17th century

Battle of Nördlingen (1634). The Catholic Imperial army, bolstered by professional Spanish troops won a great victory in the battle over the combined Protestant armies of Sweden and their German allies
Millennium: 2nd millennium
Centuries: 16th century · 17th century · 18th century
Decades: 1600s 1610s 1620s 1630s 1640s
1650s 1660s 1670s 1680s 1690s
Categories: Births – Deaths
Establishments – Disestablishments

The 17th century was the century which lasted from 1601 to 1700 in the Gregorian calendar.

The 17th century falls into the Early Modern period of Europe and in that continent was characterized by the Baroque cultural movement, the French Grand Siècle dominated by Louis XIV, the Scientific Revolution, and The General Crisis. This last is characterised in Europe most notably by the Thirty Years' War,[1] the Great Turkish War, the end of the Dutch Revolt, the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the English Civil War.

Some historians extend the scope of the General Crisis to encompass the globe, as with the demographic collapse of the Ming Dynasty, China lost approximately 30% of its population. It was during this period also that European colonization of the Americas began in earnest, including the exploitation of the fabulously wealthy silver deposits of Potosí and Mexico which resulted in great bouts of inflation as wealth was drawn into Europe from the rest of the world.

In the midst of this global General Crisis, there were victory and triumph: In the Near East, the Ottoman, Safavid Persian and Mughal empires grew in strength. Farther east in Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu established the Edo period at the beginning of the century, starting the isolationist Sakoku policy that was to last until the 19th Century. In China, the collapsing Ming Dynasty was challenged by a series of conquests led by the Manchu warlord Nurhaci which were consolidated by his son Hong Taiji and finally consummated by his grandson, the Shunzi Emperor, founder of the Qing Dynasty.

European politics during the Crisis were dominated by the France of Louis XIV, where royal power was solidified domestically in the civil war of the Fronde, in which the semi-feudal territorial French nobility was weakened and subjugated to the power of an absolute monarchy through the reinvention of the Palace of Versailles from a hunting lodge to a gilded prison in which a greatly expanded royal court could be more easily kept under surveillance. With domestic peace assured, Louis XIV caused the borders of France to be expanded to include, among other regions, Rousillon, Artois, Dunkirk, Franche-Comté, Strasbourg, Alsace and Lorraine.

By the end of the century, Europeans were also aware of logarithms, electricity, the telescope and microscope, calculus, universal gravitation, Newton's Laws of Motion, air pressure and calculating machines due to the work of the first scientists of the Scientific Revolution, including Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Pierre Fermat, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and William Gilbert among other luminaries.

Contents

Events

Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu is the founder of Japan's last shogunate, which lasted well into the 19th century
Catholic general Albrecht von Wallenstein
Persian Ambassador during his entry into Kraków for the wedding ceremonies of King Sigismund III of Poland in 1605.
James I of England and VI of Scotland
The Night Watch or The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, 1642. Oil on canvas; on display at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Miyamoto Musashi having his fortune told. Print c.1847–1853
Map of Europe in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years' War

1600–1609

1610s

1620s

1630s

1640s

1650s

1660s

Sultan Mehmed IV

1670s

Kara Mustafa Pasha

1680s

Crimean Tatar soldier fighting with the soldier of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Europe's steppe frontier was in a state of semi-permanent warfare until the 18th century.
Giles Cory was pressed to death during the Salem witch trials in the 1690s

1690s

Significant people

See also: English Restoration
Peter Paul Rubens, Anne of Austria, Queen of France, mother of King Louis XIV, 1622–1625
Elias Gottlieb Haussmann, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748
Galileo Galilei is often referred to as the Father of Modern Astronomy
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the first person to use a microscope to view bacteria
Miyamoto Musashi, Self-portrait, Samurai, writer and artist, c. 1640
Sir Isaac Newton at 46 in Godfrey Kneller's 1689 portrait
Self portrait by Rembrandt, c. 1655
Probable self-portrait of Francisco Zurbarán as Saint Luke, c. 1635–1640 [3]
Portrait of René Descartes, dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", after Frans Hals c. 1648

Musicians and composers

Visual artists

Literature

See also: Elizabethan era and French literature of the 17th century

Educators

Exploration

Science and philosophy

See also: Scientific Revolution and Age of Reason

Inventions, discoveries, introductions

List of 17th century inventions

Johannes Kepler, 1610

Major changes in philosophy and science take place, often characterized as the Scientific revolution.

Denis Papin, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the steam engine.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, c.1700

References

  1. ↑ "The Thirty-Years-War". Western New England College. http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/30yearswar.html. Retrieved 2008-05-24. 
  2. ↑ The Tatar Khanate of Crimea
  3. ↑ Saint Luke as a Painter before Christ on the Cross. Humanities Web. Retrieved 30 September 2007.

Decades and years

Decades and years
Centuries and millennia
Millennium Century
BCE (BC)
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1st 10th 9th 8th 7th 6th 5th 4th 3rd 2nd 1st
CE (AD)
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