• After much politicking, Spanish king Charles V is elected Holy Roman Emperor, becoming the most powerful person in Europe as ruler of the largest empire on Earth.
• Chasing rumors of fantastic riches, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrives in Mexico with 500 men, and 15 horses. Allegedly believing him to be the god Quetzalcoatl, Aztec emperor Montezuma II welcomes him into Tenochtitlán with a lavish celebration.
• Chinese forces led by Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming suppress a rebellion in Fukien province led by the Prince of Ning.
• Five ships under the command of Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan set out from Seville, Spain on a voyage of discovery that will eventually be the first to circumnavigate the Earth.
• Religious reformer Martin Luther openly declares himself in opposition to the Catholic church during a public debate with Johann Eck at Leipzig, now known as the Leipzig Disputation.
• Spanish conquistador Pedro Arias de Avila founds Panama City.

These people were born in 1519:

• Catherine de Medici, future queen of France.
• French king Henry II.
• Gian Antonio Facchinetti de Nuce, the future pope Innocent IX.
• Cosimo I de Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany.
• English merchant and financier Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of Gresham College in London, and often inaccurately credited with coining Gresham's Law, the economic principle that "bad money drives out the good."
• English poet Nicholas Grimald.
• French Calvinist theologian Theodore Beza.
• Italian botanist and physiologist Andreas Caesalpinus.
• Spanish naval officer and colonial administrator Pedro Menendez de Aviles, founder of St. Augustine, Florida.
• French protestant leader Gaspard de Châtillon, comte de Coligny.

These people died in 1519:

• Leonardo Da Vinci.
• Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, succeeded by his grandson, Charles V of Spain. Spanish conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, first European to view the Pacific Ocean, beheaded for treason.
• Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino and father of Catherine de Medici.
• Italian noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia.
• German priest Johann Tetzel, whose sale of papal indulgences spurred Martin Luther to initiate the Protestant Revolution.
• German engraver Michael Wolgemut, the teacher of Albrecht Dürer.

1518 - 1519 - 1520

16th century