The 1400s in Ten Events
9 min read
The fifteenth century is the hinge on which the medieval world swings into the modern one. It opens with enormous treasure junks sailing out of China, and it closes with small European caravels reaching India and the Americas. In between, a printing press in a German workshop begins to copy words faster than any scribe, and the thousand-year-old capital of Eastern Rome finally falls to Ottoman cannon.
Saeculum holds hundreds of events from the 1400s. This guide gathers ten of the highest-significance turning points and arranges them in order, so you can watch the century's two great themes — the closing of the old order and the opening of the oceans — unfold side by side.
East and West at the century's dawn
The 1400s began not in Europe but on the water off the coast of China. In 1405 the admiral Zheng He led out the first of his treasure voyages — sixty-three nine-masted junks carrying some twenty-seven thousand men — across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa. For a generation, Ming China projected power and diplomacy across half the globe before abruptly turning inward.
In Europe the century opened with war. At Agincourt in 1415, an exhausted, outnumbered English army under Henry V destroyed the French nobility with massed longbows and mud, reviving the Hundred Years' War. That same year, Portugal captured Ceuta in North Africa — a small foothold that would grow into the launchpad for a century of Atlantic exploration. And in 1431, the war produced its most haunting figure: Joan of Arc, the teenage peasant who had rallied France, was burned at the stake in Rouen.
Ming China launches the first of seven vast maritime expeditions, projecting power across the Indian Ocean decades before Europe's ocean age.
Henry V's longbowmen annihilate the French nobility; the same year, Portugal takes Ceuta and begins its push down the African coast.
The peasant girl who turned the tide of the Hundred Years' War is executed for heresy — and later canonized as a saint of France.
The press and the fall of an empire
Around 1440, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg was experimenting in Strasbourg with movable metal type, oil-based ink, and a modified wine press. The combination would let a single workshop produce in weeks what had taken monasteries years, and it began the slow explosion of cheap printed information that reshaped religion, science, and politics.
Then came the event that closed an age. In 1453, after a fifty-three-day siege, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II breached the walls of Constantinople with enormous bronze cannon. The last emperor died fighting, and the eleven-hundred-year Roman Empire in the East came to an end. In the same year, far to the west, the Battle of Castillon ended the Hundred Years' War, expelling the English from France. Two years later, Gutenberg's forty-two-line Bible appeared — and in England the dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses erupted at St Albans.
In Strasbourg, the pieces of the printing press come together — a technology that would make books cheap and ideas uncontainable.
Mehmed II's cannon end the Byzantine Empire; the same year, Castillon ends the Hundred Years' War in France.
The first major book from movable type in Europe appears, as England slides into the Wars of the Roses.
Faith, fear, and the Inquisition
The same decades that produced the printing press also produced new instruments of control. In 1478, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, obtained papal permission to establish the Spanish Inquisition, a tribunal aimed first at converts from Judaism and Islam suspected of secretly keeping their old faith. It would become one of the era's most notorious institutions, a reminder that the century of Botticelli and the printed book was also a century of suspicion and enforced orthodoxy.
That tension runs through the whole century. Florence produced some of the most beautiful paintings in European history — Botticelli was at work in these very years — while Spain built a machinery of persecution that would shadow the Mediterranean for centuries.
Ferdinand and Isabella create a tribunal to police the faith of converts — an institution that would endure into the nineteenth century.
The ocean opens
The century's last decade changed the shape of the world. In 1492 the Catholic Monarchs completed the Reconquista by taking Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain; issued the Alhambra Decree expelling the country's Jews; and dispatched a Genoese navigator named Christopher Columbus westward across the Atlantic. When he made landfall on a Bahamian island that October, he opened a permanent link between the hemispheres — and began the collision of peoples that would define the coming centuries.
The rush to claim the new discoveries was immediate. In 1494 Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, drawing a line down the Atlantic and dividing the unexplored world between them. And in 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded Africa and reached Calicut in India, at last giving Europe the direct sea route to Asian spices it had sought for a hundred years. The medieval search for the edges of the map was over; the age of global empires had begun.
Spain completes the Reconquista, expels its Jews by the Alhambra Decree, and sends Columbus across the Atlantic — three world-changing events in a single year.
Spain and Portugal draw a line across the Atlantic, dividing the unexplored world between them before most of it had been seen.
The first direct sea route from Europe to India opens, rewiring global trade and beginning Portugal's Indian Ocean empire.
How to read the century as a whole
Laid end to end, the ten events tell one story of an old world ending and a new one beginning. The fall of Constantinople and the close of the Hundred Years' War buried the medieval order; the printing press, the Atlantic crossings, and the sea route to India built the early modern one. Even the century's darker turns — the Inquisition, the expulsions of 1492 — belong to that same shift toward centralized states reaching for control over faith and trade.
To see where these threads came from, read the crises of the 1300s; to see where they led, follow the timeline into the Renaissance, when print, empire, and reformation remade Europe entirely. The 1400s are the century in which the modern world first becomes visible.
Frequently asked
What was the most important event of the 1400s?
Two events compete. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire, while Columbus's Atlantic crossing in 1492 opened a permanent link between the hemispheres. Gutenberg's press, developed around 1440, arguably had the deepest long-term impact of all, by making information cheap and hard to control.
Why did Constantinople fall in 1453?
The Byzantine capital had been shrinking for centuries and was nearly surrounded by Ottoman territory. In 1453 the young sultan Mehmed II besieged it with a large army and enormous cannon that could batter the ancient walls. After fifty-three days the city fell, ending the eastern Roman Empire and making the Ottomans the dominant Mediterranean power.
What was happening outside Europe in the 1400s?
Ming China launched Zheng He's treasure voyages across the Indian Ocean from 1405, projecting power far beyond anything Europe could match, before turning inward. The Ottomans expanded across the Balkans and Anatolia, and in West Africa the Songhai empire rose along the trans-Saharan trade routes.
How did the fifteenth century change the world?
It ended the medieval order and opened the age of global connection. The press transformed how knowledge spread, the fall of Constantinople redrew the political map, and the voyages of Columbus and da Gama linked continents that had developed in near-total isolation.