1675
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Marshal Turenne scores a major victory over the Dutch at Turkheim January 5, recovers all of Alsace within a few weeks, but is killed July 27 at age 63 by almost the first shot fired in a battle at Sassbach in Baden. The French retreat across the Rhine, and Austrian generalissimo Raimondo Montecuccoli is finally allowed to retire.
Swedish allies of France's Louis XIV invade Brandenburg but are defeated June 28 by the elector of Brandenburg in the Battle of Fehrbellin; the elector retaliates by invading Pomerania (see 1679).
Poland's new king Jan III Sobieski concludes the secret Treaty of Jaworów with France in June, pledging himself to fight the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I once he has made peace with the Ottoman Turks (see 1674; 1676; treaty with Leopold, 1683).
Charles Emmanuel II, duke of Savoy, dies at his native Turin June 12 at age 40 after a 37-year reign in which he has persecuted Waldensians, enlarged Turin, and consolidated Piedmont.
King Philip's War devastates New England as Chief Metacum rebels against a 1671 order requiring his people to pay an annual tribute of £100. Called King Philip of Potanoket by the colonists, Metacum leads the Narragansett and Wampanoag in attacks on 52 American settlements, destroying 12 or 13 of them and killing 600 New England male colonists.(see 1662; 1676).
Iroquois tribesmen defeat warriors of the rival Andaste and Mohegan tribes after years of conflict and turn their attention to diverting the western fur trade from Montreal to Albany, where the Five Nations can profit by acting as intermediaries. They attack tribes that have allied themselves with the French and threaten the colonists of New France, whose governor-general Louis de Buade, comte de Palluau et de Frontenac, tries to appease them but does nothing to build up a defensive capability (see 1682).
Père Marquette founds a mission at the Indian town of Kaskaskia in the Illinois wilderness but dies May 18 at age 37 on the river that will bear his name (see 1673; 1699).
Boston has 30 merchants worth £10,000 to £20,000 each and 430 large vessels at sea "so that there is little left for the merchants residing in England to import into any of the plantations."
London watchmaker Thomas Tompion, 36, improves on the design of watches; following a design by experimental physicist Robert Hooke, he produces one of the first English watches to be regulated by a balance spring (see minute hands, 1670; cylinder escapement, 1695).
Philosopher Gottfried W. Leibniz establishes the foundations of both integral and differential calculus (see Newton, 1666; 1671; Barrow, 1670). Leibniz visited Christiaan Huygens at Paris 3 years ago, was shown Huygens's work on the theory of curves, and has devoted himself since then to studying mathematics, reading lectures on geometry by Isaac Barrow, investigating relationships among the summing and differencing of finite and infinite numerical sequences, and devising a transformation rule to calculate quadratures (see 1684).
Astronomer Jean Picard makes the first recorded observation of barometric light—the luminous glow that appears in a vacuum above the mercury when a barometer tube is agitated. The cause of the faint glow is static electricity, and although that is not yet understood, Picard's finding will lead to the development of the electric discharge lamp (see Geissler tube, 1855).
Mathematician and balance inventor Gilles Personier de Roberval dies at Paris October 27 at age 73, having promoted the geometry of infinitesmals and the merging of experiment with reason.
Microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek at Delft gives the first accurate description of red corpuscles (see science, 1674; population, 1677; Kircher, 1642).
The Black Death kills 11,000 in Malta.
The ninth Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur dies in the Punjab after an 11-year reign and is succeeded by Gobind Rai, who will found the fraternity Khalsa, assume the name Gobind Singh, and head the Sikhs as their final guru until his death in 1708.
England's Charles II tries to suppress the nation's news publications. Journalist Henry Muddiman and his London Gazette copublisher Sir Joseph Williamson lose their privileged positions as principal publishers of newsletters, but the public demands to have news, and although Muddiman will work for Sir Roger L'Estrange, Muddiman will retain his connections to the office of secretary of state and publish manuscript newsletters aimed chiefly at the upper classes.
Painting: The Music Lesson and The Concert by Geraert Torborch; A Lady Seated at the Virginal by Johannes Vermeer, who dies at Delft December 15 at age 43, having painted no more than three pictures per year. He leaves debts that his widow, Catharina, will pay off by selling the family's paintings.
Theater: The Country Wife by William Wycherley in January at London's 11-year-old Theatre Royal in Drury Lane: "Good wives and private soldiers should be kept ignorant" (I); The Mistaken Husband by John Dryden in September at the Drury Lane Theatre; Aureng-Zebe by Dryden in November at the Drury Lane Theatre.
England's Charles II begins wearing long waistcoats, introducing a fashion that encourages men to wear their watches in their waistcoat pockets instead of from their necks.
Construction of a new St. Paul's Cathedral begins at London June 21 (see 1667). Charles II has levied a special tax on coal arriving at the port of London to finance the structure. Architect Christopher Wren has received a royal warrant to proceed with his own design. He lays the first (Portland) stone of the cathedral that will replace the old Gothic church gutted in the Great Fire of 1666. Much of the work on it will be done behind scaffolding, and clergymen who favored the design of the previous church will not discover what Wren has done until it is too late for any change (see 1697).
France applies the Gabelle (salt tax) to Brittany, whose people have heretofore been exempt (see 1550; 1680).
England's Charles II issues a proclamation December 23 "for the suppression of Coffee Houses"; Charles's intent is to suppress talk that might lead to the kind of rebellion that caused his father's execution in January 1649, but his proclamation prompts an outcry among merchants and other patrons of the coffeehouses (see 1676).
New England has 50,000 colonists, up from 16,000 in 1642, while its Native American population has dropped to no more than 20,000.
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