gentlemen unused to hard labor. By the “starving time” of 1609–1610, when Jamestown experienced a serious drought, only 61 of the 500 original colonists survived. But settlers continued to arrive, and the following year things began to improve as colonists expanded their planting areas. In 1614 John Rolfe successfully harvested tobacco and married Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, establishing a personal tie that fostered better relations with the Powhatan people. SEE FIGURE 12 1610 Galileo Galilei Invents Telescope A physicist, astronomer and inventor, the Florentine Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) played a major role in the scientific revolution of the early modern era. In 1609, learning of Dutch advances in optics, he constructed the first telescope and turned it toward the heavens. His astonishing astronomical discoveries — that the moon’s surface is mountainous, that the planet Jupiter has at least four moons, that Venus has crescent phases — made him famous. Galileo showed, in effect, that the human senses could be enhanced in studying nature, that Aristotle was wrong in asserting that heavenly bodies are ethereal, and that planets did not revolve around earth. However, when in succeeding years he explicitly defended the heliocentric theories of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), he incurred the suspicion of the papacy and was called before the Inquisition, which in 1633 found him “suspect of heresy” for contradicting Scripture. Galileo was forced to recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It was during these years that he wrote perhaps his finest work, summarizing his research on acceleration and strength of materials. SEE FIGURE 13
competing dynastic states, and changes associated with the rise of capitalism and international commerce. Absolute monarchs created national bureaucracies that reinforced them in confronting their most powerful institutional opponents, especially the nobility. Louis XIV, the Sun King, ruler of France for 72 years, was widely recognized as the perfect embodiment of absolutist principles. Many features of the modern state were created in France during his reign: centralized authority, a civil bureaucracy, a national judiciary, national tax collection, state control of culture, and a large standing army. SEE FIGURE 14
Figure 13. Galileo offering his telescope to the muses of invention while pointing to the heavens where his astronomical discoveries originated. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.
1687 Isaac Newton Promulgates Laws of Gravity
By formulating laws of gravity, defining light, color, and optics, and inventing the calculus, Isaac Newton revolutionized study of the physical world. A graduate of Cambridge University, Newton as a young man investigated the nature of light, observing that when a beam passes through a prism it spreads into a spectrum of colored rays. His experiments convinced him that such fracturing limits the effectiveness of lenses and led him to invent the reflecting telescope. After 1679 Newton returned to an earlier interest, the problems of planetary orbits and celestial mechanics. Hypothesizing that attraction within the solar system was the same force as terrestrial gravity, in 1687 he published Principia Mathematica , propounding a universal law of gravitation and three laws of motion that form the basis of classical mechanics. In 1704 Newton published a second great work, Optiks , in which he reiterated a theory of light and a spatial ether in which light moves. Internationally acclaimed, Newton was elected president of the Royal Society in 1703 and knighted in 1705.
1643–1715 Louis XIV Creates Centralized Absolutist Monarchy In the 17th and 18th centuries European nations became increasingly centralized,
1703 Peter the Great Establishes St. Petersburg
In the two centuries following the end of Tatar domination, Moscow faced two fundamental questions: (1) whether it was to be ruled by a feudal aristocracy or an autocratic tsar, and (2) whether it was to remain landlocked or reach the sea. It was during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great that these questions were answered. Coming to the throne in 1689, Peter waged war against Tatars and Turks, but with little success. In 1697, hoping to secure allies as well as obtain the latest knowledge about shipbuilding, he embarked on an 18 month tour of Western Europe. Finding no interest in a crusade against
territorialized, and bureaucratized. England was a partial exception to this rule, having overthrown its king, replaced him with a republic, and finally
Figure 14. Louis XIV, King of France was absolute monarch of all he surveyed from the
reinstalled a weakened monarch. But the rest of Europe saw steady growth in the power of kings, a development fueled by a desire to escape the chaos of post-Reformation religious violence, increasingly expensive warfare among
sparkling windows of his gilded palace at Versailles. Image courtesy of Goupil & Cie.
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