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The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I dies at Vienna May 5 at age 54 after a 47-year reign. He is succeeded by his 26-year-old son, who will reign until 1711 as Josef I.
Stanislaw Leszczynski is crowned king of Poland September 24, succeeding the deposed Augustus II (see 1704); he concludes an alliance with Sweden's Karl XII and supplies Karl with some help against Russia's Peter I in the continuing Great Northern War.
The Austrian archduke Karl (Charles) lands in Catalonia, and English forces help him take Barcelona October 14 in the continuing War of the Spanish Succession. Sentiment against the French has been strong in Catalonia and Valencia. Both support Karl's claim to the Spanish throne.
The former English queen Catherine da Braganza (Bragança) dies at Lisbon December 31 at age 67, having returned to her native Portugal in 1692 and become regent last year for her ailing younger brother Pedro II.
Bavarian troops loyal to Austrian occupation forces at Munich clash with rebellious farmers early Christmas morning and open fire in what will be remembered as the Sendlinger massacre (see politics, 1704). Their bullets leave an estimated 3,000 dead or wounded, and farmers who seek refuge in nearby churches or the Südliche Friedhof are rounded up and executed. Some 682 are buried in mass graves.
"Money and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money" by Edinburgh-born mathematical odds expert John Law, 34, is a 120-page pamphlet based on studies of banking operations at Amsterdam, Genoa, and Venice, where banks typically receive coins from merchants and give them credit in the form of paper banknotes that can be used as legal tender in trade, transferring specie among their various accounts and keeping their metal reserves intact (the Bank of Amsterdam has been doing it since 1609). Law's goldsmith father died when John was 12. His widow took over the family business, whose operations included money lending, and John worked for the firm for 3 years before leaving for London, where he took up fencing, tennis, gambling, and debauchery. His mother bailed him out after he had lost much of his fortune at the gaming tables, and he worked to master the laws of probability. After killing a London dandy in a 1694 duel, he went abroad for 10 years, wound up at Paris, and has returned to his native land, where he has written his pamphlet. He submits his banking reform plan to the Scottish parliament, but it is rejected (see 1690; 1716).
Factum de la France by the sieur de Boisguilbert proposes a single capitation tax—10 percent of the revenues on all property to be paid to the state (see 1695). Farmers oppose the idea of taxation, and it finds little support from anyone (see George, 1879).
The Newcomen steam engine invented by English blacksmith Thomas Newcomen, 42, at Dartmouth will pave the way for an Industrial Revolution (see Savery, 1698). Helped by John Calley (or Cawley), Newcomen uses a jet of cold water to condense steam entering a cylinder. He thus creates atmospheric pressure that drives a piston to produce power that will be used beginning in 1712 to pump water out of coal mines, but his engine is large and ponderous, cycling several times per minute (see Darby, 1709; Watt, 1769).
Halley's Comet will receive that name on the basis of studies reported by astronomer Edmond Halley, now 49, who notes that comets observed in 1531, 1607, and 1682 followed roughly the same paths (see 1456). Observations of the comets have been made since 240 B.C.; Halley suggests that they were all the same comet and that it will reappear in 1758 (see Bailly, 1760).
Queen Anne confers knighthood on Isaac Newton, now 62.
Naturalist John Ray dies at his native Black Notley, Essex, January 17 at age 77 while working on his Historia Insectorum, in which he divides insects according to whether or not they have metamorphoses; mathematician Jakob Bernoulli dies at his native Basel August 16 at age 50, having introduced the first principles of the calculus of variations. His brother Johann, 38, has been teaching at Groningen in the Netherlands, having earlier taught calculus to the French mathematician Guillaume-François-Antoine de L'Hospital, and takes over the professorship that Jakob has held at Basel, where he will make even more contributions to mathematics than did Jakob.
Religious leader-poet Michael Wigglesworth dies at Malden in the Massachusetts Bay colony May 27 at age 73.
Painting: Young Girl Holding a Dove by Venetian miniaturist Rosalba Carriera, 29. Luca Giordano dies at his native Naples January 3 at age 72, having completed the ceiling of the Cappella del Tesoro in San Martino.
Theater: The Tender Husband; or, The Accomplished Fool by Richard Steele 4/23 at London's Drury Lane Theatre, is an adaptation of the 1667 Molière comedy Le Sicilian; The Mistake by John Vanbrugh 10/27 at London's Haymarket Theatre; The Confederacy by Vanbrugh 10/30 at the Haymarket Theatre; Ulysses by Nicholas Rowe 11/23 at the Haymarket Theatre; Idomeneus (Idomenée) by French playwright Prosper Jolyot, 31, sieur de Crébillon, 12/29 at the Comédie-Française, Paris.
Opera: Almira 1/8 at Hamburg, with music by German composer George Frideric Handel, 20.
First performances: St. John Passion by George Frideric Handel.
The French courtesan Ninon de Lenclos dies at her native Paris October 17 at age 85, having retired in 1671 after a career in which her receptions became perfectly respectable as well as fashionable.
Blenheim Palace goes up at Woodstock for the duke of Marlborough on 2,000 acres of Oxfordshire parkland. Queen Anne has commissioned London playwright John Vanbrugh to design the baroque palace as a tribute to the victor of last year's great battle. Vanbrugh has turned from drama to architecture and gets a hand from architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, 44, who began his career as an aide to Sir Christopher Wren in about 1679.
Famine strikes France, causing widespread distress that will continue for years.
Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, orders his court alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger to discover the secret of hard Chinese porcelain (see 1673; 1708).
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