Important: Intended as an aid to your understanding, not as something to be memorized.

1397 — Medici Bank established in Florence.

1420 — Portuguese colonize Madeira.

1434 — Cosimo de’ Medici assumes power in Florence.

1440 — Frederick II becomes Holy Roman Emperor; exposure of Donation of Constantine as a forgery (an early triumph for humanist textual analysis).

1448 — Gutenberg invents movable type.

1453 — Fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II; end of the Hundred Years War between England and France.

1478 — Establishment of Spanish Inquisition.

1492 — Columbus’s first voyage to Americas; conquest of Granada and expulsion of the Moors from Spain by Ferdinand & Isabella; death of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

1494 — Establishment of Florentine Republic.

1498 — Da Gama reaches India.

1500 — Cabral lands in Brazil.

1504 — Michelangelo’s David completed.

1505 — Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa.

1509 — Accession of King Henry VIII.

1511 — Erasmus, The Praise of Folly.

1512 — Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling completed; restoration of Medici rule in Florence.

1513 — Cortes lands in Mexico; Portuguese capture Hormuz; Machiavelli writes The Prince.

1514 — Portuguese reach China.

1517 — Martin Luther’s 95 theses.

1521 — Diet of Worms; Magellan reaches Pacific.

1527 — Sack of Rome by army of Emperor Charles V.

1529 — Raising of Ottoman siege of Vienna.

1533 — Henry VIII splits from Rome.

1535 — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion.

1541 — Francois Rabelais, Gargantua & Pantagruel.

1543 — Portuguese reach Japan; Copernicus, De revolutionibus; Vesalius, Fabrica.

1550 — Vasari, Lives of the Artists.

1558 — Accession of Elizabeth I.

1569 — Mercator’s world map.

1570 — Excommunication of Elizabeth I.

1571 — Defeat of Ottoman navy at Battle of Lepanto.

1572 — St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

1580 — Montaigne, Essays.

1582 — Introduction of Gregorian calendar.

1588 — Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

1598 — Edict of Nantes.

1600 — (British) East India Company founded.

1601 — Shakespeare, Hamlet.

1603 — Death of Elizabeth I; accession of James VI & I.

1605 — Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part One.

1607 — Establishment of Jamestown colony.

1610 — Galileo, The Starry Messenger.

1615 — Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part Two.

1618 — Outbreak of Thirty Years War.

1620 — Mayflower lands; Bacon, Novum Organum.

1637 — Descartes, Discourse on Method.

1642 — Beginning of the English Civil War.

1644 — Milton, Areopagitica.

1648 — Peace of Westphalia.

1649 — Charles I executed; Commonwealth established.

1651 — Hobbes, Leviathan; Louis XIV comes of age.

1653 — Instrument of Government; Cromwell becomes Lord Protector.

1660 — Restoration of Charles II; Royal Society founded.

1667 — Milton, Paradise Lost.

1687 — Newton, Principia Mathematica.

1688 — Glorious Revolution.

1689 — Accession of Peter the Great.

1690 — Locke, Treatise of Civil Government.

1694 — Bank of England established.

1705 — Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive.

1707 — Act of Union between England & Scotland.

1715 — Death of Louis XIV; First Jacobite Rebellion.

1726 — Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.

1729 — Swift, A Modest Proposal.

1733 — Pope, Essay on Man.

1745 — Second Jacobite Rebellion.

1751 — Diderot & d’Alembert, Encyclopedia: publication, begun—final volume in 1772.

1759 — Voltaire, Candide.

1762 — Rousseau, Emile; Catherine the Great assumes power in Russia.

1764 — Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary.

1769 — James Watt’s improved steam engine.

1774 — Louis XVI becomes King of France.

1776 — US Declaration of Independence; Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

1777 — Hume’s essays ‘Of Miracles’ & ‘Of Suicide’ published posthumously.

1779 — Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

1781 — Rousseau, Confessions (posthumous publication begun); Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

1789 — Outbreak of French Revolution.

1790 — Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

1791 — Paine, Rights of Man.

1792 — Execution of Louis XVI.

1794 — William Blake, Songs of Innocence & Experience.

1798 — Wordsworth & Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads; Malthus, An essay on the principle of population.

1799 — Napoleon becomes temporary consul.

1803 — Louisiana Purchase.

1804 — Coronation of Napoleon I, Emperor of France; Haiti becomes first independent Caribbean nation.

1812 — Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

1813 — Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

1815 — Battle of Waterloo; Restoration of Bourbon monarchy in France.

1819 — Peterloo massacre.

1822 — Death of Shelley.

1832 — Great Reform Act.

1834 — Abolition of slavery in British Empire.

1844 — Chambers: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.

1845 — Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.

1848 — Marx & Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party.

1850 — Tennyson: In Memoriam A. H. H.

1858 — Wallace & Darwin’s Linnaean Society papers.

1859 — Darwin: The Origin of Species.

1861 — Outbreak of American Civil War.

1864 — End of Civil War and abolition of slavery in U.S.

1867 — Marx: Capital, Vol. 1.

1870 — Franco-Prussian War: collapse of French Second Empire.

1871 — Darwin: The Descent of Man.

1883 — Death of Marx.

1899 — Conrad Heart of Darkness; Freud: Interpretation of Dreams.

1905 — First Russian Revolution; Freud: Dora.

1914 — Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and outbreak of World War One.

1916 — Easter Rising in Ireland.

1915 — Kafka: Metamorphosis.

1917 — Second Russian Revolution: death of Tsar Nicholas II.

1918 — Armistice in World War One.

1922 — Mussolini’s March on Rome; Partition of Ireland.

1924 — Death of Lenin.

1929 — Wall Street Crash; Woolf: A Room of One’s Own.

1933 — Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.

1936 — Spanish Civil War begins (ends 1939); Italian conquest of Ethiopia.

1939 — Germany invades Poland: beginning of World War Two; Death of W. B. Yeats.

1940 — Fall of France; Battle of Britain.

1941 — Pearl Harbor; Hitler attacks USSR; Borges: The Garden of Forking Paths.

1945 — Use of atom bomb; Defeat of Germany and Japan; Start of Cold War.

1947 — Indian independence.

1948 — Israel established; Berlin airlift begins.

1953 — Death of Joseph Stalin; structure of DNA discovered.

1954 — Dien Bien Phu; Algerian War begins (ends 1962).

1957 — Launch of Sputnik; Camus: The Guest.

1962 — Cuban Missile Crisis.

1972 — Calvino: Invisible Cities.