1455
Gutenberg Bible Published
Fust and his son-in-law Peter Schoffer, having sued Gutenberg for his debts and seized the press, began selling the first printed Bibles at the Frankfurt book fair. A cardinal wrote to the pope praising the clarity of the type. Nobody yet quite understood that the manuscript age was finishing. Forty-nine copies survive today, and the clarity of their Gothic textura typeface established a standard printers pursued for generations.
Cadamosto Explores Gambia and Senegal
The Venetian navigator Alvise Cadamosto, sailing under Portuguese flag and financing, explored the Gambia and Senegal rivers, trading with Wolof and Mandinka peoples along the banks. His detailed written accounts described West African markets, Islamic customs, local kingship, and the astonishment of African villagers at European ships with their alien rigging. His journals are among the earliest European ethnographic observations of sub-Saharan Africa and its complex societies.
First Battle of Saint Albans
Richard of York ambushed King Henry VI's court in a narrow market-town street, killed the Duke of Somerset, and took the half-mad king into protective custody. The skirmish was small, the casualties few, but the Wars of the Roses had begun. England's nobility would spend the next thirty years murdering each other.
Fra Angelico Dies in Rome
The Dominican friar and painter whose luminous frescoes at San Marco in Florence had married medieval piety to Renaissance technique with unearthly grace died in Rome while decorating a Vatican chapel for Pope Nicholas V. His epitaph praised him as both a supreme painter and a genuinely humble monk. The Catholic Church would eventually beatify him, making him the patron saint of artists. No other painter has been so formally honored by Rome.
Alfonso de Borja Elected Callixtus III
A Valencian cardinal, elderly and uncontroversial, became the first Borgia pope and installed his Italian-born Spanish nephews at the papal court. One of them, Rodrigo, would become Alexander VI decades later. The pope's family strategy of patient nepotism was just beginning to shape the late fifteenth century. His promotion of Spanish nephews established the Borgia nepotism that reached its apex under Alexander VI decades later.