1641
Dutch Capture Malacca
After a seven-month siege, Dutch VOC forces stormed the Portuguese fortress of Malacca, ending a century of Portuguese control over the straits between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. The Dutch now commanded the choke point of Indian Ocean trade and added another jewel to their spice empire, though the fortress they inherited was badly damaged and the city never fully recovered.
Irish Rebellion
Irish Catholics, fearing a Puritan-led English parliament, rose across Ulster and drove Protestant settlers from their farms. Atrocities were committed on both sides; English propaganda magnified them into massacres that hardened Puritan resolve. The rebellion became a stumbling block in the slide toward English civil war and gave Cromwell the justification for his later devastating campaign.
Dutch Take Angola
A Dutch West India Company fleet seized the Portuguese slaving port of Luanda and, briefly, the entire colony of Angola. The interruption of Portuguese slave supplies helped collapse the sugar economy of Brazil. Seven years later, Salvador Correia da Sa would retake Luanda for Portugal, with Brazilian slave labor lining up on the docks.
Arauco War Continues in Chile
The Mapuche of southern Chile, having fought Spanish expansion for nearly a century, achieved de facto independence below the Biobio River through the Treaty of Quilin. They had resisted one of the longest colonial frontier wars in the Americas and kept their lands and languages for another two centuries, an achievement unmatched by any other indigenous nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Grand Remonstrance
The Long Parliament passed by a narrow margin a long list of grievances against Charles I and a demand for the removal of his ministers. The Grand Remonstrance was England's declaration that the relationship between king and parliament had fundamentally changed. Royalist and parliamentarian parties now had distinct platforms, and the country was dividing into two armed camps.