Voltaire had returned to France at the…

The Russians in 1731 create the Okhotsk Military Flotilla under its first commander, Grigoriy Skornyakov-Pisarev, to patrol and transport government goods to and from Kamchatka.

A scheme developed by the new sultan and the Divan (Turkish privy council) succeeds, as many Janissaries cease to back the rebels, whose leader is invited to a meeting of the Divan, seized, and strangled in front of the sultan.

Then, for three weeks, a general massacre of the rebels occurs in which seven thousand die, thus weakening their ardor for rebellion.

The massacres and consequent banishments reduce the military by some fifty thousand men, but the war against the Persians is now ready to proceed.

Nadr has consolidated his hold over eastern Iran by 1731.

The details of the discovery of Gough Island, half way between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, are unclear, but the most likely occasion is July 1505 by the Portuguese explorer Gonçalo Álvares.

Maps during the next three centuries named the island for him.

On some later maps, this was erroneously given as Diego Alvarez.

According to some historians, the English merchant Anthony de la Roché was the first to land on the island, in Spring 1675.

British captain Charles Gough rediscovers the island in March 1731, thinking it is a new find.

It has since been named for him.

The name of Fouta Djallon, a series of stepped sandstone plateaus in west-central Guinea with many picturesque trenches and gorges, the watershed for some of western Africa's greatest rivers, comes from its early Dialonke (Djallonke) inhabitants.

The region is first organized as a separate political entity as a result of the Fulbe and Malinke jihad (Muslim holy war) led by Karamoko Alfa and Ibrahima Sori against the animists in the late 1720s.

After the battle of Talansan, a Muslim victory, the theocratic empire of Fouta Djallon, or Futa Jallon, had been founded under one ruler ("Almamy" from Arabic al-Imami) and eight Almamy ruling over the nine provinces (Diiwe) of Futa Jallon, dominating both central and coastal Guinea.

Labé, a town located near the source of the Gambia River, at the intersection of roads from Mamou to the Senegal border and from the Guinean towns of Mali, Tougué, and Télimélé, is founded in the 1720s by the Dialonke people and named for their chief, Manga Labé.

The town will become an important political and commercial center of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Fulani state of Fouta Djallon.

Antonio Stradivari, the most prominent luthier, had been born in the year 1644 but his exact birth place is not documented, apart from the fact that he was born in Italy to Alessandro Stradivari and Anna Moroni.

It is possible that in the years 1667 through 1679 he had served as a pupil in Niccolò Amati's workshop, though there is much evidence to dispute this fact.

In 1680 had Stradivari set up for himself in the Piazza San Domenico, Cremona, and his fame as an instrument-maker had soon been established.

He had begun to show his originality, and to make alterations in Amati's model.

The arching was changed, the various degrees of thickness in the wood were more exactly determined, the formation of the scroll altered, and the varnish more highly colored.

His instruments are recognized by their inscription in Latin: Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno [date] (Antonio Stradivari, Cremona, made in the year ...).

It is generally acknowledged that his finest instruments had been manufactured from 1698 to 1725 (peaking around 1715), exceeding in quality those manufactured between 1725 and 1730.

After 1730, some of the instruments are signed Sotto la Desciplina d'Antonio Stradivari F. in Cremona [date], and are probably made by his sons, Omobono and Francesco.

Apart from violins, Stradivari also has made guitars, violas, cellos, and at least one harp—more than eleven hundred instruments in all, by current estimate.

About six hundred and fifty of these instruments survive today.

Vivaldi, at the height of his career, is receiving commissions from European nobles and royalty.

He writes the wedding cantata Gloria e Imeneo for the marriage of the king of France Louis XV, and dedicates Opus 9, La Cetra, to the Austrian Emperor Charles VI.

Vivaldi had had the chance to meet the Emperor in person in 1728, when he came to Trieste to oversee the construction of a new port.

Charles had admired the music of the Red Priest so much that he is said to have spoken more with the composer in that occasion than with his ministers in two years.

He had given him the title of knight, a gold medal, and an invitation to come to Vienna.

On his part, Vivaldi had given Charles a manuscript copy of La Cetra; this is a set of concertos almost completely different from the one published with the same title as Opus 9.

Probably the printing had been delayed and Vivaldi had been forced to gather an improvised collection.

He had Iin 1730 traveled in the company of his father to Vienna and Prague, where his opera Farnace (RV 711) had been presented.

Victor Amadeus had abdicated in 1730, in favor of his twenty-nine-year-old son, Charles Emmanuel III, but, when he changes his mind and attempts to resume his throne in 1731, Charles Emmanuel has him arrested, and confines his father until his death the following year at the age of sixty six.

Laura Bassi, born in Bologna into a wealthy family with a lawyer as a father, had beeb privately educated and tutored for seven years in her teens by Gaetano Tacconi, a University teacher of Biology, Natural History and Medicine.

She had came to the attention of Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, who has encouraged her scientific work.

She was appointed professor of anatomy in 1731 at the University of Bologna at the age of twenty-one, becoming the first woman to officially teach at a university in Europe.

French silversmith Thomas Germain, the son of distinguished silversmith Pierre Germain, had studied painting as a boy under Louis Boullogne the Younger.

He had been sent in about 1688 to Rome, where in 1691 he had become apprenticed to an Italian silversmith.

Soon employed as one of the artists on the altar of St. Ignatius for the Church of the Gesù, other commissions had followed, and from 1697 he was an independent silversmith.

He was by 1706 back in France, where until the 1720s he had been active on church commissions.

Among such works was a silver-gilt monstrance (vessel to contain the Host) for Notre Dame in Paris, commissioned in 1716.

He had become a master in the guild in 1720, and in 1722 had made a silver-gilt sun (destroyed in 1790) for the coronation of Louis XV.

Germain had been granted apartments in the Louvre in 1723, when he was a royal goldsmith.

From then until his death he is to be particularly active in making such objects as covered dishes, candlesticks, sconces, and plates for the king.

He also produces numerous objects for special occasions, such as gold rattles on the birth of royal children.

Although he is best known for flamboyantly elaborate objects in the Rococo style, some of his pieces are simple and elegant.

Germain also has foreign patrons, including the elector of Cologne, the king of Portugal, the queen of Spain, and the king and queen of Naples.

The Portuguese court is particularly important: during the forty-year period beginning in 1728, some three thousand silver works are believed to have been made by the Germain workshop for the palace in Lisbon.

For the tax-farmer Samuel-Jacques Bernard, he begins in 1729-31 an exceptionally fine surtout de table (table centerpiece), ornately decorated with cupids, hounds, and hunting horns.