Events and ideas: 1600-1700

* EVENTS

1605 Guy Fawkes arrested as Gunpowder Plot fails (right)

1609 Galileo uses first complete telescope

1618 Pan-European Thirty Years' War begins

1620 Pilgrim Fathers set sail in Mayflower for America

1633 Galileo recants Copernican views at Inquisition trial

1642 English civil war begins

1648 Thirty Years' War ends with Peace of Westphalia

1649 Execution of Charles I

1666 Great Fire (below) destroys four-fifths of London

1687 Sir Isaac Newton (right) formulates laws of motion in Principia Mathematica

1688 Expulsion of English king James II after conversion to Catholicism

1694 Bank of England founded

1696 Protestant philosopher Pierre Bayle persecuted for profanity in his Dictionnaire

* IDEAS

1600 Philosopher Giordano Bruno burnt for heresy

1611 Publication of King James's Authorised Version of the Bible

1620 Francis Bacon's Novum Organum applies inductive method to science

1641 Rene Descartes (below) defends mind/body dualism in his Meditations

1651 Philosopher Thomas Hobbes rejects the divine right of kings in Leviathan

1667 John Milton's epic masterpiece, Paradise Lost, appears

1676 German philosopher and mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz, invents calculus

1690 John Locke defends individual liberty in Two Treatises on Government