China. A series of factors led to the fall of the Ming Dynasty: political sectarianism, a severe fiscal crisis, the decline in the purchasing power of silver, famine, epidemics, rebellions, and foreign invasions.

Thanks to his solemn abjuration, Galileo’s life sentence was commuted to house arrest in Siena under the watchful eye of Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini, a former student of Galileo. Piccolomini allowed Galileo to write and publish, even encouraging him. Galileo thus worked on his work “Dialogues on Two New Sciences.”

Galileo forced to recant his ideas before the Inquisition (“…and yet it moves…”). The sentence of the Holy Office tribunal reads: “You, Galileo […] have made yourself […] vehemently suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed a false doctrine contrary to the Holy Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the Earth and does not move from East to West, and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world…”

India. Mumtaz Mahal (“The Palace’s Choice,” or the harem’s favorite) dies in agony during the throes of her fourteenth pregnancy. At her bedside is her husband, Shah Jahan, the fifth emperor of the Mughal dynasty, distant descendants of the Mongol hordes. He promises to build her a funerary mausoleum with 12,000 tons of stone and marble, with white marble (previously considered heresy in Islamic tradition, a color reserved for the tombs of saints), and precious and rare stones embedded in the walls. This is the Tak Mahal. With 100 million subjects in the 17th century, India is by far the largest and most influential Islamic nation in the world. An open and tolerant version of Islam, coexisting with Hinduism, Christianity, and other religions.

Magdeburg, Thirty Years’ War. The Catholic League captures the Lutheran city after a long siege. The final assault comes from six directions simultaneously. Twenty thousand Magdeburgians are captured and massacred.

Magdeburg, Thirty Years’ War. The Catholic League lays siege to the Lutheran city.

English colonists found Boston, New England

Modena. The Collegio dei Nobili, later known as the Collegio San Carlo, is built, with its famous Portico del Collegio.

Jubilee celebrated by Urban VIII

The Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora da Guia runs aground on rocks in the South China Sea. It had misjudged its longitude after departing the port of Manila, bound for Macau. On board was the Jesuit Adriano de las Cortes. They were immediately spotted by local Chinese fishermen. The Chinese called the foreigners Aoyi, the Japanese Wokou (dwarf pirates), the terrifying Dutch Hongmao (red hair), and the terrifying black slaves Heigui (black ghosts). The black slaves were truly something completely different from anything the Chinese had ever seen. In an official description to the emperor, it was said that these individuals, even when they washed, remained black… Then the Chinese soldiers arrived. One opened fire with his arquebus, but the shot was so weak that it was absorbed by a Portuguese man’s clothing. Another Portuguese, Francesco, was stabbed and then beheaded. Shortly thereafter, the Macanese Miguel Xuarez was impaled by a spear. They ordered the others to hand over their treasures. Faced with the refusal of two Indians, one, Ismael, a Muslim, was beheaded immediately, and the other, Budo, shortly thereafter. The owner Goncalo Ferreira’s slave, named Masmamuth Ganpti, reached land unharmed, but had his hands and feet amputated and then beheaded, perhaps due to a misunderstanding. On board were 91 Portuguese and dozens of others from the Canary Islands to Goa, including 69 Japanese (used to trade with the Chinese and to infiltrate the Chinese interior), 34 Goan Muslims, and also Jews, Moors, Africans, and Filipinos. The Portuguese ships were not Portuguese passengers at all, but they contained an incredible microcosm of cultures from around the world. The Chinese describe Spaniards (any Westerner was often referred to as a Spaniard) as “having long bodies, high noses, cat-like eyes, large mouths, curly hair, and red whiskers. They love to do business, and when they do so, they raise several fingers of their hands in the air… They distinguish between the Great West (Europe) and the Little West (India). They are impressed by blacks and their obedience to their masters and their ability as swimmers, but also by their cost.

Blaise Pascal was born in Auvergne (southern-central France). He invented a rudimentary mechanical calculator and inspired experiments that demonstrated the empirical possibility of a vacuum.

Shortly after the death of Scottish Baron John Napper (Napper, Lord of Markinston, eighth Lord of Markinston), Henry Briggs published Logarithmorum Chilias Prima, a series of tables containing the logarithms of the integers from 1 to 1,000, to 14 decimal places. In 1624, he published the base-10 logarithms of the integers from 1 to 20,000 and from 90,000 to 1,000,000. Years later, other scholars filled in the gaps.

Dutchman Willem Corneliusz Schouten sailed around the world with his crew. He died in 1625 off the coast of Madagascar.

The first coffee seeds manage to reach Venice: for the first time, coffee, jealously guarded by the Arabs, arrives in Europe.

Scottish Baron John Napier is considered by locals to be a sorcerer who practiced dark arts. Dressed in black, with a jet-black rooster perched on his shoulder (a familiar), he prowled furtively around his castle, muttering what his apocalyptic algebra predicted: the Last Judgement between 1688 and 1700. But beyond this, Napier also discovered the magic of the logarithmic function and Napier’s Number. He translated the complex problem of multiplying two large numbers into the simpler one of adding their logarithms. A discovery that would save man-centuries of calculations over the next three centuries. Napier was also called Napper, lord of Markinston, eighth Lord of Markinston.