12.3: Questions to Guide Your Reading
1. Who held most political and military power in a feudal system?
2. What were some reasons that European towns started to grow in the eleventh century?
3. Why did Europe’s agricultural output increase in the eleventh century?
4. What were some lasting results of the eleventh-century popes’ attempts to reform the Church?
5. What did Pope Urban II call on Western Europe’s nobles to do in 1095?
6. How did the thirteenth-century Capetian kings of France strengthen their authority?
7. Why did Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II ultimately fail to establish control over Italy?
8. What was the Reconquista?
9. How did noble and peasant diets differ?
10. What caused the death of a third of Europe’s population between the years 1347 and 1351?
11. Why were Genoese merchants in the service of Iberian kings exploring the Atlantic and western Africa in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries?
12. Why did Christopher Columbus think he could sail directly from Europe to Asia?