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France's queen mother Anne of Austria dies of breast cancer at Paris January 20 at age 64. Armand I de Bourbon, prince de Conti and governor of Languedoc, dies at Pézénas February 21 at age 36, having married a niece of the late Cardinal Mazarin in 1654 and, like his sister, become a Jansenist. His 28-year-old widow, Anne-Marie (née Martiniozzi), will survive only until 1672.
Acting Rear Admiral Sir Robert Holmes, Royal Navy, distinguishes himself in the Four Days' Battle in January as the Second Anglo-Dutch War continues (see 1665), but he draws condemnation in August when he raids the Dutch islands of Vlie and Schelling and starts a fire that destroys 250 Dutch merchant ships.
France allies herself with the Dutch and declares war on England; French forces take Antigua, Montserrat, and Saint Kitts in the Greater Antilles (see 1627). An English privateer takes Tobago (see 1651; 1662), but the island will eventually return to French control and remain French until 1763. The Dutch sign a treaty of alliance with the elector of Brandenburg Friedrich Wilhelm and form a quadruple alliance with Brunswick, Brandenburg, and Denmark.
Hungarian noblemen revolt against the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.
India's former Mughal emperor Shah Jahan dies in captivity at Agra January 22 at age 74 (see 1658). His son Aurangzeb continues the oppressive rule he began in 1659, but the Maratha leader Shivaji escapes from Agra August 16 (see 1665). Although he was facing execution at any time while living under house arrest, Shavaji did not give up hope; pretending to be ill, he sent out large baskets filled with sweets to be distributed among the poor, and his followers have used these baskets to carry him and his son past their guards. He reorganizes his army, begins building a naval force, and by 1668 will have regained all the territory that he has lost and more besides, collecting tribute from some Mughal districts and instituting reforms that benefit his largely Hindu followers (see 1667).
French explorer René Robert Cavelier, 23, sieur de La Salle, voyages to the New World to occupy a grant of land he has received on the St. Lawrence River. He plans to establish trading posts on the Wisconsin River to buy furs from trappers and make a fortune (see 1669).
Newark is founded on the Passaic River in the New Jersey colony by Connecticut Puritans, who have arrived under the leadership of Robert Treat.
Former Barbados governor Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby, dies at sea between Barbados and Saint Kitts in July at age 53 (approximate). He was given joint proprietorship of Surinam with Lawrence Hyde after the restoration of the monarchy 6 years ago.
Charles II's master of mechanics Samuel Morland, 41, invents the first multiplying machine (see Pascal, 1642). It employs a duodecimal scale based on English currency and requires human intervention to enter the carry displayed in an auxiliary dial (see Leibniz, 1672).
Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, 41, determines the rotation period of Mars to be 24 hours, 40 minutes (later astronomers will establish more precisely at 24 hours, 37 minutes, 22.6 minutes) (see Jupiter's satellites, 1668).
Laws of gravity established by Cambridge University mathematics professor Isaac Newton, 23, state that the attraction exerted by gravity between any two bodies is directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Newton has returned to his native Woolsthorpe because the plague at Cambridge has closed Trinity College, where he is a fellow; he has observed the fall of an apple in an orchard at Woolsthorpe and calculates that at a distance of one foot the attraction between two objects is 100 times stronger than at 10 feet (see Galileo, 1592). Although he does not fully comprehend the nature of gravity, he concludes that the force exerted on the apple is the same as that exerted on Earth by the moon (see Einstein, 1905).
The calculus discovered by Isaac Newton will prove to be the most effective tool for scientific investigation ever produced by mathematics. Newton may have observed that an apple falling from a tree moves faster and faster in its descent (see Archimedes, 212 B.C.). Expressing this mathematically, he comes up with rules for dealing with rates of change: the numbers in any given algebraic problem remain constant while a calculation is being made, but problems that arise in engineering and in natural phenomena such as astronomy involve constant change which have made accurate mathematical calculation impossible without calculus (see 1671; Barrow, 1670).
A French Academy of Sciences (Académie Royale des Sciences) founded by Louis XIV at Paris seeks to rival London's 4-year-old Royal Society. Jean Baptiste Colbert has persuaded the king to begin subsidizing scientists.
Destroyed in London's Great Fire are thousands of old dwellings that have harbored lice-bearing rats which spread plague (see 1665). Some 2,000 Londoners nevertheless die of the plague, which rages also at Cologne and in the Rhine district, where it will continue for the next 5 years. Incidence of the Black Death will decline in other English cities even where no fires have occurred (see 1673).
French royal physician Jean-Baptiste Denis performs the first known blood transfusion December 19. A nobleman has found one Antoine Mauroy wandering naked through the streets of Paris and brought him to Denis, who has been studying the possibilities of transfusing animal blood into human. He inserts a silver tube into the man's arm, drains off about 10 ounces of blood, inserts the other end of the tube into the leg artery of a calf, and allows perhaps a cupful of the gentle animal's blood to flow into the man, who survives a second such transfusion and appears to be cured of his irascible behavior, although Mauroy is evidently syphilitic and his "cure" will not prove permanent (see Lower, 1667).
The Mughal emperor Aurangzb imposes a poll tax on Hindus, schemes to have them forcibly converted to Islam, and demolishes their temples, replacing the structures with mosques.
German-born missionary and astronomer Adam Schall von Bell dies at Beijing (Peking) August 15 at age 75 (all charges against him will be dropped in 1668).
Nonfiction: "On the Art of Combination" ("De Arte Combinatoria") by philosopher Gottfried W. Leibniz formulates the idea that all reasoning and all discovery is reducible to an ordered combination of elements, be they words, numbers, colors, or sounds. Now 19, Leibniz completes his legal studies, applies for a degree of doctor of law, is refused because of his age, leaves his native Leipzig, writes a dissertation entitled "On Perplexing Cases" ("De Casibus Perplexis"), and promptly obtains the degree at Nuremberg's university town of Altdorf; Women's Speaking Justified, Proved, and Knowed of the Scriptures by English widow Margaret Fell, mother of nine, explains the ideas that she shares with George Fox, leader of the Society of Friends, whom she will soon marry. She has supported Fox, a Leicestershire cobbler, and 3 years ago went to prison for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance after pleading with Charles II to release a group of Quakers. Woman, like man, was created in God's image, Fell writes, and while she may be weak she was chosen for his purposes. To deny women their role is to act in behalf of the Devil, fulfilling the enmity decreed by God between woman and the serpent; Antisynodalia scripta Americana by clergyman and Harvard College president Charles Chauncy.
Poetry: Instructions to a Painter by Edmund Waller.
Painting: Head of a Young Girl by Johannes Vermeer; Founding of the Trinitarian Order by Spanish painter Juan Carreño de Miranda, 52. Frans Hals dies at Haarlem August 26 at age 86; the Italian painter Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) at Bologna December 22 at age 75.
Sculpture: Apollo Tended by the Nymphs by French sculptor François Girardon, 38, who is employed at Versailles and has been a member of France's Royal Academy since 1657.
Theater: Le Misanthrope by Molière 6/4 at the Palais-Royal, Paris: "my mind is no more shocked at seeing a man a rogue unjust, or selfish, than at seeing vultures eager for prey, mischievous apes, or fury-lashed wolves" (I, i); "twenty, as everyone well knows, is not an age to play the prude" (III, v); The Doctor in Spite of Himself (Le médecin malgré lui) by Molière 8/6 at the Palais-Royal.
Playwright James Shirley dies at London October 29 at age 70 from causes related to the Great Fire.
"The King hath yesterday in council declared his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes, which he will never alter," writes Samuel Pepys in his diary October 8. Charles II has proclaimed that men shall wear vests, and Pepys notes a few days later, "This day the King begins to put on his Vest, and I did see several persons of the House of Lords, and Commons, too, great courtiers who are in it—being a long cassocke close to the body, of black cloth and pinked [i.e. slashed] with white silk undre it, and a coat over it . . . and upon the whole, I wish the King may keep it, for it is a very fine and handsome garment."
England's Charles II demands September 6 that a plan for the rebuilding of London be ready within 5 days. He makes architect Christopher Wren, 34, the royal surveyor for the project; the London Corporation appoints physicist Robert Hooke, 31, as its surveyor. The men are good friends, and together they will lay out a city plan and separately or together design new structures to replace those lost in the Great Fire of London.
Royal architect (Nicholas) François Mansard (or Mansart) dies at his native Paris September 23 at age 68 having popularized what will be called the "mansard" roof (which he did not invent).
The Great Fire of London begins early in the morning of Sunday, September 2, in a Pudding Lane bakery near London Bridge. Aides to the city's lord mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth awaken him to ask what he thinks of a fire burning not far away; "Pish," he replies, "a serving woman might piss it out," and goes back to sleep. But fierce winds whip the flames into a fire that spreads through the crowded wooden houses to the Thames wharf warehouses and continues for 4 days and nights; Charles II and his brother James, duke of York, use gunpowder to blow up a row of houses and create a fire break that saves the Banqueting Hall of 1622, but flames consume four-fifths of the walled city, destroying 13,200 houses in an area 436 acres plus another 63 acres of property outside the city walls. Homeless Londoners huddle in fields outside the walls, convinced that the fire has been set either by Dutch terrorists in retaliation for the burning of the Dutch fleet by Robert Holmes or by "Papists." London's Guildhall, 44 of the city's rich livery company halls, the Custom House, the Royal Exchange, the great Gothic cathedral of St. Paul's, and 86 other churches are destroyed. Jurist Sir Matthew Hale, now 56, will spend the better part of the next 6 years with the statutory tribunal set up to resolve owner-tenant disputes arising from the fire, but new structures will spring up to make London the world's most modern metropolis (see medicine [Wren], 1667).
The Newton pippin will be so named to commemorate the apple that inspired Newton's law of gravity.
Louis XIV issues an edict encouraging large families. Drafted by Jean Baptiste Colbert, the edict will prove ineffectual.
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