"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
- John Donne, Meditation XVII, 1623
In the year AD 1623...
- The Thirty Years War enters its sixth year.
- Despite their brutal defeat at the hands of Gonzalo de Córdoba at the Battle of Fleurus the previous year, as well as the refusal of Frederick the Winter King to pay their armies, Protestant generals Count Ernst von Mansfeld and Duke Christian of Brunswick hatch a new plot to retake Bohemia.
- With assistance from Hungarian general Bethlen Gabor and exiled Bohemian nobleman Count Thurn, Christian raises a new army of 15,000 men and marches into Saxony, expecting Mansfeld to follow shortly with his own troops.
- Word of Christian's march reaches Catholic generalissimo Tilly, who quickly countermarches with his army of 25,000.
- Meanwhile Mansfeld sends a letter to Christian to the effect that he is out of money and low on troops and is unable to leave the Netherlands.
- Pursued by Tilly, Christian frantically retreats back toward the Netherlands. Tilly catches up with him just 5 miles shy of the safety of the Dutch border and utterly annihilates him at the Battle of Stadtlohn.
- Christian flees back to The Hague a broken man, and just three days later Frederick signs an armistice with Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. The war appears to be over. In truth, it is just getting started, and there are still 25 bloody years to go...
In the Amboina Massacre, troops of the Dutch East India Company slaughter the English factor on Ambon Island in what is now Indonesia, along with 10 Japanese samurai mercenaries and one Portuguese slave overseer that had been under the employ of the British East India Company, bringing an end to Anglo-Dutch cooperation in the Spice Islands and providing fodder for British anti-Dutch propaganda for the next hundred years or so.
Mentally insane Ottoman sultan Mustafa I is deposed in a peaceful palace coup, replaced by Murad IV.
Korean king Kwanghaegun is deposed amidst intense factional rivalries in the Korean court and exiled to Jeju Island, replaced by his nephew Injo.
Istanbul-based Armenian alchemist Avedis Zildjian founds the Zildjian cymbal-making company, after discovering in the course of his alchemical experiments that a certain combination of tin and copper rang especially clearly. The company will eventually relocate to Massachusetts in 1929.
German astronomer Wilhelm Schickard invents a "calculation clock" to help with multiplying large numbers, the first true mechanical calculating machine. The machine is destroyed by fire and its existence is forgotten until its rediscovery in the late 20th century based on drawings Schickard sent to Johannes Kepler.
English poet John Donne is nearly killed by illness, and as he recovers, he writes his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, including the famous Meditation XVII.
The "First Folio" of William Shakespeare's plays is published.
French king Louis XIII orders the construction of a small hunting lodge that will eventually grow to become the enormous Palace of Versailles.
A rule is established in the British Parliament preventing members of Parliament from resigning from office before their term is up. Eventually elaborate legal fictions will be concocted in order to circumvent this rule and allow MPs to effectively resign by becoming an officer of the crown, either as the "Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds" or the "Steward of the Manor of Northstead."
These people were born in 1623...
These people died in 1623...
1622 - 1623 - 1624
17th century
How they were made