1561

"I am the Wrath of God, the Prince of Freedom, Lord of Tierra Firme and the Provinces of Chile"

- Conquistador Lope de Aguirre, upon forcing his soldiers to
sign a document declaring him Prince of South America

In the year AD 1561...

• At the fourth and most climactic Battle of Kawanakajima Japanese warlords Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen battle each other to yet another draw, with both sides losing more than half of their men in the battle.
• The citizens of Nuremberg in Germany witness what appears to be an aerial battle. This may have been a solar anomaly, perhaps a sun dog, but UFO enthusiasts have declared contemporary accounts of this event as historical evidence of previous visitations to Earth by extraterrestrials.
• Spanish bishop Ruy López de Segura writes one of the first modern books on the game of chess, Libro de la Invencion Liberal y Arte del Juego del Axedrez ("Book of the Liberal Invention and Art of the Game of Chess"). One of the chess openings he studies in the book is now known as the "Ruy Lopez."
• Saint Basil's Cathedral, with its colorful onion domes, is completed in Moscow, having been built on the order of Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible to commemorate Russia's recent conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan.
• Spanish king Philip II permanently relocates his court from Valladolid to a town called Madrid, which remains to this day the capital of Spain.

These people were born in 1561:

• English philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon.
• Italian composer Jacopo Peri, widely considered the inventor of opera.
• English mathemetician Henry Briggs, a pioneer of the concept of logarithms.
• Spanish poet Luis de Góngora, after whom the literary style of Gongorism is named.
• Danish mathemetician Thomas Fincke, best known for introducing the modern names of the trigonometric functions "tangent" and "secant."
• English Jesuit poet Robert Southwell.
• Japanese warlord Fukushima Masanori, remembered as one of the "Seven Spears of Shizugatake."
• Korean admiral Yi Ŏk-Ki.

These people died in 1561:

• Frieslandic Anabaptist relgious leader Menno Simons, whose followers became known as "Mennonites" after his name.
• Basque conquistador Lope de Aguirre, the self-styled "Wrath of God" and legendary for his cruelty, killed by Spanish troops in Venezuela for having revolted against the Spanish crown.
• Turkman nobleman, poet, and Mughal military commander Bairam Khan, assassinated by the son of a man he had killed in battle while traveling through Gujrat.

1560 - 1561 - 1562

16th century

How they were made