January–March •
January 11 –
Valladolid is briefly the capital of
Habsburg Spain under
Philip III, before returning indefinitely to
Madrid in 1606. •
January 17 –
Treaty of Lyon:
France gains
Bresse,
Bugey and
Gex from
Savoy, ceding
Saluzzo in exchange. •
February 8 –
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, longtime favourite of Queen
Elizabeth I of England, begins
a rebellion against the Queen. The revolt is crushed the next day. The Earl of Essex and
Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton are arrested and charged with treason. Essex confesses to the plot and then implicates his co-conspirators. •
February 13 - the first
East India Company fleet leaves England
on its voyage to the East Indies. •
February 23 –
Michael the Brave,
Prince of Wallachia, arrives in
Prague to enlist the assistance of
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in driving Ottoman troops out of Transylvania. Michael leaves on March 5, having received a pledge of Austrian troops to the fight. •
February 25 – The Earl of Essex becomes the first of the Essex's Rebellion participants to be executed. He is beheaded at
Tower Hill. His co-conspirator, the Earl of Southampton, sentenced to death, but Queen Elizabeth commutes his penalty to life imprisonment; Southampton will be released two years later. •
March 5 – The treason trial for five secondary participants in
Essex's Rebellion —
Gelli Meyrick,
Henry Cuffe,
Christopher Blount,
Charles Danvers, and Sir John Davies — is held in London. All five are found guilty. Meyrick and Cuffe are hanged at Tyburn on March 13, and Blount and Danvers are beheaded at Tower Hill on March 18. Davies is allowed to go free. •
March 7 – In India, Mughal Empire Prince
Daniyal Mirza, son of the
Emperor Akbar, is named the ruler of
Khandesh, after having completed the conquest of the sultanate of
Ahmednagar. •
March 24 –
Sigismund Báthory, who had abdicated as
Prince of Transylvania in 1599, returns as the leader of the invading Polish Army.
April–June •
April 3 – At an assembly of nobles at
Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca in Romania), Sigismund Báthory is again proclaimed Prince of Transylvania. •
April 22 – The first expedition of the
East India Company sets sail from England for the
Spice Islands with
John Davis as pilot-major. •
May 5 – Dutch explorer
Joris van Spilbergen, leading three ships of the
Compagnie van De Moucheron, departs on his first expedition to Asia, departing from
Veere with the ships
Ram,
Schaap, and
Lam (Ram, Sheep and Lamb). After establishing trade in
Sri Lanka, Spilbergen and his crew return to the Dutch Republic in 1604. •
May 28 –
Sekigahara Campaign: Japanese warlord
Date Masamune leads an unsuccessful attempt to take
Fukushima Castle. •
June 23 •
Polish–Swedish War (1600–1611): The
Battle of Kokenhausen is fought at
Koknese in
Livonia (now
Latvia) after Swedish troops had invaded the Lithuanian territory). The
Polish hussars, commanded by
Prince Krzysztof Radziwill, overwhelm a numerically superior force of Swedish attackers led by General
Carl Gyllenhielm, and over 2,000 Swedish soldiers are killed. •
Juan de Oñate, the Spanish colonial administrator in what is now the U.S. state of
New Mexico, departs from
San Gabriel de Nuevo Mexico with 130 Spanish soldiers and 12 priests on an expedition to explore the interior of the area.
July–September •
July 2 – The Spanish expedition of
Juan de Oñate reaches the
Canadian River on (the feast day of Biblical Mary Magdalena), in what is now Texas. •
July 5 – The
Siege of Ostend, which will last more than three years and claims more than 100,000 casualties for both Spain and the Netherlands, begins as
Albert of Austria, Governor General of the Habsburg Netherlands, leads an attack on the Dutch Netherlands fortress at
Ostend. The Spanish forces eventually triumph on September 20, 1604, albeit in a
Pyrrhic victory that will see at least 60,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or dead from disease. •
July 22 – General
Yemişçi Hasan Pasha is selected as the new
Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire by Sultan
Mehmed III, 12 days after the death of Grand Vizier
Damat Ibrahim Pasha. He served for only 15 months before being executed on the Sultan's orders on October 4, 1603. •
August 2 – The Oñate expedition reaches the Rita Blanco River on the day of the Feast of the Porciuncula and follows it northward into Oklahoma. •
September 9 – The
siege of Nagykanizsa, an Ottoman fortress in Hungary, is started by
Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and lasts for more than two months before being abandoned. •
September 11 – Queen Elizabeth I summons her 10th, and last, meeting of the English Parliament. •
September 19 – The Juan de Oñate expedition of Spanish explorers first encounters the indigenous
Escanjaque Indians in what is now the U.S. state of
Kansas. The Escanjaques ask the Spaniards to assist them in a war against a rival tribe, the Rayados. Instead, Oñate befriends the Rayados five days later. The Ottomans will recapture Székesfehérvár a year later. •
September 28 – The
Escanjaque Indians attack Juan de Oñate's Spanish expedition as the Spaniards are returning from their furthest venture east, the Little Arkansas River. •
October 26 –
Johannes Kepler, assistant to
Tycho Brahe, is promoted to the position of Royal Mathematician of the
Holy Roman Empire after Brahe's sudden death. •
October 27 – The
10th Parliament of Elizabeth I is opened by Queen Elizabeth of England. It serves until December 19. •
November 4 –
Cyril I is selected as the new leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church as
Patriarch of Constantinople and
Greek Patriarch of Alexandria, succeeding
Meletius I Pegas, who died on September 12. •
November 18 – Ottoman defenders commanded by
Tiryaki Hasan Pasha successfully resist the Austrian siege of Nagykanizsa. •
December 6 – The
Battle of Castlehaven is fought off of the coast of southern Ireland as six Spanish Navy ships led by General
Pedro de Zubiaur are intercepted by an English fleet of four warships led and commanded by
Sir Richard Levenson. Two of the Spanish ships are sunk, and the other four are run aground. •
December 19 – The
10th Parliament of Elizabeth I is adjourned. Another English Parliament will not be assembled until 1604 when summoned by James I. •
December 24 (
Julian calendar, used by the English; January 3, 1602, according to the
Gregorian calendar used by the Irish and Spanish forces in the battle) – The
Battle of Kinsale ends the
siege of Kinsale,
Ireland (begun in autumn 1601). •
December 27 – The
Battle of Bantam is fought within what is now
Indonesia off of the coast of the island of
Java, as Walter Harmensz leads five Dutch Republic galleons in a successful attack against a Portuguese fleet led by André Furtado de Mendonça.
Date unknown •
Dutch troops attack the
Portuguese in
Malacca. • Jesuit
Matteo Ricci becomes the first European to enter the
Forbidden City in Beijing, China, being invited by the
Ming Dynasty Emperor. • A rainy summer in the
Tsardom of Russia causes a bad harvest, leading to the
Russian famine of 1601–03 which kills about two million people. • Martin Möller is accused of
Crypto-Calvinism. • Possible first performance of
William Shakespeare's tragedy
Hamlet, perhaps in springtime. == Births ==