1623
Shakespeare's First Folio Published
Seven years after his death, Shakespeare's friends John Heminges and Henry Condell gathered thirty-six plays, eighteen of them never printed before, into a large and expensive folio volume. Without the First Folio, we would have no Macbeth, no Tempest, no Twelfth Night. Only seven hundred and fifty copies were printed.
Amboyna Massacre
Dutch VOC officials on the spice island of Amboyna arrested ten English factors, a Portuguese, and several Japanese on charges of conspiring to seize the fort. Under torture the accused confessed and were beheaded. The atrocity poisoned Anglo-Dutch relations for a generation and pushed English merchants toward India, where they would eventually build an empire far larger than the Dutch ever managed.
Galileo Publishes The Assayer
Ostensibly about comets, Galileo's witty Italian treatise contained one of the most-quoted passages in the history of science: the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Pope Urban VIII, his friend, read it with delight, which made the coming trial all the more painful. The Assayer remains a masterpiece of scientific polemic and elegant Italian prose.
Papal Conclave Elects Urban VIII
Maffeo Barberini ascended to the papal throne as Urban VIII, a cultured Florentine who wrote Latin verse and befriended Galileo. He would fortify Castel Sant'Angelo, commission Bernini's baldachin in Saint Peter's, and eventually authorize the trial that silenced his old friend. The Barberini bees swarmed across Rome's monuments for two decades.