The International Scientific Conference “The Challenge of Time: the Rise of the Centralised States in East and West Europe in Late 15th — 17th Centuries” was held in Kaluga State University named after K. E. Tsiolkovsky, on October 8—11, 2019. Conference was jointly organized with the Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian historical society, the Fund “History of the Fatherland” and Kaluga Region Government. The conference was attended by more than 100 Russian and foreign scholars, historians from Sweden, France, Belarus, Germany, Poland, Donetsk, as well as representatives of leading scientific centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd, Samara, Smolensk, Oryol, Tula, Belgorod, Vologda, and Petrozavodsk. Several similar “challenges of time” that faced different states in Western, Central and Eastern Europe in Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period were in the focus of discussion during the conference. Among them were threats from abroad and changes in foreign policy, “military revolution” and religious conflicts. During this period the conditions of the development in these regions are comparable and there were constant relations and interaction between different countries. It provides opportunities for the use of simultaneous study in the research of radical changes of that time. This approach let the participants of the conference to unveil several important tendencies in the rise of centralised states, development of the political institutions, transformations in urban administration and economy, changes in relations of the state and the church as well as in the social processes, typical for the period.