1727
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Britain's George I dies of apoplexy at 67 the night of June 10 while en route by carriage to Hanover. He is succeeded by his son George Augustus, 44, elector of Hanover, who will reign until 1760 as George II with the guidance of his ministers and his wife, Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, also 44, to whom he was married in 1705. Far more cultured and disciplined than he, she stops the new king from discharging the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, with whom she enjoys discussing politics.
An Ottoman army of 60,000 with 70 guns advances on Isfahan (see 1726). Persia's Shah Ashraf has only 20,000 men and 40 small camel-mounted field guns but kills 12,000 Turks before concluding a treaty acknowledging the sultan as caliph and being recognized himself as shah of Persia. Tahmasp II still holds court at Farahabad, where he is joined by the former brigand Nadir Kuli, 38 (see 1730).
Russia's extravagant, illiterate (but shrewd) Catherine I dies at St. Petersburg May 16 at age 44 after a brief reign and is succeeded by her 12-year-old son Peter, who will reign until 1730 with help from Andrei Ivanovich Osterman, now 40, who has become not only vice chancellor but also a member of the Supreme Privy Council, postmaster general, and the head of a special commission to encourage commerce.
The Russian-Chinese border is fixed by the Kiakhta Treaty, arranged by a mission to Beijing (Peking) headed by Sava Vladislavich.
The walled city of Jaipur is founded November 18 by Maharajah Sawai Jai Singh to replace Amber as the capital of the princely state of Rajasthan founded by Rajputs in the 12th century. Jai Singh will work until his death in 1743 to make the "pink city" a beautiful center of culture and learning.
Fredericksburg is laid out in the Virginia colony. First settled in 1671 and named for the Hanoverian prince Frederick Louis, its location at the head of navigation on the Rappahannock River will make it a thriving port for shipments of tobacco, iron products, and other exports.
The Royal Bank of Scotland founded at Edinburgh will by its own account invent the bank overdraft next year, giving depositors a standing line of credit attached to a checking account. Other banks in the British Isles will follow its lead.
Observations on the Different Strata of Earths and Minerals by English geologist John Strachey, 46, suggests the first theory of a relationship between surface features and rock structure, but his idea will not gain common acceptance for another century (see Steno, 1669; Lehmann, 1756).
Vegetable Staticks by English parson-botanist Stephen Hales, 50, founds the science of plant physiology with its studies of the rate of plant growth. Having discovered that leaves give off water vapor in a process called transpiration that encourages a continuous upward flow of water and dissolved nutrients, he has developed new measurement techniques, including a way to determine the rate of transpiration, the pressure that roots exert on the flow of sap, and the rates of growth of shoots and leaves (see medicine, 1733; Saussure, 1804).
Sir Isaac Newton dies of a lung inflammation at London March 20 at age 84 and is buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, but it will turn out that he has wasted his last 20 years in foolish experiments with alchemy.
The statutes of the Brotherly Agreement of Herrnhut proposed August 13 by Pietist leader Nikolaus, graf von Zinzendorf at a special Communion service embody the count's utopian notion of a Christian settlement in which the attainment of a joyous fellowship with Christ will take precedence over every aspect of everyday life (see 1722). "There can be no Christianity without community," Zinzendorf has decided. His 5-year-old settlement at Herrnhut attracts new members, and he will establish Moravian settlements whose participants are rigidly stratified into "choirs" according to age, sex, and marital status, with the choir providing housing, food, clothing, and employment while the participants assume responsibility for raising and educating their children on the basis of the count's novel and effective teaching methods. His movement takes on an evangelical zeal. It will send out missionaries in 1732 to work among black slaves in the Caribbean, and within 20 years there will be missions in Greenland, among the native tribes of North America, and in Dutch Guiana, Algiers, and South Africa (see 1734).
Protestant religious leader August Hermann Francke dies at Halle June 8 at age 64, having helped to promote Pietism in opposition to academic Lutheran teachings.
The Ottoman minister to Paris returns to Constantinople with a printing press. It will be instrumental in spreading enlightenment in the Muslim world.
Poetry: Summer by James Thomson, whose work is published together with his 1726 work Winter.
German chemist J. H. Schulze pioneers photography; using a mixture of silver nitrate and chalk under stencilled letters, he establishes that light, not heat, causes darkening of silver salts (see Scheele, 1777).
Opera: Admeto 1/31 at the King's Theatre, London, with Faustina Bordoni creates the role of Alcestis, music by George Frideric Handel; Bordoni and her rival, Francesca Cuzzoni, exchange blows onstage 6/6 at the King's Theatre in the presence of the Princess of Wales at a performance of the Bononcini opera Astianatte; she creates the role of Pulcheria in Handel's Riccardo Primo 11/11 at the King's Theatre; dancer Marie Sallé makes her Paris Opéra debut 9/14 in the Mouret opera Les amours des dieux.
English organist and church music composer William Croft dies at Bath August 14 at age 48, having written a setting of the Church of England burial service that will remain in use for centuries.
Salzburg's Mirabell Palace is completed by Austrian architect Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, 59, after 6 years of construction.
House rats overrun Astrakhan and appear within a few months in the German states. Originally from eastern Siberia, the rats have not been seen in Europe until now. They will be in England by next year.
History of Japan and Siam by the late German physician Engelbert Kämpfer, who visited Japan from 1692 to 1694 as a guest of the Dutch East India Company, died in 1716 at age 65, and has written about the blowfish: "The Dutch call him Blazer, which signifys Blower, because he can blow and swell himself up into the form of a round Ball. He is rank'd among the Poisonous Fish, and eat whole, is said unavoidably to occasion death . . . Many People die of it, for want, as they say, of thoroughly washing and cleaning it . . . The Japanese won't deprive themselves of a dish so delicate in their opinion, for all they have so many Instances, of how fatal and dangerous a consequence it is to eat it" (see Cook, 1774).
Brazil gets her first coffee bushes; the country will become the world's largest coffee producer (see 1723).
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