1541 John Calvin, 32, a Protestant, is driven out of France.
1541 Spanish conquistadors arrive in New Mexico.
1541 Suleiman captures the town of Buda.
1542 A Chinese vessel carrying hides from Siam and three Portuguese is blown by a storm to a small island 20 miles southwest of Japan's island of Kyushu. The Portuguese have muskets, which they introduce to the Japanese.
1542 The Ming emperor, Jiajing, has focused on Taoism and immortality, but his spiritualism has not made him worthy in the eyes of eighteen of his concubines. They detest him and conspire to strangle him while he sleeps. All of them are executed except the one who warned the empress.
1542 Ivan, to be known as The Terrible, is twelve-years-old. He entertains himself by dropping dogs from the roof of a Kremlin wall battlement.
1542 Francis Xavier, a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, lands in Goa.
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus is dead. He had waited until the end of his life to defy Church doctrine with the publication of his work "On The Revolution of Heavenly Bodies," explaining his theory that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun rather than the sun around the earth.
1543 John Calvin's theocratic government begins in Geneva.
1543 Michelangelo paints the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.
1545 The Council of Trent – the 19th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic church – begins, to be on and off again until 1563.
1545 In France, attacks to the Catholic clergy have occurred. Troops are sent against the Protestant heresy in a cluster of towns. About twenty towns are destroyed and about 3,000 Protestant men, women and children are killed.
1545 Humayun is marching eastward with 14,000 Safavid troops from Iran, where he had gone into exile and where he had allied himself with the Safavid sultan. Humayun takes the Afghan city of Kabul.
1547 Henry VIII of England dies.
1549 Francis Xavier, a Catholic Portuguese missionary, arrives in Japan.
1550 A Frenchman, Ambrose Pare, begins creating artificial limbs.
Copyright © 1998-2018 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.