Ivan the Terrible, the Mughal emperor Akbar and Elizabeth I were contemporaries: from 1558 to 1584 all three reigned at the same time.
The events
- Siege of Kazan1552 · Kazan. Ivan IV's army stormed Kazan and annexed the Kazan Khanate to Muscovy. Russia gained the Volga and a road to the east; St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow was built to commemorate the victory.
- Defeat of the Spanish Armada1588 · Gravelines. Philip II sent a great fleet to invade England. After the battle off Gravelines and storms on the voyage home the Armada lost many ships; England kept its independence and Protestantism and began its rise as a sea power.
More amazing facts
- 1521 · 1697 The last independent Maya kingdom fell only in 1697, 176 years after Tenochtitlan, when Peter the Great was already ruling Russia.
- 1543 · 1547 Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, four years after Copernicus published that the Earth goes round the Sun.
- 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.
- 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.
- 1582 · 1918 In autumn 1582 Catholic Europe jumped from 4 to 15 October, while Yermak’s Cossacks were marching on the capital of the Khanate of Sibir.