Era · c. 1500 – 1800
Voyages of exploration, the Reformation and the age of revolutions that reshaped Europe and the wider world.
A special court investigated several hundred people and sentenced 36 to death; the king closed the inquiry in 1682, shielded Madame de Montespan and issued new laws on poisons and fortune-telling.
A major bubonic plague epidemic devastated Vienna; Leopold I vowed a memorial that became the Plague Column on the Graben.
The Pueblo peoples expelled Spanish colonists and missionaries from New Mexico until Diego de Vargas began the reconquest in 1692.
Penn received a vast proprietary colony, which he organised as a refuge for Quakers with broad religious freedom and a planned capital at Philadelphia.
Versailles became the official residence of the French kings and the centre of government until 1789, and a model for palaces across Europe.
La Salle reached the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the whole Mississippi basin for France as Louisiana; his later attempt to settle the river mouth ended in disaster.
Holy League victory; the Ottomans ceded most of Hungary, Transylvania, Podolia and the Morea at Karlowitz in 1699 and Azov to Russia in 1700.
The relief army destroyed the Ottoman siege, saving Vienna and beginning the Holy League war that drove the Ottomans out of Hungary.
Decisive Qing victory; the Kingdom of Tungning surrendered and Taiwan was annexed to the Qing empire in 1684.
Historians now agree that Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently; Newton first, Leibniz first to publish, with Leibniz's notation prevailing.
Dombo's Rozvi forces defeated the Portuguese, destroyed their inland trading posts and founded a state that dominated the plateau until the 1830s.
Protestant worship was banned in France; an estimated 150,000–200,000 Huguenots fled abroad, while most of the rest were forced into nominal Catholicism until toleration returned in 1787.
