1643
Louis XIV Becomes King of France
Four-year-old Louis, son of Louis XIII, inherited the French throne on his father's death. His mother Anne of Austria ruled as regent with Cardinal Mazarin beside her. The child who would one day call himself the Sun King learned early that monarchy was personal, ceremonial, and precarious, lessons he would repay with seventy-two years on the throne and the palace at Versailles.
New England Confederation Formed
Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed a mutual defense league against the French, Dutch, and Native American nations. The United Colonies of New England were the first experiment in intercolonial union in North America, and would suggest models of federation to later generations. The confederation lasted four decades and demonstrated both the promise and the friction of shared colonial governance.
Battle of Rocroi
A twenty-one-year-old French prince, the duc d'Enghien, led French forces to a crushing victory over the Spanish tercios in the Ardennes. The legendary Spanish infantry was finally broken, and with it the myth of Habsburg military invincibility. Spain's great-power century was ending in smoke, and the battlefield dominance of France that would define the next seventy years had announced itself.
Torricelli Invents the Barometer
The Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli, Galileo's last student, filled a glass tube with mercury, inverted it in a dish, and noticed the column rose to about thirty inches regardless of tube length. He had discovered atmospheric pressure and, incidentally, the vacuum. Weather forecasting would not be the same, and physics had gained a new instrument for measuring the invisible weight of air.