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Portuguese began systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa
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First consignment of slaves brought to Lisbon (Portugal)
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Under Ferdinand and Isabel, the Spanish inquisition became independent of Rome. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the Medieval Inquisition which was under Papal control. The Inquisition was originally intended in large part to ensure the orthodoxy of those who converted from Judaism and Islam. Blog
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Columbus sailed for King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain. On his first trip, Columbus led an expedition with three ships, the Niña (captained by Vicente Yáñez Pinzon), the Pinta (owned and captained by Martin Alonzo Pinzon), and the Santa Maria (captained by Columbus), and about 90 crew members. They set sail on Aug. 3, 1492 from Palos, Spain, and on October 11, 1492, spotted the Caribbean islands off southeastern North America. They landed on an island they called Guanahani, but Columb
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On a second, larger expedition (Sept. 25, 1493-June 11, 1496), sailed with 17 ships and 1,200 to 1,500 men to find gold and capture Indians as slaves in the Indies. Columbus established a base in Hispaniola and sailed around Hispaniola and along the length of southern Cuba. He spotted and named the island of Dominica on November 3, 1493.
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To prevent a war with Portugal, a Treaty of Tordesillas)was signed in 1494 between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchs, dividing the world into two regions of exploration
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On a third expedition (May 30, 1498-October 1500), Columbus sailed farther south, to Trinidad and Venezuela (including the mouth of the Orinoco River). Columbus was the first European since the Viking Leif Ericsson to set foot on the mainland of America.
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By an accidental landfall on the South American coast for some, by the crown's secret design for others, Pedro Álvares Cabral discovered Brazil.
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On his fourth and last expedition (May 9, 1502 - Nov. 7, 1504), Columbus sailed to Mexico, Honduras and Panama (in Central America) and Santiago (Jamaica). Columbus is buried in eastern Hispaniola (now called the Dominican Republic).
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Christopher Columbus, in a desperate effort to induce the natives of Jamaica to continue provisioning him and his hungry men, successfully intimidated the natives by correctly predicting a lunar eclipse for February 29, 1504, using the Ephemeris of the German astronomer Regiomontanus.
A total lunar eclipse occurred on March 1, 1504 (visible on the evening of February 29 in the Americas).
See <a href='http://makinghistoryrelevant.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/1504-the-lunar-eclipse-that-saved-christo -
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[Blog](The Protestant Reformation)
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Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) was a Portuguese explorer who led the first expedition that sailed around the Earth (1519-1522
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[Blog](1653)
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Treaty of Zaragoza, which specified the antimeridian to the line of demarcation specified in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494
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Pope Paul III established, in 1542, a permanent congregation staffed with cardinals and other officials, whose task was to combat the spread of Protestantism in Italy, to maintain and defend the integrity of the faith and to examine and proscribe errors and false doctrines. Blog
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Nicolaus Copernicus presented the heliocentric theory of the universe in his book “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” in
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Giordano Bruno had the audacity to go beyond Copernicus, and, dared to suggest, that space was boundless and that the sun and its planets were but one of any number of similar systems. For such blasphemy, Bruno was tried before the Inquisition, condemned and burned at the stake in 1600.
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April 1633 Galileo is interrogated before the Inquisition. Galileo agrees to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a more lenient sentence. He declares that the Copernican case was made too strongly in his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, and offers to refute it in another book.
June 22, 1633 Galileo is sentenced to prison for an indefinite term. Blog -
The Great Plague of London in 1665 was the last in a long series of plague epidemics that first began in London in June 1499. The Great Plague killed between 75,000 and 100,000 of London’s rapidly expanding population of about 460,000. By September 1665, the death rate had reached 8,000 per week. Helpless municipal authorities threw their earlier caution to the wind and abandoned quarantine measures. Houses containing the dead and dying were no longer locked. London’s mournful silence was broken
