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Russia's Peter the Great has his emissary Count Peter Tolstoi bring back the czarevich Alexius Petrovich, forces him to sign a "confession" February 18 implicating his friends, and has them impaled, broken on the wheel or otherwise dispatched (see 1716). The ex-czarevich Eudoxia is dragged from her monastery and publicly tried for alleged adultery. Alexius is given 25 lashes with the knout June 19 (nobody has ever survived 30), given 15 more June 24, and dies in the guardhouse of the citadel at St. Petersburg June 26 at age 28, 2 days after being condemned by the senate for "imagining" rebellion against his father. His death increases the power of Peter's wife, the empress Catherine (Marta Ekaterina), who gives birth to another daughter, Natalia, and will spend the next 7 years trying to keep the czar away from vodka and from other women.
The Quadruple Alliance (Britain, France, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Emperor Karl VI) block an effort by Tuscany's minister Carlo Rinuccini to restore a republican form of government in the grand duchy, whose sixth grand duke Cosimo III de' Medici is now 76. They agree in the Treaty of London that upon the extinction of the Medici family's male line the grand duchy shall pass to Don Carlos de Borbón along with Parma and Piacenza (see 1720).
The Treaty of Passarowitz July 21 ends a 4-year war between Venice and Constantinople in which Austria has intervened on behalf of the Venetians. The Ottoman Turks lose the Banat of Temesvar, northern Serbia, and Little Wallachia (see 1690), but they retain the Morea while Venice retains only the Ionian Islands and the Dalmatian Coast (see 1739).
Spain's Felipe V sends troops into Sicily in July, and his seizure of the country raises fears of a new European war. The Quadruple Alliance formed August 2 by the Holy Roman Emperor, Britain, and France (Holland will join next year) determines to prevent Felipe from overturning the peace of 1714 (see 1720).
France's regent Philippe II, duc d'Orléans, dissolves his cumbersome and inefficient conciliar government in September and reinstates the secretaries of state whose authority he removed in 1715.
Sweden's Karl (Charles) XII is shot through the head December 11 as he peers over the parapet of the foremost trench 280 paces from the fortress of Fredriksten during a military expedition to Norway (see 1715). Dead at age 36 after a momentous 21-year reign, Karl is succeeded by his sister Ulrika Eleanora, 30, who accepts the crown on condition that the riksdag be allowed to draft a new constitution and who brings the Great Northern War to a close. Peter the Great's secretary Andrei Ivanovich Osterman represents the czar at a peace conference with Sweden (see 1721).
San Antonio de Valero is founded in a Texas cottonwood grove by Franciscan monks who build a chapel they call the Alamo, meaning cottonwood (see 1836).
Colonist William Penn dies at Ruscombe, Berkshire, July 30 at age 73, leaving an estate of 21 million acres. His widow, Hannah, inherits control of the Pennsylvania colony (his will passes over the children by his first wife), and she will keep it intact for 14 years, resisting pressure from the crown to surrender it and from some colonial factions to abandon it (see 1712). Penn's oldest son by his first marriage initiates legal action to nullify Penn's will and obtain the colony for himself, but Hannah will have the son's claims dismissed a week before her death from a stroke at age 55 in 1726.
New Orleans is founded August 25 near the mouth of the Mississippi by the sieur de Bienville. A few Frenchmen emigrate to the Louisiana territory (see 1701; 1720).
John Law's Compagnie de l'Occident purchases the French government's tobacco monopoly, and Law announces that in 6 months he will "call" for a small number of shares in the company at par, despite the fact that they are now selling for about half their face value (see 1717). Share prices begin to rise (see 1719).
The first English bank notes are issued, but most Britons put their trust only in gold and silver specie (see Bank of England, 1694; John Law, 1716).
The first table of chemical affinities is presented to the Académie by French chemist Etienne-François Geoffroy, 46, who advances the Age of Enlightenment by showing how various chemicals react to each other. He is the first chemist to mention an affinity between different bodies in terms of fixed attractions (see Berthollet, 1785).
The Doctrine of Chances by mathematician Abraham de Moivre expands on his 1711 paper and gives the first clear definition of statistical independence: the probability of a compound occurrence created by statistically independent events occurring together is the product of the probabilities of its components. Moivre's work includes many problems in dice and other games, using some that appeared 5 years ago in Jakob Bernoulli's work, which appeared 2 years after publication of Moivre's paper "De mensura sortis."
"Innoculation Against Smallpox" by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reports a workable method known in the East since ancient times. Now 29, Lady Mary is in Constantinople, where her husband is the English minister, and although she married for love she has taken at least two lovers despite the fact that her own face is deeply pitted from smallpox she contracted in December 1815. She describes inoculation parties she has witnessed at which a small wound is made in the arm, a few drops of smallpox pus inserted, and a walnut shell tied over the infected area, a procedure used by Chinese physicians for at least 400 years to produce a true case of smallpox but usually one so mild that 98 percent of those inoculated recover (see 1721).
A mysterious disease comparable in its effects to England's 1518 "sweating sickness" strikes Picardy in the first of a series of epidemics that will recur in France for more than a century. The "Suette des Picards" differs in its symptoms from the "sweating sickness" but is no less deadly.
Yale College renames itself as such to honor benefactor Elihu Yale, who has become an official of the East India Company serving as governor of Fort St. George at Madras (see 1672). English colonial agent Jeremiah Dummer has secured books and patrons for the Collegiate School founded at Saybrook in the Connecticut colony 17 years ago; Cotton Mather in the Massachusetts Bay colony has written to Yale, insinuating broadly that the school might be renamed in his honor if Yale were to make a substantial gift. Yale has sent a cargo of additional books and East India goods; the school sells the cargo at Boston for £560 (£800 by some accounts), and it uses the proceeds to move to New Haven and put up a building (see 1861; Yale University, 1745).
Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, 21, marries the marquis de Deffand, from whom she will soon be separated. As witty as she is beautiful, she will preside over a salon that will attract the leading literary figures of Paris.
Poetry: Alma, or The Progress of the Mind and Solomon, or The Vanity of the World by Matthew Prior, now 54, who played a leading role in negotiating the Peace of Utrecht 5 years ago.
Painting: Parc Fête by Antoine Watteau; The Duke of Norfolk by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
Theater: The Non-Juror by Colley Cibber is an adaptation of Molière's 1669 play Tartuffe designed to support the Whig cause; Oedipé by the playwright Voltaire, now 24, 11/18 at the Théâtre Français, Paris. Voltaire's father, François Arouet, managed the business affairs of the late courtesan Ninon de Lenclos, and she left money in her will to buy books for the young man, who was released from the Bastille in April after serving nearly a year for libel.
Opera: Italian soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, 20, makes her Venetian debut as Delinda in C. F. Pollarolo's opera Ariodante (Faustina Bordoni sings the role of Ginevra and the two women begin a rivalry that will continue for the next decade).
The pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, raids Charleston (Charlestown) in the South Carolina colony and holds the town to ransom. His ship Queen Anne's Revenge is the largest pirate vessel on the high seas (although even the smallest of the Royal Navy's 67 ships of the line can match the firepower of her 50 guns), and in recent years he has plundered ships off Saint Kitts and in the Bay of Honduras; Blackbeard raided the Virginia coast in October of last year, but he is killed in a skirmish near Ocracoke Island in the North Carolina colony.
English pirate John Rackam challenges his captain, who has declined to attack a French frigate in the windward passage; elected captain in his own right, he will gain notoriety as "Calico Jack," sailing out of New Providence in the Bahamas (see 1720).
Former privateer Woodes Rogers arrives at Nassau to take up the position of royal governor of the Bahamas to which he was appointed last year. Now about 39, he establishes order in what has been the headquarters of more than 2,000 pirates and forces many of them to surrender.
Carolina coastal pirate Stede Bonnet dies on the gallows after having been seized with his crew.
French artisans visit St. Petersburg at the invitation of the new Russian czar Peter II, who wants help in beautifying his new capital. Among the invitees is Paris-born woodcarver Nicolas Pineau, 31, who will remain in Russia until about 1728, carving the czar's cabinet in the Peterhof Palace while serving also as an architect and interior designer. When he returns home he will launch a vogue for rococo rooms in private houses.
Potatoes arrive at Boston with some Irish Presbyterian immigrants (see 1719).
A great Scots-Irish emigration to America begins.
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