1502 Cesare Borgia has ordered the execution of Spanish mercenary Ramiro de Lorca for plotting to kill him. In Rome, Cesare’s father, Pope Alexander VI, is enjoying a banquet – “after dinner thirty actors took part in a masquerade in the piazza before St. Peter’s. Many of them were wearing long large noses in the form of penises, all virile and erect. . . . The Pope watched from a window.”
1509 Henry VIII of England marks his first Christmas as king with 3 plays and a concert. The lavish festivities will consume almost all of the country’s annual tax revenue. Among those receiving royal largesse are a blind court poet, Chapel Royal choristers, and a woman who brought a perfumed ball to keep the air fresh.
1511 In Korea, Chief State Councillor Kim Sudong reports worrying events in China. I have recently ascertained that there is rebellion in Shandong. If this is the case, then the overland route to the Central Plains will be impassable [thus severing normal diplomatic relations]. Further, Shandong is close by our country. We cannot take this lightly… If the rebels occupy Shandong, they are certain to want our country to acknowledge them as our sovereign.
1518 In Spain, mystic nun Magdalena de la Cruz announces that in a virgin birth she has borne a son who radiated a blinding light and then disappeared. Midwives confirm both the childbirth and the virginity; the miracle brings wealth and prestige to her convent. Twenty-five years later she will confess that she has had sex with a devil for decades and that the child she bore was really a monstrous caterpillar. She will be exorcised and die repentant.
1521 The Wolof rebellion, by captured Senegalese Muslims, breaks out on the island of Hispaniola – America’s first slave revolt. Africans and natives unite against the Spanish. Though this uprising is soon put down, it frightens Spain enough to ban the introduction of Muslim/Wolof slaves, termed “arrogant, disobedient, rebellious, and incorrigible”, to the New World.
1522 The Ottoman Turks have taken the great fortress of Rhodes from the crusading order, the Knights of St. John. Philippe de Villiers l’Isle-Adam, the grand master of the Order lamented: “Ce jour de Nohel ledit grand Turq entra dedans la ville, et le premier jour de l’an avons faict voyle noz navires désarmez, et aprez avoir passé en mer plusieurs fortunes, sommes arrivez tous espars en ceste isle de Candie.” (On this Christmas day, the Great Turk entered the city, and on the first of the year our disarmed ships set sail. After having countered several misfortunes at sea, we arrived, disheveled, on the island of Crete).
1535 French explorer Jacques Cartier and crew celebrate their first Christmas in Canada at Stadacona (present-day Québec City). Deposed English Queen Katharine of Aragon is very ill with pains in the stomach, so violent and acute that she cannot eat or drink. She will die in two weeks.
1541 The Portuguese expedition to Ethiopia led by Dom Christovão da Gama rests on “a mountain in the lordship of the Barnaguais”. Dom Christovão had a large tent fitted up with an altar, with a very reverential picture of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, where Mass was said by the patriarch and the Portuguese Mass-priests, who were in our company. We remained all night armed before the altar, and the matins were very solemn for such a country, as we had bagpipes (charamellas), kettledrums (atabales), flutes, trumpets, and the full Mass that night we all confessed, and at midnight Mass received the holy sacrament. The Queen looked on at all this from her tent, which was pitched in front; she was much astonished at our customs, which appeared to her very fitting; she was so delighted to see them and our Mass that, to get a better view, she and one of her ladies, both muffled, left the tent so secretly that her own servants did not miss her, for those who knew what had happened made the greater fuss thus the ladies in the tent, as well as those outside, kept moving the people from the line of sight of the tent. Thus she went about, seeing all that passed, as several other ladies did, and in this had much pleasure.
1558 Queen Elizabeth I walks out of Christmas mass when the presiding bishop Owen Oglethorpe refuses her demand to omit elevating the Host. “You shall understand that yesterday, being Christmas Day, the Queen’s Majesty repaired to her great closet with her nobles and ladies, as hath been accustomed in such high feasts; and she, perceiving a bishop preparing himself to mass, all in the old form, tarried there until the gospel was done, and when all the people looked for her to have offered according to the old fashion, she with her nobles returned again from the closet and the mass, on to her privy chamber, which was strange unto divers. Blessed be God in all His gifts.”
1568 Spanish Moriscos rise against the government of Philip II and his policy of forced conversion from Islam. For over two years a rebellion will rage in the mountains of Granada with atrocities committed by both sides. A Spanish veteran of the campaign remarked “Day by day we fought our enemies, in the cold or the heat, hungry, lacking munitions, suffering continual injuries and deaths until we could confront our enemies: a warlike tribe, well-armed and confident in terrain which favoured them. Finally they were driven from their houses and possessions; men and women were chained together; captured children were sold to the highest bidder or carried away to distant places… It was a dubious victory, with such consequences that one might doubt whether those whom God wished to punish were ourselves or the enemy.”
1569 Thomas Pounde falls trying to execute a tricky step during a dance at the English court and is kicked by Queen Elizabeth who sneers “Arise, Sir Ox”. He mutters “Sic transit gloria mundi” (“So pass the glories of this world”), subsequently leaves England and converts to Catholicism, joining the Jesuit order.
1594 An agent of the Fugger banking house reports an uproar in Silesia over the eruption of a mountain and the rising of the dead.