1608
year
1608 (MDCVIII) was a leap year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar, the 1608th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 608th year of the 2nd millennium, the 8th year of the 17th century, and the 9th year of the 1600s decade. As of the start of 1608, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 2 – The first of the Jamestown supply missions returns to the Colony of Virginia with Christopher Newport commanding the John and Francis and the Phoenix bringing about 100 new settlers to supplement the 38 survivors he finds at Jamestown.
January 7 – At Jamestown, Virginia, fire destroys "all the houses in the fort"; the fort is repaired in March.
January 11 – John Smith is released by Powhatan after 15 days of captivity, and arrives back at Jamestown the next day. Upon his return, instead of being welcomed, he is charged with negligence for the deaths of the two men with him at the time of his capture, Jehu Robinson and Thomas Emery, but later exonerated.
January 17 – Emperor Susenyos I of Ethiopia defeats an Oromo army at Ebenat; 12,000 Oromo are reportedly killed at a cost of 400 Amhara.
January 23 – Treaty of The Hague, a defensive alliance between France and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, is signed.
February 6 – Gabriel Báthory makes an agreement with Hungarian mercenary soldiers, the Hajduk, in order to overthrow the government of Transylvania.
February 7 – A peace conference opens at the Binnenhof at The Hague, in the Netherlands, to end a war between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium).
The public source identifies “1608” as year. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around year.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6758. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1608 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “1608” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.