1584
William the Silent Assassinated
In the Prinsenhof at Delft, a French Catholic named Balthasar Gerard shot William of Orange in the stairwell with a pair of pistols. The leader of the Dutch Revolt lingered long enough, according to Dutch memory, to commiserate with his soul and his people. His sons carried on the war.
Raleigh Names Virginia
A scouting expedition dispatched by Walter Raleigh reached Roanoke Island off the Carolina coast and returned with glowing reports. Raleigh named the new territory Virginia in honor of the Virgin Queen. The first attempt to plant an English colony there would follow the next year, and fail horribly. The name, honoring Elizabeth's virginity, was flattering propaganda that worked better in London drawing rooms than on the Carolina coast.
Ivan the Terrible Dies
The aged tsar collapsed during a chess game in the Kremlin, his body ravaged by years of mercury treatments and paranoid rages. He had killed his own eldest son with an iron-tipped staff three years earlier. Russia passed to his simple-minded son Fyodor, with court factions already jockeying for power.
Russian Time of Troubles Approaches
The death of Ivan the Terrible left Russia under his pious and simple-minded son Fyodor, with the boyar Boris Godunov emerging as de facto regent. Within two decades the Rurikid dynasty would die out, and Russia would sink into the famines, pretenders, and invasions of the Time of Troubles. The mysterious death of Tsarevich Dmitry spawned pretenders claiming to be the dead prince, plunging Russia into civil war.
Death of William the Silent
The assassination of William of Orange in July left the Dutch Revolt temporarily leaderless. His son Maurice of Nassau, still a teenager, would eventually assume command and transform Dutch military tactics with disciplined drill, trenches, and a new professionalism that would influence European warfare for a century. The assassination, the first political killing with a handgun, set a troubling precedent for religiously motivated political violence.