Isaac Newton spends a creative period in Lincolnshire, at home in Woolsthorpe Manor, apples or no apples

The Great Fire of London rages for four days, destroying 13,200 houses and 81 churches

Michiel de Ruyter sails up the Thames to destroy much of the English fleet at its base in the Medway

The first successful human blood transfusion is achieved in Paris by Jean Baptiste Denis, apparently saving the life of a 15-year-old boy

Bernini's great curving colonnade is completed, to form the piazza in front of St Peter's

French dramatist Jean Racine's first great success, Andromaque, finds tragic drama in a quadrangle of love

Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10

Wood-carver Grinling Gibbons arrives from Holland to begin an immensely successful career in England

Spain finally accepts the independence of the kingdom of Portugal, after nearly a century of Spanish rule

The Bank of Sweden is founded, and survives today as the world's oldest bank

The duke of York, heir to the English and Scottish thrones, is secretly received into the Roman Catholic church

Samuel Pepys ends his diary, after only writing it for nine years

The Dutch develop a new pattern of middle-class urban life and architecture, later copied in England

Giovanni Domenico Cassini, working in the Paris royal observatory, calculates the distance from the earth to the sun and is only 7% out

Charles II issues a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the restrictions on Catholics and Nonconformists

Isaac Newton's experiments with the prism demonstrate the link between wavelength and colour in light

Molière falls fatally ill when acting in his own play Le Malade Imaginaire

Sébastien de Vauban's new technique for conducting the siege of a town shows its effectiveness at Maastricht

Parliament in England passes a Test Act excluding Catholics and Nonconformists from public office

The Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek builds a microscope powerful enough for him to observe and describe the red corpuscles in blood

Dutch traders purchase Kakiemon wares in Japan for import to the Netherlands

Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, now develops the hairspring - of great future importance in watches

The double-hung sash window is introduced in England and soon spreads to Holland

Ole Roemer, a Danish astronomer working with Cassini in Paris, calculates the speed of light with an error of only 25%

With his powerful new microscope Leeuwenhoek observes spermatozoa in the semen of a dog