Swedish forces defend their strongholds on the…

Rákóczi, returning in 1659 with other Hungarian recruits to Transylvania, is again proclaimed prince.

Turkish forces under the pasha (governor) of Buda invade in response and attack from Temesvár to Torda and Herrmannstadt, victorious all the way.

Conflict between Dutch farmers and Khoikhoi breaks out once it becomes clear to the latter that the Dutch are here to stay and that they intend to encroach on the lands of the pastoralists.

Doman, a Khoikhoi who had worked as a translator for the Dutch and had even traveled to Java, leads an armed attempt to expel the Dutch from the Cape peninsula in 1659.

The attempt is a failure, although warfare will drag on until an inconclusive peace is established a year later.

French ships had entered the estuary of the Sénégal River in 1658; in 1659, France establishes the trading post of Saint-Louis on an uninhabited island called Ndar.

Christened Saint-Louis-du-Fort in homage to the French king Louis XIV, it is the first permanent French settlement in Senegal.

Commanding trade along the Senegal River, the fortified factory exports slaves, hides, beeswax, ambergris and, later, gum arabic.

Huygens had proposed in 1655 that Saturn was surrounded by a solid ring, "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic."

Using a 50 power refracting telescope that he designed himself, Huygens had so discovered the first of Saturn's moons, Titan.

In the same year he had observed and sketched the Orion Nebula.

His drawing, the first such known of the Orion nebula, is published in Systema Saturnium in 1659.

Using his modern telescope he succeeds in subdividing the nebula into different stars. (The brighter interior of the Orion Nebula bears the name of the Huygens Region in his honor.)

He also discovers several interstellar nebulae and some double stars.

The Spanish Infanta Maria Theresa brings cocoa to Paris in 1659, the year Diego Velázquez's portrait of the Infanta is first exhibited.

Considered one of the artist's best late portraits, it shows its subject in a majestic pose, illuminated in a light dress against a dark background.

Its seriousness and formality is added to by the two watches she carries, while the handkerchief in her left hand is one of the painting's highlights.

(Now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, it has been cut down at the top and bottom.)

The Iroquois Confederacy has seized control of the Illinois Country as far west as the Mississippi River by the late 1650s.

The Navajo, or Diné, agriculturist kin to the semi-nomadic Apaches, begin in 1659 to breed horses, increasing trade with other nations with a developing horse culture.

The anti-Swedish alliance has meanwhile deployed an army to Denmark, to confront Charles X Gustav with a force of fourteen thousand five hundred Brandenburgers commanded by Frederick William I, ten thousand six hundred Austrians commanded by Raimondo Montecuccoli, and forty-five hundred Poles commanded by Czarniecki.

By January 1659, the allied forces stand at Fredriksodde, ...

...Kolding and ...

...Als.