1618
year

1618 (MDCXVIII) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar, the 1618th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 618th year of the 2nd millennium, the 18th year of the 17th century, and the 9th year of the 1610s decade. As of the start of 1618, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 6
Jahangir, ruler of the Mughal Empire in northern India, gives an audience for the first time to a representative of the British East India Company, receiving Sir Thomas Roe at the capital at Ahmedabad.
Ben Jonson's play Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue is given its premiere performance, presented at the Palace of Whitehall in London.
January 28 – Rules are established for the Ōoku, the section of Edo Castle that housed the Shōgun's consort and his concubines.
February 18 – Chŏng Inhong becomes the new Chief State Councillor (the Yŏngŭijŏng, similar to a Prime Minister) of the Joseon Kingdom, after being appointed by Gwanghaegun of Joseon.
February 26 – Osman II deposes his uncle Mustafa I as Ottoman sultan (until 1622).
March 8 – Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion (after some initial calculations, he soon rejects the idea, but on May 15 confirms the discovery).
April–June
April 21 – Spanish-born Jesuit missionary Pedro Páez becomes (probably) the first European to see and describe the source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia.
May 23 – The Second Defenestration of Prague – Protestant noblemen hold a mock trial, and throw two direct representatives of Ferdinand II of Germany (Imperial Governors) and their scribe out of a window into a pile of manure, exacerbating a low-key rebellion into the Bohemian Revolt (1618–1621), precipitating the Thirty Years' War into armed conflict, and further polarizing Europe on religious grounds.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6801. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1618, 1923, 1622 and 1621.
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This entry incorporates text from “1618” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.