Contextualizing Renaissance and Discovery Practice Test

In 1494, European monarchs endorsed a papal-brokered agreement to reduce conflict over newly encountered lands. The treaty drew an imaginary north-south line in the Atlantic, granting one Iberian kingdom rights to most lands west of the line and the other rights to lands east of it, shaping early colonial claims in the Americas and beyond. Which agreement is being described?

Renaissance writers often contrasted the energetic, cultured life of their own city-states with what they portrayed as the ignorance and disorder of the centuries after Rome’s fall. By labeling the intervening period a “middle age,” they implied a sharp break between classical antiquity and their present. Which interpretation best explains why Renaissance humanists promoted this periodization?