1684 - Definition and Overview

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

Births

• March 19 - Jean Astruc, French physician and scholar
• April 15 - Martha Skavronskaya, a Lithuanian peasant who later became Empress Catherine I of Russia
• 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