The Prix de Rome, a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture and architecture, is created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV as an annual bursary for promising artists who prove their talents by completing a very difficult elimination contest.

The prize, organized by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture or the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, is open to their students.

Vermeer paints mostly domestic interior scenes.

His works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories.

His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendor of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses.

Besides these subjects, religious, poetical, musical, and scientific comments can also be found in his work.

Young Woman with a Water Jug is one of a closely related group painted in the early to mid 1660s where the artist appears to be moving away from an emphasis on linear perspective and geometric order.

He seems to be moving to a simpler form using only one figure and emphasizing the use of light.

The Iroquois send an army of eight hundred warriors into the Susqehannock territory in 1663.

The Susquehannocks and their English allies repulse the attack, but the invasion prompts the colony of Maryland to declare war on the Iroquois.

The Iroquois are at war also in 1663 with the Sokoki tribe of the upper Connecticut River, a branch of the Abenaki.

Smallpox strikes again; through the effects of disease, famine, and war, the Iroquois are threatened by extermination.

An Oneida party strikes at allies of the Susquehannock on Chesapeake Bay in 1664.

Most of the work on the approximately fifty plantations around Paramaribo in 1663 is done by native Indians and three thousand enslaved Africans.

The approximately one thousand whites here, including the Brazilian Jews, have been attracted by the religious freedoms granted by the English to all the settlers.

Buccaneers from all over the Caribbean join the pirate Myngs in 1663 for the announced next expedition.

Myngs directs the largest buccaneer fleet as yet assembled, fourteen ships strong and with fourteen hundred pirates aboard, among them such notorious privateers as Henry Morgan and Abraham Blauvelt, and sacks San Francisco de Campeche in February.

King Charles charters a new colony to the south of Virginia (and north of Spanish Florida) named Carolina after his father and centered on the recently established settlements of Albemarle sound.

The Charter of Carolina establishes the Province of Carolina on March 24, 1663, and divides it between eight of his loyal friends, known as the Lords Proprietors, as a reward for their faithful political and financial support of his efforts to regain the throne of England.

Myngs’s atrocities lead to an outrage and Charles II of England is forced to forbid further attacks in April, a policy to be carried out by Jamaica’s new acting governor, Thomas Lynch.

Nevertheless, a pattern has been set and large buccaneer attacks on Spanish settlements, secretly condoned by the English authorities, will continue till the end of the century, gradually laying waste to the entire region.