To Father John Gerard, the King’s words…

Dutch traders, under Cornelius Specx, receive King Naresuan’s permission to open a trading post in Ayutthaya in 1604.

Chodkiewicz twice defeats the Swedish generals in 1604 at Biały Kamień and near Weissenstein (Paide) (often winning against superior odds, as at Weissenstein, where he has only twenty-three hundred men and defeats a six thousand-man Swedish force; Chodkiewicz will write in his memoirs that this was a decisive battle and one of his greatest victories, with Polish-Lithuanian losses at eighty-one dead, one hundred wounded and Swedish losses approaching half of their army).

For his valor, Chodkiewicz is rewarded by the king with the grand hetman buława of Lithuania.

The Austrians have again failed to capture Buda during 1602-04 and the Turks have failed to take Pest.

Religious antagonism has played an important part in the current long war between the German empire and the Turks.

Imperial troops have entered Transylvania, and their commander, Giörgio Basta, has behaved there (and in northern Hungary) with such insane cruelty toward the Hungarian Protestants, also illegally expropriating their estates, that the Transylvanian general Stephen Bocskay, formerly a Habsburg supporter, revolts.

The Persians in 1604 recapture Erivan (Yerevan), ...

...Shirvan, and ...

...Kars.

Yerevan finally falls in June 1604 and with it the Ottomans lose the loyalty of most Armenians, Georgians and other Caucasians.

But Abbas is unsure how the new sultan, Ahmed I, will respond and withdraws from the region using scorched earth tactics.

Iran has meanwhile started to regain what had earlier been lost to the Ottomans.

Abbas had recently undertaken a major reform of his army through the English gentleman of fortune Robert Shirley and the shah's favorite ghulam and chancellor Allahverdi Khan and thus had opened in 1603, with the first Safavid pitched victory won in 1604.

This forces the Ottomans to return the territory they have seized from Persia, including Baghdad.

The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, allegedly negotiates an opium monopoly for northern India with Humayun's son and successor, Akbar, who relies upon opium land as a significant source of revenue.

Although cultivation covers the entire Mughal empire, ...