1665

1661 1662 1663 1664 1665 1666 1667 1668 1669 1670

political events

English naval forces defeat a Dutch fleet off Lowestoft June 3 as a Second Anglo-Dutch war begins, 11 years after the end of the first such war. General George Monck, 1st duke of Albemarle, commands the English fleet, Charles II bestows a knighthood on Irish-born pirate Robert Holmes, 42, and promotes him to acting rear admiral, giving him command of the new third rate battleship Defiance, but the Dutch block the entrance to the Thames in October (see 1666).

The Battle of Montes Claros results in another victory for Portugal over a Spanish army (see 1664).

Spain's Felipe (Philip) IV dies at Madrid September 17 at age 60 after a weak reign. His illegitimate son Juan José de Austria, now 36, has offended the king by hinting at an ambition to inherit the throne and is out of favor at court; Felipe is succeeded by his legitimate son Don Carlos, now 4 and nearly crippled with rickets, who will reign until 1700 as Carlos (Charles) II, last of the Spanish Hapsburgs.

Former French revolt leader César, duc de Vendôme, dies at Paris October 22 at age 71.

The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb sends an army that may number as many as 100,000 men to suppress the rebel Marathan leader Shivaji (see 1664). Led by Aurangzeb's top general Mirza Raja Jai Singh, the army is far too big for Shivaji to challenge. He sues for peace; Jai Singh agrees on condition that Shivaji and his son come to Agra and submit to being vassals of the emperor. When they reach Agra, Shivaji and his son are placed under house arrest (see 1666).

Former Qing dynasty political leader Hong Chengchou (Hung Cheng-chou) dies at his native Nan-an in Fukien province April 3 at age 71.

exploration, colonization

Paris appoints the 40-year-old intendant (royal agent) of Hainaut intendant of New France, giving Jean (-Baptiste) Talon responsibility for all civil administration in the colony, instructing him to collaborate with military leaders and subordinate the authority of the clergy with a view to establishing economic independence. Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert have set that as a goal, and Talon's program for attaining it involves clearing land for new settlements, encouraging immigration, introducing some industrialization to supplement the colony's fur and fishing enterprises, and establishing a three-way trade between Canada, France, and the West Indies (but see 1668).

The New Haven colony accedes reluctantly to join the Connecticut colony rather than be taken over by New York (see 1638; 1662).

Massachusetts Bay colony deputy governor John Endecott dies at Boston March 15 at age 76 (approximate).

The New Jersey colony is founded by English colonists under the leadership of Philip Carteret, son of Sir George (see 1663). They settle at Elizabethtown and make it their capital with Carteret as governor (see Newark, 1666).

commerce

Fur trader Pierre Radisson and his brother-in-law Médard Chouart, sieur de Groseillers, travel to England in quest of financial backing for their Canadian fur-trading venture (see 1659). Rowed up the Thames past plague-stricken London, they confer at Oxford with Charles II, who sees an opportunity to expand English trade, supplies the Frenchmen with 40 shillings per week for their maintenance, and suggests to Prince Rupert that he form a syndicate that will finance the venture (see Rupert House, 1668).

Compagnie Saint-Gobain is founded by royal decree to make mirrors for France's Louis XIV. It will become Europe's largest glass-maker.

science

Mathematician Pierre de Fermat dies at Castres January 12 at age 63, having (with the late Blaise Pascal) founded the probability theory (his remains will be reburied in the family vault at Toulouse).

medicine

England has her last large outbreak of the Black Death. The plague began in the fall of last year in the London suburb of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, having been introduced either by Dutch prisoners of war or in bales of merchandise from Holland that originated in the Levant (see 1625). It has taken its largest toll in the densely crowded areas of Clerkenwell, Cripplegate, Shoreditch, Stepney, and Westminster on the outskirts of town, but it spreads again in May. Charles II and his court flee the city in June, going first to Salisbury, then to Exeter, then Oxford, and will not return until February of next year. Some two-thirds of London's 460,000 inhabitants leave town to avoid contagion but at least 68,596 (and possibly more than 75,000) die, plus a few thousand each at Norwich, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Southampton, and Sunderland, most of them poor people who are imprisoned in their houses (marked by large red crosses) and given food handed in by constables. "Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people," writes Samuel Pepys in his Diary, "and very few upon the 'Change. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the plague; and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up."

English physicians institute a peer-review system as many medical practitioners flee the country to escape the plague. A rumor that contracting syphilis will serve to ward off the more deadly plague drives the men of London to storm the city's brothels. The death rate falls abruptly in December, and only 2,000 fatalities will be ascribed to the Black Death next year.

literature

Nonfiction: Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales by French writer François, 6th duc de La Rochefoucauld, 52, is published anonymously. The wise and witty La Rochefoucauld won the love 19 years ago of the beautiful Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse de Longueville, and used her to gain influence over her brother the Great Condé, thereby obtaining honors for himself. He will be quoted for centuries: "The surest way to be deceived is to think oneself more clever than the others." "When we think we hate flattery we only hate the manner of the flatterer." "The head is always the dupe of the heart." "We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk of ourselves at all." "The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than about what others are saying, and we never listen when we are eager to speak." "Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise"; "There are few chaste women who are not tired of their trade"; "There's no use being young without being beautiful, and no use being beautiful without being young"; "Few people know how to be old."

art

Painting: Juno by Rembrandt van Rijn, who has used his common-law wife, Henrickje Stoffels, as his model; The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt; The Artist's Studio by Johannes Vermeer; The Physician in His Study by Adriaen van Ostade. Nicolas Poussin dies at Rome November 19 at age 71 (or 72) after a career in which he has founded French classical art.

theater, film

Theater: Don Juan; or, the Feast with the Statue of Don Juan (Don Juan; ou, le festin du pierre) by Molière 2/15 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Paris; The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards by John Dryden in April at London's Theatre Royal in Bridges Street; Love Is the Best Doctor (L'amour médecin) by Molière 9/22 at the Palais-Royal, Paris; Alexander the Great (Alexandre Le Grand) by Jean Racine 12/4 at the Palais-Royal, Paris.

architecture, real estate

Francesco Borromini completes Rome's Church of San Andrea delle Fratte.

Bucharest's Church of the Patriarchy is completed on a three-lobed plan with an icon dating from 1463.

agriculture

Potatoes are planted on a limited basis in Lorraine (see 1663; 1744; 1757; 1770; Parmentier, 1771).

food and drink

England imports less than 88 tons of sugar, a figure that will grow to 10,000 tons by the end of the century as tea consumption (encouraged by cheap sugar) increases in popularity.

Charles II grants an exemption from last year's Navigation Act to Portugal's island "province" of Madeira, whose vintners are permitted to trade directly with the colonies and with England's Caribbean possessions. Madeira wine gains popularity in the American colonies as a result of the royal decree, which levies high taxes on all other wines (see agriculture, 1420). Shipping the wine to the colonies by way of England's Caribbean islands and thus exposing it to heat for long periods of time will prove to benefit Madeira (whereas it would ruin other wines) and English connoisseurs will actually come to prefer Madeira wine that has voyaged to America and been returned to England. In the next century virtually all Madeira wine will be fortified to improve its keeping qualities, and although shippers will continue for more than 250 years to send Madeira round-trip to India in order that it may be "baked" twice, winemakers on the island will simply heat their product to obtain the same effect (see agriculture [oidium mildew], 1852).

1661 1662 1663 1664 1665 1666 1667 1668 1669 1670

Astronomy

Giovanni Cassini measures the rotational speed of Jupiter, previously measured by Robert Hooke. See also 1664 Astronomy. (See biography.)

Marcello Malpighi describes in De cerebro how the nervous system consists of bundles of fibers connected to the brain by the spinal cord. See also 1660 Biology; 1666 Medicine & health.

Robert Hooke's Micrographia, with illustrations of objects viewed through a microscope, appears. The book greatly influences both scientists and educated laypeople. In it, Hooke describes cells (viewed in sections of cork) for the first time. See also 1838 Biology.

Science administrator Henry Oldenburg [b. Bremen (Germany) c. 1618, d. London, September 5, 1677] founds Philosophical Transactions, the first scientific journal and the main publication of the Royal Society. As secretary of the Royal Society from 1663 through 1677, the time of Newton and Leibniz, he becomes the recipient of many formal letters announcing developments in the calculus, often serving as a link between the two mathematicians. See also 1660 Communication; 1682 Communication.

Publication of Journal des savants ("journal of wise men") begins in France. See also 1666 Communication.

Physician and architect Claude Perrault [b. Paris, September 25, 1613, d. Paris, October 11, 1688] begins work on the facade for the Louvre known as the Colonnade, a project that will not be completed until 1680. See also 1673 Construction.

Robert Hooke uses the microscope to study fossils, describing fossil mollusk shells and comparing them to shells of living mollusks. He believes the fossils are remains of once-living animals. See also 1500 Earth science; 1667 Earth science.

Hooke proposes that artificial silk might be manufactured by extruding a solution of a gum. See also 1892 Materials.

In his Mettalum martis Dud Dudley claims to have learned the secret of making iron with coal instead of charcoal. Previously, his father, Lord Dudley, had been granted a patent for this process. Despite the patent and the claim, modern writers have generally assumed that the process would not have worked for iron of any usable quality since it called for coal instead of coke. See also 1621 Materials; 1709 Materials.

Blaise Pascal's 1654 work Traité du triangle arithmétique ("treatise on figurative numbers"), published posthumously, introduces mathematical induction to most mathematicians. Although the first use of mathematical induction was in 1575, the method had failed to have any impact until Pascal's use. See also 1575 Mathematics; 1666 Mathematics.

Isaac Newton discovers the general binomial theorem in either this year or in 1664. See also 1669 Mathematics.

The Great Plague in London kills 75,000 and closes Cambridge for two years. Newton retires to the country, where he begins to develop the first version of his law of universal gravitation. According to Newton's later reconstruction, he observes an apple fall and realizes that the Moon must also be attracted toward Earth (modern scholars, however, think Newton invented this story in his old age). See also 1687 Physics.

Robert Hooke's Micrographia, fundamentally the first book dealing with observations through a microscope, compares light to waves in water. See also 1678 Physics.

Physico-mathesis de lumine coloribus et iride ("physics of light, colors, and the rainbow") by Francesco Maria Grimaldi [b. Bologna (Italy), April 2, 1618, d. Bologna, December 28, 1663], published posthumously, describes Grimaldi's experiments with diffraction of light and his theory that light is a wave phenomenon. It also notes his observation that muscles make sound as they expand and contract. See also 1678 Physics.

Poetry, Fiction, and Drama

• Cornelius Watkinson (fl. 1660s), Philip Howard (fl. 1660s), and William Darby (fl. 1660s): Ye Beare and Ye Cub. In what is believed to be the first record of a play performed in English in America, three residents of Accomac County, Virginia, write and perform this play and are charged with licentiousness. They perform the work at their trial and are found not guilty. The play has not survived.

Sermons and Religious Writing

• Samuel Danforth: An Astronomical Description of the late Comet or Blazing Star.... This work attempts to reconcile science and religion while justifying the study of astronomy by theologians.
• John Eliot: The Communion of Churches. The work includes reports on the conversion progress among the Indians. It is considered the first privately printed American book.

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