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Louis XIV renews French rights to enlist Swiss mercenaries through an alliance obtained over the objection of Zürich and some of the Protestant cantons.
Henri II d'Orléans, duc de Longueville, dies May 11 at age 68; his widow, Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, leaves Normandy for Paris, where she will become the great protectress of the Jansenist religious sect.
A Muscovite riot against Czar Aleksis is suppressed with help from Aberdeen-born soldier of fortune Patrick Gordon, 28, who fought as a mercenary in the First Northern War and 2 years ago entered the Russian army as a major; the czar promotes him to colonel but he will lose favor in 1666 when Aleksis sends him as an envoy to England and he fails in his mission.
The Portuguese forces of Afonso VI defeat a Spanish army under the command of Juan José de Austria at the Battle of Ameixal June 8, beginning a series of such victories (see 1664).
Matamba and Ndongo's queen Nzinga Mbandi dies at age 80 (approximate) after a career in which she has blocked the Portuguese from taking slaves (while participating in the trade herself at times), created the neighboring kingdom of Matamba, and helped the Dutch defeat her Portuguese enemies. Having abandoned Christianity, she has been re-converted, but her corpse is displayed in jewel-bedizened robes, a bow and arrow in her right hand, to inspire her people with awe, apprehension, and grief.
Paris recalls its governor-general Baron d'Avaugour from Quebec after hearing complaints by Bishop François de Montmorency Laval, who returns to New France and establishes the Seminary of Quebec as a training school for priests and a retirement home for Roman Catholic clergymen (see 1662; but see also1664).
England's Charles II grants Carolina territory from Virginia south to Florida as a reward to eight courtiers who have aided him in his restoration. The March 24 grant includes land between 31° and 36° North latitude, and the grantees include the lord chancellor Edward Hyde, now 54, 1st earl of Clarendon. The lords proprietor appoint William Sayle governor of the colony, and he points out to them the potential for plantations in the Bahama Islands (see 1670; Albemarle, 1653; Charleston, 1672).
Charles II grants the Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations July 8 (see 1644). It will remain the constitution until 1842.
A Third Navigation Act adopted by Parliament July 27 forbids English colonists to trade with other European countries. European goods bound for America must be unloaded at English ports and reshipped, even though English export duties and profits to middlemen may make prices prohibitive in America (see 1672).
Dutch forces hold the best pepper ports of India's Malabar Coast, giving them a virtual stranglehold on the spice trade once controlled by Portugal.
Jean Baptiste Colbert, 44, works to reform the finances of the world's leading nation; he will be named controller general of French finance in 1665.
Physicist Otto von Guericke invents the first electric generator (see air pump, 1650; 1654). It produces static electricity by applying friction against a revolving ball of sulfur, and Guericke will show in 1672 that the electricity can cause the surface of the sulfur ball to glow.
An epidemic of the Black Death at Amsterdam kills 10,000 of the city's 200,000 people (see 1664; Eastern Europe, 1654).
William Juxon, Archbishop of Canterbury, dies at London June 4 at age 80.
Quebec's Laval University has its beginnings in the Seminary of Quebec founded by Bishop François de Montmorency Laval. It will survive as Canada's oldest institution of higher learning (see 1852).
English pamphleteer Roger L'Estrange wins appointment as surveyor of the imprimery and gains power to license and control the press (see politics, 1660). His appointment jeopardizes the monopoly of journalist Henry Muddiman, 34, who supported the Royalist cause during the Civil War and has had the support of General George Monck in his advocacy of a free Parliament in his publications the Parliamentary Intelligencer and Mercurius Publicus, opposing the ideas expressed in pamphlets circulated by Marchamont Needham. L'Estrange begins publication of the news sheets the Intelligencer and the News, and he will use his position to weed out unlicensed printers who presume to issue anti-government propaganda while he himself puts out pamphlets supporting the government.
Nonfiction: "On the Principle of the Individual" ("De Principio Individui") by Leipzig-born University of Leipzig student Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 16, whose baccalareate thesis enunciates the notion that the existential value of the individual cannot be explained by matter or form alone but only by the individual's whole being (entitate tota), an idea based in part on the nominalist Lutheran theory that universals are mere names and have no reality.
Poetry: Hudibras by English poet Samuel Butler, 51, whose satirical heroic poem mocks the hypocrisy, pedantry, and self-important pomposity of the Puritans.
Painting: Artist and Model and Young Woman with a Water Jug by Johannes Vermeer; Jacob and Laban by Adriaen van de Velde.
France's minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert appoints painter Charles Le Brun director of the Gobelins, which will grow under Le Brun's direction from a small tapestry manufactory into a vast enterprise that supplies all of the royal houses. The Academy of Painting and Sculpture is reorganized, with Le Brun as its director.
Theater: Sophonisbe by Pierre Corneille in January at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, Paris; The Wild Gallant by English playwright-poet John Dryden, 32, in February at London's Theatre Royal in Vere Street. Dryden marries the sister of Sir Robert Howard. The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane opens 5/7 with a performance of a comedy entitled The Humorous Lieutenant (see Drury Lane, 1639). Women perform on stage along with men, often appearing in risqué comedies as the old Elizabethan (and recent Puritan) proscriptions give way to freer theatrical expression (but see 1698).
England's Charles II files suit against Sir Charles, 4th Baronet Sedley, 24, in what will survive as the earliest recorded obscenity case (The King v. Sir Charles Sedley). The accused has allegedly gone on a drinking spree with Charles Sackville and Sir Thomas Ogle at Oxford Kate's tavern The Cock in Bow Street near Covent Garden. They have climbed to the balcony of the tavern and exposed themselves, and Sedley has allegedly harangued the public while standing naked as a jaybird, shouting (according to diarist Samuel Pepys) that he had for sale a powder that would make all women run after whomever used it, and using a profusion of profanities. Sedley is fined 2,000 marks, committed without bail for a week, and released only after confessing to the charges against him and binding himself to good behavior for 1 year.
Dublin's corporation fences off St. Stephen's Green and closes the 27-acre ground to the public. Dubliners of means will erect handsome Georgian-style houses facing the green, which will remain private until 1880.
Parliament reduces duties on English grain imports but also reduces subsidies on exports. The domestic price level at which exports may be halted is increased in a move that serves the interest of landowners but not that of townspeople (see 1673; 1689).
England's Royal Society urges that potatoes be planted to provide food in case of famine.
Japan's Tokugawa government issues an order banning extravagant use of food and drink and demanding more restraint.
Samuel Pepys notes in his diary that he has enjoyed at a London tavern "a sort of French wine called Ho-Bryan which hath a good and most particular taste." Bordeaux landowner Arnaud de Pontac inherited the Château Haut-Brion and its vineyard in 1649 and will retain possession until his death in 1681; he has introduced the practices of racking his wine from barrel to barrel on a regular basis, separating young wine from early lees, and allowing wine in casks to improve rather than spoil by "topping off" to compensate for evaporation.
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