1709
year

1709 (MDCCIX) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar, the 1709th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 709th year of the 2nd millennium, the 9th year of the 18th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1700s decade. As of the start of 1709, the Gregorian calendar was 11 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923. In the Swedish calendar it was a common year starting on Friday, one day ahead of the Julian and ten days behind the Gregorian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 1 – Battle of St. John's: The French capture St. John's, the capital of the British colony of Newfoundland.
January 6 – Western Europe's Great Frost of 1709, the coldest period in 500 years, begins during the night, lasting three months, with its effects felt for the entire year. In France, the Atlantic coast and Seine River freeze, crops fail, and 24,000 Parisians die. Floating ice enters the North Sea.
January 10 – Abraham Darby I successfully produces cast iron using coke fuel at his Coalbrookdale blast furnace in Shropshire, England.
The public source identifies “1709” as year. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around year.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6857. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1709 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “1709” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.