1435
Ming Court Abandons Maritime Ambitions
With the Yongle Emperor dead and Zheng He buried at sea, the Confucian mandarinate persuaded the court to halt treasure fleets, burn shipyards' records, and make oceanic shipbuilding illegal. China's navy was dismantled by edict. The next four centuries of maritime Asia would be shaped by others, including eventually Europeans.
Treaty of Arras
Philip the Good of Burgundy switched sides, abandoned the English alliance, and reconciled with Charles VII of France. The Hundred Years' War's geopolitical center of gravity lurched. Within eighteen years, English France would be reduced to Calais. Burgundy's price was autonomy, which it would enjoy for forty more years. Philip exacted a humiliating apology from Charles VII for the murder of his father at Montereau, satisfying Burgundian honor.
Leon Battista Alberti Writes De Pictura
The Florentine polymath produced the first theoretical treatise on painting, establishing mathematical perspective as the scientific foundation of Renaissance visual art. Alberti described the canvas as an open window through which the viewer perceives a rationally constructed world. His rules for vanishing points and proportional diminution gave European painters a geometric grammar that would govern Western art for four centuries, from the Uffizi to the Impressionists who finally rejected it.
Rogier van der Weyden Paints Descent from the Cross
The Flemish master completed his monumental altarpiece for the Leuven crossbowmen's guild, depicting Christ's body being lowered tenderly from the cross while the Virgin collapses in a parallel swoon that mirrors her son's descent. The painting compressed real human grief into a shallow golden box with an emotional power that reportedly made viewers weep on sight. Northern European painting had found its devastating emotional register.
Fall of Paris Prepared
Negotiations at Arras had already removed Burgundy from the English alliance. Paris, isolated, was now vulnerable. Constable Richemont began gathering forces for the recapture of the French capital, which would fall the next year. The English dual monarchy's territorial hold was cracking along the Seine. Paris's isolation after Arras demonstrated that diplomacy, not battlefield victory, would determine the Hundred Years' War's final outcome.