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The devistating outbreak of the black plague hit Europe. This was carried by fleas, then through rats to the people. The plague kills 25 million people. Nearly 1/3 of the population in Europe!
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The first guns apear in Europe! It is unknown who first discovered gun powder. However it is a proven fact the first gun was made in Italy. This changed war fare drastically because before only metal/wooden weapons were used.
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The first Caravels were built. They were used alot by the Spanish in the 15th to 16th centuries. They were a faster way of transportation. Used mostly by explorers, this was a great importance to the history to of exploration.
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The guttenberg Bilbe was printed on a printing press. The press used movable type for the print. This invention made it possible for books to be made inexpensively. As a result knowledge began to spread more rapidly than ever before in history.
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Moslem Turks capture the great Christain city of Constantinople. This is the beginning of the historical period of the Renaissance. This is an age when art florished and took a new turn as well as science. After this the Genoese put their financial supposrt behind Portuguese efforts to find a new route to Asia.
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Columbus dicovers the West Indies in the New World. Columbus also learns the compasses change direction slightly as the longitude changes. After seven centuries the last moslems are driven from Spanish soil. Leonardo Da Vinci draws a plan for a flying machine.
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A new map of the world uses the name "America" for the newly discovered southern continent in honor of Amerigo Vespucchi. Johannes Ruysch an explorer, cartographer, astronomer and painter from the Low Countries produced the second oldest known printed representation of the New World. The Ruysch map was published and widely distributed in 1507.
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Balboa led an expedition across Panama looking for gold, but discovered the Pacific Ocean instead. It took 24 days for his group of 190 Spaniards and 1000 natives to cross the 45 miles of jungle. On September 29, 1513 they reached the Pacific Ocean and claimed all the land that touched the Pacific Ocean for Spain.
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African slaves were used on the sugar plantation of the West Indies, and with them came smallpox. In 1495, fifty-seven to eighty percent of the native population of Santa Domingo and in 1515, two-thirds of the Indians of Puerto Rico were wiped out by smallpox. Ten years after Cortez arrived in Mexico, the native population had been reduced from twenty-five million to six million five hundred thousand a reduction of seventy-four percent.
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Ethnohistorians say that when the Spanish second arrived, native peoples did not view them as supernatural in any sense but rather as simply another group of powerful outsiders. Many Spanish accounts incorporated omens to emphasize what they saw as the preordained nature of the conquest and their success as Spanish destiny. This means that native emphasis on omens and bewilderment in the face of invasion.
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During the Spaniards' retreat, they defeated a large Aztec army at Otumba and then rejoined their Tlaxcaltec allies. In May 1521, Cortés returned to Tenochtitlán, and after a three-month siege the city fell. This victory marked the fall of the Aztec empire. Cuauhtámoc, Cuitláhuac's successor as emperor, was taken prisoner and later executed, and Cortés became the ruler of a vast Mexican empire.
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