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The 1490s

664 sourced entries across 10 years, inside the 15th century. Each year below opens its own page; the lines under it are that year’s highest-ranked entries.

1490 CE58 entries

  • January 4 – Anne of Brittany announces that all those who ally themselves with the king of France will be considered guilty of the crime of Lèse-majesté.
  • March or April – 1490 Qingyang event, a presumed meteor shower or air burst over Qingyang in the Gansu province in Ming dynasty China. Some later accounts lists casualties of more than 10,000 people. The only date given for the Qingyang event is that it was in "the third lunar month" on the Chinese lunar calendar coinciding with a period beginning on March 12 and ending on April 19, 1490.
  • May 28 – At Junnar in what is now India's Maharashtra state, the Ahmadnagar Sultanate is established by Ahmad Nizam Shah, who leads a secession of his land from the Bahmani Kingdom and defeats the Bahmani General Jahangir Khan.

1491 CE72 entries

  • February 2 – At Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland) Bogislaw X, Duke of Pomerania, marries Anna Jagiellon, daughter of King Casimir IV.
  • April 23 – The city of Granada, capital of the Muslim Emirate of Granada in Spain, is besieged by the armies of Castile and Aragon, ruled by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella.
  • May – The Ottoman–Mamluk War (1485–1491) between the Ottoman Empire and the Egyptian Mamluks ends.

1492 CE78 entries

  • May 31 – Pope Innocent VIII and members of the College of Cardinals meet at the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome with diplomatic envoys sent by the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II. The envoys present the Pope a gift, said to be the Holy Lance, from the Sultan, along with the Sultan's proposal, payment of 120,000 crowns of gold and an annual subsidy of 45,000 ducats in return for the continued imprisonment of Cem Sultan, a half-brother of Bayezid and a rival claimant to the throne.
  • August 2 – The Jews are expelled from Spain on the Tisha B'Av fast day, pursuant to the Alhambra Decree. More than 40,000 and perhaps as many as 200,000 leave. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, learning of this, dispatches the Ottoman Navy to bring the Jews safely to Ottoman lands, mainly to the cities of Thessaloniki (in modern-day Greece) and İzmir (in modern-day Turkey); others settle in Sarajevo.
  • August 3 – The Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus sails with three ships (Niña, Pinta and Santa María) from Palos de la Frontera, in the service of the Crown of Castile, on his first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, intending to reach Asia.

1493 CE62 entries

  • February 15 – Columbus begins writing his first account of his voyage to the New World, titled "Letter of Columbus, on the islands of India beyond the Ganges recently discovered", an account later printed and sold throughout Europe. His reference to the Ganges river in India confirms that he thought he had reached Asia.
  • March 4 – Christopher Columbus anchors in Lisbon and completes his February 15 letter on the first voyage, conveying the news of his discoveries.
  • September 24 – Christopher Columbus leaves Cádiz on his second voyage of exploration.

1494 CE80 entries

  • January 4 – The Cetinje Octoechos (Цетињски октоих, an Eastern Orthodox octoechos (liturgy), first tone), the first incunabulum written in the Serbian recension of Church Slavonic, and the first book printed in Cyrillic in Southeast Europe, is completed in Cetinje.
  • May – Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, recognises the pretender Perkin Warbeck as rightful King of England.
  • November 10 – Fra Luca Pacioli's Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità is published in Venice, containing the first printed account of algebra in the vernacular, and the first published description of the double-entry accounting system.

1495 CE65 entries

  • February 10 – King's College, Aberdeen, predecessor of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, is founded with the issuance of the papal bull Primo Erectio Universitatis by Pope Alexander VI on the petition of William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen.
  • July 3 – At the Battle of Deal, Perkin Warbeck's troops land in Kent, in support of his claim to the English crown, backed by Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy. They are routed before Warbeck himself can disembark, and he retreats to Ireland and then to Scotland.
  • July – Perkin Warbeck, having failed to land in Kent in support of his claim to the English crown, retreats to Ireland before proceeding to Scotland. Walter St. Lawrence plays an active part in the defence of Dublin.

1496 CE58 entries

  • February – Pietro Bembo's Petri Bembi de Aetna Angelum Chalabrilem liber, a description of a journey to Mount Etna, is published in Venice by Aldus Manutius, the first book printed in the old-style serif or humanist typeface cut by Francesco Griffo (known from the 20th century as Bembo) and with early adoption of the semicolon (dated 1495 according to the more veneto).
  • May 14 – At Augsburg, Maximilian, King of the Romans, grants an audience to Sir Christopher Urswick, the Kingdom of England's ambassador to the Empire, and informs his advisers that he believes the Ambassador is a spy gathering intelligence on the Empire's intentions toward England. Zacharia Contarini, the Empire's ambassador to France, then sends the report to the Doge of the Republic of Venice, Agostino Barbarigo.
  • November 27 – Led by Prince Prataparudra Deva, son of the Emperor Purushottama Deva, the Gajapati Empire (now India's state of Odisha) invades the Vijayanagara Empire (now the Karnataka state) and its armies advance as far as the Penna River, where they are stopped by a force commanded by the Vijayanagara sultan Tuluva Narasa Nayaka, and are turned back.

1497 CE68 entries

  • February 7 – At the public square in Florence, on Shrove Tuesday, followers of the charismatic Dominican friar and evangelist Girolamo Savonarola carry out the first "bonfire of the vanities" and burn thousands of artworks, books, clothing, mirrors, music instruments, playing cards and other objects deemed by them to be a temptation to sin.
  • March 3 – The Russo-Swedish War (1495–1497) ends with a six year truce signed in Russia at Novgorod. Due to gathering unrest at home, the Swedish leader Sten Sture the Elder is forced to offer a peace to Ivan III of Moscow.
  • September 7 – Second Cornish Uprising in England: Perkin Warbeck lands near Land's End; on September 10 he is proclaimed as King in Bodmin.

1498 CE60 entries

  • May 30 – Christopher Columbus sets out on his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere from Sanlúcar, Spain.
  • September 20 – (Meiō 7, 2nd day of the 7th month) A massive earthquake, estimated centuries later as having been 8.6 magnitude occurs off of the coast of the Japanese region of Nankaidō at about 8:00 in the morning. The resulting tsunami kills at least 5,000 people (and perhaps as many as 41,000) when it strikes Kamakura and the surrounding area in what is now Japan's Kanagawa Prefecture. The tsunami washes away a building that houses the Kotoku-in Buddhist temple, but spares the large bronze statue of the Buddha Amitābha.
  • October 28 – In the Chinese Empire, two days after being blamed by the Emperor Zhu Youcheng for bringing misfortunes to the Empire by having built a pavilion in the imperial gardens that disregarded feng shui principles, royal administrator Li Guang commits suicide. The Emperor's daughter Princess Taikang had died suddenly on October 1, and a fire had broken out in one of the palaces in Beijing's Forbidden City on October 26.

1499 CE63 entries

  • August – Polydore Vergil completes De inventoribus rerum, the first modern history of inventions.
  • November 5 – The Catholicon is published in Tréguier (Brittany). This Breton–greek–Latin dictionary had been written in 1464 by Jehan Lagadeuc. It is the first dictionary of either French or Breton.
  • November 5 – The Catholicon is published in Tréguier (Brittany). This Breton–French–Latin dictionary had been written in 1464 by Jehan Lagadeuc. It is the first dictionary of either French or Breton.