Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1500

The world in AD 1500

By the Our Earth's History editorial team · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

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TL;DR — In 1500 Portuguese ships had reached India and Brazil, the Ottomans held Constantinople, the Ming ruled from Beijing, and the Aztec and Inca empires stood untouched at full size.

The world of 1500 was joined by sea for the first time. Vasco da Gama’s fleet had returned from India in 1499, and the Metropolitan Museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline records that in 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral reached Brazil for Portugal, eight years after Columbus landed in the Bahamas. Every settled region of the Old World had cities, writing and kings: Mamluk Cairo, Ottoman Constantinople, Timurid Herat, Ming Beijing, Delhi under the Lodi sultans, Songhai Timbuktu and the Swahili port of Kilwa, whose merchants, according to UNESCO, traded gold and ivory for Chinese porcelain. In the Americas the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the Inca capital Cuzco governed empires that had never seen a European. In the Pacific the statue carvers of Rapa Nui had just passed their busiest century, and Australia’s Aboriginal peoples held a continent they had occupied for some 65,000 years.

Africa

Egypt was ruled from Cairo by the Burji Mamluk sultans, slave soldiers of mostly Circassian origin. The Heilbrunn Timeline records that the reign of Qaitbay, the greatest of the later sultans, had ended in 1496, that da Gama’s 1498 voyage let the Portuguese bar the Mamluks from the spice trade, their richest source of revenue, and that Qansuh al-Ghawri, the last sultan, took the throne in 1501. On the Niger, Askia Muhammad (r. 1493–1528) ruled the Songhai empire, which had held Timbuktu since Sonni Ali took it in 1465, and made the city a center of Islamic learning while extending his hold over the gold trade to the south. On the Guinea coast the Portuguese had reached Benin City in 1485, and the Timeline dates the kingdom’s Warrior Kings period, with its guilds of lost-wax brass casters and its first cast brass heads, to the 15th and 16th centuries. On the Indian Ocean, UNESCO records that Kilwa Kisiwani traded with Arabia, India and China until the Portuguese built a fort there in the 16th century, and that Great Zimbabwe, inland on the plateau, was built between 1100 and 1450 and inhabited only into the 15th century, so by 1500 its stone city was past its building phase.

West Asia

Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) ruled the Ottoman empire from Constantinople, which his father Mehmed II had taken in 1453. The Heilbrunn Timeline describes his reign as a conservative religious reaction against Mehmed’s cosmopolitan court, with unrest in the eastern Anatolian provinces feeding tension with a new power in Iran, and it records his building in Tokat, Amasya and Manisa. Iraq and northern Iran belonged to the Aq Quyunlu, the “White Sheep” Turkmen dynasty (1378–1508), which kept diplomatic relations with Venice. The next year settled the region’s future: in 1501 Ismail Safavi and his red-capped Qizilbash took Azerbaijan from the Aq Quyunlu, Ismail was crowned in Tabriz as the first Safavid shah, Shia Islam became the state religion, and within ten years all of Iran was Safavid.

Europe

Spain and Portugal had changed the map. The Heilbrunn Timeline records that Granada fell to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 after a ten-year war, ending almost 800 years of Islamic rule in Iberia; that the same year Jews who refused conversion were expelled; and that the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 drew a line through the Atlantic, with Spain’s rights to the west of it and Portugal’s to the east. Italy had been a battlefield since Charles VIII of France invaded in 1494, the year the Medici were driven from Florence. In 1500 Leonardo da Vinci came back to Florence after almost two decades in Milan and turned to engineering, mathematics and topography; Michelangelo returned in 1501 to carve the David, finished in 1504. In Moscow, Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) had employed Italian architects since 1475 to rebuild the Kremlin in brick, with the Cathedral of the Dormition and the Palace of Facets, and the first story of his great bell tower went up in 1505.

East Asia

Ming China had turned inward. Zheng He’s seven fleets, which sailed between 1405 and 1433, were seventy years in the past; the Heilbrunn Timeline records that Mongol incursions from 1474 set off extensions of the Great Wall that continued to the end of the dynasty, and that the first Portuguese ship did not reach the Pearl River until 1517. Suzhou was the center of the Wu school of scholar painters, with Shen Zhou (1427–1509) and Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) at work. Japan had no effective central government: the Onin War of 1467–77 had wrecked Kyoto and left power with the provincial daimyo, the century of fighting the Timeline calls the Sengoku period, and Sesshu Toyo (1420–1506) had painted his Splashed-Ink scroll in 1495. Korea was ruled by the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), which had made Neo-Confucianism the state creed, sent regular embassies to the Ming court and allowed Japanese trade at three southeastern ports, a concession it withdrew in 1510 after a Japanese uprising there.

South Asia

Delhi was ruled by the Lodi sultans, who had held it since 1451, and the Heilbrunn Timeline records that no Delhi-based sultanate after Timur’s sack of 1398 regained a strong hold on the subcontinent. In the Deccan the Bahmani sultanate had broken up in 1490 into five states, Ahmadnagar, Berar, Bidar, Bijapur and Golconda. South of them the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, which the Timeline places at the height of its power in the 15th century, would stand until its capital was sacked in 1565. The Portuguese had set up trading posts on the western coast in 1498 and would add Colombo in 1505 and Goa in 1510; Babur, the Timurid prince who would defeat Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in 1526, was in 1500 still fighting for Samarqand.

Central Asia

Herat, the Timurid capital in Khurasan, was in the last years of Husain Baiqara (r. 1470–1506), whose court the Heilbrunn Timeline describes as a final flowering: the poet Jami had died in 1492, the poet and patron Mir Ali Shir Nava’i lived until 1501, and the painter Bihzad and the calligrapher Sultan Ali al-Mashhadi were working there. North of the Oxus the Timurids were losing Transoxiana to the Uzbeks. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that Muhammad Shibani Khan, grandson of Abu’l-Khayr, had governed Tashkent since 1494 and took Samarqand in 1501; the Timeline adds that Khurasan fell to his Shaibanids in 1507, ending Timurid rule, and that Babur fled toward India. On the Mongolian steppe, Dayan Khan, a descendant of Kublai, had ruled from the Urals to Lake Baikal since 1491.

The Americas

Tenochtitlan was governed by Ahuitzotl, the eighth Aztec ruler, whose reign World History Encyclopedia gives as 1486 to 1502; he had rededicated the enlarged Templo Mayor in 1487 and built a canal to bring fresh water from Coyoacan, which, according to the chronicler Diego Duran, flooded the city. In the Andes, Huayna Capac had succeeded Topa Inca around 1493, and the Heilbrunn Timeline records an empire that had taken the Chimu capital Chan Chan around 1470, ran a provincial center of nearly 4,000 buildings at Huanuco Pampa, and around 1500 arranged the shrines around Cuzco along some forty lines radiating from the Temple of the Sun. In the north, Moundville in Alabama, the last important Mississippian center, was in decline in 1500; John Cabot had claimed Newfoundland for England in 1497, and Columbus had touched the South American mainland in 1498.

Oceania

The Heilbrunn Timeline places the peak of moai carving on Rapa Nui at about 1400–1500, after which production declined as warfare grew and the large timbers needed to move the statues became scarce; a new cult of the birdman had begun to develop around 1450. In New Zealand, Maori wood carving reached what the Timeline calls its classic form around 1500, and on Pohnpei in Micronesia building continued at the stone city of Nan Madol. No European had yet crossed the Pacific; Magellan did so in 1521. For Hawaii no source consulted for this page dates an event to 1500. Australia’s Aboriginal peoples left no written record for the year; what is known is that a dating program at Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land, published in Nature in 2017 by Chris Clarkson and colleagues, put the first human occupation of northern Australia at around 65,000 years ago.

Sources

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Our Earth's History. (2026, September 20). The world in AD 1500. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1500/
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Our Earth's History. “The world in AD 1500.” Our Earth's History, September 20, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1500/.
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“The world in AD 1500.” Our Earth's History, 20 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1500/.

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