St Bartholomew's Day Massacre
A Paris royal wedding turns into a massacre of Protestants

On the night of 24 August 1572, days after the wedding of Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois, Catholics began killing the Huguenots gathered in Paris. The massacre spread to other cities and claimed thousands of lives.
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Did you know
Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina (1565–1572) and France's St Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572) were bloody purges of the same decade.
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1547 Ivan IV crowned Tsar — 25 years earlier
- 1555–1561 Saint Basil's Cathedral — 17 years earlier
- 1569 Union of Lublin — 3 years earlier
- 1582 Yermak's conquest of Sibir — 10 years later
Africa
- 1591 Battle of Tondibi and fall of Songhai — 19 years later
Asia
- 1556 Shaanxi earthquake — 16 years earlier
- 1556 Akbar and the Second Battle of Panipat — 16 years earlier
- 1592–1598 Imjin War — 20 years later
Alive at the time
- Ivan the Terrible (aged 42)
- Elizabeth I (aged 39)
- Akbar the Great (aged 30)
- Tokugawa Ieyasu (aged 29)
- Miguel de Cervantes (aged 25)
- William Shakespeare (aged 8)
- Galileo Galilei (aged 8)
- Selim II (aged 48)
- Philip II of Spain (aged 45)
- Yermak Timofeyevich (aged 40)