1610s

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	16th century – 17th century – 18th century
Decades:	1580s 1590s 1600s – 1610s – 1620s 1630s 1640s
Years:	1610 1611 1612 1613 1614 1615 1616 1617 1618 1619
Categories:	Births – Deaths – Architecture Establishments – Disestablishments

1610s: events by year

Contents: 1610 1611 1612 1613 1614 1615 1616 1617 1618 1619

January–June

• January 7 – Galileo Galilei first observes the four Galilean moons of Jupiter: Ganymede, Callisto, Europa and Io, but is unable to distinguish the latter two until the following day.
• March 12 – Swedish troops under Jacob de la Gardie take Moscow.
• May 14 – Francois Ravaillac assassinates Henry IV of France.
• May 23 – Jamestown, Virginia: Acting as temporary Governor, Thomas Gates, along with John Rolfe, Captain Ralph Hamor, Sir George Somers, and other survivors from the Sea Venture (wrecked at Bermuda) arrive at Jamestown; they find that 60 have survived the "starving time" (during winter), the fort palizadoes and gates have been torn down, and empty houses have been used for firewood, in fear of attacks by natives outside the fort area.
• May 24 – Jamestown, Virginia: The temporary Governor, Thomas Gates, issues The Divine, Moral, and Martial Laws.
• May 27 – Francois Ravaillac is executed by being pulled apart by horses in the Place de Grève.
• June 4 – A Polish–Lithuanian army defeats a much larger Russian army at the Battle of Klushino.
• June 7 – Jamestown: Temporary Governor Gates decides to abandon Jamestown.
• June 8 – Jamestown: Temporary Governor Gates' convoy meets the ships of Governor Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr ("Delaware") at Mulberry Island.
• June 10 – Jamestown: The convoy of temporary Governor Gates and the ships of Governor Lord De La Warr land at Jamestown.
• June 22 – Arbella Stuart, pretender to the English throne, secretly marries William Seymour; both are later imprisoned for marrying without the king's permission.

July–December

• July 5 – John Guy sets sail from Bristol with 39 other colonists for Newfoundland.
• August 2 – Henry Hudson sails into what it is now known as Hudson Bay, thinking he has made it through the Northwest Passage and reached the Pacific Ocean.
• August 9 – Jamestown: The English launch a major attack on the Paspahegh village, capturing and executing the native queen and her children, burning houses and chopping down the corn fields; the subsequent use of the term "Paspahegh" in documents refers to their former territory.
• August 21 – The Tuscans fight the Turks.
• October 10 – The Tuscans fight the Turks again.
• October 17 – Louis XIII of France is crowned.

Date unknown

• Johannes Fabricius is the first to observe sunspots by telescope.
• Poland captures Moscow, just to lose it again to Russian and Swedish troops.
• In Jamestown, Virginia, only 60 out of 500 settlers survive over winter.
• The Orion Nebula is discovered by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc.
• Bonham's Case is decided by Edward Coke, chief justice of England's Court of Common Pleas. Coke affirms the supremacy of the common law, which limits the power of Parliament as well as the king.
• By this year, the Portuguese colony of Brazil has either 400 mills producing 57,000 tons of sugar a year, or only 230 mills producing 14,000 tons of sugar a year; accepting either figure depends on which expert you believe is more accurate, according to Alfred W. Crosby Jr. on page 69 of his book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. In any case, the incredible wealth the Portuguese acquire from selling sugar in Europe prompts the English and French to follow suit in this century.
• The Manchu tribal leader Nurhaci breaks his relations with the Ming Dynasty of China, then under the aloof and growingly negligent Wanli Emperor; Nurhaci's line later becomes the emperors of the Qing Dynasty that overthrow the short-lived Shun Dynasty in 1644 and the remnants of the Ming throne in 1662.
• Publication of the Douay-Rheims Bible is completed.

January–June

• January 6 – Axel Oxenstierna becomes Lord High Chancellor of Sweden.
• January 20 – Matthias becomes Holy Roman Emperor upon the death of Rudolf II.
• January 20–November 4 – An uprising in Moscow expels Polish troops.
• March 2 – False Dmitry III is recognised as tsar by the Cossacks.
• April 11 – Edward Wightman, a radical Anabaptist, is the last person to be executed for heresy in England, by burning at the stake in Lichfield.
• May 10 – Shah Jahan marries Mumtaz Mahal.
• May 23–May 25 – A Sicilian–Neapolitan galley fleet defeats the Tunisians at La Goulette.
• June 13 – Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor formally elected.

July–December

• July 22 – Four women and one man are hanged following the Northamptonshire Witch Trials in Northampton, England.
• August 20 – Ten 'Pendle witches' are hanged having been found guilty of practising witchcraft in Lancashire, England.
• August 26 – A Scottish mercenary force is destroyed in Norway at the Battle of Kringen.
• November 29–Treaty of Nasuh Pasha: Signed between Ottoman Empire and Safavid Empire
• November 30 – Battle of Swally: Forces of the British East India Company and Portugal engage off the coast of India, resulting in a British victory.
• December 28 – Galileo Galilei becomes the first astronomer to observe the planet Neptune when in conjunction with Jupiter, yet he mistakenly catalogues it as a fixed star because of its extremely slow motion along the ecliptic. Neptune is not truly discovered until 1846, about 234 years after Galileo first sights it with his telescope.

Date unknown

• Jamestown: John Rolfe exports first crop of improved tobacco (seeds from Trinidad).
• Nagoya Castle is completed.
• Thomas Shelton's English translation of the first half of Don Quixote is published. It is the first translation of the Spanish novel into any language.

January–June

• 11 January - Workers in a sandpit in the Daulphine discover the skeleton of what is to be allged to be a 30-foot tall man, the remains, it is thought, of the giant Theotocus, a legendary Gaillic king who fought the Romans.
• January 20 – King James I of England successfully mediates the Treaty of Knäred between Denmark and Sweden.
• February 7 – An assembly of the Russian Empire elects Mikhail Romanov to be Tsar of Russia, and establishes the Romanov Dynasty, ending the Time of Troubles.
• February 14 – Elizabeth, daughter of King James I of England, marries Frederick V, Elector Palatine.
• March 27 – The first English child is born in Canada at Cuper's Cove, Newfoundland to Nicholas Guy.
• March 29 – Samuel de Champlain becomes the first unofficial Governor of New France.
• April 13 – Samuel Argall captures Algonquian princess Pocahontas in Passapatanzy, Virginia to ransom her for some English prisoners held by her father. She is brought to Henricus as hostage.
• June – At Jamestown, John Rolfe makes the first shipment of West Indian tobacco grown in Virginia to England.
• June 29 – Fire destroys London's famed Globe Theatre.

July–December

• July – Algonquian princess Pocahontas meets English colonist John Rolfe in Henricus, Virginia during her captivity. Reverend Alexander Whitaker converts her to Christianity. She adopts the name "Rebecca".
• August 29 – The Sicilians under de Aragon defeat the Turkish trade fleet.
• November 3 – English royal favourite Robert Carr is created 1st Earl of Somerset.
• December 26 – The Earl of Somerset marries Frances Howard, occasioning John Donne's Eclogue.

Date unknown

• The New River is opened, to supply London with drinking water from Hertfordshire.
• James I of England condemns duels in his proclamation Against Private Challenges and Combats.
• The Ottoman Empire invades Hungary.
• A locust swarm destroys La Camarque, France.
• The territory of Kuwait is founded.
• Sultan Agung of Mataram takes the throne of the kingdom of Mataram on Java.
• Near Jamestown, Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale starts a settlement called "Bermuda City" which later becomes part of Hopewell, Virginia.

January–June

• April 5 – Pocahontas marries English colonist John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia.

July–December

• August 23 – The University of Groningen is established in the Netherlands.
• September 1 – In England, Sir Julius Caesar becomes Master of the Rolls.
• October 11 – Adriaen Block and a group of Amsterdam merchants petition the States General for exclusive trading rights in the area he explored and named "New Netherland".
• November 16 – The Treaty of Xanten ends the War of the Jülich succession.
• November 19 – Start of hostilities resulting from an attempt by Toyotomi Hideyorito restore Osaka Castle. Tokugawa Ieyasu, father of the Shogun, is outraged at this act, and leads three thousand men across the Kizu River, destroying the fort there.
• December 4 – The Siege of Osaka begins.

Date unknown

• The French Estates-General meets for the last time before the era of the French Revolution. In between, France will be governed as an absolute monarchy.
• John Napier publishes Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, a paper outlining his discovery of logarithms.
• The Rosicrucian Order is instituted in Germany according to Fraternitas Rosae Crucis.
• Christianity banned throughout Japan

January–June

• January 1 – The New Netherland Company is granted a 3-year monopoly in North American trade between the 40th and 45th parallels.
• March 10 – Saint John Ogilvie, a Catholic priest, is hung in Glasgow, Scotland.
• May 6 – The Peace of Tyrnau is signed between Holy Roman Emperor Matthias and Gábor Bethlen.
• June 2 – The first Récollet missionaries arrive at Quebec City, from Rouen, France.
• June 4 – Forces under the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu take Osaka Castle in Japan, beginning a period of peace which lasts nearly 250 years. Bands of Christian samurai support Ieyasu's enemies at the Battle of Osaka.

July–December

• July
  • The Peace of Asti between the Spanish Empire and Savoy.
• November
  • The Mughals under Abu Bakr launch the first offensive against Kajali, a border post of the Ahom kingdom.
  • Hasekura Tsunenaga visits Pope Paul V in Rome to request a trade treaty between Japan and Mexico.
• December 6 – In England, John Winthrop, later governor of the future Massachusetts Bay Colony, marries his second wife (of 4), Thomasine Clopton, daughter of William Clopton of Castleins, near Groton, England.

Date unknown

• The second volume of Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote ("El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha") is published, and is just as successful as the first half. Don Quixote eventually becomes the only truly famous work its author ever wrote.
• The Sengoku Period ends in Japan.
• The Grolsch Brewery is founded in Groenlo, Netherlands.
• Persian hordes led by Shah-Abbas kill all the monks at the David Gareja monastery complex in Georgia, and set fire to its collection of manuscripts and works of art.
• Mary Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, is released from the Tower of London in recognition of her role in helping to discover the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.
• The Somers Isles Company is founded to administer Bermuda.
• Johannes Kepler publishes Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo in response to Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons.
• King James I of Great Britain sends Sir Thomas Roe as his ambassador to the Mughal court of Jahangir.
• The Perse School in Cambridge, England, is founded by Dr Stephen Perse.
• John Browne is created as the first King's Gunfounder
• Austrian merchants receive economic privileges in Turkey.
• Wilson's School is founded by Royal Charter.
• Konoike Shinroku opens an office in Osaka. He begins shipping tax-rice from wester Japan to Osaka.
• Manuel Dias (Yang MaNuo), a Portuguese jesuit missionary introduces for the first time in China the telescope in his book Tian Wen Lüe (Explicatio Sphaerae Coelestis).

January–June

• January
  • The Dutch try to gain control of all the nutmeg-producing spice islands with the retreat of the English from Ai to Pula Run Island. Nutmeg at this time is more valuable than gold, and the English, led by Nathaniel Courthope, hold on to Run.
  • The development of the thoroughbred horse is greatly encouraged by the appointment to the court of King James I of England of courtier George Villiers as Master of the Horse.
  • António Vieira arrives, with his parents, in Bahia (present-day Salvador) in colonial Brazil, an unpromising beginning for his great career as a diplomat, noted author, leading figure of the Church, and protector of Brazilian Indians in an age of intolerance.
  • Officials in Württemberg charge astronomer Johannes Kepler with practicing "forbidden arts" (witchcraft). His mother had also been so charged and spent 14 months in prison.
• January 1 – James I of England, theatre-going and literary king with absolutist aspirations, attends the masque The Golden Age Restored, a satire by Ben Jonson on fallen court favorite Somerset. The king asks for a repeat performance on January 6.
• January 3 – In the court of James I of England, the king's favorite George Villiers becomes Master of the Horse; on April 24 he receives the Order of the Garter; and on August 27 is created Viscount Villiers and Baron Waddon, receiving a grant of land valued at £80,000. In 1617, he is made Earl of Buckingham. After the Earl of Pembroke, he is the 2nd richest nobleman in England.
• January 10 – Sir Thomas Roe, emissary from the court of King James I of England, presents his credentials to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, in Ajmer Fort, thus opening the door to the British presence in India. Roe sailed in the Lyon under the command of captain Christopher Newport, best known for his role in the Virginia colonies.
• January 12 – The city of Belém, Brazil is founded on the Amazon River delta by the Portuguese captain Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco, who had previously taken the city of São Luís in Maranhão from the French.
• January 15 – After overwintering with the Huron Indians, Samuel de Champlain and Recollect Father Joseph Le Caron visit the Petun and Ottawa Indians of the Great Lakes. This is Champlain's last trip in North America before returning to France. Having secured Canada, he helps create French America, New France, or L'Acadie.
• January 24 – Dutch captain Willem Schouten rounds the southern tip of South America and names it Kaap Hoorn, after his birthplace in the Netherlands.
• February – English merchants of the East India Company complain that the great troubles and wars in Japan since their arrival have put them to much pains and charges. Two great cities, Osaka and Sakaii, have been burned to the ground, each one almost as big as London, and not one house left standing, and it is reported above 300,000 men have lost their lives, “yet the old Emperor Ogusho Same hath prevailed and Fidaia Same either been slain or fled secretly away, that no news is to be heard of him.” Jesuits, priests, and friars are banished by the emperor and their churches and monasteries pulled down; they put the fault on the arrival of the English; it is said if Fidaia Same had prevailed against the emperor, he promised them entrance again, when without doubt all the English would have been driven out of Japan.
• February 19 – First recorded eruption of Mayon Volcano, the Philippines' most active volcano.
• February 24 – A commission of Roman Catholic theologians, the "Qualifiers," reports that the idea that the Sun is stationary is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture...".
• March
  • Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus is placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Congregation of the Index of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • Action of 1616 – La Goulette, Tunisia: A Spanish squadron under Francisco de Ribera defeats a Tunisian fleet.
• March 11
  • Galileo Galilei meets Pope Paul V in person, to discuss his position.
  • The English Roman Catholic priest, Thomas Atkinson (born c.1546) is hanged, drawn, and quartered at York, at age 70 (he is beatified by Pope John Paul II on November 22, 1987).
• March 19 – Sir Walter Raleigh, English explorer of the New World, is released from prison in the Tower of London in order to conduct a second, ill-fated expedition in search of El Dorado in South America.
• May – The Thomas Overbury Murder Scandal (1615–1616) ends with the conviction of Earl and Countess of Somerset, who were, however, not hanged but imprisoned until 1622 in the Tower of London. Although King James I of England has ordered the investigation of the poet's murder and allowed his former court favorite to be arrested and tried, his court, now under the influence of the Earl of Buckingham (George Villiers) gains the reputation of being corrupt and vile. The royal visit of James's brother-in-law Christian IV, king of Denmark, a notorious soak, adds further scandal.
• May 3 – The Treaty of Loudun is signed, ending a series of rebellions in France.
• June 12 – Pocahontas (now Rebecca) arrives in England, with her husband, John Rolfe, their infant son, Thomas Rolfe, her half-sister Matachanna (alias Cleopatra) and brother-in-law "Tomocomo", the shaman also known as Uttamatomakkin. Ten Powhatan Indians are brought by Sir Thomas Dale, the colonial governor, at the request of the Virginia Company, as a fund-raising stunt. Dale, having been recalled under criticism, writes A True Relation of the State of Virginia, Left by Sir Thomas Dale, Knight, in May last, 1616 in a successful effort to redeem his leadership. Neither Pocahontas or Dale see Virginia again.

July–December

• July 6 – First recorded eruption of Manam Volcano (erupting frequently since then), forming a 10-km-wide island in the Bismarck Sea, 13 km off coast of Papua New Guinea, in the southwestern part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
• July 20 – Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, dies in Rome, thus concluding the Flight of the Earls from Ireland.
• August 8 – The Tokugawa shogunate (Bakufu) in Japan forbids foreigners other than Chinese from traveling freely or trading outside of the ports of Nagasaki and Hirado.
• September – Sakazaki Naomori of Iwami Tsuwano han fails to kidnap Princess Sen and commits suicide.
• September 15 – The first non-aristocratic, free public school in Europe is opened in Frascati, Italy.
• October
  • John Donne is appointed as Reader in Divinity at his old inn of court, Lincoln's Inn.
  • King James's School in Knaresborough was founded by Dr. Robert Chaloner and the charter was signed by King James himself in October 1616.
• October 25 – Dirk Hartog makes the second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at Dirk Hartog Island off the Western Australian coast. The pewter Hartog Plate, left to mark the landfall of the Dutch ship Eendracht, is now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• November
  • Peter Paul Rubens begins work on his famous classical tapestries, when a contract is signed in Antwerp with cloth dyers Jan Raes and Frans Sweerts in Brussels, and the rich Genoese merchant Franco Cattaneo.
  • René Descartes, at age 20, graduates in civil and canon law at the University of Poitiers, where he becomes disillusioned with books, preferring to seek truths from "le grand livre du monde." His thesis defense may have been written in December 1616.
  • With small profits to show, the Virginia Company decides to distribute land in Virginia to stockholders according to the number of shares owned. Each stockholder can set up a "particular" plantation and pay associated expenses, receiving 100 acres (0.40 km²) of land for each share and 50 acres (200,000 m²) for each person transported (the "headrights" system).
  • Author Richard Burton is made vicar of St. Thomas in the west suburbs of London.
• November 4 – Charles I (15 year-old second son of James I of England and Anne of Denmark) is invested as Prince of Wales at Whitehall in London, the last such investiture until 1911.
• November 5 – Bishop Lancelot Andrewes preaches the annual Gunpowder Treason sermon before King James I of England at Whitehall (both were intended victims).
• November 6–November 25 – The famous, if still inaccurate, folio edition of Ben Jonson's Workes is published.
• November 6 – Captain William Murray is granted a royal patent, giving him the sole privilege of importing tobacco to Scotland for a period of 21 years. Continuing from the reign of Elizabeth I of England, the creation of grants and patents reaches a new highwater mark from 1614 to 1621, during the reign of James I of England.
• November 16 – Roman Catholic Archbishop of the See of Spalato and Primate of Dalmatia, Marco Antonio de Dominis, having run afoul of Pope Paul V over secular matters relating to Venice, submits to King James I of England and later becomes Dean of Windsor.
• November 30 – Cardinal Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, is named French Secretary of State by young king Louis XIII. Richelieu will change France into a unified centralised state, able to resist both England and the Habsburg Empire.
• December – In the Middle East, traveller Pietro Della Valle marries Jowaya, daughter of a Nestorian Christian father and an Armenian mother, in Baghdad. The couple then sets off (1617) to find the Shah in Isfahan.
• December 10 – An ordinance establishes parish schools in Scotland. The same act of the Privy Council commends the abolition of Gaelic.
• December 18 – A widely reported earthquake occurs in Leipzig, Germany (also dated December 22).
• December 22 – An Indian youth (called one of "the first fruits of India") is baptized with the name "Peter" in London at the St. Dionis Backchurch, in a ceremony attended by the Lord Mayor, the Privy Council, city aldermen, and officials of the Honourable East India Company. Peter thus becomes the first convert to the Anglican Church in India. He returns to India as a missionary, schooled in English and Latin.
• December 25 – "Father Christmas" is a main character of the Christmas masque written by Ben Jonson and presented at the court of King James I of England. Father Christmas is considered a papist symbol by Puritans, and later banished from England until the Restoration of Charles II shortly after Oliver Cromwell's death. The traditional, comical costume for this jolly figure, as well as regional names, leaves little doubt that he is descended from the presenter of the medieval Feast of Fools. (Ben Jonson received a royal pension of 100 marks in 1616, causing some historians to identify him as England's first Poet Laureate, even though John Fletcher was more popular).^{[citation needed]}

Date unknown

• The Uskok War occurs between the Austrians and Spanish (Habsburg Empire) on one side and the Venetians, Dutch, and English on the other. An Austro-Turkish treaty is signed in Belgrade under which the Austrians are granted the right to navigate the middle and lower Danube River by the Ottoman Empire.
• The Collegium Musicum is founded in Prague.
• Physician Aleixo de Abreu is granted a pension of 16,000 reis for services to the crown in Angola and Brazil by Philip III of Spain, who also appoints him physician of his chamber.
• Ngawang Namgyal arrives in Bhutan, having escaped Tibet.
• The Swiss Guard is appointed part of the household guard of King Louis XIII of France.
• Week-long festivities in honor of the Prince of Urbano, of the Barbarini family, occur in Florence, Italy.
• Constantinople's Sultan Ahmed Mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque) is completed during the rule of Ahmed I.
• Nurhaci declares himself khan (emperor) of China and founds the Later Jin Dynasty.
• Manchurian leader Qing Tai Zu crowns himself king.
• Tokugawa Ieyasu dies and is replaced by his xenophobic son Tokugawa Hidetada, and Japan moves towards the "Sakoku" policy of isolation.
• Richard Steel and John Crowther journey from Ajmeer in Mogul India, to Ispahan, Persia, in 1615 and 1616.
• Captain John Smith (1580–1631) publishes his book A description of New England in London. Smith relates one voyage to the coast of Massachusetts and Maine, in 1614, and an attempted voyage the following year (1615) when he was captured by French pirates and detained for several months before escaping.
• The New England Indian smallpox epidemic of 1616–1619 begins to depopulate the region, killing an estimated 90% of the coastal native peoples.
• In London and neighboring towns, an epidemic of louse-borne typhus ravages the poor, crowded English. Lack of bathing encourages body lice that, when scratched, defecate on the skin, where a minor cut or sore can serve as an entry portal for the typhus-infected feces to enter the bloodstream, leading to high fever, delirium, and gangrenous sores.
• At the behest of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Dr. Richard Vines, a physician, passes the winter of 1616—17 at Biddeford, Maine, at the mouth of the Saco River, that he calls Winter Harbor. This is the site of the earliest permanent settlement in Maine of which we have a conclusive record. Maine will become an important refuge for religious dissenters persecuted by the Puritans.
• In Spanish Florida, the Cofa Mission at the mouth of the Suwannee River disappears.
• The first African slaves are brought to Bermuda, an English colony, by Captain George Bargrave to dive for pearls, because of their reputed skill in pearl-diving. Harvesting pearls off the coast proves unsuccessful, and the slaves are put to work planting and harvesting the initial large crops of tobacco and sugar cane. (At the same time, the freedom-loving English refused to purchase Brazilian sugar because it was produced by slave labor.)
• William Baffin is held at bay from finding the Northwest Passage to China.
• Thomas Middleton writes The Witch, a tragicomedy that may have entered into the present-day text of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
• With much legal strife and the encouragement of Sir Francis Bacon, Chief Justice Edward Coke is dismissed from the King's Bench, and the royal prerogatives of King James I triumph over English common law.
• English dramatist Thomas Dekker is imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison (1612–1619) because of a debt of 40 ₤ to the father of John Webster. In prison he continues to write.
• Saint Ambrose Edward Barlow, recently graduated from the College of Saint Gregory, Douai, France, and the Royal College of Saint Alban in Valladolid, Spain, enters the Benedictine Order. In 1641 he is hanged, drawn and quartered in Lancaster, England, for preaching.
• Italian natural philosopher Giulio Cesare Vanini publishes a radically heterodox book in France after his English interlude De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis, for which he is condemned and forced to flee Paris. For his opinion that the world is eternal and governed by immanent laws, as expressed in this book, he is executed in 1619.
• Francesco Albani paints the ceiling frescoes of Apollo and the Seasons at the Palazzo Verospi in Via del Corso for Cardinal Fabrizio Verospi. Italy still houses most of the Renaissance artwork of Europe.
• In the aftermath of the 1613–1614 anti-Jewish pogrom called the Fettmilch Uprising, in Frankfurt, Germany, mob leader Vincenz Fettmilch is beheaded, but the Jews, who had been expelled from the city on August 23, 1614, following the plundering of the Judengasse, can only return in February 1616, as a result of direct intervention by Holy Roman Emperor Matthias. After long negotiations, the Jews are left without any compensation for their plundered belongings.
• Elizabethan polymath and alchemist Robert Fludd's Apologia is published. Fludd has become a cult figure, being linked with Rosicrucians and the Family of Love, without any historical evidence.
• John Cotta writes his influential book The Triall of Witch-craft.
• Witch-hunting: Elizabeth Rutter is hanged as a witch in Middlesex, England. Orkney witch Elspeth Reoch is tried, and Agnes Berrye is hanged as a witch in Enfield, England. In France Leger (first name unknown) is condemned for witchcraft on May 6, and Sylvanie de la Plaine is burned at Pays de Labourde as a witch. In Orleans, France, 18 witches are killed.
• A second witch craze breaks out in Biscay, Spain. An Edict of Silence is issued by the Inquisition, but the king overturns the Edict and 300 accused witches are burned alive.
• The Leicester witch trial, in which nine women were hanged on the testimony of a raving 13-year old boy named John Smith, is held under the 1604 Witchcraft Statute of King James I. This bill was supported by some of the most able and learned men in England, including the Earl of Northumberland, the Bishop of Lincoln, the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, the Attorney General for England and Wales, the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and the Chief Justice of the King's Bench.
• The witch trial of in-keeper Harmonia Applegate, who was arrested on February 20, for poisoning 32 of her guests over the course of 12 years, is held. When questioned, Applegate gives excuses ranging from non-payment of debt to offence at guests' body odour.
• The Scornful Lady, a comedy stage play written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, is published.
• "Drink to me only with thine eyes" comes from Ben Jonson's love poem, To Celia. Ben Jonson's poetic lamentation On my first Sonne is also from this year.
• Ben Jonson's witty and satirical play The Devil Is an Ass, a comedy in five acts, is produced at Blackfriars Theatre by the King's Men, in October or November. The play pokes fun at credence in witchcraft and Middlesex juries. It is published in 1631.
• Francis de Sales' literary masterpiece Treatise on the Love of God is published, while he is Bishop of Geneva.
• Orlando Gibbons' anthem See, the Word is Incarnate is written.
• Tommaso Campanella’s book In Defence of Galileo is written.
• In Tunis, Tunisia, the mosque of Youssef Deyis is built. Today it has an octagonal minaret crowned with a miniature green-tiled pyramid for a roof.
• Italian naturalist Fabio Colonna states that "tongue stones" (glossopetrae) are shark teeth in his treatise De glossopetris dissertatio.
• An important English dictionary is published by Dr. John Bullokar with the title An English Expositour teaching the Interpretation of the hardest Words used in our Language with sundry Explications, Descriptions and Discourses.
• Scot John Napier's Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithms is published, a great boon to mathematics. The decimal point makes its first appearance in Napier's book Descriptio. Astronomer Johannes Kepler soon thereafter begins to employ logarithms in his description of the solar system.
• English mathematician Henry Briggs goes to Edinburgh to show John Napier his efficient method of finding logarithms by the continued extraction of square roots (unfortunately, Napier dies in April, 1617).
• Moralist writer John Deacon publishes a quarto entitled Tobacco Tortured in the Filthy Fumes of Tobacco Refined. (Even King James I writes against this fad.) Deacon writes the same year that syphilis is a "Turkished," "Spanished", or "Frenchized" disease that the English contract by "trafficking with the contagious courruptions."
• Human deformities are seen as producing monsters. Italian Fortunio Liceti publishes his book De monstrorum natura caussis et differentiis (On the nature, causes and differences of monsters).
• Dutch traders smuggle the coffee plant out of Mocha, a port in Yemen on the Red Sea, and cultivate it at the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens. Dutch later introduce Mocha coffee to Java.
• Mohammad Baqer Majlesi, known as "Allameh Majlesi", is born in the city of Isfahan.
• The Tepehuán Revolt in Nueva Vizcaya tests the limits of Spanish and Jesuit colonialism in western and northwestern Durango and southern Chihuahua, Mexico.
• Fort San Diego, in Acapulco Bay, Mexico, is completed by the Spanish as a defence against their erstwhile vassals, the Dutch. Today the fort houses the Acapulco Historical Museum.
• Anti-Christian persecutions break out in Nanking, China, and Nagasaki, Japan. The Jesuit-lead Christian community in Japan at this time was over 3000,000 strong.
• John Speed publishes his Atlas of England.
• Master seafarer Henry Mainwaring (1587–1653), Oxford graduate and lawyer turned successful Newfoundland pirate, returns to England, is pardoned after rescuing a Newfoundland trading fleet near Gibraltar, and writes a revealing treatise on piracy. He is knighted and later becomes Vice-Admiral and Chancellor of Ireland under Kings James I and Charles I, before being exiled to France for being on the losing side of the English Civil War. In his book, he advises the King against granting pardons to pirates.
• The first Thai embassy to Japan arrives.
• In the Edo Era of Japan, Hideyori's forces are defeated during the Summer Battle of 1616, he commits suicide, and the house of Toyotomi is ended.
• William Harvey gives his views on the circulation of blood as Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians. It is not until 1628 that he gives his views in print.
• The Dutch establish their colony of Essequibo in the region of the Essequibo River in northern South America (present-day Guyana) for sugar and tobacco production. The colony is protected by the Kyk-Over-Al fort, now in ruins. The Dutch also map the Delaware River in North America.
• The Ottoman Empire attempts landings at the shoreline between Cadiz and Lisbon.
• Croatian mathematician Faustus Verantius publishes his book Machinae novae, a book of mechanical and technological inventions, some of which are applicable to the solutions of hydrological problems, and others concern the construction of clepsydras, sundials, mills, presses, and bridges, and boats for widely different uses.
• Pierre Vernier is employed, with his father, in making fine-scale maps of France (Franche-Comté area).
• Danish natural philosopher Ole Worm collects materials that will later be incorporated into his museum in Copenhagen. His museum is the nucleus of the University of Copenhagen's Zoological Museum.
• Italian artist Guido Reni executes his famous Pietà, on commission from the Senate of Bologna and placed on the greater altar of the church of Santa Maria della Pietà on November 13.
• A fatal disease of cattle, probably rinderpest, spreads through the Italian provinces of Padua, Udine, Treviso, and Vicenza, introduced most likely from Dalmatia or Hungary. Great numbers of cattle die in Italy, as they had in previous years (1559, 1562, 1566, 1590, 1598) in other European regions when harvest failure also drives people to the brink of starvation (for example, 1595–1597 in Germany). The consumption of beef and veal is prohibited, and Pope Paul V issues an edict prohibiting the slaughter of draught oxen that were suitable for plowing. Calves are also not slaughtered for a some time afterwards, so that Italy's cattle herds can be replenished.
• Gustavus Adolphus (1611–1632), trained, since childhood, to become the Swedish king, begins to accompany the army on campaigns. In 1630 he will invade Germany to fulfill his victorious and fatal role in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648).
• Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), Dutch intellectual and friend of René Decartes, has his own candle factory in Zierikzee, Netherlands, until 1616, when he returns to Middelburg to study medicine. In 1618, he takes his degree at the French university of Caen, with the defence of his Theses de febre tertiana intermittente. His notebooks, unfortunately not fully published until the 20th century, reveal a coherent mechanical philosophy of nature with incipient atomism, a force of inertia, and mathematical interpretations of natural philosophy are present.
• In Sardinia, the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Sassari is founded.
• Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) sculpts Bacchanal: A Faun Teased by Children, at the age of 18 years. This work is now in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• The States of Holland set up a commission to advise them on the problem of Jewish residency and worship. One of the members of the commission is Hugo Grotius (Hugo de Groot), a highly regarded jurist and one of the most important political thinkers of his day.
• Frans Hals, artist, paints his well-known The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company.
• A slave ship carries smallpox from the "Kongo" to Salvador, Brazil.
• Marie Venier, dite Laporte, is the first female actress to appear on the stage in Paris. She is either a dramatic actress or a comedienne.
• Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner becomes the advisor to Archduke Maximilian, brother of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in Vienna. In a series of published letters in 1612 and 1613, Scheiner had sparred with Galileo over the nature of sunspots and been roundly trounced since Galileo's careful observations indicated that sunspots could not be satellites around the Sun because they often disappear on the disk. In fact, Scheiner sought to remove these smudges to the celestial body's immaculate reputation. A life-long enemy of Galileo, Scheiner is credited with reopening the 1616 accusations against Galileo in 1633.
• Despite being appointed to the usually profitable post of comptroller to Prince Charles in 1616, John Vaughan, 1st Earl of Carbery later claims that serving the Prince had cost him £20,000.

January–June

• February 27 – The Treaty of Stolbovo ends the Ingrian War between Sweden and Russia. Sweden gains Ingria and Kexholm.
• April 14 – Second Battle of Playa Honda: The Spanish navy defeats a Dutch fleet in the Philippines.
• April 24 – Encouraged by Charles d'Albert, the seventeen-year-old Louis XIII, king of France, forces his mother Marie de Medici, who has held de facto power, into retirement and has her favourite, Concino Concini, assassinated.
• June 5 – Ferdinand II, Archduke of Inner Austria, is elected King of Bohemia. Ferdinand's forceful catholic counter-reformation causes great unrest amongst the Protestants and moderates in Bohemia.

July–December

• September 1 – Weighing ceremony of Jahangir. Described by the first English ambassador to the Mughal court Sir Thomas Roe.
• September 23 – Treaty of Busza between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
• October 9 – The Treaty of Pavia is signed between Spain and Savoy, under which Savoy returns Monferrato to Mantua.
• November 17 – A naval battle between the Sicilians and Venetians ends inconclusively.
• November 22 – Mustafa I succeeds Ahmed I as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

Date unknown

• At least seven women are sentenced to death by burning for witchcraft at the Finspång witch trial in Sweden.
• Giambattista Andreini's play The Penitent Magdalene is published in Mantua.

January–June

• March 8 – Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion (he soon rejects the idea after some initial calculations were made but on May 15 confirms the discovery).
• May 23 – The Second Defenestration of Prague – Protestant noblemen hold a mock trial and throw two direct representatives of Ferdinand II of Germany (Imperial Governors) and their scribe out of a window into a pile of manure, exacerbating a low-key rebellion into the Bohemian Revolt (1618–1621) precipitating the Thirty Years' War into armed conflict and further polarizing Europe on religious grounds.
• June 14 – Joris Veseler prints the first Dutch newspaper Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. in Amsterdam (approximate date).
• July 20 – Pluto reaches, according to sophisticated mathematical calculations, its second most recent aphelion. The next one occurs in 1866, and the following one will occur 2113.

July–December

• August 29 – Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius are imprisoned by Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange.
• September 4 – Rodi avalanche: A rock- or snowslide buries the Alpine town of Piuro, claiming 2,427 victims.
• September 18 – Beginning of the 13th Baktun in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (12.0.0.0.0), the final phase of the Great Cycle.
• September 19–November 21 – Thirty Years' War: The Siege of Plzeň occurs.
• October 9 – residents of Mogilev revolt against the Uniate bishop Josaphat Kuntsevych.
• October 29 – English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England.
• November 13 – The Synod of Dort has its first meeting.

Date unknown

• The markgraves of Brandenburg are granted Polish approval to inherit the Duchy of Prussia, creating the state of Brandenburg-Prussia.
• Osman II deposes his uncle Mustafa I as Ottoman Emperor (until 1622).
• The 3,000 seat Teatro Farnese, the first permanent proscenium theatre, is built into the Great Hall of the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, Italy.
• The Ming Chinese embassy of the Wanli Emperor presents tea to the Russian tsar.

January–June

• March – Battle of Sarhu: Manchu leader Nurhaci is victorious over the Ming forces.
• March 20 – Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor dies, leaving the Holy Roman Empire without an official leader to deal with the Bohemian Revolt.
• May 8 – The Synod of Dort has its final meeting.
• May 13 – Dutch statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt is executed in The Hague after having been convicted of treason.
• May 30 – Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Governor General of the Dutch East Indies, conquers Jayakarta and renames it Batavia.
• June 10 – Thirty Years' War – Battle of Záblatí: Protestant forces are defeated.

July–December

• July 30 – In Jamestown, Virginia, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convenes for the first time.
• August – Captain Jope's ship brings the first Africans to what will later be called America. Jope trades these Africans for food and supplies. This trade of Africans is as temporary indentured servants in the same way that English whites are owned as laborers in the New World. Because the Spanish had Christianized these Africans, this labor arrangement is for a specified time and then they are free to live their lives, just as the English laborers are. These Africans had been stolen from the cargo of a Spanish vessel on the high seas. The enslavement of Africans in America is progressively and intentionally implemented later, beginning with the sentencing of John Punch in 1640.
• August 5 – Thirty Years' War – Battle of Věstonice: Bohemian forces defeat the Austrians.
• August 10 – The Treaty of Angoulême ends the civil war in France.
• August 28 – Ferdinand II is elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
• October 8 – Thirty Years' War – The Treaty of Munich is signed by Ferdinand II and Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria.
• November 16 – William Parker School, Hastings is founded by the will of Rev. William Parker.
• November 23 – Thirty Years' War – Battle of Humenné: Polish troops assist the Holy Roman Emperor by defeating a Transylvanian force, forcing Gabor Bethlen to raise his siege of Vienna.
• December 4 – Thirty-eight colonists from Berkeley Parish in England disembark in Virginia and give thanks to God (considered by some to be the first Thanksgiving in the Americas).

Date unknown

• Jahangir grants a British mission important commercial concessions at Surat on the west coast of India.
• England establishes its first outpost in India.
• The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth reaches the height of its territorial extent.
• The Banqueting House of James I of England is destroyed by fire.
• The Danish–Dutch whaling settlement of Smeerenburg is founded in Svalbard.
• An expedition in Sri Lanka led by Phillippe de Oliveira deposes and executes the last Jaffna king Cankili II, putting an end to the Jaffna Kingdom.
• A Spanish expedition sails around Tierra del Fuego, mapping the coast and discovering the Diego Ramirez Islands.