The two rival Thai kingdoms conclude peace…

The poet Janus Pannonius helps teach Catherine Latin.

The queen is very young, so she plays little part in the politics of her husband's two kingdoms.

Matthias, on returning home, is crowned with the Holy Crown on March 29, 1464.

Twenty-one days after, on April 8, the fourteen-year-old Queen Catherine dies in childbirth.

The child, a son, is stillborn.

The event causes Matthias to lose hope of siring a legitimate heir.

After driving the Czechs out of his northern counties, he turns southwards again, this time recovering all the parts of Bosnia which still remain in Ottoman hands.

Matthias has gained independence of and power over the barons by dividing them, and by raising a large royal army, fekete sereg (the King's Black Army of Hungary of mercenaries), whose main force includes the remnants of the Hussites from Bohemia.

At this time Hungary reaches its greatest territorial extent of the age (present-day southeastern Germany to the west, Dalmatia to the south, Eastern Carpathians to the east, and southwestern Poland to the north).

Soon after his coronation, Matthias, no longer bound to the family of George of Poděbrady, again turns his attention upon Bohemia.

The crusade for which the Congress of Mantua had been convoked has made no progress.

Pius has done his best: he had addressed an eloquent letter to the sultan urging him to become a Christian, a letter that probably never was sent.

Not surprisingly, if it was delivered, this invitation was not successful.

A public ceremony had been staged to receive the relics of the head of Saint Andrew when it was brought from the East to Rome.

Pius II has succeeded in reconciling the Emperor and the King of Hungary, and has derived great encouragement as well as pecuniary advantage from the discovery of mines of alum in the papal territory at Tolfa.

But France is estranged; the Duke of Burgundy has broken his positive promises; Milan is engrossed with the attempt to seize Genoa; Florence has cynically advised the Pope to let the Turks and the Venetians wear each other out.

Pius, not quite fifty-nine, is unaware he is nearing his end, and his malady probably prompts the feverish impatience with which on June 18, 1464, he assumes the cross and departs for Ancona to conduct the crusade in person.

It seems certain that the issue of such an enterprise can only be ridiculous or disastrous, but the good genius of Pius renders it pathetic.

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.

Pope Paul II, declaring George a heretic, excommunicates the Hussite monarch on December 23, 1465, along with other Hussites and pronounces his deposition as king of Bohemia, releasing all subjects of the Bohemian crown from their oaths of allegiance to George and ordering all the neighboring princes to depose him.

Emperor Frederick III and King Matthias of Hungary, George's former ally, join the insurgent Bohemian nobles.

Stephen regains Khotyn from Poland in a diplomatic victory in 1466, but in the same year, Corvinus becomes on bad terms with King Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland, which frustrates the Hungarian king further, given that Moldavia is a Polish fief.

The locals of Transylvania start an uprising in 1467, and Corvinus has a difficult time in quelling the riots.

He later discovers that Stephen had supported the rioters, probably in order to find and kill Aron.

The Hungarians recruit an army of forty thousand, many drawn locally from Transylvania.

Many knights and Hungarian aristocrats follow, one of them being Stefan Báthory, who will one day rule Transylvania.

With them, they bring five hundred cannon and other heavy siege equipment.

The Moldavians, being fewer in number and seeing that the Hungarians are determined to wage war, start to evacuate the population close to the Hungarian border and blockade the passages by cutting down trees and placing them on the roads.

The Hungarians depart in the middle of October and reach the realm of Moldavia at the beginning of November, using a passage near Bacău.

On November 19, the Hungarians arrive at the Trotuș River, where they meet some Moldavian resistance.

The town is destroyed and the Hungarians head for Bacău, which they also burn down; they then continue to …

…Roman and stay there between November 29 and December 7.

Roman is put to the torch and the Hungarians kill everyone they encounter.

After three days of marching and more pillaging, …

…the Hungarians reach Baia, where Corvinus meets with a Hungarian by the name of Sythotus, who reveals to him the Moldavian position, their numbers (twelve thousand), and their plan to attack before dusk.

The Moldavians are encamped further north, between Moldova River and Șomuz creek.

Corvinus orders the city to be fortified as the men are told to be prepared for battle and guards are sent to man strategic points.

On December 15, when dusk is approaching, Stephen sends smaller detachments that set the town on fire from three different places: noise and confusion set in.

Stephen orders his men to dismount; soon after, they launch their attack and battle until dawn.

Descriptions of the battle say that the fire made the night equally light as the day and that many Hungarians were consumed by the flames.

The two armies start to butcher each other at the gate of the city; the fierce fighting then continued onto the streets.

The Moldavians gain the upper hand and launch another attack against the royal guard, which consists of two hundred heavily armed knights, the aristocrats and Corvinus.

Many Moldavians are killed in the tumult that followd, as Báthory and the rest of the knights try to defend the entrance to the market.

Corvinus is wounded by three arrows in the back and has to be carried from the battlefield.

Around ten thousand Hungarians are said to have been killed; most of the barons escape with their king.

A Hungarian chronicle mentions seven thousand casualties for the Moldavians.

This chronicle is disputed, due to it being the only one mentioning the Moldavian casualties in numbers; and because the Hungarians do not have the opportunity to calculate the numbers of their fallen enemy.

The entire conflict, with the Hungarian invasion and retreat, takes around forty days.

The retreating Hungarian army, on its way to Transylvania, is stopped by a blockade; here they decide to bury the five hundred cannon and other valuables, so that the Moldavians will be unable to capture them.

Some of the captured Hungarian standards come with great troves of booty that are sent to Casimir as proof of Stephen's victory.

Corvinus, upon his return to Brașov on Christmas day, takes revenge on many of the people who had rebelled against him by torturing them to death; he then fines the Transylvanians a sum of four hundred thousand florins, which they have to pay immediately, in gold.

He will use this money to raise an army of foreign mercenaries, which will prove more loyal to him than his conscripts.

Platina is again imprisoned in 1467 on the charge of having participated in a conspiracy against the Pope, and is tortured along with other abbreviators, like Filip Callimachus (who will flee to Poland in 1478), all of whom have been accused of pagan views.

Pope Paul’s abuse of the practice of creating cardinals in pectore, without publishing their names, raises another sore point with the College of Cardinals.

Anxious to raise new cardinals to increase the number who are devoted to his interests, but restricted by the terms of the capitulation, which gives the College a voice in the creation of new members, in the winter of 1464-65 Paul had created two secret cardinals both of whom had died before their names could be published.

In his fourth year, on September 18, 1467, he creates eight new cardinals; five are candidates pressed by kings, placating respectively James II of Cyprus, Edward IV of England, Louis XI of France, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and Ferdinand I of Naples; one is the able administrator of the Franciscans; the last two elevate his old tutor and a first cardinal-nephew.