1684
Events France under Louis XIV makes Truce of Ratisbon separately with the Empire and Spain. Pope Innocent XI forms a Holy League with the Habsburg Empire, Venice and Poland to liberate Europe from the Ottoman Turkish rule. Japanese Chief Minister Hotta Masatoshi is assassinated, leaving Shogun Sunayoshi without any adequate advisors, leading him to issue impractical edicts and create hardships for the Japanese people The Japanese poet Saikaku composes 23,500 verses in 24 hours at the Sumiyoshi Shrine at Osaka; the scribes cannot keep pace with his dictation and just count the verses The British East India Company receives Chinese permission to build a trading station at Canton. Tea sells in Europe for less than a shilling a pound, but the import duty of 5 shillings makes it too expensive for most English people to afford Smuggled tea is drunk much more than legally imported tea England has its coldest winter in living memory; the River Thames and the sea as far as 2 miles out from land freezes over John Bunyan writes The Pilgrim's Progress Part 2
BirthsMarch 19 - Jean Astruc, French physician and scholarApril 15 - Martha Skavronskaya, a Lithuanian peasant who later became Empress Catherine I of RussiaJune 22 - Francesco Manfredini, Italian baroque composer (d. 1762) October 10 - Antoine Watteau, French painter December 3 - Ludvig Holberg, historian and writer (d. 1754) Johann Jacob Dillenius, German botanist (d. 1747)
Deaths Chief Minister Hotta Masatoshi, assassinated
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