Coen also sets about establishing a monopoly over the trade in nutmeg and mace, which can be obtained only from the Banda Islands.

The inhabitants of Banda have been selling the spices to the English, despite contracts with the VOC which oblige them to sell only to the VOC, at low prices.

He leads an armed expedition in 1621 to Banda, taking the island of Lonthor by force after encountering some fierce resistance, mostly by cannons that the natives have acquired from the English.

The orang kaya are forced at gunpoint to sign an unfeasibly arduous treaty, one that will in fact be impossible to keep, thus providing Coen an excuse to use superior Dutch force against the Bandanese.

The Dutch quickly note a number of alleged violations of the new treaty, in response to which Coen launches a punitive massacre.

Japanese mercenaries are hired to deal with the orang kaya, forty of whom are beheaded with their heads impaled and displayed on bamboo spears.

A large number of the inhabitants are killed or exiled to other islands.

The population of the Banda Islands prior to Dutch conquest is generally estimated to have been around thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand people, some of whom were Malay and Javanese traders, as well as Chinese and Arabs.

The actual numbers of Bandanese who were killed, forcibly expelled or fled the islands in 1621 remain uncertain.

Most survivors flee as refugees to the islands of their trading partners, in particular Keffing and Guli Guli in the Seram Laut chain and Kei Besar.

Shipments of surviving Bandanese are also sent to Batavia (Jakarta) to work as slaves in developing the city and its fortress.

Some five hundred and thirty of these individuals will later be returned to the islands because of their much-needed expertise in nutmeg cultivation (something sorely lacking among newly arrived Dutch settlers).

Whereas up until this point the Dutch presence has been simply as traders, that has sometimes been treaty-based, the Banda conquest marks the start of the first overt colonial rule in Indonesia, albeit under the auspices of the VOC.

Jayajakarta is renamed Batavia in 1621.

Coen had preferred Nieuw Hoorn, after his hometown, but didn't get his way.

King Songhtam is unsuccessful in martial affairs.

Leading Siamese armies into Cambodia to bring the kingdom under control in 1621, he is repelled by King Sri Suriyopor of Oudong.

The configuration of Sweden's borders have made the region around the Älvsborg Fortress, originally a castle built by the Swedes in the fourteenth century and gradually expanded, strategically important as the Swedish gateway to the west, lying on the west coast in the narrow area between the territories of Denmark-Norway.

After several failed attempts, Gothenburg is successfully founded in 1621 by King Gustavus Adolphus.

The city is heavily influenced by the Dutch immigrants and traders already resident in the area.

Dutch city planners are contracted to build the city as they have the engineering skills needed to build in the marshy areas around the new city.

Gothenburg is today the second largest city in Sweden after Stockholm and the fifth largest among the Nordic countries.

Johannes Kepler had become mathematician to the states of Upper Austria in 1612.

Ursula Reingold, a woman in a financial dispute with Kepler's brother Cristoph, had in 1615 claimed Kepler's mother Katharina had made her sick with an evil brew.

The dispute had escalated, and Katharina had in 1617 been accused of witchcraft; witchcraft trials are relatively common in central Europe at this time.

Beginning in August 1620, she had been imprisoned for fourteen months.

She is released in October 1621, thanks in part to the extensive legal defense drawn up by Kepler.

The accusers had no stronger evidence than rumors, along with a distorted, secondhand version of Kepler's Somnium, in which a woman mixes potions and enlists the aid of a demon.

However, Katharina had been subjected to territio verbalis, a graphic description of the torture awaiting her as a witch, in a final attempt to make her confess.

Throughout the trial, Kepler had postponed his other work to focus on his "harmonic theory".

The result, published in 1619, was Harmonices Mundi ("Harmony of the Worlds"), in which Kepler discusses harmony and congruence in geometrical forms and physical phenomena.

The final section of the work relates his discovery, in 1618, of the so-called "Third Law" of planetary motion.

Abbas falls seriously ill in 1621.

His designated heir, Mohammed Khodabanda, thinks he is on his deathbed and begins to celebrate his accession to the throne with his Qizilbash supporters.

But the shah recovers and punishes his son with blinding, which will disqualify him from ever taking the throne.

The blinding is only partially successful and the prince’s followers plan to smuggle him out of the country to safety with the Great Mughal, whose aid they will use to overthrow Abbas and install Mohammed on the throne.

But the plot is betrayed, the prince’s followers are executed and the prince himself imprisoned in the fortress of Alamut, a mountain fortress located in the central Alborz Mountains south of the Caspian Sea close to Gazor Khan near Qazvin, where he will later be murdered by Abbas’ successor, Shah Safi.

Domenichino, absent from Rome from 1617 until 1621, had been working in Bologna and at Fano, where during 1618-19 he had frescoed the Nolfi chapel of the Fano Cathedral with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin.

The Dutch Republic, surprised by such easy gains in the East, quickly decides to exploit Portugal's weakness in the Americas.

The Dutch government and private commercial companies form the Dutch West India Company (Dutch: Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie or GWC; English: Chartered West India Company) in 1621, primarily to secure the supply of sugar for member companies and colonize regions favorable for sugar plantations.

Among its founding fathers is Willem Usselincx (1567-1647?).

The GWC is on June 3, 1621,  granted a charter for a trade monopoly in the West Indies (meaning the Caribbean) by the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and given jurisdiction over the African slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.

The area where the company is chartered to operate consists of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which include the Pacific Ocean and the eastern part of New Guinea.

The intended purpose of the charter is to eliminate competition, particularly Spanish or Portuguese, between the various trading posts established by the merchants.

The company is to become instrumental in the Dutch colonization of the Americas.

The Dutch, aiming for unconditional independence, renew their war with Spain.

Cornelis Drebbel, a Dutch engraver, had been in Middelburg in 1600, where he built a fountain at the Noorderpoort.

He met there with Hans Lipperhey, spectacle maker and constructor of telescopes and his colleague Zacharias Jansen.

There Drebbel had learned lens grinding and optics.

The Drebbel family around 1604 had moved to England, probably at the invitation of the new king, James I of England.

Drebbel, who also worked at the masques performed by and for the court, had been connected with the court of Crown Prince Henry.

Drebbel and family had been invited in 1610 to come to the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague.

Drebbel had returned to London in 1612 after Rudolf's death.

Unfortunately, his patron prince Henry had also died and Drebbel was in financial trouble.

Drebbel had in 1619 begun designing and building telescopes and microscopes and become involved in a building project for the Duke of Buckingham.

William Boreel, the Dutch Ambassador to England, mentions the microscope that was developed by Drebbel.

While working for the English Royal Navy in 1620, Drebbel had also built the first navigable submarine in 1620, using William Bourne's design from 1578 to manufacture a steerable submarine with a leather-covered wooden frame.

Drebbel becomes famous for his invention in 1621 of a microscope with two convex lenses.

Several authors, including Christiaan Huygens, assign the invention of the compound microscope to Drebbel.

However, a Neapolitan, named Fontana, had in 1618 claimed the discovery for himself.

Other sources attribute the invention of the compound microscope directly to Hans Jansen and his son Zacharias around 1595.