while the science was starting...
Ottoman Empire:

Mehmed II (1451-1481) Fall of Constantinople (1453)

Bayezid II (1481-1512)
Selim I (1512-1520) Battle of Chaldiran against Safavids (1514), conquest of
Egypt (1517)

Suleiman I (1520-1566) Conquered Belgrade, Rhodes, and most of Hungary
before he was stopped at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He annexed most of the
Middle East in his conflict with the Safavids and large swathes of North Africa
as far west as Algeria. Under his rule, the Ottoman fleet dominated the seas
from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Selim II (1566-1574) His Grand Vizier, Mehmed Sokollu, a Bosnian devsirme,
controlled much of state affairs, and succeeded in concluding an honourable
treaty with the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, whereby the
Emperor agreed to pay an annual "present" and granted the Ottomans authority
in Moldavia and Walachia.

England and France
In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, led an invasion of England. He
defeated the English King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings, and had
himself crowned King of England.
Following a period of civil wars and unrest in England the Anglo-Norman
dynasty was succeeded by the Angevin Kings. At the height of their
power the Angevins controlled Normandy and England. The King of
England directly ruled more territory on the continent than the King of
France himself. John of England inherited this great estate from King
Richard I. However, Philip II of France acted decisively to exploit the
weaknesses of King John, both legally and militarily, and by 1204 had
succeeded in wresting control of most of the ancient territorial
possessions and reduced Angevin hold on the continent to a few small
provinces in Gascony, and the complete loss of the crown jewel of
Normandy.
By the early 14th century, many people in the English aristocracy were
motivated to regain possession of these territories.
Hundred Years' War
Hundred Years' War
Charles IV died without an heir in 1328. Under the rules of the Salic law
adopted in 1316, the crown of France could not pass to a woman, nor
could the line of kinship pass through the female line. Accordingly, the
crown passed to the cousin of Charles, Philip of Valois, rather than
through the female line to Charles' nephew, Edward, who would soon
become Edward III of England. In the reign of Philip of Valois, the French
monarchy reached the height of its medieval power. However, Philip's
seat on the throne was contested by Edward III of England and in 1337,
on the eve of the first wave of the Black Death, England and France
went to war in what would become known as the Hundred Years' War.
The exact boundaries changed greatly with time, but French
landholdings of the English Kings remained extensive for decades.
Strong French counterattacks won back all English continental
territories, except Calais which was captured in 1558 by the French. Like
the rest of Europe, France was struck by the Black Death. Around 1340,
France had a population of about 17 million, which by the end of the
pandemic had declined by about one-half.
Castille and Aragon
The marriage of the Queen of
Castille Isabella and the King of
Aragon Ferdinand II unified
Spain at the end of 15th Century.
Queen Isabella rejected Christopher Columbus's plan to reach the Indies by
sailing west (2000 miles, according to Columbus) more than three times before
changing her mind. His expedition arrived in America in 1492. He returned the
next year and presented his findings to the monarchs, Spain entered a Golden
Age of exploration and colonization, the period of the Spanish Empire.
The Portuguese did not recognise that South
America belonged to the Spanish and the
Portuguese King John II threatened to send an
army to claim the land for the Portuguese. In
1494, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, Isabella and
Ferdinand agreed to divide the Earth, outside of
Europe, with king John II of Portugal.
Portugal
Young prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) of Portugal wished to
know how far Muslim territories in Africa extended, hoping to bypass it
and trade directly with West Africa by sea, find allies in legendary
Christian lands to the south and to probe whether it was possible to
reach the Indies by sea, the source of the lucrative spice trade. He
invested in sponsoring voyages down the coast of Mauritania.
In 1460 Pero de Sintra reached Sierra Leone. In the Southern
hemisphere, they used the Southern Cross as the reference for celestial
navigation.
The next crucial breakthrough was in 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias
rounded the southern tip of Africa, which he named "Cape of Storms"
and then sailing east, proving that the Indian Ocean was accessible from
the Atlantic. Soon the cape was renamed by king John II of Portugal
"Cape of Good Hope" (Cabo da Boa Esperança), because of the great
optimism engendered by the possibility of a sea route to India, proving
false the view that had existed since Ptolemy that the Indian Ocean was
land-locked.
Italy
The Black Death pandemic in 1348 left its mark on Italy by killing one
third of the population. However, the recovery from the disaster of the
Black Death led to a resurgence of cities, trade and economy which
greatly stimulated the successive phase of the Humanism and
Renaissance, that best known for its cultural achievements. Accounts of
Renaissance literature usually begin with Petrarch and his friend and
contemporary Boccaccio. 15th century writers such as the poet Poliziano
and the Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino made extensive translations
from both Latin and Greek. In the early 16th century, Machiavelli cast a
jaundiced eye on "la verita effetuale delle cose" — the actual truth of
things — in The Prince, composed, humanist style, chiefly of parallel
ancient and modern examples of Virtù. Italian Renaissance painting
exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting for
centuries afterwards, with artists such as Giotto di Bondone, Masaccio,
Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Michelangelo,
Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian.
Austria
In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Habsburgs began to accumulate
other provinces in the vicinity of the Duchy of Austria. In 1438 Duke
Albert V of Austria was chosen as the successor to his father-in-law,
Emperor Sigismund. Although Albert himself only reigned for a year,
henceforth every emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was a Habsburg,
with only one exception.
The Habsburgs began also to accumulate lands far from the hereditary
lands. In 1477 Archduke Maximilian, only son of Emperor Frederick III,
married the heiress Maria of Burgundy, thus acquiring most of the
Netherlands for the family. His son Philip the Fair married the heiress of
Castile and Aragon, and thus acquired Spain and its Italian, African and
New World appendages for the Habsburgs. In 1526 following the Battle
of Mohács, Bohemia and the part of Hungary not occupied by the
Ottomans came under Austrian rule. Ottoman expansion into Hungary
led to frequent conflicts between the two empires, particularly evident in
the so-called Long War of 1593 to 1606.
Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398 – 1468) was a German goldsmith, printer
and publisher who introduced modern book printing. His invention of
mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is
widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period. It
played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation
and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern
knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
Gutenberg was the first European to use
movable type printing, in around 1439, and
the global inventor of the printing press.
Among his many contributions to printing
are: the invention of a process for massproducing movable type; the use of oilbased ink; and the use of a wooden printing
press similar to the agricultural screw
presses of the period.
First circumnavigation
Since 1516, several Portuguese conflicting with king Manuel I of
Portugal gathered in Seville, at the service of the newly crowned Charles
I of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan was among them. Ferdinand Magellan—
who had sailed in India for Portugal until 1513, when Maluku Islands
were reached developed the theory that the islands were in the
Tordesillas Spanish area. Aware of the efforts of the Spanish to find a
route to India by sailing west, Magellan presented them a plan to get
there.
The Spanish king financed Magellan's expedition. On August 10, 1519,
departed from Seville a fleet of five ships—flagship Trinidad under
Magellan's command, San Antonio, Concepcion, Santiago and Victoria.
The expedition managed to cross
the Pacific. Magellan died in a
battle in the Philippines, leaving
the Spaniard Juan Sebastián
Elcano the task of completing the
voyage. In 1522 Victoria returned
to Spain, thus completing the first
circumnavigation of the globe.
France in the
th
16
Century
The French Renaissance saw a long set of wars, known as the Italian
Wars, between the Kingdom of France and the powerful Holy Roman
Empire It saw also the first standardization of the French language,
which would become the official language of France and the language of
Europe's aristocracy. French explorers, such as Jacques Cartier or
Samuel de Champlain, claimed lands in the Americas for France, paving
the way for the expansion of the First French colonial empire. The rise of
Protestantism in Europe led France to a civil war known as the French
Wars of Religion, where, in the most notorious incident, thousands of
Huguenots (French Protestants) were murdered in the St. Bartholomew's
Day massacre of 1572. The wars of Religion were ended in France by
Henry IV's Edict of Nantes which granted some freedom of religion to the
Huguenots. Henry IV was eventually murdered by a Catholic fanatic.
England
The Black Death epidemic hit England, starting in 1348, it eventually
killed up to half of England's inhabitants. From 1453 to 1487 civil war
between two branches of the royal family occurred—the Yorkists and
Lancastrians—known as the Wars of the Roses. Eventually it led to the
Yorkists losing the throne entirely to a Welsh noble family the Tudors, a
branch of the Lancastrians headed by Henry Tudor who invaded, gaining
victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field where the Yorkist king Richard III
was killed. During the Tudor period, the Renaissance reached England
through Italian courtiers, who reintroduced artistic, educational and
scholarly debate from classical antiquity. During this time England began
to develop naval skills, and exploration to the West intensified.
Henry VIII broke from communion with the Catholic Church under the
Acts of Supremacy in 1534 which proclaimed the monarch head of the
Church of England. There were internal religious conflicts during the
reigns of Henry's daughters; Mary I and Elizabeth I. The former
attempted to bring the country back to Catholicism, while the later broke
from it again more forcefully.
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was the European Christian reform
movement that established Protestantism as a constituent branch of
contemporary Christianity. It was led by Martin Luther, John Calvin and
other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers",
who objected to ("protested") the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical
structure of the Catholic Church, led to the creation of new national
Protestant churches. The Catholics responded with a CounterReformation, led by the Jesuit order, which reclaimed large parts of
Europe, such as Poland. In general, northern Europe, with the exception
of Ireland and pockets of Britain, turned Protestant, and southern Europe
remained Catholic, while fierce battles that turned into warfare took place
in the centre. The largest of the new denominations were the Anglicans
(based in England), the Lutherans (based in Germany and Scandinavia),
and the Reformed churches (based in Germany, Switzerland, the
Netherlands and Scotland). The most common dating begins in 1517
when Luther published The Ninety-Five Theses, and concludes in 1648
with the Treaty of Westphalia that ended years of European religious
wars.