1560s

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	15th century – 16th century – 17th century
Decades:	1530s 1540s 1550s – 1560s – 1570s 1580s 1590s
Years:	1560 1561 1562 1563 1564 1565 1566 1567 1568 1569
Categories:	Births – Deaths – Architecture Establishments – Disestablishments

The 1560s decade ran from January 1, 1560, to December 31, 1569.

Births

• Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.
• William Shakespeare, English playwright.
• Edward Wright (baptized 8 October 1561), English mathematician and cartographer.

Events and trends

• The first, second and third French Wars of Religion were fought between Catholics and Protestants as part of the fallout from the Reformation.
• In 1565, the city of St. Augustine was founded by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on August 28 in modern-day Florida. The city would become the oldest continually occupied European settlement in the continental United States.
• In 1566, widespread Protestant iconoclasm in the Netherlands led to the start of the Eighty Years' War.
• In 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was founded.
• Suzanne Erkur managed the imperial silver mint at Kutna Hora in Bohemia.
• The sweet potato first entered China from the New World of the Spanish Americas; it would come to replace rice as the major staple crop of the poor in China, and would carry a culturally negative association with poverty up until the Communist era.