1620
Battle of White Mountain
Outside Prague, Catholic imperial and Spanish forces smashed the hastily assembled Protestant army of Frederick V, the Winter King, in under two hours. Bohemia was reconquered and forcibly re-Catholicized, its Protestant nobility executed or exiled. The Thirty Years' War had produced its first catastrophe, and the Bohemian national identity was suppressed for nearly three centuries.
Mayflower Compact Signed
Anchored off Cape Cod outside the Virginia patent area, forty-one male passengers of the Mayflower signed a brief civil covenant binding themselves to frame just and equal laws for the good of the colony. The Plymouth settlers had improvised the first self-government in New England before setting foot ashore, establishing a precedent for consensual governance that would echo through American history.
Slave Ship Trade Intensifies
With Dutch Brazil, Portuguese Angola, and new English and French Caribbean colonies all demanding labor, the transatlantic slave trade began its steep seventeenth-century expansion. Tens of thousands of Africans were now shipped across the Atlantic each year. The apparatus of forts, middle passage, and plantation was taking industrial shape, and the human cost would eventually reach into the tens of millions.
Pilgrims Land at Plymouth
After a miserable Atlantic crossing and a month of coastal scouting, a shallop of Mayflower passengers waded ashore at a sheltered harbor on Massachusetts Bay. Half of the hundred and two settlers would die before spring. The survivors called the place Plymouth and planted what would become New England, though only the kindness of the Wampanoag kept them from perishing entirely.
Francis Bacon's Novum Organum
The English Lord Chancellor published a Latin treatise proposing a radical new method for natural philosophy: inductive reasoning from carefully tabulated experiments. Bacon called it the Great Instauration. He meant to replace Aristotle wholesale, and though he never finished the project, generations of scientists took up the plan, making the empirical method the foundation of Western science.
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Frequently asked
What happened in the year 1620?
Saeculum lists 5 curated events from 1620. The most significant is Battle of White Mountain: Outside Prague, Catholic imperial and Spanish forces smashed the hastily assembled Protestant army of Frederick V, the Winter King, in under two hours.
What era was 1620 part of?
1620 falls within the Renaissance (1501-1650). Reformation, conquest, and the world drawn whole.
Which regions saw notable events in 1620?
The curated events from 1620 span Europe, North America and Africa.