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The Japanese shōgun Ietsuna Tokugawa dies at age 39 after a 29-year reign. He is succeeded by his 34-year-old brother, who will reign until 1709 as Tsunayoshi.
India's Maratha king Shivaji falls ill and dies at his mountain stronghold and capital Rajgarh April 3 at age 53 (approximate), having founded a monarchy that practiced religious tolerance. The Marathans will continue to war with the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb until his death in 1707 but will be allies at times with Aurangzeb's successors (see 1761).
Sweden's Karl (Charles) XI brings pressures on the estates to pass a law requiring all earldoms, baronies, and other large fiefs to revert to the crown, thereby legalizing wholesale confiscation of properties. The Karolinska enväldet stabilizes the nation's economy and deals a heavy blow to aristocrats but enables the king to maintain an army in peace as well as in war. Sweden adopts a military-tenure system (the indelningsverk) that will survive until 1901, with officers and men given crofts to cultivate, while peasants gain tax exemption by assuming the responsibility of maintaining cavalrymen, infantrymen, and sailors.
Austrian field marshal Raimondo Montecuccoli dies at Linz October 16 at age 71, having reformed the Hapsburg army and pioneered new military techniques.
New Hampshire is separated by royal charter from Massachusetts, whose Bay Colony governors have bought most of Maine from the heirs of Fernando Gorges.
Pueblo tribesmen at Taos and Santa Fe rise against the Spaniards August 11, killing many of them and destroying most of the Spanish churches (see 1610); led by a man known as Popé of the Oke Owingeh pueblo, they drive the 2,500 survivors down to El Paso (but see 1692).
Bohemian peasants stage a major revolt to begin an era of endemic unrest among the serfs following a shift from soil tillage to dairy farming encouraged by the Thirty Years' War that ended in 1648.
Surging demand for cocoa, tea, and coffee in England brings an increased demand for slaves to produce more sugar in English colonies (see 1652).
Minneapolis has its beginnings in St. Anthony's Falls, named by Father Hennepin, who has accompanied the sieur de La Salle to the upper Mississippi Valley (see 1678; 1819).
Europe enters a 40-year period of economic troubles that will be accompanied by wild price fluctuations, revolts, famines, and disease epidemics.
French controller general Jean-Baptiste Colbert, now 61, reorganizes the Gabelle (salt tax) in May but does not suppress any of its abuses (see 1675). The petite gabelle sets up 17 boards with tribunals, procurators, and other functionaries. In some areas salt sells for 20 times its cost (see human rights, 1780).
Work nears completion on France's Canal du Midi (Canal du Languedoc), whose construction has entailed the first use of explosives (black powder) for blasting rock. Designed to save ships from having to sail around the Rock of Gibraltar to travel between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the 14-year project has employed 12,000 workers. It will be hailed as perhaps the greatest engineering triumph of the 17th century, but it has exhausted the fortune and physical strength of public official and self-taught engineer Pierre-Paul, Baron Riquet de Bonrepos, who dies at Toulouse October 1 at age 76 while working on Mediterranean harbor facilities at the port of Cette (later Sète) (see 1603; 1681).
Naturalist Jan Swammerdam dies in poverty at his native Amsterdam February 15 at age 43, having suffered fits of depression and become a disciple of the religious evangelist Antoinette Bourignon; Jesuit priest and scholar of natural sciences Athanasius Kircher dies at Rome November 27 at age 79, having written some 44 books; anatomist-mathematician Thomas Bartholin dies at his native Copenhagen December 4 at age 64, having served as physician to Kristian V since 1670.
The Black Death strikes Dresden in epidemic proportions.
De Motu Animalium by the late Italian mathematician and astronomer Giovanni Alphonso Borelli expresses the view that digestion is a mechanical process with blood pressure inducing gastric secretion. Fevers, pains, and convulsions are the result of defective movements of the "nervous juices," says Borelli, who died at Naples on the last day of 1679 at age 71. He founded the iatrophysical school of medicine by applying mechanical principles for the first time to the study of human muscular movement (see hydrochloric acid, 1823; pepsin, 1835).
Writer François, duc de La Rochefoucauld dies at Paris March 17 at age 66; encyclopedist Louis Moréri of tuberculosis at Paris July 10 at age 37.
Poet Samuel Butler dies at London September 25 at age 68.
Painter Ferdinand Bol dies at Amsterdam July 24 at age 64.
Theater: The Spanish Friar, or The Double Discovery by John Dryden in March at London's Dorset Garden Theatre.
Sculptor-architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini dies at Rome November 28 at age 81.
Maryland colonists complain that "their supply of provisions becoming exhausted, it was necessary for them, in order to keep from starvation, to eat the oysters taken from along their shores."
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