1687
Newton Publishes Principia
After eighteen months of obsessive labor in his Cambridge rooms, Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in three slim Latin volumes. Three laws of motion and one law of gravitation explained why apples fall and planets orbit using the same mathematics. The universe had been unified on paper, and natural philosophy had its greatest single achievement.
Battle of Mohacs
Duke Charles of Lorraine's imperial army destroyed the Ottoman forces at the second Battle of Mohacs, reversing the catastrophe of 1526. The Hungarian Diet in Pressburg declared the Habsburg crown of Hungary hereditary. The long Ottoman retreat from central Europe was now a rout in progress, and within a decade the Habsburgs would control nearly all of historic Hungary.
Parthenon Shelled
A Venetian mortar fired into the Acropolis of Athens, which the Ottomans were using as a gunpowder magazine, scored a direct hit on the Parthenon. The explosion destroyed the middle section of a temple that had stood for two thousand years. Europe had just discovered the archaeological cost of warfare.
Acqua Alta in Venice
An unusually high flood, the worst in living memory, submerged Piazza San Marco and the Rialto for days. Merchants rowed gondolas through their own warehouses. The event was the most severe acqua alta before the famous flood of 1966 and a reminder that the lagoon city was already adjusting to a world that would one day drown it.