February 18 – In the course of the Eighty Years' War, a sea battle is fought in the English Channel off of the coast of Dunkirk between the navies of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, with 12 warships, and Spain, with 12 galleons and eight other ships. The Spanish are forced to flee after three of their ships are lost and 1,600 Spaniards killed or injured, while the Dutch sustain 1,700 casualties without the loss of a ship.[2]
April 22 – Pope Urban VIII issues a papal bull prohibiting slavery in the New World colonies of Spain and Portugal, encompassing most of Latin America.
July 1 – Parthenius I becomes the new leader of the Eastern Orthodox Christian church as he is selected as Patriarch of Constantinople, succeeding Cyril II.
July 16 – A revolt in France begins in Normandy with the assassination of tax collector Charles Le Poupinel while he is working in the town of Avranches. The rebellion is brutally crushed on November 30.
September 3 – The alliance of cantons in Switzerland known as the Three Leagues or Raetia agrees with Spain to bring Italy's Valtellina area back into the alliance, on the condition that the Catholic faith of the natives be respected.
Dejima, an island trading post off Nagasaki, becomes the only official port of trade allowed for Europeans, with the multi-national United East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) as the only European party officially allowed. Trading parties from China, India and other places are still officially allowed, though the VOC will become the usual broker for them.
Japanese wives and children of Dutch and British people from Hirado are sent to Batavia (Asian headquarters of the VOC, renamed Jakarta by the Japanese around three centuries later) on Dutch ships.[9]
January 3 – Éléonore Desmier d'Olbreuse, French Huguenot noblewoman, grandmother of George II of Great Britain, great-grandmother of Frederick the Great (d. 1722)
^C.R. Boxer, The Journal of Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp (Cambridge University Press, 1930) p.24
^Bély, Lucien (2015). L'art de la paix en Europe: naissance de la diplomatie moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN9782130738961.
^ abSamuel Rawson Gardiner, The Fall of the Monarchy of Charles I. 1637-1649 (Longmans, Green, & Company, 1882) p. 224, 243
^Peberdy, Robert (2021). A dictionary of British and Irish history. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 53. ISBN9780631201540.
^ Jaques, Tony (2007). Dictionary of battles and sieges : a guide to 8,500 battles from antiquity through the Twenty-first century. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. p. 650. ISBN9780313335389.
^Roberts, J. (1994). History of the World. Penguin
^R. Prud’homme van Reine, Schittering en Schandaal: Dubbelbiografie van Maerten en Cornelis Tromp (Arbeidspers, 2001)
^LastName, FirstName (2020). Chase's calendar of events 2021 : the ultimate go-to guide for special days, weeks and months. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 607. ISBN9781641434249.
^Magill, Frank (1997). Cyclopedia of world authors. Pasadena, Calif: Salem Press. p. 1739. ISBN9780893564483.
^Flood, John (2006). Poets laureate in the Holy Roman Empire. a bio-bibliographical handbook. Berlin New York: Walter de Gruyter. p. 1452. ISBN9783110912746.
^Warrack, John (1992). The Oxford dictionary of opera. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. p. 394. ISBN9780198691648.