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Ferdinand of Aragon marries Isabella of Castile in Valladolid, thus beginning a cooperative reign that would unite all the dominions of Spain and elevate the nation to a dominant world power. -
Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547.
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Elizabeth succeeded to the throne on her half-sister's death in November 1558. She was very well-educated (fluent in five languages), and had inherited intelligence, determination and shrewdness from both parents.
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The Edict of Nantes, issued under Henry of Navarre after he ascended to the French throne as Henry IV, effectively ended the French Wars of Religion by granting official tolerance to Protestantism.
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On January 16, 1605, Miguel de Cervantes' El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, better known as Don Quixote, is published. The book is considered by many to be the first modern novel and one of the greatest novels of all time.
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The Thirty Years' War was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, lasting from 1618 to 1648.
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In 1628 the English Parliament sent this statement of civil liberties to King Charles I. The next recorded milestone in the development of human rights was the Petition of Right, produced in 1628 by the English Parliament and sent to Charles I as a statement of civil liberties. -
The reign of Louis XIV is often referred to as “Le Grand Siècle” (the Great Century), forever associated with the image of an absolute monarch and a strong, centralized state.
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The Long Parliament was an English Parliament which lasted from 1640 until 1660. It followed the fiasco of the Short Parliament, which had convened for only three weeks during the spring of 1640 after an 11-year parliamentary absence.
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The Peace of Westphalia is the collective name for two peace treaties signed in October 1648 in the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster. -
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan is a book written by Thomas Hobbes and published in 1651. Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan.
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But England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, when England was governed as a republic led by Oliver Cromwell. -
He adopted the title of Emperor in place of the old title of Tsar in 1721, and founded and developed the city of Saint Petersburg, which remained the capital of Russia until 1918.
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The Glorious Revolution[a] is the term first used in 1689 to summarise events leading to the deposition of James II and VII of England, Ireland, and Scotland in November 1688, and his replacement by his daughter Mary II and her husband and James's nephew William III of Orange, de facto ruler of the Dutch Republic.
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John Locke's Two Treatises of Government were published anonymously in 1689. In it, Locke proposed that government emerges from the consent of the government to protect their natural rights, which is the thesis of what is now called social contract theory. -
An Act declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject, and settling the Succession of the Crown. -
Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building, Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time and is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music. -
The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.
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Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was first published in 1726 under the title Travels into several Remote Nations of the World.
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Frederick II, by the name Frederick the Great, German Friedrich der Grosse, was born on January 24, 1712, in Berlin, Prussia, and died on August 17, 1786, in Potsdam, near Berlin).
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Montesquieu's greatest work, De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws), was published in 1748. It is a comparative study of three types of government: republic, monarchy, and despotism.
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This encyclopedia, written by a collaborative group of “men of letters,” is commonly viewed as a principal work of the Enlightenment and was highly influential in shaping and spreading the kind of progressive thinking that eventually led to the French Revolution.
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The Seven Years' War was a global conflict that involved most of the European great powers, and was fought primarily in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. Other concurrent conflicts include the French and Indian War, the Carnatic Wars and the Anglo-Spanish War.
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Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire written by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, first published in 1759.
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He became heir to the throne on the death of his father in 1751, succeeding his grandfather, George II, in 1760. He was the third Hanoverian monarch and the first one to be born in England and to use English as his first language.
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Catherine II most commonly known as Catherine the Great was the reigning empress of Russia.
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The Boston Massacre was a deadly riot that occurred on March 5, 1770, on King Street in Boston. -
The Boston Tea Party was an American political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773. -
The Intolerable Acts were a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament. -
The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. The battles were fought on April 19, 1775, in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy, and Cambridge.
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The Wealth of Nations was published on 9 March 1776, during the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution. It influenced a number of authors and economists, as well as governments and organizations. -
The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. It was engrossed on parchment and on August 2, 1776, delegates began signing it. -
The siege of Yorktown, also known as the Battle of Yorktown, the surrender at Yorktown, or the German battle because of the presence of Germans in all three armies, began September 28, 1781 and ended on October 19, 1781, in Yorktown, Virginia.
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The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States on September 3, 1783, officially ended the American Revolutionary War and overall state of conflict between the two countries. -
He was the first ruler in the Austrian dominions of the union of the Houses of Habsburg and Lorraine, styled Habsburg-Lorraine.
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Written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and in operation since 1789, the United States Constitution is the world's longest surviving written charter of government.
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he Tennis Court Oath was a key moment that set off the French Revolution. On June 20, 1789, the Tennis Court Oath was taken. There, the men of the National Assembly swore an oath never to stop meeting until a constitution had been established. -
The Storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris, France, on 14 July 1789, when revolutionary insurgents stormed and seized control of the medieval armory, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille. -
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good. -
The Women's March on Versailles, also known as the October March, the October Days or simply the March on Versailles, was one of the earliest and most significant events of the French Revolution.
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The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, also known as the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, was written on 14 September 1791 by French activist, feminist, and playwright Olympe de Gouges in response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
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Initially, the monarchy was abolished and a republic was established. War continued throughout Europe. After the radicals gained control, those who were against the revolution were subject to arrest or execution.
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The National Convention was elected to provide a new constitution for the country after the overthrow of the monarchy (August 10, 1792). The Convention numbered 749 deputies, including businessmen, tradesmen, and many professional men.
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The Committee of Public Safety was created by the National Convention with the intent to defend the nation against foreign and domestic enemies. -
The Reign of Terror was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervour, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety.
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France was ruled by a five-man executive committee called the Directory and a legislature of two chambers: the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. 2. This government was formed after the passing of the Constitution of Year III in mid-1795.
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He became Emperor of the French under the name of Napoleon I, and was the architect of France's recovery following the Revolution before setting out to conquer Europe, which led to his downfall. -
The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement that took place on 21 October 1805 between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies during the War of the Third Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars. -
The Battle of Austerlitz also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important and decisive engagements of the Napoleonic Wars.
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The Battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of the Nations, was fought from 16 to 19 October 1813 at Leipzig, Saxony. The Coalition armies of Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Russia, led by Tsar Alexander I and Karl von Schwarzenberg, decisively defeated the Grande Armée of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon's army also contained Polish and Italian troops, as well as Germans from the Confederation of the Rhine.
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Wiener Kongress of 1814–1815 was a series of international diplomatic meetings to discuss and agree upon a possible new layout of the European political and constitutional order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
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Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France and one of the greatest military leaders in history, abdicates the throne, and, in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, is banished to the Mediterranean island of Elba. The future emperor was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on August 15, 1769.
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Napoleon embarked onto a new ship, Northumberland, and left British waters on 9 August, having never set foot on British soil. After a journey of nine weeks at sea, he arrived at the island of St Helena on 15 October 1815. -
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva in 1712, was one of the 18th century's most important political thinkers. His work focussed on the relationship between human society and the individual and contributed to the ideas that would lead eventually to the French Revolution.