Louis XI and the Forced Marriage of…

Archbishop Johann Beckensloer leaves Hungary for reasons unknown, taking with him the treasury of the Esztergom See in early 1476.

He flees to Vienna and offers his funds to the Emperor.

Matthias accuses the Emperor of having incited the Archbishop against him.

Maximilian, the son of Emperor Frederick III and Eleanor of Portugal, was born at Wiener Neustadt on March 22, 1459.

His father, Frederick III, named him for an obscure saint whom Frederick believed had once warned him of imminent peril in a dream.

In his infancy, he and his parents were besieged in Vienna by Albert of Austria.

One source relates that, during the siege's bleakest days, the young prince would wander about the castle garrison, begging the servants and men-at-arms for bits of bread.

The Dukes of Burgundy, a cadet branch of the French royal family, with their sophisticated nobility and court culture, are the rulers of substantial territories on the eastern and northern boundaries of modern-day France.

The reigning duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, is Frederick’s chief political opponent.

Frederick is concerned about Burgundy's expansive tendencies on the western border of his Holy Roman Empire and, to forestall military conflict, he attempts to secure the marriage of Charles's only daughter, Mary of Burgundy, to his son Maximilian.

After the Siege of Neuss, he is successful.

Human settlements existed in the area of Šabac, on the Sava River in western Serbia, in Neolithic times.

In the Middle Ages, a Slavic settlement named Zaslon existed at the current location of Šabac.

This settlement, first mentioned in Ragusan documents from 1454, had been part of the Serbian Despotate until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1459.

The Ottomans had built the town’s first fortress in 1470 and named it Bejerdelen (Böğürdelen, meaning "side-striker").

Sultan Mehmed II has proposed peace but Matthias, displeased at the peace between the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks, has refused him.

Instead, he storms into Ottoman territory and captures Šabac on February 15, 1476.

During the siege, Matthias barely escapes capture while he is watching the fortress from a boat on the Sava.

The fort will remain under the administration of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1521, when it will again be captured by the Ottoman Empire.

Mehmed invades Moldavia in 1476 with an army of one hundred and fifty thousand, which is joined by ten thousand Wallachians under Laiotă and thirty thousand Tatars under Meñli I Giray.

The Tatars, who call for a Holy War, attack with their cavalry from the north and start to pillage the country.

The Moldavians give chase after them, routing and killing most of them.

Giray writes to Mehmed that he cannot wage more war against Stephen, as he has lost his son and two brothers, and has returned with only one horse.

In July 1476, after killing thirty thousand Ottomans troops, Stephen is defeated at the Battle of Valea Albă.

However, the Ottomans are unsuccessful in their siege of the Suceava citadel and …

…the Neamţ fortress, while …

…Laiotă is forced to retreat back to Wallachia when Vlad and Stefan Báthory, Voivode of Transylvania, gives chase with an army of thirty thousand.

Stephen assembles his army and invades Wallachia from the north, while Vlad and Báthory invade from the west.

Laiotă flees, and in November, Vlad Țepeș is installed on the Wallachian throne.

He receives two hundred loyal knights from Stephen to serve as his loyal bodyguards, but his army remains small.

When Laiotă returns, Vlad Tepes goes to battle and is killed by the Janissaries near Bucharest in December 1476.

Laiotă again occupies the Wallachian throne, which prompts Stephen to make another return to Wallachia and dethrone Laiotă for the fifth and last time, while a Dăneşti, Ţepeluş, is established as ruler of the country.

From Nancy, Charles marches against the Swiss, hanging or drowning, in spite of their capitulation, the garrison of Grandson, a possession of the Savoyard Jacques de Romont, a close ally of Charles, which the Confederates had invested shortly before.

Some days later, on March 2, 1476, he is attacked before the village of Concise by the confederate army in the Battle of Grandson and suffers a shameful defeat, being compelled to flee with a handful of attendants, and leaving his artillery and an immense booty (including his silver bath) in the hands of the allies.

Nicholas Froment paints a second celebrated altarpiece in 1476, “The Burning Bush,” for the Cathedral of Saint Sauveur in Aix-en-Provence.

This work, like his earlier “The Raising of Saint Lazarus,” reveals an awareness of the innovations of both the Italian Renaissance and the new Flemish realism.

His concept of space, initially northern European in his detailed landscapes, seems now to become more Tuscan, employing an Italian style of perspective.

Regiomontanus, called to Rome to work with Pope Sixtus IV on calendar reform, dies of unknown causes in Rome on July 6, 1476, a month after his fortieth birthday.

According to a rumor repeated by Gassendi in his Regiomontanus biography, he was assassinated by relatives of George of Trebizond whom he had criticized in his writings.

More likely he died in an epidemic raging in Rome at the time.

A prolific author, Regiomontanus was internationally famous in his lifetime.

Despite having completed only a quarter of what he had intended to write, he leaves a substantial body of work.

Nicolaus Copernicus' teacher, Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, refers to Regiomontanus as having been his own teacher.

There is speculation that Regiomontanus had arrived at a theory of heliocentrism before he died; a manuscript shows particular attention to the heliocentric theory of the Pythagorean Aristarchus, mention was also given to the motion of the earth in a letter to a friend.

Antonello’s influential “Madonna and Saints” altarpiece, usually known as the “San Cassiano Altarpiece,” is painted for the Venetian church of that name (only three fragments survive).

Antonello assembles the painting’s figures symmetrically around the elevated throne of the Madonna, all placed within a large-scale architectural setting.

His sensitivity to characteristically Venetian treatments of certain themes, such as the Venetian school's preoccupation with color, light, and atmosphere, can be seen in his St. Sebastian and his Pietá, both painted in 1475-76.