Timeline: 1611 to 1620

1611  Galileo exhibits the wonders of the telescope to the pontifical court. He tries to produce scriptural confirmation of the view that the earth revolves around the sun, but he is rebuffed.

1611  The Dutch East India Company builds a factory on India's coast in the southeast, at Pulicat, to make gunpowder.

1612  The English further reduce Portugal's presence in the Indian Ocean by defeating them in a naval battle off the western coast of India, at Surat. From the Mughals the English receive permission to build a factory at Surat. The Mughals, without a navy, had looked to the Portuguese to protect the ship that took Muslim Indians on their annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and now they turn to the English for this protection.

1613  Dutch arrive at the island of Timur, previously claimed by Portugal and now claimed by the Dutch.

1614  The first barrels of cured tobacco reach England from the colony of Virginia.

1614  In Japan, the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu outlaws Christianity.

1615  Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats the last of his competitors, capturing the Osaka castle. The Warring States (Sengoku) period is ended. The Tokugawa Period of Japanese history has begun (from 1603 according to some), to last into the 1800s. 

1616  William Shakespeare dies. So too does Tokugawa Ieyasu.

1616  Blown off course, a Dutch sea captain, Dirk Hartog, "discovers" western Australia.

1617  Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu has been succeeded by his son, Tokugawa Hitetada. At Edo he establishes a district for hedonistic impulses that are outside the shogun's code of Confucian conduct. The district provides theater, musical and sexual entertainment to anyone who can afford it. There a new genre of paintings, prints, literature and theater rises. 

1617  Ships are carrying 50,000 pounds of cured tobacco annually from Virginia to England. Smoking has become a fad in England, with King James describing it as "loathsome," harmful to the brain and dangerous to the lungs.

1618  The pious Catholic Habsburg, King Ferdinand II, closes some Protestant churches in Prague. His Protestant subjects there rebel. Siding with Ferdinand are Maximilian, the Catholic monarch of Bavaria, and Philip III, King of Spain. Siding with the Protestants are some German princes. It is the beginning of the Thirty Years' War.

1619  Forces of the Dutch East India Company conquer the city of Jayakarta and rename it Batavia (Latin for the Netherlands). They make it their capital in the Spice Islands.  Also this year, the Dutch East India Company and the Britain's East India Company agree to cease all fighting, to return each other's captured ships and prisoners and to create a joint fleet (one-third English, two-thirds Dutch) to expel Spain and Portugal from the Spice Islands, China, the Philippines, and the Malay Peninsula

1619  African slaves are being transported to the West Indies to replace those Africans who have died there. The sugar industry is killing them faster than they can be replaced by procreation.

1619  To work their tobacco fields, colonists in Virginia buy 20 blacks from a Dutch ship that arrives for supplies.

1619  Lucilio Vanini is accused of atheism and burned at the stake.

1620  In England the slide rule is invented.

1620  Puritans are blown off course and land in Massachusetts.

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