Tycho Brahe kept a tame elk that, so the story goes, was killed by beer.

1576

Taken to a banquet at another nobleman's castle, the animal drank too much, fell down the stairs and died.

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• Uraniborg, Tycho Brahe's island1576 · Island of Hven. King Frederick II of Denmark granted Tycho Brahe the island of Hven, where he built a castle-observatory with its own printing press and paper mill. Without a telescope, he gathered the most precise observations of his age, which Kepler used to find his laws of planetary motion.

16th century

More amazing facts

• 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.
• 1581 When Oda Nobunaga first saw the African Yasuke in 1581, he had his skin scrubbed, thinking it was ink. Convinced otherwise, he took Yasuke into service with a stipend and a sword.
• 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.
• 1582 · 1918 Russia's February 1918 had no 1st to 13th. By decree, Wednesday 31 January was followed by Thursday 14 February — Russia adopting the Gregorian calendar 336 years after Catholic Europe.

All amazing facts (1058) →