A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

1400 First stirrings of Renaissance 1414 Jan Hus betrayed 1433 Prince Henry the Navigator flourishes 1453 Constantinople falls 1458 Gutenberg’s Bible 1475 Birth of Cesare, Cardinal Borgia’s son 1477 Canterbury Tales 1478 Pope Sixtus IV conspires to slay Medicis during High Mass in Florence Cathedral 1480 Birth of Lucrezia, Cesare’s sister 1486 Dias rounds the tip of Africa 1484 Pied Piper murders 130 German children 1485 Le morte d’Arthur 1487 Torquemada named Grand Inquisitor Star Chamber in England 1488 King James III of Scotland murdered 1490 Savonarola’s first Bonfire of the Vanities 1492 Cardinal Borgia buys the papacy, becomes Pope Alexander VI Columbus discovers the Bahamas 1495 Vatican revels with naked prostitutes First syphilis outbreak ravages Naples 1497? Amerigo Vespucci in the New World 1497 Lucrezia Borgia’s triple incest The pope’s eldest son, Juan, is murdered 1498 Manutius’s five-volume Aristotle published Rise of humanism Savonarola burned at the stake Lucrezia gives birth to the Infans Romanus 1500 Michelangelo: Madonna and Child 1501 Over 1,000 printing shops now in Europe Pope acknowledges paternity of his daughter’s child 1502 All books challenging papal authority ordered burned 1503 Julius II: the Warrior Pope New universities include Wittenberg and Frankfurt an der Oder Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa 1505 Death of Russia’s Ivan the Great 1506 First stone of St. Peter’s Basilica laid 1507 Violent death of Cesare Borgia Waldseemuller christens “America...