while the science was starting...

Ottoman Empire:

Mehmed II (1451-1481) Fall of Constantinople (1453)

Bayezid II (1481-1512)

Selim I (1512-1520) Battle of Chaldiran against Safavids (1514), conquest of Egypt (1517)

Suleiman I (1520-1566) Conquered Belgrade, Rhodes, and most of Hungary before he was stopped at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He annexed most of the Middle East in his conflict with the Safavids and large swathes of North Africa as far west as Algeria. Under his rule, the Ottoman fleet dominated the seas from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Selim II (1566-1574) His Grand Vizier, Mehmed Sokollu, a Bosnian devsirme, controlled much of state affairs, and succeeded in concluding an honourable treaty with the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, whereby the Emperor agreed to pay an annual "present" and granted the Ottomans authority in Moldavia and Walachia.

England and France

In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, led an invasion of England. He defeated the English King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings, and had himself crowned King of England.

Following a period of civil wars and unrest in England the Anglo-Norman dynasty was succeeded by the Angevin Kings. At the height of their power the Angevins controlled Normandy and England. The King of England directly ruled more territory on the continent than the King of France himself. John of England inherited this great estate from King Richard I. However, Philip II of France acted decisively to exploit the weaknesses of King John, both legally and militarily, and by 1204 had succeeded in wresting control of most of the ancient territorial possessions and reduced Angevin hold on the continent to a few small provinces in Gascony, and the complete loss of the crown jewel of Normandy.

By the early 14th century, many people in the English aristocracy were motivated to regain possession of these territories.

Hundred Years' War

Hundred Years' WarCharles IV died without an heir in 1328. Under the rules of the Salic law

adopted in 1316, the crown of France could not pass to a woman, nor could the line of kinship pass through the female line. Accordingly, the crown passed to the cousin of Charles, Philip of Valois, rather than through the female line to Charles' nephew, Edward, who would soon become Edward III of England. In the reign of Philip of Valois, the French monarchy reached the height of its medieval power. However, Philip's seat on the throne was contested by Edward III of England and in 1337, on the eve of the first wave of the Black Death, England and France went to war in what would become known as the Hundred Years' War. The exact boundaries changed greatly with time, but French landholdings of the English Kings remained extensive for decades. Strong French counterattacks won back all English continental territories, except Calais which was captured in 1558 by the French. Like the rest of Europe, France was struck by the Black Death. Around 1340, France had a population of about 17 million, which by the end of the pandemic had declined by about one-half.

Castille and Aragon

The marriage of the Queen of Castille Isabella and the King of Aragon Ferdinand II unified

Spain at the end of 15th

Century.

Queen Isabella rejected Christopher Columbus's plan to reach the Indies by sailing west (2000 miles, according to Columbus) more than three times before changing her mind. His expedition arrived in America in 1492. He returned the next year and presented his findings to the monarchs, Spain entered a Golden Age of exploration and colonization, the period of the Spanish Empire.

The Portuguese did not recognise that South America belonged to the Spanish and the Portuguese King John II threatened to send an army to claim the land for the Portuguese. In 1494, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, Isabella and Ferdinand agreed to divide the Earth, outside of Europe, with king John II of Portugal.

PortugalYoung prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) of Portugal wished to

know how far Muslim territories in Africa extended, hoping to bypass it and trade directly with West Africa by sea, find allies in legendary Christian lands to the south and to probe whether it was possible to reach the Indies by sea, the source of the lucrative spice trade. He invested in sponsoring voyages down the coast of Mauritania.

In 1460 Pero de Sintra reached Sierra Leone. In the Southern hemisphere, they used the Southern Cross as the reference for celestial navigation.

The next crucial breakthrough was in 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa, which he named "Cape of Storms" and then sailing east, proving that the Indian Ocean was accessible from the Atlantic. Soon the cape was renamed by king John II of Portugal "Cape of Good Hope" (Cabo da Boa Esperança), because of the great optimism engendered by the possibility of a sea route to India, proving false the view that had existed since Ptolemy that the Indian Ocean was land-locked.

ItalyThe Black Death pandemic in 1348 left its mark on Italy by killing one

third of the population. However, the recovery from the disaster of the Black Death led to a resurgence of cities, trade and economy which greatly stimulated the successive phase of the Humanism and Renaissance, that best known for its cultural achievements. Accounts of Renaissance literature usually begin with Petrarch and his friend and contemporary Boccaccio. 15th century writers such as the poet Poliziano and the Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino made extensive translations from both Latin and Greek. In the early 16th century, Machiavelli cast a jaundiced eye on "la verita effetuale delle cose" — the actual truth of things — in The Prince, composed, humanist style, chiefly of parallel ancient and modern examples of Virtù. Italian Renaissance painting exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting for centuries afterwards, with artists such as Giotto di Bondone, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian.

AustriaIn the 14th and 15th centuries, the Habsburgs began to accumulate

other provinces in the vicinity of the Duchy of Austria. In 1438 Duke Albert V of Austria was chosen as the successor to his father-in-law, Emperor Sigismund. Although Albert himself only reigned for a year, henceforth every emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was a Habsburg, with only one exception.

The Habsburgs began also to accumulate lands far from the hereditary lands. In 1477 Archduke Maximilian, only son of Emperor Frederick III, married the heiress Maria of Burgundy, thus acquiring most of the Netherlands for the family. His son Philip the Fair married the heiress of Castile and Aragon, and thus acquired Spain and its Italian, African and New World appendages for the Habsburgs. In 1526 following the Battle of Mohács, Bohemia and the part of Hungary not occupied by the Ottomans came under Austrian rule. Ottoman expansion into Hungary led to frequent conflicts between the two empires, particularly evident in the so-called Long War of 1593 to 1606.

Johannes GutenbergJohannes Gutenberg (c. 1398 – 1468) was a German goldsmith, printer

and publisher who introduced modern book printing. His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period. It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type printing, in around 1439, and the global inventor of the printing press. Among his many contributions to printing are: the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type; the use of oil-based ink; and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period.

First circumnavigationSince 1516, several Portuguese conflicting with king Manuel I of

Portugal gathered in Seville, at the service of the newly crowned Charles I of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan was among them. Ferdinand Magellan—who had sailed in India for Portugal until 1513, when Maluku Islands were reached developed the theory that the islands were in the Tordesillas Spanish area. Aware of the efforts of the Spanish to find a route to India by sailing west, Magellan presented them a plan to get there.

The Spanish king financed Magellan's expedition. On August 10, 1519, departed from Seville a fleet of five ships—flagship Trinidad under Magellan's command, San Antonio, Concepcion, Santiago and Victoria.

The expedition managed to cross the Pacific. Magellan died in a battle in the Philippines, leaving the Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano the task of completing the voyage. In 1522 Victoria returned to Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the globe.

France in the 16th Century

The French Renaissance saw a long set of wars, known as the Italian Wars, between the Kingdom of France and the powerful Holy Roman Empire It saw also the first standardization of the French language, which would become the official language of France and the language of Europe's aristocracy. French explorers, such as Jacques Cartier or Samuel de Champlain, claimed lands in the Americas for France, paving the way for the expansion of the First French colonial empire. The rise of Protestantism in Europe led France to a civil war known as the French Wars of Religion, where, in the most notorious incident, thousands of Huguenots (French Protestants) were murdered in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572. The wars of Religion were ended in France by Henry IV's Edict of Nantes which granted some freedom of religion to the Huguenots. Henry IV was eventually murdered by a Catholic fanatic.

EnglandThe Black Death epidemic hit England, starting in 1348, it eventually

killed up to half of England's inhabitants. From 1453 to 1487 civil war between two branches of the royal family occurred—the Yorkists and Lancastrians—known as the Wars of the Roses. Eventually it led to the Yorkists losing the throne entirely to a Welsh noble family the Tudors, a branch of the Lancastrians headed by Henry Tudor who invaded, gaining victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field where the Yorkist king Richard III was killed. During the Tudor period, the Renaissance reached England through Italian courtiers, who reintroduced artistic, educational and scholarly debate from classical antiquity. During this time England began to develop naval skills, and exploration to the West intensified.

Henry VIII broke from communion with the Catholic Church under the Acts of Supremacy in 1534 which proclaimed the monarch head of the Church of England. There were internal religious conflicts during the reigns of Henry's daughters; Mary I and Elizabeth I. The former attempted to bring the country back to Catholicism, while the later broke from it again more forcefully.

Protestant ReformationThe Protestant Reformation was the European Christian reform

movement that established Protestantism as a constituent branch of contemporary Christianity. It was led by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to ("protested") the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Catholic Church, led to the creation of new national Protestant churches. The Catholics responded with a Counter-Reformation, led by the Jesuit order, which reclaimed large parts of Europe, such as Poland. In general, northern Europe, with the exception of Ireland and pockets of Britain, turned Protestant, and southern Europe remained Catholic, while fierce battles that turned into warfare took place in the centre. The largest of the new denominations were the Anglicans (based in England), the Lutherans (based in Germany and Scandinavia), and the Reformed churches (based in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scotland). The most common dating begins in 1517 when Luther published The Ninety-Five Theses, and concludes in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia that ended years of European religious wars.