1514
Selim Crushes the Safavids at Chaldiran
On a dusty plain east of Lake Van, Ottoman artillery and Janissary arquebusiers tore apart Shah Ismail's red-capped Qizilbash cavalry. The Shi'a messiah, supposedly invulnerable, fled bleeding. Selim I entered Tabriz in triumph. The Sunni-Shi'a frontier of the Middle East had been drawn in gunpowder. The battle demonstrated Ottoman firearms' advantage over cavalry, reshaping Persian military organization for the coming century.
Duerer Engraves Melencolia I
In Nuremberg the goldsmith-printmaker Albrecht Duerer cut an engraving of a winged figure slumped amid compasses, geometrical solids, and a hungry dog. Melencolia I fused alchemy, mathematics, and northern melancholy into a single baffling image. Scholars have been puzzling over its meaning ever since. Its magic square and truncated polyhedron have generated theories ranging from alchemical allegory to a meditation on the limits of knowledge.
Gyorgy Dozsa's Peasant Crusade
A Transylvanian soldier named Gyorgy Dozsa, preaching a crusade against the Ottomans, found his peasant army turning instead against the Hungarian nobles who had starved them. The rebellion was crushed with genocidal cruelty. Dozsa was roasted alive on an iron throne, a grim warning to every serf in Central Europe.
Duerer Engraves Saint Jerome in His Study
Albrecht Duerer cut an engraving of Saint Jerome in his Nuremberg study, dust motes catching the light through bottle-glass windows, a sleeping lion at his feet. The quiet scholarly image, paired with Melencolia and The Knight, Death, and the Devil, formed one of the Renaissance's most beloved print trilogies. Together with Melencolia I and Knight, Death and the Devil, these three master engravings represent the summit of Northern Renaissance printmaking.