CHRONOLOGY - The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age

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CHRONOLOGY

A.D. 410	Visigoths sack Rome
426	St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei
476	Fall of Rome, end of Western Roman Empire
493	Barbarian Clovis accepts Christ
539	Arthur of Britain slain
800	Charlemagne crowned in St. Peter’s

A.D. 1000	Leif Erikson reaches America
1100	200 years of crusades begin
1123	Future priests must be celibates
1215	Medieval papacy reaches culmination 1218–1224 Genghis Khan extends empire in west
1247	Robin Hood dies
1296	Marco Polo dictates memoirs
1347	First Black Death pandemic
1381	Oxford expels Wyclif

A.D. 1400	First stirrings of Renaissance
1414	Jan Hus betrayed
1433	Prince Henry the Navigator flourishes
1453	Constantinople falls
1458	Gutenberg’s Bible
1475	Birth of Cesare, Cardinal Borgia’s son
1477	Canterbury Tales
1478	Pope Sixtus IV conspires to slay Medicis during High Mass in Florence Cathedral
1480	Birth of Lucrezia, Cesare’s sister
1486	Dias rounds the tip of Africa
1484	Pied Piper murders 130 German children
1485	Le morte d’Arthur
1487	Torquemada named Grand Inquisitor Star Chamber in England
1488	King James III of Scotland murdered
1490	Savonarola’s first Bonfire of the Vanities
1492	Cardinal Borgia buys the papacy, becomes Pope Alexander VI Columbus discovers the Bahamas
1495	Vatican revels with naked prostitutes
	First syphilis outbreak ravages Naples
	1497? Amerigo Vespucci in the New World
1497	Lucrezia Borgia’s triple incest
	The pope’s eldest son, Juan, is murdered
1498	Manutius’s five-volume Aristotle published
	Rise of humanism
	Savonarola burned at the stake
	Lucrezia gives birth to the Infans Romanus

A.D. 1500	Michelangelo: Madonna and Child
1501	Over 1,000 printing shops now in Europe
	Pope acknowledges paternity of his daughter’s child
1502	All books challenging papal authority ordered burned
1503	Julius II: the Warrior Pope
	New universities include Wittenberg and Frankfurt an der Oder
	Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa
1505	Death of Russia’s Ivan the Great
1506	First stone of St. Peter’s Basilica laid
1507	Violent death of Cesare Borgia
	Waldseemüller christens “America”
	Martin Luther ordained a Catholic priest
1508	First English translation of Thomas à Kempis’s De imitatione Christi
1509	Aged 18, Henry VIII becomes England’s king
	Humanist Erasmus: Encomium moriae
	His books encourage critics of Rome
	Beginnings of slave trade in America
	Judenspiegel: an eruption of anti-Semitism
1510	Da Vinci discovers principle of water turbine
	Two speakers of the House of Commons beheaded
	Da Vinci’s Anatomy
1512	Michelangelo completes Sistine Chapel ceiling
1513	Balboa sights the Pacific
	Ponce de Leon reaches Florida
	Machiavelli’s Il principe, inspired by Cesare Borgia
1514	Copernicus postulates the solar system in De hypothesibus … commentariolus
	Heroides Christianae: humanist blasphemy
1515	Raphael named chief architect of St. Peter’s
	England’s Thomas Wolsey made cardinal and lord chancellor
1516	More’s Utopia
	Birth of the future Bloody Mary
	Raphael: The Sistine Madonna
1517	Wolsey hangs 60 May Day rioters
	Strangling of Cardinal Petrucci
	Turks sack Cairo
	Pope Leo X’s jubilee sale of indulgences
	Martin Luther brands Tetzel a fraud
	Luther posts Ninety-five Theses on church door
1518	He defies Cardinal Cajetan
	Titian: The Assumption
1519	Luther vs. Eck
	Erasmus refuses to support Luther
	Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian dies
	Spain’s King Carlos becomes Emperor Charles V
	Magellan leaves to sail around the world
1520	San Julián mutiny against Magellan
	He finds and negotiates Strait of Magellan
	Rome hurls Exsurge Domine at Luther
	He publishes Adel deutscher Nation
	The pope excommunicates him
	Aleandro’s witchhunt of Erasmus begins
	Henry VIII and France’s Francis I meet on Field of the Cloth of Gold
	Erasmus is Europe’s most popular author
	German gunsmith invents the rifle
	Scipione del Ferro solves cubic equation
1521	Diet of Worms; Luther becomes a fugitive
	Germany rises in support of him
	Magellan crosses the Pacific
	He dies in Philippines
1522	The voyage of circumnavigation ends, vindicating Copernicus
	Protestantism sweeps northern Europe
	Archbishop slays Von Sickingen in battle
1524	Peasants’ revolt in Germany
1525	Tyndale’s translation of New Testament
	Jakob Fugger II dies worth 6 million guilders
1527	Second sack of Rome; end of Renaissance
1528	Plague sweeps England
1529	Fall of Wolsey; More made lord chancellor
1533	Henry VIII divorces Catherine, marries pregnant Anne Boleyn; she gives birth to the future Elizabeth I
1534	Rabelais: Gargantua
	Defiant Luther translates Bible into German
1535	Sir Thomas More beheaded for treason
1536	Pietro Aretino’s pornographic Ragionamenti
	Queen Anne Boleyn found guilty of adultery and incest and beheaded
	Tyndale burned at the stake
	Death of Erasmus; his books banned
	Calvin: Christianae religionis institutio

^* Because of the complex method used to determine when Easter would fall each year, Easter tables reckoned the future dates of the celebration. Easter in turn determines the dates of all other movable feasts in the Christian calendar.

^* This is a rough conversion. Providing modern equivalents of original currencies is extremely difficult. The sort of basic consumption items for which we have figures—e.g., grain, oil, wine—have tended to grow absolutely less expensive with the productivity of modern agriculture. Moreover, there were at least twenty distinct ducats afloat in the sixteenth century, each with a different value, and a similar number of florins, guilders, livres, pounds, et cetera. The florin and the ducat with the largest circulation had the same value. For the purpose of this narrative, that value may be considered analogous to twenty-five dollars today.

^* The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as it was called after the mid-1400s, was also the First Reich, a cultural nation (Kulturvolk) of some three hundred different sovereign states. After Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Otto von Bismarck created the Second Reich, a nation-state (Staatsvolk) over which the Hohenzollerns reigned until its defeat in 1918. The Third Reich (1933–1945) was, of course, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

^* Thais was an Athenian hetaira (courtesan) who, in the fourth century B.C., became Alexander the Great’s mistress. She is said to have persuaded him to burn down the Achaemenian capital of Persepolis during a drunken revel. Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast is based on the incident, which is probably apocryphal.

^* In a letter to Duke George of Saxony. Here, for the first time, he gave his movement the name by which history knows it.

^* Most German universities remained loyal to the Church. Two exceptions were Erfurt, where Luther had been a student, and Wittenberg, where he taught.

^* Appearing this early, the word “Protestant” is slightly anachronistic. It would not enter the language for another eight years. In 1529 at a Speyer Reichstag, a Catholic bloc voted to rescind toleration of Lutheranism, which had been granted three years earlier. The protesting minority were called Protestants. The term is introduced here because even at the outset of the Reformation not all Protestants were Lutherans.

^* In the 1560s the Council of Trent, after rescinding many of the bans, allowed dissemination of most of his works in expurgated editions.

^* “Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” and “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

^* He was also the last non-Italian elected pope until John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla of Poland) in 1978.

^* “Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.”

^* Who became Henry’s third wife and deserves to be remembered as one of the few genuine ladies of the age. The sister of the duke of Somerset, Jane spurned the king’s advances as long as his queen lived. She asked him never to speak to her when they were alone and returned his letters and gifts unopened. Her first act as queen was to reconcile Henry and Catherine’s daughter.

^* Or Aranda de Duero, also in Castile, or Barcelona, in Aragón. Since the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, uniting Castile and Aragón, the court had become a traveling circus. Madrid did not become the capital of Spain until 1561.

^* Vespucci claimed that he had sailed to fifty degrees south latitude in 1502, but he has never been taken seriously.

^* He christened the islands San Lázaro. Twenty years later they were renamed for Philip II, “the most Catholic of kings.”

^* Comparable distances: Columbus’s first crossing, 3,900 miles; Liverpool to New York, 3,576 miles; San Francisco to Yokohama, 5,221 miles.

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