1653
Taj Mahal Completed
Twenty-one years after the foundations were laid, the mausoleum of Mumtaz Mahal at Agra was declared finished. Its white marble dome, inlaid with semiprecious stones, rose above a garden of flowing water. Shah Jahan had spent perhaps thirty-two million rupees and achieved the architectural masterpiece of the Mughal empire, a monument to conjugal love that travelers would call the most beautiful building on earth.
Cromwell Becomes Lord Protector
Under a new written constitution drafted by army officers, Oliver Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland in Westminster Hall. He was offered a crown but refused it, settling for near-royal power under a republican name. In practice he governed as a military dictator tempered by occasional parliaments and a persistent Puritan conscience.
Cromwell Dissolves the Rump
Oliver Cromwell, impatient with the lingering Rump Parliament, marched a company of soldiers into the Commons, pointed at the mace and called it a bauble, and ordered the members out. Take away these baubles, he said. The last remnant of the Long Parliament was gone; the Protectorate loomed, and England's experiment in republican government had taken an authoritarian turn.
Blaise Pascal's Provincial Letters
The French mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal published the first of his Lettres provinciales, anonymous broadsides savaging the casuistry of the Jesuits with devastating wit. Written in lucid, conversational French, they invented modern polemical journalism and wounded the Society of Jesus more deeply than any papal censure. Voltaire later called them the first French prose worth reading.
Aurangzeb Conquers the Deccan Forts
As Mughal viceroy of the Deccan, the ambitious prince Aurangzeb besieged and captured the fortress of Golconda and terrorized the sultanates of southern India. His campaigns were efficient, ruthless, and personally devout - he prayed between bombardments. The experience hardened him for the fratricidal war that would soon deliver the Peacock Throne.