January 1 – PrinceMuhammad Akbar, son of theMughal EmperorAurangzeb, initiates a civil war in India. With the support of troops from theRajput states, Akbar declares himself the new Mughal Emperor and prepares to fight his father, but is ultimately defeated.
January 18 – The "Exclusion Bill Parliament", summoned by King Charles II of England in October, is dissolved after three months, with directions that new elections be held, and that a new parliament be convened in March in Oxford.
March 21 – The "Oxford Parliament" is summoned in England by King Charles II and meets in Oxford rather than in Westminster, but is dissolved seven days later. No further sessions of parliament are held until after the death of Charles in 1685.
May 15 – TheCanal du Midi in France is opened officially, as theCanal Royal de Languedoc.[2]
June 23 – TheChurch of the East, an Eastern Orthodox rite in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), already split between two patriarchs in the Eliya line and the Shimun line, is split along a third line by the Roman Catholic Church when Mar Yousip of the Archdiocese of Amid (nowDiyarbakır in Turkey) is proclaimed byPope Innocent XI asJoseph I, "Patriarch of the Chaldean nation deprived of its patriarch", creating the "Josephite line" of theChaldean Catholic Church.
October 27 –Sir John Child of England becomes the new Governor of Bombay province and, unofficially, Governor-General of all of the settlements of theEast India Company inIndia. With the exception of a rebellion by CaptainRichard Keigwin during the year 1684, Child expands British control until involving the British in a war with theMughal Empire.
November 29 – A storm strikes theIsthmus of Panama and overwhelms the Spanish Navy's Flota de Tierra Firma, sinking the shipNuestra Señora de Encarnación in theChagres River. TheEncarnación wreckage is not found until almost 340 years later, in2011, mostly intact and still loaded with most of its cargo.
December 3 – Another ship in the Flota de Terra Firma,Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, sinks in the Chagres River with the loss of its 280 crew.
^Frederic E. Wakeman,The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-century China (University of California Press, 1985) p. 1120
