 1600s
1600 German theologian Jakob Böhme begins to write Aurora 12 years after a mystical revelation he had observing a beam of reflected sunlight. It is condemned as heretical, but he will continue to develop his theological concepts about the trinity in the 1620s.
1604 King James I commissions Bible translation
1605 English Catholics attempt to blow up the House of Lords in the failed Gunpowder Plot
1607 Jamestown, Virginia becomes the first enduring English colony in North America.
1609  Galileo Galilei discovers the moons of Jupiter with a homemade telescope
|
 1610s -
1611 The King James Version of the Bible was completed
1614 King James I dissolves Parliament, which refuses to pay his debts
1614–1667 Dutch West India Company founds New Netherland
1618 The Defenestration of Prague, starts the Thirty Years' War (1618-48 ).
1609-19 Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion published.
|
 1620s -
1620 Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon publishes The Great Instauration and New Method, which advocated for empirical observation and a Scientific Method to understand physical reality.
1620 The Mayflower Compact
1621-22 Huguenot protestants who rebel against King Louis XIII are appeased by Cardinal Richelieu,, which helps unify France
1622 Jamestown massacre by warriors of the Powhatan.
1625 The Barbary pirates first attack England and enslave about 60 people
1626 King Charles I is crowned, but without his French Catholic wife, /Henrietta Maria
1628 Massachusetts Bay Colony is granted a royal charter
|
 1630s -
1631 French philosopher Pierre Gassendi is the first person to observe the transit of a planet (Mercury) across the Sun.
1631 Swedish Army under King Gustavus Adolphus defeats Russian army (30 Years' War).
1632 Swedish King Adolphjus killed, but Swedish army is victorious in the Battle of Lützen (30 Years' War).
1637 René Descartes formulated analytic geometry
|
 1640s -
1640 Frederick William of Hohenzollern, the Great Elector, rises to power in Prussia, and inaugurates a military state.
1641 Dutch capture Malacca from Portuguese.
1642 Blaise Pascal invents the mechanical calculator
1642 Start of English Civil Wars.
1645 New Model Army, under Sir Thomas Fairfax, defeats Royalists at Naseby, in English Civil War.
1648 Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years' War.
1648 The Fronde uprising against Louis XIV begins.
1649 King Charles I executed.
|
 1650s
1651 English philosopher Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan, in which he argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign.
1653-58 Oliver Cromwell rules England as Lord Protector.
1655 British take Jamaica from the Spanish. In the upheaval, most of the Spaniards' 1,500 African slaves take to the mountains,
establishing "Maroon" communities which become military strongholds, whose members bargain with the British
officers for freedom and autonomy in exchange for promising to defend Jamaica and to help quell slave revolts.
1659 Peace of the Pyrenees between France and Spain. |
 1660s
1664 The Dutch New Netherland colony becomes English New York after Gov. Peter Stuyvesant surrenders to the British navy.
1660s writings by Flemish Cartesian philosopher Arnold Geulincx emphasized the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition. Reasoning that there is nothing that "is my own but to know and to will", he concluded "if you do not know how a thing is done, then you do not do it".
1664 New York becomes a proprietary and then a royal colony after conuest of New Amsterdam from the Dutch West India Company.
1665 French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld publishes Maximes (basic truths about life), which established his position among the men of letters of the time.
1668 Isaac Newton makes the first reflecting telescope
|
 1670s
1672 The Royal African Company is given a monopoly in the English slave trade.
1672 The Dutch begin fighting separate wars with the Btitish and
French
1673 - The British Navigation Act of 1673 sets up the office of customs commissioner in the colonies to collect duties on goods that pass between plantations.
1675-1676 King Philip's War erupts in New England between colonists and Native Americans
1677 Baruch Spinoza dies and his students preserve his writings, which are later published.
|
 1680s
1681 - Pennsylvania is founded by William Penn, a Quaker who receives a Royal charter with a large land grant from King Charles II.
1683 Second Turkish Siege of Vienna.
1685 French King Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes, driving French Protestants from
France.
1686 Turks ejected from Budapest.
1687 Isaac Newton publishes his Laws of Motion
1688 Queen Mary II and William III replace K. James II in the Glorious Revolution
1688 Mughals complete conquest of India.
1689 Bill of Rights in England gains royal consent.
1689 English philosopher John Locke anonymously publishes Two Treatises of Government, which presents the consent of the governed as a means to protect the three natural rights of "life, liberty and estate". For decades it was rarely cited, but its influence would greatly increase in the 18th century.
1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk establishes border between Siberia and Manchuria (along the Amur
or Heilong River), with Outer Mongolia as no man's land. This was China's first agreement with a
western power.
|
 1690s
1680s - 1700s French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche controversially combined concepts of Descartes and Aquinas in claiming that the ideas through which we perceive objects exist in God and all interaction between mind and body is mediated by God.
1690 At the Battle of Boyne, deposed English King James II and his Irish and
French allies are defeated by William III.
1692 French navy defeated by Anglo-Dutch fleet at La Hogue (War of the Grand Alliance).
1693 Spanish King Charles II issues a royal decree granting freedom and protection to all enslaved Africans escaping British colonies, as long as they convert to Catholicism and serve Spain.
1694 The Bank of England is established.
King Louis XIV reigns from 1654 to 1715, moves capital from Paris to Versailles in 1682
1697 Austrians defeat Muslims at Zenta.
1699 Peter I
of Russia joins coalition against Sweden.
1699 Treaty of Carlowitz, where Ottoman Empire surrenders Hungary to Austrians. |
1600s 