1441
First African Slaves Arrive in Portugal
A Portuguese caravel captained by Antao Goncalves landed at Lagos with ten captives taken from the Mauritanian coast. Prince Henry received his share and sold them. Within a decade a regular trade was organized. The Atlantic slave system that would last four centuries began with a single raid for silver fur and men.
Donatello Casts the Bronze David
The Florentine sculptor produced the first free-standing nude bronze since antiquity: a smooth-limbed boy wearing only a hat and boots, standing on Goliath's severed head. Cosimo de Medici placed it in his palace courtyard. Europe relearned, in an afternoon, that the human body could be sacred without being martyred. The statue's ambiguous sensuality has generated centuries of debate about its symbolism, from civic republicanism to homoerotic celebration.
Sejong Commissions Rain Gauge
King Sejong of Korea ordered the construction of standardized bronze rain gauges to be distributed across the kingdom's provinces, making Joseon the first state in all of recorded history to systematically measure rainfall on a national scale. Data was collected at each station and reported to the capital to improve agricultural planning and flood prediction. Korean science under Sejong's patronage was, by any honest measure, the most empirically advanced government program of its century.
Mayapan Falls in Yucatan
The last centralized Maya political authority, the walled city of Mayapan in the northern Yucatan, was sacked and permanently abandoned following a violent revolt by the Xiu lineage against the ruling Cocom dynasty. The peninsula fragmented into sixteen quarreling small kingdoms that would still be fighting each other with obsidian-edged clubs when the Spanish arrived eighty years later. Any remaining hope of Maya political unity was finished.
Eton College Founded
Henry VI laid the foundation stone for a college at Eton to educate seventy poor scholars in preparation for his companion foundation at King's College, Cambridge. The king's own mental fragility never slowed the building. Eton would outlast his dynasty and all subsequent English dynasties, training future prime ministers for six centuries.