1659
Treaty of the Pyrenees
After twenty-four years of war, France and Spain signed a peace along the mountain border that transferred Roussillon and Artois to France and betrothed the Spanish infanta Maria Theresa to Louis XIV. Spain's European dominance was finished; France's was beginning. The center of gravity of Europe had moved, and the marriage clause would later give Louis a pretext for claiming the Spanish throne.
Afzal Khan Slain by Shivaji
At the fortress of Pratapgad in the Western Ghats, the Maratha warrior Shivaji met the Bijapur general Afzal Khan in what was supposed to be a peace parley. Shivaji, concealing steel tiger claws in his fist, disemboweled the larger man in a single embrace. The ambush launched the Maratha Empire and became the stuff of legend.
Jamaica Gains Synagogue
Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil, via Amsterdam, established a synagogue in Port Royal, Jamaica. The Sephardic diaspora was now woven into English Atlantic commerce, financing sugar plantations, running trans-shipment routes, and translating between Iberian and northern European trade worlds. Global capitalism had a specific religious infrastructure, and the wandering communities of the Jewish diaspora provided crucial commercial intelligence.
Huygens Describes Saturn's Rings
In his treatise Systema Saturnium, Christiaan Huygens finally explained the strange arms that Galileo had puzzled over decades earlier: Saturn was surrounded by a thin flat ring nowhere touching the planet. Telescopes had explained the most peculiar object in the solar system, and Huygens's elegant solution demonstrated how improved optics could resolve mysteries that had baffled the greatest minds of the previous generation.
Vermeer Paints Girl Reading a Letter
In a quiet room in Delft, Johannes Vermeer began painting the intimate domestic scenes that would make him the most private genius of the Dutch Golden Age. His Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, bathed in cool left-hand light, rendered silence visible. He would produce fewer than forty paintings in his lifetime, each one a held breath.