In 1571 Spain was busy at both ends of its empire: in June it founded Manila in the Philippines, and in October it joined its allies in destroying the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto.
The events
- Spanish Manila and the Manila galleons1571 · Manila. Miguel López de Legazpi founded Spanish Manila. Galleons sailing between Manila and Acapulco carried American silver in exchange for Chinese silk and porcelain, linking Asia and the Americas by regular trade for the first time.
- Battle of Lepanto1571 · Lepanto. The fleet of the Holy League — Spain, Venice and the Papacy — destroyed the Ottoman fleet off Greece. The greatest galley battle checked Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean; Cervantes was wounded in it.
More amazing facts
- 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.
- 1566 · 1601 The great astronomer Tycho Brahe wore a metal nose.
- 1569 Most online maps use a projection from 1569.
- 1570 · 1582 Ivan the Terrible asked Elizabeth I for asylum in England in case his boyars overthrew him. The queen agreed, provided he paid his own way. Later he even sought to marry her relative Mary Hastings.
- 1572 Two and a half months after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre a new star blazed in the sky. Tycho Brahe spotted it on 11 November 1572 and showed the heavens could change: it was a supernova.
- 1576 Tycho Brahe kept a tame elk that, so the story goes, was killed by beer.