1456
Siege of Belgrade Lifted
John Hunyadi and the Franciscan friar John of Capistrano led a peasant crusade that drove Mehmed II back from Belgrade's walls. Mehmed was wounded in the thigh and retreated. To celebrate, Pope Callixtus III ordered church bells rung every noon across Christendom, a practice Catholics still keep without knowing why.
Joan of Arc Rehabilitated
Twenty-five years after her execution, a papal commission under Callixtus III nullified her heresy conviction as procedurally fraudulent. Her mother, now eighty, wept in the front row. The verdict restored Joan to the Catholic fold; five centuries later she would be canonized. History was retroactively corrected, at least on parchment.
Francois Villon Disappears
The French poet and petty criminal, sentenced to hang for his part in a brawl, had his sentence commuted to ten years of exile from Paris and walked out of the city gates. He left behind the Ballade des Pendus and a handful of lyrics. Nobody ever saw him again.
Athens Falls to the Ottomans
The Ottoman conquest of the Duchy of Athens reduced the Acropolis to a garrison strongpoint and the Parthenon to a Turkish mosque. Classical Athens, which had survived Ostrogoths, Slavs, Franks, and Catalans, now became a provincial administrative center of the sultan. Its surviving Greek population dwindled further. The Parthenon's conversion to a mosque left the structure largely intact until a Venetian shell exploded its powder magazine in 1687.