1510
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Russia's last free republic loses her charter January 29. Basil III Ivanovich obliges Pskov to send her assembly bell to Moscow (see 1316).
Hamburg becomes a free city of the Holy Roman Empire.
Pope Julius lifts his excommunication of Venice February 10 and turns against France's Louis XII (see 1509). The Swiss join his Holy League of Cambrai, but Ferrara's Alfonso I d'Este sides with the French, and the pope deprives him of Modena, which has belonged to Ferrara since the 13th century (see 1512).
France's chief minister Georges Cardinal d'Amboise dies at Lyons May 25 at age 49 upon his return from another venture into Italy with Louis XII.
Parliament attaints former House of Commons speakers William Empson and Edmund Dudley, who are beheaded in mid-August. Henry VIII has charged them with treason, but their real crime has been their use of extortionate measures in administering Henry VII's arbitrary system of taxation-measures to fatten their own purses and obtain vast estates.
Swedish forces under the command of Ake Hansson Natt och Dag invade Denmark as they did 3 years ago, attacking the Skanian towns of Markaryd and Orkelljunga, plundering the town of Wä, and burning it to the ground as an earlier Swedish army did in 1452 (see 1523).
Persia's Safavid shah Ismail I defeats an Uzbek army, kills Mohammed Shaybani, and takes Herat, Bactria, and Khiva, extending his realm from the Tigris to the Oxus.
Afonso de Albuquerque, now 57, occupies the island of Goa off India's Malabar coast in March (see 1503). He has failed in an attempt to seize Cochin in January but has gained support from the pirate Timoja and attacked Goa in February with 23 ships. Forced out of the citadel by a Muslim army in May, he storms the citadel in November and puts its defenders to the sword. Western Europe's first real toehold in India, Goa will remain in Portuguese hands for more than 4½ centuries.
Chinese bureaucrat-philosopher Wang Yangming (Wang Yang-ming) is appointed magistrate in Kiangsi Province, where he will carry out reforms that include a "joint registration system" that allows 10 families to share responsibility for a community's security (see 1506). Wang has come to the realization that knowledge and action are one, in that proper action requires correct knowledge. He will be summoned to an imperial audience next year and be given successively higher appointments until by 1516 he will be governor of southern Kiangsi Province and adjacent regions (see 1517).
The Chinese court eunuch Liu Jin (Liu Chin) is executed for treason at age 48, having used graft to amass a fortune in gold and silver, but eunuchs continue to rule the country while the Ming emperor Zhengde (Cheng-te) devotes himself to frivolity (see 1521).
Soldier-explorer Francisco de Almeida is killed in a skirmish with Khoikhoin (Hottentot) natives while taking on water at Table Bay on the Cape of Good Hope March 1 at age 59. He has been the first viceroy of Portuguese India.
European explorers probe the east coast of North America to a point north of the Savannah River.
A horizontal water wheel designed by Leonardo da Vinci pioneers the water turbine.
Anatomy by Leonardo da Vinci contains drawings from life based on cadavers that Leonardo has somehow obtained and dissected, but he does not permit his work to be published (see Vesalius, 1543).
The Venetian painter Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco) dies of plague at age 32, having caught the disease from "a certain lady." The artist is remembered for his landscape Tempests, and his death brings a rush by Italian art patrons for this and for a handful of other known Giorgione canvases including Laura, The Three Philosophers, Trial of Moses, Judgment of Solomon, Sleeping Venus, and The Virgin and St. Francis and St. Liberate.
Other paintings: Presentation in the Temple by Vittore Carpaccio; The Gypsy Madonna by Venetian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 23; Salome by Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo (Sebastiano Luciani), 25; The Triumph of Galatea by Raphael; Rest on the Flight to Egypt by German painter-printmaker-architect Albrecht Altdorfer at Regensburg. Sandro Botticelli dies at his native Florence May 17 at age 65.
Engravings: Ecce Homo, The Milkmaid, and The Return of the Prodigal Son by Lucas van Leyden.
Theater: Everyman is an English morality play based on the Dutch morality play Elckerlijk first performed in 1495.
Venetian women adopt a platform-style shoe called the chopine, worn by Turkish harem women for hygienic reasons when visiting the bath (date approximate). One version, worn by men, has an iron ring on top to make it easier for its wearer to lift his feet from the mud. Women wear shoes mounted on painted wooden stands that raise them from three to four inches to a foot above the ground, making it impossible to walk in extreme versions of the shoe unless supported by a maid on either side.
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