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

The House of Orange becomes the leading family of the new Dutch republic

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

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

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

After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III

Henry IV becomes a Catholic so as to secure Paris and the throne of France

Willem Barents sets off on the first of his three expeditions to find a passage to the east through the waters north of Russia

A year after Mercator's death, his son publishes a bound collection of his maps with the title Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations

Tycho Brahe enters the service of the emperor Rudolf II in Prague, where he invites Johannes Kepler to join him

Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin begins work classifying 6000 plants on a new binomial system of nomenclature

A flush toilet is illustrated in an English pamphlet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax by John Harrington

Dafne is performed in Florence, becoming the first example of a new art form - opera

A manuscript, the Guildford Book of Court, uses the word 'creckett' for a game played in a Guildford school