All Events
The English artist John White paints the everyday life of the Secotan Indians of America
Anthony Babington is involved in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne

Mary Queen of Scots, implicated in the Babington plot, is beheaded in Fotheringay castle
Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
Venice opens the first modern bank (the Banco della Piazza di Rialto) for safe deposits and credit transfers
A new group of English settlers arrives at Roanoke Island and makes a second attempt at a settlement
Virginia Dare becomes the first English child to be born in America, on Roanoke Island
Francis Drake sails into a crowded Cadiz harbour and destroys some thirty Spanish ships
Nicholas Hilliard paints the delightful miniature known simply as Young Man among Roses
16-year-old Abbas I, subsequently one of the greatest of shahs, inherits the throne of Persia
The House of Orange becomes the leading family of the new Dutch republic
The shogun's Tea Master awards a gold seal with the one word raku ('felicity') to a beautiful bowl, thus naming Japan's most famous ware
Seven provinces of the northern Netherlands consider themselves a new republic - the United Provinces

The more nimble English fleet destroys the galleons of the Spanish Armada, introducing a new kind of naval warfare
The tactics used against the Armada reveal that the sailing ships themselves have become fighting machines, as men-of-war
An English clergyman, William Lee, develops the world's first industrial machinery, to knit stockings
Queen Elizabeth I instals in Richmond Palace a flushing water closet (or toilet) recently invented by Sir John Harington
Royal (or real) tennis is so popular in France that there are now said to be 250 courts in Paris alone
Serfdom is introduced in Russia by Boris Godunov, whose measures tie the peasants to the land
An English ship, the first to arrive at Roanoke Island since 1587, finds no remaining trace of the settlers or their settlement

Arjan, the fifth Sikh guru, builds many gurdwaras and commences the holy city of Amritsar
English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene
Zacharias Janssen, a spectacle maker in the Dutch town of Middelburg, creates the first microscope

The dome of St Peter's is finished, completing nearly a century of construction on Europe's largest church
Queen Elizabeth I grants Jane Lovell, widow of John, the ongoing rights to his offices in Richmond Palace