1556
year
Year 1556 (MDLVI) was a leap year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 4 – In Japan, Saitō Yoshitatsu, the eldest son of Saitō Dōsan, arranges the murders of his two younger brothers, Magoshiro and Kiheiji, and forces his father to flee from the Sagiyama Castle.
January 16 – Charles V abdicates the thrones of the Spanish Empire (including his colonies in the New World) in favor of his son, Philip II, and retires to a monastery.
January 23 – The Shaanxi earthquake, the deadliest earthquake in history, occurs with its epicenter in Shaanxi province, China; 830,000 people may have been killed.
January 24 – In India, at the Sher Mandal in Delhi, the Mughal Emperor Humayun trips while descending the stairs from his library and strikes the side of his head against a stone step, sustaining a fatal injury. He never regains consciousness and dies seven days later.
February 5 – Truce of Vaucelles: Fighting temporarily ends between France and Spain.
February 14 – Akbar the Great ascends the throne of the Mughal Empire in India at age 13; he will rule until his death in 1605, by which time most of the north and centre of the Indian subcontinent will be under his control.
March 21 – In Oxford, Thomas Cranmer, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is burned at the stake for treason for his role in the English Reformation as chief bishop of the Anglican Church.
March 22 – Reginald Pole, a Roman Catholic Cardinal, is appointed by Queen Mary of England as the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Catholic Archdiocese of Canterbury.
“1556” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1556” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 4, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6590. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1556 and 1605.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “1556” 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.