1575
Year 1575 was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
- January 21 - Queen Elizabeth I of England grants a monopoly on producing printed sheet music, to Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.
- February 8 - William I of Orange founds Leiden University.
- February 11 - Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais arrives in southeastern Africa to colonize what is now Angola.
- February 13 - The formal coronation of Henry III as King of France takes place at the Reims Cathedral. Henry inherited the throne on May 30, 1574, upon the death of his older brother, Charles IX. He marries Louise de Lorraine-Vaudémont.
- March 3 - Battle of Tukaroi: The Mughal Empire decisively defeats the Karrani dynasty of Bengal. The battle took place near the village of Tukaroi in present-day Balasore District of Odisha.
April–June
- April 2 - English privateer Gilbert Horseley and his crew sail into the Bay of Honduras in Central America and conduct three days of raids of Spanish settlements and ships.
- April 6 - Antoine I de Gramont, Lord Sovereign of the Principality of Bidache in the French Pyrennees Mountains, promulgates a legal code for his people.
- April 18 - Bayinnaung, King of Burma, returns to his capital at Pegu from Vientiane after installing Voravongsa I as the Burmese-appointed monarch of the Kingdom of Lan Xang.
- May 12 - King Henry III of France, who had been selected in 1573 by the nobles of Poland and Lithuania to be King of Poland as Henryk Walezy, is stripped of his Polish and Lithuanian titles after failing to return to Kraków by the deadline imposed by the Polish nobility.
- May 24 - In an attempt to reform the Eastern Orthodox Church, Lutheran missionaries meet with Jeremias II Tranos, the Ecumenical Patriarch, at his residence in Constantinople, and present him with a Greek translation of the Augsburg Confession. Jeremias sends the missionaries, Jakob Andreae and Martin Crusius, three rebuttals to define the objections he has to the Lutheran document, declaring the reasons why the Eastern Orthodoxy has no desire for reformation.
- June 24 - William I of Orange marries Charlotte of Bourbon.
- June 28 - Battle of Nagashino: Oda Nobunaga defeats Takeda Katsuyori in Japan's first modern battle.
July–September
- July 7 - Raid of the Redeswire: Sir John Carmichael defeats Sir John Forster, in the last battle between England and Scotland.
- July 26 - Edmund Grindal succeeds Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury.
- August 5 - Henry Sidney is appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
- September 22
- *Paulo Dias de Novais becomes the first Portuguese Governor of Angola.
- *Ottoman forces led by Ferhad Pasha Sokolović defeat the Austrian Army, led by Herbard VIII von Auersperg, in the Battle of Budačka. Auersperg is decapitated and Ferhad Pasha leaves Croatia with the head as a trophy.
- September 1 -As a result of the Eighty Years' War, the government of the Kingdom of Spain is in bankruptcy and stops paying its troops, beginning in March.
- September 25 - At St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, Rudolf of Habsburg, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, is crowned King of Bohemia by the Archbishop Antonín Brus of Mohelnice.
- September 26 - Future Spanish author and playwright Miguel de Cervantes, then 28, is taken hostage by the Ottoman Albanian pirate Arnaut Mami after an attack on the Spanish galley Sol off of the Catalan coast. Cervantes spends the next five years as a slave in Algeria before his family pays a ransom to free him.
October–December
- October 10 - Battle of Dormans: Catholic forces under Henry I, Duke of Guise defeat the Protestants, capturing Philippe de Mornay among others.
- October 22 - The city of Villa de la Asunción is founded in New Spain, by permission from Philip II of Spain.
- November 8 - The Sejm of Poland meets in Warsaw to elect a new King of Poland after King Henryk has failed to return from France, and considers 11 candidates.
- November 9 - Ferhad Pasha Sokolović returns to Constantinople in triumph with the head of General Auersperg as a trophy after his September 22 victory at Budecka.
- November 22 - Portuguese navigator Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo departs from Mozambique on a mission for to map the coastline, completing the task on March 13.
- December 12 - Under pressure from Papal nuncio Vincenzo Lauro when a majority of the Sejm has still not agreed on a candidate, the Primate of Poland, Jakub Uchański, declares Maximilian II new King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.
- December 16 - An earthquake hits Valdivia.
Date unknown
- Russians occupy Pernau in western Estonia, and the fortress of Weissenstein.
- The seat of the Audiencia Real in Chile moves from Concepción to Santiago.
- Abraham Ortelius becomes a geographer to Philip II of Spain.
- The bubonic plague decimates Venice.
- Captains of vessels flying the Spanish flag are legally required to maintain a logbook.