• Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga breaks the power of the mighty Takeda clan at the Battle of Nagashino, making effective use of guns to shatter the fabled Takeda cavalry charge.
• Mughal emperor Akbar invades Bengal, trouncing the Bengalis at the Battle of Tukaroi.
• The Dutch Revolt drags on as the peace negotiations at Breda break down, but fighting lulls as Spanish king Philip II declares bankruptcy and is unable to pay his soldiers. Meanwhile William the Silent founds the Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands, to commemorate the lifting of the seige the year before.
• Led by Paulo Dias de Novais, the Portuguese begin the colonization of Angola, establishing a settlement at Luanda.
• On his way home from army service in Italy, Miguel de Cervantes is captured by pirates and sold into slavery.
• The first European porcelain is produced in Florence, but is still vastly inferior to the Chinese product.
• Saint Philip Neri founds the Congregation of the Oratory.
• Stephen Báthory is elected king of Poland.
• Italian poet Torquato Tasso begins his masterwork, the epic poem Jerusalem Delivered
• English queen Elizabeth I grants a monopoly on the publication of sheet music to printers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

These people were born in 1575:

• German mystic Jakob Böhme, founder Behmenism.
• English noblewoman Arabella Stuart, whose claim to succeed Elizabeth I as ruler of England was preferable to that of James I because she had been born on English soil.
• Dutch poetess Anna Bijns.
• English mathematician William Oughtred, inventor of the slide rule and creator of the "x" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.
• Italian painter Guido Reni.
• English dramatist Cyril Tourneur.
• Louis Hébert, the first Canadian.
• Italian collector of fairy tales Giovanni Battista Basile.
• Rory O'Donnell, earl of Tyrconnel, one of the last Irish chieftans.

These people died in 1575:

• Hawaiian warrior-king Umi-a-Liloa.
• Italian anatomist Constantio Varoli.
• Jewish scholar Joseph ben Ephraim Caro.
• Swiss Protestant religious reformer Heinrich Bullinger.
• Scottish nobleman James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran.

1574 - 1575 - 1576

16th century