The Seventy Years the Sun Forgot to Have Spots
Between 1645 and 1715 the surface of the Sun was nearly blank. Sunspot counts dropped to almost zero. Europe froze. Astronomers noticed, then forgot.
Read the story →An era
Early Modern
1500 – 1750
Reformation, scientific revolution, the early colonial empires, the long eighteenth century beginning.
110 stories in this era.
The Winters They Roasted Oxen on the Thames
Between 1608 and 1814 the river through London froze solid often enough to hold fairs on its surface. Then they tore down a bridge, and it never froze again.
Read the story →The Arab Pilot Who May Have Shown Vasco da Gama the Way to India
The standard narrative of European maritime expansion credits Vasco da Gama with finding the sea route from Africa to India in 1498. The Portuguese sailed the route. The man who navigated them across the Indian Ocean was almost certainly an Arab named Ahmad ibn Majid.
Read the story →Christopher Columbus Believed in a Smaller Earth Than Eratosthenes Had Measured and That Is Why He Sailed
The Eratosthenian Earth circumference (about 250,000 stadia, accurate to 2%) was the standard ancient figure but had been substantially undermined by a competing late-antique calculation by Posidonius. Columbus took the smaller Posidonian figure as his planning baseline. If he had used Eratosthenes's number, he would never have sailed.
Read the story →The Ten-Year-Old Pretender Who Was Crowned King of England in Dublin in 1487 and Then Worked in Henry VII's Kitchen
Lambert Simnel was crowned Edward VI of England in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, on 24 May 1487, aged about 10. He was a baker's son being impersonated by Yorkist conspirators as the imprisoned Earl of Warwick. After his army lost the Battle of Stoke Field, Henry VII pardoned him and put him to work in the royal kitchens as a spit-turner.
Read the story →The Flemish Boatman's Son Who Convinced Half of Europe He Was the Younger Prince in the Tower for Eight Years
Perkin Warbeck claimed from 1490 to be Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the younger of the two Princes in the Tower. He was recognised by Margaret of Burgundy, James IV of Scotland, and Maximilian I of Austria. He landed in Cornwall in 1497 with 8,000 supporters, was captured, and was hanged at Tyburn on 23 November 1499.
Read the story →The Dominican Friar Who Ruled Florence for Four Years, Burned the City's Artwork and Books, and Was Then Burned Himself in the Same Piazza
Girolamo Savonarola dominated the Florentine Republic from the 1494 expulsion of the Medici until his own execution in May 1498. His February 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities consumed thousands of paintings, books, mirrors, musical instruments, and cosmetics in the Piazza della Signoria. The same piazza was the site of his hanging and burning fifteen months later, on 23 May 1498.
Read the story →The Earlier Solar Minimum That Lasted Ninety Years and Helped Empty Norse Greenland
The Spörer Minimum was a period of unusually low solar activity that ran from approximately 1450 to 1540. It overlapped with the catastrophic late-medieval collapse of Norse Greenland, the worst phase of the Little Ice Age in central Europe, and the agricultural crisis that preceded the religious upheavals of the Reformation.
Read the story →The French Swordsman Brought From Calais Because the English Axe Was Considered Too Crude for a Queen
Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536 with a French sword rather than the standard English execution axe. Henry VIII had paid for a substantial professional executioner to travel from Calais. The decision was made before the verdict was delivered.
Read the story →The Holy League Naval Victory Over the Ottoman Fleet Off Western Greece on 7 October 1571 That Was the Last Great Galley Battle in History
The Christian Holy League fleet of approximately 212 galleys defeated the Ottoman fleet of approximately 251 galleys at the Gulf of Patras off western Greece on 7 October 1571. About 30,000 Ottoman sailors and approximately 7,500 Christian sailors were killed in approximately four hours of close combat. Approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves chained to Ottoman rowing benches were liberated. It is conventionally the last major naval battle fought primarily with oared galleys.
Read the story →The Pet Elk That Drank Too Much at a Castle Dinner and Fell Down the Stairs
Tycho Brahe kept a tame moose at his Bohemian residence in the late 1590s. According to a letter Tycho wrote to a friend, the animal was lent to a neighbouring nobleman for a banquet, drank too much beer, and broke its neck falling down a flight of stairs while attempting to descend after the meal.
Read the story →The Summer Strasbourg Could Not Stop Dancing
In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.
Read the story →The Devon Privateer Who Sailed Around the World in 1577-1580, Captured a Spanish Treasure Ship Off Peru, and Was Knighted Aboard His Own Vessel by Elizabeth I
Francis Drake left Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with five ships. He returned alone in the Golden Hind on 26 September 1580 with about £400,000 of captured Spanish silver from his Pacific raid — about half the English government's annual revenue. He was the first English captain to complete a circumnavigation. Elizabeth I knighted him aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford on 4 April 1581.
Read the story →The Strasbourg Housewife Whose Solo Dancing in July 1518 Started a Plague That Pulled in Four Hundred Others
Frau Troffea stepped into a Strasbourg alley around 14 July 1518 and began dancing alone, silently, for no announced reason. She did not stop. Within a week thirty others had joined her. Within a month approximately four hundred people were dancing involuntarily through the city. Several died. She is the index case of the most-documented dancing plague in European history.
Read the story →The Dominican Friar Burned at the Stake in Rome on 17 February 1600 for Holding That the Universe Is Infinite and That Other Stars Have Their Own Planets
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome, on 17 February 1600. The Roman Inquisition's verdict identified eight specific theological errors. Among them were the doctrines of an infinite universe with countless inhabited worlds. He was 52. His statue at the execution site was erected in 1889 by an Italian liberal-republican fund-raising campaign against the modern Vatican.
Read the story →The Comet That Broke the Crystal Spheres
In November 1577 a comet appeared over Europe so bright it cast shadows. A twenty-eight-year-old Dane measured its distance and demolished Aristotle's heavens.
Read the story →The English King Whose Six Marriages Between 1509 and 1547 Produced Three Surviving Children, Two Beheaded Wives, and the English Reformation
Henry VIII married six times between 1509 and 1547. Two of his wives — Anne Boleyn (1536) and Catherine Howard (1542) — were beheaded at the Tower of London. Two were set aside by annulment (Catherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves). One died of childbirth complications (Jane Seymour). One outlived him (Catherine Parr). The pursuit of his desired succession produced the foundational break with the papacy that became the English Reformation.
Read the story →The Last Crusader Order on Rhodes Held Out For Six Months Against an Ottoman Army Twenty Times Its Size
The Knights Hospitaller had governed Rhodes since 1309. In summer 1522 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the island with an army of approximately 100,000 against the Hospitallers' 7,500 defenders. The siege ran six months. The Hospitallers surrendered on negotiated terms in December and were given safe passage to Crete.
Read the story →The Elizabethan Mathematician Astrologer Who May Have Coined 'British Empire' and Definitely Talked to Angels
John Dee was the senior English mathematician of the late 16th century, court astrologer to Elizabeth I, scientific adviser to the substantial early English exploration ventures, and possibly the first English-language writer to use the phrase 'British Empire.' He also believed he was communicating with angels through a polished obsidian mirror.
Read the story → The Coroner’s Report June 18, 2026 · Battlefield near Ksar el-Kebir (Alcácer Quibir), modern Morocco
The Battle Where Three Kings Died and Spain Inherited Portugal
In August 1578 the 24-year-old King Sebastian of Portugal led 17,000 men into Morocco to depose its sultan. Three kings died in a single day. Sebastian had no heir. Two years later his great-uncle Philip II of Spain claimed the empty Portuguese throne. The Armada disaster of 1588 followed.
Read the story →La Noche Triste, the Night of 30 June 1520 When the Aztecs Drove Cortés from Tenochtitlan
On the rainy night of 30 June 1520, Hernán Cortés's army tried to slip out of Tenochtitlan across the Tlacopan causeway and was caught. Hundreds of Spaniards and thousands of native allies died in the lake, many dragged down by the gold sewn into their clothes. Spain remembered it as the Sad Night; Mexico City has renamed it the Victorious one.
Read the story →The 16-Year-Old Protestant Cousin of Edward VI Who Was Queen of England for Nine Days in July 1553 Before Being Replaced and Eventually Beheaded
Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England on 10 July 1553 under the terms of Edward VI's deathbed Devise. The proclamation was a failed attempt to keep the English Crown Protestant against the legitimate claim of the Catholic Mary Tudor. Jane was deposed on 19 July 1553 after Mary's army marched on London. She was executed for treason at the Tower of London on 12 February 1554. She was 17 or 18.
Read the story →The Portuguese Navigator Who Was Killed on a Philippine Beach in 1521 Before His Fleet Completed the First Circumnavigation of the Globe Under His Deputy
Ferdinand Magellan died on the island of Mactan in the Philippines on 27 April 1521 in a skirmish with the local chief Lapu-Lapu. His fleet of five ships had left Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 with 270 men. Eighteen survivors aboard the single remaining ship Victoria reached Spain on 6 September 1522 under Juan Sebastián Elcano. The voyage was the first complete circumnavigation of the planet.
Read the story →The Cousin Who Cut Tycho's Nose Off
Manderup Parsberg outlived the duel by fifty-nine years and outlived his cousin by twenty-four. He never spoke about either.
Read the story →The Inca King Who Almost Took His Empire Back
Manco Inca was the Spanish puppet ruler of conquered Peru. In 1536 he escaped, raised an army of 100,000, and laid siege to Cuzco for eleven months. He nearly succeeded. The last Inca state he founded would survive another 36 years.
Read the story →The Manila Galleons, the 250-Year Trade Route That First Tied the World Together
From 1565 to 1815, one or two Spanish galleons a year crossed the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, swapping American silver for Chinese silk and porcelain — the first sustained trade link binding Asia, the Americas, and Europe into one economy. The eastward crossing took four to six months and killed crews by the score; some thirty galleons were lost.
Read the story →The Ninety-Five Latin Propositions a German Friar Sent to His Archbishop on Halloween 1517 and That Maybe He Also Nailed to a Door
Martin Luther sent his *Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum* — the Ninety-Five Theses — to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz on 31 October 1517. The famous door-nailing detail is from a single later source. Within five years the document had substantially detonated Western Christendom.
Read the story →The German Student Sword Tradition That Cut Faces On Purpose for Four Centuries
The Mensur is a German academic-fraternity fencing tradition in which two combatants stand at fixed distance and exchange controlled blade strokes aimed at the face. The cut — the *Schmiss* — was the substantive point of the exercise. The tradition descends substantially from the 16th-century university dueling culture that cost Tycho Brahe his nose.
Read the story →The Spanish Engineer Who Drew a Grid on the Bones of Tenochtitlán
Within months of the Aztec capital's fall, the Spanish surveyor Alonso García Bravo laid out the colonial grid of Mexico City directly on top of the destroyed lake-city. The Templo Mayor was buried under the cathedral. It stayed buried until 1978.
Read the story →The Tübingen Astronomer Who Taught Kepler That Copernicus Was Right
Michael Maestlin taught mathematics and astronomy at Tübingen from 1583 to 1631. He was the man who privately taught the young Johannes Kepler that the Copernican heliocentric system was probably correct, while officially continuing to teach the Ptolemaic system that the university curriculum required.
Read the story →The Sixteen-Month Anabaptist Theocracy in the German City of Münster That Ended on 24 June 1535 With the Polygamous King-Prophet Hanged in an Iron Cage From the Cathedral Spire
A radical Anabaptist movement under Jan van Leiden seized the city of Münster in February 1534. The "New Jerusalem" they established practised mandatory polygamy and community of goods. The Bishop of Münster recaptured the city on 25 June 1535. Jan van Leiden, Bernhard Knipperdolling, and Bernhard Krechting were tortured publicly with red-hot tongs for an hour, killed, and their bodies hung in iron cages from the spire of Saint Lambert's Church.
Read the story →The Four-Story Wooden Palace That Was Shipped to London in Pieces and Pegged Together on Top of the Bridge
Nonsuch House was a four-story prefabricated Dutch timber palace built in the Low Countries in 1577, dismantled, shipped to London, and reassembled on Old London Bridge using only wooden pegs. It stood there for 180 years, was demolished in 1757, and gave its name to a generation of substantial-luxury London building.
Read the story →Cerro Rico de Potosí, the Silver Mountain That Bankrolled an Empire and Consumed Its Miners
Discovered in 1545 at 4,000 metres in the Andes, the Cerro Rico of Potosí produced a huge share of the early modern world's silver. By 1600 Potosí ranked among the largest cities on Earth. The forced-labour mita system fed Indigenous workers into its tunnels for 250 years, and the mountain — honeycombed and slowly collapsing — is being mined still.
Read the story →The Renaissance Craft Tradition That Made Tycho Brahe's Replacement Nose and a Thousand Other Lost Faces
Tycho Brahe wore a metal prosthetic nose for the entire adult portion of his life after losing the original to a student duel in 1566. The Renaissance prosthetics tradition that produced his nose was a substantial European craft specialism that survived from the 15th to the 19th century before being substantively replaced by 20th-century plastic surgery.
Read the story →The 115 English Colonists Found Gone Without Trace From an Island Off North Carolina in August 1590 With Only the Word CROATOAN Carved on a Tree
John White returned to the Roanoke colony on 18 August 1590 — three years after he had left for England to resupply — to find the entire 115-person colony gone. The houses were dismantled, the heavier equipment buried, and the word CROATOAN was carved on a post. White assumed the colonists had moved to the Croatoan tribe's island 50 miles south. He never returned to confirm. Their fate is unresolved.
Read the story →The Catholic Spanish Fleet of 130 Ships That Sailed for England in May 1588 and Was Wrecked Around Scotland and Ireland by the Following October
Philip II of Spain dispatched 130 ships under the Duke of Medina Sidonia in May 1588 to invade England, depose Elizabeth I, and reverse the English Reformation. The English fleet defeated the Armada at Gravelines on 8 August 1588. The surviving Spanish ships were driven north around Scotland by storms; many wrecked on the western Irish coast. Approximately 11,000 Spanish sailors died, against fewer than 100 English casualties in combat.
Read the story →The Bolognese Surgeon Who Built New Noses Out of Upper-Arm Skin in 1597
Gaspare Tagliacozzi's *De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem* (1597) described the first systematic European reconstructive surgical technique for nose loss — using a substantial skin flap rotated from the patient's upper arm. The technique required the patient to keep the arm strapped to the face for several weeks while the graft established blood supply.
Read the story →The Battle of Talikota in 1565 and the Abandonment of Vijayanagara, One of the World's Largest Cities
On 23 January 1565 the allied Deccan sultanates destroyed the army of Vijayanagara and beheaded its de facto ruler on the field. The capital — a metropolis European visitors ranked with Rome, perhaps half a million people — was sacked for months and never recovered. Its granite ruins at Hampi are now a World Heritage site.
Read the story →The Duel Over an Equation
In December 1566 the 20-year-old Tycho Brahe and his cousin fought in the dark with rapiers over a mathematical disagreement. Tycho lost the bridge of his nose.
Read the story →The Danish Astronomer Who Was Given an Entire Island by the King of Denmark in 1576 to Build the Largest Pre-Telescopic Observatory in History
King Frederick II of Denmark granted Tycho Brahe the island of Hven in the Øresund Strait in February 1576 with funding to build a state-supported astronomical observatory. The resulting Uraniborg and Stjerneborg observatories operated from 1576 to 1597 and produced the most accurate pre-telescopic positional astronomy in history. The data set was the foundation on which Kepler's three laws of planetary motion were derived.
Read the story →The Two-Metre Brass Arc That Made Tycho's Pre-Telescopic Astronomy Possible
The mural quadrant at Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory was a brass arc mounted on a north-south wall and used for measuring the meridian altitudes of stars and planets. It was the largest and most accurate astronomical instrument of the pre-telescopic period and produced most of the data that Kepler would later use to derive the laws of planetary motion.
Read the story →The New Star Tycho Brahe Saw From Denmark in 1572
On the evening of 11 November 1572 a bright new star appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was visible for sixteen months. Tycho Brahe — twenty-five at the time — measured it carefully enough to prove it sat above the Moon. The Aristotelian heavens that were supposed to be unchanging had quietly changed.
Read the story →The Renaissance Observatory the Danish Crown Built on a Private Island and Then Tore Down
Uraniborg was the most expensive scientific instrument in 16th-century Europe — an island observatory built for Tycho Brahe at royal expense. He worked there for 20 years, made the most accurate pre-telescope astronomical observations ever, then fled in 1597. The Crown demolished it the next year.
Read the story →The 1543 Anatomical Atlas That Demolished 1,300 Years of Galenic Anatomy in One Book and Established That Galen Had Never Dissected a Human
Andreas Vesalius's *De humani corporis fabrica*, published at Basel in June 1543, was an anatomical atlas based on the direct dissection of approximately thirty human cadavers in Padua between 1540 and 1542. The book identified approximately 200 specific errors in Galen's anatomy. The conclusion that Galen had dissected only animals — never humans — ended 1,300 years of medical-faculty authority.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →The German Astronomer Killed in 1617 By a Peasant He Had Accused of Stealing a Goose
David Fabricius was a Lutheran pastor and astronomer in East Frisia who corresponded with Tycho Brahe and Kepler, observed the first known variable star (Mira Ceti) in 1596, and made independent sunspot observations in 1611. He was killed in May 1617 by a parishioner he had accused from the pulpit of stealing a goose.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →The Rye Fungus That May Have Made the Salem Girls Convulse in 1692
The standard 17th-century explanation for the Salem witch trials was demonic possession. The standard modern alternative is ergot poisoning from contaminated rye. Both theories have problems. The 1976 paper that revived the ergot theory has been argued about ever since.
Read the story →Eyam, the Derbyshire Village That Quarantined Itself Against the Plague in 1666
When plague arrived in Eyam in a parcel of cloth from London in 1665, the village made an extraordinary choice: led by its rector William Mompesson, it sealed itself off so the disease would spread no further. At least 260 villagers died — but the surrounding country was spared.
Read the story →The Year the Sun Was Found to Have Blemishes
In 1610 four astronomers in four countries pointed early telescopes at the Sun and saw spots. They spent the next decade arguing about who had seen them first.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →The Last Great London Plague Killed About a Quarter of the City in Eight Months
Between the spring and the autumn of 1665, plague killed roughly 70,000 to 100,000 Londoners — about a quarter of the city's population. It was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England. Six months later the Great Fire burned down most of the worst-affected districts.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →The Astronomer Who Defended His Mother From the Stake
In 1620 the seventy-four-year-old mother of Johannes Kepler was arrested for witchcraft. He spent six years getting her out.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →The Astronomer Who Was Too Polite to Pee
Tycho Brahe died because nobody told him he could leave the dinner table. Four centuries later they dug him up to find out for sure.
Read the story →The Vasa, Sweden's Mightiest Warship, Which Sank 20 Minutes into Her Maiden Voyage on 10 August 1628
The Vasa, the most expensively armed warship in the world, capsized in Stockholm harbour on 10 August 1628 after sailing barely 1,300 metres, killing around 30 people. Everyone knew she was unstable; nobody could tell the king. Raised in 1961, she is now the world's best-preserved 17th-century ship.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →The Earthquake That Hit Catholic Europe on All Saints Day in 1755 and Substantially Broke Eighteenth-Century Theology
A magnitude 8.5–9.0 earthquake struck Lisbon at approximately 9.40 AM on 1 November 1755 — All Saints Day, when the city's churches were full. The earthquake, the fires that followed, and the tsunami forty minutes later killed approximately 30,000 to 50,000 people. The European Enlightenment never substantially recovered the cosmic optimism of the early 18th century.
Read the story →Alexander Selkirk, the Sailor Who Asked to Be Marooned in 1704 and Became Robinson Crusoe
In October 1704 the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, convinced his worm-eaten ship would sink, demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island 670 km off Chile. The ship did sink. Selkirk survived alone for four years and four months, was rescued in 1709 as a goat-skinned 'wild man' — and a decade later Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe.
Read the story →The Two Women Tried for Piracy at Saint Jago de la Vega in November 1720 Who Pleaded Their Bellies and Avoided the Gallows
Anne Bonny and Mary Read were captured along with the pirate captain "Calico Jack" Rackham off Jamaica on 22 October 1720. Tried for piracy at Saint Jago de la Vega the following month, both pleaded pregnancy. Their executions were postponed; the men of the crew were hanged on 18 November. Mary Read died in prison of fever in April 1721. Anne Bonny's fate is unknown.
Read the story →The Widowed Princess of Wales Who Spent Twenty-Five Years Holding Together a Court of Disappointment
Augusta of Saxe-Gotha was 32 when her husband Frederick, Prince of Wales, died unexpectedly in 1751. She lived another twenty-one years as the senior court figure of the Leicester House faction, raised the future George III, and substantially shaped the early Hanoverian succession before her death in 1772.
Read the story →The Fall of Ayutthaya on 7 April 1767, When Burma Burned One of Asia's Richest Cities
For 417 years Ayutthaya was the capital of Siam — an island city of golden temples that Europeans compared to Paris. After a fourteen-month siege, Burmese armies stormed it on 7 April 1767, burned it, and carried off tens of thousands of captives. Siam rebuilt downstream within a generation; the capital became, eventually, Bangkok. Ayutthaya itself was never reoccupied as a capital — its ruins stand as left.
Read the story →The Three-Hour Battle in Bengal on 23 June 1757 That Made the British East India Company the Effective Government of India
Robert Clive's force of 3,000 men defeated the Bengali Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah's army of 50,000 at Plassey on 23 June 1757. Clive had previously bribed the Bengali commander Mir Jafar to defect at the battle. The British East India Company became the effective sovereign of Bengal within weeks. The transfer of Indian tax revenue to the Company funded the early Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Read the story →The Marseille Bishop Who Stayed in the City Through the Plague and Became a National Saint
Henri-François-Xavier de Belsunce was Bishop of Marseille from 1709 to 1755. He refused to leave the city during the 1720 plague, administered last rites at street corners, organised parish-by-parish burial details, and substantially defined the visible Catholic authority during the worst summer months. The French Catholic tradition substantially canonised him in popular memory.
Read the story →The Mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, Bligh's Impossible Boat Voyage, and the Secret of Pitcairn
On 28 April 1789 Fletcher Christian seized HMS Bounty and set Captain Bligh adrift with 18 men in an open launch. Bligh sailed it 3,618 nautical miles to Timor and lived to be court-martialled and acquitted. The mutineers vanished with Tahitian companions to unlocated Pitcairn Island, burned the ship — and were found 18 years later: one ageing mutineer, nine widows, and a village of children.
Read the story →The Queen of Britain Who Died Because She Wouldn't Admit She Had a Hernia
Caroline of Ansbach, Queen of Great Britain, had been carrying a strangulated umbilical hernia for fourteen years when it ruptured in November 1737. She had concealed it from everyone including her doctors. She died after twelve days of pain. She was 54.
Read the story →The First European Dictionary of an Inuit Language Was Compiled by a Lutheran Pastor Who Had Sailed to Find Vikings
Hans Egede arrived in Greenland in 1721 expecting to find the lost Norse community. He found Inuit. Over the following fourteen years he learned the local Kalaallisut language well enough to compile the first European dictionary and grammar of any Inuit language — published in 1750 by his son Paul.
Read the story →The French Marquise Who Produced the Definitive French Translation of Newton's Principia, Wrote It While Pregnant at 42, and Died Six Days After Childbirth
Émilie du Châtelet's French translation and mathematical commentary on Newton's *Principia* was completed in summer 1749 while she was carrying a fourth child at age 42. She finished the manuscript at Lunéville on 1 September 1749, gave birth on 4 September, and died of puerperal fever on 10 September. The translation, published posthumously in 1759, remained the standard French Newton until the 20th century.
Read the story →The Forty-Seven Ronin, Who Avenged Their Lord in 1703 and Were Sentenced to the Death They Expected
In 1701 Lord Asano drew his sword against the court official Kira inside Edo Castle and was ordered to die the same day. His leaderless samurai — ronin — waited nearly two years, then stormed Kira's mansion in the snow, took his head to their master's grave, and surrendered. The shogunate's verdict: honourable seppuku for all 46 who stood trial. Japan has argued about them ever since.
Read the story →The Probably-Apocryphal 1752 Kite Experiment That Made Benjamin Franklin Internationally Famous
Benjamin Franklin's June 1752 kite-and-lightning experiment is one of the most-told stories in the history of science. The contemporary documentation is thin. Modern historians of science consider it possible that Franklin never actually performed it.
Read the story →The Heir Who Was Not Killed by a Cricket Ball
Frederick, Prince of Wales died in March 1751, aged forty-four. The story that a cricket ball had killed him survived for two centuries. His lungs had killed him.
Read the story →The King Who Died on the Close Stool
On the morning of 25 October 1760 the King of Great Britain rang for his chocolate, walked to the privy, and was dead before his valet got back.
Read the story →The Last Major Plague Outbreak in Western Europe Was Brought to Marseille by a Ship in 1720
The *Grand Saint-Antoine* arrived at Marseille on 25 May 1720 with a hold full of Levantine silk and several already-dead crew members. The harbour authorities knew the ship was infected. They cleared it anyway. The resulting outbreak killed about half of Marseille and approximately 100,000 people across Provence over two years.
Read the story →The Missionary Who Sailed to Greenland to Find the Vikings
Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast looking for Norse Christians who had been dead for three centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit.
Read the story →John Harrison, the Carpenter Whose Sea Watch Solved Longitude and Who Had to Fight Twenty Years to Be Paid
John Harrison, a self-taught Yorkshire carpenter, spent his life building clocks accurate enough to carry longitude to sea. His 1759 watch H4 lost only seconds on a transatlantic trial — meeting the £20,000 Longitude Prize's terms — but the Board of Longitude paid in grudging halves until King George III himself intervened. A copy of H4 guided Captain Cook.
Read the story →Guillaume Le Gentil, the Astronomer Who Chased Two Transits of Venus for Eleven Years and Saw Neither
The French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil left home in 1760 to observe the transit of Venus from India. War kept him at sea for the 1761 transit; he waited eight more years for the 1769 one — which a single cloud obscured. He returned after eleven and a half years to find himself declared dead, his wife remarried, and his estate divided.
Read the story →The Hanoverian London Mansion That Twice Served as the Alternative Royal Court
Leicester House stood on the north side of Leicester Square from 1635 to 1791. It served twice in the 18th century as the alternative royal court for the heir-presumptive who was politically estranged from the reigning Hanoverian monarch — under George II's rebellion against George I, and again under Frederick Prince of Wales's rebellion against George II.
Read the story →The Hanoverian Courtier Whose Memoirs Are the Single Best Source on the Reign of George II
John, 2nd Baron Hervey was vice-chamberlain to George II from 1730 to 1740. His private *Memoirs* — kept up nightly for ten years, suppressed by his family for ninety, finally published 1848 — are the single best source on the personalities and politics of the early-Hanoverian court. Lord Hervey was also the witty pen behind much of the period's anonymous verse satire.
Read the story →The Birmingham Dinner Club That Industrialised the World Between Bowls of Soup
The Lunar Society of Birmingham met about fourteen times a year between approximately 1765 and 1813, always on the Monday nearest the full moon (so members could ride home by moonlight). The members included James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and Josiah Wedgwood. They built the Industrial Revolution in their spare time.
Read the story →Mary Toft, the Woman Who Convinced the King's Surgeons She Was Giving Birth to Rabbits in 1726
In the autumn of 1726, Mary Toft of Godalming appeared to give birth to a series of dead rabbits. The king's own surgeon-anatomist endorsed the miracle; London's medical elite descended on the case. In December she confessed to the hoax, and the careers of her believers collapsed with her.
Read the story →The Twenty-Seven Kilometre Dry-Stone Wall the French Built Across the Provençal Hills to Contain a Single City's Plague
The Mur de la peste was a dry-stone wall approximately 27 km long, with guard posts at 100-metre intervals, built across the limestone garrigue of the Comtat Venaissin between September 1720 and August 1721. It enforced the cordon sanitaire that kept the Marseille plague from spreading north into the French interior.
Read the story →Nadir Shah's Sack of Delhi in 1739, Which Took the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor
After crushing the Mughal army at Karnal in February 1739, the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah occupied Delhi. A riot and false rumour of his death triggered a day-long massacre — perhaps 20,000-30,000 killed — and a plunder so vast that Persia's taxes were remitted for three years. The Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond left India in his baggage.
Read the story →The French Knight Who Took A Hundred Galley Convicts Into the Streets of Plague Marseille and Came Out With Eight
The Chevalier Nicolas Roze organised the clearing of approximately 1,200 plague corpses from the Esplanade de la Tourette at Marseille in September 1720. He used condemned galley convicts as labour, promising their freedom if they survived. Eight of his hundred labourers did.
Read the story →The Bitter Mathematical Priority Fight That Cut Continental Europe Off From British Mathematics for a Century
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed the differential and integral calculus in the 1670s and 1680s. Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism in 1699. The subsequent thirty-year priority war split the European mathematical community along Newtonian-British and Leibnizian-Continental lines and substantially retarded British mathematics for the next century.
Read the story →The British Capture of Quebec on 13 September 1759 in a Short Battle on the Plains of Abraham in Which Both Commanding Generals Were Killed
General James Wolfe led approximately 4,500 British troops up the unguarded cliffs above Quebec on the night of 12-13 September 1759. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham that followed on the morning of 13 September lasted approximately 20 minutes. Both Wolfe and the French Marquis de Montcalm were killed. Quebec surrendered on 18 September. The Seven Years War concluded with British control of French North America.
Read the story →The Scilly Naval Disaster of 22 October 1707, Which Drowned an Admiral and Created the Longitude Prize
On the night of 22 October 1707, a Royal Navy fleet returning from the Mediterranean — its position miscalculated — drove onto the rocks of the Isles of Scilly. Four ships and up to 2,000 men were lost, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell among them. The catastrophe pushed Parliament to the Longitude Act of 1714 and its £20,000 prize.
Read the story →The British Joint-Stock Company That Took Over Most of the National Debt in 1720 and Whose Share Price Rose Tenfold in Six Months Before Collapsing in September
The South Sea Company's January 1720 deal with the British Treasury exchanged government debt for company shares. The share price rose from £128 in January to £1,050 in late June. It collapsed to £190 by the end of September. Many of the Whig political class were ruined; several Treasury and Mint officials were imprisoned; Isaac Newton lost about £20,000 of his own money in the crash.
Read the story →The Formerly Enslaved Haitian General Who Was the Effective Ruler of Saint-Domingue Until Napoleon Tricked Him Onto a Ship in 1802 and Locked Him in a French Alpine Fortress to Die
Toussaint Louverture led the Saint-Domingue revolution from 1791 to 1801 and was the effective ruler of the colony — the wealthiest slave-economy in the Atlantic — when he wrote a constitution making himself governor for life in July 1801. Napoleon sent a 30,000-man army to depose him in 1802. Toussaint was captured by deceit, taken to the Fort de Joux in the French Jura, and died there of pneumonia on 7 April 1803.
Read the story →Túpac Amaru II and the Great Andean Rebellion of 1780, the Largest Rising in Colonial Spanish America
In November 1780 the kuraka José Gabriel Condorcanqui — Túpac Amaru II — executed a Spanish corregidor and raised the southern Andes against colonial abuses. The rebellion he started outlived him: captured in April 1781, he was forced to witness his wife's execution and was quartered in Cuzco's plaza. The wars that followed killed on the order of 100,000 people.
Read the story →The 234-Line French Poem Voltaire Wrote in Three Weeks After Lisbon and the Three-Year Argument It Started With Rousseau
Voltaire wrote the *Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne* in mid-November 1755 — three weeks after the earthquake — as a direct philosophical attack on the Leibnizian doctrine of optimism. Rousseau answered with a long defence in August 1756. The argument substantially defined the French Enlightenment's theological position for the next generation.
Read the story →The Jasperware Medallion That Became the Most-Circulated Political Image of the Late 18th Century
Josiah Wedgwood produced the *Am I Not a Man and a Brother?* anti-slavery medallion in 1787 as a free contribution to the substantial Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. About 15,000 were distributed in the first two years. It became the substantially substantively most-circulated political image of the 18th century and the substantial visual template of the British abolitionist movement.
Read the story →The Three-Week Siege of October 1781 at Which a French Fleet, a French Army, and a Combined American-French Land Force Captured an Entire British Army and Effectively Ended the American Revolution
General Lord Cornwallis surrendered approximately 7,000 British troops at Yorktown, Virginia, on 19 October 1781. A combined Franco-American army of approximately 17,000 under George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau had besieged the position for three weeks. The French Atlantic fleet under Admiral de Grasse had blockaded the seaward escape. The British government opened peace negotiations within months.
Read the story →