1590
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The Battle of Ivry 40 miles west of Paris March 14 secures the French throne of Henri IV as the king defeats the Catholic League, which has 15,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry under the duc de Mayenne. Henri's 11,000-man royalist army (8,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry) routs the enemy, who suffer heavy losses (4,000 killed, wounded, or captured, as compared to 500 killed and wounded on the royalist side) and lays siege to Paris in mid-May. France's Catholic party refuses to recognize Henri IV. It has proclaimed the elderly cardinal de Bourbon king in January, but "Charles X" dies in May. Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, arrives in a few months to lift the siege after starvation has killed thousands of Parisians.
England's secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham dies at London April 6 at age 57 (approximate), having spent his final years sniffing out and suppressing Roman Catholic conspiracies against Queen Elizabeth.
Persia's shah Abbas and the Ottoman sultan Murad III end a 12-year war. Murad extends his empire to the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea by acquiring Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Shirwan. The shah has his father and brothers blinded.
The Mughal emperor Akbar conquers Orissa.
Siam's king Maha Thammarach dies and is succeeded by his son, now 35, who has gained his country's independence from Burma and will reign until his death in 1605, capturing the Cambodian capital of Lovek and making Cambodia a vassal state (see 1593).
The civil dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi unifies Japan (see 1587). His vassal Ieyasu Tokugawa moves his capital to Edo, dominating the great eastern plain (see 1598).
Rebecca Lamp of Nördlingen, Swabia, is burnt at the stake as a witch in March after months of imprisonment and torture. She was arrested in the absence of her husband, Peter, a respected accountant; his eloquent defense of her piety and innocence has been ignored, and more than 30 other well-respected women of the town meet the same fate, which will be ascribed to the ambitions of two local lawyers and a burgomaster.
Viaggio all'Iridia Orientali by Venetian merchant-traveler Gasparo Balbi is the first European account of India beyond the Ganges.
Baltic trade with the rest of Europe will reach its peak in the next 3 decades as measured by shipping tolls exacted in the sound (see Kronborg Castle, 1585).
Venice's Rialto Bridge is completed to join the island of Rialto, financial center of the city, with the island of San Marco.
Dutch optician Zacharias Janssen invents the compound microscope (see van Leeuwenhoek, 1675).
The bubonic plague that will be called the Black Death reaches Rome and other Italian cities.
Ergotism remains endemic in Spain.
Surgeon Ambroise Paré dies at Paris December 20 at age 80. He will be considered by many the father of modern surgery.
Dominican mystic Catherine Dei Ricci dies at Prato in the Florentine Republic February 2 at age 67. Prioress of the convent at Prato since 1560 (she entered as a novitiate at age 13), she has gained renown for her visions of the Passion, her stigmatization, and her letters. She will be canonized as Saint Catherine in 1746 and celebrated with a feast day on February 13 each year.
Pope Sixtus V dies at Rome August 27 at age 69 after a momentous 5-year reign in which he has played an active role in French politics, imposed strict discipline on Rome's churches and colleges, refilled the Vatican coffers by imposing new taxes, built the Lateran Palace, completed the dome of St. Peter's, favored Franciscans over Dominicans and Jesuits, promoted the silk and wool industries, ended the banditry that plagued the papal states under his predecessor, constructed aqueducts, and begun to drain the Pontine marshes. Sixtus is succeeded September 15 by the Bologna-born Giovanni Antonio Cardinal Facchinetti, 72, who reigns until September 15 as Urban VII but dies at Rome December 3; Urban is succeeded December 5 by Niccolo Cardinal Sfondrati, 55, who will reign until next year as Gregory XIV.
Poetry: The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser is published in its first three books with a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh explaining its purpose and structure: "And all for love, and nothing for reward."
Poet Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas, dies at Coudons in July at age 46.
Painting: Queen Luisa of France Presenting Her Son Francis I to S. Francesca di Paolo by Lavinia Fontana.
Theater: King Henry VI by English playwright-poet William Shakespeare, 26, of Stratford-upon-Avon, who bases his drama on history as do other playwrights (references to current politics would risk censorship by the Stationers' Company). An actor who married his neighbor, Anne Hathaway, after impregnating her in 1582, Shakespeare will move to London in 1592 (dates for all Shakespearean plays are imprecise, and some skeptics will question that a man with little or no formal education and whose daughters will grow up illiterate can have written the masterful works for which he will be credited).
Motets: Opus musicum by German-Austrian composer Jacob Handl (Jacobus Gallus), 40, is a collection of motets for the entire year. A Cistercian monk, Handl has worked in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, serving from 1579 to 1585 as choirmaster to the bishop of Olmütz.
The cupola of St. Peter's Basilica at Rome is completed to designs by the late Michelangelo.
Palazzo Balbi is completed for Venetian merchant Nicolo Balbi after 8 years of construction on the bend of the Grand Canal.
The siege of Paris brings hunger and malnutrition that kill 13,000 in the city. Food supplies are inadequate for the 30,000 inhabitants and the 8,000-man garrison. By mid-June the Spanish ambassador has proposed grinding the bones of the dead to make flour. By July 9 the poor are chasing dogs and eating grass that grows in the streets, and a Fugger newsletter in August reports "great hunger in Paris; a pound of white bread costs half a crown . . . Rumor has it that people are eating mice, cats, and dogs."
The Natural and Moral History of the East and West Indies by the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta is published at Seville and will soon be translated into French, Italian, German, and Shakespearean English, finding a wide readership. Acosta will be called the American Pliny, after the naturalist Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. He was in Peru from 1570 to 1585 and stopped on his way home for a few years in New Spain (Mexico).
The archbishop of York accuses English vicar Edward Shawcross of Weaverham, Cheshire, of being an "instructor of young folkes how to comyt the syn of adultrie or fornication and not to beget or bring forth children."
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