1681
Pennsylvania Charter Granted
Charles II granted William Penn, a wealthy Quaker and the son of an admiral, a vast tract of land north of Maryland as payment for a debt owed the Penn family. The proprietor, promising religious toleration and fair dealing with Native Americans, founded Philadelphia the next year on the banks of the Delaware.
Moulay Ismail Consolidates Morocco
Sultan Moulay Ismail, ruling from his new capital at Meknes, deployed his fearsome Black Guard - an army of enslaved soldiers numbering over fifty thousand - to crush tribal rebellions and unify Morocco under Alaouite rule. He built palaces of staggering opulence, kept a harem of legendary proportions, and corresponded as an equal with Louis XIV.
Canal du Midi Opens
After fifteen years of labor, Pierre-Paul Riquet's canal connecting the Atlantic and Mediterranean via Toulouse and the Garonne was opened. Two hundred and forty locks carried barges over the continental divide. It was the greatest civil engineering project since the Romans and a monument to French absolutism's organizational capacity, though Riquet himself died of exhaustion months before its completion.
Comet Kirch
A German astronomer named Gottfried Kirch, observing from Coburg, became the first person to discover a comet with a telescope. Newton would use the orbit of this comet as key evidence for the universal gravitation theory he was then working out. Observational astronomy had begun its long telescopic future, and the era of naked-eye discovery was drawing to a close.