...Rathlin Island, where Sorley Boy's children and…

Bayinnaung, having by the beginning of 1575 gained complete control over Laos, has installed on the Laotian throne a Laotian prince whom he has held hostage for a decade.

The country falls into chaos.

Nagashino Castle, in the Mikawa province of Japan, threatens Takeda Katsuyori's supply lines, and he therefore puts it under siege from the seventeenth of June, 1575; Okudaira Sadamasa, a vassal of Tokugawa Ieyasu, commands the defending force.

Both Tokugawa and Nobunaga on June 28 send troops totaling thirty-eight thousand men to lift the siege and devastate the Takeda clan with the strategic use of arquebuses.

Nobunaga compensates for the slow reloading time of the arquebus by arranging the arquebusiers in three lines.

After each line fires, it ducks and reloads as the next line fires.

The bullets are able to pierce the Takeda cavalry armor.

Ashigaru spearmen stab through or over the stockades at any horses that make it past the initial volleys, and samurai, with shorter swords and spears, engage in single combat with any Takeda warriors who make it past the wooden barricades.

Strong defenses on the ends prevent the Takeda forces from flanking the stockades.

The Takeda break by mid-afternoon, flee, and are pursued and cut down without quarter.

Takeda suffers a loss of ten thousand men, two-thirds of his original besieging force.

Eight of his famous 'Twenty-Four Generals' are killed in this battle, including Yamagata Masakage and Oyamada Nobushige.

The victory of Oda's Western-style tactics and firearms over Takeda Katsuyori's cavalry charge is often cited as a turning point in Japanese warfare; many cite it as the first 'modern' Japanese battle.

Ironically, while Takeda's cavalry charge represents the old, traditional, means of warfare, it had been invented by his father, Takeda Shingen, less than a generation earlier.

Nevertheless, while others had used firearms previously, Oda Nobunaga is the first to conceive of the wooden stockades and rotating volleys of fire that had led to the decisive victory at Nagashino.

Nobunaga continues his expansion, ...

...sending Shibata Katsuie and Maeda Toshiie to the north and Akechi Mitsuhide to Tamba province.

Shibata Katsuie, after gaining control of Echizen in 1575, ...

...gains the castle of Kitanoshō-jō (Hokujō) and is commanded by Nobunaga to conquer the Hokuriku region.

Akechi Mitsuhide, having received from Nobunaga a small village in Kumamoto Prefecture, Sakamoto,moves to pacify the Tamba region by defeating several clans such as the Isshiki of Tango.

Hans Sachs, a popular and prolific German dramatist and meistersinger had, after his apprenticeship as a shoemaker, settled in his hometown, Nuremberg, where he is to remain throughout his life.

By his own tally, he has written more than four thousand two hundred and seventy-five Meisterlieder, seventeen hundred tales and fables in verse, and two hundred and eight dramas.

In his eighty-five Shrovetide plays, which are vivid and realistic, Sachs employs prototypes from medieval farces—the shrew, the cunning peasant, the quack, and the bragging soldier.

A supporter of Martin Luther (which position caused him a temporary loss of official favor), he draws from classical, biblical, and medieval themes to express humanistic tenets and principles.

Many of his melodies for the poems will survive him at his death at eighty-one on January 19, 1576.

Bartholomeus Spranger, a Flemish Mannerist painter who has served for eight years as an assistant to Federico Zuccari, moves in 1575 from Rome to Vienna, where he works for Emperor Maximilian II as a painter, draftsman, and etcher, peopling his paintings with contorted nude figures.

István Bathory, the prominent Hungarian noble who in 1571 had succeeded János II (János Sigismund Zápolya) as prince of Transylvania, is elected king of Poland in 1575, supported militarily by the Polish nobles.

An estimated one hundred and fifty thousand Jews live in Poland by this date, up from twenty thousand to thirty thousand in 1500.

The Utraquists in Bohemia and Moravia formulate a common doctrinal statement in 1575, accepted by Lutherans and Calvinists and known as the Bohemian Confession (Confessio Bohemia).