Early Modern Europe

The transformation of Portugal from a semi-autonomous county of the Kingdom of León into a global maritime powerhouse began on the battlefield.

In 1255, during the Baltic Crusades, the Teutonic Knights established a fortress over the Old Prussian settlement of Twangste, naming it Königsberg—King's Mountain—to honor King Ottokar II of Bohemia.

Sometime around 1300 CE, a subtle but persistent chill began to settle over the Northern Hemisphere, initiating a centuries-long epoch of erratic cooling known as the Little Ice Age.

A sudden, intense obsession with the ghost of antiquity quieted the crises of the late medieval world.

Great geniuses are rarely born with a clear path laid before them, and Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, born out of wedlock to a Tuscan notary and a lower-class woman, was no exception.

When the Medici family reclaimed control of Florence in 1512, Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was stripped of his diplomatic post, falsely accused of treason, and cast into exile.

To his contemporaries, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was simply *Il Divino*, the divine one, an artist whose work possessed a fierce, awe-inspiring power they called *terribilità*.

When Queen Dorothea of Brandenburg journeyed to Rome in 1475, she secured a papal bull from Pope Sixtus IV that would reshape the intellectual landscape of the North.

The fracturing of Western Christendom began not with an army, but with a scholar’s doubt.

The impulse to sail beyond the horizon transformed a fragmented planet into a single, interconnected world-system, binding previously isolated civilizations together for the first time.

In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses, unwittingly signaling the end of the Middle Ages and fracturing the spiritual monopoly of Western Christianity.

The lute is an instrument of precise mathematical ratios, a truth well understood by the Florentine composer Vincenzo Galilei.