1605
Don Quixote Published
In Madrid, a former tax collector and amputee of Lepanto named Miguel de Cervantes published a long comic novel about an aging hidalgo driven mad by chivalric romances. Don Quixote de la Mancha, tilting at windmills with his earthy squire Sancho, invented the modern novel almost by accident and gave the world its most enduring parable of idealism colliding with reality.
Akbar the Great Dies
In Agra, the illiterate Mughal emperor who had built an empire from Kabul to the Deccan, invited Jesuits and Hindus to debate religion in his House of Worship, and abolished the tax on non-Muslims, died at sixty-three. His son Jahangir, a poet and opium addict, inherited the most tolerant court in Asia.
Gunpowder Plot Foiled
A King's Messenger searching the cellars beneath the House of Lords found a Yorkshire Catholic named Guy Fawkes crouched over thirty-six barrels of gunpowder with a slow match in his pocket. The plan had been to incinerate Parliament and the royal family. English Catholicism would not recover for two centuries.
Jahangir Crowned Mughal Emperor
Salim, the rebellious heir of Akbar, ascended the peacock throne as Jahangir, Seizer of the World. A connoisseur of miniature painting, jade wine cups, and European clocks, he would rule through his brilliant Persian wife Nur Jahan and commission some of the most exquisite art India ever produced. His memoirs remain among the most candid royal autobiographies in any language.
Macbeth Conceived for James I
Shakespeare, courting the favor of his new Scottish king, began a brooding tragedy set in an imagined eleventh-century Scotland complete with witches, regicide, and prophetic apparitions descended from James I's own ancestor Banquo. The Scottish play would compress ambition into five acts of clocklike horror and become the most frequently performed tragedy in the English-speaking world.
True Law of Free Monarchies Reprinted
James I reissued his earlier treatise arguing for the divine right of kings as an instructional text for his new English subjects. Parliament members read it with dismay. The Jacobean conflict between royal prerogative and common law had its theoretical background in plain print for anyone who cared to look.