La Salle's mission had remained secret until…

Ayutthaya’s King Narai, a son of King Prasat Thong by a queen who was a daughter of King Song Tham, had come to the throne after violent palace upheavals had cut short the reigns of his elder brother and his uncle.

An effective ruler who has dealt successfully with Siam's traditional Southeast Asian rivals, Narai has ambitions to thrust his kingdom onto the stage of world politics.

Anxious to break the domination of the Dutch East India Company over Siam's external trade, his officers—including Chinese, Persians, and Englishmen—have developed trade with Japan and India, and Narai has sought to develop contacts with the British East India Company and the French.

The East India Company had in 1678 dispatched a Greek agent, Constantine Phaulkon, to the Ayutthayan court.

Born on Cefalonia of Greek Cypriot and Venetian (Italian) parentage, Phaulkon had come to Siam (today's Thailand) as a merchant in 1675 after working for England's East India Company.

A talented linguist with a flair for international trade, already fluent in English, French, Portuguese, and Malay, he has become fluent in Thai in just a few years and has begun to work at the court of King Narai as a translator.

Due to his experience with the East India Company, he had soon been able to become a counselor of the king, serving as both the king's interpreter in diplomatic negotiations and as the chief official in charge of Siam's foreign trade.

Phaulkon had abandoned Anglicanism for Catholicism in 1682, and soon after married a Catholic woman of mixed Japanese-Portuguese-Bengali descent named Maria Guyomar de Pinha.

They live a life of affluence as Phaulkon rises through the office of the state treasury to become highly influential at Narai’s court.

He earns the Thai noble title Chao Phraya Wichayen, the favor of the king, and the enmity of the nationalist, anti-French faction led by Phra Phetracha, Commander of the Royal Regiment of Elephants.

When his English coworkers accused him of corruption, Phaulkon had quit the English East India Company and offered his services to England's archenemy, France, whose previous attempts to gain colonies in the Far East had failed.

Narai, his flirtations with France encouraged by Phaulkon, believes French influence would be an effective counterweight to growing English and Dutch power in the region, and has sent diplomatic missions to King Louis XIV of France in 1680, 1684, and 1686.

The French, encouraged by Phaulkon to hope for territorial concessions, have sent increasingly large delegations to Siam in 1682, 1685, and 1687—the last including six hundred soldiers in six warships.

A large number of missionaries had come in 1684 with the French ambassador to Siam, and when Narai allowed them to preach without restrictions the French thought (wrongly) that the king was about to convert to Catholicism.

Russia joins the Holy League after 1686, the first time the country has formally joined an alliance of European powers.

Christian V of Denmark had introduced Danske Lov (the Danish Code) in 1683, the first law code for all of Denmark; it is succeeded by the similar Norske Lov (Norwegian Code) of 1687.

The Kingdom of Kandy has survived the attacks of Ceylon's colonial Portuguese rulers, partly by allying with the Dutch.

While all the other Sinhalese kingdoms had been extinguished by the Portuguese in the early 1600s, Kandy survives with stubborn persistence.

Rajavaliya, a historical chronicle of Sri Lanka covering the history of the island from its legendary beginnings up to the accession of Kandyan King Vimaladharmasurya II in 1687, is the only continuous history of the island written in the Sinhalese language prior to the British period.

Unlike many other Sri Lankan historical chronicles, the Rajavaliya deals mainly with political rather than religious (Buddhist) events.

Its style is a popular rather than a learned one, and historians believe it to have been the work of more than one hand.

It is considered to be especially useful for the period after 1359.

Aurangzeb seizes the Shi’ite Sultanate of Golconda in 1687.

The Portuguese on the island of Mombasa, off present-day Kenya, have for many years dominated the gold and slave trade on the eastern coast of Africa.

The natives of Mombasa in 1652 had asked the sultan of Oman on the Arabian peninsula for help in expelling the Portuguese; he had sent a fleet that raided the Portuguese-held island of Zanzibar to the south of Mombasa.

This was the start of a long struggle between the Omanis, who are Arab Muslims, and the Portuguese, who are European Christians, for control of the East African coast, its natural resources, and the profitable African slave trade.

A former king of Pate (an island off Kenya) in 1687 appeals to the Portuguese for help in regaining his kingdom from the Omanis.

The Portuguese fleet on arrival at Pate finds a stronger Omani fleet waiting and is forced to retreat to Mombasa to the south.

Bissau originates in 1687 as a Portuguese fortified post and slave-trading center.

The Venetians under Morosini seize from the Ottoman Turks parts of Dalmatia and ...

...the Morea (Peloponnesus) between 1685 and 1687.

Pope Innocent, despite his friendship with Miguel de Molinos, the Spanish mystic and proponent of the doctrine of Christian perfection known as Quietism, had allowed Molinos to be arrested by the papal police and tried for personal immorality and heresy in 1685.

Some twenty thousand of his letters have been examined, and he and numerous witnesses have been interrogated, resulting in his sentence to life imprisonment and the condemnation by Innocent, in 1687, of sixty-eight propositions embodying Molinos' doctrine.

Innocent is amenable to the plans of Europe’s Grand Alliance to subdue Louis XIV of France; it is a decision from which the Republic of St. Peter will never recover.