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The Transformation of Europe: Forty Years That Shook the West and Shaped the Modern World (1490-1530)

(us)patrick Wyman

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Why has the West dominated the modern world for nearly 500 years? To answer this question, we need to go back to these crucial 40 years. The 40 years from 1490 to 1530 were a critical turning point in European and world history. During these 40 years, there was Columbus's feat of crossing the Atlantic and the Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther. A series of rapid social, political, economic, cultural and technological developments in Europe promoted the formation of the modern world: print media shaped a new humanistic view of knowledge, large-scale religious conflicts were about to break out, highly centralized military-financial states emerged, and gunpowder brought military technological changes and large-scale Model War, the West began its barbaric conquest of the world... All these factors interacted to form a unique economic system linked by finance, which in turn established Europe's dominant position on the world stage in the next four centuries, the so-called "Great Divergence" between the West and the rest of the world. This book selects nine characters as narrative clues to connect Europe at that time with the world. It tells the revolutionary changes in politics, military, religion, finance, trade and other aspects of Europe in the past half century, and analyzes the key factors that established the West's dominance and affected the development process of the entire world. The book first tells about three famous figures: explorer Columbus, Spanish Queen Isabella and financier Jacob Fugger.