1502
Montezuma II Takes the Mexica Throne
In Tenochtitlan, a severe priest-warrior named Moctezuma Xocoyotzin was lifted onto the jaguar mat. He tightened court etiquette until nobles could no longer meet his gaze, extended tribute as far as Oaxaca, and began watching the eastern horizon for omens his seers could not quite read. His reign would see the Aztec Empire reach its greatest extent, from the Gulf coast to the Pacific and from Huastec to Mixtec lands.
Vasco da Gama Bombards Calicut
Returning to India with a war fleet, Vasco da Gama demanded the expulsion of Muslim merchants from Calicut. When the Zamorin refused, he hanged captive fishermen from his yardarms and shelled the city for three days. Portuguese diplomacy on the Indian Ocean had found its voice. His brutality established Portuguese commercial policy in the Indian Ocean: trade on Portuguese terms or face naval bombardment.
Wang Yangming Enlightened
Exiled to a malarial frontier post in Guizhou for criticizing a eunuch, the Ming scholar Wang Yangming sat in a stone tomb he had prepared for himself and had a sudden mystical insight: principle was not in things but in the mind. Neo-Confucianism's most radical school of innate knowledge was born.
First Chile Expedition
Spanish forces from Peru probed southward along the Andes into the territory of the Mapuche, who lived between the coast and the cordillera. The Mapuche would resist Spanish conquest longer than any other indigenous American people, fighting a guerilla war that continued into the nineteenth century. The resulting Araucanian War lasted three centuries and produced Alonso de Ercilla's epic poem La Araucana.
Columbus Sets Out a Fourth Time
Sixty years old, gout-ridden and half-disgraced, Columbus left Cadiz with four battered caravels on a last search for a westward passage to the Indies. Forbidden to land at Hispaniola, he would spend the voyage marooned on Jamaica and never find the strait he was chasing. His exploration of the Central American coast, though it failed to find a strait, provided the first European knowledge of the isthmus Balboa would cross.