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Many great stories have what we might describe as a turning point: a moment when a decision or an action means that nothing will be the same again. It's a fairly standard, but very powerful narrative tool.

History is not often so straight forward, but in the first week of the latest series of A History of the World, we find ourselves at just such a turning point.

The time is about AD 1450 and a string of great empires dominate the world but, as lead curator of the series JD Hill explains, things are about to change:

The great powers shaping the world at this time are in some ways similar to the empires we saw in the previous 2,000 years; they're in China, South Asia and the Middle East, for example. But what's about to change is that western Europe - up to now basically an interesting place, but not a driver on the world stage - is going to become pivotal.

Imagine global history as a series of hotspots. These historical hotspots move around, but Western Europe hasn't been one yet. It's at this point that it becomes one.

But, as is more often the case than not in world history, this didn't happen overnight. The process took hundreds of years. Our five objects this week reveal the great powers that shaped the world at this time.

First up is the signature - a tughra - of Suleiman the Magnificent whose Ottoman Turkish Empire, which held dominion over the eastern Mediterranean, was pushing hard into the Middle East and tapping increasingly loudly on Europe's door.

A jade cup - thought to protect its owner from poison - helps tell the story of the Timurids, rulers of central Asia and Iran. While at the other end of Asia, the Ming Dynasty ruled an economically buoyant China, whose experiments with the idea of coin-less economy produced this banknote.

Across the Atlantic a tiny, gold llama helps us explore the world's largest state at this time: South America's Inca Empire, which ruled some 12 million people across 5,500 kilometres of what is now Peru, and parts of Equador, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

In Europe, there was no such dominant empire. In contrast, the continent was something like a bunch of argumentative cousins fighting it out for a place at the top table. The print made by Albrecht Dürer of a rhinoceros explores the new global connections that Portugal and Spain were beginning to create, and the power that the printing press was beginning to have across Europe.

European efforts to establish trade overseas, connected up the world's continents for the first time (think of Columbus setting sail to find an alternative route to the spices of the east and running aground on what would turn out to be the Americas). This seaborne enterprise would bring massive maritime empires to Europe's fragmented kingdoms, and with them great wealth, great power and great consequences.

Without wishing to sound too dramatic, this really is the moment when the modern world starts to look like the one we live in, and things would indeed never be the same again. But that's next week's story.