1631
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Contents: political eventshuman rights, social justice commerce transportation science religion literature art theater, film nutrition food and drink population |
Cardinal Richelieu takes France into the war against the Hapsburgs. The Treaty of Barwalde signed January 13 pledges French subsidies to Sweden's Gustav II Adolf and Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimar.
Magdeburg falls to the forces of graf von Tilly May 20. The German cavalry general Gottfried Heinrich, graf von Pappenheim, 37, takes the city by storm and sacks it, massacring the citizenry; fires break out at scattered locations simultaneously, and the entire city burns with the exception of the cathedral as the Catholic League soldiery commits atrocities.
The Battle of Breitenfeld outside Leipzig September 17 breaks the strength of revived Catholicism in central Europe. Having burned Halle, Eisleben, Merseburg, and other cities, graf von Tilly has occupied Leipzig September 15, but the elector of Saxony Johann George I has formed an alliance with Sweden's Gustav II Adolf, and an army of Swedish Lutherans has crossed the Elbe at Wittenberg to challenge Tilly. The 28-year-old Swedish artillery commander Lennart, count Torstensson, supports the Protestant cavalry, whose right wing is under the command of Swedish soldier Johan Banér (or Banier), 35, and withstands 7 hours of imperial cavalry charges. Tilly's initial attack routs the Saxons on the Swedes' left flank, but General Gustav Karlsson Horn commands the Swedish forces there and shifts his troops to form a new front, the first time this has been done in the heat of battle since ancient times. Gustav Adolf has trained his troops to fire and reload with greater speed than anything heretofore seen, and this superiority gives the Protestant army an edge that carries the day. The king personally leads a furious counterattack around Tilly's left and recaptures the Saxon guns lost earlier as well as the imperial artillery. The imperial army breaks ranks and flees; a Saxon-Swedish army of 40,000 defeats Tilly's army of equal size, inflicting more than 7,000 casualties, killed or wounded, and taking a similar number of prisoners (the Swedes lose 1,500, the Saxons 3,000). Seriously wounded, Tilly pulls back westward across the Weser with only a few thousand men, Gustav Adolf enters Leipzig the next day, and his victory allows him a free hand in Bohemia and the valley of the Main (see 1632).
Amsterdam recalls Peter Minuit from Nieuw Amsterdam for granting undue privileges to patroons (landowners) and concentrating economic and political power in the hands of an elite few (see 1626). Minuit will enter the service of Sweden (see 1638).
Cautio criminalis by German Jesuit poet Friedrich von Spee, 40, is published anonymously. Von Spee has often ministered to condemned witches, and he attacks the mentality behind witch-hunts and the legal use of torture to extract confessions (see Wier, 1563; Loudon, 1634; Salem, 1692).
Antwerp merchants open an exchange to trade in commodities and company shares.
Shipyards start up at Boston and other Massachusetts Bay colony seaports as cheap American lumber makes an American-built ship only half as expensive as one built in England. The 30-ton sloop Blessing of the Bay is launched in August for Governon John Winthrop.
The vernier scale for making accurate measurements of linear or angular magnitudes for navigation is described by French mathematician Pierre Vernier, 51, in Construction, Usage et Propriéties du Quadrant Nouveau de Mathématiques (see Nunes, 1536; Greenwich observatory, 1676).
Physicist Pierre Gassendi makes the first observations of the transit of the planet Mercury.
Pope Urban VIII issues a decree dissolving Mary Ward's Institute of Women but orders Ward's release when he learns that she has been imprisoned by order of the Church in a small, airless German prison cell (see 1630). She will live in Rome until her return to England in 1639 (see 1642).
Nonfiction: The English Gentlewoman by Richard Brathwaite.
Poet John Donne dies at London March 31 at age 58; Michael Drayton dies at London December 23 at age 68 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Painting: Christ on the Cross by Diego Velázquez; The Bearded Woman (Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband) by Jusepe de Ribera; Prince Ruprecht of the Palatinate and Marie de Raet by Anthony Van Dyck; Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts by Rembrandt van Rijn, who moves to Amsterdam, sets up shop in collaboration with art dealer Hendrik van Tuylenburgh, and depicts a rich fur trader; The Rejected Officer, The Proposition, The Game of Tric-Trac, and Young Woman with a Lute by Judith Leyster.
Theater: The Traitor by James Shirley, in May at London's Phoenix Theatre; The Humourous Courtier by Shirley, in November at the Phoenix; Loves Crueltie by Shirley, in November at the Phoenix (Shirley has based his plot on a story by the late William Painter).
A ship comes into Boston harbor in January carrying lemon juice that brings general relief from the scurvy that has affected so many colonists (see 1620; coffee advertisements, 1657).
Massachusetts colonists erect a grist mill at Watertown and in 2 years will set up another one at Dorchester and one at Boston (see 1621).
Potatoes are cultivated in so much of Europe, yield so much food per unit of land, and grow so well even in years when grain crops are at famine level that the tubers have encouraged the start of a population explosion in those parts of the continent where the new food is accepted and where the ravages of the Thirty Years' War have not totally disrupted society.
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