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The Treaty of Stockholm signed April 14 pledges Sweden to attack with 16,000 men any German prince who may be disposed to support the Dutch against France's Louis XIV, who agrees to pay the Swedes 400,000 ecus per year in times of peace and 600,000 in case of war. The pact signed by the Swedish regent Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie is considered obsequious, but he will retain power for another decade.
A French army of 100,000 men crosses the Rhine without warning and invades the Dutch Republic as Louis XIV acts to punish the Dutch, who have given refuge to his political critics. England's Charles II supports Louis under secret provisions contained in the Treaty of Dover of May 1670. The Royal Navy scores a victory in the Battle of Solebay May 28 at Southwold Bay off Suffolk in the North Sea. The Dutch turn for help to the prince of Orange. The Staats-General revive the stadholderate July 8, and they make Willem III of Orange, 21, stadholder, captain-general, and admiral for life. Authorities arrest Cornelius de Witt, 49, July 24 on charges of conspiring against the prince. Cornelius's brilliant brother Johan, now 46, resigns his position as councillor pensionary August 4 after 19 years as head of state. Cornelius is tortured and sentenced August 19 to banishment after being stripped of his offices. Johan goes to visit Cornelius in the Gevangenpoort at The Hague August 30; a mob gathers outside, breaks in, seizes the two brothers and tears them limb from limb; Willem rewards the instigators of the riot as he summons aid from the elector of Brandenburg to resist the French, whose captain Abraham Duquesne, 62, is deprived of his command following accusations that he refused to follow orders after the Battle of Solebay (and refused to renounce his Calvinist faith, which has prevented him from being made admiral). Duquesne served as an admiral for Sweden's queen Kristina from 1644 to 1647 but returned to France and supported the crown during the Fronde uprising of 1651 to 1653.
Austrian generalissimo Raimondo Montecuccoli is recalled to service at age 63 to lead the imperial Hapsburg armies against the French.
Ottoman forces invade Poland following a series of border raids by Tatars and Cossacks (see 1671). The strategic border fortress Kamieniec Podolski falls to the Turks, whose grand vizier Fazl Ahmed Köprülü forces Poland's Mikhail Wishniowiecki to sign the humiliating Treaty of Buczacz (Buchach), which requires the Poles to cede Podelia and pay an annual tribute of 22,000 gold pieces. The Polish commander-in-chief Jan Sobieski rejects the terms of the October 18 treaty and takes the offensive, beginning a 4-year war over control of the Ukraine (see
Former Dutch colonial official Peter Stuyvesant dies on his Manhattan farm in February at age 61; New York's first English governor Richard Nicolls is killed May 28 at age 47 fighting the Dutch in the Battle of Solebay.
French courtier Louis de Buade, 50, comte de Palluau et de Frontenac, is appointed governor-general of New France. A veteran of the Thirty Years' War who 4 years ago served briefly as a lieutenant general with Venetian forces defending Crete against the Ottoman Turks, Frontenac was soon dismissed for engaging in an intrigue against his superiors (see exploration,
Russian serfs rise in revolt against the country's great landowners.
English merchants form the Royal Africa Company to exploit the slave trade. The company is soon supplying sugar planters in the West Indies at a rate of 3,000 slaves per year.
The Dutch organize a system of relief for the poor, who have been provided for up to now by prosperous merchants. With Dutch trade declining and the country at war, the merchants can no longer afford to be so generous.
Charleston (initially Charlestown) is founded in the Carolina colony by Puritans from the Bermudas, who have moved to the peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers (see 1671). Colonist leader William Sayle has named the town after England's Charles II (see
Parliament imposes customs duties on goods carried from one of England's American colonies to another.
Boston-born English merchant Elihu Yale, 23, reaches India and enters the spice trade in the employ of the East India Company. Removed to London by his parents at age 3, he has been educated by private tutors. By 1687 he will have made himself governor of Fort Saint George, the company's Madras headquarters. But he will be charged with self-aggrandizement in 1692, removed from office, and held at Madras until 1699, when he will be allowed to return to London after paying a fine, whereupon he will enter the diamond trade (see education,
New York merchant Frederick Philipse begins acquiring a manorial estate of 205,000 acres in upper Yonkers (some say by altering a phrase in a contract with the Indians).
The New York to Boston Post Road is laid out to speed coach travel between the second and third largest American cities.
A calculating machine invented by philosopher-mathematician Gottfried W. Leibniz, now 27, multiplies by repeated addition and divides as well as doing the adding and subtracting performed by the 1642 Blaise Pascal machine (see Morland, 1666). Left without a patron since the death in February of the elector of Mainz, Leibniz has been inspired by a pedometer (a steps-counting device) that he saw while on a diplomatic mission to Paris. He makes his first visit to London in quest of financial support, and he presents his "Stepped Reckoner" to the Royal Society. The primitive computer employs a stepped drum or cylinder with nine bar-shaped teeth of incrementing length parallel to the cylinder's axis; when a crank rotates the cylinder, the cylinder rotates a ten-tooth wheel fixed over a sliding axis, moving it between zero and positions depending on its relative position to the cylinder. There is one set of wheels for each digit, as in Pascal's machine; when the cylinder is rotated, it generates a movement in the regular wheels that is proportional to their relative positions. Leibniz's device translates this movement into multiplication or division, depending on which direction the stepped drum is rotated. It not only performs the four basic arithmetical operations but also mechanizes the calculation of trigonometric and astronomical tables (see Babbage, 1833).
The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun by English botanist-physician-microscopist Nehemiah Grew, 30, pioneers the study of the anatomy of plants. Grew's work is presented to the Royal Society along with a manuscript by the Italian physician-biologist Marcello Malpighi, now 42, who has founded the science of microscopic anatomy.
Astronomer Giovanni Cassini approximates the distance between the sun and Earth, becoming the first to arrive at a close calculation (see 1666; Römer,
The Black Death flares up again in Europe, killing 60,000 at Lyons and hundreds of thousands at Naples in just 6 months.
Physician-physiologist-anatomist-chemist Franciscus Sylvius (Franz de la Boë) dies at Leyden November 15 at age 58.
Clergyman and Harvard College president Charles Chauncy dies at Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 19 at age 79.
The French intellectual journal and literary review Mercure de France has its beginnings in the Mercure Galant published at Paris (it will change its name in 1724).
Fiction: The Magical Bird's Nest (Das wunderbarliche Vogelnest) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen.
Poet Anne Bradstreet dies at Andover, Massachusetts, September 16 at age 60.
Painting: Virgin and Child by Bartolomé Murillo. Adriaen van de Velde dies at Amsterdam January 21 at age 41.
Theater: Bajazet by Jean Racine 1/1 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, Paris; The Learned Ladies (Les femmes savantes) by Molière 3/11 at the Palais-Royal, Paris; Marriage à la Mode by John Dryden, in April at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, London; The Gentleman Dancing Master by William Wycherley, in August at London's Dorset Garden Theatre; Pulcheria (Pulchérie) by Pierre Corneille 11/14 at the Théâtre du Marais, Paris; Epsom Wells by Thomas Shadwell in December at London's Dorset Garden Theatre.
The Académie Royale de Danse founded by Louis XIV in 1661 is amalgamated with the Paris Opéra and becomes the Paris Opéra Ballet.
Composer Heinrich Schütz dies at Köstritz, outside Dresden, Saxony November 6 at age 87, having pioneered German opera (although most of his compositions have been settings for religious texts in Latin and German).
England's Charles II orders judges and barristers to wear wigs in court, a custom imported from France (date approximate).
New England Rarities by English-born merchant John Josselyn says of passenger pigeons, "of late they are much diminished, the English taking them with nets" (see 1648; 1800).
The first Paris coffeehouse opens at the Saint-Germain Fair. An Armenian known only as Pascal does well at the fair, but he fails in the coffeehouse he opens thereafter in the Quai de L'Ecole and moves to London (see
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