Events

• January 30 - The death of Pope Innocent IX during the previous year had left the Papal throne vacant. Ippolito Aldobrandini is elected Pope Clement VIII.
• Founding of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland's oldest university
• Thomas Kyd publishes The Spanish Tragedy
• Japan invades Korea

Births

• January 22 - Pierre Gassendi, French philosopher and scientist (d. 1655)
• March 28 - Jan Amos Komensky, Czech teacher
• August 28 - George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham
• December 6 - William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle
• Wilhelm Schickard, builder of the "Calculating Clock", mechanical machine
• Sir John Eliot, English statesman
• Peter Stuyvesant, last Dutch governor of New Netherlands
• Jacques Callot, French baroque graphics artist
• Nicholas Ferrar Involved in the London Virginia Company
• Hong Taiji, later Emperor of the Qing Dynasty of the Manchu

Deaths

• September 3 - Robert Greene, English playwright, poet, pamphleteer, and prose writer
• September 13 - Michel de Montaigne, French Renaissance thinker.
• November 27 - John III Vasa of Sweden
• Gunilla Bielke, second wife of John III Vasa. (approximately)
• Bartolomeo Ammanati, Florentine architect and sculptor.
• Thomas Cavendish, English sailor and explorer.
• December - Alessandro Farnese , Duke of Parma and Piacenza, great grandson of Pope Paul III and nephew of Philip II of Spain.