1581
Act of Abjuration
The Estates-General of the northern Netherlands formally renounced their allegiance to Philip II of Spain at The Hague. The Act of Abjuration, drafted by lawyers steeped in humanist political thought, argued that rulers who became tyrants could be deposed. It anticipated, uncannily, the American Declaration of Independence. Its argument that tyrants could be deposed influenced the American Declaration of Independence two centuries later.
Ermak Crosses the Urals
The Cossack ataman Ermak Timofeevich crossed the Ural mountains at the head of eight hundred men, defeated the Siberian khan Kuchum, and claimed western Siberia for Ivan the Terrible. Russian fur traders and Orthodox missionaries followed him east. The longest land expansion in history had quietly begun. The conquest, initially a private venture, became the founding event of Russia's three-century expansion across Siberia to the Pacific.
English Jesuit Mission Begins
Edmund Campion and Robert Persons landed secretly in England as the first English Jesuit missionaries. Campion wrote a pamphlet known as Campion's Brag and was captured at Lyford Grange within months. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. The Jesuit mission to reconvert England had found its first martyr.
Moscow Burns Books
Ivan the Terrible, increasingly paranoid in his final years, ordered the burning of books he suspected of heretical influence and personally examined the libraries of executed nobles. A year later he would kill his own son in a rage and spend the remainder of his life trying to atone for that act.