1635
Sakoku Edicts Tighten
The Tokugawa shogunate issued the third in a series of sakoku edicts, forbidding Japanese subjects from leaving the country and Japanese abroad from returning, on pain of death. Overseas trade was funneled through a handful of ports and tightly monitored. Japan's long self-isolation was snapping shut, and the archipelago would remain sealed to most of the world for over two centuries.
France Enters the Thirty Years' War
Cardinal Richelieu, judging that Habsburg power had grown too dangerous to allow Spain and Austria another victory, declared open war on Spain and aligned France with the Protestant cause. The last and most brutal phase of the Thirty Years' War began, this time as a straightforward dynastic struggle that would devastate central Europe for another thirteen years.
Academie Francaise Founded
Richelieu, who believed language was a tool of state, formally chartered the Academie Francaise: forty scholars charged with purifying, regulating, and policing the French tongue. Their great project, a dictionary, would take nearly sixty years to publish. France had invented the linguistic civil servant, and the institution endures today as the self-appointed guardian of the French language.
Van Dyck at the Stuart Court
The Flemish master Anthony van Dyck, established in London as principal painter to Charles I, produced his great equestrian portrait of the king in armor: calm, sovereign, slightly undersized. His elegant aristocratic manner would shape English portraiture for two centuries, long after the monarch himself had lost his head. Van Dyck's vision of royal grace became the template for power depicted in paint.