As the Imjin War began, England had just broken the Spanish Armada

What was Europe doing during the Imjin War? That question is the reason this site exists, and the answer turns out to be closer than expected. In exactly the years Joseon was enduring a seven-year catastrophe, Europe was passing through a decisive turn of its own, in which one naval power fell and another rose.

Japan unified, the Armada broken: two events, one era

In 1590 Toyotomi Hideyoshi ended more than a century of civil war and unified the Japanese islands. His appetite for expansion did not stop at home. In 1592, just after unification, he invaded Joseon on the pretext of asking passage to attack Ming China. The war that followed — held off only by the combined effort of Admiral Yi Sun-sin's navy, volunteer "righteous armies" across the country, and Ming reinforcements — is known in Korea as the Imjin War.

Four years earlier, in 1588, another naval battle was fought on the far side of the world, in the English Channel. The Spanish Armada, reckoned the strongest fleet in Europe, set out to invade England and was driven back by the English navy and by storms. That defeat began the erosion of Spanish maritime supremacy, and England rose in its place as a new sea power. At the very moment Toyotomi was preparing to invade the continent, the myth of a maritime empire that had dominated a century was collapsing in Europe.

Post-Reformation Europe, and a war in East Asia

Late 16th-century Europe was split between Catholic and Protestant in the wake of Luther's Reformation of 1517. Spain cast itself as the champion of the Catholic side and stood against Protestant England; the Armada expedition was an extension of that religious conflict. In France, meanwhile, Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, drawing a line under the wars between Catholics and Protestants — the same year the Imjin War ended. In the very year Europe tied off its long religious conflict, a seven-year war was ending in East Asia.

In those same decades Copernicus' heliocentric theory was belatedly gaining ground in Europe, and Galileo would soon support it by observation. As Joseon began rebuilding from the ruins of war in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Europe stood at the threshold of the scientific revolution and of absolutist monarchy, on the far side of its age of religious war. Within one century, two entirely different worlds were passing through upheaval in their own ways.

What the comparison tells us

Coincidences like these invite us to see the Imjin War not as a war between Joseon and Japan alone but as an event set within the larger currents of 16th-century world history: the expansion of the age of exploration, the realignment that followed the Reformation, and the spread of gunpowder weapons. Behind Toyotomi's dream of invading the continent lay the matchlock musket, a new weapon introduced from Europe — evidence that technological exchange between East and West was already changing the shape of war itself.

The war left Joseon with wounds that were slow to heal, but it also reset the international order of East Asia. The Toyotomi house lost its footing in the aftermath, and Tokugawa Ieyasu took power and opened the Edo shogunate. Joseon and Japan later restored relations through the tongsinsa, the diplomatic missions Joseon sent to Edo — each country's own attempt to close the wound the war had opened.

The scars ran deep into the structure of Joseon society. With state finances ruined, the government issued blank patents of office for sale in such numbers that the hereditary status order began to loosen, a distant background to the changes in social rank in the later Joseon period. Europe, too, spent lives and strength heavily in its religious wars. For East and West alike, the 16th and 17th centuries exacted a full price for war.

The technology of the Joseon navy — the turtle ship and the panokseon — represents a line of development every bit as independent as the contemporary European galleon. Yi Sun-sin's tactics are still studied in naval history around the world precisely because this was not a local skirmish but a stage on which the finest naval technique of the age met head-on.

At a glance

Year	Korean history	World history
1517	—	Luther's Reformation (the Ninety-five Theses)
1588	—	England defeats the Spanish Armada
1590	—	Toyotomi Hideyoshi unifies Japan
1592	The Imjin War breaks out	—
1598	The Imjin War ends	France: the Edict of Nantes ends the religious conflict