1684

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File:Piazza di Sta Maura - Peeters Jacob - 1686.jpg

August 7: Morean War: The Republic of Venice begins the bombardment the Ottoman Empire fortress on the island of Lefkada.

File:Bombardment of Genes by Duquesne 1684 Beaulieu le Donjon.jpg

May 18: French Navy begins the Bombardment of Genoa and destroys most of the city in 10 days.

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Events

January–March

January 5
- King Charles II of England gives the title Duke of St Albans to Charles Beauclerk, his illegitimate son by Nell Gwyn.
- The earliest form of what is now the University of Tokyo (formally chartered in 1877), the Tenmongata, is established in Japan.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>湊御殿（夤賓閣）*の天文図を復元する (in Japanese) Retrieved 30 April 2023.</ref>
January 15 (January 5 O.S.) – To demonstrate that the River Thames, frozen solid during the Great Frost that started in December, is safe to walk upon, "a Coach and six horses drove over the Thames for a wager" and within three days "whole streets of Booths are built on the Thames and thousands of people are continually walking thereon." Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd Baronet, records the events in his diary.<ref>Anne Emily Garnier Newdigate-Newdegate, ed., Cavalier and Puritan in the Days of the Stuarts: Compiled from the Private Papers and Diary of Sir Richard Newdigate, Second Baronet, with Extracts from Ms. News-letters Addressed to Him Between 1675 and 1689 (Smith, Elder, & Co., 1901) p. 234</ref>
January 26 – Marcantonio Giustinian is elected Doge of Venice.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
January – Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke have a conversation in which Hooke later claimed not only to have derived the inverse-square law, but also all the laws of planetary motion attributed to Sir Isaac Newton.<ref>Laurence Gardner, The Shadow of Solomon (HarperCollins, 2005) p. 64</ref> Hooke's claim is that in a letter to Newton on 6 January 1680, he first stated the inverse-square law.<ref>Margaret 'Espinasse, Robert Hooke (University of California Press, 1956) p. 75</ref>
February 7 – Morocco retakes control of the city of Tangier from England, which had controlled the North African port since 1661.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> During the five months prior to evacuation of the English from the city, the Governor, Lord Dartmouth had ordered the destruction of the wall around the city, its fortifications and port facilities that had been built by the English during the occupation.
February 8 – Prince Dumitrașcu Cantacuzino returns to the throne of the principality of Moldavia for a third reign but is overthrown 14 months later on June 25. In 1859, Moldavia will unite with neighboring Wallachia to form the Kingdom of Romania.
February 15 (February 5 O.S.) – The Great Frost in Britain, during which the River Thames was frozen in London and the sea as far as Template:Convert out from land and which started the previous December, ends as the Thames begins to thaw. William Maitland later writes that the Frost, which started in December 1683, "congealed the river Thames to that degree that another city, as it were, was erected thereon; where by the great number of streets and shops, with their rich furniture, it represented a great fair, with a variety of carriages, and diversions of all sorts."<ref>William Andrews, Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain: Chronicled from the Earliest to the Present Time (G. Redway, 1887) pp. 17-18</ref> During the freeze, there had been great loss of beast and of wildlife, especially birds, and similar reports from across Northern Europe.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The Chipperfield's Circus dynasty began during the freeze, with James Chipperfield introducing performing animals to the country at the Frost Fair on the Thames in London.
February 24 – A treaty is signed between European German colonists in Brandenburg-Prussia, and the African chiefs in what is now Ghana to permit the German colonists to build a second fort on the Brandenburger Gold Coast, and the fortress of Dorotheenschanze is built. The area is now the Ghanaian city of Akwida.<ref>Ulrich van der Heyden, Rote Adler an Afrikas Küste: Die Brandenburgisch-preussische Kolonie Grossfriedrichsburg in Westafrika ("Red eagles on the African coast: the Brandenburg-Prussian colony of Grossfriedrichsburg in West Africa") (Selignow, 2001) p. 31</ref>
March 5 – Pope Innocent XI forms a Holy League with the Habsburg Empire, Venice and Poland, to end Ottoman Turkish rule in Europe.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
March 19 – In Japan, the Tenna era ends on the 21st day of the 2nd month of the Chinese calendar of the 4th year of the Tenna era and the Jōkyō era begins as Japan's royal astronomer, Shibukawa Shunkai institutes the Jōkyō calendar to replace Chinese calendar which had been used in Japan since 859 AD, after calculating that the length of the solar year is 365.2417 days.<ref>"Jōkyō-reki", in Japan Encyclopedia, ed. by Louis Frederic and translated by Kathe Roth (Belknap Press, 2002) p. 431</ref>

April–June

April 25 – The Morean War begins as the Republic of Venice declares war on the Ottoman Empire for control of the Peloponnese area of Greece, a peninsula which includes Corinth and Sparta and has been referred to by the Ottomans as Morea.
May 18 – The French Navy begins a 10-day bombardment of the Italian city of Genoa in the course of the War of the Reunions between France and the Republic of Genoa. During the fight, the French fleet, commanded by Abraham Duquesne, fires almost 13,000 cannonballs, pausing only during a cease-fire on May 21 and May 22, and uses the new technology of explosive bombs. When the bombardment ends on May 28, two-thirds of the city has been destroyed or damaged.<ref>John Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (Longman, 1999) p. 174</ref>
June 7 – After a siege of six weeks that began on April 27, Luxembourg City is taken by the French Army from control by Spain, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, previously part of the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium) is acquired by France.
June 27 – Francisco de Távora, the Viceroy of Portuguese India, a small colony located in southwestern India at Goa, issues an order prohibiting indigenous residents from speaking their native language, Konkani, and directs them to learn Portuguese within the next three years.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

July–September

July 21–August 6 – Morean War: Siege of Santa Maura – The Republic of Venice captures the Ottoman island fortress of Santa Maura.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
July 24 – René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle sails again from France, with a large expedition designed to establish a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Mississippi River.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
August – Edmond Halley goes to Cambridge to discuss the problem of planetary motion with Isaac Newton.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
August 15
- France under Louis XIV makes the Truce of Ratisbon separately with the Holy Roman Empire (Habsburg) and Spain.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
- Louis XIV decrees the foundation of the Maison royale de Saint-Louis, a boarding school for girls at Saint-Cyr, at the urging of Madame de Maintenon.
September 21 – Morean War: The Republic of Venice captures the fortress town of Preveza from the Ottoman Empire.

October–December

October 7 – Japanese Chief Minister Hotta Masatoshi is assassinated, leaving Shōgun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi without any adequate advisors, leading him to issue impractical edicts and create hardships for the Japanese people.
November 8 – James Renwick, a Scottish minister and one of the "Covenanters" challenging the attempt by Kings James VI and Charles I to take over churches in Scotland, posts his "Apologetical Declaration" on church doors and market crosses in and around Cambusnethan, Lanarkshire.<ref>Template:Cite ODNB</ref>
November 19 – Richard Keigwin, who had arrested the East India Company's Governor of Bombay in 1683, Josiah Child and had taken over as the unauthorized administrator of Bombay, turns control back to the company and its envoy, Sir Thomas Grantham, receiving a general pardon.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
December 10 – Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmond Halley.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
December 17 – The Tibet–Ladakh–Mughal War, which had been going on since 1679, ends with the signing of the Treaty at Tingmosgang between the 5th Dalai Lama (Desi Sangye Gyatso) and King Delek Namgyal of Ladakh. The Ladakh kingdom agrees to not invite foreign armies into the area (now part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir) in return for a respect for its sovereignty.

Date unknown

Japanese poet Ihara Saikaku composes 23,500 verses in 24 hours at the Sumiyoshi-taisha (shrine) at Osaka; the scribes cannot keep pace with his dictation and just count the verses.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
The British East India Company receives Chinese permission to build a trading station at Canton.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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; hence smuggled tea is drunk much more than legally imported tea.
John Bunyan publishes the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>