Maximilian I was Holy Roman Emperor from 1508 to 1519. He is one of the most prominent Holy Roman Emperors from this time period and is notable for his attempts to unify the German-speaking people under one ruler. He failed in this attempt because the German speaking people were divided into too many different princedoms and small political entities. German unification would not be completed until 1871.

The battles of Tours and Lepanto were not fought by English forces, so we can rule these two answer choices out immediately. The battles of the Somme and Trafalgar were fought during World War One and the Napoleonic Wars, respectively, and so came too late to be part of the rise of English nationalism. The Battle of Agincourt, which took place during the Hundred Years’ War with the French, happened in the fifteenth century and so came at the perfect time to be incorporated into the rise of nationalism in England. It helped solidify what it meant to be English, as opposed to French, and led to the rise of self-identifying nationalist ethnicity among the English people.

Realpolitik was the primary political philosophy of the German unifying leader Otto von Bismarck. Realpolitik is based around a pragmatic application of political power, or political power wielded outside of ideological, religious, or ethnic motivation.

Many European nation-states coalesced around ethnic identity and shared cultural heritage. The Spanish nation-state coalesced around both of these, but also around the religion of Catholicism. Protestantism was almost non-existent in Spain and those who adhered to either Islam or Judaism were either banished or forcefully converted to Catholicism during the formation of the Spanish nation-state.

The Divine Comedy was written by the famous Italian writer Dante in the fourteenth century. It tells the tale of the salvation of the human soul and was wildly popular as it was written in the vernacular language. 

Secularism emerged as a political and social philosophy in the Renaissance period of European history and grew in influence during the Enlightenment and Industrial eras. It advocates primarily for the separation of the political and the religious (for example, no laws based on religious codes, etc.). It also contends that life on Earth is "more important" than the afterlife and that all religious beliefs should be tolerated, although these tenets of secularism were added by degrees as the centuries went by.

These works of Dante and Chaucer were both written in the vernacular languages of the countries they lived in. Vernacular means locally spoken, as opposed to how most work was published in this time period, in Latin. Dante and Chaucer helped accelerate the movement away from the elite language of Latin towards the popular languages of English, Italian, French, and so on. 

Petrarch was an Italian poet in the fourteenth century. He is often described by historians as the father of humanism and the father of the Renaissance.

The feudal system had prevailed in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire. In the feudal system, a lord owns a large tract of land, and he provides grants of land to peasants or “serfs" who work the land and live on the land. The serfs provide food and resources to the lord; in exchange, he protects them with a hired army and/or fortification. The rising wealth of towns and the growth of the urban middle class during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods gradually eroded the feudal system and strengthened the power of monarchies and parliaments across Europe. A new era of absolute monarchy dawned, and was itself slowly (in some cases very quickly) replaced by constitutional monarchy and republicanism.

The Courtier is an important literary work of the Italian Renaissance. It was written by Baldassare Castiglione in the early sixteenth century. In the book, Castiglione describes the ideal Renaissance Man: how he should be artistic, athletic, scientifically-minded, etc.