1638

This article is about the year 1638.

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	16th century – 17th century – 18th century
Decades:	1600s  1610s  1620s  – 1630s –  1640s  1650s  1660s
Years:	1635 1636 1637 – 1638 – 1639 1640 1641

1638 by topic:

Arts and Science

Architecture - Art - Literature - Music - Science

Lists of leaders

Colonial governors - State leaders

Birth and death categories

Births - Deaths

Establishments and disestablishments categories

Establishments - Disestablishments

Works category

Works

1638 in other calendars

Gregorian calendar	1638 MDCXXXVIII
Ab urbe condita	2391
Armenian calendar	1087 ԹՎ ՌՁԷ
Assyrian calendar	6388
Bahá'í calendar	-206–-205
Bengali calendar	1045
Berber calendar	2588
English Regnal year	13 Cha. 1 – 14 Cha. 1
Buddhist calendar	2182
Burmese calendar	1000
Byzantine calendar	7146–7147
Chinese calendar	丁丑年十一月十七日 (4274/4334-11-17) — to — 戊寅年十一月廿七日 (4275/4335-11-27)
Coptic calendar	1354–1355
Ethiopian calendar	1630–1631
Hebrew calendar	5398–5399
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	1694–1695
- Shaka Samvat	1560–1561
- Kali Yuga	4739–4740
Holocene calendar	11638
Iranian calendar	1016–1017
Islamic calendar	1047–1048
Japanese calendar	Kan'ei 15 (寛永15年)
Korean calendar	3971
Minguo calendar	274 before ROC 民前274年
Thai solar calendar	2181

Year 1638 (MDCXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Monday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar.

Events

January–June

• February 28 – The Scottish National Covenant is signed in Edinburgh.
• March 3 – a mercenary army under Bernard de Saxe-Weimar fighting for France defeats imperial forces at the Battle of Rheinfelden.
• March 5 – Thirty Years' War – The Treaty of Hamburg is signed by France and Sweden.
• March 29 – The Swedish arrive on the ships Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip to America, to establish the first settlement in Delaware, called New Sweden.
• March – Anne Hutchinson is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy and goes to Rhode Island.
• April 3 – John Wheelwright is banished from Boston and founds Exeter New Hampshire.
• April 15 – Shogunate forces defeat the last remnants of the Shimabara Rebellion in the fortress of Hara.
• May 23 – signing of the Kandyan Treaty between the Singhala King Rajasimha II and the Dutch to rid Ceylon of the Portuguese.
• June 20 – Spanish troops under Ferdinand of Austria defeat a much larger Dutch force near Antwerp at the Battle of Kallo during the Eighty Years War.
• June 27 – Patriarch Cyril of Constantinople is deposed for high treason and strangled and thrown into the sea by Janissaries on Ottoman Sultan Murad IV's command.

July–December

• September– John Spofford originator and forefather of the decedents of Spofford family arrives in Boston harbor by way of the ship "john of london" and is one of the first people to establish Rowely, Essex County, Massachusetts.
• October 21 – The Great Thunderstorm breaks out in Widecombe-in-the-Moor, England.
• November – The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is summoned to Glasgow by King Charles I of England.
• December 18 – Mazarin becomes first adviser to French potentate Richelieu on the death of Leclerc du Tremblay.
• December 21 – The full moon is in total eclipse from 1:12 to 2:47 UT and the solstice occurs later in the day at 16:05 UT.

Date unknown

• Covenanters meet at Muchalls Castle to compose responses to the Bishops of Aberdeen.
• The Dutch settle in Ceylon.
• Pedro Teixeira makes the first ascent of the Amazon River, from its mouth to Quito, Ecuador. The same trip had been made in the opposite direction in 1541.
• Dutch merchant Willem Kieft is appointed Director of New Amsterdam by the Dutch West India Company.
• The Netherlands colonizes Mauritius.
• Shipwrecked sailors from England found the first known European settlement in Belize.
• The Finnish postal service, Suomen Posti, is founded.
• New Haven, the first planned city in America, is founded.
• The Beijing Gazette makes an official switch in its production process of newspapers, from woodblock printing to movable type printing; private newspapers in Ming Dynasty China were first mentioned in 1582.
• Sultan Murad IV captures Baghdad.
• Shah Jahan transfers the capital of the Moghul Empire from Agra to Delhi.
• Buccaneer Peter Wallace called "Ballis" by the Spanish, settles near and perhaps gives his name to the Belize River.

Births

• January 1 – Emperor Go-Sai (d. 1685)
• January 24 – Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, English poet and courtier (d. 1706)
• March 14 – Johann Georg Gichtel, German mystic (d. 1710)
• March 15 – Shunzhi Emperor of China (d. c. 1661)
• March 23 – Frederik Ruysch, Dutch physician and anatomist (d. 1731)
• May 6 – Henry Capell, 1st Baron Capell, First Lord of the British Admiralty (d. 1696)
• May 13 – Richard Simon, French Biblical critic (d. 1712)
• July 10 – David Teniers III, Flemish painter (d. 1685)
• August 6 – Nicolas Malebranche, French philosopher (d. 1715)
• September 5 – King Louis XIV of France (d. 1715)
• September 10 – Maria Theresa of Spain, wife of Louis XIV of France (d. 1683)
• November 25 – Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II of England (d. 1705)

Deaths

• January 21 – Ignazio Donati, Italian composer (b. c. 1570)
• January 27 – Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, Spanish novelist (b. c. 1585)
• February 26 – Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac, French mathematician (b. 1581)
• April 7 – Shimazu Tadatsune, Japanese ruler of Satsuma (b. 1576)
• April 13 – Henri, duc de Rohan, French Huguenot leader (b. 1579)
• May 6 – Cornelius Jansen, French bishop and religious reformer (b. 1585)
• June 25 – Juan Pérez de Montalbán, Spanish writer (b. 1602)
• September 14 – John Harvard, American clergyman (b. 1607)
• November 9 – Johann Heinrich Alsted, German theologian (b. 1588)
• November 11 – Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, Dutch painter (b. 1562)
• December 8 – Ivan Gundulić, Croatian poet (b. 1589)
• date unknown – Pietro Paolo Floriani, architect (b. 1585)