The 1500s were swashbuckling times, when vast empires fought each other for treasure, land and souls.
While Islamic power waxed under the Ottoman sultans and Christian economies burgeoned with New World loot, ideas and inventions old and new flooded Europe and the Mediterranean. They were, indeed, an era much like our own, and those years spawned precocious notions; in a spirit exemplified in Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, concepts appeared which would not to be fully realized for centuries.
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