Louis XI and the League of the…

The leaders of the counter-coup that has removed (and killed) Nghi Dân are two of the last surviving friends and aides of Lê Lợi: Nguyen Xi and Đinh Liệt.

These two old men have been out of power since the 1440s but they still command respect due to their association with the heroic Lê Lợi.

The new king had appointed these men to the highest positions in his new government, Nguyen Xi as Emperor’s Councilor and Đinh Liệt as commander of the army of Vietnam.

With the death of Nguyen Xi in 1465, the noble families from Thanh Hóa province lose their leader and they are mostly relegated to secondary positions in the new Confucian government of Thánh Tông.

However, they still retain control over Vietnam's armies, the old general, Đinh Liệt, remaining in command of the army.

Shogun Ahsikaga Yoshimasha, with no heir in 1464, had named his younger brother Yoshimi as successor.

The shogun’s wife bears him a son the following year, however, and asks daimyo Yamana Souzen Mochitoyo for his support in promoting her son’s claim.

Daimyo Hosokawa Katsumoto, Yamana’s son-in-law, supports Yoshimi.

The powerful Tendai, a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism, one of several Buddhist sects in Japan, have since the ninth century wielded authority from their monasteries on the Hiyesian, a large hill northeast of the Japanese capital of Kyoto.

The rival Shin sect, founded by the former Tendai Japanese monk Shinran Shonin and well established in the capital itself, has for decades been the Tendai’s major competitor for power, land, and influence.

Both sects have warrior monks, but the shoguns have in past times kept their aggressions from boiling over.

Now, with the shoguns reduced, like the emperors, to mere figureheads, antagonism between the two sects evolves into open conflict.

Marching down into Kyoto in 1465, the monks of Hiyesian torch the Shin’s Hongwanji Temple headquarters, burning it to the ground.

The different sects also war with one another on the Japanese countryside, destroying property.

As a result, the Shin would have to stay in the countryside for one hundred and twenty-five years.

This will prove a boon: their following again will grow enormously among ordinary people, especially in the Hokuriku region.

Today, Shin Buddhism is considered the most widely practiced branch of Buddhism in Japan.

Christian, having worked at repairing his relations with Uppsala’s archbishop, has attacked Charles’s forces, defeating him in 1465 and again forcing him to flee and surrender the throne.

Stephen, while Vlad is imprisoned in Hungary in 1465, again advances towards Chilia with a large force and siege weapons, but instead of besieging the fortress, he shows the garrison, who favor the Polish king, a letter in which the King requires them to surrender the fortress.

The garrison complied with the King's demand and Stephen enterd the fortress escorted by Polish troops.

Mehmed is furious about the news and claims Chilia as being a part of Wallachia, which now is a vassal to the Porte, and demands Stephen relinquish ownership.

However, Stephen refuses and recruits an army, forcing Mehmed, who is not yet ready to wage war, to accept the situation, if only for the time being.

Mehmed heavily besieges the fortress of Krujë in 1465, devastating the Albanian countryside and costing Skanderbeg his Albanian allies, who desert him.

Skanderbeg nevertheless repulses the invasion.

Andrea del Verrocchio, as the Florentine native Andrea di Michele di Francesco di Cioni is called, heads an important workshop that numbers among its assistants Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and probably Perugino. (Early sixteenth-century tradition will associate Verrochio with the sculptor Desiderio da Settignano, which may explain his extraordinary technical facility. Another sixteenth-century tradition states that he trained under Donatello, with whom he has few stylistic affinities).

Verrochio had trained as a goldsmith but succeeded in making the transition to sculpture on a monumental scale, and in 1465 begins work on his major public work in Florence, the Doubting of Thomas, a life-size group.

Antonello da Messina, born in Messina, Sicily and apprenticed while quite young to the painter Colantonio del Riore in Naples, the nearest cosmopolitan center, had gained exposure here to Flemish artists because of the French and Spanish rule that obtains there.

A lost van Eyck panel of St. Jerome in His Study, known to have been in Naples in 1456, may be the inspiration for one of Antonello's earliest pictures on the same subject, painted around 1460.

Antonello's earliest signed work, Salvator Mundi, painted in 1465, displays a similarly obvious Netherlandish cast.

The church of the Certosa di Pavia, designed by Giovanni and Guiniforte Solari as a grand structure with a nave and two aisles, a type unusual for the Carthusian Order, is the last edifice of the complex to be built; it is to serve as the family mausoleum of the Visconti.

The nave, in the Gothic style, is completed in 1465.

However, since the foundation, the Renaissance has spread in Italy, and the rest of the edifice is built according to the new style, redesigned by Guiniforte Solari and including some new cloisters.

Filarete has written a twenty-five-chapter architectural treatise that supports the principles of ancient architecture; it also includes the first Renaissance plan for an ideal city, Sforzinda.

Filarete retires as superintendent at the Ospedale in 1465. (He will die approximately four years later, at the age of about sixty-nine.)