Lorenzo de’ Medici dispatches military aid to…

Sesshu, in his celebrated Long Landscape Scroll painted in 1486, transforms the river-and-mountain landscape style of the Chinese master Xia Gui into a bold yet intimate progression of seasonal scenes.

Bayezid consolidates the conquests of his father and lays the bases for new expansion into the Arab world and central Europe.

Stephen rebounds with a victory in 1486 but will hereafter confine his efforts to secure Moldavia's independence to the diplomatic arena.

Hussain Shah, the ruler of the weakened sultanate of Jaunpur, after suffering successive defeats by the Delhi Sultanate in the battles of Senha, Rapri and Raigaon Khaga, had finally been defeated on the banks of the Rahab.

He had fled to Bengal, where he had been granted asylum by sultan Alauddin Husain Shah and passed his last days there.

Bahlul Lodi in 1486 places his eldest surviving son, Barbak Shah Lodi, on the throne of Jaunpur.

The rising power of the Ottoman Turks challenges that of the Mamluks for the control of western Asia.

Hostilities break out in 1486 when Sultan Qaitbay contests with Bayezid II the possession of some border towns in Palestine.

Boabdil is soon released from Christian protection to resume his bid for control of Granada.

For the next three years, he will de facto act as one of Ferdinand and Isabella's vassals.

He offers the promise of limited independence for Granada and peace with the Christians to the citizenry; from the Catholic Monarchs, he extracts the title of Duke for whatever cities he can control.

The position of Sarzana at the entrance to the valley of the Magra (ancient Macra), the boundary between Etruria and Liguria in Roman times, has given it military importance in the Middle Ages.

The first mention of the city is found in 983 in a diploma of Otto I; in 1202, the episcopal see had been transferred from the ancient Luni, five kilometers (three miles) southeast, to Sarzana.

Owing to its position, Sarzana has changed masters more than once, belonging first to Pisa, then to Florence.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, under the general peace of 1486, regains control of the town, lost to Genoa in 1478.

Donate Bramante's architecture has eclipsed his painting skills: he knew the painters Melozzo da Forlì and Piero della Francesca well, who were interested in the rules of perspective and illusionistic features in Mantegna's painting.

Bramante was born under the name Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio, or Donato Pascuccio d'Antonio, in Fermignano near Urbino: here, in 1467 Luciano Laurana had been adding to the Palazzo Ducale an arcaded courtyard and other Renaissance features to Federico da Montefeltro's ducal palace.

Around 1474, Bramante had moved to Milan, a city with a deep Gothic architectural tradition, and built several churches in the new Antique style.

The Duke, Ludovico Sforza, had made him virtually his court architect, beginning in 1476, with commissions that culminate in the famous trompe-l'oeil choir of the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, executed from 1482 to 1486.

Space is limited, and Bramante makes a theatrical apse in bas-relief, combining the painterly arts of perspective with Roman details.

There is an octagonal sacristy, surmounted by a dome.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, after studies in Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Pavia, had gone in 1484 to Florence, where Marsilio Ficino has converted him to Neoplatonism.

Pico is twenty-three in 1486 when he publishes Conclusiones nongentae in omni genere scientiarum (“900 Conclusions in Every Kind of Science”), covering logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, theology, ethics, and the Kabbalah.

The same year, he produces his Oration on the Dignity of Man, a humanist attempt at philosophical syncretism.

He attempts, in his eclectic thought, to reconcile Judaism, Christianity, and Greek philosophy, classifying all things in three categories: super-celestial, God and the angels; the celestial, the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars; and the terrestrial, material things below the Moon.

The mediator of all categories is humankind, "the Divine Masterpiece," whose special dignity is in its freedom and its power to shape its own destiny.

Pope Innocent VIII forbids a proposed disputation, in which Pico is to defend his theses, when thirteen of them are declared heretical.

Pico flees to France, where he will be briefly imprisoned in 1488; he will later return to Florence.

Rabbi Elia del Medigo, who holds a chair in Philosophy at the University of Padua, is a major influence on Pico della Mirandola.