1630

一生事業總成空，半世功名在夢中。死後不愁無將勇，忠魂依舊保遼東！

"A life's work ends entirely in vain; half my career seems a dream. I do not worry about lacking brave warriors after my death, for my loyal spirit shall continue to guard Liaodong."

- Poem composed by Ming patriot Yuan Chonghuan, shortly before being wrongly executed for treason

In the year AD 1630...

• The Thirty Years War enters its twelfth year. The German Princes, tired of being extorted for money by the Commander of the Imperial Army Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein succeed in convincing Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II to dismiss him and replace him with the commander of the Catholic League, Johann Tserklaes, Count of Tilly, who promptly lays siege to Magdeburg. Meanwhile, the Swedish Intervention begins as Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus lands in Pomerania with 13,000 Swedish troops, and augmented by 40,000 allied German troops, invades Mecklenburg.
• Manchu forces under Huang Taiji continue their assault on the Ming Dynasty, laying siege to Beijing. Ming commander Yuan Chonghuan rushes back from the north and breaks the siege but is unable to destroy the Manchu army, which escapes. Scheming court Eunuchs then falsely accuse Yuan of abetting the Manchu's escape and he is ordered executed for treason along with his entire family by the Chongzhen Emperor.
• In the so-called "Day of the Dupes," Marie de Medici, who has grown jealous of Cardinal Richelieu's growing power, attempts to have him dismissed by her son, French king Louis XIII, but she is unable to win the king's support for her plot, and is instead exiled to the Netherlands.
• The Deccan Famine begins in India, and will kill more than 2 million over the ensuing three years in one of the most devastating famines in India's history.
• The Puritan Great Migration begins as a large batch of new colonists under John Winthrop arrives in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They initially live in Charlestown but soon strike out on their own, establishing the towns of Cambridge (initially called "New Towne"), Arlington, Waterford, Medford, and Somerville.
• The Spanish play El Burlador de Sevilla, attributed to Gabriel Téllez, who wrote under the pseudonym Tirso de Molina, debuts and is the earliest known literary reference to legendary Spanish profligate Don Juan.
• John Milton pens his poem "On Shakespeare."
• Europeans are introduced to popcorn for the first time when Quadequina, the brother of Wampanoag chief Massasoit, brings large amounts of pre-popped popcorn in several deerskin bags to the British colonists in Massachusetts as a gift as part of a Thanksgiving feast.
• Japanese merchant Masatomo Sumitomo founds a humble shop selling medicines and books which will eventually rise to become the mighty Sumitomo corporate conglomerate that is still one of the largest in Japan to this day.
• Japanese merchant Shichizaemon Mogi I brews the first batch of soy sauce in an enterprise that will eventually grow to become the Kikkoman soy sauce company.
• Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, aged 53, marries 16-year-old Helen Fourment, and his portraits of her will be his most joyous and intimate works.

These people were born in 1630...

• English king Charles II.
• Electress of Hanover, consort of Elector Ernest Augustus, and heir to the English throne Sophia of Hanover, the mother of English king George I and the progenitress of the Hanovarian line of English kings.
• Japanese Neo-Confucian philosopher Kaibara Ekken.
• Swedish scientist, physician, linguist, and author Olaus Rudbeck.
• Cossack leader Stenka Razin, who would lead a rebellion against the Tsar's rule in the 1670s.
• Japanese zen master Tetsugen Doko.
• Meronite patriarch and historian Estephan El Douaihy.
• Duke of Parma Ranuccio II Farnese.
• English writer, poet, and angler Charles Cotton, best remembered today for his contributions to his friend Izaak Walton's fishing handbook The Compleat Angler.
• Dutch painter Maria Van Oosterwyck.
• Spanish painter Josefa de Obidos.
• Elizabeth Key Grinstead, the first woman of African ancestry in the North American colonies who sued for her freedom and won.
• Welsh mistress of English king Charles II, Lucy Walter.
• English nobleman Thomas Clifford, 1st Baron Clifford of Chudleigh.
• Spanish statesman Fernando de Valenzuela, apparently no relation to the Dodgers pitcher.
• Prussian nobleman, soldier, and traitor Christian Ludwig von Kalckstein.

These people died in 1630...

• German astronomer Johannes Kepler.
• Chinese Ming Dynasty patriot and general Yuan Chonghuan, executed for falsely alleged treason by "death of a thousand cuts."
• Japanese adventurer Yamada Nagamasa who traveled to Southeast Asia and ultimately became king of a province in Siam.
• Duke of Savoy Charles Emmanuel I.
• Japanese Go champion Nakamura Doseki, retroactively accounted by tradition as the founder of the Inoue House of Go.
• German protestant general of the Thirty Years War Christian of Anhalt.
• Italian born Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola.
• French poet and Huguenot soildier Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, best remembered for his epic poem Les Tragiques (1616).
• English mathemetician Henry Briggs, a pioneer of the concept of logarithms.
• Italian painter Fede Galizia
• Austrian cardinal and statesman Melchior Klesl.
• Japanese warlord Tōdō Takatora, a trusted general of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and later Tokugawa Ieyasu.

1629 - 1630 - 1631

17th century

How they were made