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August 1511: the landing and the river mouth

Sultan Mahmud Shah had released the Portuguese prisoners taken after a failed mission in 1509, but refused Afonso de Albuquerque's demands for reparations and for permission to build a fortress. In August 1511 Albuquerque attacked to take by force the permanent base he had been denied.

In the campaign's concluding phase, Portuguese troops landed under naval covering fire, overcame Malaccan defences and secured the city along with its strategically important river entrance.

Mahmud and his remaining forces withdrew. What Albuquerque held was Malacca itself — not the whole former sultanate, and not every sea lane in the Strait.

Which day the city fell is not settled

The conquest unfolded through bombardment, repeated assaults, occupation and clearance operations, and different accounts fix on different points in that sequence.

Modern accounts variously give 10, 15 or 24 August. A specialist Portuguese campaign history places Albuquerque's final move to take complete control on 24 August, while Tomé Pires described the seizure only as occurring in mid-August.

A Hindu merchant put in charge of the city

Hindu, Chinese and Burmese merchants assisted the Portuguese, partly to improve their own position against rival merchant groups.

Albuquerque began converting military occupation into permanent government at once: he ordered a fortress, issued coins, and announced that commerce could resume.

For chief administrator he appointed Nina Chatu, the Hindu merchant who had helped the Portuguese prisoners.

A hill in the Chucunaque highlands, 25 September 1513

On the traditionally accepted date of 25 September 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa's expedition reached a hill in the Chucunaque highlands from which an immense body of water could be seen to the south.

Balboa went ahead to the summit, saw the water, and then called his companions forward. The party gave thanks and began preparing to descend toward the coast.

They called it the Mar del Sur — the South Sea — because it lay southward from their position on the isthmus. The name Pacific came later, from Magellan's voyage.

The expedition already knew the sea was there

Indigenous informants had told Balboa of another sea and of wealthy lands farther south. Worried about his political position and hoping for gold, pearls and a route toward Asian spices, he organized the crossing with Spanish and Indigenous participants.

Indigenous guides, warriors and porters supplied route knowledge and labour for the crossing. Indigenous peoples had lived beside the ocean and travelled on it long before this expedition arrived at the hill.

The ceremony came four days later

Balboa did not reach the shore or perform the well-known act of possession on this date. That happened on 29 September at the Gulf of San Miguel, where he waded in with 26 men and the notary Andrés de Valderrábano recorded the claim for the Castilian Crown.

Alonso Martín de Don Benito reached the beach ahead of Balboa and is reported to have been the first European in the expedition to enter the water, using a canoe.

Even 25 September is not fully secure. Smithsonian's review notes that the expedition's travel records can instead yield 27 September.

One of the first days of March 1516, in Basel

On or about 1 March 1516, the Basel printer-publisher Johann Froben issued the first edition of the New Testament prepared by Desiderius Erasmus.

The exact retail-release day is less secure than the conventional date. A scholarly study says Froben published it on "one of the first days of March," and 1 March marks the end of the printed annotations.

Basel University Library's surviving copy identifies Erasmus as author-editor, Basel as the place of publication, Froben as printer and 1516 as the year.

Greek on one side, Erasmus's own Latin on the other

The folio combined Erasmus's new Latin translation, his recension of the Greek text, and extensive annotations explaining where he departed from the Vulgate and why. He dedicated it to Pope Leo X.

It ran to 1,027 printed pages in a run of about 1,200 copies — a large number for a book that required readers trained in Greek and Latin.

It was not a modern critical edition. The Greek recension rested on a narrow group of available manuscripts and contained errors, and where Erasmus's manuscript evidence ran out some Greek wording was reconstructed from the Latin Vulgate.

First published, not first printed

This was the first complete Greek New Testament ever published. The Greek New Testament of the Complutensian Polyglot had already been printed in Spain but had not been released to readers.

Erasmus went on to prepare four revised editions, issued in 1519, 1522, 1527 and 1535.

Morning of 22 January 1517, outside Cairo

On the morning of 22 January 1517, Sultan Selim I's Ottoman army advanced against Sultan Tuman Bay's fortified Mamluk position at Ridaniya, between Matariya and Jabal al-Ahmar outside Cairo.

Tuman Bay had wanted to attack the travel-weary Ottomans at Salihiyya, but abandoned that plan after his emirs insisted on a fortified defence near the capital.

The Gregorian date varies by a day across the literature. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi identifies 22 January as the correct conversion of 28 Dhu al-Hijja 922 and attributes 23 January — printed by Cambridge histories and other major works — to a one-day Hijri-calendar variation.

A flank attack, and camels that ran the wrong way

Forewarned about the Mamluk trenches and concealed artillery by Khayr Bey's network, the Ottomans turned toward the Mokattam heights before entering effective range and struck the Mamluk position from its flank.

Ottoman infantry, light artillery and firearms disrupted the Mamluk deployment. The Mamluks had to leave their prepared defences, and their left wing broke under fire.

The Mamluks tried to use camels as moving cover, but the animals panicked under gunfire, ran backward and trampled some of their own cavalry.

Cairo was not secured that day

Tuman Bay and his emirs charged toward the Ottoman command position. After roughly seven or eight hours the Mamluk field army was routed and Tuman Bay withdrew toward Cairo.

Grand Vizier Hadım Sinan Pasha was mortally wounded during the battle. Accounts disagree about who struck him: the TDV assessment considers the famous story naming Tuman Bay as his personal killer unlikely and records a competing account involving Janbirdi al-Ghazali's cavalry.

Ottoman troops were admitted to Cairo the next day, but Tuman Bay remained free. He returned with thousands of supporters on the night of 27–28 January, beginning three days of street fighting.

Valladolid, 22 March 1518

At Valladolid on 22 March 1518, Juana I and her son Charles I concluded a capitulation with the Portuguese mariner Ferdinand Magellan and the cosmographer Rui Faleiro, covering exploration on the Spanish side of the oceanic demarcation.

The agreement authorized them to seek islands, continental lands and valuable spices, and expressly forbade intrusion into the Portuguese sphere established by the Iberian demarcation.

Charles was Charles I of Spain that day. He did not become Holy Roman Emperor Charles V until the following year.

What the Crown promised, and what it kept

The Crown promised to equip five ships with artillery, crews and provisions for two years, while reserving places aboard the fleet for royal financial officers.

Magellan and Faleiro received a ten-year preference over competitors using the same route, a share of royal profits, and hereditary titles as adelantados and governors of the lands they discovered, subject to specified conditions.

Those governorships came with strings: their heirs would have to be Castilian-born and married within Castile to inherit them.

Two Portuguese made captains of a Spanish armada

A separate royal provision issued the same day appointed both men captains of the planned armada and required its officers and crews to obey them.

Faleiro was an equal contracting party and a captain from that day, although he ultimately did not sail.

What was signed was a legal undertaking, not a departure. The armada still had to be organized, and it would not leave until 1519.

26 April 1518, an arts-faculty lecture hall

On 26 April 1518, during the German Augustinian Hermits' general chapter at Heidelberg, Martin Luther presided over an academic disputation setting out his developing theology.

It took place in the arts faculty's lecture hall on the east side of Augustinergasse, not in the Augustinian monastery. University officials attended, the ceremonial university sceptre was present, and the university contributed four guilders.

Vicar-general Johann von Staupitz had arranged the disputation alongside the chapter so that Luther's emerging Wittenberg theology could be heard in a formal academic setting.

Forty theses, and the twelve that never came up

Luther supplied 28 theological and 12 philosophical theses. His fellow Augustinian Leonhard Beyer formally defended them while Luther presided.

The recorded discussion concentrated on justification, human works, grace and free will. The planned attack on Aristotelian philosophy apparently was not reached for lack of time.

No scandal, and a letter five days later

The disputation caused no immediate scandal, although the university later received a court rebuke for supporting an outside disputation.

Johann Eck was not there and was not Luther's challenger at Heidelberg. The controversy that led to Leipzig developed separately, through writings involving Eck and Andreas Karlstadt.

Among those impressed was the young Martin Bucer, who spoke privately with Luther and sent Beatus Rhenanus a detailed report dated 1 May.

30 May 1518: a covering letter to Staupitz

Martin Luther dated a covering letter to Johann von Staupitz on 30 May 1518, sending him the Resolutiones — his extended explanations and defences of the Ninety-Five Theses — for transmission toward Rome.

Staupitz, Luther's Augustinian vicar-general and mentor, received a fair copy along with the request to forward it and commend it to the pope.

Two addresses inside one manuscript

The manuscript carried separate prefatory addresses to Staupitz and to Pope Leo X. A surviving 1518 printing preserves both.

In the address to Leo, Luther presented the theses as propositions for disputation rather than settled dogma, explained how their unexpected circulation had overtaken him, and sought the pope's protection for his fuller explanation.

He remained formally deferential to Leo throughout the document, even while saying that he could not retract his theses.

What the date does not mark

30 May is securely attached to the letter to Staupitz and is the conventional date of the accompanying papal address. It is not the day the whole work was written: Luther worked on the Resolutiones principally between January and March 1518, and it reached print only afterward.

The work explained one controversy across 95 propositions — indulgences and the related questions of penance and papal power. It was not a summary of Luther's theology as a whole.

Nor was it commissioned as neutral explanation. Leo's order to Luther's Augustinian superiors called for a retraction, and the evidence supports saying Luther sent an explanation in response to the developing Roman case.

27 June 1519, in a duke's castle

The Leipzig Disputation formally opened on 27 June 1519 in the court hall of Leipzig's Pleißenburg — a ducal castle rather than a University of Leipzig lecture hall.

It proceeded under the protection of George, Duke of Saxony, despite opposition from the theological faculty and a prohibition by the bishop of Merseburg.

Mass, a procession, and an oration about manners

The opening included a Mass of the Holy Spirit at St Thomas Church and a procession to the Pleißenburg.

The Leipzig humanist Petrus Mosellanus then delivered a formal Latin oration urging fair and restrained debate.

Luther was in the room but not in the chair

The first disputants were Johann Eck and Andreas Karlstadt, who began arguing over free will, divine grace and good works. Martin Luther was present but did not begin his own disputation with Eck until 4 July.

Nothing about this was spontaneous. Eck's criticism of Luther, Karlstadt's published defence — 406 theses — and the resulting challenges among the three men had produced an agreement for a public academic disputation, which Duke George agreed to host.

Archival and critical-edition sources give the disputation's documented span as 27 June to 15 July 1519.

28 June 1519, the electoral chapel at Frankfurt

On 28 June 1519 the seven prince-electors met in the electoral chapel of St Bartholomew's Cathedral in Frankfurt and unanimously chose Charles of Habsburg — nineteen years old, and already King Carlos I of Spain — as Roman-German king.

The throne had been vacant since the death of Charles's grandfather Maximilian I on 12 January 1519.

The vote ended the principal contest between Charles and Francis I of France. Henry VIII and Frederick of Saxony had also figured among the candidates.

851,918 guilders, and what they do not explain

Charles's financiers transferred 851,918 guilders in election money to the electors, roughly 540,000 of it supplied by Jakob Fugger.

The payments are well documented. Historians dispute how decisively they determined the outcome, since dynastic legitimacy, German political sentiment, promises and military pressure also mattered.

Elected king, not crowned emperor

What the electors chose that day was the King of the Romans, the prerequisite to imperial dignity. No coronation took place at Frankfurt.

The city marked the result with festivities and artillery salutes while Charles remained in Spain; the news did not reach him in Barcelona until 6 July.

His agents and the electors negotiated an electoral capitulation restricting and conditioning the future ruler's exercise of imperial authority, and Charles's representative formally accepted it on 3 July.

15 June 1520: forty-one propositions, six censures

Pope Leo X promulgated the bull Exsurge Domine, dated 15 June 1520, as part of the canonical heresy proceeding that had been running against Martin Luther since 1518.

The bull reproduced 41 propositions from Luther's writings and condemned them collectively as heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears, seductive of simple minds, or contrary to Catholic truth.

The censures were imposed in globo. The bull did not say which proposition was heretical and which was merely scandalous or offensive.

What it ordered

It condemned the writings containing the propositions and prohibited reading, printing, preaching, praising or defending them. Ecclesiastical authorities were ordered to find copies and burn them publicly.

The document opens by asking God to rise because a "wild boar" is loose in the Lord's vineyard.

It addressed far more than indulgences: only six of its 41 propositions concerned indulgences directly.

The sixty days did not start in Rome

Luther and his adherents were allowed 60 days after the bull's local publication to desist and document their recantation. Failing that, the threatened excommunication would take effect.

So nothing changed in Wittenberg on 15 June. Copies still had to be printed and lawfully published in German dioceses, and the clock depended on that local publication.

Johann Eck, who had helped prepare the bull, was later charged with publishing it in the Holy Roman Empire, as was the papal nuncio Hieronymus Aleander.

21 October 1520, the feast of the Eleven Thousand Virgins

On 21 October 1520 the expedition reached the cape now called Cabo Vírgenes, at about 52° south, and encountered the mouth of a strait. The cape took its name from the feast day on which it was sighted.

Antonio Pigafetta recorded the sighting and placed the mouth some two to three leagues from the cape.

The date rests principally on Pigafetta's chronology; another early account supplied a different one.

Four ships, not five

Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción and Victoria were present. The fifth original ship, Santiago, had already been wrecked during an earlier reconnaissance, although its crew survived.

Magellan had resumed the southward search for a navigable route after wintering in Patagonia and losing that ship.

Nobody yet knew it went through

The ships entered a short distance and anchored. Magellan sent San Antonio and Concepción to investigate the channels while Trinidad and Victoria waited near the entrance.

The scouts came back having found connected channels, and the fleet went on. Pigafetta wrote that the snowy mountains rose around water too deep for ordinary anchoring, forcing the crews to fasten mooring lines ashore.

What the fleet had not confirmed on 21 October was that the waterway reached another ocean. Pigafetta's figure for the strait's length — 110 leagues, which he equated to 440 miles — is retrospective.

A death at the end of Quecholli

The Codex Aubin places Cuitláhuac's death in 1520, at the end of the Mexica month Quecholli. Patrick Johansson's specialist calendar correlation converts that entry to 3 December, rather than the 25 November of older chronologies.

The annal says Cuitláhuac died of smallpox while the Spaniards were in Tlaxcala, and credits him with 80 days of rule — a round number Johansson cautions may be symbolic or approximate.

Other chronologies give 25 or 28 November, and other scholarship says cautiously late November or early December.

Leading before being installed

Cuauhtémoc succeeded Cuitláhuac as the Mexica wartime leader, sought allies and set about strengthening the city.

But the Codex Aubin places his formal installation as the eleventh tlatoani 80 days after Cuitláhuac's death, during the nemontemi days. Succession in practice and formal investiture were not the same moment.

An early post-conquest account says that once Cuauhtémoc was ruling, he sent messengers offering concessions and seeking support against Cortés.

What the sources do not settle

Cuauhtémoc was a son of Ahuítzotl and a Tlatelolca noblewoman, but he did not inherit automatically. Mexica succession involved selection among eligible royal nobles rather than father-to-son primogeniture.

His age is uncertain. Bernal Díaz estimated about 25 or 26, while modern reconstructions sometimes place him in his late teens or early twenties.

Sources also differ over whether to call him Moctezuma's cousin or his nephew, reflecting conflicting genealogies and terminology.