1628

1621 1622 1623 1624 1625 1626 1627 1628 1629 1630

political events

George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, arrives at Portsmouth August 17 to lead another expedition for the relief of La Rochelle, center of France's Huguenot power (see 1627). He is stabbed to death at Portsmouth August 23 at age 23 by discontented naval subaltern John Felton, who believes that he is defending principles asserted in the House of Commons, and Londoners celebrate at news of Buckingham's assassination (his infant son and namesake will be brought up with the children of Charles I). La Rochelle surrenders October 28 after a 14-month siege that three English fleets have not been able to lift, and the Huguenots cease to be an armed political power in France.

The Austrian duke Wallenstein obtains the duchy of Mecklenburg. He assumes the title admiral of the Baltic, but suffers his first reverse when his siege of Stralsund is raised.

Swedish forces compel Polish field commander Stanislaw Koniecpolski to withdraw from his strongholds in Prussia (see 1627; 1629).

Dutch forces occupy Java and the Moluccas.

commerce

Chinese peasants in Shenxi (Shensi) Province revolt under the leadership of a 22-year-old firebrand who will become known as the Yellow Tiger. Ming dynasty tax collectors have continued to make their rounds despite a ruinous famine that has left most farmers unable to pay, but Zhang Xianzhong (Chang Hsien-chung) gathers a guerrilla force that will raid villages for the next 16 years, plundering northern China as their numbers grow, and although they will be bought off on occasion and meet with defeat at the hands of government troops, they will retreat into the hills, regroup, and resume their hit-and-run raids, putting hundreds of thousands (and perhaps millions) of people to death (see 1644).

English patriots who include Sir John Eliot and John Pym denounce the arbitrary taxation imposed by Charles I and force a Petition of Right upon him (see 1627; 1629).

Puritans obtain a patent for the Massachusetts Bay colony with help from Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, and Salem is founded on Massachusetts Bay by some 50 Puritan colonists; they arrive in September with John Endecott, 39, who with five other Englishmen has bought a patent to the territory from the Plymouth Council in England and will serve as first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony until 1630 (see exploration, colonization [Cambridge Agreement], 1629).

The Dutch West India Company founded in 1621 declares a 50 percent dividend after its freebooting admiral Piet Heyn surrounds and captures a Spanish silver fleet August 8 off the Cuban coast, seizing at least 8 million guilders of silver (see politics [Heyn], 1627). The 4 million ducats (12 million gulden) that he takes will provide the wherewithal for the Dutch Republic to pursue its struggle for control of the Spanish Lowlands. Heyn scores another triumph in September at Cuba's Matanzas Bay by capturing part of a Spanish fleet carrying the annual shipment of gold, silver, and other metals from the mines of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru.

The London Company sends ships directly to the Persian Gulf, antagonizing the Levant Company.

energy

English engineer Edward Somerset invents a crude steam engine (see Heron of Alexandria, 76; Savery, 1698).

medicine

Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood (Exercitatio de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis) by English physician William Harvey, 50, is published at Frankfurt-am-Main. Harvey's 75-page treatise is based on his Lumleian lecture of 1616; it establishes that the human heart is muscular despite earlier theories to the contrary, and that its regular mechanical contractions drive the blood out into the blood vessels. Harvey acknowledges the 1559 work of Renaldo Columbus, who first used the term "circulation," and he destroys the old idea that the liver converts food into blood, but Harvey does not offer a satisfactory new explanation for the creation of blood. Harvey follows Galileo Galilei's principle of measuring what can be measured and shows that the heart contains two ounces of blood and, at 65 heartbeats per minute, that it pumps 10 pounds of blood out into the body in less than 1 minute, an amount greater by far than can be sustained by production from food consumed. But while eminent physicians and philosophers from Denmark, England, France, and the German states rally to Harvey's thesis, it is roundly attacked by Scottish physician James Primrose and by the Paris Faculty of Medicine, whose dean Guy Patin calls Harvey's theory "paradoxical, useless, false, impossible, absurd, and harmful." Primrose, Patin, and other skeptics say that if the heart were a powerful pump as Harvey claims then surely its action would be audible.

Bubonic plague kills half the population of Lyons. The Black Death will kill a million in the northern Italian states in the next 2 years (see 1630).

art

Painting: The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus by Nicolas Poussin; The Siege of Breda by French painter-engraver-etcher Jacques Callot, 36; Charles I and Henrietta Maria with the Liberal Arts by Gerrit van Honthurst; Portrait of Anna Wake, Wife of Peter Stevens by Anthony Van Dyck.

theater, film

Masque: Britannia's Honour by Thomas Dekker 10/29 at London.

Theater: The Lover's Melancholy by John Ford 11/24 at London's Blackfriars Theatre, with the King's Men; The Witty Fair One by James Shirley at London's Phoenix Theatre.

music

Composer-organist John Bull dies at Antwerp March 12 at age 65 (approximate).

nutrition

Italian professor of medicine Johannes Sala writes in De Alimentas, "Far the greater part of mankind live on bread alone, and of the rest of our race, who have other things, it is the settled practice to eat two or three times as much bread as anything else." Standards of living are generally measured by the amount of meat and fish consumed.

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