Five hundred years ago, in the mid-1520s, the world held roughly 425 to 540 million people, less than a tenth of today’s population. Most of them lived in Asia. Europe was tearing itself apart over religion, the Americas were reeling from the arrival of Spanish invaders, and the largest cities on Earth were in China. It was a world without printing presses in most regions, without any understanding of germs, and where the fastest way to send a message was on horseback.
How Many People Were Alive
Estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau place the global population around 1500 at between 425 and 540 million. China and the Indian subcontinent together accounted for the largest share, as they do today. Europe’s population was recovering from the devastation of the Black Death, which had killed roughly a third of the continent’s people just 150 years earlier. The Americas, Africa, and the Pacific islands made up the rest, though reliable numbers for those regions are harder to pin down.
For context, the entire planet had fewer people than Europe alone does now. Growth was slow. Famine, plague, and warfare kept populations in check, and it would take another 300 years before the global count reached one billion.
The Great Powers of the 1520s
There was no single dominant superpower. Instead, several large empires controlled vast stretches of territory, often with little knowledge of one another.
The Ottoman Empire, based in modern-day Turkey, was at the height of its expansion under Suleiman the Magnificent, who came to power in 1520. His forces controlled southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Ming Dynasty ruled China with a population that dwarfed any European state, and Beijing was the largest city in the world, home to an estimated 600,000 to one million people. In South Asia, the Mughal Empire was just taking shape. Babur, its founder, would conquer much of northern India by 1526.
In Europe, power was fragmented among dozens of kingdoms and city-states. Spain and Portugal were building overseas empires. The Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of German-speaking territories, stretched across central Europe. England was a middleweight, still decades away from its rise as a naval power. France and the Habsburg dynasty (which controlled Spain, Austria, and parts of Italy) were locked in constant rivalry.
The Americas Were Being Invaded
The event that most dramatically reshaped the world in this exact period was the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Between 1519 and 1521, Hernán Cortés and a small force of Spanish soldiers, aided by Indigenous allies and European diseases, toppled an empire that had dominated central Mexico for nearly two centuries. Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital built on a lake where Mexico City now stands, fell in 1521. It had been one of the largest cities in the world, with a population rivaling any European capital.
By the mid-1520s, Spain was establishing colonial rule over what it called New Spain. The consequences were catastrophic for Indigenous peoples. Smallpox, measles, and other diseases to which Native populations had no immunity spread rapidly, killing millions over the following decades. Entire civilizations were dismantled. Further south, the Inca Empire in present-day Peru was still intact in 1525, but Spanish conquistadors would reach it within the decade.
Religion Was Splitting Europe Apart
In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther published his 95 Theses, a list of grievances against the Catholic Church’s practice of selling forgiveness for sins. This triggered the Protestant Reformation, which by 1525 had splintered into multiple competing movements. Luther himself was publicly disagreeing with other reformers over theology. A group called the Anabaptists emerged, advocating ideas that were radical for the time: pacifism, adult baptism, and the separation of church and state. The Mennonites, Hutterites, Baptists, and Quakers all trace their roots to this movement.
The Reformation wasn’t just a religious debate. It was deeply political. Princes and kings chose sides based on whether breaking from Rome served their interests. The result was over a century of religious wars, persecutions, and mass migrations that reshaped European borders and culture permanently.
Outside Europe, Islam was the dominant and expanding faith, carried by Ottoman, Mughal, and Southeast Asian trade networks. Buddhism and Confucianism shaped daily life across East and Southeast Asia. In the Americas, rich polytheistic traditions were practiced by the Aztec, Maya, Inca, and hundreds of other peoples, though European colonizers would soon work to suppress them.
What Ordinary Life Looked Like
The vast majority of people, somewhere around 90%, worked the land. Whether you lived in France, China, or West Africa, your daily existence revolved around growing food, raising animals, and surviving to the next harvest. Cities were small by modern standards. Even Beijing, the world’s largest, would qualify as a midsize city today.
In Europe, the typical peasant diet centered on stews made from beef or mutton with vegetables like cabbage and leek. Research from the University of Bristol found that these thick pottages, along with bread, dairy products (particularly simple “green cheeses”), and occasional fish, formed the backbone of what common people ate. Nobles ate more variety: spiced meats, imported fruits, wine, and white bread. In Asia, rice was the staple for most people, supplemented with vegetables, soy, and fish. Sugar, coffee, and tea were either unknown in Europe or extreme luxuries.
Clothing was handmade. Entertainment meant local festivals, religious holidays, and storytelling. Most people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born. Literacy was rare outside the clergy and merchant classes, though the printing press, invented in Europe around 1440, was beginning to change that.
How Long People Lived
Life expectancy figures from this era are famously misleading. In medieval England, boys born to landowning families had a life expectancy at birth of just 31.3 years. That sounds shockingly low, but the number is dragged down by infant and childhood mortality. Huge numbers of children died before age five from infections, malnutrition, and complications of birth.
If you made it to age 25, the picture changed dramatically. A 25-year-old landowner in medieval England could expect to live to about 50.7, on average. Plenty of people reached their sixties and seventies. Old age was not a modern invention. What was different was the sheer unpredictability of survival: a simple infection, a bad harvest, or a difficult childbirth could be fatal at any age, because antibiotics, surgical anesthesia, and reliable food storage did not exist.
How Connected the World Was
The world of 1525 was simultaneously more connected and more isolated than most people assume. The Silk Road had linked Europe and Asia for centuries. Arab and Indian Ocean trade networks moved goods between East Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. Chinese porcelain has been found in archaeological sites across Africa from this period.
But the Atlantic world was brand new. Europeans had only reached the Americas in 1492, and the first circumnavigation of the globe (by Magellan’s expedition) was completed in 1522, just three years before. Australia was completely unknown to Europeans and would remain so for another two centuries. The Pacific Ocean had been “discovered” by Europeans only in 1513.
Information traveled at the speed of a ship or a horse. A letter from Spain to its new colonies in Mexico took months. News of Luther’s writings spread across Europe in weeks thanks to the printing press, which was revolutionary at the time. In most of the world, knowledge passed orally from person to person, and entire populations could live and die without ever learning about events on the next continent.
What Was About to Change
Standing in 1525, you would be at the hinge point of several transformations that would define the next few centuries. The Columbian Exchange, the transfer of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old and New Worlds, was just beginning. Potatoes, tomatoes, and corn had not yet reached European fields. Horses were new to the Americas. Smallpox was still spreading through Indigenous populations with devastating force.
The Reformation would lead to decades of war. European colonialism was in its infancy but would soon engulf Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The Scientific Revolution was still a century away. For most of the world’s 500 million people, the rhythms of daily life in 1525 would have been recognizable to their great-grandparents: plant, harvest, pray, survive. The upheavals that would remake everything were already underway, but almost nobody alive at the time could see them coming.