1669

January 2 – Pirate Henry Morgan of Wales holds a meeting of his captains on board his ship, the former Royal Navy frigate Oxford, and an explosion in the ship's gunpowder supply kills 200 of his crew and four of the pirate captains who had attended the summit. January 4 – A 5.7 magnitude earthquake strikes the city of Shamakhi in Iran (now in Azerbaijan) and kills 7,000 people. Fourteen months earlier, an earthquake in Shamakhi killed 80,000 people. February 13 – The first performance of the Ballet de Flore, a joint collaboration of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Isaac de Benserade is given, premiering at the Palais du Louvre in Paris. King Louis XIV finances the performance and even appears in a minor role in the production as a dancer. February 23 – Isaac Newton writes his first description of his new invention, the reflecting telescope. March 11 – Mount Etna erupts, destroying the Sicilian town of Nicolosi. March 28 – Radu Leon is deposed by the Ottoman Sultan as Prince of Wallachia (now part of Romania and is replaced by Antonie Vodă din Popești. April 9 – Aurangzeb, the Muslim Emperor of the Mughal Empire in India, issues a firman decree for the protection of all Hindu temples and schools in his kingdom. May 19 – The first people executed in Sweden's Mora witch trial are put to death, with seven women and one man beheaded after being convicted of "abduction of children to Satan." May 31 – Samuel Pepys stops writing his diary. June 22 – Roux de Marsilly, accused of plotting the assassination of King Louis XIV of France, is publicly tortured in Paris, France. June 25 – François de Vendôme, Duke of Beaufort, disappears in battle, during the siege of Candia in Crete. July 13 – Trinh Tac, the warlord who administers the Kingdom of Vietnam, issues an order banning all foreign vessels from entering the harbor at Hanoi, requiring to anchor no closer than the river port at Pho Hien, down the Red River from Hanoi. July 16 – A rockfall from the Mönchsberg mountain above Salzburg in Austria kills 230 people as tons of the mountainside fall onto a neighborhood on a street, the Gstättengasse.