1593
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Elizabeth reminds England's Parliament February 27 that she has the right to "assent to or dissent from anything" it may do. Statutes are pending that will impose stiff new penalties on Catholics who refuse to attend Church of England services and make it a crime to attend Catholic services.
France's parliament (Estates-General) meets in February for the first time since 1576 and holds its assembly at Paris (held by the Catholic League), rather than at Rheims as heretofore. It calls for a Catholic king.
Marguerite d'Angoulême accepts her husband Henri IV's offer to pay off her debts of 250,000 ecus, grant her a yearly pension of 14,000 ecu, and give her the castle of Usson at Auvergne. She agrees in April to proceed with a divorce (see 1599). Henri formally rejects Protestantism July 25 at Paris, is accepted into Catholicism, makes confession, and hears Mass. "Paris is worth a Mass," he says, and his action undermines the Catholic opposition.
Chinese troops cross the Yalu River into Korea and force the Japanese to evacuate Seoul (see 1592). Yi Sun-sin is given command of the entire Korean fleet, and by year's end Toyotomi Hideyoshi has lost a third of his troop strength and retreated to the southern coast as supply ships sink, winter sets in, and Korean guerrillas harry his forces (see 1598; Ear Mound, 1597).
The Battle of Nong Sa Rai in southeast Asia results in victory for Siam over Burmese forces that have been trying to crush Siamese independence since 1584 (see 1590). The Siamese king Phra Naret (Naresuen) has gone on the offensive and taken the Burmese peninsular provinces Tavoy and Tenasserim; he kills the Burmese crown prince Minkiyi-zwa in individual combat, demoralizing the army of Burma's Nanda Bayin. Burma will not threaten Siam's independence again for another 150 years (see 1595).
English navigator Richard Hawkins, 31, leaves Plymouth Harbor in June aboard H.M.S. Dainty with two smaller ships after reporting that 10,000 men have died of scurvy under his command in the Royal Navy (see 1594).
English coal mining gains impetus from a shortage of firewood, which has become so costly that an Act of Parliament compels beer exporters either to fetch back their barrels or return with foreign clapboard sufficient to make the same number of barrels as was shipped (see 1589; environment, 1589).
Louvain-born University of Würzburg mathematician Adriaan van Roomen, 32, uses 230-sided polygons to determine the value of n to 16 decimal places.
Sweden's Diet of Uppsala adopts the 1530 Confession of Augsburg and requires the king, Sigismund, to continue Lutheranism as the state religion.
Spanish Franciscans arrive in Japan to begin proselytizing in competition with the Portuguese Jesuits who arrived in 1551 (see 1597).
Nonfiction: Lectures Concerning the Controversies of the Christian Faith Against the Heretics of This Time (Disputationes de controversiis Chriistianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos) by Tuscan-born Jesuit Roberto (Francesco Romolo) Bellarmino, 50, who has been lecturing at Rome's Jesuit College and will be made a cardinal in 1599; On Christian Monarchy (De monarchia Christianorum) by Tommaso Campanella, who is arrested at Padua on charges of sodomy but acquitted.
Poetry: "Venus and Adonis" by William Shakespeare: "Love keeps his revels where there are but twain," "Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies./ Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies"; Gerusalemme conquistata by Torquato Tasso, who has rewritten his 1575 epic of the First Crusade to conform to the strictures of the Counter-Reformation but in so doing robbed it of its lyrical beauty.
Painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo dies at Prague July 11 at age 66.
Theater: The Massacre at Paris by Christopher Marlowe 1/26 at London's Rose Theatre (Lord Strange's Men); The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II by Marlowe at London by Pembroke's Men.
Playwright-poet Christopher Marlowe is killed by most accounts May 30 at age 29 in a tavern brawl at Deptford on the Thames, where his companion Ingram Frizer is said to have stabbed him in the eye in self-defense. The most prominent playwright of his time, Marlowe has written memorable lines of verse, including "Come live with me and be my Love/ And we will all the pleasures prove/ That hills and valleys, dale and field,/ And all the craggy mountains yield" (from "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"). He is buried in an unmarked grave. His death attracts little or no attention. His learning made him a valuable spy for the late Sir Francis Walsingham, who sent him on missions to the Continent, and skeptics will later suggest that Walsingham's agents spirited Marlowe away to northern Italy.
Spain's Escorial Palace is completed near Madrid after 30 years of construction. Designed by architect Juan Bautista de Toledo, the palace includes a church, monastery, and mausoleum.
Swiss botanist Gaspard Baubin, 33, engages some farmers in the Vosges region to cultivate potatoes, now used as cattle food in several European countries (but see 1630).
Sir Richard Hawkins recommends orange and lemon juice as anti-scorbutics (see 1564; Lind, 1747).
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