1450
Gutenberg Prints First Trial Pages
In a rented house in Mainz, bankrolled by the lawyer Johann Fust, Johannes Gutenberg printed his first small books, probably Latin grammars and a papal indulgence. The process was excruciating, the yield tiny, the secrecy absolute. A forty-two-line Bible was already in planning. Europe's oral memory was about to become obsolete.
Aztec Great Famine
Four years of crop failure in the Valley of Mexico killed thousands and drove peasants to sell themselves into slavery for maize. Moctezuma I opened the imperial granaries but the emergency outlasted the reserves. The famine deepened Mexica fatalism about cosmic cycles of catastrophe and renewal that shaped their religious reasoning.
Battle of Formigny
French artillery under the Bureau brothers pulverized an English relief force in Normandy, and the longbow was finally outclassed by cannon. Within months, Normandy was French again. The Hundred Years' War was entering its last gasping phase; the English position was now technical collapse, not strategic retreat. The Bureau brothers' field artillery heralded the end of the longbow era and the beginning of gunpowder's dominance on European battlefields.
Francesco Sforza Takes Milan
The mercenary captain married to the last Visconti's illegitimate daughter starved the city into accepting him as duke after the brief Ambrosian Republic. The Sforza dynasty began with a private soldier negotiating his way onto a ducal throne. Milan's court would soon rival Florence for artistic patronage under his cunning son.
Cade's Rebellion in Kent
A mysterious Irishman calling himself Jack Cade led thousands of Kentish peasants and gentry into London, demanding tax reform and the dismissal of Henry VI's corrupt counselors. They held the city for two days before drunkenness and official bribery broke the revolt. Cade was killed in flight. The Wars of the Roses were incubating.