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Sweden's Gustav II Adolf cuts Muscovy off from direct access to the Baltic (see 1613). He restores Novgorod to Muscovy February 27 in the Treaty of Stolbovo but on terms that are financially remunerative to the Swedes, who retain Karelia and Ingria.
England's James I releases Sir Walter Raleigh from prison so that he may seek gold along the Orinoco River (see 1603). The Spanish ambassador warns that Spain has settlements on the coast, but Raleigh promises to find a gold mine for the king without encroaching on any Spanish territory. He sails with his young son March 17 in an ill-equipped expeditionary fleet and reaches the mouth of the Orinoco December 31 (see 1618).
French authorities arrest the nation's chief minister Concino Concini April 24 and he is executed on orders from Louis XIII, who banishes his mother, Marie de' Medici, to Blois. Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes, gains power over the 16-year-old king (see 1618).
The Ottoman sultan Ahmed I dies November 22 at age 27 after a 14-year reign in which plague has killed 200,000 at Constantinople. His beautiful but ambitious wife, Kösem, now 32, has exercised a strong influence on his reign, but he has paid the royal architect Mehmed Agha to design the great Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmed Cami) near the Sublime Port's Church of Hagia Sophia and contributed to the support of Mecca and Medina. None of his seven sons is old enough to inherit the throne, so he is succeeded by his idiot 16-year-old brother, who will reign briefly as Mustapha I but is so imbecilic that he will be deposed in 3 months.
Japan's Yoshiwara prostitute section is established at Edo. A local vice lord has persuaded shōgunate authorities to license him to operate an area of supervised brothels in exchange for his surveillance of suspicious strangers. Yoshiwara will flourish until 1953 (see 1789).
Eratosthenes Batavus by University of Leyden mathematics professor Willebrord van Roijen Snell proposes a method of triangulation for measuring the size of the Earth (see 1610). Building on work by the late Tycho Brache, Snell describes his novel method and gives the distance between Aikmaar and Bergen-op-Zoom as a meridian equal to 117,449 yards (55,100 toises; a recalculation will give it as 121,569 yards, or 57,033 toises). He will establish a network of hilltop stations that form 13 connecting triangles and use this chain of triangles to determine the length of an arc. After obtaining accurate measurements of one side (the baseline) of the first triangle in the chain and all angles of the other triangles, he will determine the azimuth and employ the law of sines from spherical trigonometry to compute coordinates for each point, but the size of the Earth computed by his triangulation is 3.4 percent smaller than Earth's actual size (see Picard, 1669). His work lays the foundation of geodesy.
Astronomer Christopher Scheiner calls attention to the elliptical form of the sun on the horizon in his paper "Refractiones coelestes" and attributes the phenomenon to refraction (see 1612; Snell, 1621).
Mathematician John Napier, laird of Merchiston, dies at his native Edinburgh April 14 at age 66. In addition to working out the first tables of logarithms and discovering the usefulness of exponential notation, he has introduced the use of the decimal point; astronomer and clergyman David Fabricius (David Faber) is killed at his native Osteel in East Frisia May 7 at age 53. Speaking from the pulpit, he has denounced a local goose thief, who has hit him on the head with a shovel (his son Johannes died last year at age 29).
A smallpox epidemic in England kills Rebecca Rolfe, née Pocahontas, as she prepares to embark on a return voyage to Virginia. Her son Thomas Rolfe will return to the colony.
An epidemic of what is probably smallpox sweeps the New England region and reduces the native population by some estimates from 10,000 to 1,000. A member of Thomas Hunt's 1615 slaving expedition has probably communicated the disease that leaves relatively few survivors (see food availability [Mayflower], 1620).
Bubonic plague becomes epidemic in India a year after being identified as such.
The Japanese shōgun Hidetada Tokugawa has four Christian missionaries executed (see 1616). They have ignored his ban and are the first Christians to be martyred in Japan (see 1622).
The Royal Mosque (Masjid-i-Shah) is completed at Isfahan for Persia's Shah Abbas.
An itinerary written by Fynes Moryson, Gentleman, is published at London and urges Englishmen to "lay aside the fork of Italy" (see Coryate, 1611). Playwright Ben Jonson has one of his characters in The Devil Is an Ass ask another what forks are; the reply: "The laudable use of forks, brought into custom here, as they are in Italy, to the sparing of napkins"; The Queen of Corinth by English playwright John Fletcher, 37, satirizes Thomas Coryate as "the fork-carving traveller." The French queen Anne of Austria will never use a fork, plunging her hands into the serving dish as in medieval times even when such behavior is no longer comme il faut for members of royalty and the aristocracy.
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