36 stories from this century.
On the rainy night of 30 June 1520, Hernán Cortés's army tried to slip out of Tenochtitlan across the Tlacopan causeway and was caught. Hundreds of Spaniards and thousands of native allies died in the lake, many dragged down by the gold sewn into their clothes. Spain remembered it as the Sad Night; Mexico City has renamed it the Victorious one.
Read the story →From 1565 to 1815, one or two Spanish galleons a year crossed the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, swapping American silver for Chinese silk and porcelain — the first sustained trade link binding Asia, the Americas, and Europe into one economy. The eastward crossing took four to six months and killed crews by the score; some thirty galleons were lost.
Read the story →Discovered in 1545 at 4,000 metres in the Andes, the Cerro Rico of Potosí produced a huge share of the early modern world's silver. By 1600 Potosí ranked among the largest cities on Earth. The forced-labour mita system fed Indigenous workers into its tunnels for 250 years, and the mountain — honeycombed and slowly collapsing — is being mined still.
Read the story →On 23 January 1565 the allied Deccan sultanates destroyed the army of Vijayanagara and beheaded its de facto ruler on the field. The capital — a metropolis European visitors ranked with Rome, perhaps half a million people — was sacked for months and never recovered. Its granite ruins at Hampi are now a World Heritage site.
Read the story →Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536 with a French sword rather than the standard English execution axe. Henry VIII had paid for a substantial professional executioner to travel from Calais. The decision was made before the verdict was delivered.
Read the story →The Christian Holy League fleet of approximately 212 galleys defeated the Ottoman fleet of approximately 251 galleys at the Gulf of Patras off western Greece on 7 October 1571. About 30,000 Ottoman sailors and approximately 7,500 Christian sailors were killed in approximately four hours of close combat. Approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves chained to Ottoman rowing benches were liberated. It is conventionally the last major naval battle fought primarily with oared galleys.
Read the story →Tycho Brahe kept a tame moose at his Bohemian residence in the late 1590s. According to a letter Tycho wrote to a friend, the animal was lent to a neighbouring nobleman for a banquet, drank too much beer, and broke its neck falling down a flight of stairs while attempting to descend after the meal.
Read the story →Francis Drake left Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with five ships. He returned alone in the Golden Hind on 26 September 1580 with about £400,000 of captured Spanish silver from his Pacific raid — about half the English government's annual revenue. He was the first English captain to complete a circumnavigation. Elizabeth I knighted him aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford on 4 April 1581.
Read the story →Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome, on 17 February 1600. The Roman Inquisition's verdict identified eight specific theological errors. Among them were the doctrines of an infinite universe with countless inhabited worlds. He was 52. His statue at the execution site was erected in 1889 by an Italian liberal-republican fund-raising campaign against the modern Vatican.
Read the story →Henry VIII married six times between 1509 and 1547. Two of his wives — Anne Boleyn (1536) and Catherine Howard (1542) — were beheaded at the Tower of London. Two were set aside by annulment (Catherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves). One died of childbirth complications (Jane Seymour). One outlived him (Catherine Parr). The pursuit of his desired succession produced the foundational break with the papacy that became the English Reformation.
Read the story →John Dee was the senior English mathematician of the late 16th century, court astrologer to Elizabeth I, scientific adviser to the substantial early English exploration ventures, and possibly the first English-language writer to use the phrase 'British Empire.' He also believed he was communicating with angels through a polished obsidian mirror.
Read the story →Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England on 10 July 1553 under the terms of Edward VI's deathbed Devise. The proclamation was a failed attempt to keep the English Crown Protestant against the legitimate claim of the Catholic Mary Tudor. Jane was deposed on 19 July 1553 after Mary's army marched on London. She was executed for treason at the Tower of London on 12 February 1554. She was 17 or 18.
Read the story →Ferdinand Magellan died on the island of Mactan in the Philippines on 27 April 1521 in a skirmish with the local chief Lapu-Lapu. His fleet of five ships had left Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 with 270 men. Eighteen survivors aboard the single remaining ship Victoria reached Spain on 6 September 1522 under Juan Sebastián Elcano. The voyage was the first complete circumnavigation of the planet.
Read the story →A radical Anabaptist movement under Jan van Leiden seized the city of Münster in February 1534. The "New Jerusalem" they established practised mandatory polygamy and community of goods. The Bishop of Münster recaptured the city on 25 June 1535. Jan van Leiden, Bernhard Knipperdolling, and Bernhard Krechting were tortured publicly with red-hot tongs for an hour, killed, and their bodies hung in iron cages from the spire of Saint Lambert's Church.
Read the story →John White returned to the Roanoke colony on 18 August 1590 — three years after he had left for England to resupply — to find the entire 115-person colony gone. The houses were dismantled, the heavier equipment buried, and the word CROATOAN was carved on a post. White assumed the colonists had moved to the Croatoan tribe's island 50 miles south. He never returned to confirm. Their fate is unresolved.
Read the story →Philip II of Spain dispatched 130 ships under the Duke of Medina Sidonia in May 1588 to invade England, depose Elizabeth I, and reverse the English Reformation. The English fleet defeated the Armada at Gravelines on 8 August 1588. The surviving Spanish ships were driven north around Scotland by storms; many wrecked on the western Irish coast. Approximately 11,000 Spanish sailors died, against fewer than 100 English casualties in combat.
Read the story →Gaspare Tagliacozzi's *De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem* (1597) described the first systematic European reconstructive surgical technique for nose loss — using a substantial skin flap rotated from the patient's upper arm. The technique required the patient to keep the arm strapped to the face for several weeks while the graft established blood supply.
Read the story →King Frederick II of Denmark granted Tycho Brahe the island of Hven in the Øresund Strait in February 1576 with funding to build a state-supported astronomical observatory. The resulting Uraniborg and Stjerneborg observatories operated from 1576 to 1597 and produced the most accurate pre-telescopic positional astronomy in history. The data set was the foundation on which Kepler's three laws of planetary motion were derived.
Read the story →Andreas Vesalius's *De humani corporis fabrica*, published at Basel in June 1543, was an anatomical atlas based on the direct dissection of approximately thirty human cadavers in Padua between 1540 and 1542. The book identified approximately 200 specific errors in Galen's anatomy. The conclusion that Galen had dissected only animals — never humans — ended 1,300 years of medical-faculty authority.
Read the story →Frau Troffea stepped into a Strasbourg alley around 14 July 1518 and began dancing alone, silently, for no announced reason. She did not stop. Within a week thirty others had joined her. Within a month approximately four hundred people were dancing involuntarily through the city. Several died. She is the index case of the most-documented dancing plague in European history.
Read the story →The Knights Hospitaller had governed Rhodes since 1309. In summer 1522 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the island with an army of approximately 100,000 against the Hospitallers' 7,500 defenders. The siege ran six months. The Hospitallers surrendered on negotiated terms in December and were given safe passage to Crete.
Read the story →Martin Luther sent his *Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum* — the Ninety-Five Theses — to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz on 31 October 1517. The famous door-nailing detail is from a single later source. Within five years the document had substantially detonated Western Christendom.
Read the story →The Mensur is a German academic-fraternity fencing tradition in which two combatants stand at fixed distance and exchange controlled blade strokes aimed at the face. The cut — the *Schmiss* — was the substantive point of the exercise. The tradition descends substantially from the 16th-century university dueling culture that cost Tycho Brahe his nose.
Read the story →Tycho Brahe wore a metal prosthetic nose for the entire adult portion of his life after losing the original to a student duel in 1566. The Renaissance prosthetics tradition that produced his nose was a substantial European craft specialism that survived from the 15th to the 19th century before being substantively replaced by 20th-century plastic surgery.
Read the story →Nonsuch House was a four-story prefabricated Dutch timber palace built in the Low Countries in 1577, dismantled, shipped to London, and reassembled on Old London Bridge using only wooden pegs. It stood there for 180 years, was demolished in 1757, and gave its name to a generation of substantial-luxury London building.
Read the story →The mural quadrant at Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory was a brass arc mounted on a north-south wall and used for measuring the meridian altitudes of stars and planets. It was the largest and most accurate astronomical instrument of the pre-telescopic period and produced most of the data that Kepler would later use to derive the laws of planetary motion.
Read the story →Michael Maestlin taught mathematics and astronomy at Tübingen from 1583 to 1631. He was the man who privately taught the young Johannes Kepler that the Copernican heliocentric system was probably correct, while officially continuing to teach the Ptolemaic system that the university curriculum required.
Read the story →On the evening of 11 November 1572 a bright new star appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was visible for sixteen months. Tycho Brahe — twenty-five at the time — measured it carefully enough to prove it sat above the Moon. The Aristotelian heavens that were supposed to be unchanging had quietly changed.
Read the story →Uraniborg was the most expensive scientific instrument in 16th-century Europe — an island observatory built for Tycho Brahe at royal expense. He worked there for 20 years, made the most accurate pre-telescope astronomical observations ever, then fled in 1597. The Crown demolished it the next year.
Read the story →In August 1578 the 24-year-old King Sebastian of Portugal led 17,000 men into Morocco to depose its sultan. Three kings died in a single day. Sebastian had no heir. Two years later his great-uncle Philip II of Spain claimed the empty Portuguese throne. The Armada disaster of 1588 followed.
Read the story →Manco Inca was the Spanish puppet ruler of conquered Peru. In 1536 he escaped, raised an army of 100,000, and laid siege to Cuzco for eleven months. He nearly succeeded. The last Inca state he founded would survive another 36 years.
Read the story →Within months of the Aztec capital's fall, the Spanish surveyor Alonso García Bravo laid out the colonial grid of Mexico City directly on top of the destroyed lake-city. The Templo Mayor was buried under the cathedral. It stayed buried until 1978.
Read the story →Manderup Parsberg outlived the duel by fifty-nine years and outlived his cousin by twenty-four. He never spoke about either.
Read the story →In November 1577 a comet appeared over Europe so bright it cast shadows. A twenty-eight-year-old Dane measured its distance and demolished Aristotle's heavens.
Read the story →In December 1566 the 20-year-old Tycho Brahe and his cousin fought in the dark with rapiers over a mathematical disagreement. Tycho lost the bridge of his nose.
Read the story →In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.
Read the story →