1551

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political events

The Ottoman Turks take Tripoli after failing in an attempt to conquer Malta from the Knights of St. John (see 1565).

Conquistador Sebastián de Benalcázar is indicted for killing Spanish leader Jorge Robledo and dies at Cartagena while awaiting trial at age 56 (approximate).

commerce

Parliament enacts a law to encourage employment of England's poor.

Prosperity fueled by wars and by precious metals from America will swell the coffers of European merchants in the next 6 years.

science

Prudentic Tables (Tabulae Prudenticae) by German astronomer Erasmus Reinhold, 40, contains astronomical tables based on numerical values provided by the late Nicolaus Copernicus. They represent an improvement on the widely used Alfonsine Tables.

Historia Animalium by Konrad Gesner at Zürich is published in its first volume, an illustrated, 1,100 folio-page compendium of recorded knowledge about animal life, beginning with viviparous quadrupeds (four-footed creatures that bear living offspring). Gesner has collected animals from the New World and the Old, and his work pioneers modern zoology. Volumes devoted to oviparous quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and other aquatic animals will appear between 1554 and 1556, and a fifth volume, on serpents, will be published posthumously in 1587.

medicine

A fifth epidemic of the sweating sickness strikes England in April, in Shrewsbury (see 1529). Foreigners are somehow spared, but Englishmen who flee to the Continent die there, even though Frenchmen and Lowlanders are not affected (see 1563; Kaye, 1552).

religion

Pope Julius III reconvenes the Council of Trent beginning May 1 in an effort to reform the Church (see 1545). He tries to restore monastic discipline and stop cardinals from receiving too many benefices, but France's Henri II publicly disavows the Council of Trent and renews war against the emperor Charles V, seizing the bishoprics of Toul, Metz, and Verdun (see politics, 1552).

Forty-two articles of religion published by the archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer will be the basis of Anglican Protestantism (see Thirty-Nine Articles, 1563).

Francis Xavier leaves Japan November 21 after 2 years in which he has proselytized scarcely 150 people (see 1549). He writes to the pope with advice on what trade goods should be brought to Japan, leaves behind two Jesuits and some converts, and sails for Goa (see 1552).

education

Peru's University of San Marco has its beginnings in a school founded by Dominican priests in a Lima convent.

The National University of Mexico has its beginnings in a school founded at Mexico City in New Spain (see 1865).

art

Painting: Prince Felipe of Spain by Titian; Portrait of a Nun (her sister Elena) by Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola (Sophonisba Anguisciola), 19, at Cremona; Portrait of a Lady by Caterina van Hemessen.

music

Hymn: "Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow" by French composer Louis Bourgeois.

Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 25, is appointed magister capellae and magister puerorum at Rome's Church of St. Giulia by Pope Julius III.

food and drink

Japan's bland diet fails to impress Western missionaries and traders, consisting as it does mostly of millet, wheat noodles, rice (not yet a food for the common people), seafood and seaweed (for those living near the seacoast), and radishes. The Japanese, for their part, are appalled to see Westerners eating with their hands and wiping their mouths and hands on cloth napkins, which are then soiled with food stains but not discarded.

restaurants

England and Wales license their alehouses for the first time. A German law dating to early in the century has stipulated that beer may be brewed only from hops, yeast, malt, and water. The German method of "hopping" beer was introduced during the reign of the late Henry VIII, but many have criticized the use of hops, saying that beer is a "naturall drynke for a Dutche man but on no account for an Englyshe man." Laws have been passed fining brewers who put hops in their ale (see agriculture, 1554).

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