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French royalists besiege Rouen with help from Robert Devereux, 25, 2nd earl of Essex. The resulting starvation in Normandy's richest city resembles that seen at Paris last year.
Muscovy's epileptic czarevich Demetrius, 9, is found dead May 15 at Uglitch, his throat cut. Czar Fyodor's regent, Boris Godunov, is suspected of complicity.
North Africa's black culture is destroyed, and the country made vulnerable to rival pashas. Spanish and Portuguese renegades hired by Moroccans cross the desert, use firearms to defeat a Songhai army, destroy Gao, and help the Moroccans take Timbuktu, bringing an end to the Songhai Empire created by Sonni Ali in 1460.
Portugal closes Brazil to further immigration of anyone except Portuguese, but continues to import African slaves for the plantations of its Brazilian colony (see 1570; 1603; 1619).
The English ship Edward Bonaventure sets sail from Plymouth April 10 under the command of James Lancaster, who commanded her against the Armada in 1588. The ship will be the first English vessel to round the Cape of Good Hope and sail on to the Indies (see 1592).
John White returns to Roanoke after having been delayed by the war with Spain and finds the colony there has vanished, possibly victims of hostile Indians. The word Croatan is the only message left by the 117 lost colonists who include White's family, and it will never be satisfactorily explained (see 1587; Jamestown, 1607).
French mathematician François Viète, 51, seigneur de la Bigotière, introduces systematic use of letters in algebra to represent both coefficients and unknown quantities. Viète has served as privy councilor to Henri IV and discovered the key to coded messages from Spain to the Netherlands, decoding them. He will apply algebra to both geometry and trigonometry and will be called the "father of algebra" (see Descartes, 1619).
Plague and famine strike the Italian states. Nuremberg merchant Balthaszar Paumgartner writes home to his wife, Magdalene, "It is reckoned that in one year here, one-third of the folk in all Italy has died, and a highly necessary thing, too. For were it not for the pest, they must die anyway, as there would not be enough for so many to eat."
On Egyptian Medicine (De medicina Aegptorum) by Vicenza-born Venetian physician-botanist Prospero Alpini, 37, is based on studies of diseases he made while serving as medical adviser to Giorgio Emo, Venetian consul at Cairo, in the early 1580s.
Venetian-born Jesuit Aloysius Gonzaga nurses victims of the plague at Rome, contracts the disease himself, and dies June 21 at age 23. He will be canonized in 1726 and 3 years later will be named patron saint of youth.
Pope Gregory XIV dies at Rome October 16 at age 56 after a 10½-month reign and is succeeded October 29 by Giovanni Antonio Facchinetti, 72, who reigns briefly as Innocent IX but dies at Rome December 30 after just 2 months in office (see 1592).
Dublin's Trinity College is founded by Queen Elizabeth.
Japan gets her first books to be printed from movable type. Portuguese Jesuit Alessandro Valegnani arrived last year as a messenger from the viceroy of the Indies with a printing press and several printers.
Nonfiction: Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses (Philosophia sensibus demonstrata) by Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella, 23, urges an empirical approach to philosophy, emphasizing that it must be based on human experience. Campanella advances ideas pioneered by the late Bernadino Telesio, but he is arrested at Naples on charges of heresy, tried, and given a brief prison term.
Poetry: Astrophel and Stella by the late Sir Philip Sidney is a collection of sonnets whose "Stella" was inspired by Lady Penelope Rich, daughter of the late Walter Devereux, 1st earl of Essex. Sidney adored her from the time she was 14 and loved her to his dying day (Sir Philip's sister Mary Herbert, 29, countess of Pembroke, has published his poem "Arcadia" and completed his verse translation of the Psalms); The Harmony of the Church by English poet Michael Drayton, 28.
Poet-mystic Luis de León dies at the monastery of Madrigal de las Altas in Avila August 23 at age 64 (approximate); mystic theologian and Carmelite friar-poet John of the Cross (né Juan de Yepes y Alvarez) at Ubeda, Jaén, in Andalusia December 14 at age 49, survived by mystical poems such as "Dark Night of the Soul" ("La Noche oscura del alma"). He has cofounded the order of the Discalced Carmelites.
Theater: The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare, who has based it on the Plautus comedy The Menaechmi of 215 B.C.: "There is something in the wind" (III, i); "Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast" (III, i).
Composer Jacob Handl (Jacobus Gallus) dies at Prague July 18 at age 41, having gained a reputation for his sacred musc.
Pamplona in northern Spain has a running of the bulls in which men run through the streets in front of bulls being driven to the local bullring. The event will be repeated for centuries with frequent injuries and occasional deaths as men are gored or trampled.
The starvation in the siege of Rouen, Normandy's richest city, resembles that seen last year at Paris (see 1592).
Japanese teamaster Rikyu Sen commits ritual suicide (seppuku) on orders from the civil dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He has formalized the tea ceremony (see 1449), and the nine-volume book Nanboroku by his disciple Sokei Nanbo will record what Rikyu did and said with regard to the ceremony and the meal served afterward—kaisakiryori. It will become the Bible of tea-ceremony technique and of mainstream Japanese cookery, espousing the simplicity of Zen Buddhist vegetarianism combined with fish and game birds, with the emphasis always on aesthetic presentation.
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