Ashraf, who has to contend with Russian…

The Qing incorporate additional territory in the northwest.

Qing imperial residents are stationed in Lhasa starting in 1727, and command Qing garrisons in Tibet.

An increasingly toughened stance is taken in cases of corrupt officials, and Yongzheng has led the creation of a Grand Council, which will grow to become the de facto cabinet for the rest of the dynasty’s existence.

Menshikov’s power has been practically absolute during the short reign of Catherine, who dies just two years after Peter at the age of forty-three, .

He has promoted himself to the unprecedented rank of Generalissimo, and is the only Russian to bear a ducal title.

Upon finishing the construction of a sumptuous palace on the Neva Embankment in St. Petersburg (now assigned to the Hermitage Museum), Menshikov intends to make Oranienbaum a capital of his ephemeral duchy.

Pushkin in one of his poems alludes to Menshikov as "half-tsar".

On the whole he has ruled well, his difficult position serving as some restraint upon his natural inclinations.

He contrives to prolong his power after Catherine's death by means of a forged will and a coup d'etat.

While his colleague Peter Tolstoi would have raised Elizabeth Petrovna to the throne, Menshikov sets up the youthful Peter II, son of the tsarevich Alexius, with himself as dictator during the prince's minority.

During the reign of Catherine, Peter had been quite ignored; but just before her death it had become clear to those in power that the grandson of Peter the Great could not be kept out of his inheritance much longer.

The majority of the nation and three-quarters of the nobility are on his side, while his uncle, Emperor Charles VI, through the imperial ambassador at St. Petersburg, has persistently urged his claims.

The matter is arranged between Menshikov and Count Andrei Osterman; and on May 18, 1727, Peter II, according to the terms of the forged last will of Catherine I, is proclaimed sovereign autocrat.

Menshikov, lodging him in his own palace on the Vasilievsky Island, now aims at establishing himself definitely by marrying his daughter Mary to Peter, but the old nobility, represented by the Dolgorukovs and the Galitzines, unite to overthrow him, and on September 9, 1727, he is deprived of all his dignities and offices and expelled from the capital.

Subsequently he is deprived of his enormous wealth, stripped of the titles, and he and his whole family are banished to Berezov in Siberia, where he will die at fifty-six on November 12, 1729.

Bach probably writes Matthäuspassion (St. Matthew Passion) in 1727.

Composed for solo voices, double choir and double orchestra, with libretto by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici), it sets chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel of Matthew to music, with interspersed chorales and arias. (Only two of the four or five settings of the Passion that Bach wrote have survived; the other is the St. John Passion.)

The St. Matthew Passion is first performed on either Good Friday 1727 or Good Friday 1729 in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach is the cantor.

The Dresden city council had commissioned the architect George Bähr in 1722 to work on the Frauenkirche (church of Our Lady).

It will be completed in 1743 after his death by Johann Georg Schmidt, a cousin.

Largely Italian Baroque in style, the church is innovative in concept and articulation and will be represented in a number of landscape paintings. (Allied bombs will destroy it in 1945)

Bähr had been apprenticed to a carpenter at a very early age.

Official records indicate that he had been also involved in working on the mechanics of the popular camera obscura and the workings of musical instruments.

He had become the master carpenter of Dresden by the age of thirty-nine, in 1705.

Bahr had previously designed churches in Loschwitz (1705–08), Schmiedeberg (1713–16), and Forchheim (1719–26).

Some of the survivors of the Hussite Unitas Fratrum, or Unity of Brethren, communities, which had been destroyed in the early seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation, have been living underground in Moravia and Bohemia.

They had been invited in 1722 by Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf, to settle on his estate of Berthelsdorf in Lusatia.

Enough refugees have arrived in the settlement by 1727 that they call Herrnhut to make restoration of the Unity possible, at first as a group within the established Lutheran church of Saxony. (Later, however, the renewed Moravian church will emerge as a denomination independent of the Lutheran church.)

The phrase ecclesiolae in ecclesia (Latin: “little churches within the church”), applied to this revival, will also applied by John Wesley to Methodist societies working for renewal in the Church of England.

The Hotaki dynasty is troubled and violent, as internecine conflict makes it difficult to establish permanent control.

The dynasty lives under great turmoil due to bloody succession feuds that make their hold on power tenuous.

Ghilzay power is subsequently challenged by the Abdali (Durrani), the other main Pashtun group, and by the plans of the ambitious Nadr, who becomes the leading military strategist for Tahmasp and, after reforming Iran's military forces, sets out to expel the Afghans and to reunify the former Safavid domains.

The baroque Catholic church of Santiago Apóstol is built in 1727 in Albatera, Spain.

Giovanni Antonio Canal was born in Venice as the son of the painter Bernardo Canal, hence his mononym Canaletto ("little Canal"), and Artemisia Barbieri.

Bernardo Bellotto is his nephew and pupil.

Canaletto had served his apprenticeship with his father and his brother and began in his father's occupation, that of a theatrical scene painter.

Inspired by the Roman vedutista Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Canaletto had started painting the daily life of the city and its people.

After returning from Rome in 1719, he had begun painting in his topographical style.

His first known signed and dated work is Architectural Capriccio (1723, Milan, in a private collection).

Studying with the older Luca Carlevarijs, a moderately talented painter of urban cityscapes, he had rapidly become his master's equal.

The painter Alessandro Marchesini, who was also the buyer for the Lucchese art collector Stefano Conti, had inquired in 1725 about buying two more 'views of Venice', when the agent informed him to consider instead the work of "Antonio Canale... it is like Carlevaris, but you can see the sun shining in it." (J.G. Links, Canaletto and his patrons, Granada Publishing/Paul Elek Ltd., London 1977. p. 1.)

Much of Canaletto's early artwork is painted "from nature", differing from the customary practice of completing paintings in the studio.

Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of color—an effect produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away objects.

However, his paintings are always notable for their accuracy: he records the seasonal submerging of Venice in water and ice.

Canaletto's early works remain his most coveted and, according to many authorities, his best.

One of his early pieces is The Stonemason's Yard which depicts a humble working area of the city.

The Stonemason's Yard (formally known as Campo S. Vidal and Santa Maria della Carità), unsigned and undated, is attributed and dated by stylistic clues.

The informal scene is thought to have been painted for a Venetian patron, rather than a foreign visitor to Venice, in the mid to late 1720s.

it is considered one of Canalettto's finest works.

This year's French Academy of Sciences prize is based on a problem on the masting of ships: to calculate the number of masts to use and where in the ship to locate them.

Pierre Bouguer—a man now known as "the father of naval architecture"—gains the award for his paper On the masting of ships; and two other prizes, one for his dissertation On the best method of observing the altitude of stars at sea and the other for his paper On the best method of observing the variation of the compass at sea.

The nineteen-year-old Leonhard Euler enters for the prize with an essay written in 1726 and published in 1728.

He places second, and subsequently will win this coveted annual prize twelve times in his career.

Aert de Gelder has spent his life in Dordrecht, except for a period of time in about 1661 when he had been Rembrandt's pupil in Amsterdam.

The only Dutch artist of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to paint in the tradition of Rembrandt's late style, his biblical paintings—e.g., Scenes from the Passion (circa 1715)—feature warm color and atmospheric light.

In his portraits—e.g., The Family of Herman Boerhave (circa 1722; Louvre, Paris)—his bold, broad manner of brushwork and surface texture contrasts markedly with the refined techniques and smoothly finished canvases of his contemporaries.