1497 – John Cabot explores coast of North America
1498 – King Louis XII of France weds Anne of Brittany
1508 – Michelangelo starts painting Sistine Chapel ceiling
1517 – Martin Luther posts his creed on a chapel door
1519 – Hernando Cortes meets Montezuma in Mexico
1533 – Henry VIII marries Ann Boleyn; Elizabeth I is born
1540 – Antwerp is leading European trading center
1556 – Ferdinand I becomes Holy Roman Emperor
1558 – Queen Elizabeth I is crowned; reigns until 1603
1572 – Dutch war of independence begins against Spain
1581 – Sir Francis Drake sails round the world
1588 – Spanish armada sails against England and fails
1596 – Shakespeare writes “The Merchant of Venice”
1600 – Henry IV of France marries Maria de Medici
1615 – Cervantes writes “Don Quixote”
1616 – Galileo brought before the Inquisition
1620 – Mayflower lands at New Plymouth
1626 – New Amsterdam founded on the Hudson River
1631 – Earthquake in Naples. Vesuvius erupts
1632 – Coffee shop opens in London; by 1700 there are 500
1638 – Harvard College founded at Cambridge, Mass
1639 – Rubens paints “Judgement of Paris”
1654 – Pascal and Fermat state theory of probability
1655 – Rembrandt paints “Woman bathing in a stream”
1664 – New Amsterdam becomes New York
1665 – Great Plague of London kills more than 68,000
1666 - Isaac Newton experiments with gravity
1667 – John Milton writes “Paradise Lost”
1675 – Paris is center of European culture
1679 – Habeas Corpus act passed in England
1682 – La Salle claims Louisiana territory for France
1697 – Versailles becomes the model for royal courts
1704 – English take Gibraltar
1705 – Halley correctly predicts return of comet in 1758
1719 – Daniel Defoe writes “Robinson Crusoe”
1721 – J. S. Bach writes “The Brandenburg Concertos”
1742 – Handel’s “Messiah” first performed in Dublin
1751 – Minuet becomes Europe’s fashionable dance
1753 – Ben Franklin invents the lightning conductor
