The members of the House of Commons…

Japan after 1640 allows only Chinese and Dutch ships to visit the country.

The economy of Nagasaki suffers heavily without the annual Portuguese ships from Macao.

Government officials, who are looking for means to relocate the Dutch trading post, had forced the Dutch to move from Hirado to Dejima.

The island of Dejima is on the administrative level part of the city of Nagasaki.

The twenty-five local Japanese families that own the real estate receive an annual rent from the Dutch.

Dejima is a small island, one hundred and twenty by seventy-five meters, linked to the mainland by a small bridge, guarded on both sides, and with a gate on the Dutch side.

It contains houses for about twenty Dutchmen, warehouses, and accommodation for Japanese officials.

The Dutch are watched by a number of Japanese officials, gatekeepers, night watchmen, and a supervisor (otona) with about fifty subordinates.

There are a number of merchants for supplies and catering and about one hundred and fifty tsūji ("interpreters").

They all have to be paid by the VOC.

Like the city of Nagasaki, Dejima is under direct supervision of Edo by a governor (Nagasaki bugyō).

Every Dutch ship that arrives in Dejima is inspected, and sails are seized until that ship is set to leave.

Religious books and weapons are sealed and confiscated.

No religious services are allowed on the island.

Despite the financial burden of the isolated outpost on Dejima, the trade with Japan is very profitable for the VOC, initially yielding profits of fifty percent or more.

At this time, the Dutch mainly trade in silk, cotton, and materia medica from China and India.

A peasant soldier named Li Zicheng had mutinied with his fellow soldiers in western Shaanxi early in the 1630s after the government had failed to ship much-needed supplies there.

Captured by a Ming general in 1634, he had been released only on the terms that he return to service.

The agreement had ended when a local magistrate had thirty-six of his fellow rebels executed; Li's troops had retaliated by killing the officials and since continue to lead a rebellion based in Rongyang, central Henan province.

Zhang Xianzhong, an ex-soldier and rival to Li, has by the 1640s created a firm rebel base in Chengdu, Sichuan, while Li's center of power is in Hubei with extended influence over Shaanxi and Henan.

The epidemic is even worse in 1641, with one hundred and three locales across China reporting epidemics, many of them big, the greatest of them concentrated southeast of Beijing, in Hebei and Shanxi.

It is likely that twenty to forty percent of the population dies in many of these places.

What in Wuxian is likely an epidemic of dysentery kills perhaps seventy percent of its victims, with bodies by the thousands collected daily.

Falun, a major copper-mining center in Dalarna, receives its privileges from Queen Kristina in 1641, by which time Falun is already one of Sweden’s largest cities.

The Dutch had taken the city of São Tomé, as well as the islands, for two days in 1599; they capture it again in 1641 and this time will hold it for a year.

Claude Lorrain had apparently befriended his fellow Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, with whom he has traveled the Roman Campagna, sketching landscapes.

Though both have been called landscape painters, in Poussin the landscape is a background to the figures; whereas for Claude, despite figures in one corner of the canvas, the true subjects are the land, the sea, and the air.

By report, he often engages other artists to paint the figures for him, including Courtois and Filippo Lauri.

He remarks to those purchasing his pictures that he sells them the landscape; the figures are gratis.

Rembrandt and Saskia had moved in 1639 to a prominent house (now the Rembrandt House Museum) in the Jodenbreestraat in what is becoming the Jewish quarter; the mortgage to finance the thirteen thousand guilder purchase will be a primary cause for later financial difficulties.

He should easily have been able to pay it off with his large income, but it appears his spending always keeps pace with his income, and he may have made some unsuccessful investments.

It was here that Rembrandt frequently seeks his Jewish neighbors to model for his Old Testament scenes.

Although they are by now affluent, the couple has suffered several personal setbacks; their son Rumbartus had died two months after his birth in 1635 and their daughter Cornelia had dies at just three weeks of age in 1638.

They had a second daughter, also named Cornelia, who died in 1640 after living barely over a month.

Only their fourth child, Titus, who was born in 1641, will survive into adulthood.

Saskia will die in 1642 soon after Titus's birth, probably from tuberculosis.

Rembrandt's drawings of her on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works.

During Saskia's illness, Geertje Dircx is hired as Titus' caretaker and nurse and probably also becomes Rembrandt's lover.

She will later charge Rembrandt with breach of promise and be awarded alimony of 200 guilders a year.

Rembrandt will work o have her committed for twelve years to an asylum or poorhouse (called a "bridewell") at Gouda, after learning Geertje had pawned jewelry that had once belonged to Saskia, and which Rembrandt had given her.

Kristiansand, formally founded by King Christian IV in 1641 on a sandy headland in southern Norway, has been created as a market town to encourage growth in a strategically significant area, providing a local economic base for construction of fortifications and population for defense of the area.

The layout of Kristiansand’s center, called "Kvadraturen" due to its square gridline of streets, remains essentially unchanged today.

The New Haven Colony, in an agreement with the Lenape tribe in 1641, claims that it owns all the land of what is now southern New Jersey and Philadelphia after buying the area south of Trenton along the Delaware River from the Lenape tribe.

Among the communities that will be founded are ...