The world in AD 1550

Africa

Giovanni Battista Ramusio, a Venetian geographer, published in 1550 the account of Africa that al-Hasan Muhammad al-Wazzan, known in Italy as Leo Africanus, had written around 1526. Inside the continent, the Christian kingdom of Kongo had lost some control of its own church: the Royal Museum for Central Africa records that in 1534 the papacy made the Kongo church a branch of the diocese on the Portuguese island of São Tomé, which gave Portugal greater political influence there.

• Four hundred men and one witness: Castanhoso in Ethiopia, 1541–15431542
• Kongo's king writes to Lisbon, 1526: no slave trade in these kingdoms1526
• Thirty-five libraries, 300,000 manuscripts: Timbuktu, 1591 to 20161591
• Why did the Benin Bronzes leave Benin City, and are they going home?1600

West Asia

Tabriz had fallen in July 1548 to an Ottoman invasion that Suleyman the Magnificent launched on behalf of Alqas Mirza, a rebel brother of Shah Tahmasp I who had fled to the Ottoman court with sixty followers. Colin Mitchell’s Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on Tahmasp records that Alqas then plundered Hamadan, Qom and Kashan but failed to breach the walls of Isfahan, until a Safavid counteroffensive under another brother, Bahram Mirza, drove the rest of his forces back into Ottoman territory. Safavid victories in the early 1550s, at Van and Bitlis and outside Erzurum, led to the peace treaty of Amasya on May 29, 1555, and two years later Tahmasp moved his capital from Tabriz to Qazvin.

• Why did Suleiman turn back from Vienna in 1529, and what came next?1529
• Chaldiran, August 23, 1514: guns behind gun-carriages, 40,000 horsemen1514
• Twenty sources in the margin: the Piri Reis map of 15131513
• October 21 to November 19, 1604: Julfa emptied, New Julfa built1605

Europe

Charles V summoned Bartolomé de Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 to the chapel of the Colegio San Gregorio in Valladolid, before a junta of theologians, members of the Councils of Castile and of the Indies and royal officials, to settle whether war against the peoples of the Americas could be just. Andrea Daher’s entry in the Digital Encyclopedia of European History records that Sepúlveda spent three hours on the first day arguing from his treatise Democrates alter that the Indians should accept Spanish rule under natural law and would profit from it more than the conquerors, since, in the encyclopedia’s English rendering, “virtue, humanity, and true religion are worth more than gold and silver.” Las Casas held that the Indians were endowed with understanding and capable of receiving Christian doctrine, and that the king should bring them in as subjects by recognizing their natural liberty. Beyond the written refutations, little is known of how the junta worked; the theologian Domingo Soto drew up a summary of the arguments for a final meeting in 1551 and published his own account in 1552.

• Mary Rose, July 19, 1545: the warship Henry VIII watched sink1545
• Basel, June 1543: Vesalius's Fabrica, and the copy found in 20071543
• March 12, 1610: a Venice pamphlet with four new moons around Jupiter1610
• August 10, 1628: the Vasa sank and the inquest blamed no one1628

East Asia

Altan Khan, leader of the Tumed Mongols, spent 1550 pressing the Ming court for trade. A 2021 study of the frontier horse trade by Liping Wang and Geng Tian in Theory and Society, drawing on the Veritable Records of the Ming, finds that Mongol tribute missions had been almost nonexistent between 1488 and 1550, that in 1550 Altan led the right-wing Mongols across the garrisons at Jizhen to demand trade, and that regular horse markets were granted in 1551, soon abolished and restored only in 1571. On the coast, Columbia University’s Asia for Educators describes Japanese pirates trading outside the official tribute system and Portuguese merchants who would win trading rights on the peninsula of Macao only in 1557. In Japan, still divided among warring daimyo, castles grew larger after the Portuguese brought firearms in 1543.

• Sixty-three ships in the Veritable Records: Hansan Island, 15921592
• How did one morning at Sekigahara settle Japan for 250 years?1600
• January 24, 1601: a clock and a world map arrive at the Ming court1601
• Six hundred feet by one hundred and twenty: Dejima, Nagasaki, 16411641

South Asia

Kabul, not Delhi, was the seat of the Mughal emperor Humayun in 1550. Wheeler Thackston’s Encyclopaedia Iranica entry records that Humayun, forced out of India in 1540 by the Sur Afghans, retook Kabul from his half-brother Kamran Mirza in November 1545 with Safavid troops and spent most of the next ten years there, fighting Kamran and another brother, Askari, and holding off Uzbek incursions from Transoxiana. The Iranian artists Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyed Ali joined his court in these years and, in Thackston’s account, brought the Safavid techniques that became the basis of early Mughal painting. Kamran was captured and sent to Mecca in 1553, and Humayun, marching on India in November 1554, entered Delhi on July 23, 1555.

• How did Akbar hold together an empire of many faiths?1575
• Twelve pieces of striped cloth: da Gama's gift to the Zamorin, 14981498
• A coach, virginals and two farmans: Roe before Jahangir, 1616–16181616
• Written by the humble faqir Amanat Khan: the Taj Mahal, 1631–16531632

Central Asia

Bukhara changed hands quickly after 1550. Yuri Bregel’s Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the city records that Abd al-Aziz, son of the Shaibanid khan Ubaydallah, ruled Bukhara until his death in 1550; most sources name Yar Muhammad, a grandson of Shaybani Khan, as his successor, but Pir Muhammad, the ruler of Balkh, soon took the city and then gave it up in 1551. The same year the new supreme khan of the Uzbeks, Nawruz Ahmad, called Baraq Khan, tried and failed to take Herat from the Safavids, one of only two breaks, Bregel notes, in fifty relatively peaceful years on the Khorasan frontier. Farther east, Pavel Lurje’s Iranica entry on Yarkand records that the town had been the capital of the Chaghatayid khans of the Tarim Basin since 1514, and that the Naqshbandi masters of Yarkand were by then beginning to gather power.

• Bukhara, 1558: an Englishman finds the Silk Road trade too small1558
• Merv, December 2, 1510: Shah Ismail's feint against Shaybani Khan1510
• Babur's memoir: from losing Samarkand to taking Delhi, 1497–15261504
• A beast, a deer and a sun on a madrasa: the Sher-Dor, Samarkand1636

The Americas

Pedro de Cieza de León reached Potosí in 1549, four years after an Andean prospector named Diego Huallpa apparently found silver in the Cerro Rico, a volcanic peak rising to 4,782 meters, nearly 16,000 feet. The historian Kris Lane, in a chapter for New World Objects of Knowledge, describes a town still small in those years, where several thousand indigenous furnaces called guairas, fired with llama dung, smelted the rich surface ores through the night on the ridges around it. Cieza’s sketch of the mountain became a woodcut printed in Seville in 1553 and was copied around the world; mercury amalgamation, developed in Mexico’s Pachuca district in the 1550s, reached Potosí on a large scale only after 1572.

• 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
• Twelve books, 2,446 pages: the Florentine Codex Philip II confiscated1577
• Cortés's Second Letter, 1520: four causeways and a market of 60,0001519

Oceania

Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga, sat at the center of a maritime chiefdom whose paramount chief, the Tu’i Tonga, sent junior-ranking chiefs to rule outlying islands and drew fine mats, feathers, sandalwood, barkcloth, canoes and pottery back as tribute. A 2015 isotope study in PLOS ONE by Christina Stantis and colleagues places this Chiefdom Period at about 750 to 150 years before present, roughly AD 1200 to 1800, and dates the burials in two mounds at ‘Atele on Tongatapu, excavated in 1964, to the last 460 years or so. Of the 30 people whose tooth enamel was tested for strontium, only one carried the signature of an immigrant, a result the authors read as a sign that the chiefdom tightly controlled who could stay on its sacred center.

• Taputapuātea, the marae complex at Ōpoa on Ra'iatea1600
• Australia del Espiritu Santo: Quiros at a bay in Vanuatu, 16061606
• Pelsaert's journal, June 4, 1629: the Batavia on Morning Reef1629
• December 19, 1642: four Dutch sailors die in a bay Māori already held1642

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Ṭahmāsp I (Colin Paul Mitchell)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Homāyun Pādešāh (Wheeler M. Thackston)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Kāmrān Mirzā (Sunil Sharma)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Bukhara iii. After the Mongol Invasion (Yuri Bregel)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Bukhara iv. Khanate of Bukhara and Khorasan (Yuri Bregel)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Yarkand (Pavel Lurje)
• Andrea Daher, 'The Valladolid debate,' Digital Encyclopedia of European History (EHNE)
• Kris Lane, 'Potosí,' in Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, eds., New World Objects of Knowledge (University of London Press)
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Source Profile, Leo Africanus
• Royal Museum for Central Africa: The Kongo Kingdom
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Key Points across East Asia, 1450-1750
• Liping Wang and Geng Tian, 'Clients, double clients or brokers? The changing agency of intermediary tribal groups in the Ming empire (1368-1644),' Theory and Society 51 (2022)
• Christina Stantis et al., 'Assessing Human Diet and Movement in the Tongan Maritime Chiefdom Using Isotopic Analyses,' PLOS ONE 10 (2015)