1621
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Spain's Felipe III dies at Madrid March 31 at age 42 after a 23-year reign. He is succeeded by his 15-year-old son, who is crowned in April at age 16 and will reign until 1665 as Felipe IV but will leave affairs of state to his court favorite, Gaspár de Guzman, 33, to whom he gives the rank of grandee (de Guzman styles himself conde-duque de Olivares and will be Felipe's prime minister beginning in 1623). Olivares breaks the truce of 1609 with Holland and resumes war, levying new taxes as he struggles to modernize the government and centralize power in the royalty.
Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford and baron Beauchamp, dies April 6 at age 80 (approximate), having lived as quietly as possible in his final years to avoid royal displeasure.
Parliament impeaches the English lord chancellor Sir Francis Bacon on charges of having taken bribes in connection with the granting of monopoly patents that have enriched the brothers of George Villiers, 29, marquess of Buckingham and lord high admiral. Bacon confesses, but he protests that the presents he received from parties in chancery suits never affected his judgment. He is fined £40,000, banished from the court and from Parliament, and declared incapable of holding future office, but James I pardons him and remits his fine.
The House of Commons petitions James I against popery and any marriage of his son Charles to the Spanish infanta. James angrily rebukes the Commons for meddling in foreign affairs. The Commons declares in a Great Protestation December 18 "That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England, and that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the king, state, and defense of the realm . . . are proper subjects and matter of council and debate in parliament" (see 1622).
French forces capture Saint-Jean-d'Angély; Charles I de Blanchefort, 43, marquis de Créquy, is wounded in the action but next year will be promoted to marshal.
The cardinal archduke Albrecht VII dies at Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands July 13 at age 61, having ruled as sovereign prince of the Low Countries with his wife, Isabella, since 1598. The 12-year truce that has suspended hostilities between Spain and the Low Countries since 1609 comes to an end with Albrecht's death, and the conflict becomes part of the ongoing Thirty Years' War (see 1622).
Sweden's Gustav II Adolf resumes war with Poland, attacking Riga with a view to conquering Livonia (later Latvia). The besieged city holds out for just over a month before surrendering September 15. Swedish forces occupy Mitau October 3, but sickness in their ranks have taken such a toll that the king has had to call in at least 10,000 reinforcements. The two sides declare a truce, and hostilities will not resume until 1625.
An Ottoman army estimated to number 400,000 tries to take the Polish city of Chocim; some 65,000 Poles and Cossacks resist the invaders; but the Polish general Jan Karol Chodkiewicz dies at Chocim September 24 at age 61 after forcing the Turks to raise their siege.
Dutch governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen invites the English in January to join him in an expedition to conquer the three islands that constitute the Bandas from the Portuguese (see 1620); the English decline his offer, an all-Dutch fleet proceeds to the Bandas on the pretext of punishing the Bandanese for having disregarded commercial agreements, but while Coen's successful conquest enables the Dutch East India Company to vie with the English for control of the spice trade, his wholesale slaughter and enslavement of the natives draws a reprimand from directors of the company (see 1622; Amboina, 1623).
Courtier-poet William Alexander obtains a royal grant of land in northwestern Newfoundland but soon abandons that territory and receives a much larger tract north of the Sainte-Croix River in Nova Scotia, parts of which are claimed by the French (see 1625).
Plymouth colonists sign a treaty of peace with the Wampanoag chief Massasoit after negotiations by colonist Edward Winslow, 25, who arrived last year on the Mayflower. The peace will last for 40 years.
Another 35 colonists arrive at Plymouth, joining survivors of last year's Mayflower party. The Pilgrims find beach plums and soft-shell crabs to help sustain them.
The Dutch West India Company (De West-Indische Compagnie) founded June 3 by letters-patent from their "High and Mighty Lords" the Staats-General of the Netherlands "with the advice of the Prince of Orange" has a mission to carry on economic warfare against Spain and Portugal. Dutch vessels have been making inroads into rival overseas empires; the new company receives a monopoly in trade with Africa and the Americas (see 1628), it will annex much of Brazil and, later, Guiana; and it will also annex Curaçao and other West Indian islands (see 1634; 1635; 1636), defying the Spanish ban on foreign traders and, in some places, offering to finance cacao plantation owners and carry their products to market. Neither the French nor English will be able to match the service they offer, and the Dutch will for some years control the supply of cacao beans, buying it in bulk, processing it into chocolate, and exporting it in small lots to foreign buyers.
The English East India Company completes its 12th voyage to the Indies, having earned an average profit of 138 percent on each voyage. An Englishman calculates that 3,000 tons of spices bought in the Indies for £91,041 will fetch £789,168 at Aleppo, the trading center at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Spices purchased for the equivalent of $227 in the Indies sell for the equivalent of $2 million in Europe, and the potential for such enormous profit attracts many to attempt entry into the spice trade that is monopolized by the Dutch and English East India companies.
The slide rule has its beginnings in Gunter's Scale, a two-foot rule with scales of chords, tangents, and logarithmic lines invented by English mathematician-astronomer Edmund Gunter, 40, of Gresham College, London (see logarithms, 1614). Intended to solve navigational problems, it will find wide use in mathematical calculations (see Oughtred, 1622).
The Botanic Garden of Oxford opens with plants and trees selected for scientific study (see medicine [Chelsea Physic Garden], 1673).
French physicist-philosopher Pierre Gassendi, 29, describes the Northern Lights and gives them the name aurora borealis.
Astronomer and mathematician Willebrord Snell at Leyden discovers the law of light refraction (see 1617; 1624). He publishes Cycloinetria live de circuhi dimen none, but his work on light refraction will go unpublished until Christiaan Huygens mentions it in a treatise on light that will appear in 1690.
Mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot dies at London July 1 at age 61 (approximate), having corresponded with Willebrod Snell on the subject of light refraction.
The Anatomy of Melancholy by English clergyman Robert Burton, 44, is a medical treatise on the causes, symptoms, and cure of melancholy that will be widely read for its wisdom and beauty of language. Says the vicar of St. Thomas's at Oxford: "If there be a hell on earth it is to be found in a melancholy heart"; "Who cannot give good counsel? 'Tis cheap, it costs them nothing"; "Comparisons are odious"; "When thy are at Rome, thy do there as thy see done"; "Every man for himself, the Devil for all"; "A loose, plain, rude writer, I call a spade a spade"; "Aristotle said . . . melancholy men of all others are most witty."
Pope Paul V dies at his native Rome January 28 at age 68 after a 16-year reign in which he has made his Borghese family rich, forbidden England's Roman Catholics to take the oath of allegiance imposed by James I, played a key role in averting an Italian civil war, and built the chapel in Rome's Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where he is buried. Paul is succeeded February 9 by the Bologna-born Alessandro Ludovisi, 67, who will reign until 1623 as Gregory XV. Theologian Roberto Cardinal Bellarmine dies a pauper at Rome September 17 at age 78, having fought the Protestant Reformation, led opposition to the "heretical" heliocentric astronomical views of Galileo Galilei, and given all his money to help the poor, leading an ascetic life at a time when other cardinals maintained splendid courts.
Pembroke College is founded at Oxford (see Trinity, 1555). Patroness and translator Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke, dies at London September 25 at age 59.
France's Estates-Genéral establishes a national post-office department at the urging of Armand Jean du Plessie, duc de Richelieu (see 1464).
London's first newspaper begins publication September 24: Corante, or newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine, and France.
Catholic League troops of Count von Tilly sack Heidelberg's University Library.
Painting: Rape of the Sabine Women by French painter Nicolas Poussin, 27; Family Group and Rest on the Flight into Egypt and Self-Portrait by Anthony Van Dyck, now 22; Hercules by Guido Reni.
Sculpture: Rape of Prospero by Italian sculptor-painter Gian (or Giovanni) Lorenzo Bernini, 22.
Theater: A New Way to Pay Old Bills by English playwright Philip Massinger, 38, who has drawn his central situation from Thomas Middleton's play A Trick to Catch the Old One of 1607; The Witch of Edmonton by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, 36, and William Rowley, 37, at London's Phoenix Theatre.
Poet-librettist Ottavio Rinuccini dies at his native Florence March 28 at age 59.
Architect Hendrick de Keyser dies at Amsterdam May 15 at age 56.
Potatoes are planted for the first time in the German states. Peasants resist any innovation, but potatoes and rice in the next century and a half will largely replace the dried peas, lentils, and chickpeas that have been the basic starches of European diets (see 1744).
Plymouth colonists have difficulty growing wheat, barley, and peas in fields poorly cleared of stumps and rocks but are aided by a Wampanoag Indian who was kidnapped from Patuxet by slaver Thomas Hunt in 1615 and sold into slavery at Malaga, Spain. Tisquantum (or Squanto) has made his way back from Spain, presents himself at the Pilgrim settlement on Cape Cod Bay March 16, speaks some English, supplies the Pilgrims with game, and shows them how to catch eels, how to recognize wild foods, how to find groundnuts (peanuts), and how to plant maize and beans using alewives, shad, or menhaden as fertilizer, a European idea that he has picked up either from French colonists in Maine and Canada or from English colonists in Newfoundland who have acquired the knowledge from the French. Tisquantum's people rely on gardening for at least half their food supply, obtaining the rest from deer and bear venison, nuts, berries, opossum, turtle meat, shellfish, even skunk. Their maize is mostly low-growing flint corn with eight-rowed ears of white kernels. Maize harvested by the Pilgrims is adequate in the fall but their wheat, barley, and pea crops all fail; they will soon plant hardier strains of wheat and—more extensively—rye.
Jamestown colonists build the first American grist mill to produce flour from their wheat. It is the first wheat grown successfully in the New World (see Columbus, 1494), but since the Virginia colonists lack farming tools and knowledge their wheat crops will be of only small significance for some time to come.
Native Americans encountered by the English colonists boil or roast young ears of corn; use it in stews that may contain also meat, roots, beans, wild peas, squashes, mulberries, and other foods; dry it to make a powder that is formed into cakes called pones that are boiled and then baked on hot stones; boil coarser parts of the grain for hours to make pottages whose name is translated by the colonists as hominy; parch the kernels and eat them whole; use it to make corn flour for no-cake that keeps well and is widely used by colonists as well as Indians; and boil it with beans or other foods to make succotash. The colonists adopt the words hominy, no-cake, pone, samp, succotash, and suppawn from the Indians.
New England's Pilgrim colonists entertain 92 Indian guests, including Chief Massasoit, at a Thanksgiving breakfast-dinner, actually an autumn observance of what in England and Europe has been known for ages as a Harvest Home. Of the original 102 people who arrived aboard the Mayflower in December of last year only 56 have survived. Since women are excluded, the colonists who sit down with their guests number only about 30, only one of the guests speaks any English, none of the colonists speaks Wampanoag, and communication is therefore limited. The feast is held some time between September 12 and November 9, most probably soon after the first of October. The only contemporary account is in a letter written December 12 by 26-year-old Edward Winslow, who records that the food includes ducks, geese, and just possibly some wild turkeys shot by the colonists, plus venison from five deer supplied by the guests. The feast continues by some accounts for 3 days and may also include boiled cod, clams, eels, leeks, watercress, wheat and corn breads, wild plums, Jerusalem artichokes, a pudding made of cornmeal and dried whortleberries, a stewed pumpkin, a pudding made from hominy, and homemade wine. Definitely not on the menu are cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, corn on the cob, pumpkin pie, or popcorn. The Pilgrims have cranberries but no sugar; sweet corn will not be discovered for more than 150 years, and the story about the Wampanoag introducing their hosts to popcorn will turn out to be a myth (see 1863). The colonists' everyday fare runs to English puddings, made mostly from flour that is steamed in molds suspended in kettles over hearthfires. (Boston brown bread—produced from a mixture of rye and whole-wheat flour, cornmeal, and molasses—will come from steamed pudding.)
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