1698

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1698 (MDCXCVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday in the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Saturday in the Julian calendar.

Events

• January 4 – Palace of Whitehall in London is destroyed by fire.
• June 19 – Volcano of Carguarazon erupts in the Andes and causes a rain of fish
• August 25 – Peter the Great arrives back to Moscow – general Patrick Gordon has already crushed the streltsy rebellion – 341 rebels sentenced to be decapitated. Tradition holds that tsar Peter decapitated some of them himself
• September 5 – In an effort to move his people away from Asiatic customs, Tsar Peter I of Russia imposes a tax on beards; All men except priests and peasants, are required to pay a tax of one hundred rubles a year and the commoners had to pay one kopek each

• Whigs sponsor Captain Kidd of New York as a privateer against French shipping
• Darien Scheme – First Scottish settlers leave for an ill-fated colony in Panama
• Isaac Newton calculates the speed of sound
• Tani Jinzan, astronomer and calendar scholar, observes a fire destroy Tosa (now Kochi) in Japan at the same time as a Leonid Meteor storm, taking it as evidence to reinforce belief in the "Theory of Areas".
• Thomas Savery patents an early steam engine.
• A congress begins in Sremski Karlovci to discuss a treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League.
• Humphrey Hody is appointed regius professor of Greek at Oxford.
• Bucharest becomes capital of Wallachia (now part of Romania).
• Mombasa and Zanzibar are captured by Oman.
• George Louis (who would in 1714 become King George I of Great Britain) becomes Elector of Hanover.