1651
Hobbes Publishes Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes, a seventy-three-year-old royalist in exile in Paris, published an imposing folio arguing that humans in the state of nature lived lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and that only an absolute sovereign could secure peace. Political philosophy in English had found its first great masterwork, and the debate between liberty and security its most provocative framing.
Aztec Bible of Sahagun Completed
The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun's enormous twelve-volume encyclopedia of Aztec culture, compiled in Nahuatl with Mexica informants, was suppressed and copied in secret. It would be rediscovered centuries later as the single most important documentary source for pre-Columbian Mexico. Ethnography had been invented, then hidden in a vault, preserving a vanishing civilization in meticulous detail.
Battle of Worcester
Charles II, the son of the executed king, led a Scottish army into England and was annihilated by Cromwell at Worcester. Charles famously hid in an oak tree at Boscobel and escaped to France in disguise. Cromwell called it his crowning mercy. The civil wars were over, and the young pretender began nine years of penniless continental exile.
Navigation Act
The Rump Parliament passed an act requiring goods imported to England or its colonies to arrive in English ships or in ships of the country of origin. Aimed at Dutch carrying trade, it provoked the first Anglo-Dutch War and set a template for mercantilist empire that would last two centuries.
Velazquez Paints Innocent X
In Rome on his second visit, Diego Velazquez painted the scowling, red-faced Pope Innocent X seated in his vestments. The pope himself said it was troppo vero, too true, and it remains the most unflinching ecclesiastical portrait ever painted. Francis Bacon would later base his screaming popes on it, finding in Velazquez's honesty a mirror for twentieth-century anguish.