1415
Jan Hus Burned at the Stake
Promised safe conduct by Sigismund, the Czech reformer was tried, condemned, and led in a paper miter painted with devils to a field outside Constance. He sang psalms as the flames took him. His ashes were thrown in the Rhine. Bohemia, when the news arrived, declared war. His martyrdom ignited the Hussite Wars, revolutionary conflicts that anticipated the Protestant Reformation by a full century.
Portugal Captures Ceuta
Prince Henry, later called the Navigator, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with his father King Joao and stormed the Moroccan port in a single day. The conquest was strategically useless but psychologically enormous: Portugal had crossed into Africa. The age of European overseas empire started here. Prince Henry developed an obsessive curiosity about what lay beyond Morocco, driving Portuguese exploration for fifty years.
Ming Currency Collapse
The Yongle Emperor's paper money, backed by nothing but imperial authority, inflated to uselessness after years of mistrust and overprinting. The Ming economy shifted irreversibly to silver, setting up the great sixteenth-century trade that would drain Potosi's Peruvian silver mines through Manila into Chinese treasury vaults. Merchants demanded copper coins or unminted silver, creating an informal standard that made China the world's largest sink for precious metals.
Battle of Agincourt
Henry V's starving, dysentery-ridden army met the flower of French chivalry in a ploughed field between two woods. English longbowmen sank knee-deep in mud and shot the French cavalry to pieces from two hundred yards. By afternoon the mud was a slurry of blood and horseflesh. France lost a generation.
Frederick of Hohenzollern Made Margrave of Brandenburg
Sigismund transferred the Brandenburg electorate to the Nuremberg burgrave Frederick. The Hohenzollern dynasty's six-century occupation of that frontier march began quietly, with a paper transfer and a borrowed title. Five hundred years later his descendants would be Kaisers; eleven centuries later their palaces would be museums. The march itself was impoverished, and no one predicted this transfer would seed the dynasty that eventually unified Germany.
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Frequently asked
What happened in the year 1415?
Saeculum lists 5 curated events from 1415. The most significant is Jan Hus Burned at the Stake: Promised safe conduct by Sigismund, the Czech reformer was tried, condemned, and led in a paper miter painted with devils to a field outside Constance.
What era was 1415 part of?
1415 falls within the Late Middle Ages (1301-1500). Plague, papal schism, and the seeds of nation-states.
Which regions saw notable events in 1415?
The curated events from 1415 span Europe, Africa and East Asia.