Otomo Yoshishige, who adopts the name of…

Nobunaga, having come to control all of Owari through strategic marriages and by buying or conquering land, forms an alliance with Tokugawa Iyeyasu, the capable nineteen-year-old daimyo of Mikawa, and with the daimyo of Kari.

Having thus secured his position in the east, he turns his attentions westward in 1562 and initiates the conquest of the province of Mino.

Maximilian Habsburg, the eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, becomes King of Bohemia in 1562.

Akbar begins consolidating his power in northern India by annexing Malwa in 1562 and making it a province of his empire.

Akbar initiates construction in 1562 on a magnificent tomb for his father Humayun.

The first garden-tomb on the Indian subcontinent, featuring such Persian-inspired elements as arched entryways and bulbous domes, Humayun’s Tomb is generally considered the first great monument of Mughal architecture.

Its Char Bagh garden, typical of Persian gardens but never seen before in India, is divided into four sections by two intersecting streams.

In this case, as with many subsequent Char Baghs (the Taj Mahal being an exception) the Tomb is placed directly in the center.

This four panel configuration—the word Char is Persian for four and the word Bagh is Persian for the word garden—is intended to represent paradise.

Composed of red sandstone, the principal Mughal building material in the sixteenth century, and embellished with marble inlay, Humayun’s Tomb represents a leap in Mughal architecture, and together with its accomplished Char Bagh it sets a precedent for subsequent Mughal architecture.

The ambitious Adham Khan assassinates Akbar’s favorite general, Atga Khan, in 1562.

Furious, Akbar himself throws his foster brother from the forty-foot ramparts of the Agra Fort—twice.

When Akbar breaks the news of her son’s sudden demise to Maham Anga, she famously comments, “You have done well” but, mentally unbalanced by her loss, dies shortly afterwards.

Akbar memorializes her and Adham by erecting a tomb, Bul-bulaiyan, at Mehrauli village near New Delhi.

Built atop the walls of Lal Kot and rising from a terrace enclosed by an octagonal wall provided with low towers at the corners, the tomb consists of a domed octagonal chamber in the Lodhi Dynasty style and Sayyid dynasty early in the fourteenth century.

It has a verandah on each side pierced by three openings.

It is known popularly as Bul-bulaiyan (meaning a labyrinth or maze), for a visitor often loses his way amidst the several passages in the thickness of its walls.

Akbar, applying diplomacy to the problem of economic competition from the Rajasthani Hindu kingdoms of central and western India, weds a princess of Amber (Jaipur) in 1562, thus forging a lasting friendship with its ruler.

The first period of personal union between Croatia and Hungary had ended in 1526 with the Battle of Mohács and the defeat of Hungarian forces by the Ottomans.

After the death of King Louis II, Croatian nobles at the Cetingrad assembly had chosen the Habsburgs as new rulers of the Kingdom of Croatia, under the condition that they provide the troops and finances required to protect Croatia against the Ottoman Empire.

Religious ferment in Europe is to affect Croatian culture throughout the sixteenth century; many Croatian and Dalmatian nobles have embraced the Protestant Reformation.

Stipan Konzul and Anton Dalmatin in 1562 publish the first Croatian Bible.

Lelio Francesco Maria Sozini, or simply Lelio (Latin Socinus) Sozini, had returned in August 1559 to Zürich, where he dies at the age of thirty-seven, shortly after the sequestration of his property by the Inquisition, on May 14, 1562.

Political events had drawn the Siena-born theologian back to Italy in June 1552; two visits to Siena (where freedom of speech was for that moment possible, owing to the shaking off of the Spanish yoke) had brought him into fruitful contact with his young nephew Fausto.

He was at Padua at the date of Servetus's execution, whence he traveled in January 1554 to Basel, in April to Geneva, and in May to Zürich.

Personable and generally well liked, Sozini had received a warm reception from the Reformers Melancthon, Calvin, and Bullinger; the last of these is his closest intimate.

Sozini's theological difficulties turn on the resurrection of the body, predestination, the ground of salvation, the doctrinal basis of the original gospel, the nature of repentance, and the sacraments.

It was the fate of Servetus that had directed his mind to the problem of the Trinity.

At Geneva, he had made incautious remarks on the common doctrine, emphasized in a subsequent letter to Martinengo, the Italian pastor.

Bullinger, at the instance of correspondents, including Calvin, had questioned Sozini as to his faith, and in July 1555 had received from him an explicitly orthodox confession with a frank reservation of the right of further inquiry.

The Inquisition meanwhile has its eye on Sozini’s family; his brother Cornelio is imprisoned at Rome; his brothers Celso and Camillo and his nephew Fausto are reputati Luterani, and Camillo had fled from Siena.

The Jesuits continue to expand, establishing the University of Sardinia in 1562 at Sassari, a city founded in northwestern Sardinia in the twelfth century.

Gondolas, the small, highly maneuverable boats used on the canals of Venice, were originally a much larger boat holding twelve oarsmen, but by the fifteenth century the gondola had assumed a long, narrow, keelless shape, with a tapered prow and stern that rise above the water.

This smaller version, propelled by a single oarsman, or gondolier, from a standing position near the stern, averages about thirty feet (nine meters) in length and slightly more than three feet (one meter) in width.

A seven-pronged metal ferro weighing over eighteen kilograms (forty pounds) decorates the prow, and acts as a counterbalance to the oarsman's weight.

Venetian gondolas boast sumptuous decoration until 1562, when a city ordinance bans public ostentation; most receive a coat of somber black paint.