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17th century

31 stories from this century.

The Coroner’s Report July 25, 2026 · Banda Islands, Maluku, Indonesia

The Banda Massacre of 1621, When the Dutch East India Company Emptied the Nutmeg Islands

In 1621 Jan Pieterszoon Coen led a VOC force against the Banda Islands — then the world's only source of nutmeg — to enforce a monopoly the islanders kept breaking. Of a population of some 15,000, most were killed, starved, enslaved, or deported; 44 leaders were executed by Japanese mercenaries. The islands were repopulated as slave-worked plantations. One of them was later traded for Manhattan.

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The Coroner’s Report July 25, 2026 · Houtman Abrolhos, Western Australia

The Wreck of the Batavia in 1629 and the Massacre Its Mutineers Ran on a Desert Island

The Dutch East India ship Batavia wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off Western Australia on 4 June 1629. While the commander sailed an open boat to Java for rescue, the apothecary Jeronimus Cornelisz established a reign of terror among the roughly 200 survivors, murdering some 110-125 men, women, and children before soldiers he had marooned fought back.

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The Cabinet July 25, 2026 · Wanggongchang Armoury site, Beijing

The Wanggongchang Explosion of 30 May 1626, When a Gunpowder Works Levelled a Quarter of Beijing

On the morning of 30 May 1626 the Wanggongchang Armoury — a major gunpowder works inside Beijing — detonated, devastating roughly two square kilometres of the capital and killing a reported 20,000 people. The emperor's infant heir died in the aftermath; contemporary accounts are so strange that theories still multiply around one of the largest accidental explosions of the pre-industrial world.

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The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Kahlenberg, Vienna

The Ottoman Siege of Vienna That Was Broken on 12 September 1683 by the Largest Cavalry Charge in History

The Ottoman Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha besieged Vienna from 14 July 1683 with approximately 150,000 troops. The relief army arrived on the Kahlenberg ridge on 11 September. The Polish king Jan III Sobieski led approximately 20,000 cavalry — including 3,000 Polish Winged Hussars — in a downhill charge against the Ottoman positions on the afternoon of 12 September. It is the largest single cavalry charge in recorded history. The Ottoman northwestern expansion ended.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Prague Castle, Bohemia

The Two Catholic Imperial Governors Thrown Out of a Hradčany Castle Window on 23 May 1618 That Started the Thirty Years War

On 23 May 1618 a Protestant Bohemian delegation threw two Catholic imperial regents and their secretary out of a third-floor window of Prague Castle into the moat. All three survived. The Catholic faction declared the survival a miracle; the Protestant faction said the men landed on a dung heap. The Thirty Years War began within weeks and killed an estimated 8 million people across central Europe.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Campanile di San Marco, Venice

The Padua Professor Who Demonstrated an Improved Telescope to the Venetian Senate on a Bell Tower in August 1609 and Got His Salary Doubled

Galileo Galilei demonstrated his improved 8x telescope to the Venetian Senate from the bell tower of San Marco on 21 August 1609. The senators looked at distant ships approaching the lagoon, decided that the strategic value was substantial, and doubled Galileo's University of Padua salary to 1,000 florins per year. He was a month away from turning the same instrument on the night sky.

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The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Pudding Lane, City of London

The Bakery Fire on Pudding Lane That Burned Four-Fifths of the City of London in Four Days and Killed Only Six Documented People

A fire began at the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666. By the time it was extinguished on 6 September it had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and St Paul's Cathedral across approximately 175 hectares — about four-fifths of the City of London. The documented death toll is six. The actual toll was probably higher but cannot now be reconstructed.

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The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Westminster

The 36 Barrels of Gunpowder Hidden Under the House of Lords on 5 November 1605 That a Catholic Recusant Soldier Was Going to Light at Eleven the Following Morning

Guy Fawkes was caught at midnight on 4-5 November 1605 in the cellar of the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder. The State Opening of Parliament — at which King James I, his queen, his sons, the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the Commons would all have been present — was scheduled for 11 a.m. on 5 November. Fawkes was the demolition specialist of a Catholic plot to overthrow the Protestant English government and replace it with a Catholic regent.

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The Coroner’s Report June 27, 2026 · Magdeburg

The May 1631 Sack of Magdeburg by Imperial Catholic Troops That Killed Approximately 20,000 of the City's 25,000 Inhabitants and Defined the Thirty Years War's Reputation

Imperial Catholic forces under Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, stormed the besieged Lutheran city of Magdeburg on 20 May 1631. The sack and fire that followed killed approximately 20,000 of the city's 25,000 inhabitants — about 80 percent of the population. The atrocity became the canonical symbol of the Thirty Years War's destructive scale.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Paramaribo, Suriname

The 52-Year-Old German Widow Who Sailed to a Dutch Colony in 1699 to Document Insect Metamorphosis and Produced One of the Founding Works of Modern Entomology

Maria Sibylla Merian, a 52-year-old Frankfurt-born artist and naturalist, sailed alone with her younger daughter to the Dutch colony of Suriname in June 1699. Over two years she documented the life cycles of approximately 90 South American insect species, ate the same food as her enslaved Indigenous and African informants, and produced the 1705 *Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium* — one of the founding works of modern entomology.

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The Coroner’s Report June 27, 2026 · Glen Coe, Argyll

The Highland Clan Hosting Government Soldiers for Twelve Nights Before Being Massacred by Them on 13 February 1692

At 5 a.m. on 13 February 1692, Captain Robert Campbell and approximately 120 soldiers of the Earl of Argyll's Regiment turned on the MacDonalds of Glencoe, who had been their hosts for twelve nights under the Highland code of hospitality. Thirty-eight MacDonalds were killed in their homes and on the snow. About forty more died of exposure in the mountains. The order had been signed by William of Orange.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Provincetown Harbor

The Sixty-Six-Foot Cargo Ship That Carried 102 English Separatists Across the Atlantic in 66 Days in 1620

The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth on 16 September 1620 with 102 passengers — about 41 of them religious Separatists from the Leiden Dutch exile community, the rest paying passengers — and 30 crew. The 66-day crossing landed at Provincetown Harbor on 21 November 1620. The Mayflower Compact was drafted aboard the ship the same day before the passengers disembarked.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Münster, Westphalia

The 1648 Treaty That Ended the Thirty Years War, Recognised the Independent Dutch and Swiss Republics, and Created the Modern State-Sovereignty System

The Peace of Westphalia of 24 October 1648 was actually two treaties signed at the cities of Münster and Osnabrück. They ended the Thirty Years War in the Holy Roman Empire, formally recognised the independent Dutch Republic and Swiss Confederacy, and established the principle of state sovereignty over religious choice that conventional international-law historiography treats as the foundation of the modern state system.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Seething Lane, City of London

The Naval Administrator Whose Daily Diary Recorded the Course of the Great Plague of London in 1665 With a Bureaucrat's Specificity

Samuel Pepys kept his shorthand diary from January 1660 to May 1669. The 1665 entries — running through the worst of the Great Plague that killed approximately 100,000 Londoners — are the closest surviving day-to-day record of how the plague moved through the city, how the parish authorities tried to contain it, and how an educated middle-rank professional Londoner adjusted his daily routines around an active mass-mortality epidemic.

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The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Coordinated Pueblo Uprising of August 1680 That Drove the Spanish Out of New Mexico for Twelve Years

A coordinated revolt of approximately 24 Pueblo communities in New Mexico, organised secretly by the Tewa religious leader Po'pay over five years, began on 10 August 1680 and drove the Spanish colonial administration entirely out of the province within three weeks. About 400 Spanish colonists were killed. The Spanish did not return until 1692.

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The Coroner’s Report June 27, 2026 · Salem, Massachusetts

The Massachusetts Bay Colony Court That Executed Twenty People for Witchcraft in 1692 on the Basis of Adolescent Girls' Spectral-Evidence Testimony

Between February 1692 and May 1693 the Salem Massachusetts witchcraft proceedings investigated 200 accused witches and executed 20 — 14 women and six men. Five more died in prison awaiting trial. The court accepted "spectral evidence" — the testimony of accusers who claimed to see the accused's spirit form harming them — over the explicit objection of senior Massachusetts clergy. The legal foundation collapsed in autumn 1692 and the colony issued a formal apology in 1697.

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The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Agra

The Mughal Mausoleum That Took 22 Years to Build for an Empress Who Died in Childbirth in 1631

Mumtaz Mahal, the favourite wife of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, died on 17 June 1631 giving birth to her 14th child at Burhanpur. Shah Jahan ordered the construction of the Taj Mahal mausoleum at Agra in her memory. Approximately 20,000 workers and 1,000 elephants were employed over 22 years to complete it in 1653. Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and spent the last eight years of his life imprisoned in Agra Fort with a view of the Taj.

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The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Haarlem, Netherlands

The Dutch Speculative Bubble of 1636-1637 in Which Tulip Bulb Prices Reached the Equivalent of a Wealthy Amsterdam House and Then Collapsed Within Weeks

The Dutch tulip futures market peaked in February 1637 with the rarest bulb varieties trading at prices equivalent to fully furnished Amsterdam canal houses. The collapse on 3-7 February 1637 produced the first documented modern speculative bubble. The actual economic damage was substantially smaller than the conventional legend describes; most contracts were never enforced.

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The Cabinet June 26, 2026 · Convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome

The Roman Inquisition Trial That Forced an Aged Galileo to Recant His Telescopic Astronomy

Galileo Galilei was tried by the Roman Inquisition between February and June 1633 on the charge of vehement suspicion of heresy. He was 68, ill, and threatened with formal torture. He recanted publicly on 22 June 1633 and was sentenced to indefinite house arrest. The Catholic Church formally rehabilitated him in 1992.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Ducal Observatory, Modena

The Jesuit Sunspot Book That Was Half a Major Astronomical Treatise and Half a Sustained Attack on Galileo

Christoph Scheiner's *Rosa Ursina sive Sol* (1626–1630) ran to about 780 folio pages, contained the most accurate pre-19th-century star catalogue of the Sun's surface, and devoted hundreds of pages to attacking Galileo's claim to have discovered sunspots first. The priority dispute substantially poisoned the European astronomical mainstream for two decades.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Syon House, Middlesex

The English Mathematician Who Made Galileo's Telescopic Discoveries Months Earlier and Published None of Them

Thomas Harriot observed the Moon through a telescope in July 1609, sunspots in late 1610, and the moons of Jupiter probably in early 1610. Each of these observations was made independently of Galileo, in some cases earlier. Harriot published nothing. He died in 1621 with about 5,000 pages of unpublished astronomical manuscripts.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Syon Park, London

The English Mathematician Who Saw Sunspots Six Months Before Galileo and Published Nothing

Thomas Harriot observed sunspots in December 1610 — months before Galileo's published priority claim — telescopically observed the Moon weeks before Galileo's *Sidereus Nuncius*, and worked out the law of refraction twenty years before Snell. He published almost none of it. He died in 1621 of nasal cancer leaving over 8,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts.

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The Cabinet June 23, 2026 · Duchy of Württemberg, Holy Roman Empire (modern southwestern Germany)

The Hundred-Year Witch Hunt That Killed Kepler's Mother and Almost Killed Württemberg

Between approximately 1560 and 1660 the Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany executed approximately 350 accused witches. The peak years coincided with the Thirty Years' War. Johannes Kepler's mother Katharina was tried during the worst of it; she was acquitted; she died six months later anyway.

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