• Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga consolidates his power, defeating the powerful Mori clan and dispatching his ally Toyotomi Hideyoshi to subjugate western Honshu.
• Oromo tribesmen overrun the Ethiopian city-state of Harar.
• French king Henry III is persuaded by the Catholic League to withdraw his edict of toleration that had granted religious freedom to the Huguenots the previous year. The Huguenots revolt again, initiating the sixth of the French Wars of Religion, but the conflict ends with the Peace of Bergerac, in which Henry agrees to restore most of the concessions of the Edict of Beaulieu.
• English privateer Sir Francis Drake sets out in command of five ships on a comission to raid Spanish holdings in the New World. He would eventually return to England in 1580 after becoming the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth.
• English navigator Sir Martin Frobisher makes the second of his three voyages to the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage.
• The city of Amritsar is founded in Punjab by Ram Das, the fourth Sikh guru, on land granted the Sikhs by Akbar.
• Raphael Holinshed publishes his history Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, from which Shakespeare drew source material for Macbeth, King Lear, and Cymbeline.

These people were born in 1577:

• Pieter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish painter.
• Father Joseph (François Leclerc du Tremblay), French Capuchin monk and confidant of Cardinal Richelieu, more commonly known as the Éminence Grise ("Gray Eminence").
• Flemish physician, chemist, and physicist Jan Baptista van Helmont, who discovered Carbon Dioxide and coined the term "gas" in its scientific sense as a state of matter.
• Christian IV, future king of Denmark and Norway.
• Italian tragic heroine Beatrice Cenci, imprisoned by her own father and then executed for complicity in his murder. She would be later immortalized in prose and verse, notably in Francesco Guerrazzi's novel Beatrice Cenci, Percy Bysshe Shelley's tragedy The Cenci, and Alberto Ginastera's opera Beatrix Cenci.
• Italian sculptor Pietro Tacca.

These people died in 1577:

• Italian engineer and mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia.
• English author George Gascoigne.
• Cuthbert Mayne, English Roman Catholic Saint, one of the so-called "Forty Martyrs of England and Wales" and the first priest ever executed in England.

1576 - 1577 - 1578

16th century