| content |
| Millennia: | 2nd millennium |
| Centuries: | 15th century - 16th century - 17th century |
| Decades: | 1530s 1540s 1550s - 1560s - 1570s 1580s 1590s |
| Years: | 1560 1561 1562 1563 1564 1565 1566 1567 1568 1569 |
| Categories: | Births - Deaths - Architecture Establishments - Disestablishments |
Births
- William Shakespeare, English playwright.
- Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.
Events and trends
- First, second and third French War of Religion.
- In 1565, the city of St. Augustine was founded by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on August 28 in modern-day Florida. The city is the oldest continually occupied European settlement in the continental United States.
- In 1566, widespread Protestant iconoclasm in the Netherlands led to the start of the Eighty Years' War.
- In 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was founded.
- Suzanne Erkur manages the imperial silver mint at Kutna Hora in Bohemia.
- The sweet potato first enters China from the New World of the Spanish Americas; it would come to replace rice as the major staple crop of the poor in China, and would carry a culturally negative association with poverty up until the Communist era.
