1560s

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Millennium:	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

[edit] Births

• William Shakespeare, English playwright.
• Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.

[edit] Events and trends

• The first, second and third French Wars of Religion were fought between Catholics and Protestants as part of the fallout from the Reformation.
• 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 would become 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 managed the imperial silver mint at Kutna Hora in Bohemia.
• The sweet potato first entered 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.