1458
George of Podebrady Elected King of Bohemia
A moderate Hussite nobleman was elected king of Bohemia by its feudal estates, becoming the only non-Catholic crowned monarch in all of fifteenth-century Europe. He governed pragmatically, balancing Czech Utraquist religious traditions against relentless papal demands for full recatholicization. His visionary proposal for a pan-European peace league of sovereign states anticipated the logic of the United Nations by five full centuries, and was universally ignored by every ruler who received it.
Songhai Forces Seize Timbuktu
Sunni Ali's cavalry briefly seized Timbuktu from Tuareg control before turning to larger military campaigns along the middle Niger River. The city's scholarly class viewed his rule with deep suspicion, recording his cruelty, impiety, and disdain for Islamic learning in their chronicles. Timbuktu would change hands yet again, but Songhai's claim to be the dominant military power in all of West Africa was now undeniable to friend and enemy alike.
Athens Parthenon Converted to Ottoman Mosque
Following the Ottoman conquest of the Duchy of Athens, the Parthenon, which had served as a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary for nearly a thousand years, was converted into a mosque and a minaret added to its ancient Pentelic marble columns. The building that had been a temple to Athena Parthenos, then a Byzantine cathedral, and now an Ottoman mosque embodied two full millennia of religious conquest in stone.
Pius II Elected Pope
Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, a Sienese humanist poet who had once fathered illegitimate children and written erotic fiction, was elected pope. He immediately called for a new crusade against the Turks. Nobody answered. He would die in Ancona waiting for ships that never came to carry him east. Before election he had authored histories, geographies, and erotic novellas, offering one of the richest literary portraits of fifteenth-century life.