Swiss Victory at Novara and the Retreat…

Two more of Dürer's justifiably famous Master Prints, Knight, Death and the Devil and Melancholia, executed in 1513-14, display the great master’s technical prowess as an engraver.

The former, an allegory with starting imagery, shows the high point of verisimilitude and tonal richness to which Dürer elevates the graphic arts.

A detailed full-color map drawn on a gazelle skin in 1513 by Turkish admiral Piri Reis represents a plane circular projection of a spherical cap of the Earth as it could be seen by an astronaut from a high altitude above Egypt. (Retired space scientist Maurice Chatelain estimates the projection to be centered upon the intersection of the meridian of Alexandria at 30 degrees east and the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north.)

The map, possibly derived from several older, even prehistoric, maps from the torched Alexandria Library collection, correctly depicts an ice-free Antarctic continent. (The Piri Reis map, lost until its 1931 discovery in Istanbul’s Topkapi palace, is supposed by some to be remnants of an advanced civilization’s cartographic surveys, has been studied extensively by such researches as Charles Hapsgood, author of the now-classic Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.)

The map shows several now-vanished features of prehistoric Europe and Africa.

A large lake in the center of Spain feeds the Tagus and Guadalquivir Rivers; a large lake in the Moroccan Sahara feeds the Sebou River; a very large lake in Mali feeds such wide rivers as the Gambia, Senegal, and Niger.

A large inland lake is shown in Brittany, whose western tip is an island.

The map also indicates such northern islands as Svalbard (now situated less than 10 degrees from the Pole and virtually inaccessible until the advent of twentieth century maritime technology).

Ahmet continues to control a part of Anatolia in the first few months of Selim's reign.

Finally, the forces of Selim and Ahmet fight a battle near Yenişehir, Bursa on April 24, 1513.

Ahmet's forces are defeated; he is arrested and executed shortly after.

Ismail, in response to Selim’s letters, replies that he has no wish for war, adding that he thinks the letters had been written under the influence of opium; he also sends Selim's royal secretary a box of the drug.

As Selim is indeed an opium user, the gesture hits home.

Ismail’s daughter Princess Shahnavaz Begum, is wed before May 14, 1513 as the second wife of Prince Murad Effendi, elder son of Şehzade Ahmet, Crown Prince of Ottoman Empire, son of the late Bayezid II.

Domenico Trevisan, the Venetian ambassador to Cairo, signs a Mamluk-Venetian commercial treaty is signed 1513.

After this point, however, and after the reverses of the Mamluks and the Persians against the Ottomans, Venice will increasingly favor a rapprochement with the Ottoman Empire.

Piero de' Medici's younger brother Giovanni, a cardinal, has used his influence with Pope Julius II to bring the family back to positions of power.

When the Medici return to Florence in 1512-13, the Jews return also.

The Medici accuse Machiavelli of conspiracy against them and have him imprisoned.

Despite having been subjected to torture ("with the rope", where the prisoner is hanged from his bound wrists, from the back, forcing the arms to bear the body's weight, thus dislocating the shoulders), he denies involvement and is released after three weeks.

Machiavelli retires to his family estate at Sant'Andrea in Percussina (near San Casciano in Val di Pesa) and begins work on his major writings.

Chief among these is “The Prince,” written this year, in which the author, having observed Cesare Borgia's totalitarian government in Florence, and the confusion that followed its demise, argues that an effective ruler should be pragmatic rather than virtuous in his use of power.

Although Machiavelli partly bases his argument on his reading of classical historians, The Prince is the first work to openly treat the use of force in the state and to claim that the pursuit of stable government condones amoral actions.

Machiavelli is possibly the first writer to use the term “state” (Italian stato), ultimately traceable to the Roman legal idea of status civilis, or "the civil condition.” Concerning himself in The Prince with a principality, a state in which one ruler or a small elite governs a mass of subjects who have no active political life, Machiavelli addresses a monarchical ruler and offers advice designed to keep that ruler in power.

Recommending policies that would discourage mass political activism and channel the subjects' energies into private pursuits, the author’s objective is to persuade the monarch that he could best preserve his power by the judicious employment of violence, by respecting the persons, property, and traditions of his subjects, and by promoting material prosperity.

Interpreting European imperialism as a natural expression of human aggression, Machiavelli also urges new patterns of education.

Pope Julius II dies on February 21, 1513.

His successor, the second son of Lorenzo de'Medici, called Giovanni, had been made a cardinal in his boyhood and become head of his family before he was thirty.

A pious man, he assumes the papacy at thirty-eight as Leo X.

He continues his predecessor’s great artistic projects and patronage of Raphael, but initiates little new work.

Leonardo accompanies Pope Leo X's brother, Giuliano de'Medici, to Rome, where he stays on, increasingly absorbed in theoretical research.

Pietro Bembo had resided between 1506 and 1512 in Urbino, and it was here that Bembo had begun to write his most influential work, a prose treatise on writing poetry in Italian, Prose della volgar lingua, although it will not be published until much later.

Bembo also accompanies Giulio de' Medici to Rome, where he is soon after appointed Latin secretary to the Pope.

Raphael is employed, while in Rome, not only by Popes Julius and Leo but also by a number of private patrons, particularly the Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi.

In Chigi's suburban residence (now known as the Villa Farnesina), Raphael executes, in 1513, a wall fresco of the sea nymph Galatea, classical in theme as well as style.

Titian, however, refuses an invitation to become painter to the papal court.

Uriel, Archbishop of Mainz, was one of ten children of Hans von Gemmingen (1431–1487).

He had become entangled in the Pfefferkorn controversy in 1510, after Johannes Pfefferkorn seized and desired to burn Jewish books.

Gemmingen and the consultant Johannes Reuchlin assigned by him do not see a danger to the Christian faith in the writings used by Jews.

He appoints the Jewish physician Beyfuss on May 10, 1513, has the rabbi over all Jews in the Mainzer state.

Both parties to the Pfefferkorn controversy are in June 1513 silenced by the emperor.

The argument over the books will run beyond Uriel's death in 1514, however, and will not be ultimately settled until 1520.

Uriel is supposed to have killed a cellar master in anger shortly before his own reputed death after catching the man stealing wine.

Rumors suggested that he may have then faked his own death, and that the body buried in Mainz Cathedral was instead that of the cellar master, with Uriel afterwards fleeing to Italy where he died years later.

However the tomb will be reopened in 1724, where a corpse will be found with the expected adornments of an archbishop; the matter is still considered unsettled.

Barclay’s The Ship of Fools is as popular in its English dress as it had been in Germany.

It is the starting-point of a new satirical literature.

In itself a product of the medieval conception of the fool who figured so largely in the Shrovetide and other pageants, it differs entirely from the general allegorical satires of the preceding centuries.

The figures are no longer abstractions; they are concrete examples of the folly of the bibliophile who collects books but learns nothing from them, of the evil judge who takes bribes to favor the guilty, of the old fool whom time merely strengthens in his folly, of those who are eager to follow the fashions, of the priests who spend their time in church telling "gestes" of Robin Hood and so forth.

Thus, the work is of interest as throwing light on the manners and customs of the times to which it refers.

The death of Barclay's patron in 1513 apparently puts an end to his connection with the west, and he becomes a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Ely.

In this retreat he probably writes his five eclogues, said to be the first English eclogues, which will be printed about 1518 by Wynkyn de Worde.

His style is stiff and his verse uninspired.