The Releases, and the Enclosure That Follows Each

28 entries, in the order they happened: 28 where the historical record answers. The full timeline holds 33 entries for this era; some of them are only there.

Every entry in this era

• 1382Wycliffe's Bible and the Council of ConstanceWycliffe puts the whole Bible into English and dies in his bed; the Council of Constance condemns him, and in 1428 his bones are dug up, burned and…
• 1428 (the Triple Alliance)…The Aztec tribute rollsFrom 1428, when Itzcóatl joined Tenochtitlan with Texcoco and Tlacopan, the alliance came to rule 400 to 500 small states, by one standard estimate…
• 1436The Ming sea-ban; Constantinople; ColumbusChina's Ming emperors ban sea voyages after Zheng He's treasure fleets; Constantinople falls and its Greek books reach the West just as a press in…
• c. 1438–1532 (the…The Inca labour tax and the khipu ledgersThe Inca state had no coinage and ran on labour owed to it by households in turn (mit'a): farming state and temple land, building roads and terraces…
• c. 1440Movable typeGutenberg's movable type, built to make money copying text, not to free anyone, breaks the old control of the word as a side effect; its first major…
• 1446 (published; presented…Hangul: an alphabet for the peopleKing Sejong of Joseon devised an alphabet for Korean, presented to his court at the turn of 1443–44 and published in 1446 as Hunminjeongeum, 'the…
• 1492–c. 1600The Great Dying in the AmericasA 2019 review of 119 regional estimates puts the population of the Americas before 1492 at about 60.5 million (interquartile range 44.8–78.2 million)…
• 1493Inter caetera; Pacioli; the RequerimientoA papal bull divides the New World; Pacioli prints double-entry bookkeeping; Spain reads the Requerimiento aloud, in a language the people it…
• c. 1501–1866 (SlaveVoyages'…The Atlantic slave trade, measuredBetween the early 1500s and the 1860s about 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard ships for the Americas and about 10.7 million survived the…
• 1511The Portuguese take MalaccaIn 1511 the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque seized Melaka (Malacca) on the Malay Peninsula, the main distribution point for the spices of…
• 1517LutherLuther sets out ninety-five theses against indulgences; told to recant at Worms, he refuses, then translates the New Testament into German: grace…
• 1521Tenochtitlan fallsTenochtitlan, the Aztec capital founded about 1325 on islands in Lake Texcoco and home to an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 people in 1519 (the figure…
• 1526Tyndale and the King James VersionTyndale prints an English New Testament in exile and smuggles it into England in bales of cloth; copies are bought up to be burned, and in 1536 he is…
• 1526Afonso of Kongo writes to the king of PortugalIn 1526 Afonso I (Nzinga Mbemba), the Christian king of Kongo, began a series of letters to João III of Portugal complaining that Portuguese…
• 20 or 21 April 1526Guns at PanipatAt Panipat, north of Delhi, in April 1526, Babur defeated the much larger army of Ibrahim Lodi, sultan of Delhi, placing artillery and matchlock men…
• November 1532 (capture)Cajamarca and Atahualpa's ransomIn November 1532 Francisco Pizarro, with some 168 men, 62 of them mounted, set up his artillery at Cajamarca, sent a priest to call on the Inca…
• 1543Tanegashima: the gun reaches JapanIn 1543 Portuguese sailors landed on Tanegashima, south of Kyushu, in the first recorded trade between Europe and Japan; the island's lord bought…
• 1545 (silver found)Potosí silver and the mitaSilver was found at Potosí in 1545, and within three decades the city passed 150,000 people, the largest in the New World, and the site was regarded…
• 15 August 1549Francis Xavier lands at KagoshimaOn 15 August 1549 the Jesuit Francis Xavier and Anjirō, a Japanese convert he had met at Malacca, landed at Kagoshima from a Chinese junk, the only…
• July 1562Landa burns the Maya booksIn July 1562 the Franciscan Diego de Landa held an auto-da-fé at Maní in Yucatán that destroyed about 5,000 Maya images and precious Maya books…
• 1565–1815The Manila galleon and the silver road to ChinaFrom 1565 to 1815 one Spanish galleon a year sailed each way between Acapulco and Manila, carrying Chinese silk and other Asian goods east and great…
• 1587 (Tenshō 15, sixth…Hideyoshi expels the missionariesIn the sixth month of 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a day after an edict limiting the spread of Christianity, ordered the missionaries (padres) out of…
• 1591Tondibi: guns end the Songhai EmpireIn 1591 a Moroccan army with firearms, sent by Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur after an earlier raid on the Taghaza salt deposits, routed the Songhai at…
• 5 February 1597The twenty-six martyrs of NagasakiOn 5 February 1597, on Hideyoshi's orders, 26 Catholics, twenty of them Japanese, Franciscans, Jesuits, laymen and young boys among them, were…
• 1614The Tokugawa ban on ChristianityThe Tokugawa shogunate, which saw the faith spread since Xavier's visit as a threat to its rule, banned Christianity in 1614.
• 1620Bacon, Descartes, the Royal SocietyBacon writes against Aristotle, Descartes finds certainty in the reasoning mind, and the Royal Society takes the motto “on no one's word.” Both books…
• 1637–1638The Shimabara RebellionPeasants of the Shimabara Peninsula and the Amakusa islands, most of them Catholic converts, rose against heavy taxation and abusive officials in…
• 1633–1639 (the seclusion…Japan closes; the trampling imagesEdicts of 1633 and 1635 barred Japanese from going abroad or returning, and in 1639 Portuguese ships were forbidden to trade with or visit Japan…