Targoviste, Wallachia, Romania Hovering object — 15 October 1595
When prince Michel the Brave besieged the city of Targoviste, the capital of Wallachia,
temporarily occupied by Turks, “a large comet appeared” above the military camp and rested for two hours (according to an Italian report of the facts, redacted in Prague). After three days the Turks were defeated. No such comet is mentioned in astronomical records.
Source: Calin N. Turcu, Enciclopedia observatiilor O.Z.N, din Romania (1517-1994) (Bucharest: Ed. Emanuel, 1994), 3. Epilogue to Part I-C The end of the sixteenth century finds France devastated by fanaticism and a religious civil war between Catholics and Protestants, only resolved in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, through which King Henry IV establishes for the first time the dual principles of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. Spain and France are both exhausted, while England dominates the seas and becomes a great commercial and industrial power, extending its colonial empire to America with the rise of Virginia. It is the end of the Elizabethan period. Shakespeare and Cervantes reign over literature. Science now progresses in great strides: in the last decade Galileo publishes his observations on falling bodies and (in 1593) invents the thermometer. Botanical gardens are established at the University of Montpellier, and the first manuals of veterinary science appear. When 1600 comes around, astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler are working together in Prague, while Dutch opticians have invented the telescope, Kircher has built the first magic lantern and William Gilbert has published the first scientific treatise on magnetism and electricity; The Western world has entered a new era. PART I-D Seventeenth-Century Chronology Spurred on by strategic and scientific interest in navigation, astronomy underwent unprecedented growth during the seventeenth century. Experimental and theoretical publications flourished under the pen of Galileo, Huygens, Cassini, and numerous observers of the Moon and planets using the newly-invented telescopes. Similar progress revolutionized physics, mathematics and medicine, often in spite of the dictates of the Church. This movement towards better understanding of nature and man’s relationship to it, long repressed by religious ideology, found its expression in the “Invisible College” and culminated in the creation of the Royal Society in London in 1660, while Harvard College in the colony of Massachusetts was awarded its charter in 1650. Similar forces were at play in Asia, where Chinese naturalist Chen Yuan-Lung published his treatise on “New Inventions,” and in Japan where Seki Kowa, “the Arithmetical Sage,” anticipated many of the discoveries of Western mathematics. He was the first person to study determinants in 1683, ten years before Leibniz used determinants to solve simultaneous equations. Political aspirations created turmoil in the background, particularly in England with the parliamentarian revolution led by Cromwell, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the further upheaval leading William of Orange to the throne. France fared better, dominating European culture and politics for most of the century, until the disastrous Revocation of the Edict of Nantes that forbade Protestantism and drove leading Huguenot families out of the country: hundreds of thousands fled to Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Great Britain, ruining entire provinces and decimating French industry at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Huguenots took the art of clock making to Geneva, the steamboat to England and paper making to Holland. News of extraordinary phenomena was greeted with keen interest, either for their “philosophical” value or as omens of mystical importance. Antiquarians and Chroniclers collected such reports and compiled information from various countries, including North and South America. We even begin to find reports of unusual aerial sightings in the pag£¥ of the early scientific journals, like the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, often in terms that seem surprisingly open and free compared to the staid, self-censored, dogmatic, and often arrogant scientific literature of today. Case: W168