1582
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Contents: political eventsexploration, colonization religion education everyday life food and drink |
Muscovites at Pskov put up heroic resistance in February to a siege by Polish and Lithuanian troops. Ivan the Terrible makes peace with Poland and Sweden August 10 after 25 years of conflict. Pope Gregory XIII has sent the Jesuit Antonio Possevino to Muscovy in hopes of affecting a union of the Roman and Orthodox Churches, which have been split since 1054, and Possevino has mediated differences between the warring powers. Ivan gives up claims to Livonia on the Baltic.
Cossack mercenaries use firearms to rout an army of Siberian Tatars, capture their khan Kuchum, and overrun his capital. The Stroganoff family has hired 1,500 Cossacks to safeguard its vastly profitable salt and fur empire (see commerce, 1564). By 1731 the Stroganoffs will be producing fully half of Russia's salt, and they will move to St. Petersburg in the 1750s.
English Court of Common Pleas Chief Justice Sir James Dyer dies at Great Stoughton, Huntingdonshire, March 24 at age 69, having originated the modern system of recording law cases to serve as precedents. He has compiled three volumes of cases heard in the Queen's Bench and common pleas courts since 1513 and created a method that supersedes the simple recording of cases in yearbooks, as was done beginning in 1292 with no view to having them serve as guides to future decisions.
Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo y Feigueroa dies at Lima December 4 at age 66, having ruled Peru with an iron hand since 1769. Fernando Alvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3rd duque de Alva, dies at Lisbon December 11 at age 75, having outraged Catholics as well as Protestants by his cruelty in the Lowlands.
Chinese minister Zhang Juzheng (Chang Chü-cheng) dies after a brilliant career in which he has failed to curb government spending but succeeded in centralizing the government, abridging special privileges, and bringing 106 million acres of land into the tax registers, including vast tracts of previously tax-exempt land owned by the official classes and members of the imperial family. Within 2 years the emperor will have had Zhang's own lands confiscated, his titles rescinded, and the record of his achievements besmirched.
Japan's Taira strongman Nobunaga Oda travels to join his general Hideyoshi, 46, who has conquered much of western Honshu from the Mo'ori family (see 1573). His 56-year-old general Akechi Mitsuhido settles a grievance by setting fire to a monastery at Kyoto where Oda has halted for the night, and Oda dies in the flames or commits seppuku June 21 at age 49, having destroyed the political power of the Buddhist priests. He has employed firearms to achieve his military successes, but the Japanese will soon ban the use of such weapons, which threaten the status of the samurai warrior, and the ban will continue for some 250 years as the traditional steel sword—sharp enough to slice off a head in one blow—prevails. Hideyoshi kills Mitsuhido, gains support from Nobunaga Oda's daimyo Ieyasu Tokugawa, 39, at Edo, and begins to eliminate the Oda family in a great struggle for power. Mitsuhido's daughter Otama, 19, is married to the daimyo Tadaoki Hosokawa, who sends her into hiding for her own protection (see 1584)
Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America by Oxford clergyman-geographer Richard Hakluyt, 30, is published in England (see 1584).
A delegation of Japanese Christian boys goes to Rome. The youths will return in April 1586 after visiting Pope Gregory XIII.
Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci receives orders in April at the Portuguese outpost of Goa on the Indian subcontinent to proceed to China, where he is to carry on the missionary work of the late Francis Xavier (see 1578; Xavier, 1552). Now 29, Ricci arrives in August at Macao on the east coast of China, where he meets with fellow missionary Michele Ruggieri, dons the habit of a Buddhist monk, and studies Mandarin, Chinese etiquette, and Chinese literature in preparation for a career of evangelizing the Chinese. Both men will receive permission next year to settle in the capital of Guangdong Province; Ruggieri will return to Italy in November 1588 after publishing the first catechism in Chinese; Ricci will remain in China for the rest of his life (see 1601).
The ascetic and mystic nun Teresa of Avila dies at Albe de Tormes October 4 after a career of reforming the monastic movement. Daughter of a Jewish convert whose wife was a Castilian aristocrat, Sister Teresa has insisted that the chief role of nuns is to pray for souls in peril and intercede for others.
The University of Edinburgh has its beginnings in a charter obtained from Scotland's James VI and will hold its first classes on a site at Kirk o' Field, where Lord Darnley was murdered in 1567. Scotland's fourth university, it will grow to be the nation's largest, with more than 20,000 students.
A new Gregorian calendar instituted by Pope Gregory XIII abolishes the ancient Julian calendar because its error of one day in every 128 years has moved the vernal equinox to March 11. Gregory restores the vernal equinox to March 21. The late Neapolitan astronomer-physician Aloysius Lilius (Luigi Lilio Ghiraldi) and Collegio Romano mathematician Christopher Clavius (see science, 1570) have devised the new dating system in an effort to bring the sun and the calendar back into harmony. It takes effect in Europe's Roman Catholic countries October 5 (which becomes October 15), Protestant countries will adhere to the old style Julian calendar of 45 B.C. until 1700 or later, and the Russians will retain it until 1918 (see Britain, 1752).
Japanese samurai warriors and army conscripts live as they have for centuries on rice (boiled, fried, or cooked in a pan), bonito (dried and scraped), other dried and salted fish, dried seaweed, dried vegetables, miso (soybean paste), and umeboshi (plums pickled in brine and dried).
The word coffee (kahveh) appears in print for the first time: Augsburg botanist-physician Leonhard Rauwolf, now 47, begins publication of his Travels and mentions it (see 1560; 1601; Rauwolf, 1573).
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