1696

Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight
Thus I return to the source.

               - Gesshu Soko's death poem

Born in 1696:

• English composer Maurice Greene.
• Future Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist movement.
• English landscape architect Batty Langley.
• Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
• Prince Johann Ernst of Weimar, German composer.
• French author Abbé Antoine-François Prévost.
• Future British prime minister Henry Pelham.
• French painter Louis Tocqué.
• Comte Marc Pierre de Voyer d'Argenson, founder of the Paris École Militaire.
• English poet and songwriter William Oldys.
• Italian composer Leonardo Vinci.
• Chinese painter Huang Shijun.
• Chinese painter Ding Jing.
• Chinese painter Dong Bangda.

• French novelist Jean de la Bruyère.
• French mathematician Jean Richer.
• Italian art historian Giovanni Pietro Bellori.
• Italian art historian Filippo Baldinucci.
• Jan III (Sobieski), king of Poland.
• Japanese empress Meishô.
• Chinese painter and bureaucrat Fa Ruozhen.
• Tsar Ivan V of Russia.  His 24-year-old  half brother and co-Tsar Peter now rules Russia by himself.
• Zen master Gesshu Soko, "The Great Revitalizer".

• Pierre Bayle has his Dictionnaire historique et critique published in Rotterdam.
• Peter the Great works to build Russia a Navy.   In the Voronezh shipyards, under the alias Peter Mikhailov.  Later in the year, the navy sails down the Don River and captures Azov from the Ottoman Turks.
• Eleven-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach enters the Ordruf Lyceum.
• Qing Emperor Kang Xi conquers Mongolia, crushing Dzungar Galdan Boshogtu at Jao Modo near Ulan Bataar.
• King William's War, aka The War of the League of Augsburg continues:
• Pierre le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville captures the English Fort William Henry on the Maine coast. He is then part of a French force that overruns the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland.
• The Comte de Frontenac attacks the Iroquois allies of the English.
• Louis XIV abolishes the fur trade and forbids all travel into the Illinois country.
• Duke Victor Amadeus of Savoy drops out of the war early, signing a separate treaty with Louis XIV in Turin.
• The English Parliament:
• suspends the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, after an attempted assassination of King William III.
• passes the Treason Act, granting those accused of treason (but no-one else!) the right to defense counsel, and to see a copy of their indictment.
• passes a fifth Navigation Act, stating that its North American colonies' trade must be with British citizens, on British ships, and to British ports.  Customs officials were permitted to break into buildings at any time, ostensibly to look for smuggled goods.
• "King William's Free School" founded in Annapolis, Maryland, which will evolve into St. John's College.

1695 - 1696 - 1697

How They Were Made - 17th Century