Important events in 1618:

• Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion on March 8.
• Two Catholic absentee governors, Wilhelm Grav Slavata and Jaroslav Borzita Graf Von Martinicz, sent by king-elect and near-Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, are thrown out of the window of Ferdinand's castle in Prague on May 23, beginning the Thirty Years' War. This is known as the Second Defenestration of Prague. The governors live.¹
• Pluto reaches an aphelion on July 20 (that is, it is at a point furthest from the sun). The next such occurrence was in 1866, and the next coming one should be in 2113.
• Dutch statesmen Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius are imprisoned for treason on August 29 by Maurice de Nassau, Prince of Orange.
• Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded on October 29 for alleged conspiracy against King James I of England.
• On November 13, the Synod of Dordrecht begins, its purpose being to settle the religious questions set forth by the Arminians or Remonstrants, a Dutch splinter group from Calvinism. The Synod ends on May 9, 1619, with a rejection of these views and a restatement of Orthodox Calvinism.
• The first proscenium theatre, the Teatro Farnese, is built in the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, Italy.
• Ottoman Emperor Mustafa I is deposed and is suceeded by his nephew, Osman II.
• Elector John Sigismund, margraves of Brandenburg, is given the right by Poland to inherit Ducal Prussia.
• Sir Francis Bacon is appointed Lord Chancellor of England.
• Ben Jonson, English author and dramatist, sets out to walk to his ancestral Scotland.
• William Strachey writes Historie of Travaile into Virginia Brittania, an account of the shipwreck of the Sea Adventure and of life in Jamestown.
• An appendix is published to Napier's work on logarithms in which e is mentioned for the first time.
• The krøner, a Danish coin, dates back to this year.

Births in 1618:

• Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is born on January 1.
• Francesco Maria Grimaldi, an Italian scientist who discovered the diffraction of light, is born on April 2.
• Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb of India is born on November 3.
• Simon Aurnauld de Pomponne, minister for French king Louis XIV, is born in November.
• Richard Lovelace, an English author, is born in 1618.
• English lexicographer Thomas Blount (author of Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue, the last "hard-word" dictionary) is born in 1618.
• English poet Abraham Cowley, author of the unfinished Davideis, is born in 1618.

Deaths in 1618:

• Phillip William, Prince of Orange, dies on February 20.
• Thomas West, 3^rd Baron de la Warr and English Royal Governor of Virginia, dies on June 7.
• Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, dies on August 28.
• English poet and translator Joshua Sylvester dies on September 1618.
• Sir Walter Raleigh, mentioned above, is executed on October 29.
• Archduke Maximilian III of Austria dies on November 2 in Vienna.
• French Cardinal Jacques-Davy Duperron dies on December 6.
• Italian composer Giuliano Caccini dies on December 10.
• Chief Powhatan, leader of the Powhatan tribe in Virginia and father of Pocahontas, dies.
• Bento Teixeira, a Portuguese writer, dies.

The number 1618:

• Is the first four digits of the decimal expansion of the golden ratio.
• Has a prime factorization of 1618 = 2 * 809.
• Becomes a Mersenne prime, 8191 or 2¹³ - 1, when inverted.
• Is such that 1618! + 1 has 1619 as a factor, which is minimal.
• Is a centered heptagonal number.

1617-1618-1619

17th century

¹The Catholic version of the story says that angels saved them. The Protestant version says they landed in manure.