1601

January–March

• January 11 – Valladolid is briefly the capital of Habsburg Spain under Philip III, before returning indefinitely to Madrid in 1606.
• January 17 – Treaty of Lyon: France gains Bresse, Bugey and Gex from Savoy, ceding Saluzzo in exchange.
• February 8 – Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, longtime favourite of Queen Elizabeth I of England, begins a rebellion against the Queen. The revolt is crushed the next day. The Earl of Essex and Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton are arrested and charged with treason. Essex confesses to the plot and then implicates his co-conspirators.
• February 23 – Michael the Brave, Prince of Wallachia, arrives in Prague to enlist the assistance of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in driving Ottoman troops out of Transylvania. Michael leaves on March 5, having received a pledge of Austrian troops to the fight.
• February 25 – The Earl of Essex becomes the first of the Essex's Rebellion participants to be executed. He is beheaded at Tower Hill. His co-conspirator, the Earl of Southampton, sentenced to death, but Queen Elizabeth commutes his penalty to life imprisonment; Southampton will be released two years later.
• March 5 – The treason trial for five secondary participants in Essex's Rebellion — Gelli Meyrick, Henry Cuffe, Christopher Blount, Charles Danvers, and Sir John Davies — is held in London. All five are found guilty. Meyrick and Cuffe are hanged at Tyburn on March 13, and Blount and Danvers are beheaded at Tower Hill on March 18. Davies is allowed to go free.
• March 7 – In India, Mughal Empire Prince Daniyal Mirza, son of the Emperor Akbar, is named the ruler of Khandesh, after having completed the conquest of the sultanate of Ahmednagar.
• March 24 – Sigismund Báthory, who had abdicated as Prince of Transylvania in 1599, returns as the leader of the invading Polish Army.

  April–June

• April 3 – At an assembly of nobles at Kolozsvár, Sigismund Báthory is again proclaimed Prince of Transylvania.
• April 22 – The first expedition of the East India Company sets sail from England for the Spice Islands with John Davis as pilot-major.
• May 5 – Dutch explorer Joris van Spilbergen, leading three ships of the Compagnie van De Moucheron, departs on his first expedition to Asia, departing from Veere with the ships Ram, Schaap, and Lam. After establishing trade in Sri Lanka, Spilbergen and his crew return to the Dutch Republic in 1604.
• May 28 – Sekigahara Campaign: Japanese warlord Date Masamune leads an unsuccessful attempt to take Fukushima Castle.
• June 23
• *Polish–Swedish War : The Battle of Kokenhausen is fought at Koknese in Livonia. The Polish hussars, commanded by Prince Krzysztof Radziwill, overwhelm a numerically superior force of Swedish attackers led by General Carl Gyllenhielm, and over 2,000 Swedish soldiers are killed.
• *Juan de Oñate, the Spanish colonial administrator in what is now the U.S. state of New Mexico, departs from San Gabriel de Nuevo Mexico with 130 Spanish soldiers and 12 priests on an expedition to explore the interior of the area.

  July–September

• July 2 – The Spanish expedition of Juan de Oñate reaches the Canadian River on, in what is now Texas.
• July 5 – The Siege of Ostend, which will last more than three years and claims more than 100,000 casualties for both Spain and the Netherlands, begins as Albert of Austria, Governor General of the Habsburg Netherlands, leads an attack on the Dutch Netherlands fortress at Ostend. The Spanish forces eventually triumph on September 20, 1604, albeit in a Pyrrhic victory that will see at least 60,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or dead from disease.
• July 22 – General Yemişçi Hasan Pasha is selected as the new Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire by Sultan Mehmed III, 12 days after the death of Grand Vizier Damat Ibrahim Pasha. He served for only 15 months before being executed on the Sultan's orders on October 4, 1603.
• August 2 – The Oñate expedition reaches the Rita Blanco River on the day of the Feast of the Porciuncula and follows it northward into Oklahoma.
• August 3 – The Battle of Guruslău takes place in Goroszlo in, as Wallachian troops led by Michael the Brave and Giorgio Basta defeat Transylvanian defenders commanded by Sigismund Báthory. Wallachia, assisted by Austrian troops from the Holy Roman Empire, retakes the Principality of Transylvania from Ottoman rule.
• September 2 – 4th Spanish Armada is sent; a fleet of 33 ships and 4,432 men, under the command of Admiral Juan del Águila, departs Portugal after being dispatched to Ireland by King Philip III. The Spanish fleet is intended to support an Irish rebellion led by Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone and Hugh Roe O'Donnell against the British.
• September 6 – Pope Clement VIII issues a decree forbidding the publication of any litany, except that of the saints as found in the liturgical books and the Litany of Loreto.
• September 9 – The siege of Nagykanizsa, an Ottoman fortress in Hungary, is started by Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and lasts for more than two months before being abandoned.
• September 11 – Queen Elizabeth I summons her 10th, and last, meeting of the English Parliament.
• September 19 – The Juan de Oñate expedition of Spanish explorers first encounters the indigenous Escanjaque Indians in what is now the U.S. state of Kansas. The Escanjaques ask the Spaniards to assist them in a war against a rival tribe, the Rayados. Instead, Oñate befriends the Rayados five days later.
• September 20 – The siege of Székesfehérvár, an Ottoman occupied Hungarian fortress, is completed by troops of the Holy Roman Empire after 16 days. The Ottomans will recapture Székesfehérvár a year later.
• September 28 – The Escanjaque Indians attack Juan de Oñate's Spanish expedition as the Spaniards are returning from their furthest venture east, the Little Arkansas River.

  October–December

• October 2 – 4th Spanish Armada; a large Spanish fleet, with 4,500 soldiers led by Juan del Águila, lands at Kinsale at County Cork in Ireland, to assist Tyrone's Rebellion.
• October 4 – Claudine de Culam, a 16-year-old girl in the French village of Rognon, is hanged after being convicted of "carnal cohabitation with a dog". The dog is hanged along with her.
• October 26 – Johannes Kepler, assistant to Tycho Brahe, is promoted to the position of Royal Mathematician of the Holy Roman Empire after Brahe's sudden death.
• October 27 – The 10th Parliament of Elizabeth I is opened by Queen Elizabeth of England. It serves until December 19.
• November 4 – Cyril I is selected as the new leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church as Patriarch of Constantinople and Greek Patriarch of Alexandria, succeeding Meletius I Pegas, who died on September 12.
• November 18 – Ottoman defenders commanded by Tiryaki Hasan Pasha successfully resist the Austrian siege of Nagykanizsa.
• December 6 – The Battle of Castlehaven is fought off of the coast of southern Ireland as six Spanish Navy ships led by General Pedro de Zubiaur are intercepted by an English fleet of four warships led and commanded by Sir Richard Levenson. Two of the Spanish ships are sunk, and the other four are run aground.
• December 19 – The 10th Parliament of Elizabeth I is adjourned. Another English Parliament will not be assembled until 1604 when summoned by James I.
• December 24 – The Battle of Kinsale ends the siege of Kinsale, Ireland.
• December 27 – The Battle of Bantam is fought within what is now Indonesia off of the coast of the island of Java, as Walter Harmensz leads five Dutch Republic galleons in a successful attack against a Portuguese fleet led by André Furtado de Mendonça.

  Date unknown

• Dutch troops attack the Portuguese in Malacca.
• Jesuit Matteo Ricci becomes the first European to enter the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, being invited by the Ming Dynasty Emperor.
• A rainy summer in the Tsardom of Russia causes a bad harvest, leading to the Russian famine of 1601–03 which kills about two million people.
• Martin Möller is accused of Crypto-Calvinism.
• Possible first performance of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, perhaps in springtime.

  Births

January–March

• January 8 – Baltasar Gracián y Morales, Spanish prose writer
• January 19 – Guido Cagnacci, Italian painter
• February 4 – Shi Kefa, Chinese Ming Dynasty official
• February 21 – Carolus Mulerius, Dutch Hispanist
• February 22 – Pierre Chanut, French diplomat
• March 7 – Johann Michael Moscherosch, German statesman, satirist
• March 19 – Alonzo Cano, Spanish painter
• March 20 – Henri, Count of Harcourt
• March 22 – John Scudamore, 1st Viscount Scudamore, English politician and Viscount
• March 31 – Jakov Mikalja, Italian linguist and lexicographer

  April–June

• May – Spencer Compton, 2nd Earl of Northampton
• May 3 – Nathaniel Dickinson, American settler
• May 27 – Antoine Daniel, Jesuit missionary at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons
• June 5 – John Trapp, English theologian
• June 6 – Hendrick Bloemaert, Dutch painter
• June 21 – Godfrey Henschen, Jesuit hagiographer
• June 23 – Anna Maria of Ostfriesland, German noblewoman
• June 26 – Dorothea of Saxe-Altenburg, Duchess consort of Saxe-Eisenach