1672
Louis XIV Begins Versailles Expansion
The Sun King ordered the rebuilding of his father's modest hunting lodge at Versailles into the greatest palace in Europe. Architects, gardeners, and five thousand workmen began twenty years of labor. The court would move there in 1682, and absolute monarchy acquired a ceremonial stage to match its pretensions, a theater of power that every European prince rushed to imitate.
Franco-Dutch War Begins
Louis XIV invaded the Dutch Republic with a hundred and twenty thousand men, ostensibly to punish the insult of the Triple Alliance but really for glory. The Dutch opened the dikes and flooded the countryside to save Amsterdam. The country was saved but not whole, and William of Orange rose to command.
Cassini Measures Mars Parallax
The Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, director of the Paris Observatory, coordinated simultaneous observations of Mars from Paris and Cayenne and calculated the first reasonably accurate distance from the Earth to the Sun. The solar system, previously a set of ratios, acquired absolute dimensions for the first time, and humanity began to grasp the true scale of its cosmic neighborhood.
De Witt Brothers Murdered
A mob in The Hague lynched the Dutch grand pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis, blaming them for the military catastrophe of the French invasion. Their bodies were hung upside down and partially eaten. William of Orange quietly inherited political power; the regent party never fully recovered, and Dutch republicanism took on a darker, more cautious character.