1717
Fall of Belgrade
Eugene of Savoy crossed the Sava under Ottoman fire and stormed Belgrade, ending the seventh Austro-Turkish war. The Treaty of Passarowitz that followed gave Austria its greatest Balkan extent. The Turks, humiliated, withdrew into the Tulip Era's sighs and silences. Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha turned Ottoman energies inward, cultivating gardens, printing presses, and a brief flowering of reform before the Janissaries ended it.
Ashanti Conquer Denkyira
Osei Tutu's Ashanti armies, united under the Golden Stool, smashed the Denkyira kingdom and seized control of the coastal gold trade with the Dutch. The victory confirmed Kumasi as the paramount power of the Gold Coast. European traders who had dealt with Denkyira now sent their envoys inland, bearing gifts and apprehension.
Blackbeard Captures La Concorde
Off St. Vincent, Edward Teach seized a French slave ship of forty guns and renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge. For two years his black flag, his smoking beard, his lit fuses under his hat, and his ferocious theatricality terrorized the Caribbean and Carolina coast. The Golden Age of piracy had its face.
Grand Lodge of London Formed
Four London lodges, the Goose and Gridiron, the Crown, the Apple-Tree, and the Rummer and Grapes, met at a tavern and agreed to form a Grand Lodge. Speculative Freemasonry, a fraternity of the curious, the ambitious, and the mildly mystical, would spread across Enlightenment Europe with astonishing speed. Within fifty years lodges thrived from Philadelphia to St. Petersburg, counting kings and commoners among their brethren.