1486
Malleus Maleficarum Published
The Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger published their Hammer of Witches, a detailed manual for identifying, interrogating, and executing witches. It cited Scripture, classical authorities, and pornographic imagination. Printed in dozens of editions, it became one of the earliest bestsellers of the press era and a blueprint for legal atrocity.
Diogo Cao Dies on African Coast
The Portuguese navigator who had reached Cape Cross vanished somewhere on the southwest African coast, dying of disease or in a local conflict. His padrao stones, etched with Portuguese royal arms, remained embedded in the shoreline to mark his progress. Bartolomeu Dias would pass them the next year, sailing south to the unknown cape.
Pico della Mirandola's Oration on Human Dignity
The twenty-three-year-old Florentine prodigy published nine hundred theses he offered to defend in Rome against all comers. The opening oration argued that humans, uniquely, could become whatever they willed. The pope banned the debate; the text survived. Renaissance humanism had acquired its manifesto. His assertion that humanity could ascend toward the angelic or descend to the bestial became the defining statement of Renaissance individualism.
Henry VII Marries Elizabeth of York
The Lancastrian victor wed the Yorkist heiress in Westminster, combining the red and white roses into the Tudor rose. It was a symbolic end to the civil wars. The dynastic peace that followed was secured less by romance than by Henry's ruthless bookkeeping of noble loyalty and income. The marriage produced heirs whose descendants would sit on the thrones of England, Scotland, France, and Spain.