1403

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political events

England's Henry IV takes time off from battling the Scots and Welsh to marry the widow Joanna of Navarre, 32, whose first husband, the duke of Burgundy, died in 1399. A daughter of Charles d'Albret, king of Navarre, and the mother of eight, she becomes stepmother to Henry's 15-year-old son by his first wife, the late Mary de Bohun. Richard Beauchamp, 21, 5th earl of Warwick, supports Henry July 21 at the Battle of Shrewsbury, which pits Henry's bowmen and those of his son against those of the rebellious Sir Henry Percy, 3rd Baron Percy, who has sided with Edmund Mortimer against the king and joined the 4-year-old Welsh revolt of Owen Glendower. Sir Henry is killed, and the king gives orders that his body is to be dismembered and put on display around the country. Sir Henry's brother Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, is captured (and executed soon afterward), but Glendower has not participated in the battle and will rage through Wales in the next few years with an army of 8,000 men, taking towns and castles in a bid to gain independence (see 1405). Percy's 10-year-old son Henry submits, receives a pardon, and will be the first earl of Northumberland (but see 1408).

Venice recalls her grand admiral Carlo Zeno to military service, and he engages a French fleet off Genoa. Now 69, he is then called upon to fight on land against Francesco I Carrara, lord of Padua, whose palace is sacked. Accused of having participated in plundering the palace, Zeno will be imprisoned for 2 years.

The captive Ottoman sultan Bayazid I dies in March at age 43 in Tamerlane's camp at Aksehir en route east (see 1402). He has founded the first centralized Ottoman state based on traditional Turkish and Muslim institutions, pushing to extend Ottoman domination of Anatolia. A 10-year interregnum begins as "the Thunderbolt's" six sons vie for power.

commerce

The Hanseatic League gains complete control of Bergen, Norway, and enjoys a virtual monopoly in most of the commodities produced by northern Europe including fish, the salt used for curing fish, whale oil, pitch and rosin employed in shipbuilding and maintenance, and eiderdown (see 1406).

medicine

The doge of Venice imposes the world's first quarantine as a safeguard against the bubonic plague that will be called the Black Death (see 1374). All who wish to enter the city must wait, and the waiting time will be standardized at 40 days in 1485 (see 1439).

religion

Bologna passes a law forbidding citizens to loiter about convents conversing and playing music with the nuns.

communications, media

Korea's Yi dynasty king Htai Tjong orders 100,000 pieces of type to be cast in bronze (see 1234; Wang Chen, 1313).

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