Russian patriarch Nikon, who has become a close friend of Tsar Alexis, promotes his firmly held belief that the priesthood is above political authority and claims that, as patriarch, he has the right to control imperial policies and demand fealty from the tsar.

When, in 1654, Nikon authorizes necessary revisions to liturgical texts, he decrees that the revision be made in accordance with Greek liturgical books, which differ in details from the Russian texts.

The reforms include the obligation to follow the Greek practice of making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two, and minor revisions to the texts.

These reforms are mostly intended to bring the Russian Church into line with the other Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe and Middle East.

The Duchers is the Russian name for the people populating the shores of the middle course of the Amur River, approximately from the mouth of the Zeya down to the mouth of the Ussury, and possibly even somewhat further downstream.

Their ethnic identity is not known with certainty, but it is usually assumed that they were a Tungusic people, related to the Jurchens and/or the Nanais.

The total number of Duchers (including other related Manchu groups, but not the Daurs or Evens) of the Amur Valley at the time of the appearance of the Russian explorers in the region around 1650 has been estimated by modern scholars at fourteen thousand.

According to the Russian explorers of the time, the Duchers, as well as the related groups, the Goguls, and their northwestern neighbors, the Daurs, are agriculturalists.

They grow rye, wheat, barley, millet, oats, peas, and hemp, as well as a number of vegetables.

The Duchers have horses and cattle; pigs ware a particularly important source of meat.

They do some hunting and fishing as well.

According to the seventeenth-century Cossacks' reports, the Duchers live in fortified villages with sixty and more houses in each.

The predecessor of the Qing fortress Aigun (which was originally located on the left—now Russian—bank of the Amur, opposite to its later location) is a Ducher town, currently known to the archaeologists as the Grodekovo site, after the nearby village of Grodekovo.

It is located south of the city of Blagoveshchensk and the fall of the Zeya into the Amur.

Yerofey Khabarov had reported the existence of this town (which he calls Aytyun) to the Yakutsk voivode D. Frantsbekov in 1652.

According to archaeologists, this fortress was first built around the end of the first or beginning of the second millennium CE.

The "tribute" of furs, grain, and livestock, collected (or looted, as the case may be) by the Cossacks from the Daurs and the Duchers is the main economic benefit derived by the Russians from their expansion in the region in the early 1650s, and, in order to deny it to them, the Qing government, starting in 1654, resettles the Ducher farmers from the Amur valley to the Sungari and Hurka Rivers further south.

The Daurs are resettled (to the Nenjiang River Valley) as well.

Prince Janusz Radziwiłł of Trąby (also known as Janusz the Second or Janusz the Younger, a notable Polish–Lithuanian noble and magnate, has throughout his life occupied a number of posts in the state administration, including that of Court Chamberlain of Lithuania (from 1633) and Field Hetman of Lithuania (from 1654).

He is also a voivode of Vilna Voivodeship, as well as a starost of Samogitia, Kamieniec, Kazimierz and Sejwy.

Often described as a de facto ruler of the entire Grand Duchy of Lithuania, his palace has been under construction from 1635 until 1653 in the Old Town of Vilnius.

It is likely that the wooden mansion of his ancestor, Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwill’, was on the same site as the current building.

Constructed according to the design by Jan Ullrich.

It has features of the Netherlands Renaissance as well as Manneristic decorations native to the Lithuanian Renaissance architecture.

Its original layout and symmetry of structural elements is distinctive to the palaces of the Late French Renaissance, resembling that of Château de Fontainebleau and Luxembourg Palace in Paris.

Moldavia’s Prince Vasile Lupu, coveting the richer Wallachian throne, attacks Basarab, but the latter's forces rout the Moldavians, and in 1654 a group of Moldavian boyars ousts Vasile.

English chemist Robert Boyle helps to found the Philosophical College in 1654 (the College will later become the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge).

An uneasy competition rules the relations between the New Haven Colony and the Connecticut River settlements centered on Hartford.

The colony publishes a complete legal code in 1656, but the law remains very much church-centered.

A major difference between the New Haven and Connecticut colonies is that the Connecticut permits other churches to operate on the basis of "sober dissent" while the New Haven Colony only permits the Puritan church to exist.

The Dutch near present-day Hartford, outnumbered by the flood of English settlers from Massachusetts, leave their fort in 1654.

Tobago had been inhabited by Island Caribs at the time of European contact, which appears to have been English vistors in 1580.

According to the earliest English-language source cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, Tobago bore a name that has become the English word tobacco.

The first settlers are Courlanders in 1654, the Duchy of Courland becoming the smallest nation to colonize the Americas.

Courland has a population of only two hundred thousan and is itself a vassal of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at that time.

Under Duke Jacob Kettler, a Baltic German, it has established one of the largest merchant fleets in Europe.

During his travels to Western Europe, Jacob had become the eager proponent of mercantile ideas.

Metalworking and shipbuilding became much more developed.

Trading relations had been established not only with nearby countries, but also with Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and others.

The Duchy's ships had undertaken trade voyages to the West Indies at least as early as 1637, when a Courland ship had attempted to found a colony on Tobago with 212 settlers.

An earlier European settlement on the island, a Dutch colony, formed in 1628, had been wiped out by the Spanish a few months earlier.

The first Courland colony was a failure, as was a second attempt in 1639.

Two ships under Captain Caroon with about three hundred settlers had by the beginning of the eighteenth century attempted to settle on the north coast near Courland Bay but were soon driven off by the Carib natives.

Then Courland's attention shifted and in 1651 the Duchy had gained its first successful colony but in Africa, on St. Andrews Island in the Gambia River, where they have established Fort Jacob.

Courland soon afterward decides to make still another attempt at a colony on Tobago.

The ship Das Wappen der Herzogin von Kurland ("The Arms of the Duchess of Courland") arrives on May 20, 1654, carrying forty-five cannons, twenty-five officers, one=twent-four Courlander soldiers and eighty families of colonists to occupy Tobago.

Captain Willem Mollens declares the island "New Courland" (Neu-Kurland).

A fort is erected on the southwest of the island, also called Fort Jacobus (Fort James) with the surrounding town called Jacobsstadt (Jamestown).

Other features are given Courland names such as Great Courland Bay, Jacobs (James) Bay, Courland Estate, Neu-Mitau (New Jelgava), Libau Bay and Little Courland Bay.

An Evangelical Lutheran church is built by the Courlanders in their first year on the island.