Oceans became highways, gunpowder empires rose, and the scientific revolution began. These articles cover the three centuries in which the world's regions first became one system.
Vasco da Gama reached Calicut on May 20, 1498, with cloth, hats, sugar and honey; the Zamorin's officers laughed and he left with a letter asking for gold.
· 1498Babur lost Samarkand three times, took Kabul in October 1504 without a fight, and beat Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat on April 20, 1526, with 700 roped carts.
· 1504Shah Ismail's Safavid army feigned a retreat outside Merv on December 2, 1510, then cut a bridge and killed Shaybani Khan, founder of the Uzbek state.
· 1510A gazelle-skin fragment names about twenty source charts, including one by Columbus. Found at Topkapi in 1929, it carries a disputed Antarctica claim.
· 1513On August 23, 1514, Selim I's janissaries fired from behind gun-carriages at Shah Ismail's cavalry near Khoy. Tabriz fell and was lost; peace came in 1555.
· 1514Cortés's letter of October 30, 1520 gave Tenochtitlan four causeways and a market of 60,000 a day. Modern studies put the city near 200,000 people.
· 1519In three letters of 1526, Afonso I of Kongo asked João III of Portugal for priests, physicians and an end to the slave trade. The originals are in Lisbon.
· 1526Suleiman camped at Vienna in September 1529 and quit after three weeks as winter came early. He then took Baghdad, wrote law and built the Süleymaniye.
· 1529Pizarro seized Atahualpa at Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, after plague and civil war had split the Inca; the conquest itself took until 1572.
· 1532Castanhoso marched with Cristóvão da Gama's 400 Portuguese in 1541. His memoir, in Whiteway's 1902 translation, is the record of Wofla and Wayna Daga.
· 1542The colophon reads Basel, Oporinus, June 1543. Vesalius's Fabrica gave the sternum three parts, not Galen's seven. His annotated 1555 copy surfaced in 2007
· 1543Henry VIII's Mary Rose sank in the Solent on July 19, 1545. Two museums disagree on why and on the death toll; she was raised on October 11, 1982.
· 1545Anthony Jenkinson reached Bukhara on December 23, 1558, for the Muscovy Company, found no trade "worthy the following," and returned to Moscow in 1559.
· 1558Potosí silver, found in 1545 and refined with mercury by forced mita labor, sailed to Seville and, on Manila galleons, to China, the era's silver sink.
· 1572Akbar ruled Mughal India from 1556 to 1605 by ranking Hindu and Muslim officers in one service, ending the jizya tax in 1564 and outranking his clerics.
· 1575Finished at Tlatelolco in 1577 by Sahagún and Nahua scholars, ordered to Spain by Philip II, in Medici hands by 1587, in Florence from 1783, online 2023.
· 1577John White found the word CROATOAN carved on a post at Roanoke in 1590, three years after his 1587 colonists, including newborn Virginia Dare, vanished.
· 1587The Seonjo sillok records 63 Japanese ships burned at Hansan Island; the Korean History Chronology counts 59 lost and 14 escaping. Both are given here.
· 1592Tokugawa Ieyasu broke Ishida Mitsunari's western army in a few foggy hours on October 21, 1600, redistributed a third of Japan and became shogun in 1603.
· 1600Shells in the ahu of marae Taputapuātea on Ra'iatea date to AD 1503 to 1722 at the earliest. The World Heritage text says 14th to 18th centuries.
· 1600British troops took thousands of brass plaques and heads from the Oba's palace in Benin City in 1897; since 2021 museums have begun to return them.
· 1600What the Ming History says Ricci offered the Wanli court in 1601, the six-panel world map of 1602, the Chinese Euclid of 1607, the grave granted in 1610.
· 1601Arakel of Tabriz dated the Julfa deportation to October 21 to November 19, 1604. Its merchants rebuilt across from Isfahan in 1605; a press came in 1636.
· 1605Quiros's fleet entered a bay in Vanuatu on May 1, 1606, named the land Australia del Espiritu Santo; a storm later parted his ship from Torres's.
· 1606
