1686
Buda Reconquered from the Ottomans
After a brutal siege lasting seventy-eight days, a multinational Habsburg army stormed the fortress of Buda, wresting Hungary's ancient capital from one hundred and forty-five years of Ottoman occupation. The city was gutted, its mosques demolished, its Muslim population expelled. The Ottoman tide in Europe was receding for good, and the Christian reconquest of the Balkans had begun in earnest.
Mughal Empire at Its Greatest Extent
After a long and costly campaign, Aurangzeb conquered the Deccan sultanate of Bijapur and, the following year, Golconda with its diamond mines. The Mughal empire now stretched from Kabul to Cape Comorin, covering most of the Indian subcontinent. It was also, though nobody quite realized, past its peak, and the wars that achieved its maximum extent also sowed the seeds of its collapse.
Dominion of New England
James II consolidated Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire into a single Dominion of New England under Governor Sir Edmund Andros, abolishing elected legislatures. The colonists, suddenly confronted with Stuart absolutism in their own forests, began plotting quietly. The Glorious Revolution would rescue them, and the memory of Andros's autocracy deepened colonial suspicion of royal overreach.
Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
The French savant Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle published an elegant dialogue explaining Copernican astronomy to a fictional marquise strolling through a moonlit garden. Written in witty French rather than ponderous Latin, it was the first great work of popular science, proving that the universe could be made charming as well as terrifying.
Last Aurochs Sighting Confirmed
Polish foresters at Jaktorow confirmed that the aurochs, once widespread across Europe, had been reduced to a handful of animals on a single royal reserve. A long, slow biological extinction was becoming visible to European administrators; conservation as an idea was, without being named, beginning to flicker into existence. The species would be entirely gone within decades.