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English general George Monck, 1st duke of Albemarle, dies at London January 3 at age 61, having been the principal force behind restoring the Stuart monarchy 10 years ago after 11 years of republican government. He commanded the English fleet in the Second Dutch War that ended in 1667 and has been living on a generous annual pension.
Denmark's Frederik III dies at Copenhagen February 6 at age 60 after a 22-year reign in which he has used his personal popularity to make Denmark an absolute monarchy. His son, 23, will reign until 1699 as Kristian V, putting the interests of the upper middle class and state officials ahead of those of the old nobility.
France's Louis XIV makes a defensive alliance with Bavaria and with England's Charles II, whose sister Henrietta, duchesse d'Orléans, obtains the signatures of the English ministers to the Treaty of Dover in May. She returns to France and dies at St. Cloud June 30 at age 26, allegedly the victim of poison administered by order of her estranged husband Philippe, duc d'Orléans, brother of the Grand Monarch.
French troops occupy Lorraine.
Spain recognizes England's West Indian possessions in the Treaty of Madrid signed July 18 (see 1655). The English agree to stop attacks on Spanish ports (but see Morgan, 1671).
Ukrainian Cossacks rise against the Polish nobility and bureaucracy under the leadership of their chief (hetman) Stenka Razin, 41, who since 1667 has carried out daring raids on Russian and Persian settlements on the Don, Volga, and Yaik (later Ural) rivers (see 1648). The Cossacks last year defeated a naval force on the Caspian Sea that had been sent by the shah Suleiman I. Razin has returned to the Don. He and some 7,000 Cossacks seize the towns of Tsaritsyn (later Volgograd) and Astrakhan, where they hold drunken orgies, commit atrocities against the local nobility and military, replace the municipal governments with Cossack institutions of self-rule, and continue up the Volga, enlisting peasants and urban workers along the way as Razin proceeds to capture Saratov and Simbirsk. Russia's Czar Aleksis sends an army to suppress the revolt; commanded by Prince Yuri Baryatinsky with orders to relieve Simbirsk, the force has been trained in western European military techniques, and although Razin's army has grown to number some 20,000 it is undisciplined, poorly equipped, and no match for the Russians, who gain a decisive victory in October (see 1671).
The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb comes under fresh attack from Shivaji, who has built up a Maratha state in the Deccan (see 1667). Shivaji sacks Surat again, as he did in 1664; Aurangzeb allows him to levy taxes in Khandesh (see 1674).
English Puritan William Sayle arrives from the Bermudas at Albemarle Point on the Ashley River to found the Carolina colony on territory granted by Charles II in 1663 (see agriculture [rice], 1671; Charleston, 1672).
Two more expeditions venture into the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Virginia colony under the command of John Lederer.
Charles II grants the Bahama Islands to the duke of Albemarle and five other men who accept nominal responsibility for establishing a government based in the 14-year-old settlement New Providence. The proprietors take little interest in the islands, which quickly become a haven for pirates (see 1671).
Cap-Haitien (initially Cap-Français) is founded in northern Hispaniola, where it will become known as the Paris of the Antilles. The town will serve as capital of the French colony of Saint-Domingue until 1770.
Navigator John Narborough makes his way through the Strait of Magellan and reaches the Pacific November 15, having explored the coast of Patagonia (see 1669). He sails north along the Chilean coast as far as Valdivia, where Spanish authorities refuse him entry to the harbor; when he returns to England next year Charles II will come in state to greet him at Gravesend and will be sorely disappointed with the lack of results from Narborough's expedition.
"The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson's Bay" is chartered May 2 by Charles II (see 1682; Prince Rupert, 1668).
London clockmaker William Clement improves the accuracy of clocks by inventing anchor-shaped gadgets (escapements) that control the escape of a clock's driving force (see Huygens, 1656).
Minute hands appear on watches for the first time (see 1511; Tompion, 1675).
French clergyman Gabriel Mouton, 52, at Lyons proposes a uniform and accurate decimalized system of measurements to replace the variously defined leagues, acres, pounds, and other units now in use (see 1790).
"Geometrical Lectures" ("Lectiones Geometricae") by Lucasian professor of mathematics Isaac Barrow, 40, at Cambridge uses a purely geometric form of exposition to show how the determinations of areas and tangents are inverse problems. Barrow has had a strong influence on his student Isaac Newton; his treatise unifies ideas of the calculus (see Newton, 1666; 1671) and anticipates further developments of that branch of mathematics (see Legendre, 1794).
Catalog of English Plants (Catalogus Plantarum Angliae) by naturalist John Ray, 43, is based on studies that he has made in Cornwall and Wales with his colleague Francis Willughby, who has undertaken to study the natural history of the animal kingdom while Ray dealt with the plant world. Willughby will die suddenly in 1672, and Ray will take over his end of the project in addition to his own, publishing works on birds and fish under Willughby's name even though he himself has done at least half the work.
France's Louis XIV founds Les Invalides at Paris to house up to 7,000 disabled soldiers.
The vacancy that has existed in the papacy since the death of Pope Clement IX last year ends April 9 with the consecration of Emilio Cardinal Altieri, 79, who will reign until his death in 1676 as Clement X.
Parts of Baruch de Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus are published anonymously (see 1656). Spinoza shows that the Bible, if properly understood, gives no support to the intolerance of religious authorities and their interference in civil and political affairs. The book creates a furor. It will provoke widespread denunciations as it goes through five editions in the next 5 years, and Spinoza moves to The Hague to gain the protection of influential friends. Now 37, he suffers from tuberculosis after years of inhaling glass dust produced by his lens-grinding.
Nonfiction: Pensées by the late French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (the book is garbled and no clearly edited version of Pascal's jaundiced thoughts will appear for 175 years): "All men naturally hate each other"; "If men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world"; "Men never do evil so completely as when they do it from religious conviction"; "Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been changed"; "The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know"; "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage which the universe has over him: the universe knows nothing of this"; "What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe"; History of the Rebellion by Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon; English Proverbs by naturalist John Ray: "Misery loves company," "Blood is thicker than water," "I'll trust him no further than I can fling him," "A maid that laughs is half taken"; "Haste makes waste, and waste makes want, and want makes strife between goodman and his wife"; "He that hath many irons in the fire, some will cool"; "The misery is wide that the sheets will not decide"; and "The last straw breaks the camel's back." Ray lost his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, 8 years ago for refusing to take the oath prescribed by the Uniformity Act, but he continues to pursue his botanical studies with help from rich friends.
Painting: View of Haarlem by Jacob van Ruysdael; The Pearl Necklace by Johannes Vermeer; Girl and Her Duenna by Bartolomé Murillo.
Theater: Bérénice by Jean Racine 1/1 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, Paris; The Bourgeois Gentleman (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) by Molière 11/23 at the Palais-Royal, Paris; Titus and Berenice (Tite et Bérénice) by Pierre Corneille 11/28 at the Palais-Royal, Paris; The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (Part I) by John Dryden, in December at London's Theatre Royal; The Humorists by Thomas Shadwell in December at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, London; The Forc'd Marriage by English playwright Aphra Behn (née Ayfara Amis), 30, who traveled to Surinam as a child and returned in 1658. She married a London merchant named Behn, who probably died of plague in 1666, volunteered to serve as a spy for Charles II in order to support herself, was sent to the Netherlands, never received pay for her services, and served time in debtors' prison before starting a writing career, which she begins with ribald stage comedies. Forced by her widowhood to earn a living, she will be the first woman in England to support herself by her writing, and some of her plays will remain as stock pieces well into the next century. "Who is't that to women's beauty would submit,/ And yet refuse the fetters of their wit?" (Prologue).
Ballet: Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme includes a ballet with music by court composer Jean Baptiste Lully, 38, who has come to France from his native Florence and changed his name from Giovanni Battista Lulli. The ballet is so popular that four performances are requested in the space of 8 days.
French court architect Jules Hardouin Mansard (or Mansart), 24, designs a masterpiece of classical architecture for Les Invalides (which has been designed by architect du roi Libéral Bruant, 36) and will complete the Church of the Doves for Les Invalides in 1706.
Architect Louis Le Vau dies at his native Paris October 11 at age 58.
Landscape architect André Lenôtre lays out the Champs-Elysées at Paris.
The daily ration for each colonist in the Carolina colony is one pint of peas, and lack of proper victuals will plague the settlers until the spring of 1673.
"Orange Girls" in English theaters sell Spanish Seville oranges which are popular despite their sourness. One Orange Girl, Eleanor "Nell" Gwyn, 20, has become an actress—and mistress to Charles II.
English soldiers in the field ordinarily receive a daily ration consisting of two pounds of bread, one pound of meat or an equal amount of cheese, and one bottle of wine or two of beer.
An English visitor to Ireland reports, "What need they to work, whereof the labor of one man can feed forty?" The Irish find potatoes useful in their struggles against the English since their food supply, growing as it does beneath the ground, cannot readily be confiscated (see 1649).
Café Procope opens in the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain (later the rue l'Ancienne Comédie) on the Left Bank at Paris. Limonadier Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, who has gallicized his name, serves not only lemonade but also coffee, wines, "cremes glacées," fancy sherbets, and Italian pastries and sweetmeats. By 1720 Paris will have some 300 cafés (see 1716; food and drink, 1630).
Population in the Massachusetts Bay colony reaches roughly 25,000 white colonists (see 1678).
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