Renaissance

On 17 August 1498, Cesare Borgia became the first person in history to resign the cardinalate. Trading his red hat for a French duchy and an army, he became the lethal blueprint for Machiavelli's Prince.

On 23 May 1498, Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and burned in Florence. His rise as a democratic theocrat and his fall under a corrupt pope expose the dark populist currents of the Renaissance and the birth of modern realpolitik.

On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.

On 12 February 1404, an Italian professor named Galeazzo di Santa Sofia opened a human body at a Vienna hospital, with wine poured and a fee charged at the door. It was the first anatomical dissection north of the Alps.