1274
First Mongol invasion of Japan fails
A Yuan invasion fleet landed at Hakata Bay and fought the samurai of Kyushu to a standstill before retreating to their ships. That night a storm scattered the fleet across the Korea Strait. The defenders credited the gods of Ise and began calling the wind kamikaze. The divine wind entered Japanese mythology as proof of the islands' sacred inviolability, a belief that would shape Japanese identity for centuries.
Thomas Aquinas dies at Fossanova
Struck by a low-hanging branch while riding to the Council of Lyon, the Dominican theologian whose Summa Theologiae was trying to reconcile Aristotle with revelation died in a Cistercian monastery. His last work, the Summa, was left unfinished, which he had already predicted. After a mystical experience near the end of his life, he reportedly declared that all he had written seemed to him like straw.
Second Council of Lyon attempts reunion
Byzantine envoys to a papal council at Lyon nominally agreed to church union in exchange for western protection against Charles of Anjou. The reunion was repudiated in Constantinople and would never take hold. Thomas Aquinas had died on his way to the council. The failed reunion deepened Orthodox suspicion of Latin Christianity, a bitterness that would persist through the fall of Constantinople and beyond.
Bonaventure dies at Lyon
The Franciscan theologian and minister general of the order, known as the Seraphic Doctor, died during the Council of Lyon. His mystical synthesis of Augustinian theology stood beside that of Aquinas as the two great theological achievements of the mid-thirteenth century. The deaths of both Aquinas and Bonaventure in the same year marked the close of scholasticism's golden age and the end of an intellectual epoch.