1591 1592 1593 1594 1595 1596 1597 1598 1599 1600
Contents: political eventsexploration, colonization commerce transportation science literature art theater, film music tobacco architecture, real estate environment agriculture food availability population |
Queen Elizabeth appoints Charles Blount, 8th Lord Mountjoy, to replace Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, as English lord deputy of Ireland in June, Essex having failed to subdue Hugh Roe O'Neill and the other rebels (see 1599; 1601).
France's ex-queen Marguerite warns her ex-husband, Henri IV, about her nephew Charles d'Angoulême, comte d'Auvergne, saying, "This badly-counseled boy holds many places in this locality, houses which he has usurped from the late queen my mother as well as many castles, forts, and defenses which, for your sake, would be better demolished." Son of the late Charles IX by his Huguenot mistress Marie Touchet, the nephew is a stepbrother of Henri's mistress Henriette d'Entragues, and he opposes the Bourbon regime (see 1602).
Henri IV marries his niece Marie de' Medici, 27, in October. Despite his written agreement with Henriette d'Entragues and her father, he has made the match to the overweight Marie in order to satisfy his financial obligations to her father, the grand duke of Tuscany.
The Dutch ship Liefde (Love) piloted by English navigator William Adams, 36, reaches the northwestern Pacific after a passage through the Straits of Magellan in which four companion ships have been lost; Adams anchors off Kyushu in April with his crew sick and dying (only six of the original 24 are able to walk). Portuguese Jesuits who serve as interpreters for the 58-year-old Tokugawa daimyo Ieyasu advise him that Adams and his crew have engaged in piracy and are not peaceful traders. Ieyasu learns that the Liefde is carrying at least 19 bronze cannon, 5,000 cannon balls, and 500 muskets. He summons Adams to Osaka, the captain arrives May 12, he impresses Ieyasu with his knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation, but Ieyasu is suspicious and will hold him in prison for some weeks before retaining him as adviser. Ieyasu moves his court to Edo in the summer, and although he will not let Adams and his crew return home he will reward the Englishmen with annual food stipends, an estate, and trading privleges (see commerce, 1605).
The Battle of Sekigahara October 20 involves 160,000 warriors; it ends in a victory for the Japanese general and daimyo Ieyasu Tokugawa, whose forces are outnumbered but who has the English cannon and muskets acquired from William Adams, gains support from Kazutoyo Yamanouchi and others to prevail over Kagekatsu Uesugi, 45, and the other three regents for the 6-year-old son of the late dictator Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Samurai swordsman Musashi Miyamoto, 16, changed his name from Hirata at an early age, won a duel 3 years ago, and has fought on the losing side, but he will become famous as a military strategist. A new civil war erupts in Japan; the Toyotomi general Mitsunari Ishida, 37, tries to take as hostages the wives and children of the daimyos, but Otama Hosokawa refuses to be taken prisoner. Her husband is off fighting on the side of Tokugawa, and since her Christian faith prevents her from taking her own life, she has a retainer kill her after she has set fire to the family home. General Ishida and General Konishi are captured and executed at Kyoto November 6 (Konishi's Christian faith prevents him from committing seppuku); Ieyasu Tokugawa moves the capital from Kyoto to Edo, banishes most of Ishida's supporters or strips them of their lands, and begins redistributing fiefs to consolidate his rule (see 1603).
French fur traders establish a colony on the St. Lawrence River at the mouth of the Saguenay (see Roberval, 1553; Champlain, 1603).
A French commercial partnership obtains a monopoly on fur trade in the New World.
The Honourable East India Company, Governor and Merchants of London Trading in the East Indies challenges Dutch control of the spice trade (see 1599). Chartered December 31 to make annual voyages to the Indies via the Cape of Good Hope, its initial capital is £70,000; its first governor Sir Thomas Smith (see 1601).
A new French canal links the Rhône and the Seine Rivers (see 1603; 1765).
On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth (De Magnete, Magneticisique Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure) by English physicist-physician William Gilbert, 60, is a pioneer work on electricity that introduces such terms as "electric attraction," "electric force," and "magnetic pole." Gilbert's experiments over the years have convinced him that a compass needle points northward and dips downward because the Earth acts as a bar magnet (see Leyden jar, 1745).
Jesuit theologian-missionary José de Acosta dies at Salamanca February 15 at age 60, having written extensively about the physical geography, natural history, and peoples of Central and South America.
Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, 51, is tortured and then burnt at the stake February 17 at Rome after 7 years of imprisonment. Because he has supported Copernican astronomy (see 1543), suggested the possibility of more than one world, and questioned the divinity of Jesus, the Inquisition has condemned him for heresy. Bruno has suggested that the stars are suns like our own, and news of his execution discourages others from pursuing astronomical investigations that might lead to conflict with Church dogma (see 1613).
Poetry: "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh, whose ironic pastoral poem begins: "If all the world and love were young,/ And truth in every shepherd's tongue."
Painting: Flight into Egypt by Annibale Caracci, who works with his younger brother Agostino on frescoes for the Farnese Gallery at Rome depicting scenes from classical mythology on great baroque ceilings.
Theater: The Shoemaker's Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by English playwright Thomas Dekker, 29, 1/1 at Queen Elizabeth's court, with the Lord Admiral's Men; As You Like It by William Shakespeare: "Sweet are the uses of adversity,/ Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,/ Wears yet a precious jewel in its head" (II, i); "All the world's a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players./ They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts" (II, vii); The Merry Wives of Windsor by Shakespeare: "We burn daylight" (II, i); "The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open" (II, ii); Julius Caesar by Shakespeare: "Let me have men about me that are fat,/ Sleekheaded men, and such as sleep o' nights./ Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look./ He thinks too much: such men are dangerous" (I, ii); "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a Colossus, and we petty men/ Walk under his huge legs, and peep about/ To find ourselves dishonourable graves./ Men at some time are masters of their fates./ The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings" (I, ii); "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed/ That he is grown so great?" (I, ii); "Cowards die many times before their deaths;/ The valiant never taste of death but once" (II, i); "Et tu, Brute?" (III, i); "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears./ I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him./ The evil that men do lives after them,/ The good is oft interred with their bones" (III, ii); "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now" (III, ii); "This was the most unkindest cut of all" (III, ii); "There is a tide in the affairs of men,/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/ Omitted, all the voyage of their life/ Is bound in shallows and in miseries" (IV, iii).
Opera: Euridice 10/6 at Florence's Pitti Palace, with music by Jacopo Peri, libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini; the world's first grand opera, it is presented on the occasion of the wedding of Marie de' Medici to France's Henri IV.
Tobacco sells at London for its weight in silver shillings and is a popular extravagance among the dandies. They dip snuff and blow smoke rings as they puff on clay pipes (see 1565; 1604).
Muscovy's Church of St. Nicholas is completed at Panilovo on the North Doina.
An estimated 350 mammal and bird species will become extinct in the next 370 years (see aurochs, 1627; dodo, 1681).
Théâtre d'agriculture des champs by French Huguenot squire Olivier de Serres, 61, Seigneur de Pradel, is a revolutionary treatise on agriculture. The Languedoc landowner has imported maize from Italy and hops from England, introduced root crops for winter fodder, and sown grass on land normally left fallow. While the work impresses Henri IV, who has parts of it read to him as he dines in public, only a few enthusiasts adopt the squire's innovations, peasants being too conservative, noblemen too preoccupied with other matters.
Smugglers break the Arabian monopoly in coffee growing. They take "seven seeds" of unroasted coffee beans from the Arabian port of Mocha to the western Ghats of southern India (see 1713; 1723).
A Russian famine kills some 500,000 people.
Europe's population reaches an estimated 78 million (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire), up from 70.2 million in 1550.
Europe's most populous nation is France, with 16 million people as compared to 20 million in all the German-speaking nations, principalities, and city-states; 13 million in Italy; 10 in Spain and Portugal; and 4.5 to 5 in England (where about 7.6 percent of the people live in cities of 10,000 or more). China's population reaches 120 million, having doubled in the 22 years since 1578. North America has roughly 1 million, but the New World will receive some 2.75 million slaves from Africa in the next century.
Some 54 million people will perish in the world's wars over the next 345 years, but it will later be calculated that all the wars, famines, and disease epidemics will slow population growth only by some 10 years.
1591 1592 1593 1594 1595 1596 1597 1598 1599 1600
