The world in AD 1650

Africa

Gondar had been the fixed seat of Ethiopia’s kings for 14 years. The Zamani Project at the University of Cape Town, which surveyed the site in 2018, records that Ethiopian rulers from the 13th to the 17th centuries moved their royal camps often until King Fasilides settled at Gondar and made it a permanent capital in 1636; the compound that grew around his castle, Fasil Ghebbi, was eventually enclosed by a wall 900 meters long and held palaces, churches and monasteries. On the Atlantic side of the continent, Kongo was working its European alliances. The Royal Museum for Central Africa records that Kongo armies had fought alongside the Dutch after a Dutch fleet seized Luanda in 1641, pushing the Portuguese back to their fort at Massangano, and that Dom Miguel de Castro served as Kongo’s ambassador in the Netherlands during the 1640s.

• 'Den rechten eygenaer off den vremden innemer': the Cape, 1652–16601652
• A 900-meter wall and a fixed capital: Fasilides at Gondar, 16361636
• An envoy to Luanda in 1622: Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba1622
• Fort Jesus, Mombasa: a 1593 cornerstone and a siege of 33 months1696

West Asia

Kandahar was in Persian hands. Shah Abbas II, still in his late teens, had led an army east in the summer of 1648 and took the city after a brief siege in February 1649, on February 11 by Rudi Matthee’s Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the shah, on February 22 by the Iranica article on Kandahar that Matthee wrote with Hiroyuki Mashita; the two entries put his army at about 50,000 and 40,000 respectively. The Kandahar article reports that Dutch observers credited superior Persian artillery, but suggests the victory owed most to a Mughal command split between Shah Jahan’s sons Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. The same article cites the French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s claim that the overland cloth trade from India through Kandahar had fallen off by the 1650s.

• A fire in Istanbul, September 2, 1633, and the coffeehouses closed1633
• Naqsh-e Jahan: the 524-meter square of Shah Abbas's Isfahan1611
• October 21 to November 19, 1604: Julfa emptied, New Julfa built1605
• Why did Suleiman turn back from Vienna in 1529, and what came next?1529

Europe

Descartes had been in Sweden only a few months. Gary Hatfield’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy records that the philosopher accepted Queen Christina’s invitation in 1649, wrote at her request the statutes of a Swedish royal academy, fell ill on the day he gave them to her, and never recovered. Farther west, Scotland had refused to follow England into a republic after the execution of Charles I in 1649 and stood by his son, the future Charles II, and in the summer of 1650 Cromwell invaded. A 2020 PLOS One study led by Andrew Millard of Durham University’s archaeology department records that the Scots were routed at Dunbar on September 3; Cromwell’s own estimates put his prisoners at possibly 9,000 to 10,000, he released the old and injured and marched about 4,000 south, and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, governor of Newcastle, reported 3,000 held in Durham Cathedral, which had stood empty since Parliament suppressed the bishops in 1646.

• Ninety thousand guilders at Alkmaar's orphan sale, February 5, 16371637
• London Gazette no. 85: Pudding Lane, an east wind and a pillar1666
• August 10, 1628: the Vasa sank and the inquest blamed no one1628
• March 12, 1610: a Venice pamphlet with four new moons around Jupiter1610

East Asia

The Manchu Qing dynasty had ruled China since 1644, and Korea’s Choson kings had paid tribute to the Manchus since invasions in 1627 and 1636, by the account of Columbia University’s Asia for Educators. In the middle of spring 1650, by his own inscription, the painter Wang Jianzhang finished a handscroll called Spring Rain Thatched Hut “on the Ruoye Stream” for a friend and patron, Gong Weiliu. The Cleveland Museum of Art, which owns the scroll, records that Gong had earned the prestigious jinshi degree in 1643, saw his official career cut short by the collapse of the Ming the next year, and retired to a garden at his home in Taizhou, in Jiangsu province. Twelve colophons by his contemporaries are mounted with the painting, several of them dated between 1647 and 1649.

• Thirty-six of sixty-four: Hamel's Journael and the Sillok, 16531653
• Six hundred feet by one hundred and twenty: Dejima, Nagasaki, 16411641
• Nerchinsk, 1689: a Qing-Russian treaty negotiated in Latin1689
• January 24, 1601: a clock and a world map arrive at the Ming court1601

South Asia

Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan and his heir apparent, turned 35 in March 1650. Annemarie Schimmel’s Encyclopaedia Iranica entry describes a prince more drawn to Sufi philosophy than to politics or war: in 1646 he had finished Resala-ye haqqnoma, a short study in the tradition of Ibn Arabi, and in 1652 he would compile a collection of sayings attributed to 107 Sufi masters. His one major command, the attempt to win back Kandahar from Persia, ended in failure; Schimmel dates it to 1652, and the Iranica article on Kandahar to 1653, after two earlier Mughal sieges in 1651 and 1652 were lifted, the first for the onset of winter and the second because Uzbeks invaded.

• Three records of one escape: Shivaji at Agra, August 16661666
• Written by the humble faqir Amanat Khan: the Taj Mahal, 1631–16531632
• A coach, virginals and two farmans: Roe before Jahangir, 1616–16181616
• How did Akbar hold together an empire of many faiths?1575

Central Asia

Two Uzbek courts divided the Tuqay-Timurid lands. R. D. McChesney’s Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Central Asia records that a faction of Bukharan amirs persuaded Abd al-Aziz to take Bukhara from his father, Nadr Muhammad, who was sent back to Balkh, and that Abd al-Aziz was proclaimed khan of Transoxiana near Khojand on April 27, 1645. When Nadr Muhammad appealed to Shah Jahan, a Mughal army occupied the region, but guerrilla war waged by Abd al-Aziz and his brother Subhan Quli forced it out in 1647. Nadr Muhammad’s last four years at Balkh, McChesney writes, were marked by a struggle between his two sons for control of the region, and in 1651 he handed Balkh and Badakhshan to Subhan Quli.

• A beast, a deer and a sun on a madrasa: the Sher-Dor, Samarkand1636
• Peter's decree of February 14, 1716, and a column split in five1717
• Bukhara, 1558: an Englishman finds the Silk Road trade too small1558
• Four scripts on one stone: the Torghuts' march to the Ili, 17711771

The Americas

English and Dutch colonists were drawing a line through the Connecticut River valley. Nancy Finlay, formerly curator of graphics at the Connecticut Historical Society, writes that the Dutch had built their trading post, the House of Hope, at the mouth of the Little River in 1633, that Thomas Hooker’s party founded Hartford just upstream three years later, and that in 1650 representatives of New Netherland and New England met at Hartford and signed a treaty provisionally giving up Dutch claims to the valley. Some of the men taken at Dunbar would cross the same ocean. The National Park Service at Saugus Iron Works records that 61 Scottish prisoners ended up working at the ironworks in Saugus, Massachusetts, as indentured servants who could win their freedom by redeeming their sale price or serving out their term.

• Knotted cords and a moved date: the Pueblo Revolt of August 10, 16801680
• Cleared in 2022: Salem's last conviction, and the court of 16921692
• CROATOAN on a post, 1590: John White returns to Roanoke1587
• Twelve books, 2,446 pages: the Florentine Codex Philip II confiscated1577

Oceania

Europe’s knowledge of Australia had stopped growing in 1644. The State Library of New South Wales holds the Tasman Map, the only record of Abel Tasman’s two voyages for the Dutch East India Company between 1642 and 1644, on which he charted the coast of Tasmania, the west coast of New Zealand, parts of Tonga and Fiji, and much of northern Australia; the library suggests the map may have been drawn in the late 1640s under Tasman’s chief pilot, Franz Jacobszoon Visscher, and the merchant Isaac Gilsemans. Until James Cook’s voyages from 1770, the library notes, Tasman’s charts marked the limit of what Europeans knew of the continent. No written source records events on those coasts in 1650.

• December 19, 1642: four Dutch sailors die in a bay Māori already held1642
• Pelsaert's journal, June 4, 1629: the Batavia on Morning Reef1629
• Australia del Espiritu Santo: Quiros at a bay in Vanuatu, 16061606
• Taputapuātea, the marae complex at Ōpoa on Ra'iatea1600

Sources

• Zamani Project, University of Cape Town: Fasil Ghebbi, Gondar
• Royal Museum for Central Africa: The Kongo Kingdom
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: ʿAbbās II (Rudi Matthee)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Kandahar iv. From the Mongol Invasion through the Safavid Era (Rudi Matthee and Hiroyuki Mashita)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: René Descartes (Gary Hatfield)
• Andrew R. Millard et al., 'Scottish soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar 1650: A prosopographical approach to a skeletal assemblage,' PLOS One (December 21, 2020)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Key Points across East Asia, 1450-1750
• Cleveland Museum of Art: Wang Jianzhang, Spring Rain Thatched Hut (2008.108)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Dārā Šokōh (Annemarie Schimmel)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Central Asia vi. In the 16th-18th Centuries (R. D. McChesney)
• Connecticut History, a CTHumanities Project: Nancy Finlay, 'Reckoning with the Dutch: the Treaty of Hartford, 1650'
• U.S. National Park Service, Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site: UK Archaeologists to Present Lecture on Scottish Prisoners of War
• State Library of New South Wales: The Tasman Map