1585
calendar year
1585 (MDLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar, the 1585th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 585th year of the 2nd millennium, the 85th year of the 16th century, and the 6th year of the 1580s decade. As of the start of 1585, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 21 – Robert Nutter, Thomas Worthington, and 18 other Roman Catholic priests are "perpetually banished" from England by order of Queen Elizabeth, placed on the ship Mary Martin of Colchester, and transported to France.
February 16 – Pachomius II is deposed by fellow bishops from his position as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and replaced by the Metropolitan of Philippoupolis, Theoleptus II.
February 21 – King Johan III of Sweden, widowed since 1583, marries Gunilla Bielke in a ceremony at Västerås, which the King's siblings refuse to attend. The coronation of Queen consort Gunilla takes place the next day. Over the next seven years, she works on changing the Catholic government's attitude towards Protestants.
March 10 – The Spanish Army, commanded by Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, obtains the surrender of Brussels after a siege that began the year before.
April–June
April 10 – Pope Gregory XIII, known for promulgating the Gregorian calendar within the Roman Catholic nations of the world in 1582, dies after a reign of almost 13 years. A papal conclave is convened 11 days later to elect a successor.
April 21 – The papal conclave begins at the Vatican in Rome on Easter Sunday, with only 42 of the 60 cardinals attending.
“1585” enters the record as calendar year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what calendar and year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1585” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, calendar and year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6736. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1585, 1923, 1583 and 1582.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1585” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.