Early Modern
Battle of Worcester (1651): Charles II's Defeat and Escape
Decisive Parliamentarian victory; the Scottish-Royalist army was destroyed and Charles II fled into exile.
Region
Europe
Early Modern
London Coffeehouses (1652): The Penny Universities
Coffeehouses spread across London as cheap meeting places for news, debate and business, surviving a royal attempt to suppress them in 1675–1676.
Early Modern
Cromwell's Protectorate (1653-1659): Britain Without a King
Five years of rule by a Lord Protector that ended with Richard Cromwell's resignation in May 1659 and paved the way for the Restoration of 1660.
Early Modern
Magdeburg Hemispheres (1654): Otto von Guericke's Vacuum
Guericke's vacuum experiments showed the enormous force of air pressure and inspired the air-pump research of Robert Boyle and others.
Early Modern
The Deluge (1655-1660): Swedish Invasion of Poland-Lithuania
The Commonwealth survived and expelled the Swedes, but lost Livonia at Oliva in 1660 and was left gravely weakened by war, plunder and population loss.
Early Modern
Koprulu Era (1656-1703): Grand Viziers Revive the Ottomans
The Ottoman state recovered from a deep crisis and reached its greatest extent in Europe, before the defeat at Vienna in 1683 opened a long war of losses.
Early Modern
Huygens' Pendulum Clock (1656): The Revolution in Timekeeping
The pendulum clock cut timekeeping errors from roughly a quarter of an hour a day to seconds, and became the standard precision clock for almost three centuries.
Early Modern
Royal African Company: England's Monopoly Slave-Trading Company
The company built England's slave-trading network in West Africa and shipped more enslaved Africans than any other single English institution, but lost its monopoly in 1698 and was dissolved in 1752.
Early Modern
Founding of the Royal Society (1660): Science in London
A society for experimental learning was founded and chartered by Charles II in 1662, becoming the world's oldest continuously existing national academy of sciences.
Early Modern
Restoration of Charles II (1660): The Monarchy Returns
The monarchy was restored without bloodshed; Charles II entered London on 29 May 1660 and most of the republican era was legally erased.
Early Modern
Louis XIV: The Sun King's Personal Rule in France (1661–1715)
France became the leading power in Europe with a strong, centralised monarchy, but repeated wars and heavy spending left the state deeply in debt and the population exhausted.
Early Modern
John Graunt's Bills of Mortality (1662): Birth of Demography
Graunt's Natural and Political Observations turned parish death records into numerical evidence, founding demography and early epidemiology.