30 POINTS QUESTION Refer to the two passages.

Source 1

"Christendom had recovered from . . . when the Tartar cataclysm had threatened to engulf it. The Tartars themselves were already becoming an object of curiosity rather than of fear. . . . The frail Latin throne in Constantinople was still standing, but tottering to its fall. The successors of the Crusaders still held the Coast of Syria. . . . The jealousies of the commercial republics of Italy were daily waxing greater. The position of Genoese trade on the coasts of the Aegean was greatly depressed . . . Venice had acquired [power there by expelling] the Greek Emperors. . . . But Genoa was biding her time for an early revenge, and year by year her naval strength and skill were increasing. Both these republics held possessions and establishments in the ports of Syria. . . . Alexandria was still largely frequented in the intervals of war as the great emporium of Indian wares, but the facilities afforded by the Mongol conquerors who now held the whole tract from the Persian Gulf to the shores of the Caspian and of the Black Sea, or nearly so, were beginning to give a great advantage to the caravan routes.”

Henri Cordier’s annotated translation of The Travels of Marco Polo, 1920

Source 2

"Throughout the twelfth century there were many signs that the European intelligence was recovering courage and leisure, and preparing to take up again the intellectual enterprises of the first Greek scientific enquiries and such speculations as those of the Italian Lucretius. The causes of this revival were many and complex. The suppression of private war, the higher standards of comfort and security that followed the crusades, and the stimulation of men’s minds by the experiences of these expeditions were no doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade was reviving; cities were recovering ease and safety; the standard of education was arising in the church and spreading among laymen. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of growing, independent or quasi-independent cities; Venice, Florence, Genoa, Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Novgorod, Wisby and Bergen for example. They were all trading cities with many travellers, and where men trade and travel they talk and think. The polemics of the Popes and princes . . . were exciting men to doubt the authority of the church. . . .

The Arabs [began] restoring Aristotle to Europe, and . . . [European princes like] Frederick II acted as a channel through which Arabic philosophy and science played upon the renascent European mind.”

H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World, 1922

Which of the following changes to Afro-Eurasian intercultural exchanges occurred in the 13th and 14th centuries as a result of Constantinople’s weakening and the Mongols’ consolidating caravan routes?

A. Greek city-states along the Aegean coast experienced a renaissance in art and culture.
B. Arab cities lost their status as the purveyors of art and scholarship.
C. European cities became centers of cultural rebirth and artistic expression.
D. Tartar trade centers experienced a cataclysmic decline that stifled their cultural ingenuity.