The six major players in the age of European exploration were France, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden. Germany, which was not a unified country until the 1870s, was not a major player in the age of exploration.

Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. The Cape of Good Hope is the southernmost tip of the African continent, and traversing it was vital to connecting Portugal with the lucrative trade it would soon develop with India and the Far East.

Jacques Cartier was a French explorer and navigator who discovered the St. Lawrence River and claimed the surrounding territory, which would later come to be called Canada, for the French Empire. Like many early European explorers, Cartier thought he had found a passage through the continent to Asia, but like all other explorers of this time period, he was disappointed. 

Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer and navigator who first understood and demonstrated that the American landmass was not actually part of East Asia, but was instead a separate and distinct landmass. He also made one of the first maps of the New World (rudimentary as it is) and for these achievements had two continents named after him.

Cartography refers to the science of map making, which grew in prominence in the early Age of Exploration as the Spanish and Portuguese explorers (followed later by the Italians, Dutch, French, and English) were discovering new lands (to the Europeans) and thus greatly expanding the size of the known world in Europe and Asia.

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a church in Wittenburg. It was not the first time in European history that a reformer had sought to make radical changes within Christianity to escape the abuses and power of the Catholic Church; however, it was the first time that such a reformation had been attempted since the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439. The printing press allowed Luther's work to be reprinted, translated and transmitted around Europe, spreading the ideas of the Protestant Reformation to a whole new host of people.

Following the reign of Henry VIII, English monarchs were expected to follow Anglicanism and be the head of the Church of England. Henry broke from the Catholic Church in 1535 and began the English Reformation. Mary, one of his daughters, reigned in between his son Edward and another of his daughters, Elizabeth I. She undid all the Reformation changes undertaken by her predecessors and declared England a Catholic kingdom. This would prove a costly mistake for her in terms of maintaining her power. For the rest of English history, English monarchs have rarely been Catholic and certainly have rarely been openly Catholic.

The Peace of Westphalia was a peace treaty signed in 1648 that ended the brutal Thirty Years' War that had ravaged much of Central Europe. The Thirty Years' War was primarily a conflict between Protestants and Catholics fought in the lands of modern-day Germany, but at one time or another it involved almost every major power in Europe.

The Peace of Augsburg was signed in 1555 between the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and an alliance of Lutheran rulers within his empire. It declared that the various princes of the Holy Roman Empire were free to choose whichever denomination of Christianity they wanted for their dominion, but then the entire population of that territory had to follow the chosen religion.

Predestination is the belief that the fate of all people, and their access to the afterlife, is predetermined by God before they are born. This was a core tenet of Calvinism.