1651 1652 1653 1654 1655 1656 1657 1658 1659 1660
Contents: political eventscommerce science religion literature art crime architecture, real estate food and drink population |
Henry Wilmot, 1st earl of Rochester, leads a weak uprising against Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government in March at Marston Moor, near York. Rochester was created earl 3 years ago, but Cromwell's Roundheads force him to flee to the Continent, Cromwell suppresses another uprising at Salisbury, and he divides England into 12 military districts, each controlled by a force that is financed by a 10 percent tax on Royalist estates. Irish Jacobite Richard Talbot, 25, is arrested at London in November on charges of having plotted to overthrow Cromwell's Protectorate, but he soon escapes to Flanders.
Swedish forces invade Poland as Karl X Gustav takes advantage of Poland's struggle to save her Ukrainian territories from Russia. Karl launches the First Northern War that will end with Poland losing her last Baltic territories (see 1660; Russia, 1656).
A French fleet under the command of César, duc de Vendôme, defeats a Spanish fleet off Barcelona.
An English fleet under the command of Vice Admiral William Penn, 34, takes Jamaica in the West Indies from the Spanish, who have called the sugar-rich island San Iago. Penn's action precipitates a 3-year war with Spain that will free England from dependence on Spain for imports of sugar, molasses, and cacao beans from the island. Oliver Cromwell has appointed colonist Edward Winslow one of the leaders of the expedition against the Spaniards, but Winslow dies on the return voyage May 8 at age 59.
Dutch colonists occupy New Sweden on orders from Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherlands (see 1638).
Dutch colonial governor Jan van Riebeeck at Cape Town reports that his mission will fail unless Dutch East India Company employees are given their own farms and permitted to operate them as free burghers (see 1652). Crop failures and disorderliness have slowed progress on construction of the fort at Cape Town. The company will grant "letters of freedom" to its servants there in 1657. Van Riebeeck will encourage importation of slaves from the interior, he will war with the Hottentots between 1659 and 1660, and by the time he leaves in 1662 the colony will have more than 100 colonists.
"The Arithmetic of Infinitesmals" ("Arithmetica Infinitorum") by Oxford's Savilian professor of geometry John Wallis, 38, assigns numerical values to spatial indivisibles as a way to include negative and fractional exponents in determining ways to find a square whose area is equal to that of a given circle (see Descartes, 1632; Cavalieri, 1647). Ordained as a priest in 1640, Wallis soon afterward deciphered some coded messages from Royalist partisans that had fallen into the hands of parliamentarians and thereby discovered he had mathematical skills that he has been honing ever since reading William Oughtred's The Keys to Mathematics (Clavis Mathematicae) at London in 1647. After reading a paper by the late Bonaventura Cavalieri, Wallis became interested in the problem of finding a square whose area equaled that of a given circle (quadrature of the circle), and his treatise extends Cavalieri's law of quadrature by devising a way to include negative and fractional exponents (see 1657).
Physicist-philosopher Pierre Gassendi dies at Paris October 24 at age 63.
Pope Innocent X dies at Rome January 1 after a 10-year reign in which he has been strongly influenced by his greedy sister-in-law Olimpia. Having reorganized the papal prison system, he is succeeded by the Siena-born Fabio Chigi, 57, who will reign until his death in 1667 as Alexander VII.
Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government orders Catholic priests to leave the realm, forbids Anglican clergymen to teach or preach, censors the press, and imposes rigid ("puritanical") rules. Cromwell has selected new members of Parliament based on their piety and cancels Christmas celebrations, causing great distress. People caught celebrating the holiday in a church are arrested and taken away.
Sephardic Jews from Pernambuco, Brazil, establish a congregation at Nieuw Amsterdam despite efforts by Peter Stuyvesant to exclude them (see 1642).
Nonfiction: The Republic of Letters (La republica literaria) by the late Diego de Saavedra Fajardo.
Philosopher-writer Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, dies at Paris February 10 at age 66.
Poetry: "A Panegyric to My Lord Protector" by Edmund Waller, who has made amends to Oliver Cromwell and returned from France.
Painting: The Spinners (or The Fable of Arachne [Las Hilanderas]) by Diego Velázquez; Woman Bathing in a Stream, The Polish Rider, and The Rabbi by Rembrandt van Rijn; Girl at a Window by Dutch baroque genre and portrait painter Nicolas Maas (Nicolaes Maes), 21, who has studied with Rembrandt.
English colonists in Jamaica establish the pirate stronghold of Port Royal at Kingston harbor with a view to receiving a percentage of the treasure pillaged from Spanish ships. Port Royal will quickly fill up with buccaneers, gamblers, prostitutes, slave dealers, and tavernkeepers to become the largest—and most lawless—city in the New World; gold and silver taken by the Spaniards from the natives of Central and South America will help to enrich the English crown (but see 1692).
A Royal Navy squadron sent by Oliver Cromwell to the Mediterranean under the command of Admiral Robert Blake destroys a fleet of the Barbary pirates in April at Porto Farina on the Gulf of Tunis.
The Church of St. Sulpice is completed at Paris to designs by architect Louis Le Vau, 43.
Health's Improvement, or RULES Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method and Manner of Preparing all sorts of FOOD used in this NATION by the late English physician Thomas Muffett says, beasts killed for food "eate much sweeter, kindlier and tenderer" if they are killed slowly and painfully. Muffett, who is believed to have written the work in 1595 but died in June 1604 at age 51, was a student of spiders and his daughter Patience will be celebrated in a Mother Goose rhyme. He has written that meat is improved if an animal is destroyed "with fear dissolving his hardest parts and making his very heart become pulpy" rather than "if they be killed suddenly"; Le Patissier François by F. P. de La Varenne will be far more widely read than Muffett's book.
French society uses a clean plate for each new dish but Englishmen continue to dine off trenchers—wooden platters that give hearty eaters the name "trenchermen."
Rum from Jamaica is introduced into the Royal Navy to supplement beer, which goes sour after a few weeks at sea (see 1651; 1731).
The first known reference to the use of a sheath for contraception appears in an anonymous Parisian publication (see medicine, 1564). L'Ecole Des Filles recommends a linen sheath to prevent passage of semen into the uterus, but while the upper classes in France will employ contraception by the end of the century, intrauterine sponges will be favored over condoms (see Mme. de Sévigné, 1671).
1651 1652 1653 1654 1655 1656 1657 1658 1659 1660
