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Period: 1095 to 1291
Crusades are Fought
The crusades were a series of wars called by popes with the promise of indulgences for those who fought in them. Crusades were characterized by the taking of vows and the granting of indulgences to those who participated. Like going on pilgrimage, crusading was an act of Christian love and piety. It marked a break in earlier Christian medieval conceptions of warfare. Crusades combined the ideas of: a) Holy War and b) and Pilgrimage to produce the concept of "indulgence". -
1300
Renaissance Beginning
The Renaissance witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents, the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce, and the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing, the mariner’s compass, and gunpowder. To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of Classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation. -
1337
100 Year War Beginning
The Hundred Years' War was a long struggle between England and France over succession to the French throne. It lasted from 1337 to 1453, so it might more accurately be called the "116 Years' War." The war starts off with several stunning successes on Britain's part, and the English forces dominate France for decades. -
1347
Black Death Begins in Europe
This was a widespread epidemic of the Bubonic Plague that passed from Asia and through Europe in the mid fourteenth century. The first signs of the Black Plague in Europe were present around the fall of 1347. In the span of three years, the Black Death killed one third of all the people in Europe. -
May 30, 1431
Joan of the Arc Burned at the Stake
According to historians, Joan of Arc was 19 when she was burnt at the stake in Rouen by the English on 30 May, 1431. She died of smoke inhalation. The Cardinal of Winchester is recorded as having ordered her to be burnt a second time. Her organs still survived this fire, so a third burning was ordered to destroy the body completely. Her cinders and debris were to be thrown into the Seine. -
May 12, 1444
Johannes Gutenburg Invents Printing Press
Johannes Gutenberg was born circa 1395, in Mainz, Germany. He started experimenting with printing by 1438. In 1450 Gutenberg obtained backing from the financier, Johann Fust, whose impatience and other factors led to Gutenberg's loss of his establishment to Fust several years later. Gutenberg's masterpiece, and the first book ever printed in Europe from movable type, is the “Forty-Two-Line” Bible, completed no later than 1455. Gutenberg died in Mainz in 1468. -
May 29, 1453
Fall of Constantinople
Fall of Constantinople, (29 May 1453). After ten centuries of wars, defeats, and victories, the Byzantine Empire came to an end when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in May 1453. The city’s fall sent shock waves throughout Christendom. It is widely quoted as the event that marked the end of the European Middle Ages. -
Nov 1, 1478
Start of the Spanish Inquisition
Spanish Inquisition, (1478–1834), judicial institution ostensibly established to combat heresy in Spain. In practice, the Spanish Inquisition served to consolidate power in the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom, but it achieved that end through infamously brutal methods. -
Period: 1492 to 1492
The Columbian Exchange
The Columbian Exchange was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Americas and the Old World in the 15th and 16th centuries, related to European colonization and trade after Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage. -
Period: 1492 to 1492
Columbian Exchange
There you pretty much have the essence of the Columbian Exchange. A phrase coined by historian Alfred Crosby, the "Columbian Exchange" describes the interchange of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old World and the Americas following Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean in 1492. -
Aug 1, 1498
Christopher Columbus Lands in the New World
Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451. Little is known of his early life, but he worked as a seaman and then a sailing entrepreneur. He became obsessed with the possibility of pioneering a western sea route to Cathay (China), India, and the fabled gold and spice islands of Asia. At the time, Europeans knew no direct sea route to southern Asia, and the route via Egypt and the Red Sea was closed to Europeans by the Ottoman Empire, as were many land routes. -
Period: 1502 to
Slave Trade
Timeline of Atlantic Slave Trade. At least 10 million Africans were enslaved and transported to Europe and the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries as part of the Atlantic slave trade. The brutal trade was spurred by a strong demand for labor on plantations in the Americas. -
1507
Mona Lisa Completed
Mona Lisa, oil painting on a poplar wood panel by the Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer Leonardo da Vinci, probably the world’s most-famous painting. It was painted sometime between 1503 and 1519, and it now hangs in the Louvre, in Paris, where it remains an object of pilgrimage in the 21st century. The poplar panel shows evidence of warping and was stabilized in 1951 with the addition of an oak frame and in 1970 with four vertical braces. -
1508
Michaelangelo begins painting Sistene chapel
The Sistine Chapel is one of the most famous painted interior spaces in the world, and all of this fame comes from the breathtaking painting of its ceiling from about 1508-1512. The chapel was built in 1479. The location of the building is very close to St. Peter’s Basilica and the Belvedere Courtyard in the Vatican. One of the functions of the space was to serve as the gathering place for cardinals of the Catholic Church to gather in order to elect a new pope. -
Period: 1509 to 1547
King Henry VIII Reign
Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. Henry was the second Tudor monarch, succeeding his father, Henry VII. ... Besides asserting the sovereign's supremacy over the Church of England, he greatly expanded royal power during his reign. -
Period: Apr 21, 1509 to Jan 28, 1547
King Henry VIII Reign
Henry Tudor, son of Henry VII of England and Elizabeth York, was born at the royal residence, Greenwich Palace, on June 28, 1491. Following the death of his father, he became Henry VIII, king of England. He married six times, beheaded two of his wives and was the main instigator of the English Reformation. His only surviving son, Edward VI, succeeded him after his death on January 28, 1547. -
1513
"The Prince"
Niccolo Machiavelli was born in Florence on May 3, 1469 as the son of a legal official. After receiving an education that allowed him to cultivate a good grasp of the Latin and Italian classics he entered government service as a clerk in 1494. This was at a time of a downfall of the power of the Medici family which had ruled in Florence for some sixty years previously. -
1513
"The Prince"
The Prince (Italian: Il Principe [il ˈprintʃipe]) is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (About Principalities). -
Period: 1517 to
Counter Reformation
Counter-Reformation, also called Catholic Reformation, or Catholic Revival, in the history of Christianity, the Roman Catholic efforts directed in the 16th and early 17th centuries both against the Protestant Reformation and toward internal renewal; the Counter-Reformation took place during roughly the same period as the Protestant Reformation, actually (according to some sources) beginning shortly before Martin Luther’s act of nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the church door (1517). -
Oct 31, 1517
Martin Luther Posts 95 Theses
Born in Eisleben, Germany, in 1483, Martin Luther went on to become one of Western history’s most significant figures. Luther spent his early years in anonymity as a monk and scholar. But in 1517 Luther penned a document attacking the Catholic Church’s corrupt practice of selling “indulgences” to absolve sin. His “95 Theses,” which that the Bible is the central religious authority and that humans reach salvation only by their faith and not by their deeds was to spark the Protestant Reformation. -
Aug 13, 1521
Cortez Conquers the Aztecs
The Spanish campaign declared victorious on August 13, 1521, when a coalition army of Spanish forces and native Tlaxcalan warriors led by Hernán Cortés and Xicotencatl the Younger captured the emperor Cuauhtemoc and Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. -
Period: 1533 to 1547
Ivan the Terrible's Reign
Ivan the Terrible. ... info), Ivan Grozny; a better translation into modern English would be Ivan the Formidable), was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547, then "Tsar of All the Russias" until his death in 1584. The last title was used by all his successors. -
Period: Sep 7, 1533 to
Queen Elizabeth's Reign
Queen Elizabeth I was born on the September 7, 1533 in Greenwich England. She was a princess but declared illegitimate through political machinations. She eventually claimed the throne at the age of 25 and held it for 44 years, keeping England in the ascendant through wars, and political and religious turmoil. She died in 1603. -
Period: 1545 to 1545
Counter Reformation
Counter-Reformation, also called Catholic Reformation, or Catholic Revival, in the history of Christianity, the Roman Catholic efforts directed in the 16th and early 17th centuries both against the Protestant Reformation and toward internal renewal; the Counter-Reformation took place during roughly the same period as the Protestant Reformation, actually beginning shortly before Martin Luther’s act of nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the church door (1517). -
1555
Peace of Augsburg
Peace of Augsburg, 1555, temporary settlement within the Holy Roman Empire of the religious conflict arising from the Reformation. Each prince was to determine whether Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism was to prevail in his lands (cuius regio, eius religio). -
Spanish Armada
Spanish Armada, also called Armada or Invincible Armada, Spanish Armada Española or Armada Invencible, the great fleet sent by King Philip II of Spain in 1588 to invade England in conjunction with a Spanish army from Flanders. England’s attempts to repel this fleet involved the first naval battles to be fought entirely with heavy guns, and the failure of Spain’s enterprise saved England and the Netherlands from possible absorption into the Spanish empire. -
Edict of Nantes
The Edict of Nantes (French: édit de Nantes), signed in April 1598 by King Henry IV of France, granted the Calvinist Protestants of France (also known as Huguenots) substantial rights in the nation, which was still considered essentially Catholic at the time. -
Period: to
Era of the Samurai
Samurai were supposed to lead their lives according to the ethic code of bushido ("the way of the warrior"). Strongly Confucian in nature, bushido stressed concepts such as loyalty to one's master, self discipline and respectful, ethical behavior. Many samurai were also drawn to the teachings and practices of Zen Buddhism. -
William Shakespeare's Death
William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, his 52nd birthday. In truth, the exact date of Shakespeare’s death is not known, but assumed from a record of his burial two days later, 25 April 1616, at Holy Trinity Church. When Shakespeare retired from London around 1610, he spent the remainder of his life in Stratford Upon Avon’s largest house – New House – which he had purchased as a family home in 1597. -
Petition of Rights
Petition of Right, (1628) petition sent by the English Parliament to King Charles I complaining of a series of breaches of law. The petition sought recognition of four principles: no taxation without the consent of Parliament, no imprisonment without cause, no quartering of soldiers on subjects, and no martial law in peacetime. To continue receiving subsidies for his policies, Charles was compelled to accept the petition, but he later ignored its principles. -
King Charles I Executed
Charles ascended to the English throne in 1625 following the death of his father. In the first year of his reign, Charles offended his Protestant subjects by marrying Henrietta Maria. He later responded to political opposition to his rule by dissolving Parliament on several occasions and in 1629 decided to rule entirely without Parliament. In 1642, the bitter struggle between king and Parliament for supremacy led to the outbreak of the first English civil war. -
Lord George Macartney Expelled
He was an Irishman descended from an old Scottish family, the Macartneys of Auchinleck, who had settled in 1649 at Lissanoure, in Loughguile, Ballymoney, County Antrim, Ireland, where he was born. He was the only son of George Macartney and Elizabeth Winder. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1759, he became a student of the Temple, London. Through Stephen Fox, elder brother of Charles James Fox, he was taken up by Lord Holland. -
Period: to
Opium Wars
Two armed conflicts in China between the forces of Western countries and of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1911/12. The first Opium War was fought between China and Britain, and the second Opium War was fought by Britain and France against China. In each case the foreign powers were victorious and gained commercial privileges and legal and territorial concessions in China.
