Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, four years after Copernicus published that the Earth goes round the Sun.
The events
- Copernicus publishes heliocentrism1543 · Nuremberg. Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, printed in Nuremberg, put the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre. Published in the year of his death, it began the Scientific Revolution.
- Ivan IV crowned Tsar1547 · Dormition Cathedral, Moscow. On 16 January 1547 Grand Prince Ivan IV was crowned in the Kremlin's Dormition Cathedral, the first to take the title of tsar. This created the Tsardom of Russia, which lasted until the empire was proclaimed in 1721.
More amazing facts
- 1519 · 1521 While Magellan's expedition circled the globe, Cortés fought the Aztecs.
- 1521 · 1697 The last independent Maya kingdom fell only in 1697, 176 years after Tenochtitlan, when Peter the Great was already ruling Russia.
- 1545 · 1571 Silver from Potosí (1545) made the Spanish peso the first truly global currency: from 1571, Manila galleons carried it across the Pacific to China.
- 1556 · 1584 Ivan the Terrible, the Mughal emperor Akbar and Elizabeth I were contemporaries: from 1558 to 1584 all three reigned at the same time.
- 1564 In 1564 Ivan Fyodorov printed the Apostol in Moscow, and Shakespeare was born in England.
- 1565 · 1572 Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina (1565–1572) and France's St Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572) were bloody purges of the same decade.