1559
Peace of Cateau-Cambresis
After sixty years of Habsburg-Valois war in Italy, France and Spain signed a peace at Cateau-Cambresis. France renounced its Italian claims; Spain confirmed its grip on Milan, Naples, and Sicily. The Italian Wars were over, and Spanish hegemony over Italy would last for a century and a half. Henry II's accidental death at the peace tournament plunged France into Catherine de Medici's regency and religious civil war.
Henry II Killed in a Joust
Celebrating the peace with Spain, Henry II of France took part in a joust against his captain Gabriel de Montgomery and took a splinter through the visor. He lingered for ten days in agony while Catherine de Medici watched. Their sickly sons would stumble through the French Wars of Religion.
Index of Forbidden Books Published
Pope Paul IV issued the first universal Index Librorum Prohibitorum, banning hundreds of authors from Erasmus to Machiavelli. Printers in Rome, Venice, and Milan watched their stock go into bonfires. The Catholic Reformation had acquired a censor's library to match its inquisitor's dungeon. The blanket condemnation of Erasmus demonstrated the Counter-Reformation's willingness to sacrifice its own intellectual tradition for doctrinal purity.
John Knox Returns to Scotland
The reformer John Knox, exiled preacher and scourge of queens, stepped off a ship at Leith and launched a preaching tour that would ignite the Scottish Reformation within a year. Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland, wrote her daughter in France that the preachers were stirring up dangerous fires. His confrontation with Mary Queen of Scots, reducing the young queen to tears, became one of the Reformation era's defining encounters.
Elizabethan Religious Settlement
The new English parliament passed the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, restoring royal headship of the Church of England and imposing a revised Book of Common Prayer. Catholics and Puritans alike were dissatisfied; the queen called it her via media. The settlement would hold, barely, for the rest of her reign.
Madrid Becomes Spanish Capital
Philip II quietly moved his court from Toledo to Madrid, a modest town on a high central plateau chosen for its climate, water, and central location. Within decades it would grow into Europe's most sprawling improvised capital, swelling with bureaucrats, courtiers, and the slow accretion of imperial business. Philip chose a town with no significant history, seeking a capital he could shape entirely to his administrative requirements.