1627

"Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not."

- John Donne, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" (1627)

"There is nothing that renders a library more recommendable than when a man finds in it that which his is looking for and cannot find anywhere else."

- Gabriel Naudée, Advice on Establishing a Library (1627)

In the year AD 1627...

• The last known living aurochs, a cow living in Poland's Jaktorów Forest, dies of natural causes, and the species becomes extinct.
• The Thirty Years' War rages in Germany.
• With Protestant forces on the run amidst the flailing Danish Intervention, Imperial generalissimo Albrecht von Wallenstein increases his army to 70,000 men and rampages unchecked across northern Germany.
• After overrunning Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Jutland, Wallenstein begins making plans to construct a fleet capable of challenging the Danes for control of the Baltic Sea.
• Greatly alarmed by the growing power of the Catholics along the Baltic Sea coast, Protestant Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus begins contemplating a possible Swedish Intervention into the war.
• The Manchus invade Korea, making it a quasi-vassel state.
• The Trịnh–Nguyễn War erupts in Vietnam between the ruling Trinh and Nguyen clans, and will drag out until 1670.
• Cardinal Richelieu orders an assault on the Huguenots at La Rochelle. An English attempt to break the siege, commanded by the Duke of Buckingham, fails.
• In the Forced Loan of 1627, English king Charles I, desperate for cash to fund his wars against France and Spain after having dissolved Parliament the previous year, issues a royal decree forcing nobles to loan him money.
• The Barbary Pirates raid Iceland, capturing 242 Icelanders to sell into slavery and slaughtering many others.
• Francis Bacon's New Atlantis is published posthumously.
• Johannes Kepler publishes his Rudolphine Tables for calculating the paths of the planets, based on the work of Tycho Brahe.
• The first German opera, Dafne by Heinrich Schutz, is produced in Torgau.
• French librarian Gabriel Naudé, later the head librarian of the Bibliothèque Mazarine, publishes the first study of library science, Advice on Establishing a Library.

These people were born in 1627:

• Maratha revolutionary Shivaji.
• Irish chemist Robert Boyle, best known for Boyle's Law.
• Japanese Confucian scholar Itō Jinsai.
• English botanist John Ray.
• English letter-writer Dorothy Osborne.
• French general and author Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier.
• French orator Jacques Bénigne Bossuet.

These people died in 1627:

• Mughal emperor Jahangir. He is succeeded by his son Shah Jahan, who will later build the Taj Mahal.
• Emperor Tianqi of Ming Dynasty China, succeeded by his 16-year-old brother, Emperor Chongzhen.
• Wei Zhongxian, the most powerful and notorious court eunuch in Chinese history, executed following the death of Emperor Tianqi.
• English author and playwright Thomas Middleton.
• English poet Richard Barnfield.
• Spanish poet Luis de Góngora, after whom the literary style of Gongorism is named.
• Berber scholar Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti, author more than 40 books.
• Indian poet Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan.
• Olivier van Noort, the first Dutchman to circumnavigate the world.
• Ingram Frizer, the killer of Christopher Marlow.
• Spanish adventurer Sebastián Vizcaíno.
• Spanish baroque painter Juan Sánchez Cotán.
• French composer Jacques Mauduit.
• First Canadian Louis Hébert.

1626 - 1627 - 1628

17th century

How they were made