1713
Treaty of Utrecht
After thirteen years of war, European diplomats signed a settlement that let a Bourbon keep Spain so long as its crowns stayed separate. Britain took Gibraltar, Minorca, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and the asiento slave contract. A new European balance, held in London as much as in Vienna, had been put in place.
Kangxi's Imperial Encyclopedia
In Beijing, the Kangxi Emperor commissioned what would become the Gujin Tushu Jicheng, a ten-thousand-chapter compendium distilling every field of Chinese knowledge. Printed a decade later in copper-plate movable type, it remains the largest encyclopedia ever completed. The emperor understood that empire was as much an archive as an army.
Pragmatic Sanction Proclaimed
Emperor Charles VI, lacking a male heir, promulgated a decree allowing his eldest daughter to inherit the Habsburg lands. He would spend the next twenty-seven years bribing and badgering the courts of Europe to accept it. At his death they would mostly tear the paper up, and Maria Theresa would fight.
Papal Bull Unigenitus
Pope Clement XI, under heavy French pressure, condemned one hundred and one Jansenist propositions drawn from the Bible commentaries of Pasquier Quesnel. Half the French church was scandalized. The long Jansenist controversy, which would shake the Gallican church for a century, had received its sharpest papal definition. Grace, once again, was political.