• Scottish Jacobite leader Robert MacGregor, aka 'Rob Roy'.
• Italian painter Donato Creti.
• Italian mathematician Luigi Guido Grandi.
• Scottish mathematician John Keill.
• English poet and playwright Colley Cibber.
• Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni.
• Scottish banker and speculator John Law.
• French composer Antoine Forqueray.
• Italian composer Azzolino Bernardino della Ciaia.
• English moral philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury.
• Gian Gastone de' Medici, future Grand Duke of Tuscany.
• Japanese printmaker Nishikawa Sukenobu.

• Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli.
• Dutch painter Jan van Bijlert.
• French painter Sébastien Bourdon.
• English poet Ralph Knevet.
• Original Maryland settler and political figure Margaret Brent.
• English general Thomas Fairfax (3rd Baron Fairfax), victor at the 1645 Battle of Naseby.
• English general Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester.
• Don Cossack hetman Razin Stenka, executed, see below.

• John Milton's poems Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes appear.
• Moliere's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme appears.
• Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovers a new moon of Saturn, Iapetus.  Louis XIV appoints Cassini head of his new Royal Obervatory.
• Louis XIV also creates the Académie Royale d'Architecture.
• Frederick William, elector of Brandenburg, issues an edict allowing Jews to live in Berlin, and 50 Jewish families who had been expelled from Vienna settle there.
• Christopher Wren designs a monument to commemorate the 1666 Great Fire of London.
• Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invents a mechanical calculating machine, and publishes Hypothesis physica nova, repeating Johannes Kepler's claim that movement depends on the action of a 'spirit'.
• Isaac Newton writes De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum (about Differential Calculus) but fails to publish it.
• Welsh pirate Henry Morgan sacks Panama City.
• Irish adventurer Thomas Blood attempts to steal the English Crown Jewels but is captured.   Blood manages to ingratiate himself with Charles II, and, rather than being drawn and quartered, he is pardoned and given a pension.
• Razin Stenka, whose rebellion had been defeated the year before is handed over to the forces of Russian Tsar Alexei by landowning Cossacks.
• Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb appoints Nawab Iftikhar Khan as his governor of Kashmir and orders him to forcibly convert the Pandits to Islam.
• On Guam, Chief Hurao calls on the Chamora to expel the Spanish.

1670 - 1671 - 1672

How They Were Made - 17th Century