• Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin.
• French mathematician, physicist, geodesist, and astronomer Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.
• French mathematician Pierre Bouguer.
• English clergyman William Warburton, who produced an edited version of Shakespeare's works.
• English painter George Knapton.
• French sculptor Edmé Bouchardon.
• Italian composer Nicola Bonifacio Logroscino.
• French composer Louis-Antoine Travenol.
• Italian composer Pietro Auletta.
• Scottish moral philosopher George Turnbull.
• French chemist Charles François de Cisternay Du Fay.
• Italian poet Pietro Metastasio.
• English composer William Knapp.
• English composer Joseph Gibbs.
• English poet Richard Savage.

• Ernst August, elector of Brunswick - Lüneburg (aka Hannover).  His son Georg Ludwig (later King George I of Great Britain) succeeds him.
• Dutch painter Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde.
• Chinese mathematician Fang Zhongtong.
• Chinese poet Cao Zhenji.
• Dutch cartographer Frederick de Wit.
• French courtier, and giant in the history of French Canada, Louis de Perigord, Comte de Frontenac.

 

• Bénigne d'Auvergne de St.-Mars, commander of the Ste. Marguerite prison in France], is given command of the Bastille in Paris. With him, he brings certain special prisoners whom Louis XIV put in his keeping. One of these is a man wearing a mask (leather, not iron as dramatized by Alexandre Dumas), who has his own valet. The prisoner's aappearance during his brief walk into the Bastille causes much speculation as to his identity.
• Tsar Peter the Great:
• travels incognito around Europe, but has to hurry home from England when his Streltsy guards revolt in favor of Peter's half-sister Sophia.   Sophia is put in a nunnery and the rebels are executed (some by Peter himself) to a man; the corps of Streltsy is disbanded.
• levies a tax on beards in order to encourage westernization of Russia.  Those who paid the tax were issued a metal token with a beard stamped on it.
• Jakob Bernoulli demonstrates how to calculate geodesic lines on curved surfaces.
• England removes the slave trade monopoly from the Royal African Company, allowing all English merchants to kidnap human beings and transport them into slavery.  The infamous Triangular trade of slaves, molasses and rum is set up.
• Captain William Kidd decides that chasing pirates is less profitable than being one, and begins raiding ships in the Indian Ocean.  English authorities are upset because he is disrupting the slave trade.
• The first expedition to settle Louisiana leaves Brest.
• Five ships carrying 1000 Scots leave for a new Scottish colony in Darien,  Panama.
• William III charters a New East India Company, a competitor to the original English East India Company.
• The English East India Company purchases three villages in Bengal (Kalikata, Sutanati, and Govindpurfrom) from Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.    The Company fortifies their factory at Hugli, naming it Fort William.  The villages will eventually become the city of Calcutta.
• Construction of a different Fort William, in Newfoundland, also begins.
• The army of Brandenburg-Prussia adopts marching in step, and issues iron ramrods for its muskets.
• Spanish soldiers buidl Fort San Carlos on Pensacola Bay.
• William Partridge releases a pamphlet claiming that his 1695 prediction that the world would end in 1697 was correct:  the world had ended, but no-one noticed.
• Asante king Osei Tutu begins a war against the Asante's former conquerors, the Denkyira people.
• The Dutch West India Company builds Fort Leitsaemheyt at Apam on the Gold Coast (Ghana).
• The Virginia state house in Jamestown burns down.

1697 - 1698 - 1699

How they Were Made - 17th Century