1408
Yongle Encyclopedia Completed
The Yongle Dadian, eleven thousand volumes handwritten by thousands of scholars, was formally presented to the throne. Only a single copy existed. Most would burn in the centuries of dynastic collapse to come, and today fewer than four hundred volumes survive, scattered across libraries from Beijing to Dublin. The surviving fragments represent less than four percent of the original, making its loss one of history's great intellectual catastrophes.
Donatello Carves Saint George for Orsanmichele
The young Florentine sculptor produced a marble warrior saint for a niche on the grain exchange church, commissioned by the Guild of Armorers. The figure stood alert, weight balanced forward on the balls of his feet, as though deciding whether to draw his sword or merely wait. It was the first freestanding Renaissance sculpture to convey interior psychological life through posture alone, and it announced Donatello's revolution in stone.
Order of the Dragon Founded
King Sigismund of Hungary established a chivalric order dedicated to defending Christendom against the Ottoman Turks and suppressing heresy within its borders. Its members wore a coiled dragon insignia on their cloaks. Among its inductees was Vlad II of Wallachia, whose epithet Dracul, the Dragon, would pass to his infamous son Vlad III, remembered by history as Dracula, the son of the Dragon.