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.
The events
- 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.
- Tycho's supernova1572 · Herrevad Abbey, Scania. In November 1572 a new star brighter than Venus blazed in Cassiopeia. Tycho Brahe showed it lay far beyond the Moon, undermining the belief in unchanging heavens. The same year saw the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France and the Battle of Molodi near Moscow.
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.
- 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.
- 1576 Tycho Brahe kept a tame elk that, so the story goes, was killed by beer.