1664
year

1664 (MDCLXIV) was a leap year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar, the 1664th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 664th year of the 2nd millennium, the 64th year of the 17th century, and the 5th year of the 1660s decade. As of the start of 1664, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 5 – Battle of Surat in India: The Maratha leader, Chhatrapati Shivaji, defeats the Mughal Army Captain Inayat Khan, and sacks Surat.
January 7 – Indian entrepreneur Virji Vora, described in the 17th century by the English East India Company as the richest merchant in the world, suffers the loss of a large portion of his wealth when the Maratha troops of Shivaji plunder his residence at Surat and his business warehouses.
February 2 – Jesuit missionary Johann Grueber arrives in Rome after a 214-day journey that had started in Beijing, proving that commerce can be had between Europe and Asia by land rather than ship.
February 12 – The Treaty of Pisa is signed between France and the Papal States to bring an end to the Corsican Guard Affair that began on August 20, 1662, when the French ambassador was shot and killed by soldiers in the employ of Pope Alexander VII.
February 14 – A peace treaty is signed in Turin in Italy to end the War of the Banished between the Duchy of Savoy and the Waldensians.
February 26 – Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy, appointed by King Louis XIV of France as Lieutenant Général of the Americas, departs from the port of La Rochelle with 1,200 men and seven ships to expand France's property in the Caribbean Sea and in South America.
March 12 – King Charles II of England makes royal charter for territory in North America that leases to his brother, James, Duke of York, a patent for a large amount of land in what is now the northeastern United States. According to the Charter, James receives "all that part of the mayne land of New England" between "New Scotland in America" and the river of Kenebeque", along with "Mattowacks or Long Island" and "Martins Vineyard and Nantukes", and the lands between the "Connecticutte and Hudsons rivers" and the lands "from the west side of "Connecticutte to the east side De la Warre Bay". The lease, which includes the territory claimed by the Dutch Republic as New Netherland is for most of the U.S. state of Maine and parts of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“1664” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1664” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7581. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1664, 1923 and 1662.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1664” 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.