Mr. Eaton, I pray you buy for me a pot of the best sort of chaw in Meaco, 2 Fairebowes and Arrowes, some half a dozen of Meaco guilt boxes square for to put in to bark and whatsoever they cost you I will be alsoe willing accountable for them.
Vale, yors. R. W.
--Letter of June 27, 1615 from Richard Wickham, the English East India Company's factor at Hirado in Japan, to the company's agent in Macao, which contains the first mention in English of tea.
In the year AD 1615...
- In the last great samurai battle, the Siege of Osaka Castle ends in victory for forces loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate, who capture Osaka Castle from forces loyal to Toyotomi Hideyori, ending the last significant threat to Tokugawa rule and initiating 250 years of peace in Japan.
- Sir Thomas Roe arrives in India as the first British ambassador to the Mughal court.
- An embassy from Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate, led by samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga, meets with Pope Paul V in Rome.
- Persian troops led by Shah-Abbas sack the David Gareja monastery complex in Georgia, slaughtering its monks and setting fire to its collection of manuscripts and religious art.
- In the Spánverjavígin or "Slaying of the Spaniards," Icelanders massacre and mutilate the bodies of 31 Spanish Basque whalers who had been shipwrecked on Iceland.
- In England the Thomas Overbury Scandal breaks when the murder of Thomas Overbury is uncovered, leading to a sensational trial would last into 1616.
- French explorer Samuel de Champlain discovers Lake Huron on his seventh voyage to the New World.
- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra completes his novel Don Quixote.
- George Ruggle stages his highly influential academic play Ignoramus, in which the title character, a buffoonish lawyer, is named "Ignoramus" after an obscure Latin legal term. This marks the introduction of the word "ignoramus" into the English language to denote a stupid or ignorant person.
These people were born in 1615...
These people died in 1615...
1614 - 1615 - 1616
17th century
How they were made