In Calicut, Vasco da Gama's gifts were laughed at. He brought the ruler cloth, hats, coral, sugar and honey, and courtiers said even the poorest merchant from Mecca would offer more.
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More amazing facts
- 1492 1492: Granada fell in January, Columbus reached the Americas in October, and in November the Ensisheim meteorite fell in Alsace — one of Europe's oldest witnessed falls.
- 1492 The oldest surviving globe was made in 1492, and America is not on it. Martin Behaim finished his "Erdapfel" in Nuremberg before Columbus returned; between Europe and Asia it shows only ocean and islands.
- 1494 · 1497 Ivan III's law code (1497) appeared three years after Spain and Portugal divided the world between them at Tordesillas.
- 1494 Leonardo da Vinci's maths teacher is the "father of accounting". In 1494 Luca Pacioli was the first to describe double-entry bookkeeping in a printed book — the debit-and-credit system still used today.
- 1495 · 1505 The most visited stretch of the Great Wall of China is younger than the walls of the Moscow Kremlin.
- 1500 · 1600 For centuries Europeans ate Egyptian mummies as medicine.