1563
Council of Trent Closes
After eighteen years and three sessions, the Council of Trent concluded with sweeping decrees on the sacraments, seminaries, clerical discipline, and the veneration of images. Catholicism emerged clarified and militant. The Protestant-Catholic schism was now permanent, and both sides would spend a century trying to prove otherwise. Tridentine reforms standardized Catholic worship across the globe, creating institutional culture that persisted until the Second Vatican Council.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs Published
The English exile John Foxe published his enormous Acts and Monuments, cataloguing the sufferings of Protestant martyrs from Wycliffe to the victims of Queen Mary. It became the best-selling book of Elizabethan England after the Bible and shaped English anti-Catholic sentiment for three centuries. Its woodcut illustrations of Protestants being burned alive shaped English anti-Catholic sentiment for three centuries.
Escorial Begun
Philip II laid the cornerstone of the Escorial, an enormous granite palace-monastery complex in the Guadarrama mountains northwest of Madrid. Designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, it combined a royal residence, a library, a basilica, and a mausoleum. It would take twenty-one years to complete. Philip's austere granite complex reflected his vision of a monarchy grounded in piety, order, and systematic administration of a global empire.
Thirty-Nine Articles Adopted
The Church of England adopted the Thirty-Nine Articles under Elizabeth I, a moderate Protestant statement of faith that tried to accommodate as many English Christians as possible without pleasing Puritans or Catholics. Parliament made them binding on all clergy. English theological identity had found its cautious shape. Their deliberately ambiguous language was designed to accommodate the widest possible range of English Protestant opinion.
London Plague
An outbreak of bubonic plague killed twenty thousand Londoners, roughly a quarter of the city's population. The royal court fled to Windsor. Playhouses and taverns were closed. Cross-shaped marks began appearing on the doors of infected houses, a grim medieval practice being rehearsed once again in Tudor London. The epidemic provided a rehearsal for the even more devastating outbreaks of 1603 and 1665 that punctuated London's early modern history.