January 22: The “Great Comet”, observed by astronomers around the world, comes within 6.5 million miles of Earth, the closest approach in modern history of any comet (picture from the 1493Nuremberg Chronicle).
March 11 – The Great Comet of 1472 is observed from the Earth for the last time as it flies away from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Cetus.[1]
June 4 – Shah Suwar, formerly the ruler much of southeastern Turkey as prince of the Beylik of Dulkadir, surrenders to the Egyptian Mamluk General Yashbak min Mahdi after an 11-day siege.[8] He is brought out of the Castle of Zamantu, restrained by a robe with a metal collar with chains and his guards are unable to rescue him. Suwar’s older brother, Shah Budak, is returned to the throne of Dulkadir
June – Leonardo da Vinci is admitted as a master in his own right to the artists’ Guild of Saint Luke in Florence. An entry is made in the register of the Compagnia di San Luca reading “Anno Domini 1472— Leonardo, son of Ser Piero da Vinci, painter, to pay the sum of 6 sol, for the whole month of June 1472, for the remittance of his debt to the Company until July 1472… and to pay for the whole of November 1472, 5 sol due on 18 October 1472.”[10]
July–September
July 3 – The Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Saint Peter in York, England, commonly known as York Minster, is declared complete and consecrated.[11]
August 19 – King Edward IV summons the members of the English Parliament to assemble at Westminster on October 6.
September 11 – The Treaty of Chateaugiron is concluded between King Edward IV of England and the Duchy of Brittany, providing for an English invasion of either Gascony or Normandy by April 1, 1473.[12]
October–December
October 6 – King Edward IV of England gives royal assent to the Statute of Westminster 1472 which requires, effective immediately, a tax of four bow staves per every tun (252 wine gallons) of cargo brought in by a ship to an English port.[13] The Statute is passed to remedy a shortage of yew wood, from which longbows are made, following the issuing of an edict in 1470 requiring compulsory training for soldiers to use the longbow.[14]
November 5 – Duke Nicholas of Lorraine and Duke Charles of Burgundy agree that the engagement between Nicholas and Charles’s daughter can be called off without jeopardizing the alliance between the two duchies.[5]
December 31 – The city council of Amsterdam prohibits snowball fights: “Neymant en moet met sneecluyten werpen nocht maecht noch wijf noch manspersoon.” (“No one shall throw with snowballs, neither men nor (unmarried) women.”)
Pietro d’Abano‘s medical texts Conciliator differentiarum quae inter philosophos et medicos versantur and De venenis eorumque remediis (written before 1315) are first published.
Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et precipue medicorum
The possible discovery of the island of “Bacalao” (which some historians believe to have been Newfoundland off North America, 20 years before Christopher Columbus had arrived in the “New World”) is made by João Vaz Corte-Real. The suggestion that Corte-Real found lands that he called the “Terras do Bacalhau” (and was granted lands in the Azores by the king of Portugal as a result) will be advanced by Italian writer Gaspar Frutuoso a century later in his work Saudades da Terra, although the reliability of Frutuoso’s 1570 book is questioned by later historians because of the book’s misinformation on other matters.[17]
