1475
Michelangelo Born at Caprese
The second son of a minor Florentine official was born in a small Tuscan hill town where his father held a brief podesta appointment. The family moved back to Florence within months. Decades later, Michelangelo would say he drank marble dust with his wet-nurse's milk, her father having been a stone cutter.
Ottomans Take Caffa
Mehmed II's forces captured the Genoese Black Sea colony of Caffa, ending Genoese commercial dominance in the region. The Crimean Tatars became Ottoman vassals. Slave markets on the Black Sea shifted from Genoese to Ottoman control. Italian trade eastward was steadily being squeezed shut by the expanding sultanate. The fall disrupted the slave trade supplying Egypt's Mamluks with Circassian recruits, weakening the sultanate at a critical moment.
William Caxton Prints First English Book
The Kent-born merchant, trained as a printer in Cologne, produced his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in Bruges, the first book printed in English. Within two years he would set up his press at Westminster and begin issuing Chaucer, Malory, and a flood of translations that shaped the English prose tradition.
Truce of Picquigny
Edward IV invaded France in a last Yorkist attempt to reassert ancient claims, met Louis XI on a bridge at Picquigny, and accepted a pension of fifty thousand crowns a year to go home. The French king joked that he had driven the English out more cheaply than his ancestors had. English continental ambition was bought off.