2nd Millennium AD: One Question per Century (#2) Quiz

Answer: Newfoundland and Labrador

Most of what we know about the Viking colonization of North America is contained in two 13th-century Icelandic sagas, the "Saga of Erik the Red" and the "Saga of the Greenlanders", also known as the "Vinland Sagas". Both of them start with Erik the Red, the Norse explorer who founded the first settlement in Greenland around 985, then move on to chronicle the life and explorations of other colonizers - such as wealthy merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni, one of the followers of Leif, Erik's son.

Around 1010, Thorfinn and his wife, Gudrid Thorbjarnadóttir, the widow of Leif Eriksson's brother Thorvald, left Greenland with 3 ships and about 140 men, intending to establish a settlement in Vinland, the area of coastal North America where Leif had landed a few years earlier. Their son, Snorri, is believed to have been the first European born on the American continent outside of Greenland. Due to the hostility of the native population, the settlement was eventually abandoned, and Thorfinn and his family went back to Iceland.

Though the exact location of Thorfinn's settlement is unknown, some experts have identified it with L'Anse aux Meadows, the only site that offers indisputable proof of the presence of European explorers in the Americas before Christopher Columbus. L'Anse aux Meadows is located on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, the large island in the Atlantic Ocean that is part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Norse settlement, which was first excavated in the 1960, has been dated to around 1000. It was designated as a National Historic Site of Canada in 1968, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.

Answer: Venice

Though in recent times "arsenal" has become synonymous with "armoury", the Arabic word from which it derives, "dar-aș-șina'a", means "manufacturing house", through Venetian "arzanà". When it was founded in 1104, by initiative of Doge Ordelafo Faliero, the Venetian Arsenal worked primarily to maintain privately-built naval ships; however, when it was rebuilt and expanded in 1320, it was so large and well-equipped that all the ships of the Republic of Venice's navy, as well as merchant ships, could be built and maintained in one place. The Arsenale Nuovo became a forerunner of the industrial complexes of the 19th and early 20th century, which also provided housing for the workers on or near its grounds.

At the peak of its activity, in the 16th century, the Arsenal employed over 16,000 highly specialized workers. It could produce almost one ship a day, employing an early method of mass production based on building the ship's framework first. All of a ship's parts were standardized, and produced in separate areas of the Arsenal, according to an early production-line method - mentioned by Dante in in Canto XXI of the "Inferno". The Arsenal was heavily guarded, and shielded from public view by high walls. In the late 16th century, the Arsenal availed itself of a prestigious consultant, Galileo Galilei, who advised military engineers and craftsmen on various issues related to shipbuilding and ballistics.

Located in the Castello district, at the easternmost tip of Venice, the Arsenal was severely damaged after the French occupation that followed the end of the Republic of Venice (1797). It remained in use until the end of WWII. Now part of the massive complex is used for cultural activities by the municipality of Venice; over 40% of it, however, is owned by the Italian Ministry of Defense.

Answer: Cathars

Also known as Albigensians from the name of the city of Albi in southern France, the Cathars ("pure" in Greek) were the followers of a Christian reform movement whose strongly anti-materialistic and dualistic views sharply conflicted with Catholic orthodoxy. In the late 12th century, the movement took root in the wealthy and sophisticated region of southern France known as Languedoc or Occitania, regarded with a mix of envy and suspicion by the French Crown. The spread of Catharism was facilitated by the corruption of the Catholic clergy, in spite of repeated condemnations of the movement issued by the Church.

When the highest authorities of the region - such as the powerful Count of Toulouse - showed a sympathetic attitude to Catharism in an attempt to assert their independence from the Crown, in 1209 Pope Innocent III - worried that the religious divisions within Europe might make the continent vulnerable to Muslim conquest - called for a crusade against the Albigensians. The conflict, which lasted two decades, devastated Languedoc. The thriving cultural milieu of the region never recovered by what some historians have called a veritable genocide. The Dominican Order and the Papal Inquisition were both established in those years as a response to the spread of Catharism and other "heretical" movements that demanded reform within the Catholic Church.

The Cistercian are a Catholic monastic order, while Calvinists are a branch of Protestantism, and Copts the members of a Christian ethnoreligious group of North Africa.

Answer: Bologna

The University of Bologna, the oldest in the Western world, was established in 1088. Born around 1270, Mondino de' Luzzi was the scion of a prominent family of Florentine origin that had settled in Bologna. His father and grandfather were pharmacists, and one of his uncles was a professor at the College of Medicine of the University of Bologna, which Mondino attended, graduating in 1290. The following year, a papal bull by Pope Nicholas IV granted anyone who graduated from the University of Bologna permission to teach in any other university in the known world.

Mondino's teacher was a highly regarded physician, Taddeo di Alderotto, whose contributions to the field of medicine were ahead of his time. Mondino, however, went a step further in his study of anatomy, and began to practice dissections - banned for a long time by the Church - as part of his courses. Mondino de Luzzi's first public dissection took place in January 1315, probably on the body of a female criminal, in the presence of medical students and other observers.

In spite of attempts to prove that Mondino did not actually perform any dissections, but just read aloud from textbooks while his assistants performed the job, his book "Anathomia corporis humani" ("Anatomy of the Human Body", c. 1316) provides ample evidence of the fact that Mondino dissected a number of bodies personally. Though the book contains errors, its importance in the development of anatomical studies cannot be overstated: it is believed Mondino's writings were a major influence on Leonardo da Vinci.

Answer: Portugal

Though slavery was never officially banned throughout the continent, in medieval Europe it was largely replaced by serfdom, a condition of indentured servitude. On the other hand, slavery was widely practiced in most other parts of the world; the enslavement of thousands of people was a very common outcome of wars. Most of the slaves brought to Europe in the Middle Ages came from North Africa or the Middle East. The beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, however, was a direct consequence of European exploration rather than military action.

In the mid-15th century, Portugal engaged in several voyages of exploration to the African coast. Sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator, the first Portuguese expeditions were meant to chart the coast of West Africa and discover new trade routes. However, in the 1430s and 1440s the Portuguese became involved in buying slaves from local rulers, and shipping them back to Portugal after they had been baptized. The arrival of African slaves in Europe was greeted enthusiastically, as the continent had been suffering from a workforce shortage after the drastic population decline due to the Black Death of the mid-14th century. The first shipment of African slaves was brought to Portugal from Mauritania in 1441; three years later, the first slave market in modern Europe was opened in the maritime town of Lagos, in the southern region of Algarve. Encouraged by a papal bull issued in 1452, which granted the King of Portugal the right to enslave non-Christians, the Portuguese transported increasing quantities of African slaves to their markets.

By the mid-16th century, the Atlantic slave trade had spread from Europe to the colonies of the Americas. It is estimated that more than 12 million Africans were sold into slavery over a span of about 400 years. Besides Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark were heavily involved in the slave trade (while Germany as such did not exist at the time).

Answer: sweating sickness

Also known as the sweats or "sudor anglicus" ("English sweats"), the sweating sickness first appeared in England in the summer of 1485, at the end of the War of the Roses. Unlike other infectious diseases, it was prevalent in rural rather than urban areas, with short and sudden outbreaks that often targeted younger men. Those affected initially suffered from shivers, headaches, severe body pains, and a feeling of great exhaustion - followed by the hot and sweating stage, which was often accompanied by intense thirst and palpitations. All of this usually took place within a single day, at the end of which the patient either succumbed or recovered.

Though some experts have suggested the disease was due to a form of hantavirus (a virus of zoonotic origin), its causes remain unknown. Most of what we know about the sweating sickness comes from the writings of English physician John Caius, who described the symptoms and signs of the disease in a book published in 1552. Over a period of 65 years, there were five recorded outbreaks of sweating sickness, the most severe of which were the third (1517) and the fourth (1528), when the disease also spread outside England. The 1528 outbreak affected London in a significant way, claiming a high death toll; Henry VIII and his mistress (and future second wife) Anne Boleyn are believed to have both contracted the illness. Henry's older brother, Prince Arthur, may have died of the sweating sickness in 1502, though no outbreaks were recorded at the time. After the 1551 outbreak, the disease disappeared from England, never to return again.

The dancing plague of 1518 occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace, and caused hundreds of people to dance almost unceasingly for weeks. It is not known whether any of them succumbed to this mysterious affliction.

Answer: Ottoman

The Battle of Vienna (also known as Battle of Kahlenberg, from the hill outside Vienna where the battle took place) was fought on 12 September 1683, at the end of a two-month long siege of the capital of the Holy Roman Empire by the forces of the Ottoman Empire. It was the second time that the Ottomans had put Vienna under siege: the first time, in 1529, the unsuccessful attempt had been led by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The Christian Coalition, or Holy League, included the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, under the command of John III Sobieski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. The Ottoman army was led by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, a renowned politician and military leader. The battle ended with the defeat of the Ottomans, marking the end of their attempts at expansion into Central Europe. The defeated Ottoman commander paid for his failure with his life, as he was executed at the order of Sultan Mehmet IV - while Sobieski was granted the title of "Defensor Fidei" ("Defender of the Faith") by Pope Innocent XI.

Crescent-shaped pastries are believed to be much older than the 17th century, and legends that connect them to military victories of Christian forces against Muslim ones abound - as their distinctive shape echoes that of the Islamic crescent. A popular legend relates that a baker working at night during the 1683 siege of Vienna heard noises caused by Ottoman soldiers trying to dig a tunnel under the city, and gave the alarm. As a reward for his lucky intervention, the baker was granted the exclusive right to bake crescent-shaped pastries to commemorate the event.

The Russian Empire did not yet exist in 1683, as it was established in 1721 by Peter the Great. Neither the Safavid Empire (based in Iran) nor the Mughal Empire (based in India) ever tried to invade Western Europe: together with the Ottoman Empire, these three Muslim empires are collectively known as "gunpowder empires".

Answer: rubber

Widely used by Mesoamerican cultures for a variety of purposes, natural rubber was been completely unknown in Europe before the 18th century. However, the samples that had been brought to Europe by early explorers of the Americas were treated as little more than curiosities, since Europeans lacked the know-how to make rubber usable. The expedition of 1736-1747 changed this state of affairs, as Charles Marie de La Condamine had the scientific background necessary to make sure that his discovery did not remain a novelty.

La Condamine's first encounter with Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree, occurred in 1736 in the rainforests of the Amazon basin in Ecuador. He sent samples of latex to the Académie Royale des Sciences, accompanied by a detailed description of their origins and production - including the native name "cahuchu", which became the Spanish "caucho", the French "caoutchouc", and the Italian "caucciù". In 1744, before returning to France, La Condamine met François Fresneau de La Gataudière, a trained engineer and scientist who immediately saw rubber's potential as an industrial material. Fresneau wrote the first scientific paper on rubber, presented by La Condamine to the Académie in 1751, and published in 1755. A few years later, Fresnau discovered that turpentine could be used as a solvent that enabled latex to be used to manufacture objects that kept their original elasticity.

However, it was Charles Goodyear's invention of vulcanization in 1839 that turned out to be the real game changer. The discovery of the many practical uses of rubber led to the Amazon rubber boom of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Now natural rubber is mainly produced in Southeast Asia.

Answer: rabies

Widely regarded as the founder of modern bacteriology, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) started working on vaccine development in 1877, after having achieved remarkable results in his research on fermentation and the germ theory of diseases. The rabies vaccine was developed by Pasteur in 1885 in close collaboration with his colleague Émile Roux, with whom he had previously worked on the anthrax vaccine. Pasteur produced the first vaccine by growing the rabies virus in rabbits, and then weakening it by drying the affected spinal cords. The vaccine was tested on a number of rabid dogs before it was used on a human being - a very risky endeavour for Pasteur, who had no medical experience, and was not a licensed physician.

The first recipient of the life-saving vaccine was a 9-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been severely mauled by a supposedly rabid dog. His mother brought him to Pasteur, who was already a figure of national renown in France, in the hope the scientist would be able to save him. Over 11 days, Pasteur inoculated the boy 13 times with the vaccine - using progressively stronger doses of the virus - and Joseph never developed the dreaded rabies symptoms. The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overstated, as rabies was a scourge especially in rural areas, where encounters with rabid animals were a frequent occurrence. The fatality rate close to 100% after the onset of symptoms: there are only a handful of recorded cases of survival without vaccination.

Unfortunately, even if Pasteur's vaccine has proved extremely successful, and modern scientists have also developed pre-exposure vaccines for humans and vaccines for some animals, rabies still kills thousands of people every year in developing countries, where the vaccine is very expensive and difficult to obtain. Smallpox is the only infectious disease that has been eradicated; tetanus is still widespread, while typhus much rarer than it was in the past.

Answer: Nigeria

1960 is often referred to as the "year of Africa" due to the number of former colonies of European powers that became sovereign states between January and December of that year. It was a remarkable outcome for all the independence movements that had been working for years toward that goal. The majority of those nations (14) achieved their independence from France: Cameroon (the very first, on 1 January), Togo, Mali Federation (which later split into Mali and Senegal), Madagascar, Dahomey (now Benin), Niger, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, and Mauritania. Nigeria and Somalia became independent from the UK, and Belgian Congo (later Zaire, now Democratic Republic of the Congo) from Belgium.

Nigeria declared its independence from the UK on 1 October 1960. Like many former UK colonies, it is a member of the Commonwealth - from which it was suspended in 1995-1999 after the execution of environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa on trumped-up murder charges. The country is now Africa's most populous nation (with a current population of around 230 million), and the continent's largest economy.