Spanish still says "worth a Potosí" for something priceless.
The Andean silver city was so famous that Don Quixote tells Sancho "the mines of Potosí" would not be enough to pay him.
The events
- Silver discovered at Potosí1545 · Potosí. Vast silver deposits were found in the Cerro Rico in the Andes. Potosí became one of the world's largest cities, and silver mined by indigenous forced labour (the mita) flowed to Europe and China, transforming the world economy.
- Cervantes's Don Quixote1605 · Madrid. The first part of Miguel de Cervantes's novel about the knight of La Mancha appeared in Madrid; the second followed in 1615. A parody of chivalric romances, it is often called the first modern novel.
More amazing facts
- 1543 · 1547 Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, four years after Copernicus published that the Earth goes round the Sun.
- 1543 Japanese tempura came from Portugal.
- 1543 Legend says Copernicus saw his great book on the day he died.
- 1543 1543 overturned ideas about both the heavens and the body.
- 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.
- 1547 Ivan IV's nickname Grozny meant 'formidable' or 'awe-inspiring' rather than 'terrible' in the modern sense; the English word 'terrible' once meant the same, but its sense has drifted.