The Renaissance in Ten Events
9 min read
The Renaissance is remembered for art, but the century and a half from about 1500 to 1650 was far more than beautiful ceilings. It was the age that shattered the unity of Western Christianity, circled the globe for the first time, toppled two great American empires, and set the sun and Earth in their proper places. These were the decades in which the medieval world became recognizably modern.
Saeculum holds hundreds of events from the Renaissance era. This guide picks ten of the highest-significance turning points and lays them out in order, so you can see how art, faith, empire, and science advanced together in a single crowded stretch of history.
Faith and art at the century's dawn
The era opened with a new balance of power in the Islamic east and a burst of artistic confidence in the west. In Persia, Ismail was crowned Shah in 1501 and made Twelver Shia Islam the state religion, founding the Safavid dynasty and reshaping the religious map of the Middle East. In Rome, Michelangelo unveiled the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1512 — a high-water mark of Renaissance art.
But the event that would define the century came in 1517, when Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses challenged the sale of indulgences and lit the fuse of the Reformation. Within four years Luther stood before the Diet of Worms in 1521 and refused to recant, splitting Western Christianity permanently.
The founding of the Safavid dynasty and the establishment of Shia Islam as Persia's state religion.
Michelangelo's fresco, one of the defining achievements of Renaissance art.
The spark of the Protestant Reformation, which permanently split Western Christianity.
The globe encircled
While Europe divided over faith, its ships were uniting the planet. Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Seville in 1519 on a voyage that would prove the world could be circled; though Magellan died in the Philippines, Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the first circumnavigation in 1522, returning with a single battered ship and definitive proof of a round, connected world.
The voyage transformed how Europeans understood the size and shape of the Earth, and it opened the age of global empires that would follow.
The start of the first voyage to circle the globe, launched in search of a western route to the spice islands.
The first ship to sail all the way around the world returns, confirming the globe's shape and scale.
The fall of the American empires
The same decades saw two of the largest states in the Americas destroyed by small Spanish expeditions exploiting local rivalries, disease, and gunpowder. Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlán in 1519, and the great Aztec capital fell in 1521. A decade later, Francisco Pizarro ambushed the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1532, beginning the collapse of the Inca Empire.
These conquests opened vast flows of silver and reoriented the world economy toward the Atlantic, while devastating the peoples of the Americas through war and, above all, imported disease.
The fall of the Aztec capital to Cortés and his indigenous allies, ending the Aztec Empire.
The capture of the Inca emperor, beginning the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.
Empire in India and a new cosmos
In South Asia, Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 founded the Mughal Empire, which would rule much of the subcontinent for centuries and produce some of its most famous architecture. And in 1543, Copernicus published De Revolutionibus, arguing that the Earth orbits the Sun — a quiet book that would eventually overturn the entire medieval picture of the cosmos and help launch the Scientific Revolution.
Between them, these two events point forward: one to the great early-modern empires, the other to the science that would reshape how humanity understood its place in the universe.
The founding of the Mughal Empire in India.
The heliocentric model that would ultimately overturn the medieval cosmos and help launch modern astronomy.
How to read the era as a whole
The ten events show four great forces moving at once: the Reformation splitting European faith, the first circumnavigation uniting the globe, the conquest of the Americas remaking the world economy, and the birth of modern science and the early-modern empires. This is why the Renaissance feels like a threshold — it is the moment the medieval world tips into the modern one.
To see what these upheavals grew out of, read the Late Middle Ages; to see where they led, follow the timeline into the Enlightenment and its age of reason and revolution.
Frequently asked
What was the most important event of the Renaissance era?
The Protestant Reformation, beginning with Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, had the deepest and longest-lasting consequences, permanently splitting Western Christianity and reshaping European politics for centuries. The first circumnavigation of the globe (1519 to 1522) is the era's most sweeping single achievement.
Was the Renaissance only about art?
No. Art was one strand among several. The same period saw the Reformation, the first voyage around the world, the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, the founding of the Mughal Empire, and the birth of modern astronomy with Copernicus. It was a threshold between the medieval and modern worlds.
How did small Spanish forces conquer the Aztec and Inca empires?
Through a combination of local alliances with peoples resentful of imperial rule, steel and gunpowder weapons, and — most devastating of all — European diseases to which the Americas had no immunity. The fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521 and the capture of Atahualpa in 1532 opened the Americas to Spanish empire.
Why does the Renaissance matter for understanding the modern world?
Because so many modern features begin here: a religiously divided West, a globally connected economy, the great early-modern empires, and the scientific method. Reading the era shows how recent and how interconnected these foundations really are.