The Sengoku period was the period in Japanese history in which civil wars and social upheavals took place almost continuously in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Kyōtoku incident (1454), Ōnin War (1467), or Meiō incident (1493) are generally chosen as the period's start date, but there are many competing historiographies for its end date, ranging from 1568, the date of Oda Nobunaga's march on Kyoto, to the suppression of the Shimabara Rebellion in 1638, deep into what was traditionally considered the Edo period. Regardless of the dates chosen, the Sengoku period overlaps substantially with the Muromachi period (1336–1573).

Hunminjeongeum is a 1446 work that formally introduced the first native Korean alphabet. That alphabet was originally also called "Hunminjeongeum", although it is now widely called "Hangul" or "Chosŏn'gŭl".

The Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India was the first recorded trip directly from Europe to the Indian subcontinent, via the Cape of Good Hope. Under the command of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, it was undertaken during the reign of King Manuel in 1497–1499. It is one of the most important events of the Age of Discovery and the Portuguese Empire, and it initiated the Portuguese maritime trade on the Malabar Coast and other parts of the Indian Ocean, the military presence and settlements of the Portuguese in Goa and Bombay.

The Khanate of Bukhara was an Uzbek monarchy in Central Asia from 1501 to 1785, founded by the Shaybanid dynasty, a branch of the Abu'l-Khayrids. Muhammad Shaybani, grandson of the steppe ruler Abu'l Khayr Khan, conquered the major cities of Mawarannahr (Transoxiana) – Balkh, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent – and established his rule in the region. In its earliest years, the Khanate was alternately governed from each of these cities before Abdullah Khan II established Bukhara as its permanent capital by 1562.

The governor of Portuguese India Afonso de Albuquerque conquered the city of Malacca in 1511.

The First Battle of Panipat, on 21 April 1526 was fought between the invading forces of Babur against Ibrahim Khan Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, in North India. Babur's forces, employing gunpowder firearms and cannons, defeated Ibrahim. This was one of the earliest battles involving gunpowder arms on the Indian subcontinent. The victory marked the beginning of Mughal rule in India.

The Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences is a list of propositions for an academic disputation written in 1517 by Martin Luther, then a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. The Theses are retrospectively considered to have launched the Protestant Reformation and the birth of Protestantism, despite various quasi- or proto-Protestant groups having existed previously.

The Battle of Mactan was fought on a beach in Mactan Island between Spanish forces led by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, along with local allies, and Lapulapu, a chieftain of the island, on the early morning of April 27, 1521. Magellan, a Portuguese-born commander serving the Spanish Empire who led an expedition that ultimately circumnavigated the world for the first time, commanded a small Spanish contingent in an effort to subdue Mactan under the Spanish crown. The sheer number of Lapulapu's forces, compounded with issues associated with the location and the armor, ultimately resulted in a disastrous defeat for the Europeans and the death of Magellan. Surviving members of Magellan's crew continued the expedition under the command of Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who completed the journey in September 1522.

The Wars of the Roses, known at the time and in the following centuries as the Civil Wars, were a series of armed confrontations, machinations, battles and campaigns fought for control of the English throne from 1455 to 1487. The conflict was fought between supporters of the House of York and the House of Lancaster, two rival cadet branches of the royal House of Plantagenet. The conflict resulted in the end of Lancaster's male line in 1471, leaving the Tudor family to inherit, through the female line, the Lancaster claim to the throne. The conflict was largely brought to an end upon the union of the two houses through marriage, creating the Tudor dynasty that would subsequently rule England.

The Nanban trade was trade between Europeans and the Japanese that took place in Japan from the arrival of Europeans in 1543 to the first Sakoku Seclusion Edicts of isolationism in 1614.

The Kazakh Khanate, also known as the Kazakh Khanates or Qazaq Khanate was a nomadic state in Central Asia that existed from c. 1465 to the early 19th century. It emerged after the fragmentation of the Golden Horde.

The Hundred Years' War was a series of conflicts between the kingdoms of England and France and a civil war in France during the late Middle Ages. It emerged from feudal disputes over the Duchy of Aquitaine and was triggered by a claim to the French throne made by Edward III of England. The war grew into a broader military, economic, and political struggle involving different factions from across Western Europe, fuelled by emerging nationalism on both sides. The periodisation of the war typically charts it as taking place over 116 years. However, it was an intermittent conflict which was frequently interrupted by external factors, such as the Black Death, and several years of truces.

Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, was captured by the Ottoman Empire on 29 May 1453 as part of the culmination of a 53-day siege which had begun on 6 April.

A printing press is a machine that applies pressure to transfer ink onto a surface made of paper, cloth, or a similar material. Its workers are known as printing press operators. It marked a significant improvement on earlier methods, in which the paper was rubbed by hand to transfer applied ink to the printing surface.

Between 1492 and 1504, the Italian explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus led four transatlantic maritime expeditions to the Americas in the name of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. These voyages led to Europeans learning about the New World and were an early breakthrough in the period known in Europe as the Age of Exploration, which saw the colonization of the Americas, a related biological exchange, and the beginning of trans-Atlantic trade. These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are often cited as the beginning of the modern era.

The Guarded Domains of Iran, commonly called Safavid Iran, Safavid Persia or the Safavid Empire, was one of the largest and longest-lasting Iranian empires. It was ruled by the Safavid dynasty from 1501 to 1736, albeit others place the end on the year 1722, when Isfahan fell to the Afghans. It is often considered the beginning of modern Iranian history, as well as one of the gunpowder empires.

The Battle of Chaldiran took place on 23 August 1514 and ended with a decisive victory for the Ottoman Empire over the Safavid Empire. As a result, the Ottomans annexed Eastern Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia from Safavid Iran. It marked the first Ottoman expansion into Eastern Anatolia, and the halt of the Safavid expansion to the west. The Battle of Chaldiran was just the beginning of 41 years of destructive war between the Safavids and Ottomans, which only ended in 1555 with the Peace of Amasya. Though the Safavids eventually reconquered Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia during the reign of Abbas the Great, they would be permanently ceded to the Ottomans by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab.

The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in Tordesillas, Spain, on 7 June 1494, and ratified in Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between the Kingdom of Portugal and the Crown of Castile, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. That line of demarcation was about halfway between Cape Verde and the islands visited by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage, thought then to be Cipangu and Antillia, but in fact Cuba and Hispaniola; the treaty itself does not mention Cipangu nor Antillia.

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. The book, first printed in 1543 CE in Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, offered an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy's geocentric system, which had been widely accepted since ancient times.

The Battle of Mohács took place on 29 August 1526 near Mohács, in the Kingdom of Hungary. It was fought between the forces of Hungary, led by King Louis II, and the invading Ottoman Empire, commanded by Suleiman the Magnificent and his grand vizier, Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha. The Ottomans achieved a decisive victory through superior planning, firepower, and a well-executed encirclement that overwhelmed the Hungarian forces.