1519
Magellan Sails from Seville
Ferdinand Magellan, a disgraced Portuguese captain in Spanish service, set out from Seville with five ships and two hundred and seventy men. He intended to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west through an unknown southern passage. Only one ship, without Magellan, would ever return. The departure marked the most ambitious navigational undertaking in history, demonstrating the Pacific's true size and proving the Earth a sphere.
Cortes Enters Tenochtitlan
With five hundred Spaniards, sixteen horses, and thousands of Tlaxcalan allies, Hernan Cortes walked along a causeway into the island city of Tenochtitlan, a metropolis larger than any in Europe. Moctezuma received him with gifts of gold and feathers. Within two years the city would be rubble. The encounter, mediated by the interpreter Malinche, was one of history's most consequential meetings, bringing two civilizations face to face.
Leonardo da Vinci Dies at Amboise
In a small chateau on the Loire, the aging polymath Leonardo da Vinci died in the arms, or so legend says, of his patron King Francis I. He left notebooks on anatomy, hydraulics, flight, and perspective that would not be deciphered for centuries. Florence had lost her strangest son. The story that he died in Francis I's arms, though probably apocryphal, reflects the esteem the French court held for the aging polymath.
Charles V Elected Emperor
After Jakob Fugger's bank poured eight hundred thousand florins into bribes, the nineteen-year-old Charles of Habsburg was elected Holy Roman Emperor at Frankfurt. He now ruled from Vienna to Peru. No European had wielded such territory since Charlemagne, and he could not yet sleep through the night. The Fugger bank's massive bribes established a precedent for the commercialization of imperial politics that defined Habsburg governance.
Maximilian I Dies at Wels
The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, lifelong schemer and patron of Duerer, died with his coffin already traveling beside him. His grandson Charles, heir to Spain, Burgundy, and now the Austrian lands, prepared to buy the imperial election. The map of Europe was about to be grotesquely enlarged. His obsession with posthumous reputation led him to plan an enormous tomb at Innsbruck surrounded by bronze ancestral statues, never completed.
Leonardo's Last Notebooks
Leonardo da Vinci, nearing death in France, made his final notebook entries on water and the flight of birds. He sketched the geometry of a deluge and bequeathed his papers to his devoted pupil Francesco Melzi. The notebooks would disappear into obscure attics for centuries before being gradually rediscovered. The thirteen thousand surviving pages, in his mirror script, contain observations anticipating scientific discoveries by centuries.
Zwingli Preaches in Zurich
Appointed people's priest at the Grossmuenster in Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli began preaching sequentially through the Gospel of Matthew in the vernacular, discarding the traditional lectionary. His fresh biblical preaching drew large crowds and sowed the seeds of a Reformation distinct from Luther's German movement. His insistence on preaching directly from Scripture was itself revolutionary, asserting biblical primacy over centuries of ecclesiastical tradition.