1405 (idea)

In the year AD 1405...

• Chinese eunuch Zheng He sets sail on the first of his treasure missions to the "Western Oceans" in command of a massive fleet of 317 ships and 27,800 men.
• The tide begins to turn against Welsh national leader Owain Glyndwr's revolt against English King Henry IV, as despite the aid of the disaffected Earl of Northumberland, he is twice defeated by the crown prince, the future king Henry V, although he is able to hold out hope of victory thanks to the arrival of French reinforcements at the end of the year.
• Richard le Scrope, the Archbishop of York, rises in revolt against King Henry IV with the aid of the Marshal of England, Thomas Mowbray, but the pair is tricked into surrendering at Shipton Moor by Lord Neville, and are executed on the orders of the king despite widespread popular opposition.
• Venice conquers Padua and Verona.
• Korean king Taejong establishes his new capital at Seoul and begins construction on the Changdok Palace.
• The teenage Mamluk sultan of Egypt and Syria, Faraj, is briefly deposed by his brother al-Malik al-Mansu, but is restored to the throne two months later in a counter-coup by loyal officials.
• The Bures Dragon attacks - according to a local chronicle, in the town of Bures, near Sudbury in Suffolk, England, there "appeared, to the great hurt of the countryside, a dragon, vast in body, with a crested head, teeth like a saw, and a tail extending to an enormous length. Having slaughtered the shepherd of a flock, it devoured many sheep....In order to destroy him, all the country people around were summoned. But when the dragon saw that he was again to be assailed with arrows, he fled into a marsh or mere and there hid himself among the long reeds, and was no more seen."
• French poetess and author Christine de Pisan pens three of her most important works - The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la cité des dames), a collection of tales about heroic yet virtuous women, Book of Three Virtues (Le Livre des trois vertus), a typology of women's roles in medieval society and a collection of moral instructions for women in the various social spheres, and an autobiography, Christine's Vision (L'Avision de Christine).
• The earliest written record of the existence of vodka appears in a Polish court registry.

These people were born in 1405:

• Gjergj Kastrioti, better known as Skanderbeg, the national hero of Albania who would almost singlehandedly repulse 13 Turkish invasions of Europe, becoming a hero to the entire Western world.
• Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Italian humanist, statesman, and future pope Pius II.
• Future king of Castile and León John II.
• Japanese noh actor and playwright Komparu Zenchiku.
• Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers, a powerful English noble during the War of the Roses.

These people died in 1405:

• The great Turkic conqueror Timur, aka Tamerlane, while on his way to conquer China, setting off a rash of wars by would be successors to his vast Empire.
• Dilawar Khan Ghori, sultan of the Muslim Malwa kingdom in what is now Madhya Pradesh, succeeded by his able son Hoshang Shah.
• Famed Byzantine painter Theophanes the Greek.
• Muslim theologian ad-Damiri, best known for his comprehensive encyclopaedia of 931 animals mentioned in the Quran, in Hadith, and in Arabic poetry and proverbs.
• French author and ardent advocate of the Crusades Philippe de Mézières.

1404 - 1405 - 1406

15th century