The 1500s in Ten Events

The first great rupture of the century was not European. In 1501 a teenage mystic named Ismail, heir to a Sufi brotherhood, routed the Aq Qoyunlu and rode into Tabriz to declare himself Shah of Iran. He imposed Twelver Shiism as the state religion on pain of death, breaking centuries of Sunni rule and drawing a theological line down the middle of the Islamic world that has never been erased. Thirteen years later, at Chaldiran in 1514, Ottoman artillery and Janissary arquebuses tore his red-capped Qizilbash cavalry apart and fixed that frontier in gunpowder.

Europe's own rupture came in 1517, when an obscure friar at Wittenberg posted ninety-five Latin propositions attacking the sale of indulgences. Luther had written them for scholarly debate; printers translated and circulated them without his permission, and within a decade Western Christianity had cracked in two. The Reformation is the clearest early demonstration of what the printing press had actually done: it made an argument impossible to contain.

In 1519 two Spanish expeditions set out that would redraw the map. Hernan Cortes walked along a causeway into Tenochtitlan with five hundred Spaniards, sixteen horses, and thousands of Tlaxcalan allies, and was received by Moctezuma in a city larger than any in Europe. In the same year Ferdinand Magellan left Seville with five ships to look for a western passage to the Spice Islands.

Both ventures ended in 1521 and 1522, and both ended the world as it had been. After a ninety-three-day siege in which smallpox did as much killing as gunpowder, Tenochtitlan fell block by block; Cortes founded Mexico City on the rubble. In the same year Luther refused to recant at the Diet of Worms. Then in 1522 a single battered ship, the Victoria, came home to Sanlucar under Juan Sebastian Elcano with eighteen survivors, a cargo of cloves, and a logbook that was a day out of step with the calendar on shore. The Earth had been sailed around once, and the ocean had turned out to be far larger than anyone had guessed.

The same technology that decided Chaldiran decided northern India. In 1526, on the plain of Panipat, the Timurid exile Babur faced Ibrahim Lodi with twelve thousand men and twenty small cannon against a far larger army with war elephants. The artillery panicked the elephants into trampling their own lines, and by sundown Babur held Delhi and had founded the Mughal Empire. Thirty years later his grandson Akbar came to the throne as a boy of thirteen and turned that conquest into a durable state. The Ottomans were doing the same on the other side of Asia, where Suleiman took the throne in 1520 and reigned for forty-six years.

Then, in 1543, a dying Polish canon received the printed copy of a book he had sat on for decades. De Revolutionibus argued that the Earth was a planet moving around the Sun. Copernicus died the same day, probably without understanding what he had started. Nothing changed immediately; the argument he opened would not be settled until Galileo's telescope and Newton's mathematics in the century that followed.

In 1545 two things began that would define the century's second half. In the Andes, a vein of silver was found on Cerro Rico, and the Spanish laid out the boomtown of Potosi at fourteen thousand feet. It would consume the lives of thousands of conscripted indigenous laborers and pump enormous quantities of silver toward Ming China, inflating prices across Eurasia and financing Spain's wars. In the Alps, meanwhile, bishops opened the Council of Trent, which over eighteen years reaffirmed Catholic doctrine, reformed clerical abuse, and gave the Counter-Reformation its spine.

That money and that conviction were spent on fleets. At Lepanto in 1571, a Holy League force under Don Juan of Austria destroyed the Ottoman navy in the largest galley battle ever fought - Cervantes was among the wounded - and cracked the myth of Ottoman invincibility at sea. Seventeen years later Philip II sent one hundred and thirty ships into the English Channel to escort an invasion army from Flanders; English guns, fireships, and bad weather ensured the rendezvous never happened. The century closed with Hideyoshi's armies invading Korea in 1592 and Henry IV buying France an uneasy religious peace with the Edict of Nantes in 1598.

Read in order, the ten events divide neatly into two arguments. One is about authority: who defines faith, and what happens when that question is settled by force. Persia, Germany, Trent, Lepanto, and the Armada all belong to it. The other is about connection: ocean routes, conquest, and the silver that made a genuinely global economy possible for the first time. Tenochtitlan, the Victoria, Panipat, and Potosi belong to that one.

The two arguments were not separate. Spanish silver paid for Catholic armies. Print carried both Luther and the news of the Americas. If you want to see where these threads came from, read the 1400s, when the presses and the caravels were built; to see where they lead, read the 1600s, when state sovereignty, chartered companies, and a mathematical universe finally arrive.