1520
Suleiman the Magnificent Ascends
On the death of Selim the Grim, his son Suleiman rode into Istanbul and took the Ottoman throne. Twenty-five years old, learned in poetry and law, he would reign for forty-six years, extend the empire deep into Europe, and be remembered in Turkish as the Lawgiver, Kanuni. His reign witnessed the Suleymaniye Mosque, Ottoman law codification, and military campaigns bringing the empire to its greatest extent.
La Noche Triste
On a rain-slashed night the Mexica rose against Cortes and drove the Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies from Tenochtitlan across the Tlacopan causeway. Hundreds of conquistadors, weighed down with looted gold, drowned in the lake. Cortes sat beneath a cypress and, the story goes, wept openly. The disaster cost Cortes most of his artillery and men, but within a year he had rebuilt his army and besieged Tenochtitlan.
Raphael Dies on Good Friday
Rome's favorite painter collapsed with a fever after, rumor said, a night of excess with his mistress. He was thirty-seven. His unfinished Transfiguration stood above his deathbed. The city mourned as if a prince had fallen, and a golden age of High Renaissance harmony quietly closed. His death on Good Friday, the same date as his birth, was regarded as a sign of divine favor by mourning contemporaries.
Portuguese Reach Ethiopia
A Portuguese embassy led by Rodrigo de Lima reached the court of the Ethiopian emperor Lebna Dengel after a long overland journey from the Red Sea coast. Europeans had finally made contact with the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John, whose existence had shaped medieval geographical imagination for centuries. The embassy confirmed that the legendary Prester John was in fact the Ethiopian negus, disappointing those who imagined a more powerful ally.
Exsurge Domine Condemns Luther
Pope Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine, threatening Luther with excommunication if he did not recant forty-one errors within sixty days. Luther publicly burned the bull and a volume of canon law outside Wittenberg's Elster Gate. The break with Rome was now irreversible in practice if not yet in canon law.
Field of the Cloth of Gold
Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France met in a valley in Picardy for eighteen days of jousting, feasting, and gilded tents. They wrestled one another in front of their courts, and Francis threw the English king. For all the pageantry, the alliance it sealed collapsed within two years.
Chocolate Reaches Spain
Hernan Cortes sent Moctezuma's cacao beans and a grinding stone back to Charles V along with the first samples of a dark, bitter drink the Mexica sipped cold and spiced with chile. Spanish monks would eventually sweeten it with cane sugar, and chocolate began its slow colonization of Europe. Spanish monks eventually sweetened it with cane sugar, and the transformation from Aztec ceremonial drink to European luxury took nearly a century.