* Officials in Württemberg charge astronomer Johannes Kepler with practicing "forbidden arts". His mother had also been so charged and spent 14 months in prison.
January 29 – Dutch captain Willem Schouten, in the Eendracht, rounds the southern tip of South America, and names it Kaap Hoorn, after his birthplace in Holland.
February – English merchants of the East India Company complain that the great troubles and wars in Japan since their arrival have put them to much pains and charges. Two great cities, Osaka and Sakaii, have been burned to the ground, each one almost as big as London, and not one house left standing, and it is reported above 300,000 men have lost their lives, “yet the old Emperor Ogusho Same hath prevailed and Fidaia Same either been slain or fled secretly away, that no news is to be heard of him.” Jesuits, priests, and friars are banished by the emperor and their churches and monasteries pulled down; they put the fault on the arrival of the English; it is said if Fidaia Same had prevailed against the emperor, he promised them entrance again, when without doubt all the English would have been driven out of Japan.
February 1 – James I of England grants Ben Jonson an annual pension of 100 marks, making him de facto poet laureate.
February 24 – A commission of Roman Catholic theologians, the "Qualifiers," reports that the idea that the Sun is stationary is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture...".
February 28 – In the aftermath of the 1613–1614 anti-Jewish pogrom called the Fettmilch Uprising in Frankfurt, Germany, mob leader Vincenz Fettmilch is beheaded, but the Jews, who had been expelled from the city on August 23, 1614, following the plundering of the Judengasse, can only return as a result of direct intervention by Holy Roman EmperorMatthias. After long negotiations, the Jews are left without any compensation for their plundered belongings.
March – Action of 1616, La Goulette, Tunisia: A Spanish squadron under Francisco de Ribera defeats a Tunisian fleet.
*Sir Walter Ralegh, English explorer of the New World, is released from prison in the Tower of London, where he has been imprisoned for treason, in order to conduct a second expedition, in search of El Dorado in South America.
May 25 – King James I of England's former favourite, the Earl of Somerset, and his wife Frances, are convicted of the murder of Thomas Overbury in 1613. They are spared death, and are sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower of London. Although the King has ordered the investigation of the poet's murder and allowed his former court favorite to be arrested and tried, his court, now under the influence of George Villiers, gains the reputation of being corrupt and vile. The sale of peerages and the royal visit of James's brother-in-law, Christian IV of Denmark, a notorious drunkard, add further scandal.
June 12 – Pocahontas arrives in England, with her husband, John Rolfe, their infant son, Thomas Rolfe, her half-sister Matachanna and brother-in-law Tomocomo, the shaman also known as Uttamatomakkin. Ten PowhatanIndians are brought by Sir Thomas Dale, the colonial governor, at the request of the Virginia Company, as a fund-raising device. Dale, having been recalled under criticism, writes A True Relation of the State of Virginia, Left by Sir Thomas Dale, Knight, in May last, 1616, in a successful effort to redeem his leadership. Neither Pocahontas or Dale see Virginia again.
October/November – Ben Jonson's satirical five-act comedy, The Devil is an Ass, is produced at the Blackfriars Theatre in London by the King's Men, poking fun at contemporary credence in witchcraft and Middlesex juries.
*Peter Paul Rubens begins work on classical tapestries, when a contract is signed in Antwerp with cloth dyers Jan Raes and Frans Sweerts in Brussels, and the Genoese merchant Franco Cattaneo.
* René Descartes, at age 20, graduates in civil and canon law at the University of Poitiers, where he becomes disillusioned with books, preferring to seek truths from "le grand livre du monde." His thesis defense may have been written in December.
* With small profits to show, the Virginia Company decides to distribute land in Virginia to shareholders according to the number of shares owned. Each stockholder can set up a "particular" plantation and pay associated expenses, receiving of land for each share and for each person transported.
* Author Robert Burton is made vicar of St. Thomas in the west suburbs of London.
November 6 – 25 – Ben Jonson's works are published in a collected folio edition.
November 6 – Captain William Murray is granted a royal patent, giving him the sole privilege of importing tobacco to Scotland for a period of 21 years. Continuing from the reign of Elizabeth I of England, the creation of grants and patents reaches a new highwater mark from 1614 to 1621, during the reign of James I of England.
December – In the Middle East, traveller Pietro Della Valle marries Jowaya, daughter of a Nestorian Christian father and an Armenian mother, in Baghdad. The couple then sets off to find the Shah in Isfahan.
December 22 – An Indian youth is baptized with the name "Peter" in London at the St. Dionis Backchurch, in a ceremony attended by the Lord Mayor, the Privy Council, city aldermen, and officials of the Honourable East India Company. Peter thus becomes the first convert to the Anglican Church in India. He returns to India as a missionary, schooled in English and Latin.
* "Father Christmas" is a main character of Christmas, His Masque, written by Ben Jonson and presented at the court of King James I of England. Father Christmas is considered a papist symbol by Puritans, and later banished from England until the English Restoration. The traditional, comical costume for this jolly figure, as well as regional names, indicate that he is descended from the presenter of the medievalFeast of Fools.
Physician Aleixo de Abreu is granted a pension of 16,000 reis, for services to the crown in Angola and Brazil, by Philip III of Spain, who also appoints him physician of his chamber.
Richard Steel and John Crowther complete their journey from Ajmeer in the Mughal Empire to Ispahan in Persia.
Captain John Smith publishes his book A description of New England in London. Smith relates one voyage to the coast of Massachusetts and Maine, in 1614, and an attempted voyage in 1615, when he was captured by French pirates and detained for several months before escaping.
The New England Indian smallpox or leptospirosis epidemic of 1616–19 begins to depopulate the region, killing an estimated 90% of the coastal native peoples.
In England, louse-borne epidemic typhus ravages the poor and crowded.
A fatal disease of cattle, probably rinderpest, spreads through the Italian provinces of Padua, Udine, Treviso and Vicenza, introduced most likely from Dalmatia or Hungary. Great numbers of cattle die in Italy, as they had in previous years in other European regions when harvest failure also drives people to the brink of starvation. The consumption of beef and veal is prohibited, and Pope Paul V issues an edict prohibiting the slaughter of draught oxen that are suitable for plowing. Calves are also not slaughtered for a some time afterwards, so that Italy's cattle herds can be replenished.
At the behest of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Dr. Richard Vines, a physician, passes the winter of 1616–17 at Biddeford, Maine, at the mouth of the Saco River, that he calls Winter Harbor. This is the site of the earliest permanent settlement in Maine, of which there is a conclusive record. Maine will become an important refuge for religious dissenters persecuted by the Puritans.
The first African slaves are brought to Bermuda, an English colony, by Captain George Bargrave to dive for pearls, because of their reputed skill in this activity. Harvesting pearls off the coast proves unsuccessful, and the slaves are put to work planting and harvesting the initial large crops of tobacco and sugarcane. At the same time, some English refuse to purchase Brazilian sugar because it is produced by slave labour.
Italian natural philosopherGiulio Cesare Vanini publishes a radically heterodox book in France, after his English interlude De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis, for which he is condemned and forced to flee Paris. For his opinion that the world is eternal and governed by immanent laws, as expressed in this book, he is executed in 1619.
Francesco Albani paints the ceiling frescoes of Apollo and the Seasons, at the Palazzo Verospi in Via del Corso, for Cardinal Fabrizio Verospi.
Elizabethanpolymath and alchemistRobert Fludd publishes Apologia Compendiaria, Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce suspicionis … maculis aspersam, veritatis quasi Fluctibus abluens at Leiden, countering the arguments of Andreas Libavius. Fludd later becomes a cult figure, being linked with Rosicrucians and the Family of Love, without any historical evidence.
* John Cotta writes his influential book The Triall of Witch-craft.
* Elizabeth Rutter is hanged as a witch in Middlesex, England, Agnes Berrye in Enfield, and nine women in Leicester on the testimony of a raving 13-year-old named John Smith, under the Witchcraft Act 1604. In Orkney, Elspeth Reoch is tried. In France Leger is condemned for witchcraft on May 6, Sylvanie de la Plaine is burned at Pays de Labourde as a witch, and in Orléans eighteen witches are killed.
* A second witch-hunt breaks out in Biscay, Spain. An Edict of Silence is issued by the Inquisition, but the king overturns the Edict, and 300 accused witches are burned alive.
Latest probable date of Thomas Middleton composition of The Witch, a tragicomedy that may have entered into the present-day text of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
"Drink to me only with thine eyes" comes from Ben Jonson's love poem, To Celia. Jonson's poetic lamentation On my first Sonne is also from this year.
Francis de Sales' literary masterpiece Treatise on the Love of God is published, while he is Bishop of Geneva.
Orlando Gibbons' anthem See, the Word is Incarnate is written.
Italian naturalist Fabio Colonna states that "tongue stones" are shark teeth, in his treatise De glossopetris dissertatio.
An important English dictionary is published by Dr. John Bullokar with the title An English Expositor: teaching the interpretation of the hardest words used in our language, with sundry explications, descriptions and discourses.
English mathematician Henry Briggs goes to Edinburgh, to show John Napier his efficient method of finding logarithms, by the continued extraction of square roots.
Moralist writer John Deacon publishes a quarto entitled Tobacco Tortured in the Filthy Fumes of Tobacco Refined. Deacon writes the same year that syphilis is a "Turkished", "Spanished", or "Frenchized" disease that the English contract by "trafficking with the contagious courruptions."
Fortunio Liceti publishes De Monstruorum Natura in Italy, which marks the beginning of studies into malformations of the embryo.
Fort San Diego, in Acapulco Bay, Mexico, is completed by the Spanish as a defence against their erstwhile vassals, the Dutch.
Anti-Christian persecutions break out in Nanking, China, and Nagasaki, Japan. The Jesuit-lead Christian community in Japan at this time is over 3,000,000 strong.
Master seafarer Henry Mainwaring, Oxford graduate and lawyer turned successful Newfoundland pirate, returns to England, is pardoned after rescuing a Newfoundland trading fleet near Gibraltar, and begins to write a revealing treatise on piracy.
The Dutch establish their colony of Essequibo, in the region of the Essequibo River, in northern South America, for sugar and tobacco production. The colony is protected by Fort Kyk-Over-Al, now in ruins. The Dutch also map the Delaware River in North America.
Croatian mathematician Faustus Verantius publishes his book Machinae novae, a book of mechanical and technological inventions, some of which are applicable to the solutions of hydrological problems, and others concern the construction of clepsydras, sundials, mills, presses bridges and boats for widely different uses.
John Speed publishes an edition of his Atlas of Britain, with descriptive text in Latin.
Pierre Vernier is employed, with his father, in making fine-scale maps of France.
Isaac Beeckman, Dutch intellectual and future friend of René Descartes, leaves his candle factory in Zierikzee, to return to Middelburg to study medicine.
The States of Holland set up a commission to advise them on the problem of Jewish residency and worship. One of the members of the commission is Hugo Grotius, a highly regarded jurist and one of the most important political thinkers of his day.
Marie Venier is the first female actress to appear on the stage in Paris.
Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner becomes the advisor to Archduke Maximilian, brother of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. A lifelong enemy of Galileo, following a dispute over the nature of sunspots, Scheiner is credited with reopening the 1616 accusations against Galileo in 1633.
Tommaso Campanella's book In Defence of Galileo is written.
John Vaughan, 1st Earl of Carbery is appointed to the post of comptroller, in the newly formed household of Prince Charles in England; Vaughan later claims that serving the Prince has cost him £20,000.
Ongoing
The Uskok War continues between the Austrians and Spanish on one side, and the Venetians, Dutch, and English on the other. An Austro-Turkish treaty is signed in Belgrade, under which the Austrians are granted the right to navigate the middle and lower Danube River by the Ottoman Empire.
