1536
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Contents: political eventsexploration, colonization transportation medicine religion literature architecture, real estate agriculture nutrition food and drink |
Geneva adopts the Reformation as her ally Bern subdues Vaud, Chablais, Lausanne, and other territories belonging to the duke of Savoy. A long struggle begins between Bern and Savoy (see Calvin, 1541).
England's Henry VIII has his wife, Anne Boleyn, beheaded May 19 on charges of adultery and incest, although her guilt of anything more than arrogance is by no means clear. (It has also been suggested that she was a witch, the evidence being a rudimentary sixth finger on her left hand.) His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, has died in the dank and gloomy Kimbolton Castle January 7 at age 50. Henry has had witnesses tortured; 16 have testified that Anne had incestous relations with her brother George, swearing that they all clearly and at the same time saw her "alluring him with her tongue in the said George's mouth and the said George's tongue in hers." Five of her alleged lovers are also executed. "You have chosen me from a low estate to be your queen and companion, far beyond my desert or desire," Anne says in her final letter to Henry, and she tells her supporters, "The king has been very good to me. He promoted me from a simple maid to be a marchioness. Then he raised me to be a queen. Now he will raise me to be a martyr." She has borne the king a daughter, Elizabeth, but has recently miscarried, causing Henry to believe there is a curse on the marriage. On May 20 he marries Anne's 17-year-old lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour, whose brother is duke of Somerset. She takes as her motto, "Bound to obey and serve."
A Catholic rebellion in England gains support from the prelate Reginald Pole, 36, son of Margaret, countess of Salisbury. The rebellion is crushed, but Pope Paul III makes Pole a cardinal and will dispatch him as an emissary to incite both France's François I and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to send an expedition to depose Henry VIII.
A third war begins between Charles V and François I, who has renewed claims to Milan following the death last year of Francesco Sforza (see 1525). François makes a formal alliance in March with Suleiman the Magnificent after more than a decade of discussions between French and Ottoman emissaries. Suleiman advances on Hungary and sends fleets to ravage the coasts of Italy while French forces take Turin.
France's dauphin, the duc d'Orleans, now 17, becomes enamored of Diane de Poitiers, now 37, whose late husband, Louis de Brézé, died in 1531 at age 72. Despite the discrepancy in their ages, she will be the young man's mistress until his death in 1559.
Poland's gentry (szlachta) rebel against Sigismund I, who has tried to increase his power. Jan Tarnowski comes to the king's aid in what will be called the "Poultry War."
The Ottoman grand vizier Ibrahim conducts preliminary negotiations at Constantinople in January with representatives of France's François I for a commercial treaty (see 1534), but the sultan Suleiman I becomes alarmed at his boyhood friend Ibrahim's usurpation of authority and has him executed March 15 at age 42 (approximate).
Spanish grandee Don Pedro de Mendoza arrives early in the year at the mouth of the Río de la Plata with 1500 settlers in 11 large ships to establish the town of Nuestra Señora de Buenos Aires (see 1535). But the Spaniards soon antagonize the native Guaraní population, which lays siege to the town from June to August (see 1537).
Spanish magistrate Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, 40, leads an expedition of some 900 men up the Magdalena River into the interior of New Granada. Trained as a lawyer, he came to the New World last year to serve as chief magistrate for the colony of Santa Marta. Quesada has no military experience but marches his men for 8 months through tropical jungle, overcoming hostile tribespeople until he reaches the great central plain inhabited by the Chibcha, who have established a fairly sophisticated culture. Their ruler, the Zipa of Bogotá, runs away as the Spaniards approach. Sebastián de Belalcázar from Quito and Nikolaus Federmann from Venezuela will contest Quesada's claim to New Granada (see 1539).
Hernándo Cortéz discovers Baja (Lower) California (see 1530). He believes it to be an island and gives it a name that comes by some accounts from a popular Spanish novel (see 1540).
The grandson of the late Christopher Columbus receives the title "admiral of the Indies" in June under a settlement made with the Spanish crown (see 1526). Luis Columbus (Colón) renounces all other rights in return for a perpetual annuity of 10,000 ducats, the island of Jamaica as a fiefdom, the titles duque de Veragua and marquis de Jamaica, and an estate of 15 square leagues on the Isthmus of Panama.
Explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca reaches Mexico City (Tenochtitlan), having been wrecked on a Texas coastal island in 1528. Captured by the natives and held captive for 2 years, Cabeza de Vaca has escaped, has made a long overland journey through the Southwest, and sails for Spain (see 1542).
Jacques Cartier seizes some Hurons in May when the ice breaks up on the St. Lawrence River (see 1535). Returning home from New France with a Huron chief, the chief's two sons, three adult Hurons, two little girls, and two little boys (all of whom soon die), Cartier tells François I that there is a great river of about 800 leagues (about 2,000 miles) in length which may lead to the "western sea," and the Huron chief swears to the king that Saguenay is not only rich in cloves, nutmegs, and peppers but also grows oranges and pomegranates, but the war in Europe prevents François from dispatching another expedition (see 1541).
Portuguese mathematician Pedro Nunes, 44, describes errors in the plain charts used by seamen. Nunes will invent the nonius for graduating instruments, and his nonius will be improved and developed into the vernier (see 1631).
Thrésor des Remèdes Secrets pour les Maladies des Femmes by French physician Jean Liebault describes, among other things, regimens designed to overcome lack of fertility. Catherine de' Medici, wife of the dauphin, has been unable to conceive.
John of Leyden and some of his more prominent Anabaptist followers are tortured with exquisite cruelty and then executed in January in the marketplace of Münster (see 1535). The zealot's remains will swing in a cage from a church rafter until the 20th century. His Anabaptist followers are butchered wholesale, and they will hereafter lose their identity.
Friesland clergyman Menno Simons (or Simonsz), 43, leaves the Roman communion January 12 after 11 years of questioning infant baptism and getting inconsistent answers to his questions from Martin Luther and other Protestant leaders. Anabaptists will be confused by many with Mennonites—followers of Menno Simons—who, in fact, repudiate the bellicose doctrines of the Münster Anabaptists (see 1523). Simons goes into hiding, lest he suffer the fate of the Anabaptists (see 1537).
Jacob Hutter is arrested and burnt at the stake on orders from the German king Ferdinand (see 1528). Hutter has taught that his followers were God's elect and could only expect hardship and suffering (see population, 1874).
The Practyce of Prelates by William Tyndale of 1526 Bible fame is published in England. Tyndale lost favor with Henry VIII by criticizing the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon; condemned for heresy at Vilvorde Castle outside Brussels, he is strangled at the stake October 6.
Portugal installs the Inquisition and invites the Society of Jesus to send Jesuits into the country (see 1506).
Humanist and theologian Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples dies at Nérac in March at age 80 (approximate), having fled to Nérac 5 years ago and gained support from Navarre's Margeurite d'Angoulême; humanist Desiderius Erasmus is exiled from Basel and dies at Freiburg July 12 at age 69.
Venice's Mint (Zecca) is completed with rusticated columns and wall surfaces to designs by Jacopo Sansovino, who begins construction of the Library of San Marco.
The potato (Solanum tuberosum) is discovered in the Andes by the conquistador Gonzalo Jiminéz de Quesada, who finds the natives eating a freeze-dried food that they call chunyo. A member of the Solenacaea family (which includes also capsicums, tomatoes, and tobacco), it will eventually provide Europe with a cheap source of food in the centuries to come and thus spur population growth. Quesada finds the natives eating only the largest of the tubers (the swollen tips of an underground stem), which they call papas, and planting the smallest, thus steadily reducing the size of the tubers, which their ancestors domesticated sometime between 3,700 and 3,000 B.C. Since the tubers grow underground and are only about the size and shape of peanuts, the Spanish mistake them for a kind of truffle and call them tartuffo, which will persist with variations as the word for potato in parts of Europe (see 1539). After the potato, the most important root crop for the Andean highlanders is the oca (Oxalis tuberosa). In addition, the Inca eat the leaves and seeds of lupine (Lupinus mutabilis), also called tarwi or chocho. Cultivated crops include quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa)—the Spaniards call it millet, or "small rice"—which thrives even in droughts that kill maize crops and is used in stews and soups, along with potatoes and chili, and, where maize is not grown, to make the fermented beverage which Europeans call chicha. Chicha is actually a Taíno word that the Spaniards learned in the Antilles; the beverage is known as aka or asua in Quechua and is important to religious ritual among the Inca as well as being a source of nourishment. Women and boys chew maize or quinoa (or, in some places, oca, yucca, other roots, or the fruit of the molle) and let the enzymes in their saliva work on what they chew to help ferment it before spitting it out. The Inca do not drink water unless no alternative is available. Seaweed is part of the Inca diet, eaten fresh on the seacoast and dried in sheets and blocks for trade in the Andean highlands, where it is known as cochayuyo.
Jacques Cartier loses 25 men to scurvy on his second expedition to New France (see 1535). By mid-February, "out of the 110 men that we were, not ten were well enough to help the others, a thing pitiful to see." But although 50 Huron in the area also die of scurvy, a Huron chief shows Cartier how to grind the bark of the commmon arborvitae Thuja occidentalis, boil the ground bark in water, drink the infusion every other day, and apply the residue as a poultice to swollen, blackened legs. Cartier digs up arborvitae saplings and transplants them in the royal garden at Fountainebleau upon his return.
England begins to suffer shortages of honey as the monasteries that raised honey bees as a source of wax for votive candles are dissolved pursuant to the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The breakup of English and Welsh monasteries has virtually ended production of wine in the British isles (see 1349; 1873).
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