1431
Joan of Arc Burned at Rouen
Convicted of heresy and relapse by a rigged ecclesiastical court, the nineteen-year-old was tied to a stake in the Old Market and burned alive while an English soldier sobbed that they had killed a saint. Her ashes were thrown in the Seine. Within thirty years the Church would exonerate her.
Ayutthaya Sacks Angkor
The Siamese king Borommaracha II marched into the Khmer capital, carried off its dancers and Brahmins, and left the city's million-stone temples to the jungle. The Khmer court fled south to Phnom Penh; Angkor Wat, one of humanity's greatest architectural achievements, was abandoned to the bats and the banyan roots.
Council of Basel Opens
Pope Eugenius IV reluctantly convened the latest reforming council, which would spend eighteen years arguing with him over whether the Church was governed by councils or popes. The quarrel would fracture the conciliar movement, strengthen papal absolutism, and indirectly clear ideological ground for Luther a century later. Its most radical faction argued councils held supreme authority over popes, a conciliarist position that haunted papal politics for a century.
Pope Eugenius IV Elected
A Venetian ascetic with a gift for ecclesiastical infighting took the throne of Peter and immediately clashed with the Council of Basel over reform. His pontificate would be spent fighting councils, hosting an attempted union with the Greeks, and scraping together funds to keep Rome from collapsing into ruin. His flight from Rome in 1434, disguised as a monk under a hail of stones, became one of the era's most vivid papal humiliations.