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Keichō 20, fifth month, seventh day

On that day — 3 June 1615 — the Toyotomi field army fought Tokugawa Ieyasu's forces south of Osaka Castle in the final Battle of Tennōji–Okayama.

The Battle of Dōmyōji had been fought on the preceding Japanese-calendar day, 2 June, and the two are often collapsed into one anniversary. It pitted Gotō Mototsugu, Susukida Kanesuke, and Sanada Nobushige against Tokugawa commanders including Date Masamune and Katakura Shigenaga; Gotō and Susukida were killed there.

Three charges from Chausuyama

Sanada Nobushige — popularly called Yukimura in later literature — advanced from Chausuyama and made three assaults toward Ieyasu's headquarters before he was killed near Yasui Shrine.

Toyotomi Hideyori, head of the house, remained associated with the castle's defence rather than personally leading the attacks that later retellings assign to him.

The castle falls, the line ends

The Toyotomi field defence collapsed and Osaka Castle fell on the seventh day of the fifth month. Hideyori and his mother Yodo-dono died the following day, after an unsuccessful appeal for their lives.

The date, the locations, and the outcome are firm. The hour-by-hour reconstructions and the more colourful battlefield anecdotes come from later chronicles and do not carry the same weight.

The first day of the forty-fourth Wanli year

On 17 February 1616 Nurhaci proclaimed himself han, or khan, and adopted the reign title Tianming.

The proclamation was made in the Octagonal Hall at Hetu Ala. He fixed the state name as Jin — conventionally called Later Jin by historians — and instituted a formal New Year's audience with ceremonial regalia and music.

What he did not become

The act established an independent Jurchen-ruled regime under Nurhaci's khanship. It did not make him ruler of Ming China, which remained under the Wanli emperor.

'Qing Taizu' is retrospective: Hong Taiji bestowed that temple name after Nurhaci's death. Even 'Later Jin' is under review — a recent source study finds no conclusive contemporary evidence that 'Later' formed part of the official title, and Jin, Great Jin, or Aisin gurun are the safer contemporary forms.

Built before it was proclaimed

The new regime rested on institutions already finished: the Eight Banners, completed in 1615, and an adapted Jurchen writing system begun after 1599. The Palace Museum chronology records five ministers and ten jargūci established in 1615, before the proclamation rather than after it.

From that day Nurhaci's court dated its rule by the Tianming era and operated as the Jin khanate from Hetu Ala.

Open war against the Ming came later, with the Seven Grievances in 1618.

Around 1616, with no starting day

Retrospective accounts indicate that one or more severe epidemics began among Indigenous communities in coastal New England around 1616. No source identifies a particular starting day, month, or village with confidence.

The best-known affected area ran through Wampanoag and neighbouring communities in southern coastal New England, and Patuxet — around present-day Plymouth Harbor — was severely depopulated. What later observers described as one catastrophe may have been several overlapping or successive outbreaks.

Symptoms without a diagnosis

Surviving descriptions mention fever, headache, nosebleeds, jaundice, and skin lesions. These sparse reports have produced numerous proposed diagnoses rather than a settled identification.

Leptospirosis with Weil syndrome is one published proposal; its authors, John S. Marr and John T. Cathey, explicitly described it as a hypothesis rather than a definite diagnosis, and other authorities have argued for smallpox or other infections. Importation of an Old World infection is plausible, but the organism, vessel, reservoir, and route remain unproved.

What the numbers can and cannot bear

Published mortality estimates run from about one-third to as high as 90% in affected local populations, and they lack reliable numerators and denominators. Salisbury's figures put the pre-epidemic Wampanoag population at 21,000 to 24,000 and Patuxet at about 2,000.

John Smith's later account described successive plagues extending nearly 200 miles along the coast and about 15 miles inland.

In 1619 Thomas Dermer reported finding settlements that had been populous a few years earlier standing empty.

Late August 1619, at Point Comfort

In late August 1619 the White Lion reached Point Comfort in the English colony of Virginia, carrying what the colonial secretary John Rolfe called '20 and odd' captive Africans. Governor George Yeardley and the cape merchant Abraham Peirsey acquired them from Captain John Colyn Jope in exchange for provisions the ship needed.

Rolfe's letter says only 'about the latter end of August.' The familiar 20 August is not established by it; the National Park Service now gives 25 August as the believed date.

Where they came from

The White Lion was an English privateer operating under Dutch authority, not the Dutch warship Rolfe assumed. It and the Treasurer had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista in the Gulf of Mexico, which was carrying enslaved people from West Central Africa toward New Spain.

Research indicates the Virginia captives were probably Kimbundu-speaking people taken amid Portuguese-Imbangala campaigns against Ndongo, though their precise individual origins are not documented.

Where they went

Some of the Africans were taken upriver to Jamestown and Flowerdew Hundred. Three or four days later the Treasurer reached Point Comfort with more captives and sold two or three before sailing on to Bermuda.

'Twenty and odd' is deliberately imprecise. Virginia's muster of March 1620 counted 32 Africans in the colony — 15 male and 17 female.

Their legal classification under 1619 Virginia law is uncertain, because race-based hereditary slavery had not yet been codified. Their factual condition — capture, sale, and involuntary labour — is not uncertain.

London, 1620

A first edition of Bacon's Latin Instauratio magna appeared in London in 1620, printed by the royal printer John Bill. Its second part carried the running title Novum organum.

The volume presented that second part as one stage of Bacon's planned reconstruction of knowledge, and followed it with a preliminary sketch for a third part, the Parasceve on natural and experimental history. The engraved title page, signed by Simon de Passe, shows ships passing the Pillars of Hercules.

Three tables, then twenty-seven more things to look at

The work set out Bacon's eliminative induction: observations organized into tables of presence, absence, and degree, followed by exclusions and further investigative steps.

The tables were only the opening machinery. Book II adds 27 further classes of 'prerogative instances' — and the table of absence pairs the warming rays of the Sun with the apparently non-warming rays of the Moon, so that light itself can be excluded as the form of heat.

Four idols

The same volume published Bacon's four classes of intellectual error — the Idols of the Tribe, Cave, Market, and Theatre — as obstacles investigators had to guard against.

Bacon's title deliberately answered the Organon, the collection of six logical works that ancient commentators grouped under that later name; Aristotle himself did not so title the collection.

Publication did not complete the larger Instauratio magna, most of which Bacon left unfinished.

12 April 1633, at the Palace of the Holy Office

On 12 April 1633 Galileo appeared in Rome before Commissary General Vincenzo Maculano and the prosecutor Carlo Sinceri, and formally swore to tell the truth.

He said the Florentine inquisitor had ordered him to Rome and that he believed the summons concerned his recently printed Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He told the tribunal he had made the journey in a litter.

The book on the table

Shown a Florence 1632 copy of the Dialogue, Galileo identified it and acknowledged that its entire contents had been written by him.

He put the writing at seven or eight years, not continuously, beginning ten or twelve years before the hearing.

What did not happen that day

Questioned about the 1616 injunction, Galileo recalled Cardinal Bellarmine ordering him not to hold or defend Copernicanism, but said he did not remember the broader wording 'teach' or 'in any way whatever.'

At the deposition's end he was confined to a room in the officials' dormitory 'in lieu of prison,' forbidden to leave without permission, and sworn to silence.

No conviction was delivered on 12 April. The sentence and abjuration came on 22 June, and its formula was that Galileo was 'vehemently suspected of heresy' — not that he was a convicted heretic.

1633: the first of five

In 1633 the Tokugawa shogunate, under Tokugawa Iemitsu, issued the first of five orders later grouped together as the Kan'ei 'sakoku edicts.'

That grouping is retrospective. The contemporary machinery was kaikin — maritime restriction — and no contemporary policy used sakoku to name a single national-isolation law. The order ran to seventeen articles and is dated Kan'ei 10, second month, twenty-eighth day.

What it actually prohibited

It prohibited Japanese ships from sailing abroad unless they carried the required shogunal authorization. It did not yet ban every Japanese overseas voyage, and the red-seal licensed-voyage system continued in a narrowed form.

It also drew a human line at five years: Japanese who had resided overseas longer than that faced restrictions on returning.

One step, not a wall

The order was one stage in a tightening system of control over seafaring, foreign commerce, Christianity, and the Nagasaki administration. Four more followed, in 1634, 1635, 1636, and 1639.

No single incident is securely established as its trigger — and the Shimabara-Amakusa uprising often named as the cause of the policy did not begin until 1637, four years later.

The eleventh day of the fourth lunar month

On the eleventh day of the fourth lunar month of 1636 — May in the modern calendar — Hong Taiji formally assumed the title of emperor and proclaimed the Qing empire at Mukden, the existing Manchu capital.

At dawn he led Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese officials from the palace out to the suburban Altar of Heaven and Earth, where the participants were arranged by rank.

Three sticks of incense, nine prostrations

Hong Taiji took the altar's central position, made the offerings, and read a prepared declaration addressed to Heaven.

The offerings were three sticks of incense, three bolts of silk, and three offerings of wine. Each presentation was followed by three genuflections and nine prostrations.

What changed, and what was already true

The proclamation replaced the polity's Jin-associated identity with Da Qing, or Daicing, and publicly turned its khan into an emperor presiding over a multiethnic imperial order. It followed the 1635 collapse of the Chahar Mongol polity, whose submission brought with it a purported Yuan imperial seal — an object whose origin, authenticity, and legitimating force specialists still contest.

Mukden was not chosen as capital that year. Nurhaci had captured Shenyang and Liaoyang in 1621 and moved the capital to Shenyang in 1625.

And the empire proclaimed in 1636 did not yet hold China: the Qing took Beijing only in 1644.

12 April 1638, at a ruined castle

Tokugawa forces launched their final assault on the rebels' stronghold — the ruined Hara Castle on the Shimabara Peninsula — on 12 April 1638. Information reaching the besiegers indicated the defenders' food and ammunition were nearly spent.

About 30,000 people had crowded into the abandoned fortress: peasants, former samurai, Christians, and their families. The hunger-weakened defenders were overwhelmed, and the fall of Hara ended organized resistance.

Where the Dutch were

At the shogunate's request, the Dutch East India Company factor Nicolaes Couckebacker had reluctantly supplied naval and shore bombardment earlier in the siege — 426 rounds fired into Hara between 24 February and 12 March 1638.

They withdrew on 12 March and took no part in the storming.

12 April, or 15 April

The capture was followed by a massacre of the remaining rebel population, which included combatants, women, and children. The rebels' religious and symbolic leader was the youth Masuda Shirō, commonly called Amakusa Shirō.

The anniversary depends on where a historian draws the line. The strongest scholarly source dates the assault and the fall of Hara to 12 April, while some modern chronologies carry surviving resistance and killing through 15 April.

Paris, late August 1641

Michel Soly published René Descartes's first Latin edition of Meditationes de prima philosophia in Paris in late August 1641. No secure day of publication has been established.

The printed volume contained six Meditations together with six sets of objections from readers and Descartes's replies to them.

A debate, printed

That format made the publication itself a staged philosophical argument, with objections from figures including Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, and Antoine Arnauld. Marin Mersenne had circulated the manuscript, collected the criticisms, and helped arrange publication.

The volume was addressed to the dean and doctors of the Paris Faculty of Theology, from whom Descartes sought correction, protection, and public endorsement.

A title promising more than the book delivers

The title page announced demonstrations of God's existence and of the soul's immortality. The six meditations do not in fact present a proof of immortality — the 1642 title substituted the real distinction of mind and body.

Descartes was unhappy enough with the printer's errors to begin work almost immediately on a corrected edition, published at Amsterdam in January 1642.

Monday, 22 August 1642

On 22 August 1642 Charles I had his royal standard raised at Nottingham — the conventional formal opening of the First English Civil War.

The ceremony summoned the king's supporters to arms against the forces commanded for Parliament by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. It was a symbolic declaration of war rather than the first violence: localized seizures of arms and fortified places were already under way.

What a witness remembered

An eyewitness later testified that gentlemen carried the standard from the castle to the adjoining hill, preceded by a herald, and that it was erected amid shouting, drums, and trumpets, with Charles present. Contemporary narratives name Sir Edmund Verney, the Knight Marshal, as its bearer.

The later paintings of a grand ceremony are not eyewitness images, and the testimony suggests a poorly attended event.

Few came

Charles attracted few recruits at Nottingham, and the standard reportedly blew down in the storm that night. He soon moved west in search of a stronger recruiting base.

The date itself carries a wrinkle: 22 August is confirmed by the title of a contemporary pamphlet, but Clarendon's narrative produced a long-running 25 August variant, and some accounts distinguish an initial raising inside the castle precincts from a later one on nearby Standard Hill.

25 April 1644

Li Zicheng's Shun forces had surrounded Beijing on 23 April 1644 and failed to secure the Chongzhen emperor's surrender. On 25 April they entered the capital with little or no resistance.

In the first hours of that day the emperor went to Jingshan, immediately north of the Forbidden City, and died by hanging. The Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell saw him ride past the Jesuit residence on the way toward Coal Hill; Li entered the city later the same day.

Not a sack, at first

Li's troops initially behaved with restraint. Confiscations and torture of former Ming officials began afterwards, followed by broader looting — so describing the entry itself as a sack collapses the sequence.

Several details stay unsettled. Accounts differ on whether Chongzhen used a rope or a sash and on the precise tree or spot at Jingshan, and some chronologies place the opening of the gates late on 24 April.

Forty-two days

By the end of 25 April the Shun regime held the Ming capital and the Beijing-based imperial government had ceased to function. Li's control of the city lasted roughly 42 days.

Chongzhen was the last Ming emperor to rule from Beijing, not the last person to claim the Ming throne. Ming claimants and loyalist governments continued in southern China until 1662.