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Noon on the rising tide

Columbus's journal says the Niña reached the approaches to Saltés at sunrise on 15 March 1493 and entered the harbour it had departed from at about noon, on the rising tide. That entry closes the surviving journal of the first voyage.

Martín Alonso Pinzón arrived independently in the Pinta later the same day. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's account places Columbus's arrival first and the Pinta's in the afternoon.

Neither ship's first European landfall

Atlantic storms had separated the vessels. The Pinta had already reached Bayona in Galicia and the Niña had entered Lisbon on 4 March, so Palos was a homecoming rather than a first return to the peninsula.

The Santa María did not come back at all, having been wrecked off Hispaniola. Columbus sailed home aboard the Niña, whose captain was Vicente Yáñez Pinzón.

A disputed date and a death

The near-contemporary chronicler Andrés Bernáldez gives 23 March for Columbus's return instead. Most modern accounts prefer 15 March because the surviving journal explicitly dates and describes that entry, but the conflict is real.

Martín Alonso Pinzón came home gravely ill. Testimony preserved from the Columbian lawsuits says his relatives took him to La Rábida, where he died near the end of March.

7 June 1494, at Tordesillas

Three representatives of Ferdinand and Isabella and three ambassadors of João II of Portugal executed and swore to a treaty at Tordesillas on 7 June 1494, settling their crowns' dispute over Atlantic discoveries.

It placed a pole-to-pole boundary 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Discoveries east of it were assigned to Portugal, discoveries west of it to the Castilian monarchs.

What the envoys bound their sovereigns to

Beginning on the treaty date, each crown promised not to send ships into the other's zone for discovery, trade, barter or conquest, and accidental discoveries were to be surrendered to the entitled crown.

The envoys required their sovereigns to exchange ratifications within 100 days and proposed a joint voyage within ten months to determine the boundary at sea.

The text ordered pilots and astronomers from each crown to sail aboard the other crown's ships, so neither side could secretly manipulate the survey.

An undefined league and reference island

The treaty never defined the length of its league or identified which Cape Verde island the measurement started from. The planned joint demarcation voyage was never carried out.

It was a bilateral treaty rather than a papal decree, though the negotiators asked the pope to confirm it. Nor did it knowingly divide a continent — it allocated rights over islands and mainlands discovered or yet to be discovered in the "Ocean Sea."

The monarchs did not sign at Tordesillas. Ferdinand, Isabella and Prince Juan ratified on 2 July, and João II on 5 September.

Saturday, 8 July 1497, below Lisbon

Four vessels under Vasco da Gama left Restelo, just below Lisbon, on Saturday, 8 July 1497, to make discoveries and seek spices.

The fleet was the naus São Gabriel and São Rafael, the caravel Bérrio, and a smaller stores vessel carrying provisions. Vasco commanded the expedition and São Gabriel; his brother Paulo commanded São Rafael, and Nicolau Coelho commanded Bérrio.

A prayer vigil, then the Tagus

The departure followed a prayer vigil and a religious ceremony. The expedition's surviving first-hand journal opens with a prayer that God permit the voyage to be accomplished in his service.

That journal is anonymous, and its traditional attribution to Álvaro Velho is plausible but not proven. Because it states both the weekday and the date, the departure is unusually securely fixed.

What is not known about the fleet

The complement was not certainly 170: a scholarly review reports source estimates between 120 and 170. The storeship's name is not securely recorded, and later accounts supply conflicting identifications.

Manuel I had ordered the preparations completed and dispatched the four vessels; João II had sponsored earlier exploration and planning but was not the sovereign who sent this fleet.

By the end of the day the ships were outbound from the Tagus. Within a week they sighted the Canaries, and after fog separated them they followed their prearranged plan and regrouped near Cape Verde.

A probable date, not a fixed one

Portuguese institutional accounts traditionally place da Gama's return at Lisbon on 18 September 1499, though the public broadcaster RTP describes that date as only probable.

The disagreement runs deeper than a day. João de Barros gives 29 August; other traditions give 8 September or 18 September. The surviving voyage journal ends before the homecoming, so the detailed arrival narrative comes from sixteenth-century chronicling.

Flags on the Tagus

In the narrative followed by the historian F. C. Danvers, da Gama's vessel entered Lisbon decorated with flags while Manuel I watched from the House of Mines.

Manuel sent the courtier Jorge de Vasconcelos aboard with royal greetings, and nobles escorted da Gama ashore to an audience with the king and queen. The same narrative says Manuel granted him the honorific Dom the following day.

Arriving last, and separately

This was not the day Portugal learned the expedition had reached India. Nicolau Coelho's Bérrio had brought that news in July and the São Gabriel followed in August; da Gama came last, delayed by a stop in the Azores with his gravely ill brother Paulo, who died there.

The human cost is recorded in the muster-roll scholarship: against competing estimates of 148 or 170 people who set out, Castanheda and Góis report 55 returned.

Tabriz, after Sharur

Ismail's Qizilbash army defeated the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Alvand at Sharur in 1501, breaking Aq Qoyunlu power in Azerbaijan and opening the route to Tabriz. There the teenage Ismail proclaimed himself shah, made the city his capital, and had coins struck in his name. A later chronicle places the enthronement on 1 Jumada II 907 AH, conventionally converted to 22 December 1501, though most chronologies place the proclamation that summer.

He decreed Shiism the official faith of the new Safavid realm. Encyclopaedia Iranica gives his age at the proposed December enthronement as fourteen.

Guards at the congregational mosque

At Tabriz's main congregational mosque Ismail threatened death to anyone resisting the Shiite prayer ritual, while Qizilbash soldiers guarded the congregation during the cursing of the first three caliphs. An estimated two-thirds of the city's population was Sunni.

The threat is documented for resistance to that ritual and the enforced cursing; it was not a standing statute condemning every Sunni. Ismail appointed his former guardian Husayn Beg Shamlu as vicegerent and commander of the Qizilbash army.

One chronicle, fifty years later

That precise date rests on a single source: Qāsem Beg Ḥayāti Tabrizi's Tārīkh, completed in 1554. Ḥayāti said he relied on witnesses, but he wrote more than fifty years afterward and no contemporary document confirms the day.

The conversion of 1 Jumada II 907 to 22 December uses a proleptic Gregorian calendar, and corresponds approximately to 12 December in the Julian calendar then used in Christian Europe. The Safavid source itself used the Islamic calendar. Most standard chronologies instead put the capture of Tabriz and the proclamation in the summer of 1501, often July.

Fourteen days between capture and the rope

Tumanbay II kept up armed resistance outside Cairo after the city fell, was betrayed and captured, and was handed to Ottoman forces on 30 March 1517. On 13 April 1517, fourteen days after his capture, Selim I ordered him hanged publicly at Bab Zuwayla, one of Cairo's principal gates.

Advisers reportedly urged Selim to execute Tumanbay rather than pardon or exile him. Former Mamluk commanders now serving the Ottomans — Khayrbak and Janbirdi al-Ghazali among them — argued that a living Tumanbay remained a rallying point for rebellion.

Ibn Iyas, the sympathetic Cairene chronicler who left the fullest account, says the condemned sultan asked the surrounding crowd to recite al-Fatiha with him three times, and that the execution rope failed before the hanging succeeded.

13 April or 15 April, and not a treaty either way

The date turns on a calendar conversion. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives the Islamic date 21 Rabīʿ al-awwal 923 and converts it to 13 April 1517, a reading Mustafa Banister's specialist study follows; other conversions produce 14 or 15 April.

The larger problem is the label. No consulted scholarly source identifies 15 April 1517 as the date of a peace treaty, a formal end of the war, or an empire-wide annexation decree.

What had already happened, and what had not

Ottoman incorporation was a process, not an act completed at the gate. The Levant had been overrun in 1516 and Cairo fell in late January 1517; the Hejaz was not folded in that April either, since Sharif Barakat's son presented his father's submission to Selim in Cairo on 3 July 1517, after which sharifian government continued under Ottoman suzerainty.

What the execution did end was the realistic hope of restoring the old regime. Mamluk households and personnel survived under Ottoman government; the independent Mamluk sultanate did not.

Tumanbay's body remained displayed above Bab Zuwayla for three days before burial in al-Ghawri's madrasa.

18 August 1518

Charles I of Spain granted his courtier Laurent de Gorrevod, governor of Bresse, permission on 18 August 1518 to transport as many as 4,000 enslaved Africans, male and female, to Spanish islands and mainland territories in the Americas.

The grant allowed Gorrevod or his assigns to arrange shipments directly from Guinea or other customary African supply regions, rather than first bringing the captives through Iberia.

A near-monopoly, with paperwork

Until the quota was exhausted, the charter barred further licences except permissions already issued.

It required records of how many captives reached each destination, proof of customs payment, and proof of Christianisation after arrival.

Gorrevod subsequently sold or assigned the grant to merchants including Adán de Vivaldi and Tomás de Fornari.

What the document did and did not do

The charter created legal capacity. It does not show that 4,000 people were transported that day or in any single shipment.

This was not the first arrival of Africans in the Americas: Spanish monarchs had authorised imports from Iberia in 1501, and Africans were already present in Spanish colonies.

Calling it the first asiento can mislead. Recent scholarship generally describes it as a large royal licence or concession rather than a mature later asiento contract.

20 September 1519, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir

Ferdinand Magellan's five-ship fleet sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, on 20 September 1519 and entered the Atlantic. The eyewitness Antonio Pigafetta recorded that it took a southwesterly course.

The ships were Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria and Santiago, with Trinidad as Magellan's flagship.

How many men is unsettled

The archival embarkation roll used by modern scholarship gives 239 crew; Pigafetta's contemporary account says 237.

Pigafetta also records that before the ocean departure Magellan required the men to confess and barred women from joining the fleet.

Juan Sebastián Elcano sailed as master aboard Concepción — he became captain of Victoria only much later.

Not yet a voyage around the world

The expedition had begun moving from Seville on 10 August; 20 September was its definitive departure into the Atlantic.

Its stated objective was to reach the Moluccas by a western route within the Spanish demarcation, not explicitly to circumnavigate the Earth.

Six days out, on 26 September, the armada reached Tenerife to obtain meat, water and firewood.

Intercepted on the plain

On Saturday 7 July 1520 the retreating Spanish–Indigenous column was intercepted on the plain near Otumba, traditionally identified as Temalcatitlan, by a large Mexica-led force. It had marched about a league and a half from its camp.

Cortés described his people as exhausted, hungry and nearly all wounded, attacked from every side and so crowded that the two sides became intermingled. The date is reconstructed from his statement that the column entered Tlaxcala the next day, Sunday 8 July.

Who gets named, and by whom

Cortés's near-contemporary letter says the fighting lasted much of the day and ended when a leading opponent fell. It does not name that person, and it does not mention Juan de Salamanca or a captured standard.

Later Spanish narratives identify the fallen leader as Matlatzincatzin, the cihuacoatl of Tenochtitlan — the city's second-highest political and military office, not a high priest. One version has Cortés knocking him from his litter and Salamanca killing him and seizing the standard. That detail belongs to the later accounts.

Enough to reach Tlaxcala

The pursuit was broken sufficiently for the survivors to continue. No reliable strength or casualty totals exist; Spanish narratives emphasize overwhelming odds and later estimates vary enormously.

Tlaxcalan and other Indigenous fighters fought on both sides, though Cortés's account centres the Spanish survivors. On 8 July the surviving Spanish and Indigenous column entered Tlaxcalan territory, where it received food and shelter.

30 September 1520: Üsküdar to the palace

Suleiman learned in Manisa that his father Selim I had died and travelled overland toward Istanbul. On 30 September 1520 — 17 Shawwal 926 — he reached Üsküdar, crossed to the imperial palace and sat on the Ottoman throne.

His accession ended the interval during which a small group of senior officials had concealed Selim's death to protect the succession.

The day after

On the following day Suleiman went to Edirnekapı to receive his father's body, and Selim's funeral ceremony was then held at the Fatih Mosque.

He retained Grand Vizier Piri Mehmed Pasha, who had sent the messenger to Manisa, distributed the customary accession gratuity, and began appointing his governing household.

Why 22 September is the wrong date

Selim died near Çorlu on 8–9 Shawwal 926, variously converted as 21 or 22 September 1520. That is his death date, not his son's enthronement.

Succession was not an automatic transfer at the instant of death: the heir had to reach the capital and secure the throne, which here took eight or nine days.

"Crowned" is European shorthand. Ottoman accession centred on enthronement, allegiance, an accession gratuity and investiture traditions such as sword-girding, not the placing of a crown.

3 January 1521, at St Peter's

Pope Leo X issued Decet Romanum Pontificem at St Peter's in Rome on 3 January 1521, formally declaring Martin Luther excommunicated after the compliance period prescribed by the earlier bull Exsurge Domine had expired.

Luther had neither submitted nor publicly recanted within that period. He had instead publicly burned a copy of Exsurge Domine in Wittenberg on 10 December 1520.

The sentence reached past Luther

The bull treated Luther and those who persisted in supporting or protecting him as condemned heretics. It ordered prelates to announce the sentence publicly and to instruct Christians to shun them.

That threat covered people who sheltered, funded, advised or militarily protected him.

No immediate arrest

No immediate arrest or physical seizure followed. Elector Frederick the Wise continued protecting Luther, so enforcement moved into negotiations at the imperial level.

Excommunication was an ecclesiastical penalty. Luther did not become an imperial outlaw until the separate imperial process culminating in the Edict of Worms that May.

One scholarly study reports that the bull initially drew little response and was not widely seen until later in 1521.

17 and 18 April 1521, the bishop's palace

Luther arrived in Worms on 16 April 1521, but his formal hearings occurred on 17 and 18 April in the bishop's palace, separate from the Diet's ordinary business premises.

On 17 April officials asked whether the books displayed before him were his and whether he would retract them. He acknowledged authorship but requested time to consider the second question.

The answer on the second day

Luther waited about two hours before entering the larger chamber for the decisive second hearing. On 18 April he refused a wholesale recantation unless refuted by Scripture or evident reason, stating that his conscience was bound by God's word.

The compact formula "Here I stand, I can do no other" appears in an early printed literary version and is judged by the prevailing scholarly view not to have been spoken at the hearing. What is securely documented is the appeal to Scripture, reason and conscience.

Not a debate, and not yet an outlaw

Luther was not offered an open theological disputation. He was principally asked to acknowledge and retract his books, and the imperial spokesman Johann von der Ecken put the questions to him in Latin and German.

Charles V rejected the answer the following morning and said he would proceed against Luther as a heretic, while still honouring the safe conduct that had brought him.

The formal Edict of Worms followed on 8 May; it was not issued during Luther's 18 April testimony.