1726
Gulliver's Travels Published
Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, released a satire disguised as a sea-yarn: tiny warring kingdoms, giants who found us contemptible, flying islands of useless savants, and horses more rational than men. Readers laughed first and shivered afterwards. It became, against its author's bitter expectations, a children's classic.
Montevideo Founded
Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, governor of Buenos Aires, established a fortified settlement on the northern shore of the Río de la Plata to check Portuguese encroachment from Brazil. The garrison town, named San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo, would grow into the capital of a nation that would not exist for another century.
Academy of Sciences Opens in St. Petersburg
Peter the Great had decreed it before his death; Catherine I inaugurated it. The new academy imported Euler, the Bernoullis, and a generation of German and Swiss mathematicians to a frozen capital barely twenty years old. Russia was purchasing an Enlightenment at wholesale prices, and the investment would compound for centuries.
Cardinal Fleury Takes Power in France
The gentle, patient tutor of Louis XV, now seventy-two, quietly eased the Bourbon dukes aside and took control of French government. For seventeen years, until his death at ninety, he pursued peace, stable finances, and colonial expansion. France under Fleury enjoyed one of its last genuinely prosperous generations before the Revolution.