The dawn of the modern era in Europe was marked by a wave of exploration, artistic flourishing, and religious upheaval. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, funded by the Spanish Crown of Ferdinand and Isabella, reached the Americas, opening an age of sustained contact between the Old World and the New. Two years later, the Treaty of Tordesillas drew an imaginary line dividing newly claimed lands between Spain and Portugal, formalizing the Iberian monopoly over transatlantic expansion. Back in Europe, the Renaissance, a cultural revival of classical learning, art, and humanism running roughly from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, produced towering figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the Mona Lisa between about 1503 and 1519, and Michelangelo, who completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1512. Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable-type printing press accelerated the spread of ideas, making books cheaper and more widely available than ever before.
Religious change shook the continent in the sixteenth century when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517, launching the Protestant Reformation. King Henry VIII of England founded the Anglican Church after breaking with Rome, and the Catholic Church responded with the Counter-Reformation, including the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which reaffirmed doctrine while reforming abuses. These divisions eventually fed into the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which the Peace of Westphalia concluded by establishing the principle of state sovereignty that still underpins international relations today.
While Europe fractured and reformed, powerful empires flourished elsewhere. Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire at its golden age from 1520 to 1566, while in South Asia Babur founded the Mughal Empire in 1526; it would dominate the region until 1857 and produce architectural wonders such as the Taj Mahal, completed by Shah Jahan in 1653. In Japan, the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868) imposed a long period of relative isolation. Meanwhile, the Scientific Revolution transformed European thought: Galileo Galilei championed heliocentrism and suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, and Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica in 1687, establishing the laws of motion and universal gravitation.