1762
Catherine Seizes the Russian Throne
Six months after her husband Peter III alienated his guards by pro-Prussian posturing, Catherine - a minor German princess - led the Preobrazhensky regiment in a bloodless coup. Peter was strangled in custody a week later. Europe got its most formidable empress for the next thirty-four years. She would expand Russia to the Black Sea, partition Poland, correspond with Voltaire, and commission the Hermitage collection.
British Capture Havana
After a two-month siege in tropical heat, British forces stormed Morro Castle and took Havana - along with a fifth of Spain's entire navy. Yellow fever killed more redcoats than Spanish muskets did. The conquest lasted less than a year; it was traded back for Florida. The brief British occupation opened Havana to unrestricted slave imports that would transform Cuba's sugar economy for a century.
British Take Manila
A small British expedition from Madras sailed into the Philippines and, to Spain's astonishment, captured Manila. For twenty months the Union Jack flew over the cathedral. News arrived too late to matter - the Treaty of Paris had already returned it. A hint of how global this war had become.
Rousseau's Social Contract and Émile
Two books in one year: The Social Contract began 'Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.' Émile proposed raising children by their own nature. Paris banned them; Geneva burned them; readers hid them under mattresses. Jefferson and Robespierre both took notes. The modern politics of feeling was born.
Elizabeth of Russia Dies - Prussia Saved
The Tsarina's death was Frederick's 'miracle of the House of Brandenburg.' Her successor Peter III, a fanatical admirer of Frederick, not only made peace but returned every inch of Russian conquest. Prussia, which had been staring at annihilation, was abruptly handed a second life. Peter's wife Catherine, watching his pro-Prussian folly with cold eyes, was already planning the coup that would make her empress within months.
Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice
At Vienna's Burgtheater, Christoph Gluck premiered an opera that abandoned castrati ornament for dramatic truth. It was the beginning of his operatic reform - cleaner lines, fewer arias, the music serving the story. Mozart was six. European opera had its first whiff of what would become its nineteenth-century soul. The aria 'Che faro senza Euridice' remains one of the most performed pieces in the operatic repertoire.