1624 (thing)

"There was such merriment, hubbub and applause that even if I had been many leagues away it would not have been possible for me not to have taken notice of it."

- The Spanish ambassador to England, complaining to King James I
about Thomas Middleton's play A Game At Chesse

In the year AD 1624...

• The Thirty Years' War enters its seventh year. With the Protestant armies thoroughly defeated and Frederick the Winter King having sued for peace, the war seems over. However, England, France, the Dutch, Sweden, Denmark, Savoy, Venice, and Brandenburg unite together into an anti-Hapsburg, anti-Spanish alliance, formalized in a series of treaties, setting the stage for the Danish Intervention the following year.
• A Dutch fleet under Admiral Piet Hein captures and ransacks Salvador, at that time the capital of Brazil, marking the first of 30 years of Dutch incursions along the Brazilian coast.
• In France Cardinal Richelieu cements his hold on power by having the prime minister, Charles, duc de La Vieuville, imprisoned on charges of corruption and having himself named prime minister in his place.
• Portuguese Jesuit priest António de Andrade becomes the first European to visit Tibet.
• The Dutch establish a trading post and fort on a costal islet that will eventually grow to become the major city of Tainan in southern Taiwan.
• The Tokugawa shogunate bans Spaniards from visiting Japan.
• On the logic that smoking tobacco promotes sneezing which in turn too closely resembles sexual ecstasy, Pope Urban VIII issues a papal bull banning smoking on pain of excommunication from the Catholic Church.
• The Virginia Colony is so unprofitable that it has its charter revoked and is taken over as a crown colony of England.
• At the Globe Theatre in London, William Shakespeare's old acting troupe the King's Men perform Thomas Middleton's play A Game at Chess, an elaborate and thinly veiled satire of Anglo-Spanish relations, creating a city-wide sensation until the play is banned after nine performances for being too politically sensitive. The Globe Theatre is temporarily shut down and Middleton and the players are prosecuted for the crime of portraying the king on stage (it was obvious that the "White King" of the chess match was King James I). Although they are acquitted, Middleton is blackballed and never writes another play.

These people were born in 1624...

• Sino-Japanese pirate king and ruler of Taiwan Koxinga.
• Japanese empress Meishō.
• English religious dissenter George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, aka the Quakers.
• Japanese poet Kitamura Kigin.
• French naval commander Jean II d'Estrées.

These people died in 1624...

• German mystic Jakob Böhme.
• Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin.
• Angolan king Mbandi, of suicide, succeeded by his sister Queen Nzinga.
• English nobleman Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, one of Shakespeare's patrons, usually identified with the "Fair Youth" figure in Shakespeare's Sonnets.
• Japanese warlord Fukushima Masanori, remembered as one of the "Seven Spears of Shizugatake."
• German astronomer Simon Marius.

1623 - 1624 - 1625

17th century

How they were made