While Magellan's expedition circled the globe, Cortés fought the Aztecs.
Magellan was killed in April 1521; Tenochtitlan fell that August.
The events
- Magellan's circumnavigation1519–1522 · Strait of Magellan. Ferdinand Magellan's Spanish expedition found a strait at the tip of South America and crossed the Pacific. Magellan was killed in the Philippines; the Victoria under Elcano completed the first circumnavigation in 1522.
- Fall of Tenochtitlan1521 · Tenochtitlan. After a long siege, Hernán Cortés's Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies took the Aztec capital, already ravaged by smallpox. The Aztec Empire fell, and Mexico City, capital of New Spain, rose on its ruins.
More amazing facts
- 1485 · 1508 The Kremlin's present walls were built by Italian masters (1485–1495).
- 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.
- 1494 · 1497 Ivan III's law code (1497) appeared three years after Spain and Portugal divided the world between them at Tordesillas.
- 1521 · 1697 The last independent Maya kingdom fell only in 1697, 176 years after Tenochtitlan, when Peter the Great was already ruling Russia.
- 1543 · 1547 Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, four years after Copernicus published that the Earth goes round the Sun.
- 1545 · 1571 Silver from Potosí (1545) made the Spanish peso the first truly global currency: from 1571, Manila galleons carried it across the Pacific to China.