Wu Sangui, not waiting for a response from Wang Fuchen after conquering Hunan, had moved his armies north, while the Qing forces concentrate on recapturing Hunan.

Wu proclaims himself emperor of a new Great Zhou Dynasty in Hengzhou (present-day Hengyang, Hunan province) in 1678 and establishes his own imperial court.

When Wu Sangui dies in autumn of the same year, Kangxi has his corpse dismembered and scattered across the provinces of China.

His grandson Wu Shifan takes over Wu's troops and continues the battle.

Many Albanian converts to Islam had migrated elsewhere within the Ottoman Empire in the early seventeenth century and found careers in the Ottoman military and government.

Some have attained powerful positions in the Ottoman administration. (About thirty Albanians will rise to the position of grand vizier, chief deputy to the sultan himself.)

The Albanian Köprülü family in the second half of the seventeenth century provides four grand viziers, who fight against corruption, temporarily shore up eroding central government control over rapacious local beys, and win several military victories.

Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasa has served during the grand vizierate (1661–76) of his brother-in-law Köprülü Fazil Ahmed Pasa as captain of the fleet, vizier in the State Council, and deputy grand vizier.

Succeeding Fazil Ahmed Pasa as grand vizier, he has led unsuccessful successive campaigns against Poland and Russia.

A Hungarian revolt against Habsburg rule in 1678 allows Kara Mustafa Pasa to move against Austria.

The battles between the Kimpanzu and Kinlaza continue to plunge the Kingdom of Kongo into a chaos not known in centuries.

The fighting between the two lineages leads to the sack of São Salvador in 1678.

Ironically, the capital built by the pact of Mpemba and Mbata is burned to the ground not by the Portuguese or rival African nations but by its very heirs.

The city and hinterlands around Mbanza Kongo are depopulated.

São Salvador becomes the grazing place of wild animals where rival claimants will crown themselves, then retreat before drawing the ire of opposition partisans.

Even after its resettlement, the city will never regain its prominence.

The most famous case of the Affair of the Poisons is Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin or La Voisin, who implicates a number of important individuals in the French court.

Promiscuous throughout her marriage to her husband, an unsuccessful jeweler named Monvoisin, she had practiced chiromancy and face-reading to retrieve her and her husband's fortunes, and had gradually added the practice of witchcraft, in which she had the help of a renegade priest, Etienne Guibourg, whose part was the celebration of the "black mass", a parody of the Christian Mass.

She practices medicine, especially midwifery, procures abortion, and provides love powders and poisons.

Her chief accomplice is one of her lovers, the magician Lesage, whose real name is Adam Cœuret.

The great ladies of Paris had flocked to La Voisin, who has accumulated enormous wealth from them.

Among her clients are Olympe Mancini, Comtesse de Soissons, who had sought the death of the king's mistress, Louise de La Vallière; and the Comtesse de Gramont ("la belle Hamilton"), among others.

Françoise-Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan, is accused of working with La Voisin to poison Louis XIV and Mademoiselle de Fontanges, a woman who is sleeping with Louis.

Although La Voisin never admits to working with Montespan, many other people claim she had worked with La Voisin but there is no sufficient evidence of this and many of the confessor's stories are inconsistent.

Also involved in the scandal is Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, the eldest living son of a prominent noble family.

De Cavoye had been disinherited by his family when, in an act of debauchery, he chose to celebrate Good Friday with a black mass.

Upon being disinherited he had opened a lucrative trade in "inheritance powders" and aphrodisiacs.

He mysteriously disappears after the abrupt ending to Louis's official investigation in 1678.

The first treatise on smallpox and measles appears in America in 1678.

King Philip’s War war has been devastating to both the natives in southeastern New England as well as the English.

More English have died in this war proportionate to population than any other war in American history, but their hard-won victory ensures that natives will never, can never, again launch so large an attack against the English.

Sir Edmund Andros negotiates a treaty with some of the northern native bands on April 12, 1678, as he tries to establish his New York-based royal power structure in Maine's fishing industry.

Sporadic native and French raids will plague Maine, New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts for the next fifty years as France encourages and finances raids on New England settlers.

Most of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island is now nearly completely open to New England's continuing settlement, free of interference from the natives.

Frontier settlements in New England will face sporadic native raids until the French and Indian War finally drives the French authorities out of North America in 1763.

King Philip's War, for a time, had seriously damaged the recently arrived English colonists' prospects in New England.

For the English, their society had been badly destroyed and their confidence diminished from the war, but with their extraordinary population growth rate of about three percent a year (doubling every twenty-five years), they will repair all the damage, replace their losses, rebuild the destroyed towns, and continue on with establishing new towns within a few years.

Sugar cane dominates Barbados' economic growth, and the island's cash crop is at the top of the sugar industry.

As sugar has developed into the main commercial enterprise, the island has been divided into large plantation estates which have replaced the small holdings of the early British settlers as the wealthy planters push out the poorer.

Some of the displaced farmers relocate to British colonies in North America, most notably South Carolina.

About twelve hundred Irish families sail from Barbados in 1678 to Virginia and the Carolinas.

Michel, Chevalier de Grammont, a nobleman who had come into disfavor after killing his sister's suitor in a duel and was forced to leave France, had in about 1670 gone to Hispaniola, where he had been given a French ship.

Serving as a privateer, his first success had been the capture of a Dutch convoy, valued at about four hundred thousand livres (four million US dollars).

On his next voyage he had run up onto a reef and sunk.

Grammont had then moved to Tortuga, where he bought and outfitted a new ship which he uses to attack Spanish shipping.

When war broke out between France and Holland, he had joined the fleet under the command of Comte d'Estrées for an abortive raid on the Dutch island of Curaçao in which the entire fleet of seventeen vessels had been wrecked on the Los Roques Archipelago (Las Aves).

De Grammont is in June 1678 made commander of the six ships and seven hundred men salvaged from the Las Aves Disaster.

He lands his men in Spanish-held Venezuela and captures Maracaibo, ...

...then follows with the capture and plundering of several smaller towns, penetrating as far inland as Trujillo.