1629
Charles I Dissolves Parliament
Furious at opposition to his taxes and religious policies, Charles I dissolved the English parliament and began an eleven-year period of personal rule. He would raise money through medieval prerogatives like ship money, antagonize the Scots, and set fire to a slow-burning constitutional crisis that would eventually consume his throne, his freedom, and his life.
Shah Abbas the Great Dies
The Safavid ruler who had rebuilt Persia into a first-rank power, pushed back the Ottomans and Uzbeks, and turned Isfahan into a jewel of Islamic urbanism died at Mazandaran. His grandson inherited a dazzling empire that would begin its slow, ornate decline almost immediately. Abbas had raised Persia higher than any ruler since the Sasanians, but left no successor equal to holding it.
Massachusetts Bay Company Chartered
A group of Puritan merchants and country gentry obtained a royal charter to settle the coast north of Plymouth. By a happy oversight, the charter did not specify where the company had to meet, so the Puritans took it and themselves to New England, out of reach of royal oversight.
Dutch Take Pernambuco
A Dutch West India Company fleet occupied the sugar-rich Portuguese captaincy of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, beginning Dutch Brazil. Rich Sephardic refugees from Amsterdam arrived at Recife and founded the first synagogue in the Americas. Sugar, capital, and Jewish commerce briefly converged on the Brazilian coast, creating a multiethnic colonial experiment unique in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world.