1684

• Catherine I, (Ekaterina Alexeevna in Russian, born Lithuanian Marta Skavronskaya), Empress of Russia 1725-1727.
• Johann Gottfried Walther, friend and distant relative of Bach, an organist and composer whose choral organ pieces rival Bach's own.
• Jean-Antoine Watteau, a French rococo artist, best known for his fetes galantes.

Died:

• William, Viscount Brouncker, a founder of the Royal Society of London and a brilliant mathematician, whose accomplishments include a well-known continued fraction for pi.

Events:

• Leibniz's mechanical mine-draining project in the Harz mountains fails.

• Italian composer Alessandro Marcello.
• Italian composer Francesco Durante.
• Italian composer Francesco Manfredini.
• German composer Johann Gottfried Walther.
• French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau.
• French painter Jean-Baptiste Van Loo.
• French composer François Dagincourt.
• French-born (Huguenot) British military commander in Nova Scotia, Jean Paul Mascarene.
• Bohemian composer Bohuslav Cernohorský.
• Danish dramatist and historian, Baron Ludwig Holberg.
• English art historian George Vertue.
• Dutch writer Justus van Effen.
• Future Irish Catholic Archbishop Thomas O'Beirne.
• Future British admiral Edward Vernon.
• Tokugawa Yoshimune, future shogun of Japan.
• Lithuanian peasant girl Marta Skavronskaya, future wife of Peter the Great and eventually Empress Catherine I of Russia.

• French playwright Pierre Corneille, "father of French tragedy".
• Chinese calligrapher and artist Fu Shan.
• French mathematician Pierre de Carcavi.
• Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch.
• Dutch painter Caspar Netscher.
• Dutch painter Jan Wijnants.
• Dutch painter Adriaen van Ostade.
• Anglican Archbishop Robert Leighton.
• Italian composer Pietro Andrea Ziani.
• Spanish composer Cristóbal Galán.
• German composer Johann Oelsnitz Rosenmüller.
• English mathematician Viscount William Brouncker.
• French physicist Edmé Mariotte.
• Flemish painter Gonzales Coques. (ahem).
• Greek intellectual Alexandra Mavrokordatou, in a Turkish prison.
• French fortuneteller Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin, also known as "La Voisin", burnt at the stake for witchcraft.
• Hashemite Grand Sharif Ibrahim bin Muhammad of Mecca.

• John Bunyan publishes part 2 of his best-known work The Pilgrim's Progress.
• Aphra Behn publishes Poems upon Several Occasions as well as  the first part of her novel Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister.
• Takemoto Gidayu and Chikamatsu Monzaemon open the Takemotoza theater in Osaka, Japan. The theater offers a new form ('ningyo joruri') of puppet theater.  This style, later known as Bunraku closes the Joko Era of Japanese art and opens the Tenwa Era.
• Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovers two new moons (Tethys and Dione) of Saturn.
• Thomas Otway's play The Atheist, a sequel to The Soldier's Fortune, premieres.
• In France, the Canal du Midi opens after 22 years of construction.
• Schenectady, founded in eastern New York.
• Myughal Emperor Aurangzeb overruns Gujarat, and solidifies control over Dhaka with the completion of Lalbagh Fort.
• The last supporters of the Ming Dynasty on Taiwan surrender to Qing Emperor Kangxi.
• English buccaneer William Ambrosia Cowley visits and maps the Galapagos Islands, discovered more than a hundred years previously, but mis-mapped, and so believed "enchanted".
• In western New York, the Iroquois go to war with the French, but peace is restored by September.
• English pirates based in Charles Town, Carolina destroy the Spanish missions in the area that will later be called Georgia.
• Louis XIV
• alarms the other European powers by invading and annexing Trier, Lorraine and Luxembourg.
• Sends Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle on an expedition to start a French settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi River.  La Salle claims the entire Mississippi River basin for France, calling it "Louisiana".
• After a standoff, the Holy Roman Empire's Reichstag, meeting in Regensburg, agrees to France's annexation of the invaded territories.
• Officials in New France make it a capital crime for colonists to emigrate to England's North American colonies.
• Having barely repulsed the Ottoman army from the gates of Vienna the previous year, Poland, Austria, and Venice form a "Holy Alliance"; a crusade, as it were, to capitalize on Turkey's weakness.

1683 - 1684 - 1685

How They Were Made - 17th Century