1638

1631 1632 1633 1634 1635 1636 1637 1638 1639 1640

political events

French forces in the Milanese try to raise a Spanish siege of the fortress of Crema but Charles I de Blanchefort, marquis de Créquy, prince de Poix, and duc de Lesdiguières, is killed March 17 at age 59.

The Ottoman sultan Murad IV retakes Baghdad from the Persians after a 40-day siege, slaughtering the city's defenders.

Clergyman Thomas Hooker tells the Connecticut General Court that people have a God-given right to choose their own magistrates (see Hooker, 1636). Although he has no thought of separating Church and state and prefers the more autonomous Congregational style of governance to Presbyterianism's more hierarchical structure, he insists that the privilege of voting should be exercised according to the will of God, a view that will cause some later historians to call him "the father of American democracy."

exploration, colonization

Dutch colonists in the Indian Ocean settle on the island of Mauritius, named after the late Maurice, Prince of Orange, and begin clubbing to death the island's indigenous bird, the dodo (see 1598; 1681).

Wilmington, Delaware, has its beginnings in Port Christina on the Delaware River, where Peter Minuit of the New Sweden Company lands two shiploads of Swedish and Finnish colonists and builds a fort. Minuit is lost at sea soon afterward (see 1637; Stuyvesant, 1655).

The New Haven colony founded by English settlers on the southern New England coast takes its name from Newhaven in southern England; its colonists follow a more rigid and intolerant Puritanism even than that observed in the Connecticut colony (see 1635).

science

German-born Jesuit priest and natural scientist Athanasius Kircher, 37, visits Messina and is about to leave for Naples when an earthquake destroys the city of Epuphemia. When he reaches Naples he immediately climbs Mount Vesuvius, has himself lowered by rope into its crater, ascertains in exact detail the crater's different dimensions, and publishes his findings for the Knights of Malta under the title "Specula Melitensis Encyclica sive syntagma novum instrumentorum physico-mathematicorum."

religion

Japanese peasants who have occupied Hara Castle near Nagasaki for nearly 3 months yield February 28 for lack of food and musket ammunition (see 1637). Most of the 37,000 have accepted Christianity, and the 124,000-man siege force of the shōgun Iemitsu Tokugawa annihilates the vast majority of them. Iemitsu expels or executes any remaining missionaries and forces everyone to register as parishioners of local Buddhist temples (see 1639).

Colonial American religious leader Anne Hutchinson, 47, and her husband acquire territory from the Narragansett and establish a democratic community. They came to Boston 4 years ago from England. She held biweekly meetings with women where she denounced Massachusetts Bay colony clergymen as being "under the covenant of works, not of grace" for not permitting women to have a voice in Church affairs, and she was tried for heresy and sedition. One of her accusers has said, "You have stepped out of your place. You have rather been a husband than a wife, and a preacher than a hearer, a magistrate than a subject." Hutchinson has been banished by Governor John Winthrop, who has described her as "a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man" (see 1643).

London police arrest former cloth merchant John Lilburne, 24, on charges that he has adopted separatist principles hostile to the idea of a state Church and helped to smuggle Puritan pamphlets from Dutch presses into England. Tried before the Star Chamber, he is fined, publicly whipped, pilloried, and sent to prison, where he will remain until his release in 1640 (see 1640; politics, 1645).

Scottish Presbyterians circulate a National Covenant for signature throughout the country following a threat by England's Charles I to impose the Anglican liturgy. Charles offers to withdraw the new prayer book and to permit the meeting of a free assembly and a free parliament, but Scottish opposition mounts. The assembly that meets at Glasgow in December admits only Covenanters. Presbyterian extremists defy the royal commissioner; the assembly deposes Anglican bishops and repeals all the legislation by which James VI and Charles I have established episcopacy, actions which precipitate civil war (see 1639).

Flemish Roman Catholic reformist Cornelius Jansen is elevated to the episcopate but dies of plague at Ypres May 16 at age 52; Kyrillos Loukaris, patriach of Constantinople, is condemned to death and strangled by his Ottoman guards aboard a ship in the Bosphorus June 27 at age 65.

education

English clergyman John Harvard dies of tuberculosis September 14 at age 31 after 1 year in the Massachusetts Bay colony, leaving his library and half his £800 estate to the "seminary" established in October 1636. Most of his family has died of plague, leaving Harvard in possession of the entire Harvard estate. Because he is a Cambridge University graduate, New Towne on the Charles River across from Boston will be renamed Cambridge; the Great and General Court of Massachusetts next year will order that "the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridge shalbee called Harvard College," and colonist Ann Radcliffe will contribute funds to the school.

literature

Poetry: Love's Riddle by Abraham Cowley, now 20, who has become a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge; Barnabees Journal by Richard Brathwaite, now 50, whose rhymed verses are published in Latin under the pseudonym Corymbaeus and promptly translated into English.

German poet Sibelle Schwartz dies of dysentery July 31 at age 17. Writer Samuel Gerlach will edit and publish two volumes of her work, totaling more than 150 pages, and will call her the "Tenth Muse," echoing Schwartz's statement in defense of women writing, "Weren't the Muses women?" (see Bradstreet, 1650).

art

Painting: The Duke of Modena by Diego Velázquez; Et in Arcadia ego by Nicolas Poussin; Portrait of Thomas Killigrew and Thomas Carew and Lords John and Bernard Stuart by Sir Anthony Van Dyck; Self-Portrait by Peter Paul Rubens; The King Drinks by Jacob Jordaens. Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer dies at Antwerp in late January at age 31.

architecture, real estate

Boston gets its first brick house. Brick has been used until now only for chimneys, fireplaces, and backyard baking ovens.

agriculture

Honeybees will be introduced into the American colonies in the next few years, will soon escape from their domestic hives, and will establish wild colonies. Native Americans will call honeybees "the white man's fly," and as the bees move westward many pioneers will be led to believe that the bees are indigenous (see Irving, 1835).

population

An English order council passed in March to halt emigration to New England detains eight ships in the Thames (see politics, 1634); another such order passed April 8 forbids emigration to New England without a license, but many ships set sail for Virginia and voyage instead to New England, which will have few new arrivals from 1640 to 1780 but will grow through natural reproduction to have a white population of about 33,000 by 1650 (see 1678).

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