1696
Famine Devastates Finland and the Baltics
A succession of crop failures brought on by volcanic cooling and brutal winters killed roughly a third of Finland's population and devastated the Baltic provinces of Sweden. Entire parishes vanished. The Great Famine of 1695-1697, proportionally one of the worst in European history, exposed the fragility of northern agriculture and weakened Swedish power on the eve of the Great Northern War.
Peter the Great Captures Azov
After a failed attempt the previous year, the young Russian tsar personally led a second campaign against the Ottoman fortress of Azov on the Don. With newly built galleys and foreign engineers, he took the fort, Russia's first warm-water port on the Black Sea. Peter had tasted empire and wanted more.
Calculus War Erupts Between Newton and Leibniz
The simmering priority dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the invention of calculus burst into open acrimony when followers of each accused the other of plagiarism. The quarrel, fought through pamphlets, intermediaries, and the Royal Society, would poison Anglo-German scientific relations for a generation and impoverish both men's late years.
Window Tax Introduced in England
William III's government imposed a tax on houses according to the number of windows, believing it an easy way to tax wealth without requiring income returns. Many homeowners promptly bricked up windows to reduce their assessment, which is why so many English houses have blank panels in their facades. The tax endured for over a century and a half before its repeal in 1851.