names, indicate that he is descended from the presenter of the medieval Feast of Fools. Captain Nathaniel Courthope reaches the nutmeg-rich island of Run in the Moluccas, to defend it against the Dutch East India Company. A contract with the inhabitants, accepting James I of England as their sovereign, makes it part of the English colonial empire. December – In the Middle East, traveller Pietro Della Valle marries Jowaya, daughter of a Nestorian Christian father and an Armenian mother, in Baghdad. The couple then sets off (1617) to find the Shah in Isfahan. Date unknown Abbas I's Kakhetian and Kartlian campaigns occur as progressive combats. Abbas I of Persia captures Tbilisi following a conflict with the Georgian soldiers and the general populace. After the capture of Tbilisi, Abbas I confronts an Ottoman army. The battle takes place near Lake Gökçe, and results in a Safavid victory. Oorsprong en voortgang der Nederlandtscher beroerten (Origin and progress of the disturbances in the Netherlands), by Johannes Gysius, is published. The Collegium Musicum is founded in Prague. Physician Aleixo de Abreu is granted a pension of 16,000 reis, for services to the crown in Angola and Brazil, by Philip III of Spain, who also appoints him physician of his chamber. Ngawang Namgyal arrives in Bhutan, having escaped Tibet. The Swiss Guard is appointed part of the household guard of King Louis XIII of France. Week-long festivities in honor of the Prince of Urbano, of the Barberini family, occur in Florence, Italy. Richard Steel and John Crowther complete their journey from Ajmeer in the Mughal Empire to Ispahan in Persia. Captain John Smith publishes his book A description of New England in London. Smith relates one voyage to the coast of Massachusetts and Maine, in 1614, and an attempted voyage in 1615, when he was captured by French pirates and detained for several months before escaping. The New England Indian smallpox or leptospirosis epidemic of 1616–19 begins to depopulate the region, killing an estimated 90% of the coastal native peoples. A slave ship carries smallpox from the Kingdom of Kongo to Salvador, Brazil. In England, louse-borne epidemic typhus ravages the poor and crowded. A fatal disease of cattle, probably rinderpest, spreads through the Italian provinces of Padua, Udine, Treviso and Vicenza, introduced most likely from Dalmatia or Hungary. Great numbers of cattle die in Italy, as they had in previous years (1559, 1562, 1566, 1590,