1488
Bartolomeu Dias Rounds the Cape
A storm drove the Portuguese captain's caravel past a point he did not see, and when he turned north he found open ocean where no European had sailed. His crew mutinied at the Great Fish River; Dias named the southern headland the Cape of Storms. King Joao rechristened it Good Hope.
Ivan III Defies the Horde
The Muscovite grand prince refused the final embassy of the Great Horde, reportedly stamping on the khan's portrait. It was a theatrical break. Russia's rulers would soon be calling themselves autocrats and building the Kremlin in its present form, brick by Italian-engineered brick. His reconstruction of the Moscow Kremlin using Italian architects gave the capital the red-brick fortress silhouette it retains today.
Battle of Sauchieburn
Scottish rebels under Prince James defeated and killed King James III outside Stirling. The prince, now James IV, wore an iron chain around his waist for the rest of his life as penance for his father's death. Scotland's new king would become a patron of letters, shipbuilding, and an unlucky invasion of England.
Diogo Cao's Padrao at Cape Cross
Portuguese captain Diogo Cao erected a stone pillar at Cape Cross on the Namibian coast, the southernmost point any European had charted. The monument was a legal claim and a navigational landmark. Within a year it would be superseded by Dias's round of the Cape, but for one season it marked the edge of the known.
James IV Crowned at Scone
The fifteen-year-old son, wearing his penitential iron chain, was crowned King of Scots. He would become one of Scotland's ablest medieval monarchs, building ships, founding universities, negotiating marriage alliances, and dying at Flodden in 1513 along with most of his nobility. The iron chain he wore was penance for his role in the rebellion that killed his father, a guilt shaping his pious reign.
Peasant Revolt in Styria
Austrian peasants rose against Habsburg tax demands and landlord exactions in the mountains of Styria. The rising was suppressed with characteristic violence; its leaders were quartered in village squares as warnings. Central European peasant grievance was building toward the explosive rebellions of the 1520s. The revolt was one of dozens across the German-speaking lands, part of a pattern of rural resistance culminating in the Peasants' War of 1525.