1526
Babur Wins the First Battle of Panipat
With twelve thousand men and twenty small cannon, the Timurid exile Babur faced Sultan Ibrahim Lodi's hundred thousand warriors and war elephants on the plain of Panipat. Artillery panicked the elephants, which trampled their own lines. By sundown Babur held Delhi and had founded the Mughal Empire. His memoir describes the battle with characteristic candor, noting the terror of war elephants and his careful deployment of chained carts for gunners.
Mohacs and the Death of a King
Suleiman's army annihilated the Hungarians on a marshy plain south of Mohacs in less than two hours. King Louis II, twenty years old, drowned fleeing in his armor. Hungary was partitioned between Ottomans and Habsburgs, and Central Europe's defensive shield lay in splinters. The battle partitioned Hungary into three zones: Ottoman center, Habsburg west, and the semi-autonomous principality of Transylvania.
Ayutthaya Besieges Chiang Mai
The Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, wealthy from rice and Chinese trade, pressed northward against the Tai kingdom of Lan Na. Elephant corps and Chinese-style walled encampments collided outside Chiang Mai. The long struggle over the Ping River valley foreshadowed the coming century of Burmese and Siamese war. The rivalry would continue through multiple invasions until Burmese conquest rendered both kingdoms subordinate.
Anabaptists Emerge in Zurich
A group of Zurich radicals, impatient with Zwingli's pace of reform, rebaptized one another in a private house and rejected infant baptism entirely. Persecuted by Protestants and Catholics alike, the Anabaptist movement would spread across Europe, producing Mennonites, Hutterites, and eventually the martyrs of Muenster. Their insistence on adult baptism and church-state separation made them the most persecuted group of the Reformation, hunted by Catholics and Protestants alike.
Saint Peter's Rebuilding Continues
After twenty years of demolition and construction, the new Saint Peter's stood as an enormous roofless cross of travertine, its four great piers rising like cliffs above the old tomb of the apostle. Raphael was dead, Bramante was dead, and the search for a successor architect grew desperate. The seemingly interminable construction became a symbol of papal excess that reformers cited as evidence of Rome's spiritual corruption.