyone reads Machiavelli's The Prince as a guide to being evil. That misses the point. What was he actually arguing?
A ruler's first goal is keeping power and order, by results. So he should be feared rather than hated, not measured against Biblical virtue.
Da Vinci's Last Supper makes the room look like it has real depth pulling your eye to the back wall. What technique creates that illusion?
Geometric (linear) perspective fakes 3-D depth. Converging lines create the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface.
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Key terms in Unit 1
These 12 terms show up in the Unit 1 cards. Each one links to its definition in the AP European History key-term reference.
Drill all of Unit 1 with spaced repetition
Free Unit 1 on every AP course. Smart spaced repetition. No subscription.