What was happening in 1492 outside Europe?
The year Columbus crossed the Atlantic, empires rose and fell in West Africa, Central Asia, the Caribbean, and Japan — the map shows the world he didn't know.
In the standard European story, 1492 is the year Columbus sailed. Annalium's global view turns the question around: what else was the world doing? Quite a lot, on every inhabited continent. In West Africa the year after, the Battle of Anfao in 1493 — fought near Gao on the Niger — ended the Sonni dynasty and confirmed Askia Muhammad as ruler of the Songhai Empire, then one of the largest states on earth. None of this had anything to do with Europe.
Across Asia the same independence holds. In Central Asia, the Siege of Samarkand in 1497 records the young Babur capturing the legendary city — the future founder of the Mughal Empire still fighting for his first foothold. In Persia, the Battle of Isfahan appears in 1497, and in Japan the Battle of Funada (1495) and the Siege of Mount Hiei (1499) mark the warfare of the Sengoku period. These were full, self-contained histories running in parallel, not reactions to events in Spain.
Then there is the New World that Columbus's voyage actually touched. The map shows the consequences arriving fast and hard: the First Spanish Hispaniola War and the Spanish expansion to Cibao in 1494, the Battle of Vega Real in 1495 against the Taíno, and the 1494 Hispaniola yellow fever epidemic. Nearby, the Conquest of Tenerife (1494) shows the same expansion reaching the Canary Islands. Held together on one screen, 1492 reads less as a beginning and more as a hinge — a moment when several previously separate worlds were about to collide.
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Events from Wikipedia/Wikidata (CC-BY-SA); boundaries from OpenHistoricalMap (ODbL). Spotted a mistake? Email [email protected].