The world in AD 1450

Africa

Gold was still being refined at Great Zimbabwe in the fifteenth century, on the evidence of excavations published in 2023 by Vieri, Chirikure, Lane and Martinón-Torres. The team recovered fragments of more than a hundred crucibles and reused pots from the Eastern Ridge Ruins and adjacent areas, and the gold droplets left in them matched natural, unalloyed gold. Their radiocarbon dates place the main Eastern Ridge midden between the early fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while a single sample from the Fireguard Midden fell between 1430 and 1505, and the authors date the city as a whole to between 1000 and 1600, with gold-working vessels in use well into the sixteenth century. They argue that far more of the city’s gold was worked and used locally than earlier accounts of Indian Ocean trade assumed.

• Kongo's king writes to Lisbon, 1526: no slave trade in these kingdoms1526
• Four hundred men and one witness: Castanhoso in Ethiopia, 1541–15431542
• Kulwa in the Travels: Kilwa in 1331 and five coins in Australia1331
• How much gold did Mansa Musa bring to Cairo in 1324?1324

West Asia

Murad II, the Ottoman sultan, was in the final months of a reign that the Encyclopaedia Iranica dates from 1421 to 1451; Mehmed II would succeed him and take Constantinople in 1453. A history written in Turkish for Murad in 1436 or 1437 by Yazıcıoğlu Ali had already claimed that the Ottoman house outranked in descent the Qara Qoyunlu, the Aq Qoyunlu and the Timurids. To the east the Qara Qoyunlu leader Jahanshah, who ruled from 1434 to 1467, held for a time western Persia, Armenia, Georgia, Arran and Azerbaijan, and Iranica names the surviving remains of the Blue Mosque in Tabriz as a relic of that dynasty’s rule. The Ottoman historian Şükrullah had been at the Qara Qoyunlu court in 1448 or 1449, most likely, Iranica suggests, where he came upon the Oghuz lore he later worked into his universal history.

• Twenty sources in the margin: the Piri Reis map of 15131513
• Chaldiran, August 23, 1514: guns behind gun-carriages, 40,000 horsemen1514
• Why did Suleiman turn back from Vienna in 1529, and what came next?1529
• Ibn Battuta's 29 years: what the Rihla records, and what it invents1325

Europe

Kent rose on June 4, 1450. A proclamation dated that day, which the Fordham sourcebook files under the rebel leader Jack Cade, was printed by the historian James Gairdner in 1880 in a volume of fifteenth-century chronicles. It lists why “the king’s liege men of Kent” had assembled: royal councilors took bribes, the law served “for to do wrong,” and “the sea is lost, France is lost.” It asked the king to remove the followers of the Duke of Suffolk from around him and to take in their place the Duke of York and other great lords. In Mainz, Johann Gutenberg may have been working on a new printing method since as early as the 1430s, the Harry Ransom Center notes; his Latin Bible, printed with his partner Johann Fust in more than 150 copies, did not appear until the mid-1450s.

• How did a 21-year-old sultan take Constantinople in 1453?1453
• "I, Johan Fust, have borrowed 1,550 guilders": Gutenberg Bible, 14551455
• Basel, June 1543: Vesalius's Fabrica, and the copy found in 20071543
• Mary Rose, July 19, 1545: the warship Henry VIII watched sink1545

East Asia

Korea’s King Sejong reached the end of a reign that the National Hangeul Museum dates from 1418 to 1450. Four years earlier, in 1446, he had promulgated the Hunminjeongeum, the “Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People,” which set out the new Korean script, and in 1447 his court produced the Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the first work written in Hangeul alongside Chinese characters. In China 1450 was the first year of the Jingtai reign: an imperial inscription on a set of 36 Water-Land ritual paintings now partly in the Cleveland Museum of Art gives the fifth year of Jingtai as 1454, when the court donated them, probably to the Da Longfu monastery in Beijing, for a Buddhist rite held for “all souls of the dead on land and sea.” In Kyoto, Ryoan-ji records its own founding in 1450 by Hosokawa Katsumoto, deputy to the Ashikaga shoguns, who took over a mountain villa of Lord Tokudaiji and had it made into a Zen temple; its abbot’s hall was not built until 1499, and the temple dates its garden, presumably, to that same time.

• Twenty-eight letters, 1443: Sejong's alphabet in the Sillok1446
• Why did Zheng He's treasure fleets sail seven times, then stop?1405
• The Jikji colophon of 1377 and a Paris copy shelved as Coréen 1091377
• Sixty-three ships in the Veritable Records: Hansan Island, 15921592

South Asia

Bidar was the Deccan capital of the Bahmani sultans, and Alaʾ al-Din Ahmad II ruled there from April 1436 until May 1458, by the regnal list in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. The historian Firishta, cited by Iranica, describes Ahmad II as fluent in Persian and Turkish. The Persian poet Adhari of Esfarayen, author of the Bahman-nama, a verse history of the dynasty, was held in high esteem at the court, and in 1451 he addressed to the king a poem of advice after which Ahmad II gave up drinking.

• 'Never seen a place like it': Abdur Razzaq at Vijayanagara, 14431443
• Twelve pieces of striped cloth: da Gama's gift to the Zamorin, 14981498
• Fondest of making gifts and of shedding blood: Ibn Battuta's Delhi1334
• How did Akbar hold together an empire of many faiths?1575

Central Asia

Samarqand was changing hands. Ulugh Beg, who had governed Transoxiana since 1409, was defeated by his own son Abd al-Latif and on October 25, 1449, sentenced to death on the son’s order. Abd al-Latif ruled the city for about six months, a reign the Encyclopaedia Iranica says left almost no record, until a conspiracy of notables and clan chiefs ended it with his killing on May 8, 1450, or May 9 in a second Iranica entry. The amirs then chose Abdallah, a grandson of Shahrokh, who in 1450 held off one attack by the rival prince Abu Saʿid; in June 1451 Abu Saʿid returned with the Uzbek khan Abu’l-Khayr, defeated Abdallah near Samarqand and succeeded him.

• A forty-meter arc under a Samarkand hill: Ulugh Beg's observatory1429
• Babur's memoir: from losing Samarkand to taking Delhi, 1497–15261504
• Merv, December 2, 1510: Shah Ismail's feint against Shaybani Khan1510
• Bukhara, 1558: an Englishman finds the Silk Road trade too small1558

The Americas

Mayapan, a walled city in Yucatan that Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) calls the last great capital of Maya culture, fell at about 1450. INAH counts roughly 4,000 structures over four square kilometers and believes the city had some 12,000 inhabitants. In Tenochtitlan Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, the first Moctezuma, ruled from 1440 to 1469, and in 2023 the Templo Mayor Project found an offering box from his era containing 14 stone figures in the Mezcala style of northern Guerrero, along with shells and corals from the Atlantic coasts his alliance had conquered. The project’s director, Leonardo López Luján, said in INAH’s announcement that some of those figures were already more than 1,000 years old when the Mexica conquered the peoples who kept them.

• Radiocarbon says 1420: Machu Picchu's age and its return from Yale1450
• Cortés's Second Letter, 1520: four causeways and a market of 60,0001519
• Why did an empire of millions fall to 168 men at Cajamarca?1532
• How did silver from a mountain in the Andes end up in Ming China?1572

Oceania

Moa, the large flightless birds of New Zealand, had gone extinct by the early to middle fifteenth century, according to a 2014 study in Nature Communications by Richard Holdaway and colleagues that used radiocarbon dates on moa bone and eggshell. The same team placed the first Polynesian settlement in the early fourteenth century, later than the date of about 1280 that other archaeologists had estimated for the Wairau Bar site. Starting from a founding population the authors estimate at 400 from genetic evidence, they calculate that the people who hunted the moa out never numbered more than 2,000.

• Did the moai of Rapa Nui walk? What the 2012 experiment showed1400
• Ash from AD 1314 and the dating of New Zealand's first settlement1314
• Taputapuātea, the marae complex at Ōpoa on Ra'iatea1600
• A 13-year-old's find at Wairau Bar in 1939, and a return in 20091300

Sources

• Vieri, Chirikure, Lane and Martinón-Torres, Archaeological science, globalisation, and local agency: gold in Great Zimbabwe, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 15 (2023)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: IRAN ii. IRANIAN HISTORY (2) Islamic period (page 3)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: HISTORIOGRAPHY xiv. The Ottoman Empire
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham University): Jack Cade, Proclamation of Grievances, 1450
• Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin: The Gutenberg Bible
• National Hangeul Museum: National Hangeul Museum opens to promote Korean alphabet
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: Water-Land ritual paintings, 1454 (1973.70)
• Ryoan-ji Temple: Our History
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: BAHMANID DYNASTY
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: ʿABD-AL-LAṬĪF MĪRZĀ
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: ʿABDALLĀH B. EBRĀHĪM
• INAH: Zona Arqueológica de Mayapán
• INAH: El Proyecto Templo Mayor descubre ofrenda de consagración de la época de Moctezuma Ilhuicamina
• Holdaway et al., An extremely low-density human population exterminated New Zealand moa, Nature Communications 5 (2014)