Another segment of 'Ali's party meanwhile intensifies…

Japanese envoys are sent on a mission to the Tang empire and gain an audience with the Emperor.

However, as the Tang Government determines that in the next year they will take administrative measures in regard to Japan, the envoys are detained.

Constans is able to secure a nonaggression treaty with Muawiyah, the governor of Syria, in 659, as the murder of the caliph 'Uthman ibn 'Affan in June 656 had touched off a civil war among the Arabs that prevented them from attacking Constantinople.

Bede lists Oswiu as the seventh and last king to hold imperium (or bretwalda in the language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) over the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Overlordship is a common relationship between kingdoms at this time, often taking the form of a lesser king under the domination of a stronger one.

Oswiu had gone further than this, however, and had installed his own governors in Mercia after the deaths of Penda and Peada.

This attempt to establish close control of Mercia fails in 658 when three Mercian leaders, Immin, Eafa and Eadbert, rebel against the Northumbrians.

Bede reports that they had kept Wulfhere in hiding, and when the revolt succeeded Wulfhere became king.

It has been suggested that the Mercian revolt succeeded because Oswiu may have been occupied with fighting in Pictland, in northern Britain.

His nephew the Pictish king Talorgan, son of Eanfrith, had died in 657.

The Korean kingdoms of Baekje and Goguryeo combine forces in 660 to war against their longtime rival in the south, the kingdom of Silla.

China’s Tang emperor Gaozong, as desirous as was his father of conquering the Korean peninsula, responds to the Sillans’ appeal for help, dispatching Chinese forces.

Empress Saimei of Japan makes an order to dispatch a force to the Korean Peninsula to save Baekje, but it is apparently not carried out or given too late.

A Chinese army advances through Manchuria into Goguryeo, as a Chinese naval force attacks coastal Baekje.

Baekje is overthrown by the alliance of the Tang and Silla, led by General Su Dingfang, General Kim Yu-shin and Kim Beopmin.

The Japanese envoys detained in Chang’an are paroled following the overthrow of Baekje by the Tang Dynasty.

Emperor Gaozong of Tang suffers a stroke; his wife Wu Zetian starts to rule.

Constans had grown increasingly fearful that his younger brother, Theodosius, could oust him from the throne; he had therefore obliged Theodosius to take holy orders and later had him killed in 660.

Constans' sons Constantine, Heraclius, and Tiberius have been associated on the throne since the 650s.

However, having attracted the hatred of citizens of Constantinople, Constans decides to leave the capital and to move to Syracuse in Sicily.

…Ali's authority diminishes to Kufah, his capital.

Ali and Muawiyah retain their own partisans, but the result is an irrevocable split in Islam by the formation of the shi'at Ali (”party of Ali”), political allies of 'Ali (who will eventually translate their political demands into a religious conviction that 'Ali and all his descendants were divinely appointed to succeed Muhammad as caliphs.)

Muawiyah, strengthened by the outcome follows an aggressive policy, seizing Egypt and raiding Ali's stronghold, Iraq.

As Muawiyah's authority begins to expand into Iraq and the Hejaz, …

Felix, a patrician of Toulouse, unites under his rule the duchies of Vasconia and Aquitaine.

Evidence suggests that his duchy was a recreation of the old kingdom of Charibert II.

The last known duke before Felix was Boggis.

Therefore, in Felix's time Vasconia forms a part of Aquitaine, into which it had been incorporated following the successful suppression of a rebellion in 645.

It is disputable whether Felix was a sovereign in his own right over a state of his own creation or a Merovingian official governing a constituent kingdom of the Frankish realm.

It is also argued that the Basques were the allies of the Aquitainians and not their subjects.Felix's duchy encompasses Bordeaux, Vasconia (the Novempopulania and its poorly defined borderlands to the south and northeast) and Narbonensis (including Toulouse), but does not extend to the districts along the Mediterranean coast, which remain under the control of the Visigoths, or to the Loire, as it will in later ages.

Swithelm succeeds King Sigeberht II of Essex after he, along with his brother Swithfrith, murders him in 660, after accusing him of being too friendly toward Christians.