1599

• Thai king Naresuan raids the kingdom of Burma, sacking the Burmese capital at Bago (Pegu).
• Michael the Brave, prince of Walachia, conquers neighboring Transylvania, briefly uniting Romanians under a single ruler.
• King Sigismund III of Sweden is deposed by the Swedish parliament - the Riksdag - in favor of his uncle Charles IX, as a result of Charles's defeat of Sigismund the previous year at the Battle of Stangebro.
• Khmer forces attack and massacre Spanish troops stationed in Phnom Penh, ending Spanish influence over the Cambodian court.
• Governor Philippe de Mornay oversees the foundation of a great Protestant Academy at Saumur in western France and the town soon becomes a bastion of Huguenot power.
• Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, is named Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and dispatched with large force to quell the rebellion of Irish chieftan Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. The mission is a total failure, and ends when Essex makes an unauthorized truce with Tyrone and returns to England in disgrace.
• William Shakespeare writes Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, and the Globe Theater is constructed by his playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
• King James IV of Scotland (later to become English king James I), pens the Basilikon Doron, treatise on government aimed at his son Henry, with advice on the dangers of meddlesome ministers and an explication of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
• The Archbishop of Canterbury orders two of John Marston's satires - the licentious love poem The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image and The Scourge of Villanie, a volume of coarse verses - burned, causing Marston to turn to a new career writing for the stage.
• Spanish novelist Mateo Aleman publishes the first part of his picaresque novel, Guzmán de Alfarache.
• English playwright Ben Johnson produces his play Every Man out of His Humour, the sequal to his popular production of the previous year, Every Man in His Humour.
• English poet Sir John Davies publishes Nosce Teipsum, his long poem on the immortality of the soul.

These people were born in 1599:

• English dictator Oliver Cromwell.
• The great Spanish painter Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez.
• French missionary Marie de l’Incarnation.
• Italian architect Francesco Borromini.
• English admiral Robert Blake.
• Flemish painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck.
• French salon proprietor Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé.
• Italian general for the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years War, Ottavio Piccolomini.
• Protestant military leader in the Thirty Years War Christian of Brunswick.
• Lion Gardiner, founder of the first English colony in New York, at Gardiner's Island in 1639.
• Italian painter Andrea Sacchi.

These people died in 1599:

• Burmese king Nanda Bayin.
• The great English poet, Edmund Spenser.
• Italian composer Luca Marenzio, master of the Renaissance madrigal.
• Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, executed after a sensational trial along with her her stepmother Lucrezia, her brothers, and her lover, for the murder of her abusive father. Beatrice would be immortalized as a tragic heroine in later years in novels, plays, and opera.
• Gabrielle d'Estrées, mistress of French king Henry IV.

1598 - 1599 - 1600

16th century

How they were made