The Year 1631

A few years ago I wrote a prose poem in Italian chronicling the main events of 1631. This poem was read to inaugurate an evening of poetry readings at our little church. I thought, for reasons that will become obvious towards the end of the poem, of translating it into English and editing it for this post.

SHORT CHRONICLE FOR THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1631

The first day of the year 1631 was a Wednesday.

At the beginning of that year, could be heard the desperate screams of more than twenty thousand inhabitants, men, women and children, who were massacred by the sword in the German city of Magdeburg, which had already been sacked by an imperial army.

It was the year when, in Massachusetts in the New World, John Winthrop was elected the first governor, when “La Gazzette”, the first French newspaper, was founded, when the Treaty of Cherasco ended the war of the Mantuan succession, and when Algerian pirates sacked the port of Cork in Ireland.

It was the year when the city of Wurzburg was captured by the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, but not before about nine hundred people were burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft.

Woe to those who play with the forces of darkness! The witches meet each night on the Prato Fiorito, where they reside in a deep ditch near the ruins of an ancient monastery. Hear their gloomy moans during stormy twilights, do not enter the fantastic castles they build on mountain tops, be afraid and keep away from the forces of necromancy and the flattery of the Devil!

It was another year in the most merciless war of all time – the Thirty Years’ War. The elector of Saxony – until now neutral – sided with the king of Sweden to drive the imperial army out of Saxony. The Spanish fleet was intercepted and almost entirely destroyed by a Dutch fleet in the Battle of the Slaak. Blood dripped endlessly, and in the autumn of the same year, at the battle of Breitenfeld, the imperial army was defeated by the king of Sweden, marking the first victory for the Protestants in the infamous war.

It was the year when, in the orient, in the city of Agra, part of the Mughal Empire, the architects Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, Indian, and Geronimo Veroneo, Italian, began to build the Taj Mahal, supreme sign of a man’s love for a woman, and one of the new Seven Wonders of the World.

(My photo of the Taj, taken a long time ago)

In this year, among many others who are either remembered or forgotten, were born:

The Welsh poet, Katherine Philips
The English poet, John Dryden
Salem Witchcraft Judge William Stoughton
The English philosopher, Lady Anne Finch Conway.

Those who died this year included:

Michelagnolo Galilei, composer and luthier, Galileo Galilei’s younger brother
The English poet and prelate, John Donne.
Mumtaz Mahal, the exquisite wife of Shah Jahan, creator of the Taj Mahal
Cesare Cremonini, Italian philosopher.
Guillén de Castro y Bellvis, the Spanish playwright
The Queen of Denmark, Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow,
Michael Drayton, the English poet, friend of Shakespeare

In the year 1631, as we read on the cornerstone, unknown architects and forgotten masons built, between the forest and the mule track that leads to the fortress tower, in the Controneria of the Lima valley, by the village of Longoio, our own little church or Chiesina ‘della Margine’ dedicated to the Madonna dei Sette Dolori (Madonna of the Seven Dolours*)