1594
Henry IV Crowned at Chartres
Unable to use Reims, which was held by the Catholic League, Henry IV had himself anointed and crowned King of France at Chartres Cathedral. The ceremony reused the chrism from a medieval ampulla. Within weeks the new king entered Paris to general relief and began the long stitching-together of his exhausted country.
O'Neill's Rebellion in Ulster
Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, joined Red Hugh O'Donnell in open revolt against Elizabethan English rule in Ulster. Armed with modern firearms and Spanish gold, the Gaelic lords would wage the Nine Years' War across Ireland, inflicting several humiliating defeats on English armies before being ground down. O'Neill's modern firearms tactics and Spanish alliance made the Nine Years' War the most serious challenge to English rule since the Normans.
Gresham College Opens
The bequest of the merchant Sir Thomas Gresham opened a new London college in Bishopsgate offering free public lectures in divinity, law, astronomy, geometry, music, and physic. Gresham College drew scholars and mathematicians and would later provide the nucleus from which the Royal Society would grow. Free lectures in English opened advanced learning to London's mercantile class, creating the community that later formed the Royal Society.
Tintoretto Dies in Venice
The Venetian painter Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto for his father's dyer's trade, died at seventy-five after decades of furious canvas production in the Scuola di San Rocco. His enormous, crowded, stormy paintings had defined Venetian Mannerism. Venice mourned the last titan of its pictorial century. His enormous Paradise in the Doge's Palace remained the world's largest oil painting for centuries.
Famine in Russia
A devastating famine struck parts of Muscovy after successive crop failures, and grain prices soared. Peasant flight from estates accelerated, eventually contributing to the tsarist government's tightening of serfdom laws. Russia's deepening rural crisis was preparing the ground for the chaos of the Time of Troubles. The famine's severity contributed to social unrest that erupted into the Time of Troubles within a decade.