The Edict of Nantes secures the civil rights of France's Protestants, the Huguenots

The Globe, where many of Shakespeare's plays are first performed, is built on Bankside in London

William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth, concludes that the earth is a magnet and coins the term 'magnetic pole'

A performance in the Oratory in Rome, with music by Emilio de' Cavalieri, is in effect the first oratorio

Britain's East India Company is established when Elizabeth I grants a charter to a 'Company of Merchants trading into the East Indies'

Electricity is given its name (in the Latin phrase vis electrica) by the English physician, William Gilbert

Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age

The Dutch East India Company is founded, with a tax-free monopoly of the eastern trade for twenty-one years

Geneva wins independence from the duchy of Savoy, in the treaty of St Julien, after repelling a midnight assault on the city

James VI of Scotland inherits peacefully the crown of his English cousin Elizabeth, and becomes James I of England

The accession of James I and VI to the throne of England brings the union of the crowns of England and Scotland

The British king James I launches a blistering attack on the smoking of tobacco, which he considers a loathsome custom

The first false Dmitry marches into Russia with a Polish army to claim the throne

Annibale Carracci completes an influential ceiling fresco in the Farnese palace in Rome

James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years

Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I

Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes publishes the first part of his satirically romantic novel Don Quixote

The Gunpowder Plot, attempting murder and treason, severely damages the Catholic cause in Britain

The satirical voice of the English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone

Claudio Monteverdi presents Orfeo, the first opera to win a lasting place in the international repertory

The earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel sail from Ireland with their families, in the event known as the Flight of the Earls

The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens completes an altarpiece in Rome which is an early masterpiece of the baroque

A lucky accident reveals the principle of the telescope to a spectacle maker, Hans Lippershey. In the Dutch town of Middelburg

A second false Dmitry marches on Moscow, to be followed by a third in 1612

Rubens returns from Italy to Antwerp, where he soon establishes Europe's most successful and prolific studio