1609 - Definition and Overview

Events

• April 4 – King of Spain signs an edit of expulsion of all moriscos from Spain
• April 9 – Spain recognizes Dutch independence
• May 23 - Official ratification of the Second Charter of Virginia.
• July 6 - Bohemia is granted freedom of religion.
• August 25 - Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. He is the first to perform observational astronomy as he observes the moons of Jupiter
• August 28 - Henry Hudson is the first European to see Delaware Bay.
• September 2 - Henry Hudson enters New York Bay aboard the Halve Maen.
• September 11 – Valencia expulses all the Moriscos
• October 12 - "Three Blind Mice" published by London teenage songwriter Thomas Ravenscroft.
• Samuel de Champlain claims the Lake Champlain area of Vermont for France.
• The first published rounds in English are published by Thomas Ravenscroft.
• Claudio Monteverdi publishes his first opera, Orfeo.
• The Douay Rheims bible is published in England.
• Bermuda is first settled, by English shipwreck victims en route to Virginia.
• The Netherlands and Spain agree to the Twelve Years' Truce in the Eighty Years' War
• Dutch East India Company imports tea to Europe
• Japanese clan of Shimizu conquers Okinawa
• Cornelius Drebbel invents thermostat
• Henry Hudson explores Delaware Bay and Hudson River
• Warsaw becomes the capital of Poland

Science

• Johannes Kepler publishes his first two laws of planetary motion in Astronomia Nova
• Hugo Grotius - Mare liberum

Births

• March 28 - King Frederick III of Denmark
• November 25 - Henrietta Maria, Princess of France and Navarra, later Queen Consort of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Deaths

• January 21 - Joseph Justus Scaliger, protestant scholar
• Barnabe Barnes, English poet
• Federigo Zuccaro, Italian painter