Early Modern

After capturing Tabriz in 1501, the teenage Safavid leader Ismail I took the title Shah and declared Twelver Shia Islam the official and compulsory faith of his new Iranian state.

In 1510 the Portuguese governor Afonso de Albuquerque seized Goa from the Sultanate of Bijapur, occupying the city in February, losing it in May, and finally storming it in November.

In August 1511 the Portuguese governor of India, Afonso de Albuquerque, stormed and captured the Sultanate of Malacca, the principal entrepôt commanding the strait through which trade between China, the Indian Ocean and the Spice Islands…

On 23 August 1514 the Ottoman Sultan Selim I crushed the Safavid army of Shah Ismail I at Chaldiran in northwestern Iran.

In 1516 the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus published the Novum Instrumentum, the first printed Greek New Testament, presenting the Greek text alongside his own revised Latin translation and a body of scholarly notes, the Annotationes.

Between 1516 and 1517 Sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, first at Marj Dabiq near Aleppo (August 1516) and decisively at Ridaniya outside Cairo (January 1517), capturing the city later that month.

On 31 October 1517 the Augustinian friar and theology professor Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses at Wittenberg, attacking the sale of indulgences and questioning papal authority over salvation.

On 13 August 1521 the Mexica (Aztec) capital Tenochtitlan fell to a coalition of Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés and tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, above all the Tlaxcalans.

Between 1519 and 1522 a Spanish expedition achieved the first circumnavigation of the globe.

Sultan Suleiman I ruled from 1520 to 1566, presiding over the political, military and cultural zenith of the Ottoman Empire. Known in the West as the Magnificent, his own subjects called him Kanuni, the Lawgiver.

Summoned before the imperial Diet of Worms, convened by Emperor Charles V and held from January to May 1521, Martin Luther was ordered to recant his writings.

Between 1524 and 1525 a vast popular uprising swept through German-speaking central Europe, the largest mass revolt before the French Revolution of 1789.

On 29 August 1526 Suleiman the Magnificent destroyed the army of King Louis II of Hungary at Mohács.

On 21 April 1526 Babur, a Timurid prince from Central Asia, defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi at Panipat in northern India.

Mvemba a Nzinga, baptised Afonso I, ruled the central African Kingdom of Kongo from 1509 to 1542 and made it a Christian, literate state in correspondence with Lisbon and Rome.

From late September to mid-October 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent besieged Vienna, the Habsburg capital, with an army of over 100,000. The roughly 21,000 defenders under Niklas Graf Salm held the city behind hastily strengthened walls.

On 16 November 1532 a band of fewer than two hundred Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro ambushed and captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca, slaughtering thousands of his unarmed retinue.

In 1534 the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring King Henry VIII to be the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England and severing the kingdom's ecclesiastical ties with Rome.

In March 1536 the French reformer John Calvin published in Basel the first edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first systematic theological summary of the reform movement.

The Catholic Church mounted a sustained response to the Reformation through institutional renewal and doctrinal clarification.

Spanish colonisation rested heavily on the encomienda, a grant entitling a colonist to extract labour and tribute from indigenous communities in return for nominal protection and religious instruction, a system that in practice often…

In 1543, as he lay dying, the Polish canon and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) at Nuremberg.

In 1543 the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius, then only 28 and teaching at Padua, published De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books).

In 1545 rich silver veins were found at Cerro Rico, the "rich hill" above what became the city of Potosí in present-day Bolivia, traditionally credited to an Indigenous prospector named Diego Huallpa.

The cocoliztli epidemic of 1545–1548 was a catastrophic outbreak of disease that swept through the Indigenous populations of New Spain, emerging in the central and southern Mexican Highlands near present-day Puebla and spreading from…

On 25 September 1555 the imperial Diet at Augsburg proclaimed a religious settlement that ended decades of conflict between Emperor Charles V and the Lutheran princes of the Holy Roman Empire.

During his long reign (1556–1605) the Mughal emperor Akbar built one of the most powerful and inclusive states of the early modern world.

On 23 January 1556, a catastrophic earthquake of an estimated magnitude around 8.0 struck Huaxian (modern Huazhou) in the Wei River Valley of Shaanxi province during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor of the Ming dynasty, earning it the name…

Between roughly 1560 and 1630 the European witch hunts entered their most lethal phase, the 'Great Hunt', during which about 60 percent of all prosecutions occurred and more than 40,000 people, the great majority women, were executed.

In 1564 the Mughal emperor Akbar abolished the jizya, the poll tax traditionally levied on non-Muslim subjects, signalling a deliberate state policy of religious accommodation across his vast and diverse empire.

On 23 January 1565 a coalition of the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Golconda decisively defeated the army of the Vijayanagara Empire at Talikota (Rakshasi-Tangadi) in northern Karnataka.

In 1565 the Augustinian friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta discovered the tornaviaje, the eastward return route from the Philippines to Mexico, by sailing far north to catch the prevailing westerlies.

By 1565 King Bayinnaung of the Toungoo dynasty had assembled the largest empire ever seen in mainland Southeast Asia, the culmination of a decade and a half of relentless military expansion from his base at Pegu (Bago).

The Great Wall that survives as the iconic image of China is overwhelmingly a Ming-dynasty achievement, built and rebuilt in stone and brick across the later sixteenth century to defend the northern frontier against Mongol raids.

On 7 October 1571 a fleet of the Holy League, a Catholic coalition assembled by Pope Pius V and led by Spain and Venice under Don Juan of Austria, defeated the Ottoman navy in the Gulf of Patras off western Greece.

On 24 June 1571 the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi formally founded the city of Manila on the ruins of the Tagalog polity of Maynila, designating it the capital of the Spanish East Indies.

Beginning at dawn on 24 August 1572 in Paris, Catholic mobs and royal forces slaughtered French Protestants (Huguenots) who had gathered for the wedding of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to Margaret of Valois.

Completed in 1577, the Istanbul observatory of the Ottoman chief astronomer Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf was one of the largest astronomical observatories of the pre-modern world, conceived to rival Ulugh Beg's earlier Samarkand…

Around 1581 the powerful grand secretary Zhang Juzheng promulgated the Single Whip Law (yitiaobian fa) across the Ming empire, consolidating a tangle of separate land taxes and labour-service obligations into a single payment levied in…

In 1588 King Philip II of Spain dispatched a great fleet, the Armada, to escort an invasion army from Flanders and overthrow the Protestant Elizabeth I of England, whose support for the Dutch rebels and Protestant cause had inflamed…

Isfahan became the Safavid capital in 1598, when Shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629) moved his seat of power there from Qazvin, transforming the central Iranian city into one of the most splendid in the world.

On 13 March 1591 a Moroccan expeditionary force under Judar Pasha, dispatched across the Sahara by the Saadi sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, crushed the army of Askia Ishaq II at Tondibi near Gao.

In May 1592 Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched roughly 158,000 troops against Joseon Korea, intending to march through the peninsula to conquer Ming China.

On 13 April 1598 King Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, granting French Protestants (Huguenots) substantial rights of conscience and worship and bringing the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) to a close.

On 31 December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I chartered the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, granting a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope.

Between 1600 and 1611 the institutional core of modern finance took shape in northwestern Europe.

During the seventeenth century the Northern Hemisphere experienced the deepest cold of the Little Ice Age, with falling temperatures, shortened growing seasons and erratic weather driven partly by reduced solar activity and volcanic…

Within a few centuries of Polynesian settlement around 1200 CE, the subtropical forest that once covered Rapa Nui (Easter Island) - dominated by a now-extinct giant palm (Paschalococos disperta, related to the Chilean wine palm Jubaea)…

On 19 February 1600, the Huaynaputina volcano in the Moquegua region of southern Peru erupted explosively, producing the largest volcanic eruption recorded in South American history and one of the most powerful worldwide in the past two…

After his decisive victory at the Battle of Sekigahara on 21 October 1600, where his Eastern coalition defeated the forces loyal to the Toyotomi heir, Tokugawa Ieyasu emerged as the paramount power in Japan.

In 1604, Guru Arjan, the fifth Sikh Guru, completed the compilation of the Adi Granth ("First Book"), the foundational scripture of Sikhism, at Amritsar in the Punjab.

In 1605 Johann Carolus began printing the Relation in Strasbourg, generally recognised as Europe's first regular printed newspaper, converting handwritten newsletters into a mass-reproduced weekly.

In October 1606 the Spanish (Galician-born) navigator Luís Vaz de Torres completed the first recorded European passage through the strait separating the island of New Guinea from the Australian mainland, a waterway later named the Torres…

On 14 May 1607 roughly a hundred settlers sent by the Virginia Company of London established a fort on Jamestown Island in the Chesapeake Bay, founding the first permanent English settlement in North America.

On 3 July 1608 Samuel de Champlain led some 32 colonists to a narrowing of the St Lawrence River and built a fortified trading post, the 'Habitation', that grew into Quebec City, the first permanent French settlement in what is now Canada.

In 1609 the Italian natural philosopher Galileo Galilei learned of the newly invented spyglass, built improved versions reaching roughly twenty-fold magnification, and turned them on the night sky.

Working from the unprecedentedly precise observational data of his late employer Tycho Brahe, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler transformed the heliocentric model into a quantitatively accurate description of the heavens.

On 31 January 1609 the municipal authorities of Amsterdam established the Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, or Bank of Amsterdam, an exchange bank created to bring order to the chaotic monetary conditions of the early Dutch Republic, where…

On 23 May 1618 Bohemian Protestant nobles threw two Catholic imperial regents and their secretary from a window of Prague Castle, an act of defiance against the Habsburg crown that triggered the Bohemian Revolt and ignited the Thirty…

On 8 November 1620, outside Prague, a Catholic imperial and Catholic League army under Count Tilly and Bucquoy routed the Protestant forces of Frederick V of the Palatinate in barely an hour at the Battle of White Mountain.

In 1620 the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon published Novum Organum (The New Organon), a programmatic call to reform the methods of natural knowledge.

In September 1620 about a hundred passengers, including English Separatists later known as the Pilgrims who sought to worship outside the Church of England, sailed from England aboard the Mayflower.

In 1621 the Dutch East India Company, under Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, completed a brutal conquest of the Banda Islands, the world's only source of nutmeg and mace.

Njinga Mbande became ruler of Ndongo in 1624 and, after Portuguese pressure drove her from that kingdom, seized and ruled neighbouring Matamba until her death in 1663.

Seeking to control the fur trade of the Hudson valley, the Dutch West India Company established a fortified settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

In 1628 the English physician William Harvey, physician to King Charles I, published at Frankfurt his short Latin treatise Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart…

In 1628 and 1629 Sultan Agung of Mataram, ruler of the dominant Javanese kingdom, launched two great expeditions to expel the Dutch East India Company from its fortified port of Batavia (modern Jakarta).

In 1632 Galileo published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which compared the Ptolemaic and Copernican models and made a powerful case for a moving Earth, despite a 1616 precept warning him not to hold or defend…

After his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal died in childbirth in 1631, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan commissioned a vast mausoleum at Agra in her memory.

Between 1633 and 1639 the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, issued a series of decrees that formalised sakoku, the policy of national seclusion.

In 1637 the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes published the Discourse on the Method (Discours de la methode), written in French rather than Latin to reach a broad audience.

In December 1637 an uprising of overtaxed peasants and masterless samurai, many of them Catholic converts, erupted on Japan's Shimabara Peninsula and the nearby Amakusa islands under the youthful leader Amakusa Shiro.

In 1642 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) dispatched navigator Abel Janszoon Tasman from Batavia with the ships Heemskerck and Zeehaen to probe the southern oceans for the fabled Great South Land and new trade routes.

In 1644 the Ming dynasty collapsed amid famine, fiscal breakdown and rebellion. The peasant rebel Li Zicheng, who had proclaimed his own Shun dynasty, marched across north China and entered Beijing on 24 April; the next day the last Ming…

The Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties concluded between May and October 1648 in the Westphalian cities of Munster and Osnabruck, ended the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) in the Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty Years' War between…

On 30 January 1649 Charles I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, was beheaded outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall in London, following his conviction for high treason by a High Court of Justice convened by the Rump Parliament.

Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) expanded the Mughal Empire to its greatest territorial extent, stretching across nearly the entire Indian subcontinent.

On 28 November 1660 twelve natural philosophers met at Gresham College in London and resolved to found a 'College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning'.

In 1661-62 the Ming loyalist commander Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, besieged and expelled the Dutch East India Company from its fortress of Zeelandia on Taiwan, ending nearly four decades of Dutch colonial presence on the…

In 1672 King Charles II granted a royal charter to the Royal African Company, reorganised from the bankrupt Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa and headed by his brother James, Duke of York.

On 6 June 1674 Shivaji Bhonsle was crowned Chhatrapati (sovereign) at Raigad fort, formally establishing the Maratha state in western India.

On 6 May 1682 King Louis XIV formally established the seat of the French monarchy at the Palace of Versailles, transforming his father's hunting lodge into the most magnificent royal residence in Europe and the operational centre of the…

In July 1683 the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to Vienna with a great army, hoping to seize the Habsburg capital and open Central Europe to Ottoman power. The city held out for two months under desperate conditions.

On 18 October 1685 Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, revoking the Edict of Nantes (1598) and stripping France's Protestant Huguenots of the legal toleration they had held for nearly a century.

In March 1685, King Louis XIV of France promulgated the Code Noir (Black Code), a royal edict of sixty articles that codified the legal status and treatment of enslaved Africans across France's American colonies, beginning with the…

In 1687 Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), printed under the authorisation of the Royal Society after Edmond Halley urged him to write it and underwrote the…

Between November 1688 and the spring of 1689 the Catholic king James II of England was deposed and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary II and her Dutch husband William III of Orange, in what became known as the Glorious Revolution.

Signed in 1689 between the Kangxi Emperor's Qing China and the Russia of Tsar Peter the Great, the Treaty of Nerchinsk was the first treaty China concluded with a European power on terms of formal equality.

Returning to England after the Glorious Revolution, John Locke published in 1689-1690 two works that became foundational to the Enlightenment.

Quilombo dos Palmares was the largest maroon community in the Americas, a confederation of settlements in the highlands of Pernambuco and Alagoas in northeastern Brazil founded by escaped enslaved Africans around 1600.

The Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise money for King William III's government, which was struggling to finance the Nine Years' War against Louis XIV's France.

After a siege lasting from March 1696 to December 1698, the army of the Yarubid sultan of Oman, Saif ibn Sultan, stormed Fort Jesus at Mombasa on 13 December 1698, ending nearly two centuries of Portuguese dominance over the East African…

Around 1701 a coalition of Akan states led by Osei Tutu and his priest-counsellor Okomfo Anokye defeated the powerful kingdom of Denkyira at the Battle of Feyiase, founding the Asante Empire in the forest interior of modern Ghana.

The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, transferred to Great Britain the Asiento de Negros, the monopoly contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's American colonies.

The Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, was a European intellectual and cultural movement spanning roughly the late 17th to early 19th centuries, conventionally bracketed between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French…

Variolation, the deliberate inoculation of healthy people with material from smallpox pustules to induce a mild, survivable infection and lifelong immunity, was transmitted from Asia, Africa, and the Ottoman world into Western Europe and…

Onesimus, a West African man (likely of Akan/Coromantee origin from the region of modern Ghana) enslaved in Boston in the household of Puritan minister Cotton Mather, described around 1716 a longstanding African practice of inoculation…

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722, the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen became the first European to sight and land on Rapa Nui, which he named Paasch-Eyland (Easter Island) for the day of its discovery.

Between 1724 and 1727 King Agaja of Dahomey conquered the coastal kingdoms of Allada and, on 26 February 1727, the great slaving port of Whydah, more than doubling his kingdom's territory and securing direct access to the Atlantic.

Around 1724, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II of Amber and Jaipur, a Rajput astronomer-king serving under the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, began constructing a series of monumental masonry astronomical observatories in northern India…

Drawing on his exile in Britain from 1726 to 1729, Voltaire published the Letters Concerning the English Nation in English in 1733 and in French as the Lettres philosophiques in 1734.

On 24 February 1739 the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah, founder of the Afsharid dynasty, routed the Mughal army at the Battle of Karnal, and on 20 March he entered Delhi.

After more than a decade of guerrilla warfare from the mountainous Cockpit Country, the Jamaican Maroons, communities of escaped enslaved Africans and their descendants, forced the British colonial government to terms.

In 1744 the religious reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud, the emir of the small Najdi oasis town of Diriyah, sealed a mutual-support pact that fused religious authority with political power on the Arabian Peninsula.

In 1748 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, published The Spirit of the Laws, a sweeping comparative study of legal and political systems shaped by climate, custom and history.

On 1 July 1751 the first volume of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers appeared in Paris, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert.

Between 1755 and 1759 the armies of the Qianlong Emperor destroyed the Dzungar Khanate, the last great steppe nomadic power of Inner Asia, and brought the vast region north and south of the Tianshan mountains under Qing rule as a single…

On the morning of Saturday, 1 November 1755, the Feast of All Saints, a massive earthquake estimated at magnitude 7.7 or greater struck off the coast of Portugal, with its epicentre in the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Cape St. Vincent.

On 23 June 1757 a British East India Company force of about 3,000 under Robert Clive defeated the roughly 50,000-strong army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, on the field of Plassey near Murshidabad.

On 14 January 1761 the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani, allied with the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh, crushed the Maratha army under Sadashivrao Bhau at Panipat north of Delhi.

In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau published two influential works: The Social Contract in April and Émile in May.

In 1764 the young Milanese thinker Cesare Beccaria published On Crimes and Punishments, the first systematic treatise on penology and a landmark application of Enlightenment reason to law.

In March 1765 the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, levying a direct tax on printed materials in the thirteen North American colonies—legal documents, newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets and playing cards—to help defray the cost of…

In 1767 Empress Catherine II of Russia issued the Nakaz, or Instruction, a guiding document for the Legislative Commission convened to draft a new law code.

During the first Pacific voyage of HMS Endeavour (1768-1771), Lieutenant James Cook undertook the systematic European charting of New Zealand and the previously uncharted east coast of Australia.

The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 was a catastrophic famine that devastated Bengal, Bihar, and parts of Orissa under the administration of the British East India Company.

In 1771 Richard Arkwright and his partners opened Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, England, the world's first purpose-built water-powered cotton-spinning factory, driven by Arkwright's water frame (patented 1769).

In 1774, a group of Japanese physicians led by Sugita Genpaku published Kaitai Shinsho ("New Book of Anatomy") in Edo, the first complete Japanese translation of a Western scientific text.

On 9 March 1776 Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the founding text of classical economics.

On 4 July 1776 the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted the Declaration of Independence, severing the political bonds between the thirteen colonies and Great Britain.

On 10 January 1776 the English-born radical Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a roughly fifty-page pamphlet that made a plain-language argument for American independence and against hereditary monarchy.

In 1781 Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, a monumental attempt to reconcile empiricism and rationalism by arguing that the mind actively structures experience through innate categories, setting limits to what reason can…

Building on his 1769 separate-condenser patent, James Watt, in partnership with the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, introduced in 1781 a steam engine capable of producing continuous rotary motion through his 'sun-and-planet'…

Signed in Paris on 3 September 1783, the Treaty of Paris formally ended the American Revolutionary War and secured Great Britain's recognition of the United States as a sovereign, independent nation.

Beginning on 8 June 1783, the Laki (Lakagígar) fissure system in southern Iceland, linked to the Grímsvötn volcano, erupted continuously for roughly eight months, disgorging some 14 cubic kilometres of basaltic lava along with vast clouds…

Meeting in Philadelphia from May to September 1787, delegates from the American states abandoned an effort merely to revise the weak Articles of Confederation and instead drafted an entirely new frame of government.

On 26 August 1789 the French National Constituent Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a foundational statement of the principles of the French Revolution.

On 14 July 1789 a Parisian crowd seeking arms and gunpowder stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress-prison that symbolised Bourbon absolutism.

On the night of 22 August 1791, following a clandestine vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman associated with the leader Dutty Boukman, enslaved people across the northern plain of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt, burning plantations and seizing…

The Doji bara, or Skull, famine devastated the Indian subcontinent between roughly 1789 and 1792, triggered by one of the most severe El Nino events in recorded history, which scholars date to 1789-1793 (with associated climatic disruption…

In 1793 King George III dispatched Lord George Macartney as Britain's first envoy to the Qing court, seeking expanded trade beyond the single port of Canton, a permanent embassy in Beijing, and a small trading base near the coast.

Between September 1793 and July 1794 the French Revolution entered its most violent phase, the Reign of Terror.

On 14 May 1796, the English physician Edward Jenner performed a landmark experiment in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, that established the practice of vaccination.

On 4 May 1799 a British East India Company army and its allies stormed the island fortress of Seringapatam (Srirangapatna), capital of the Kingdom of Mysore, ending the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War.

On 9–10 November 1799 (18–19 Brumaire, Year VIII) General Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France in a coup d'état that overthrew the Directory and established the Consulate.

As Britain mechanised cotton spinning and weaving, the world's textile trade was upended, and nowhere more dramatically than in India, long the leading producer and exporter of fine cotton cloth.