1622
Powhatan Attack on Virginia
Opechancanough, brother of the dead Powhatan chief, coordinated a dawn assault on English settlements up and down the James River that killed nearly a third of the Virginia colony in a single morning. The war that followed ended any pretense of Anglo-Powhatan coexistence. The tobacco frontier advanced anyway, expanding over the graves of the fallen into lands the Powhatan had tended for generations.
Propaganda Fide Founded
Pope Gregory XV established the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, a Vatican department dedicated to coordinating Catholic missionary efforts from China to Peru. For the next four centuries it would train polyglot priests, send them to the ends of the earth, and argue bitterly with colonial powers over whether conversion required cultural submission or merely spiritual assent.
Persia Recaptures Hormuz
Shah Abbas of Persia, aided by an English East India Company fleet, besieged and took the Portuguese island-fortress of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Portuguese domination of the Gulf, begun a century earlier by Afonso de Albuquerque, was finished. Persian trade flowed through the new port of Bandar Abbas.
Siege of Bergen-op-Zoom
Spanish forces under Ambrogio Spinola besieged the Dutch fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom and were, after three months, forced to withdraw by Maurice of Nassau's relief. Dutch trench warfare, with elaborate bastions and star forts, was becoming the laboratory of modern military engineering. Every European prince sent observers, and the lessons learned would reshape fortress design across the continent.