Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1600

The world in AD 1600

By the Our Earth's History editorial team · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

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TL;DR — In 1600 Tokugawa Ieyasu won at Sekigahara, Shah Abbas I had just retaken Herat, Akbar’s armies fought in the Deccan and Moroccan rule on the Niger was failing.

On October 21, 1600, a single day of fighting at Sekigahara set Tokugawa Ieyasu on the road to a shogunate that would rule Japan for more than 250 years. In Persia, Shah Abbas I had just driven the Uzbeks out of Herat and was moving his capital to Isfahan. In India, Akbar’s armies were finishing five years of campaigning across the Deccan, and in London merchants had just persuaded Elizabeth I to charter a company to trade with the same part of the world. On the Niger River in West Africa, Moroccan soldiers who had conquered the Songhay empire nine years earlier were losing a guerrilla war in the swamps south of Timbuktu, and in Central Asia a century of Shibanid rule in Bukhara had just given way to a new dynasty. Outside the courts and armies that left written records, Kongo’s king was denouncing Portugal’s governors in Angola, and on Rapa Nui islanders were still building statue platforms.

Africa

King Álvaro II ruled a kingdom of Kongo that had been Catholic since 1491, when his ancestor Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptized. The Royal Museum for Central Africa records that Álvaro II spent these years denouncing what he called the hostile conduct of Portugal’s governors in the neighboring colony of Angola, a colony whose later push into the kingdom of Ndongo would draw a ruler named Njinga into decades of war after 1622. To the north, the Songhay empire that had ruled the Niger bend for over a century had fallen nine years earlier, when a Moroccan army under Pasha Judar routed Songhay forces at Tondibi in 1591. The Journal of African History account by Lansiné Kaba describes what followed: by 1600 Moroccan control of the conquered cities, including Timbuktu, was breaking down as rival pashas fought each other for power, musketeers refused to face Songhay archers in the flooded swamps to the south, and the resistance of the Songhay ruler Askiya Nuhu wore the occupiers down; the war for the Niger bend, in Kaba’s words, would swallow up conqueror and conquered alike before it ended in 1612. On the Swahili coast, Portugal held its position with a new stone fort at Mombasa. The National Museums of Kenya date Fort Jesus to 1593-96, designed by the Milanese military engineer Giovanni Battista Cairati, its five bastions guarding the harbor.

West Asia

Shah Abbas I (r. 1588-1629) had just won the war he needed to secure his throne. The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry by Roger Savory records that the Uzbek leader Abdallah Khan II, who had held Herat for ten years, died in 1598; Abbas took the offensive, routed the Uzbek army in August of that year, and recaptured Herat, ending a decade of Uzbek occupation of Khorasan. With his eastern frontier secured, Abbas transferred his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan, where within a few years he would resettle Armenian merchants from Julfa into a new suburb, New Julfa, in 1604 and 1605. War with the Ottoman Empire was still further off than that: Iranica notes that Abbas did not feel strong enough to try conclusions with the Ottomans until 1605-06, so in 1600 Persia’s western frontier remained quiet while its eastern one had just been won back by force.

Europe

In the Spanish Netherlands, the Dutch Revolt was in its thirty-third year. On July 2, 1600, the army of Maurice of Nassau met the Spanish Habsburg forces of Archduke Albert VII, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and Francisco de Mendoza, admiral of Aragon, on the dunes near Nieuwpoort in Flanders. The Royal Collection Trust’s record of the battle describes a Dutch victory. In London that same year, Elizabeth I’s government chartered a very different kind of venture. The Royal Museums Greenwich research guide to the East India Company records that the queen granted its royal charter in 1600, giving the newly formed company exclusive English trading rights to India and the Far East, though the company’s first Indian trading post, at Surat, was still seven years away.

East Asia

On October 21, 1600, the armies of Tokugawa Ieyasu and Ishida Mitsunari fought the single day’s battle at Sekigahara that decided who would rule Japan. Nippon.com’s account of the aftermath describes what followed: Mitsunari fled to Mount Ibuki, was captured, paraded through Osaka, Sakai, and Kyoto, and executed on November 6; Ieyasu confiscated some 6.3 million koku of land from the losing side, roughly a third of the realm’s total rice production, and redistributed it among his allies, while about eighty-eight clans lost rank entirely. Ieyasu’s own holdings grew from 2.5 million to 4 million koku, though he waited two and a half years before formally founding his shogunate at Edo. Columbia University’s Asia for Educators notes that the Tokugawa shogunate which followed would govern Japan for more than 250 years, built above all on the reestablishment of order after a century of civil war. Eight years earlier, on the Korean coast, Yi Sun-sin’s fleet had broken a Japanese invasion fleet at Hansan Island; by 1600 the war that invasion began had been over for two years.

South Asia

The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) was in the last stretch of a five-year military campaign. The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry by Fritz Lehmann lists his conquests in order: Kashmir in 1586-87, Sind in 1591-92, part of Orissa in 1592-93, and, from 1596 to 1601, territories across the Deccan plateau, the last round of expansion in a reign that had by then lasted forty-four years. Akbar would die at Agra in 1605. The English merchants who had just received their royal charter in London would not open a trading post inside his empire until Surat in 1607, two years after his death.

Central Asia

North of Persia, the Uzbek khanate of Bukhara was working through a succession crisis. The Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Central Asia by Robert McChesney records that Abdallah Khan II, who had ruled Bukhara and Balkh for decades, died in February 1598; his son Abd al-Moʾmen succeeded him, purged his uncles and cousins, and was himself assassinated by a group of amirs about six months later. For roughly a year three rival claimants split Transoxiana and Balkh among Tashkent, Balkh, and Bukhara, until Baqi Muhammad defeated the Bukharan force at the battle of Bagh-e Shamal in the spring of 1599, killed the Bukharan khan Pir Muhammad, and ended a century of Shibanid rule. The new dynasty, later known as the Tuqay-Timurid line, divided its territories among the sons of its senior khan, Jani Muhammad. Iranica records that Wali Muhammad occupied Balkh in late September 1600, extending the new dynasty’s control over the khanate’s second major city almost exactly as the century turned.

The Americas

On the northern edge of Spain’s American empire, a colonizing expedition was still finding its footing. The National Park Service’s history of the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro records that Juan de Oñate led settlers and cattle herds across the Chihuahua Desert and crossed the Rio Grande at what is now El Paso in 1598, founding a capital at Ohkay Owingeh, called San Juan Pueblo by the Spanish. Santa Fe, which would become the permanent seat of Spanish New Mexico, was still years off; the NPS account dates the final leg of Oñate’s expedition there to 1603. Far to the north and east, on land the National Park Service’s history of Jamestown describes as Powhatan hunting territory, no English colonist had yet arrived: the ships that would carry 104 men and boys to found Jamestown did not depart England until December 1606, reaching Virginia and choosing the site on May 13, 1607.

Oceania

No written record touches the Pacific in 1600. Popular accounts of Rapa Nui, the island Europeans would later call Easter Island, held that construction of its moai, the monumental stone figures, stopped around 1600 after an ecological and demographic collapse. A 2020 study in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Robert DiNapoli, Timothy Rieth, Carl Lipo, and Terry Hunt tested that narrative against radiocarbon dates, architectural stratigraphy, and early European accounts, and found no such halt: by their account, statue-platform construction continued past the island’s first recorded European contact in 1722. Elsewhere in the Pacific, and across Aboriginal Australia, the absence of outside observers means 1600 marks no comparable dated event; what continued there is measured only in the slower record of excavated sites.

Sources

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APA
Our Earth's History. (2026, September 27). The world in AD 1600. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1600/
Chicago
Our Earth's History. “The world in AD 1600.” Our Earth's History, September 27, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1600/.
MLA
“The world in AD 1600.” Our Earth's History, 27 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1600/.

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