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After sunset, 11 November 1572

On the evening of 11 November 1572, at Herrevad Abbey in Scania, Tycho Brahe saw an unfamiliar and exceptionally bright star in Cassiopeia.

The traditional biographical account has him distrusting his own eyes and asking servants and passing peasants whether they could see the object too. Once other witnesses confirmed it, he prepared to measure its position against the principal stars of Cassiopeia.

Measuring without a telescope

That sighting began Tycho's systematic record of the object's position, brightness, and colour. One recorded angular separation from Schedir in Cassiopeia is 7° 55′ — taken with naked-eye instruments, decades before the telescope entered astronomy.

His subsequent failure to detect diurnal parallax placed the object beyond the Moon rather than in the changeable terrestrial region, contradicting the Aristotelian claim that the heavens above the Moon do not change.

Five days late to his own discovery

Tycho was not the first to record it. An abbot at Messina and Wolfgang Schüler at Wittenberg both reportedly noted the new star on 6 November, five days earlier, and other observers reported it independently.

His 11 November date follows the Julian calendar he used; Denmark did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1700, and the proleptic Gregorian equivalent is 21 November 1572. Modern estimates put the star's maximum apparent visual magnitude at approximately −4.0.

It faded from naked-eye view around March 1574, though sources give dates between February and March because visibility near the limiting magnitude depends on observer and conditions.

Makishima falls, and the shōgun submits

Ashikaga Yoshiaki repudiated an earlier reconciliation and again raised forces against Oda Nobunaga in 1573, at Makishima Castle near Uji, south of Kyoto. Nobunaga crossed the Uji River, assaulted the fortified position, and forced his submission.

On the traditional Japanese date — Genki 4, seventh month, twentieth day, converted to 27 August in the proleptic Gregorian calendar — Yoshiaki was sent to Wakae Castle in Kawachi Province, where Miyoshi Yoshitsugu received him.

What the last shōgun kept

Yoshiaki was not executed. He furnished his son as a hostage as security for the settlement and, after the expulsion, retained both his shogunal title and his court rank.

Nobunaga issued no decree formally dissolving the shogunate. What ended was the Kyoto-based Muromachi shogunate as an effective government.

An ending described rather than declared

Nobunaga became the dominant military power in the capital region, while Yoshiaki continued his opposition from exile.

The 1573 'end' of the shogunate is a conventional description of political collapse, not a same-day legal abolition — and it did not end warfare across Japan. The New Cambridge History of Japan describes 1573 as a turning point followed by an intensification, a zenith, of Sengoku fighting.

Two ships out of Manila, sailing east

Two ships, the Santiago and the San Juan, left Manila on 1 July 1573. One reached Acapulco on 15 November; the leaking flagship followed on 24 November.

Their cargo was Asian merchandise bound for New Spain — Chinese silk and porcelainware, reportedly 712 pieces of silk and 22,300 pieces of porcelainware — not New World silver arriving at Manila.

A hard crossing

The flagship reached Acapulco with great difficulty, leaking and short of water.

Captain Pedro de Luna and some of his sailors died of illness before landfall; his reported distance from land at death was about 200 leagues.

The viceroy's verdict, 5 December

Writing to Philip II on 5 December 1573, Viceroy Martín Enríquez concluded that commerce with China would have to be conducted with silver, because China valued silver above the goods New Spain could offer.

The trans-Pacific return route itself was not new: Andrés de Urdaneta had established it in 1565. Historians describe 1573 as the year the commercial galleon trade took off, rather than the first crossing between Asia and America.

April to September 1576, from one valley outward

The illness was first reported in the Valley of Mexico in April 1576 and stayed largely confined around Mexico City through July.

It began moving outward in August and expanded explosively during September's rainy-season peak, reaching from central Mexico to Sonora and Guatemala within weeks.

Three or four days

Victims developed an acute syndrome of fever, jaundice, severe pain, neurological symptoms, nodules, dysentery, and bleeding. The physician Francisco Hernández, writing as an eyewitness, reported that death commonly followed within only a few days — an interval he put at three to four.

At the height of the outbreak small towns reported twenty to forty deaths a day or more, larger towns hundreds. Indigenous communities suffered extreme mortality, while contemporary reports and later analysis found Spaniards were affected much less severely, which by itself establishes neither genetic immunity nor the pathogen's origin.

Autopsies at the Royal Indian Hospital

As deaths mounted, colonial authorities directed Hernández and the barber-surgeon Alonso López de Hinojosos to examine victims and conduct autopsies at Mexico City's Royal Indian Hospital, looking for an explanation or a treatment.

The epidemic ran until its end was declared in December 1578. Deaths across 1576–1578 are estimated at 2 to 2.5 million, about half of the remaining Indigenous population — demographic estimates drawn from colonial censuses and contemporary reports rather than a count of individuals.

No pathogen has been conclusively established. Cocoliztli is a Nahuatl word meaning pest or pestilence, not the name of an identified disease.

One ship out of five enters Plymouth Harbour

On 26 September 1580 the Golden Hind entered Plymouth Harbour, having sailed home by way of the Cape of Good Hope and Sierra Leone. Five ships had left England on 13 December 1577; the Golden Hind was the only one to complete the circuit and return.

The voyage had taken about 34 months. The recorded date is Old Style Julian, the calendar England then used, and corresponds to 6 October 1580 in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.

A cargo England could not easily explain

The ship came back carrying spices and captured Spanish treasure — described in an English annal as gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones. Raiding Spanish ships and settlements had been central to the enterprise, not incidental to it.

Drake's first action on landing was to send the result urgently and confidentially to Elizabeth I, because the captured property posed an immediate diplomatic problem: England and Spain were not yet formally at war, and the Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza represented a government already aware of the raids.

Master Drake, not yet Sir Francis

The return completed the first circumnavigation conducted throughout by the same commander. Magellan's earlier expedition had been completed under Juan Sebastián Elcano after Magellan died in the Philippines.

Elizabeth's court and Privy Council now faced the question of whether to acknowledge Drake and keep the treasure or appease Spain by giving it back. Drake was still 'Master Drake' when he entered Plymouth; his knighthood came aboard the Golden Hind in 1581.

Before dawn in Kyoto

In 1582 Akechi Mitsuhide was ordered west with roughly 13,000 troops to reinforce Hashiba Hideyoshi against the Mōri. Instead he took that mobilized force into the capital and, before dawn, attacked his own lord, Oda Nobunaga, at Honnō-ji.

The contemporary date was the second day of the sixth month of Tenshō 10; 21 June 1582 is its modern Western-calendar rendering. Nobunaga was staying at the temple with only a small household retinue while the main Oda armies were deployed elsewhere.

What the Shinchō Kōki says happened inside

The Shinchō Kōki has Nobunaga shooting several arrows, fighting on with a spear, taking a spear wound to the elbow, then withdrawing into his residence, having the building set alight, and killing himself. His page Mori Ranmaru, who identified the attackers as Akechi troops in that narrative, died defending him.

The chronicle is an indispensable early record based on Ōta Gyūichi's notes, but its reconstruction of Nobunaga's final moments cannot be independently confirmed. No remains and no incontrovertible eyewitness description of the suicide survive.

The heir dies the same morning

Mitsuhide's forces then turned on Nobunaga's eldest son and designated successor, Oda Nobutada, who had withdrawn from Myōkaku-ji to Nijō. Overwhelmed there, Nobutada committed suicide.

Within hours the coup had killed both the Oda regime's leader and its principal adult successor, and Mitsuhide held the initiative around Kyoto.

Mitsuhide left no securely established explanation for the revolt; grudge, ambition, imperial-court, Shikoku-policy and wider-conspiracy theories all remain unproved.

Dated at Tusculum, 24 February 1582

Pope Gregory XIII dated the bull Inter gravissimas to 24 February 1582 in modern year-numbering, though its closing clause reads 1581 because it used an Annunciation-style year beginning on 25 March.

That date is Julian, equivalent to 6 March in the proleptic Gregorian calendar — a retrospective conversion, since the new calendar was not yet in legal use. A document held by the Italian Chamber of Deputies records that Gregory signed on 24 February but had the bull publicly affixed and promulgated on 5 March, so 24 February is safest described as its signing date.

Ten days deleted, three century leap days in four

The bull ordered ten dates omitted — 5 through 14 October 1582 — so that 4 October would be followed by 15 October while the weekday sequence continued normally. It kept leap years every four years but directed that three of every four century years cease to be leap years, with 1600 and every fourth century year after it retained.

It also replaced the old lunar 'golden number' mechanism with a cycle of epacts, meant to restore the ecclesiastical full moon used to calculate Easter. The bull identified about ten days of drift since the Council of Nicaea and a lunar displacement of four days or more.

The clause about debts

Gregory did not simply delete dates. The bull ordered judges to add ten days to affected payment deadlines so that the jump would not cause financial harm to those owing money.

No civil dates changed that February. The bull authorized printing and dissemination of the corrected calendar and directed Catholic institutions to make the October change, allowing later implementation where notice arrived too late.

Within papal jurisdiction, unauthorized printers faced loss of the books and a penalty of 100 gold ducats.

A departure that took more than one day

The fleet left the Tagus in 1588 under Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, Duke of Medina Sidonia, with Juan Martínez de Recalde as his principal naval deputy.

A contemporary printed relation catalogued by the Folger Shakespeare Library says the Armada began emerging from Lisbon's harbour on 29 May and completed its departure on 30 May, and a contemporary map held by the National Museum of the Royal Navy also dates the sailing to 29 May. Other museum chronologies describe the prolonged movement as running from 28 to 30 May, which is where the traditional date comes from.

Spain and Portugal had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, so no calendar conversion applies to the Iberian departure date.

How many ships, and how many men

Royal Museums Greenwich reckons the fleet at 138 ships carrying more than 25,000 seamen and soldiers. The Museu Marítim de Barcelona gives about 130 ships with 8,000 sailors and 18,000 soldiers.

The totals differ because they count differently: whether small craft, dispatch vessels, volunteers, servants, clergy, and other noncombatants are included changes the answer. Nor was this a uniform body of 130 warships — it mixed galleons, galleasses, galleys, armed merchantmen, transports, and smaller support craft.

Toward Parma, by way of a storm

The immediate mission was to sail toward the Netherlands and rendezvous with the Duke of Parma's army for the planned crossing to England. Medina Sidonia held overall command; he had recognized naval-administrative ability but little significant experience commanding at sea.

By 30 May the fleet had cleared Lisbon and turned north. It did not sail straight into the Channel: bad weather scattered it and forced ships into A Coruña for repairs, delaying the campaign until July.

Daybreak, 31 July 1588

The Armada had been sighted off the Lizard on 29 July 1588. Lord Howard of Effingham and his vice-admiral Francis Drake brought the Plymouth squadron to sea the next day and manoeuvred to gain the weather gauge.

At daybreak on 31 July the English fleet engaged the Spanish near Plymouth and the Eddystone Rocks. English documents date the same action 21 July, because England still used the Julian calendar — ten days behind.

Gunfire, not boarding

The English attacked from windward and put much of their pressure on the Spanish rear, where Juan Martínez de Recalde turned his flagship to meet them. They relied on gunfire and avoided the close-range boarding fight the Spanish preferred.

The Armada's defensive formation held. Royal Museums Greenwich classifies the engagement as indecisive; the English eventually withdrew and the Spanish continued eastward.

An explosion and a collision

During the action the Spanish San Salvador suffered a magazine explosion, and Nuestra Señora del Rosario was disabled in a collision during the manoeuvres that followed.

Neither ship was taken in the fighting. The English captured both the next day, on 1 August. How much of that day's Spanish damage English gunfire actually caused remains uncertain.

2 August 1588, with the wind in Spanish favour

On 2 August 1588 the Armada reached Portland Bill in Dorset, where the pursuing English fleet renewed the fight in several separate actions.

A northeasterly wind gave the Spanish the weather gauge for once. Contemporary English records date the encounter 23 July, England still being on the Julian calendar; Spanish records, already Gregorian, put it on 2 August.

Frobisher cut off

Martin Frobisher's Triumph and five accompanying ships became separated from the English fleet south of Portland Bill and were attacked by Spanish galleasses.

The galleasses worked at them for about an hour and a half. Lord Howard of Effingham brought other English ships to their aid.

Both fleets running low on powder

The fleets exchanged cannon fire into the evening, English attacks concentrating on Recalde's San Juan and Medina Sidonia's flagship San Martín. Dwindling powder and ammunition contributed to the disengagement.

Despite the claim of an English victory attached to this date, the action ended without a decisive victor and caused little damage to either fleet.

Both fleets continued east toward the Isle of Wight, the English still pursuing an Armada that was still intact.

Tenshō 18, seventh month, fifth day

On the fifth day of the seventh month of Tenshō 18 — 4 August 1590 in the proleptic Gregorian calendar — the Hōjō leader Ujinao and his brother Ujifusa left Odawara and surrendered at the camp of Takigawa Katsutoshi, one of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's commanders.

The submission followed negotiations that had begun in early June and continued after envoys entered Odawara Castle to meet him. Odawara City's account estimates about 180,000 besiegers against roughly 50,000 defenders.

The 'one-night castle' took months

By late June nearly every important Hōjō supporting castle except Oshi had fallen, and Odawara — whose outer earthwork enclosure ran more than nine kilometres around castle and town — was encircled by land and sea.

Ishigakiyama, remembered as the castle raised overnight, was not. Odawara's museum says construction began in early April, masonry was finished by mid-May, and Hideyoshi moved his headquarters there on the twenty-seventh day of the sixth month — weeks after peace talks had already started.

The castle changes hands, and the bill comes due

Ujinao's surrender ended organized Hōjō resistance, but the transfer of the castle was a separate process. Tokugawa Ieyasu began receiving it the following day, and the formal handover is dated to the ninth day of the month.

Hideyoshi assigned responsibility for the war to Ujinao's father Ujimasa, to Ujiteru, and to two other Hōjō leaders; Ujimasa and Ujiteru were later ordered to commit seppuku.

Ujinao himself was spared and later sent to Mount Kōya.

The fourth day of the ninth month, Tenshō 19

In 1591, on the fourth day of the ninth month, Kunohe Masazane and seven other commanders surrendered at Gamō Ujisato's camp outside Kunohe Castle in Mutsu Province.

Masazane accepted terms mediated by a priest associated with his family, after being promised favourable treatment or protection for those inside the castle.

The date usually printed as 4 September is that lunisolar date, not a Gregorian one; its proleptic Gregorian equivalent is 21 October 1591.

Who was outside the walls

Iwate Prefecture's account puts the besieging force at about 65,000 against roughly 5,000 defenders; a Heibonsha encyclopedia account reports about 60,000 besiegers.

This was a Toyotomi punitive force — an Ōshū re-pacification army, not an imperial one. Toyotomi Hidetsugu was named with Tokugawa Ieyasu among its commanders and Asano Nagamasa served as military inspector; Hideyoshi ordered the campaign but did not personally receive the surrender.

The terms are broken

After the surrender the promise was not honoured. The castle garrison was killed — a reported figure is 5,000 — while Masazane and the other leaders were taken south as prisoners and executed later.

The fall of Kunohe ended this major armed challenge to Toyotomi-backed Nanbu authority and was followed by a reorganization and destruction of many castles in the Nanbu domain.

The massacre is well established in reference accounts, though its most vivid details derive from later chronicles rather than the sparse contemporary evidence.