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1469
Isabella and Ferdinand unify Spain
Ferdinand of Aragon marries Isabella of Castile in Valladolid, thus beginning a cooperative reign that would unite all the dominions of Spain and elevate the nation to a dominant world power -
Period: Apr 22, 1509 to 1547
Henry VIII reigns England
Henry VIII sent two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to their deaths on the executioner's block at the Tower of London. -
Period: Nov 17, 1558 to
Elizabeth I reigns England
Elizabeth unified a Protestant England against the Catholic Spanish and defeated the Spanish armada in 1588. -
Edict of Nantes
The Edict of Nantes effectively ended the French Wars of Religion by granting official tolerance to Protestantism. -
Don Quixote was published
Don Quixote is a classic novel from 1605 that portrays the life and insightful journey of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a Spanish man who seems to be losing his mind on his quest to become a knight and restore chivalry alongside a farmer named Sancho Panza. -
Period: to
Thirty Years War
The Thirty Years' War was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, lasting from 1618 to 1648. -
Petition of Right was signed
The petition of Right asked for a settlement of Parliament's complaints against the King's non-parliamentary taxation and imprisonments without trial, plus the unlawfulness of martial law and forced billets. -
Period: to
Louis XIV reigns as king of France
Louis XIV oversaw the administrative and financial reorganization of his realm, and also set up manufactures and worked to boost trade. -
The Long Parliament
The Long Parliament was an English Parliament that lasted from 1640 until 1660 -
Peace of Westphalia was signed
The Peace of Westphalia, concluded in 1648 in Münster, Germany, ended the Thirty Years' War. -
Thomas Hobbes publishes “Leviathan”
Leviathan concerns the structure of society and legitimate government and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. -
Period: to
Charles II reigns is England
Charles II was king of Great Britain and Ireland from 1660 to 1685 -
Peter the Great reigns as czar of Russia
Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703, the victory against Sweden at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, and the birth of the Russian navy, Peter's lifelong passion. -
Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution is the term first used in 1689 to summarise events leading to the deposition of James II and VII of England, Ireland, and Scotland in November 1688. -
English Bill of Rights was signed
The 1689 English Bill of Rights was a British Law, passed by the Parliament of Great Britain in 1689 that declared the rights and liberties of the people and settled the succession in William and Mary following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. -
John Locke publishes “Two Treaties of Government"
Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in 1689 by John Locke. -
Johann Sabastian Bach was at the height of his career
Sabastian Bach advanced our knowledge throughout time as we know it. -
Daniel Dafoe publishes “Robinson Crusoe"
Robinson Crusoe is about Crosoe leaving the safety of his comfortable middle-class home in England and going to sea. He is shipwrecked and becomes a castaway who spends years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad. He meets cannibals, captives, and mutineers, and is eventually rescued. -
Jonathan Swift publishes “Gulliver’s Travels"
Gulliver's Travels is a four-part prose travelogue, narrated by the fictitious persona of Lemuel Gulliver, who tells the story of his extensive global voyages, the places he has been, and the people he met. -
Period: to
Frederick II reigns Prussia
Frederick II was a brilliant military campaigner who greatly enlarged Prussia's territories and made Prussia the foremost military power in Europe. -
Baron de Montesquieu publishes “The Spirit of Laws”
Montesquieu's best-known work in which he reflects on the influence of climate on society, the separation of political powers, and the need for checks on a powerful executive office -
Denis Diderot publishes his “Encyclopedia"
The Encyclopédie, often referred to simply as Encyclopédie or Diderot's Encyclopedia, is a twenty-eight-volume reference book published between 1751 and 1772 by André Le Breton and edited by translator and philosopher Denis Diderot. -
Period: to
Seven Years War
The Seven Years' War was a global conflict that involved most of the European great powers and was fought primarily in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. -
Voltair published "Candide"
Candide is the illegitimate nephew of a German baron. He grows up in the baron's castle under the tutelage of the scholar Pangloss, who teaches him that this world is “the best of all possible worlds.” Candide falls in love with the baron's young daughter, Cunégonde. -
Period: to
George III reigns in England
George III was the third Hanoverian monarch and the first one to be born in England and to use English as his first language, he is widely remembered for two things: losing the American colonies and going mad. -
Jean Jacque Rousseau publishes “Social Contract"
The Social Contract is a 1762 French-language book by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. -
Period: to
Catherine Great reigns Russia
Catherine the Great was thirty-three years old when she seized power and became Empress. -
Intolerable Acts
The four acts were the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Quartering Act -
Period: to
Joseph II reigns Austria
Joseph II ordered the abolition of serfdom; by the Edict of Toleration he established religious equality before the law, and he granted freedom of the press. -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was a confrontation in Boston on March 5, 1770, in which a group of nine British soldiers shot five people of a crowd of three or four hundred who were harassing them verbally and throwing various projectiles. -
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin's Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts -
Battle of Lexington and Concord
The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. -
Adam Smith publishes “Wealth of Nations"
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is a foundational treatise in economic thought, but one that is as much philosophical in character as it is economic. -
Declaration of Independece was signed
The United States Declaration of Independence is the pronouncement and founding document adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at the Pennsylvania State House. -
Battle of Yorktown
The siege of Yorktown, also known as the Battle of Yorktown, the surrender at Yorktown, or the German battle because of the presence of Germans in all three armies. -
Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris was signed by U.S. and British Representatives on September 3, 1783, ending the War of the American Revolution. -
US Constitution was ratified
To ratify amendments, three-fourths of the state legislatures must approve them, or ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states must approve them. -
Tennis Court Oath
The Tennis Court Oath was an oath the French Third Estate took in the tennis court which had been built in 1686 for the use of the Versailles palace. -
Storming of the Bastille
The Storming of the Bastille occurred when revolutionary insurgents stormed and seized control of the medieval armory, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille. -
Declaration of the Rights of Man
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a human civil rights document from the French Revolution. -
Women's March in Versailles
The Women's March on Versailles was a riot that took place during this first stage of the French Revolution and was spontaneously organized by women in the marketplaces of Paris who complained over the high price and scant availability of bread. -
Declaration of the Rights of Women
The Declaration of Rights of Women stated that women, like their male counterparts, have natural, inalienable, and sacred rights. Those rights, as well as the related duties and responsibilities to society, are outlined in the remainder of the document. -
Mary Wollstonecraft publishes “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a ground-breaking work of literature that still resonates in the feminism and human rights movements of today. -
Radical Phase of the French Revolution
During the radical phase of the French Revolution, France was made a republic, abolishing the monarchy and executing the king -
National Convention was formed
The National Convention was the constituent assembly of the Kingdom of France for one day and the French First Republic for the rest of its existence during the French Revolution, following the two-year National Constituent Assembly and the one-year Legislative Assembly. -
Committee of Public Safety was created
The Committee of Public Safety was a committee of the National Convention that formed the provisional government and war cabinet during the Reign of Terror, a violent phase of the French Revolution. -
Period: to
Reign of Terror in the French Revolution
The Reign of Terror was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervor, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety. -
Five Man Directory was created
The Directory was the governing five-member committee in the French First Republic from 2 November 1795 until 10 November 1799. -
Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor
Napoleon centralized the government, reorganized the banking and educational systems, supported the arts, and improved relations between France and the pope. -
Battle of Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement that took place on 21 October 1805 between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies during the War of the Third Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars -
Battle of Austerlitz
The Battle of Austerlitz was the first engagement of the War of the Third Coalition and one of Napoleon's most significant victories. -
Battle of Leipzig
The Coalition armies of Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Russia, led by Tsar Alexander I and Karl von Schwarzenberg, decisively defeated the Grande Armée of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. -
Congress of Vienna
The Congress of Vienna was a series of international diplomatic meetings to discuss and agree upon a possible new layout of the European political and constitutional order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. -
Napoleon was exiled to Elba
Napoleon's broken forces gave up and Napoleon offered to step down in favor of his son. -
Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena
Napoleon had been exiled to St. Helena after he was defeated by the British at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.