O’Neill’s small party of gallowglass (Gaelic-Norse mercenaries…

Two hundred Spanish and Mexican soldiers and laborers under orders of the Spanish king arrive in Cebu in 1567, establish a settlement, and build the port of Fuerza de San Pedro, which is to become their outpost for trade with Mexico and protection from hostile native revolts.

The sweet potato first enters China in the 1560s from the New World of the Spanish Americas; it will come to replace rice as the major staple crop of the poor in China, and will carry a culturally negative association with poverty up until the Communist era.

The long reign of Chia-ching, eleventh emperor of the Ming dynasty, has added a degree of stability to the government but whose neglect of official duties ushered in an era of misrule.

Notoriously cruel, Jiajing has caused hundreds of officials who had had the temerity to disagree with him to be tortured, demoted, or killed.

He has spent much of his time and money, especially in his later years, patronizing Taoist alchemists in the hopes of finding an elixir to prolong his life, leaving the government in the hands of a few favorites who have allowed the situation on China's borders to deteriorate.

Mongol tribesmen under the leadership of Altan Khan (dies 1583) raid the northwest frontier and several times even besiege the Chinese capital at Peking.

Japanese pirates harass trade along the coast, and rebellions in the southern provinces have been frequent.

Emperor Jiajing dies in 1567—possibly due to mercury overdose—after forty-five years on the throne (the second longest reign in the Ming dynasty) and is succeeded by his son, the Longqing Emperor.

Though his long rule has given the dynasty an era of stability, Jiajing's neglect of his official duties results in the decline of the dynasty at the end of the sixteenth century.

His style of governing or for that matter the lack thereof will be emulated by his grandson, the Wanli emperor, later in the century.

Nobunaga—stouthearted, audacious, and autocratic—is quick to seize on any promising new invention.

He is the first of the daimyo to organize units equipped with muskets.

He has also brought under his control the agricultural production of the fertile Owari plain, as well as the rising merchant class of the city of Nagoya in the center of the plain.

Feeling that he has secured his rear flank, he moves his base of operations north to the city of Gifu.

With an economic base thus assured, he plans to advance on the Kinki district, the prosperous area surrounding Kyoto, long the center of Japanese power.

Recognized as a military genius, he is in 1567 invited by Yoshiaki, the brother of the murdered shogun, to the capital city of Kyoto to restore order, broken by bloody feuds over the succession of the shogun.

The killers of Yoshiteru, the thirteenth Ashikaga shogun, have already set up a puppet shogun, Ashikaga Yoshihide.

Nobunaga agrees to Yoshiaki's request, seizing the opportunity to enter Kyoto.

Ivan’s new elite bodyguard has set about the task of destroying the great lords.

The Oprichnina contains much of Russia's best land, including parts of Moscow and many of the large central cities.

In total area, the Oprichnina covers almost one-third of all Russian lands.

The rest of the country is referred to as the zemshchina; these areas are ruled by powerful boyars.

The war between Sweden and the coalition of Denmark and Lubeck has dragged on since 1563.

Eric XIV, the thirty-four-year-old Swedish king, has successfully repelled most Danish attempts of conquest, but has not not able to keep his own conquests.

The war, which is particularly bloody, has gone well for Sweden at sea but very badly on land, and becomes increasingly unpopular as Swedish towns are damaged and destroyed, and casualties mount.

As the aristocracy’s frustration with Eric’s reign become increasingly apparent, the King and his most trusted advisor, Jöran Persson, head of the King's network of spies, fear a new rebellion.

Eric, who at this stage is beginning to show signs of mental illness, decides to take action to prevent a rebellion and he invites those he suspects of plotting against him to Svartsjö Castle in May 1567.

Those suspected of being a threat to the King are arrested upon their arrival at the castle and they are tried in Uppsala with Persson leading the prosecutions.

All those tried are, unsurprisingly, found guilty and sentenced to death.

The last nobleman to arrive at Svartsjö is Nils Sture, a descendent of Christian II, who has only just returned from a diplomatic mission to Lorraine.

The King has long regarded Sture as the most dangerous nobleman in Sweden; in 1566, he had ordered Sture’s execution but ultimately decided against this and publicly humiliated him instead.

Sture is arrested on May 22; the following day, Eric murders him in his cell.

Following the murder, Persson manages to persuade a council of the nobility, who are unaware of Sture’s murder, that those who have been arrested are traitors and that the death penalty is therefore justified; the assent of the nobility means that the murder and the executions are legal.

The murder of Nils Sture, however, has a huge effect on Eric’s health.

Within weeks he is removed from the throne on grounds of insanity.

The regents elect to rule in place of Eric, decide to release Erik’s brother John from prison, and decide to arrest Persson for ordering the deaths of the prisoners in Uppsala; it has become apparent by this stage that those executed had been not traitors but victims of the King's increasing paranoia.

The enormous Hamzanama, comprising fourteen hundred painted canvas folios designed to augment a storytelling performance of the life and legendary exploits of the Islamic hero Hamza, is begun in 1567 under the supervision of Sayyid 'Ali and 'Abdus Samad.

The Hamza romance had originated more than fife hundred years earlier, probably in Persia, and has subsequently spread throughout the Islamic world in oral and written forms.

On one side of most folios is a painting, about fifty-four centimeters by sixty-nine centimeters in area, done in a fusion of Persian and Indian styles.

On the other side of most folios is Arabic text in Nasta'liq script.

The folios are ordered, and the text on the back of one folio accompanies the painting on the subsequent folio.

Repeated Oromo raids have brought famine to the city of Harar by 1567.

Nur leaves the city for three months on a punitive raid against the invaders; on his return, he finds an epidemic afflicting Harar, and he himself dies of typhus this year.

The city of Harar was originally inhabited by the Harla people.

Upon the arrival of Arab cleric Abadir in the tenth century, he had been met by the Harla, Gaturi and Argobba tribes.

These three ethnic tribes form the Harari ethnicity.

Harar had witnessed internal power struggles during the absence from the capital of Emir Nir ibn Mujahid, and the unlucky city has been disturbed by encroaching Oromo clans.

It is at this time that the walls of Harar are built; tradition attributes them to Nur ibn Mujahid with the help of two chiefs, Ahu Abadir and Ahu 'Ali.

Pey de Garros, a Provençal poet and a Protestant, had studied law, theology, and Hebrew at the University of Toulouse and eventually had become avocat-général of Pau.

He had published a rhymed Gascon translation of the Psalms of David (1565).

His Églogues go beyond the imitation of classical models, attempting to capture the true flavor of Gascon peasant life.

In the preface to his Poesias gasconas (1567; “Gascon Poetry”) he chides his fellow countrymen for preferring French to Gascon and pleads for a restoration of the native dialect, which he single-handedly has raised to the rank of a literary language.

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, governor of Florida, returns in 1567 to Spain, urging a "just war" against those peninsular native peoples who refuse to accept the Christian message.

Giovanni Battista Guarini, a member of an illustrious literary family, has taught at the University of Ferrara and, like the poet Torquato Tasso, is a member of the Paduan Accademia degli Eterei.

He is twenty-nine in 1567 when he joins the brilliant court of Duke Alfonso II d'Este in Ferrara, whom he serves as a diplomat.

Tasso continues under the Este family’s patronage, producing in the same year his important Discourses on the art of poetry.