Decades: 1630s 1640s 1650s 1660s 1670s - 1680s - 1690s 1700s 1710s 1720s 1730s

Years: 1679 1680 1681 1682 1683 - 1684 - 1685 1686 1687 1688 1689

Table of contents

1 Events 2 Year in topic 3 Births 4 Deaths

Events

• France under Louis XIV makes Truce of Ratisbon separately with the Empire and Spain.
• 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 can't keep pace with his dictation and just count the verses
• The British East India Company gets 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 Thames and the sea as far as 2 miles out from land freezes over

• John Bunyan writes The Pilgrim's Progress Part 2

• 1684 in literature
• 1684 in science

• 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