Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina (1565–1572) and France's St Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572) were bloody purges of the same decade.
The events
- Oprichnina1565–1572 · Alexandrov Sloboda. In 1565 Ivan the Terrible set aside part of the country as the oprichnina under his personal rule, with its own guard. The oprichniki carried out mass executions and confiscations, culminating in the sack of Novgorod in 1570. It was abolished in 1572.
- St Bartholomew's Day Massacre1572 · Paris. 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.
More amazing facts
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 1598 · 1605 While False Dmitry I ruled in Moscow (1605–1606), the first part of Don Quixote came out in Madrid.