1697
Peter's Grand Embassy
Peter I left Russia incognito, traveling through Prussia, the Netherlands, and England to study shipbuilding, artillery, navigation, and dentistry. He worked for months as a carpenter in the Dutch East India Company dockyards. No reigning European monarch had ever deliberately made himself a common laborer abroad, and the skills he gathered would fuel the transformation of Russia into a modern European power.
Last Maya Kingdom Falls at Nojpeten
A Spanish expedition crossed the lakes of Peten and stormed the island fortress of Nojpeten, capital of the Itza Maya, the last independent Maya kingdom. The conquest, nearly two centuries after Cortes, brought the final holdout of pre-Columbian Maya civilization under Spanish colonial rule. The conquerors found temples, libraries, and a people who refused to forget.
Battle of Zenta
Prince Eugene of Savoy, the short, scarred French-born commander of imperial armies, caught an Ottoman army crossing the Tisza river and annihilated it. Grand Vizier Elmas Mehmed Pasha died on the field along with thirty thousand of his men. Eugene had announced himself as the great general of the new century.
Treaty of Ryswick
The Nine Years' War between France and the Grand Alliance ended with Louis XIV recognizing William III as King of England and returning most of his conquests. France's relentless expansion had been checked for the first time. The eighteenth century's pattern of coalitions against France was being set, and the struggle for the Spanish succession was already gathering on the horizon.
Perrault Publishes Tales of Mother Goose
The French academician Charles Perrault gathered Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and Puss in Boots into a slim volume of fairy tales he attributed, with courtly modesty, to old wives and nursemaids. The Histoires ou contes du temps passe invented a literary genre and gave every childhood since its library of nightmares and wishes.