Most online maps use a projection from 1569.
Gerardus Mercator designed it for sailors, and web maps still use a version of it.
More amazing facts
- 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.
- 1566 · 1601 The great astronomer Tycho Brahe wore a metal nose.
- 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.
- 1571 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.
- 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.