Spanish navigator and explorer Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira leads the voyage that in 1595 discovers the first islands of Polynesia known to Europeans.

He names them the Marqusas after his patron, García Hurtado de Mendoza, 5th Marquis of Cañete, who is Viceroy of Peru at this time.

Mendaña visits first Fatu Hiva and then Tahuata before continuing on to the Solomon Islands.

...Moulmein on the Salween River.

Nanda Bayin is obliged to retreat to Pegu in 1595 and defend the city from a Siamese attack.

Abbas needs to reform the army before he can hope to confront the Ottoman and Uzbek invaders.

He has also used military reorganization as another way of sidelining the Qizilbash.

Instead, he has created a standing army of forty thousand ghulams and Iranians to fight alongside the traditional, feudal force provided by the Qizilbash.

The new army regiments, who have no loyalty but to the shah, consist often thousand to fifteen thousand cavalry armed with muskets and other weapons, a corps of musketeers (twelve thousand strong) and one of artillery (also twelev thousand strong).

In addition, Abbas has a personal bodyguard of three thousand ghulams.

Abbas also greatly increased the amount of cannons at his disposal, permitting him to field five hundfed in a single battle.

Ruthless discipline is enforced and looting is severely punished.

Annibale Carracci is known to have had traveled to Parma and then Venice, where he had joined his brother Agostino.

The three Carraccis had from 1589-92 completed the frescoes on the Founding of Rome for Palazzo Magnani in Bologna.

Annibale had by 1593 completed an altarpiece, Virgin on the throne with St John and St Catherine, in collaboration with Lucio Massari.

His Resurrection of Christ also dates from 1593.

He painted an Assumption in 1592 for the Bonasoni chapel in San Francesco.

All three Carraccis are working during 1593-1594 on frescoes in Palazzo Sampieri in Bologna.

Annibale completes the painting of San Rocco distributing alms, now in Dresden Gemäldegalerie, on July 8, 1595.

Annibale, on the basis of the prolific and masterful frescoes by the Carracci in Bologna, has been recommended by the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio I Farnese, to his brother, the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, who wishes to decorate the piano nobile of the cavernous Roman Palazzo Farnese.

Annibale and Agostino travel in November-December of 1595 to Rome to begin decorating the Camerino with stories of Hercules, appropriate since the room houses the famous Greco-Roman antique sculpture of the hypermuscular Farnese Hercules.

Meanwhile, Caravaggio executes a number of intimate chamber-pieces for Del Monte and his wealthy art-loving circle.

These include The Musicians, The Lute Player, and a tipsy Bacchus, all probably painted in 1595.

Jews in the northwestern Italian town of Piedmont build a synagogue within a courtyard in 1595, but are concerned for their security: following the prohibition of Jewish prayer to be heard by Christians, they place the entrance away from the street.

The Nomenclator of Leiden University Library appears as the first printed catalog of an institutional library.

Petrus Plancius, born as Pieter Platevoet in Dranouter, now in Heuvelland, West Flanders, had studied theology in Germany and England and at the age of tgwenty-four had become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Fearing religious prosecution by the Inquisition, he had fled from Brussels to Amsterdam after the city fell to Spanish hands in 1585.

Here he has become interested in navigation and cartography and, being fortunate enough to have access to nautical charts recently brought from Portugal, he had soon been recognized as an expert on the shipping routes to India.

He had collaborated in 1589 with the Amsterdam cartographer Jacob Floris van Langren on a 32.5-centimeter celestial globe, which, using the sparse information available about southern celestial features, for the first time depicts: Crux, the southern cross; Triangulum Australe, the southern triangle; and the Magellanic Clouds, Nubecula Major and Minor.

He had in 1592 published his best known world map titled Nova et exacta Terrarum Tabula geographica et hydrographica.

Apart from maps, he publishes journals and navigational guides and is developing a new method for determining longitude.

He has also introduced the Mercator projection for navigational maps.

In 1595, he asks Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser, the chief pilot on the Hollandia, to make observations to fill in the blank area around the south celestial pole on European maps of the southern sky.

Murad, not yet fifty, dies on January 15/16, 1595.

At the outset of the reign of his son and successor, Mehmed III, the war against Austria has already been in progress for two years.

The Porte has meanwhile lost control of so much of central Hungary and the principalities that the next several years—eleven, as it turns out—must be devoted to recovering these territories.