1528
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French forces lay siege to Naples in the war against Spain's Carlos I (the uncrowned Holy Roman Emperor Charles V). Imperial troops under the command of Philibert de Chalon, 26, prince of Orange, come close to starvation, but typhus forces an end to the siege in late August after 6 weeks in which the city has come close to starvation. The prince of Orange leads his cavalry out of Naples and cuts down the retreating forces of François I and Clement VII.
Genoa reinstates the office of doge, but restricts it to aristocrats who are to serve no more than 2 years each.
Military leader Georg von Frundsberg dies at his native Mindelheim Castle near Memmingen August 20 at age 54, having helped found the Landsknechte to support the Hapsburgs and fought in 20 pitched battles.
The aged Songhai emperor Mohammed I Askia in West Africa is overthrown after a 35-year reign by his eldest son, who has killed Mohammed's brother and new general in chief, Yaya. The son deposes his father and will reign until 1531 as Askia Musa.
Spanish conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez lands on the west coast of Florida in April with 400 prospective colonists. Most die of hunger and thirst; de Narvaez dies at sea.
Spanish explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, 38, is wrecked on a Texas coastal island and held captive by the natives.
Hernándo Cortéz returns to Spain to confront the authorities who revoked his authority in 1526.
Augsburg banker Bartholomeus Welser, 40, and his brother Amon obtain rights to conquer and colonize most of northeastern South America as an hereditary fief under a treaty signed May 27 with his agents Ehinger and Sailer. Welser has made a fortune trading in sugar, spices, and African slaves; he has helped Carlos I finance some Spanish expeditions to the New World; and his agent Ambrosius Ehinger (Dalfinger) explores the interior of what will become Venezuela (see 1527; 1546).
Caribe tribesmen in the Lesser Antilles (probably Guadeloupe) kill explorer Giovanni da Verrazano at age 43 as he collects wood in November; his ships proceed on an expedition to Brazil.
A typhus epidemic sweeps the Italian states and kills an estimated 21,000 in July. The French army laying siege to Naples is felled by the disease and by late August only 4,000 of the original 25,000-man army remain.
Basel physicians force Theophrastus von Hohenheim to leave town (see 1527; Paracelsus, 1530).
The Reformation gains acceptance in Bern, Basel, and three other cantons, but Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Fribourg, Solothurn, and Zug remain staunchly Catholic (see 1531).
Austrian evangelist Jacob Hutter founds a "community of love" whose Austrian, German, and Swiss members share everything communally. The Hutterites will be forced to seek refuge in Muscovy (see 1536).
Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, dies October 5 at age 80, having founded Oxford's Corpus Christi College.
Nonfiction: The Courtier (Il Cortegiano) by Count Baldassare Castiglione is a manual for courtiers in dialogue form that has circulated privately for some years (see 1516). Now 50, Castiglione was sent by the duke of Urbino in 1505 as an envoy to England's Henry VIII (who made him a knight) and has since served as Mantua's ambassador to the papal court at Rome and as papal nuncio for Pope Clement VII in Spain. He recounts four evenings of conversation among several dozen lords and ladies at Urbino in March 1507. The ideal lady and ideal gentleman must be of aristocratic birth, he says, and his characters expound on concepts of love, courtship, and sexual conduct. A lover must see his lady often and converse with her, says Castiglione in his neo-Platonic theory of ideal love, instead of going off on endless quests in the name of serving her, as in medieval times, but to be the finest and most ennobling their love must remain chaste. A woman should never show her admirer any clear sign of love, either by words or gestures or any other means.
Painting: Nicholas Kratzer and The Artist's Family by Hans Holbein; Madonna of St. Jerome (Il Giorno) by Correggio; The Visitation by Jacopo da Pontormo. Albrecht Dürer dies at Nuremberg April 6 at age 56; Matthias Grünewald at Halle August 30 (or 31) at an age somewhere between 45 and 58.
Fontainebleau Palace is completed outside Paris for François I; three Italian architects have designed the structure.
Spanish colonists introduce wheat into New Spain (see Mexico, 1941).
Sweet potatoes, haricot beans, turkeys, cocoa beans, and vanilla are introduced to Spain by Hernándo Cortéz, who gives some of the haricot beans to Pope Clement VII (Giulio de' Medici). Fava beans have been the only beans known to Europe until now, and the new, kidney-shaped beans are called fagioli, an association with the traditional broad fava beans. The pope gives some of the large, kidney-shaped beans to Canon Piero Valeriano, who sows them in pots and finds that they flourish. Northern Italians will be quick to begin cultivation of fagioli (they will not be called haricot beans for more than a century; see 1640).
Spaniards use the term cacao beans for the cocoa brought home by Cortéz (the word is derived from the Aztec cacahuatl). Where the Aztec have mixed cocoa paste with spices, Spanish nuns in their convent at Oaxaca have mixed it with sugar, which adds greatly to its acceptability. In Spain, it is mixed with orange or rose water, to which cinammon, vanilla, almonds, pistachios, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, or aniseed may be added according to taste. Served cold, the exotic mixture—thick enough to hold up a spoon—is swizzled to a froth with a utensil adapted from the Aztec, a wooden stick with several concentric loose disks around it. The late Montezuma II's 371 tribute towns paid him tributes that included tlilxochitl (vanilla), some of it from the Mazantla Valley (see 1532). The Aztec also drink pulque, a wine they make from the maguey plant.
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