Columbus and his fellow explorers make landfall on the largest of the Caribbean islands, Cuba

John I Albert summons the first recorded sejm, a parliament representing the whole of Poland

Columbus returns to Spain, landing at Palos with news of his great discoveries

On Topa's death his son Huayna Capac succeeds to the throne as Inca emperor

Pope Alexander VI draws a line through the Atlantic, dividing new discoveries between Spain (west) and Portugal (east)

The Nuremberg Chronicle integrates text and pictures in an ambitious history of the world

John Williams, a brewer, acquires half an acre of land beside the Thames in Mortlake and builds on it a house subsequently known as Cromwell House

In negotiations about the New World at Tordesillas, the king of Portugal insists on a new demarcation line which later brings him Brazil

Charles VIII, king of France, marches through the Alps with an army of 30,000, to claim the throne of Naples

Piero de' Medici and his brothers flee from Florence, after a mob ransacks the Medici palace

Charles VIII captures Naples in February and is crowned there in May, but is forced back across the Alps before the end of the year

Dürer, the first great artist to tackle the complexities of printing, becomes a master of woodcut and engraving

The type faces known as roman and italic are created in Venice by the printers Nicolas Jenson and Aldus Manutius

Diego Columbus, brother of the explorer, establishes the first secure Spanish colony at Santo Domingo

Philip, heir to Austria, marries Joanna, a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, in the second of the great Habsburg marital alliances

Savonarola, in the carnival before Lent, urges the people of Florence to throw playing cards and lewd images on a great bonfire of vanities

Henry VII commissions the Italian navigator John Cabot to cross the Atlantic in search of new territories for England

John Cabot, searching for a trade route to China, probably reaches Newfoundland

The Florentine mob, weary of puritanism, attacks the convent of San Marco and drags Savonarola away to be hanged and burnt

Vasco da Gama reaches the southern coast of India, at Calicut, after sailing across the Indian Ocean from east Africa

24-year-old Michelangelo provides for St Peter's in Rome an exquisite Pietà – the Virgin holding on her lap the dead Christ

The Swiss (or Swabian) War ends with the treaty of Basel, bringing effective recognition of Swiss independence from the Habsburg empire

After three feeble attempts to invade England, Perkin Warbeck is captured by Henry VII (in 1497) and is hanged at Tyburn

A number of noblemen and wealthy merchants build their villas around Kew Green, including Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester, closely associated with Queen Elizabeth I. The only villa to survive from this period is the present Kew Palace built in the Dutch style for Samuel Fortrey.

The people of Benin begin a lasting tradition of sculpture in brass, melted down from objects brought by traders