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The Treaty of Nystadt August 30 gives Russia a "window" on the West and makes her a European power. Peter the Great's secretary Andrei Ivanovich Osterman, now 35, has helped to negotiate the treaty, whose terms permit the czar to retain the land on which he has built his new capital of St. Petersburg and obtain additional territories from Sweden that include Estonia, Ingermanland, Livonia, part of Carelia, and some Baltic islands; Peter changes his title October 2 (October 22 New Style) to Emperor of All the Russias.
Denmark's queen Louise of Mecklenburg-Güstrow dies after 26 years of marriage to Frederik IV, who has contracted two morganatic marriages during Louise's lifetime and arouses public indignation by elevating his second morganatic wife to status of queen. The new queen is Anna Sophie, daughter of the Danish chancellor Conrad, Count Reventlow.
China suppresses a revolt in Taiwan.
Britain's chancellor of the exchequer John Aislabie, 51, goes to the Tower of London on charges of fraud in connection with the collapse last year of the "South Sea Bubble." Sir Robert Walpole becomes prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer in April, reduces import and export duties to encourage trade, and averts financial panic by amalgamating South Sea Company stock with stock in the Bank of England and the East India Company. Walpole's policy of "salutary neglect" of the American colonies will slacken enforcement of the navigation laws (see 1663; 1672; Molasses Act, 1733).
Philadelphia entrepreneur John Copson offers "Assurances from Losses Happening at Sea, &c.," pioneering marine insurance for American shipping.
Japan's shōgun Yoshimune Tokugawa bans expensive clothing, furniture, cakes, candies, and other extravagances at the court in an austerity decree designed to set an example.
Botanist Rudolph Camerarius dies at his native Tübingen September 11 at age 56, having demonstrated the existence of sexes in plant life.
A London smallpox epidemic takes a heavy toll but Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has apothecary surgeon Charles Maitland inoculate her 5-year-old daughter in the presence of some leading physicians (see 1718). The child has a mild case of pox and is thereby immunized. The physicians are impressed, and George I has two of his grandchildren inoculated—but only after the procedure has been tested on 11 charity school children and on six inmates of Newgate Prison who volunteered in return for having their death sentences commuted.
Smallpox introduced from the West Indies strikes Boston with an epidemic in June. The British vessel Seahorse has arrived from the Caribbean April 22, one of her crew was stricken a day later and forcibly confined to a house near the docks (a red flag in front says, "God have mercy on this house"). Nine other seamen show acute symptoms within a few days, about 1,000 Bostonians flee the community, and local clergyman Cotton Mather writes in his diary May 26, "The grievous calamity of the small pox has now entered the town." He writes a treatise urging inoculation (as a member of the Royal Society he has read the account of variolation published in 1714). The town has by some estimates only 11 physicians to serve a population of 11,000, but most residents older than 19 have been through epidemics in 1690 and 1702; if they contracted Variolae and survived they acquired some immunity, but as more such people die of unrelated causes the number susceptible to the pox increases. The only Boston physician to act on Mather's advice is Zabdiel Boylston, 42, who inoculates his 13-year-old son and two black slaves June 26. All three survive mild cases of the pox and Boylston then inoculates 247 colonists. Six die. Many people accuse Boylston of spreading the pox and denounce him for interfering with nature. He narrowly escapes being hanged by a mob. But another epidemic strikes. Some 5,980 Bostonians—nearly half the population—eventually come down with the pox, and 844 die. The mortality rate is just over 14 percent, as compared with 2.42 percent of Boylston's inoculated patients. Most of the survivors are left pockmarked, and since inoculated persons can spread the disease, the practice of inoculation (variolation) will eventually be banned (see Jenner, 1796; Waterhouse, 1799).
Pope Clement XI dies at Rome March 19 at age 71 after a 20½-year reign in which he struggled to keep the papacy aloof from European politics and encouraged proselytizing, especially in the northern German states and the Philippines; Michelangelo Cardinal de' Conti, 65, is elected pope May 28 and will reign until his death in 1724 as Innocent XIII.
"Because of the destroying angel standing over the Town, a day of prayer is needed that we may prepare to meet our God," writes Cotton Mather as smallpox decimates Boston, which has seven churches.
East India Company official and educational benefactor Elihu Yale dies at London July 8 at age 72.
Regular postal service begins between London and New England.
The New-England Courant begins publication at Boston under the direction of local printer James Franklin, a soap boiler and candlemaker's son whose weekly newspaper is modeled on The Spectator, published at London from 1711 to 1712. Franklin invites readers to contribute to the paper (see 1722).
The French National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale) that opened to the Paris public in 1692 moves to the Mazarin Palace in the rue de Richelieu and will be enlarged repeatedly in years to come; it will have an estimated 300,000 volumes by 1789 and more than 600,000 by 1818 (see 1996).
An Universal Etymological English Dictionary by British boarding-school keeper Nathan [or Nathaniel] Bailey is published at London (see 1604; Johnson, 1755).
Nonfiction: De Motu by philosopher George Berkeley refutes Sir Isaac Newton's notion of absolute space, time, and motion (see Bayes, 1736).
Fiction: Lettres Persanes by French lawyer-philosopher Charles de Secondat, 42, the Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, criticizes French society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary Persians traveling through the country.
Poet Matthew Prior dies at Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, September 18 at age 57 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Painter Jean Antoine Watteau dies of tuberculosis at Nogent-sur-Marne July 18 at age 36.
Theater: The Refusal; or, The Ladies' Philosophy by Colley Cibber 2/4 at London's Drury Lane Theatre; The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki shinju) by Monzaemon Chikamatsu, now 68, at Osaka. The play is the first of several domestic pieces based on actual incidents that Chikamatsu will write about the love affairs of Japan's growingly important middle class.
First performances: The Brandenberg Concerti by Johann Sebastian Bach at Weimar.
Italian violinist Giuseppe Tartini, 29, wins appointment as principal violinist at Padua's Church of San Antonio. He secretly married a protégé of Padua's archbishop 10 years ago, was arrested, fled the city disguised as a monk, found refuge in a monastery at Assisi, but was later allowed by the archbishop to return to his wife.
Pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read are convicted and sentenced to be hanged but reprieved at the last moment when both are found to be pregnant (see 1720). "Calico Jack" Rackam himself will be convicted, placed in an iron cage, and hanged from a gibbet on Deadman's Cay, outside Port Royal, Jamaica; his corpse will be coated in tar to preserve it as a warning to other would-be pirates, but an estimated 2,000 pirates continue to menace shipping in the Atlantic (see 1722).
Former privateer Alexander Selkirk dies of tropical fever at sea December 13 at age 45 (see 1711). He had grown rich from plundering merchantmen, and his body is returned for burial at his native Largo, Fifeshire, Scotland.
The Palace of La Granja is completed in the Guadarama Mountains high above Segovia. Built by Spain's Felipe V, it is a miniature Versailles modeled on the great palace of Felipe's grandfather Louis XIV.
Broccoli is introduced into England some 70 years after the "Italian asparagus" became popular in France (any dish "à Parisienne" includes broccoli).
Japan's city of Edo reaches a population level of more than a million despite the earthquake and fire that killed 200,000 in 1703.
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