"The New World conquered by you has conquered you in its turn."
- Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsis in a letter to a Spanish friend, 1603
In the year AD 1603...
- The Elizabethan Age comes to an end as Queen Elizabeth passes away. She is succeeded by her distant cousin King James VI of Scotland, who becomes King James I of England, uniting Scotland and England under one crown.
- Japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu seeks and is granted the title of shogun by Emperor Go-Yozei, establishing the Tokugawa Shogunate that would rule Japan peacefully for the next 265 years.
- With Queen Elizabeth dead and no longer able to protect him, the enemies of Sir Walter Raleigh contrive to have him arrested, tried, and convicted of treason on the flimsiest of hearsay. Despite the guilty verdict, King James spares his life for the time being, consigning him to imprisonment in the Tower of London.
- The nine-year rebellion in Ireland led by Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone finally comes to an end as O'Neill surrenders to English forces led by Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy.
- The Time of Troubles keeps getting worse for Russia, as yet another poor harvest extends the Great Famine into a third consecutive year, killing hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, False Dmitri surfaces in Poland, claiming to be the long-lost son of Ivan the Terrible, and begins soliciting the support of the sympathetic Polish nobility, who are always on the lookout for a chance to meddle in Russian affairs.
- An uprising of Chinese settlers in Manila leads to a massacre of 23,000 Chinese by the Spanish, Japanese, and Filipinos.
- A sudden resurgence of the Black Death in England kills nearly 40,000 people
- Galileo Galilei invents the Galileo thermometer.
- William Shakespeare writes his plays Measure for Measure and Othello.
- The first of eight companies that will eventually unite to form the mighty Kikkoman soy sauce conglomerate is founded.
- The words enthusiasm, apathy, and ejaculation appear in the English language for the first time.
These people were born in 1603...
These people died in 1603...
1602 - 1603 - 1604
17th century
How they were made