Ev

Adam Smith predicts that America and other new continents will be the new models of a mercantilist world

French Empire: extends to Louisiana, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, all of Northwest Africa, Madagascar, Southeast India, Siam

British Empire: the largest in the world (in area and population): India, Pakistan, Yemen, Malaysia, Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, the Middle East, North America, the Caribbean, Bermuda, the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Horn of Africa, South-East Africa, islands in the Pacific, Atlantic

With the Treaty of Karlowitz, Venice retained everything Francesco Morosini had conquered in the Ionian Sea and Morea, and even more. A fifteen-year period of peace followed for Venice.

Vladimir Atlasov discovers the Kamchatka Peninsula

James II, King of England, after being exiled to France, attempts again, for the third time in a few years, to return to England with the support of the French fleet, but an unexpected and terrible storm completely routs the French fleet. On May 5th,

William Kidd, a wealthy New York businessman, is hired by the King of England to fight the pirates threatening the Red Sea trade routes; however, he soon becomes a pirate himself under the name of Captain Kidd.

The Bank of England begins officially issuing paper money. It is the first in Europe. But paper money had already been invented in Asia several centuries earlier.

Isaac Newton suffers another nervous breakdown and retires from scientific research

James II, King of England, after being exiled to France, attempts to return to England with the support of the French fleet, but is defeated at La Hougue. The French general Tourville, with 44 ships, 21,000 sailors, and 3,000 cannons, is defeated by Edward Russell

Indonesia. The Dutch bring coffee cultivation to Java.

Peter I the Great becomes Tsar of Russia, his reign lasts until 1725

James II, King of England, after being exiled in France, landed in Catholic Ireland, from where he hoped to reach London leading his supporters, who took the name Jacobites. Despite having gathered around him a large army, largely financed by his French cousin Louis XIV,

North America (the future United States). The Kunders family (later Cunreds, then Cunards, and finally Conrads) has German ancestry. They founded Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1689. They received 500 acres of virgin land from William Penn himself. Pete Conrad, the third man on the moon, with

England. King James I is deposed thanks to a Dutch coup d’état, carried out at the invitation of the British Parliament itself.

William of Orange landed at Tobay, Devonshire, England, at the head of a fleet of 600 ships. King James confronted him with an army of 25,000 soldiers, and his wife Mary Beatrice remained in London and temporarily assumed the regency.

England. Maria Beatrice d’Este gives birth to a son: Giacomo Francesco Edoardo, Prince of Wales. After having previously lost several children, the doctors consulted at length and decided to feed the baby only a porridge made from boiled milk. The poor child, who was strong

The Dutch began to bring opium from India to Southeast Asia, mainly for military purposes, namely to keep soldiers’ morale high.

London. Edward Lloyd opens Lloyd’s Café. He is the owner of the Lloyd’s insurance group: his activities of distributing news and gathering information are intertwined with his bar.

Cambridge: Isaac Newton: “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”: proof of Kepler’s three laws and Newton’s three laws. The first edition of the Principia was printed in only 500 copies. It is a 550-page treatise in three volumes, written in just 18 months, but the result of

Battle of Nagyharsany or Second Mohacs. The Allies retake Mohacs and the Ottomans flee.

The Venetian Francesco Morosini, having reconquered everything Venice had lost in the Cretan War in the Ionian Sea and Morea, and more, is attacking Athens. One of his gunners lodges a shell in the roof of the Parthenon, detonating the enormous ammunition stockpiles the Turks

Paris. Procope, one of the city’s first cafés, opens in Saint-Germain. It was opened by Sicilian Francesco Procopio Cutò.

Buda. The Allied army breaks through the Ottoman defenses and enters the city. Governor Pasha dies bravely in the breach where he valiantly defends himself, scimitar in hand. The imperials carry out the most terrible massacre, despite the explicit orders of Lorraine and the Elector

Three thousand Turks, who were supposed to be providing relief to the besieged in Buda, were massacred in the surrounding countryside by Lorraine’s soldiers. They were janissaries and elite men.

Thursday, April 23, English (not Gregorian) calendar. Westminster Abbey. James II, Duke of York, and Maria Beatrice d’Este are crowned. Maria Beatrice, originally from the Duchy of Modena, wears a sumptuous purple and gold velvet cloak trimmed with ermine, lined with white satin, with a

Charles II, King of England, while having his wig trimmed by his barber, rolls his eyes, flails his arms, and leans back in his chair. He suffers a stroke. He is blood-stained (which, as a layman, I’d say doesn’t help), and dies on February 16,

Newton decides to check the validity of Kepler’s third law using his mathematical methods: the mathematics matched perfectly

At a discussion at the Royal Society, Robert Hooke claims to have found proof that gravity is a force emanating from the Sun, but refuses to reveal it to Edmond Halley. Halley, furious, rushes to Isaac Newton and poses the problem: “What would be the

The siege of Ottoman Buda is lifted.

Buda. The Christian siege of the Ottoman city has been going on for several weeks without success. Elector Maximilian Emanuel, having just dismounted from his horse, moves to greet some commanders. His groom is holding onto the horse’s reins when a cannon shot hits the

Central Europe. Siege of Visegrad: Lorraine warns the besieged Ottomans. Those who surrender will be spared. The rest will all be impaled. They surrender. And the road to Buda is clear.

Central Europe. Lorena positions her guns in front of Visegrad and begins the bombardment.

The King of Poland, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold, and the Doge of Venice sign an agreement to wage war on the Ottomans. Pope Innocent XI is behind it.

Legend, probably half true, holds that part of the Allies’ enormous loot after the Ottomans hastily abandoned their positions during the siege of Vienna included sacks full of small, dark beans: coffee beans. Unknown to the West, they gave rise to the first coffeehouses in

Vienna. The Ottoman siege exasperates the citizens: in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, even today, a graffiti in German can be read: “Muhammad, you bastard, go home!”; the Turkish cannons will be melted down to make the cathedral’s new bell, decorated with the skulls of six Turkish

Vienna. 10:00 PM. Several Allied contingents have already entered the city, greeted by cheering crowds. But the Saxons, Poles, and other knights spend the night outside in case the enemy returns to attack. But by 10:00 PM, the camp is completely in Allied hands. Victory

Vienna. 10:00 a.m. The Allied advance is halted by insistent Ottoman artillery fire. From the diary of the Ottoman Master of Ceremonies: “A huge army of Giour [Christians] is advancing towards our camp. It looks like a flood of black pitch pouring down the slope,

Vienna. The Ottoman war council in the Grand Vizier’s tent decides that the cavalry and the troops lounging in the heat will face the Allied contingents, while the siege continues as before.

Vienna. The Habsburg forces are now complete and begin to move towards the Ottoman besiegers.

Vienna. In the plain north of Vienna, the Polish contingent finally appears on the horizon. Charles of Lorraine rides at the head of 3,000 light cavalry, followed by 2,000 hussars (hussars), the legendary noble winged knights, followed by 10,000 other cavalry and all the infantry.

Vienna. The Ottoman lines reach the palisade. Turkish engineers begin slow but steady excavation work to place mines beneath them. They then change tactics and build small earthen hills that rise 5 meters above the palisade.

Vienna. Word spreads that a sixteen-year-old boy dressed in women’s clothing attempted to set fire to the arsenal, overloaded with ammunition and gunpowder. The boy suffers a terrible death. He is lynched by an enraged mob, leaving only his dismembered torso, as if mauled by

Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa crosses the Darda River on a pontoon bridge and proceeds with his immense army, reinforced by countless contingents from every corner of the Ottoman Empire, towards Vienna.

Dutch linen trader Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovers bacteria through direct observation through his microscope (x275)

After René La Salle’s voyage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta and the annexation of the entire area, naming it Louisiana in honor of the King of France, an ungrateful Louis XIV wrote, “I am convinced that Sieur de La Salle’s discovery is

Inauguration of the Studio San Carlo, which three years later would become the University of Modena.

Istanbul. The sultan’s gardeners dig a trench next to the Imperial Gate of Topkapi Palace. At regular intervals, they plant seven long crimson poles, each as thick as a man’s arm, topped with a richly carved and gilded piece with black horsetails. These are the

The Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini publishes his observations of Halley’s Comet, putting forward the revolutionary hypothesis that the comet is the same one observed by Tycho Brahe in 1577.

Jacob Bernoulli, observing a comet, decided to dedicate his life to mathematics rather than the Church. It was the beginning of a dynasty of mathematicians that would last 150 years and produce eight renowned mathematicians, three of whom are among the most famous of all

Bubonic plague devastates Vienna: 76,000 dead. It originates from the marshy lands of the Ottoman Empire in the east.

Robert Hooke: in “De poentia restitutiva or of a spring” he discovers that the deformation of a material allows it to exert a reaction force (“ut tensio, sic vis”, as much as the deformation as much as the force)

Gottfried Leibniz introduces binary arithmetic

Pierre de Fermat in De Tangentibus Linearum Curvarum illustrates a method for drawing straight lines tangent to any curved line.

England. Maria Beatrice d’Este and James Stuart, Duke of York, leave England just before the opening of Parliament, which is hostile to the Catholic regency. They then set out for Brussels, arriving on March 27th with three ships of the Prince of Orange. In May,

Isaac Newton suffers a severe nervous breakdown

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza dies of tuberculosis, a disease caused by inhaling glass dust from his work grinding lenses. That same year, several of his works are published pseudonymously, only to be banned by the Dutch government within twelve months. He argues that the human

Jubilee celebrated by Innocent X

Netherlands. The painter Johannes Vermeer dies in Delft, where he spent his entire life, producing several dozen works but failing to sell a single one. His wife will sell some of them after his death to pay off debts, including one to the baker.

Modena. Maria Beatrice d’Este married James Stuart, represented by proxy from Peterborough. On October 5, she left Modena with her mother, Laura Martinozzi, and an entourage of about sixty people, and—passing through Voghera, Mont Cenis, Chambéry, and Lyon—arrived in Paris on November 2, where she

Modena. The Este court of Modena receives a letter addressed to the young Maria Beatrice from Pope Clement X, urging her to accept the marriage proposal of James Stuart, Duke of York, in England (obviously to establish a Catholic king and queen in England). The

John Wallis proposed thinking of the complex number x + iy as a point on a plane. The idea was ignored by almost everyone, or worse, harshly criticized. It was taken up and expanded upon by Gauss in 1811.

Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovers Iapetus, a satellite of Saturn.

Gian Domenico Cassini, in Paris, discovers the rotation of Mars, Jupiter and 4 satellites of Saturn and the separation in Saturn’s rings

Isaac Barrow leaves his Lucasian Chair at Cambridge to Isaac Newton

Cretan War. Francesco Morosini concludes the agreement for the surrender of Candia to the Turks. He allows Venice to withdraw with honors and maintain small naval bases of commercial importance in Crete, as well as retaining Tine and Cerigo in the Aegean, as well as

The Peace of Breda ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War (but there would be two more). The English offered to return New Amsterdam (New York) to regain possession of the Indonesian islands of Banda, the Moluccas, and Ambon. The Netherlands refused and obtained complete control of

London. John Locke is working on his major philosophical work: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It won’t be published until 1690, however. It consists of four books. He argues that our minds have no innate principles, whether speculative or practical: all our ideas derive from

Isaac Newton invents (at the same time as Leibniz) the Infinitesimal Calculus: integration and derivation (differentiation)

Fermat dies after signing his last arrest warrant only three days earlier

Black Death (bubonic plague or Great Plague) in London: it was the worst epidemic of the century; sneezing was a warning sign and so people responded “God bless you” to a sneeze, as a sort of last rites.

Second Anglo-Dutch War. Under the command of Michiel De Ruyter, the Dutch inflict a severe defeat on the English in the Four Days’ Battle, the longest naval battle ever fought. He then attacks the English right in their refuge: the Thames Estuary. In a daring

The Royal Society’s Correspondence evolves into the Philosophical Transaction, the modern scientific journal. This marks the birth of the oldest English-language scientific periodical.

Ottoman disaster on the Raab River. Montecuccoli’s outnumbered cuirassiers and his deadly imperial field artillery manage to drive the Ottoman army back, once again on the road to Vienna. But the coalition assembled by Emperor Leopold, including the Rhineland States of the Holy Roman Empire,

Henry Lucas, a member of the British Parliament, with a royal warrant from King Charles, established a new chair of mathematics whose holder would be designated Lucasian Professor; the first holder would be Barrow, the second Newton, at the end of the 20th century. Hawking

This time, the Ottoman advance toward Vienna was halted by the stubborn defense of a small Habsburg fortress: Neuhausel (now Nove Zamky) on the Nitra River, which flows into the Danube. The siege dragged on for weeks, and by the time the city was taken,

Shortly after Blaise Pascal’s death, a servant noticed a small bulge in the pocket of his jacket. He discovered a sewn lining containing sheets of paper and parchment with phrases dated November 23, 1654. Pascal described how, in a trance, God appeared to him, freeing

Robert Boyle publishes “The Sceptical Chymist” which draws a clear and definitive distinction between chemistry and alchemy

England, General Monk restores Parliament

Christian Huygens builds the first pendulum clock to be used on a ship to estimate longitude; he calls it Horologium