Tsar Ivan now begins expanding eastward to Siberia, where Russia has had a foothold since the early part of the century.

Burmese forces under Bayinnaung move through the Shan states, taking Hsipaw and other towns in 1556 while advancing southward toward ...

...the Thai kingdom of Chiang Mai, held by Laotian ruler Setthathirat, who has dispatched agents to foment and support rebellions against Burma by the Shan.

Bayinnaung responds by invading in April 1556 and seizing Chiang Mai, which surrenders without a fight.

Electing not to sack the capital, Bayinnaung installs a puppet ruler.

Pinto returns in 1556 to Malacca and reports to the Captain-General here, who sends him on a mission to Martaban in Lower Burma.

...who takes him east to the kingdom of Calaminham, now identified as Luang Prabang.

Portuguese poet Luiz Vaz de Camões sails in 1556 from Goa to Macao, where he is given an officership.

The diplomatic mission from Portuguese India to Japan is in some ways a small success.

Pinto, serving as the Viceroy of Portuguese India's ambassador to the daimyo of Bungo on the island of Kyūshū, establishes an embassy here, but he fails to convert Otomo Sorin because of an ongoing civil war.

Otomo cannot afford to alienate his supporters by converting to a foreign religion during the conflict.

Pinto, at the end of his tour of the archipelago, lends money to Xavier’s successor to create the first church in Japan.

The deadliest earthquake in history, in which as many as eight hundred and thirty thousand people may have died, occurs on January 23, 1556, with its epicenter in Shaanxi province, China.

Ivan sends Russian Strelets and Cossack armies, who conquer and annexed the region in 1556.

Xacitarxan, the Khanate’s capital, situated approximately twelve kilometers north of the modern city of Astrakhan, is besieged and burned; the khanate is absorbed by Russia and abolished.

Darwish Khan escapes to the castle of Azov.

This leaves the Sibir Khanate as the sole remaining independent Tatar state in Russia, and thus consolidates imperial control of the Volga River basin and guaranteeing Russian access to the Caspian Sea.

After the fall of Astrakhan, the Tatars are attacked by Kalmyks who, also displace the nomadic Nogai Horde.

Many Nogay remove to the regions of present Kazakhstan and Dagestan.

English navigator Stephen Borough, a thirty-one-year-old veteran of the Willoughby expedition, sails as commander of the Searchthrift for the Muscovy Company in 1556.

In his attempt to reach the Ob River, he sails as far as the island of Novaya Zemlya, unmapped but probably known to Norse sailors and Novgorod hunters since the eleventh century.

Probably the first Englishman to sail this far east, he is turned back at the entrance to the Kara Sea by ice storms and fog.