1616
Nurhaci Proclaims the Later Jin
In the forests north of the Ming frontier, a Jurchen chieftain named Nurhaci united his tribes under a banner system, declared himself khan, and took the old dynastic name Jin. Within a generation, his descendants would rename themselves Manchu and march south to claim the Dragon Throne, overthrowing the Ming and founding China's last imperial dynasty.
Catholic Church Condemns Copernicanism
The Roman Inquisition, prodded by conservative theologians, declared the proposition that the Earth moves around the Sun formally heretical. Cardinal Bellarmine summoned Galileo and warned him, politely but firmly, to abandon the Copernican hypothesis as anything more than a mathematical convenience. Galileo bit his tongue, though he would keep thinking, writing, and building arguments for another sixteen years.
Pocahontas in London
The Powhatan princess, now the Christian Rebecca Rolfe, arrived in London with her husband and infant son and was presented at court as proof that English colonization was peaceful and civilizing. She met Ben Jonson's masques and caught sight of John Smith at a dinner. She died at Gravesend the next year.
Shakespeare and Cervantes Die
In the same month, though not quite the same day, the two greatest writers of their age died: Miguel de Cervantes in Madrid on April twenty-second, William Shakespeare in Stratford on the twenty-third, his fifty-second birthday. Europe's literature lost its twin pillars within hours of each other, though the works they left behind would outlive every empire that claimed them.