Northern Qi, the strongest of the three main Chinese states (along with Northern Zhou and the Chen Dynasty) when it was established in 550, has been since plagued by emperors either violent or incompetent or both (Emperor Wenxuan, Emperor Wucheng, and Gao Wei), corrupt officials, and deteriorating armies.

Having gradually declined, Northern Qi is destroyed by Northern Zhou in 577.

(Emperor Wenxuan's son Gao Shaoyi the Prince of Fanyang, under protection by Tujue, will later declare himself the emperor of Northern Qi in exile, but in 579 will be turned over by Tujue to Northern Zhou and exiled to modern Sichuan.

It is a matter of controversy whether Gao Shaoyi should properly be considered a Northern Qi emperor, but in any case, historians generally use the 577 date as the ending date for Northern Qi.)

Cuthwine and Ceawlin fight the Britons in 577: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the slaying of three kings—Coinmail, Condidan, and Farinmail—in a place called Deorham and the capture of three strongholds: Gloucester, Cirencester and Bathcester.

Deorham has been identified as Dyrham, a village some eight miles north of Bath, and five miles west of the Fosse Way, the Roman road between Bath and Cirencester.

The Historia Britonum records one Glast as coming from Lichfield south to found Glastonbury about the time the Mercians conquer part of their kingdom to create Shropshire.

More important is the fact that the Anglo-Saxon invaders can now sweep into the Severn valley (as Ceawlin is said to have done several years later) and plunder the inhabitants, while the Celts to the west can no longer as easily penetrate the Cotswolds scarp between Gloucester and Cirencester to return the visit.

The Korean kingdom of Baekje under its king, Wideok, who has reigned since the disastrous battle of Gwan Mountain Fortress in 554, in which his father and nearly thirty thousand men died fighting the Silla army, is inimical to both Silla and Goguryeo, launching various battles and border incursions against the rival kingdoms.

To avoid isolation, and to strengthen the royal position against the power of the aristocracy, Wideok maintains friendly relations with the Chinese dynasties of Chen and Northern Qi.

Although ties had been largely broken following the cataclysmic events of the 550s, he had in 567 sent Baekje's first mission to Northern Qi; this may have been facilitated by an improved relationship with Goguryeo.

In 570, the Northern Qi had granted him titles including "Duke of Daifang prefecture", and he had sent another tribute mission in 572.

After Northern Qi had been conquered by Northern Zhou in 577, Baekje had also sent a congratulatory mission including musicians to the Zhou court.

The following year a second and final embassy is sent to Northern Zhou.

The origins of the family owned construction company Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd., in 2006 the world's oldest continuously operating company, date to the year 578, when Prince Shotoku brings Kongō family members from Baekje, Korea to Japan to build the Buddhist Shitennoji Temple, which still stands today.

The special privileges of China’s Buddhist monasteries (such as exemption from taxes) had again become a main source of tension between clergy and government and led to another round of anti-Buddhist movements and harsh restrictive measures imposed upon the Buddhist church from 574 to 578.

Justin's successor, crowned by him Tiberius II Constantinus on September 26, 578, nine days before the death of Justin himself, removes the taxes and, choosing between his enemies, awards subsidies to the Avars while taking military action against the Persians.

Constantinople and Persia now enter into peace negotiations to settle the Armenian question.

Tiberius, to increase his popularity, immediately begins spending money that Justin had reserved in his treasury.

Jacob (James) Baradai, Monophysite Christian bishop of Edessa, organizes a separate church, which comes to be called Jacobite, in opposition to the Orthodox episcopate of Eastern Christendom.

The Jacobite church, together with the Copts of Egypt, the Armenians, and the Ethiopians, rejects the doctrine of the 451 Council of Chalcedon on the "two natures in one person" of Christ and prefers to define Christ's person as "one nature."

Jacob dies in Homs, Syria, in 578.

Greece had experienced a raid in Macedonia in 479 and another in 482 by the Ostrogoths under their king, Theodoric the Great.

The Bulgars in 540 and on repeated other occasions had raided Thrace and the rest of northern Greece.

These continuing Bulgar incursions had required the Empire to protect Constantinople by building the "Anastasian Wall," which extends for some thirty miles, or more, from the city of Selymbria (now Silivri) to the Black Sea.

There is no such protection, however, for the provinces in front of the walls.

The Huns and Bulgars in 559 had raided Greece until the imperial army returned from Italy, where Justinian I had been attempting to capture the heart of the Roman Empire.

The Slavs, alone or in association with the Kutrigur Bulgars, have steadily occupied imperial lands in the Balkan peninsula in the fifty years since their initial occupation of lands south of the Danube.

Already a presence in Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus, and Thessaly, the Slavs have by 578 penetrated as far as Achaea in the Peloponnese.

Basque highland clans from the Pyrenees driven northward by the Visigoths in 578 settle in Novempopulana (that is, "land of the nine tribes"), which has been under loose Frankish control since 507.

Novempopulana will become known as Vasconia (that is, "land of the Vascones", the Latin word "Vasco" later evolving into the word "Basque").

The word Vasconia will evolve into Wasconia, and then into Gasconia, or Gascony.

Further campaigns to control independent territories had lasted another four years after the Visigothic campaigns in Toledo and Évora.

Hermenegild, who had been raised in the Arian belief, is sent by Liuvigild to Seville.

Hermenegild's Frankish wife Ingund, who is Catholic, has been pressured by Leovigild's wife Goiswinth, but she will not abandon her faith.