1434
Gil Eanes Rounds Cape Bojador
For decades Portuguese caravels had turned back at the Saharan headland where, sailors swore, the sea boiled and monsters waited. Gil Eanes, on his second attempt, simply kept sailing south and discovered nothing but empty water. The psychological barrier of the West African coast dissolved that afternoon. His modest achievement proved the sea beyond the Saharan coast was navigable, opening the way to the Gulf of Guinea within two decades.
Cosimo de Medici Returns to Florence
The exiled banker re-entered the city through the San Gallo gate to crowd acclamation, and the Albizzi fled. Cosimo never held formal office. He preferred to rule through allies placed in the Signoria and loans forgiven at strategic moments. Florence was now, essentially, a family business. Over three decades he commissioned Brunelleschi and Donatello, turning cultural patronage into an instrument of political power.
Van Eyck Paints the Arnolfini Portrait
In Bruges, Jan Van Eyck finished a small oil panel of a merchant and his wife in a bedchamber, his hand on hers, a convex mirror on the back wall reflecting two witnesses including, probably, the painter himself. Nothing quite like this psychological and spatial intimacy had been painted before.
Battle of Lipany
Moderate Utraquist Hussites defeated the radical Taborites and Orebites in a decisive engagement at Lipany. The Hussite revolution's radical phase ended. Bohemia would negotiate a conservative peace with the Catholic Church while retaining lay communion in both kinds, a distinctive compromise that lasted until the Thirty Years' War. Moderate Hussites negotiated the Compacts of Basel granting communion in both kinds, a distinctive compromise lasting until the Thirty Years' War.
Gomes Eanes Reaches Senegal
Portuguese caravels continued their systematic charting of the West African coast. The push past Bojador released a decade of rapid southward progress. Trade goods, slaves, and geographical knowledge flowed north to Lisbon; gold from the African interior began reshaping Portuguese royal finance. The encounter with sub-Saharan Africa's green coastline shattered the medieval assumption that the tropics were uninhabitable wastelands of boiling sea.