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The Peace of Prague May 30 resolves differences between the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and Johann George I, elector of Saxony. France's Cardinal Richelieu makes an alliance with Sweden's Count Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna. Hans von Arnim, now 53, resigns from the Saxon army to protest the settlement (see religion, 1629). He will be arrested by the Swedes in 1637, but he will escape and be reinstated in the Saxon army in 1638. The Thirty Years' War becomes a conflict between the Franco-Swedish alliance and the Hapsburgs. France agrees to regular subsidization of Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimar.
Murad IV leads an Ottoman army against Persia. Erivan capitulates after a siege, Tabriz surrenders without resistance but is deliberately destroyed (the Blue Mosque is spared when the mufti observes that it was built by a Sunni, not a Shiite).
The former Lebanese ruler Fakhr ad-Din II is executed at Constantinople at age 63 (approximate), having been held captive since last year (see 1633). His territories are broken up, but the Druse and Maronite districts will remain united.
The Japanese shōgun Iemitsu Tokugawa acts to prevent any feudal lord from becoming too rich and powerful. He orders that each daimyo must visit Edo every other year, leave his wife and children at Edo for the year he is absent, and pay all the expenses of maintaining two places of residence.
Dutch forces invade and occupy northern Brazil, where Dutch planters will enter the lucrative sugar industry (see 1623; 1654).
Dutch forces capture St. Eustatius in the Caribbean, ending Spain's monopoly in cacao beans (see 1779; exploration, colonization [Curaçao], 1634).
The Connecticut colony is created by a union of the "River Towns" Windsor and Wethersfield with English settlements at Hartford and Saybrook (see 1634; Hooker, 1636). Saybrook is named for the 53-year-old William Fiennes, 1st viscount Saye and Sele, and Robert Greville, baron Brooke, who are members of a company created originally to colonize Providence Island (later Providencia) in the Caribbean.
Directors of the Plymouth colony prepare to surrender their charter and draw lots for apportioning the colony's territory. Captain James Mason, who helped found Portsmouth in 1630, has obtained a patent to the New Hampshire area from the London Company and receives the entire area (see 1680).
The General Court of Massachusetts authorizes settlement of Concord; several families move inland to obtain more pasturage on the new frontier.
Native Americans destroy Dutch settlements founded in Delaware 2 years ago (see New Sweden Company, 1638).
French trader Pierre Bélain, sieur d'Esanambuc, lands on the Caribbean island of Martinique September 1 (see 1626); now 50, Bélain set up a colony on St. Kitts in 1627. It was then taken by the English. He now brings in 80 settlers and builds Fort-St. Pierre at the mouth of the Roxelane River, establishing what will be France's first permanent colony in the West Indies for the Compagnie des Iles d'Amérique. Bélain takes formal possession in the name of Louis XIII September 17. He will die in 1637, and his nephew Jacques-Dyel du Parquet that year will become captain general of Martinique and will purchase it from the Compagnie des Isle d'Amérique (see agriculture [sugar], 1654). French traders Léonard de L'Olive and Jean Duplessis d'Ossonville seize the island of Guadeloupe and establish a colony whose settlers will battle the hostile Carib natives for 5 years before gaining a measure of security, but four chartered companies will fail in successive attempts to colonize the island (see 1674).
Explorer and governor of Quebec Samuel de Champlain dies at Quebec December 25 at age 68 (approximate).
"A Certain Method for the Developmnt of a New Geometry by Indivisibles of Continuous Indivisibles" ("Geometria Indivisibilibus Continuorum Nova Quadam Ratione Promota") by University of Bologna mathematics professor (Francesco) Bonaventura Cavalieri, 37, formulates a systematic means of determining areas and volumes of geometric figures. A disciple of Galileo Galilei, Cavalieri has delayed publishing his work for 6 years out of respect for Galileo, who had planned a similar work; the Swiss mathematician Paul Guldin and others find Cavalieri's writing style turgid, and since his method of indivisibles requires intricate calculations to derive even simple results it is difficult to apply (see 1647).
Yellow fever breaks out in Guadeloupe and Saint Kitts in the West Indies. The French physician Duterte gives the first reliable account of the disease in western medical literature.
The world's first free medical clinic for the poor opens at Paris under the direction of physician-journalist Théophraste Rénaudot, 49.
Boston Latin School opens under the name Latin Grammar School. The first secondary school in the American colonies to be supported by public taxation, it is open only to boys, its purpose is to teach students the classics in preparation for admission to Harvard and the ministry, and its 7-year course will remain until 1789, when it will be reduced to four in emulation of English public schools.
England gets her first inland postal service as mail-coach service begins between London and Edinburgh.
The Académie Française is founded at Paris to establish rules of grammar and correct usage and to cleanse the French language of "impurities" (see Real Academia Española, 1713).
Nonfiction: Mare clausum by legal antiquarian John Selden, now 49, whose rebuttal to the Mare liberum of 1609 is dedicated to Charles I.
Painting: Self-portrait with Saskia by Rembrandt van Rijn, who was married in June of last year to the 22-year-old Saskia Uylenburgh, daughter of the burgomaster of Leeuwarden, who provided her with a substantial dowry; Venus and Adonis by Peter Paul Rubens, who creates canvases for the ceilings of London's Banqueting House (see architecture, 1622). Charles I bans performances of masques in the hall lest lamp-smoke harm the paintings; Charles I in Hunting Dress and Prince Thomas of Savoy by Sir Anthony Van Dyck; Equestrian Portait of Felipe IV, Equestrian Portrait of Prince Baltasar Carlos, and Equestrian Portrait of Olivares by Diego Velázquez; The Immaculate Conception by Jusepe de Ribera; Prometheus by Italian painter Salvator Rosa, 20, who has arrived at Rome from his native Naples; Portrait of a Woman, Girl with a Coral Necklace, Portrait of a Lutanist, and Young Flute Player by Judith Leyster, who marries Jan Miense Molenaer, a fellow artist; Cardinal Richelieu by Brussels-born French painter Philippe de Champaigne, 33. Jacques Callot dies of a painful stomach ailment at Nancy March 24 at age 42.
Theater: Medea (Medée) by Pierre Corneille, in January at Paris, with Montdory as Jason; The Comedy of the Tuileries (La comédie des Tuileries) by Corneille, François Le Metel de Boisrobert, 42, Guillaume Colletel, and Claude de L'Estville, in February at the Louvre Palace, Paris; The Challenge of Charles V (El desafio de Carlos V) by Mexican-born Spanish playwright Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, 26, 5/28 at Madrid; The Lady of Pleasure by James Shirley.
Playwright-poet-priest Lope de Vega Carpio faints while among his fellow priests and is taken to his home at his native Madrid, where he dies August 27 at age 72. He has undermined his constitution with the vigor of his religious fervor, scourging himself so vigorously on Fridays that the walls of his room were spattered with blood.
A new French law restricts sale of tobacco to apothecaries on prescription from a physician.
The Mauritzhus at the Hague is completed by Dutch architect Jacob van Campen, 40.
The Queen's House in Greenwich is completed at London to designs by Inigo Jones. Construction began in 1617 but was suspended upon the queen's death in 1619.
The Chinese orange citrus sinensis reaches Lisbon and is even sweeter than the "Portugals" introduced to Europe by the Portuguese in 1529.
Massachusetts colonist Richard Mather writes of his voyage from England, "We had no want of good and wholesome beer and bread; and as our land stomachs grew weary of ship diet, of salt fish and salt beef, and the like . . . we used bacon and buttered peas, sometimes buttered bag-pudding, made with currants and raisins; sometimes drinked pottage of beer and oatmeal, and sometimes watered pottage well buttered." More affluent passengers on emigrant ships have their livestock and fowl aboard to be killed as the need arises, but most passengers must make do with spoiled meat and water that is often brackish, collecting rainwater from the deck and using it even though it tastes of tar.
Chocolate houses will by the middle of this century be in vogue in many of the German states as well as in France and the Italian peninsula. The high-priced cacao beans still come almost entirely from Spain, whose merchants import them from foreign possessions, but the Dutch West India Company has begun to challenge Spain in the cacao trade (see 1621).
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