1467
Onin War Begins in Japan
A succession dispute between two Shogunal deputies boiled over into full combat in the streets of Kyoto. For ten years, the imperial capital was systematically burned, block by block, while rival armies looted its wooden palaces. The authority of the Ashikaga shogunate evaporated. Japan entered its Sengoku century of warring provincial lords.
Charles the Bold Becomes Duke of Burgundy
Philip the Good's son inherited the richest, most centralized state in Europe outside the Ottoman Empire and immediately set about trying to turn it into a kingdom linking the North Sea to the Alps. His ambition would make him the most feared ruler of his decade and, within ten years, a frozen corpse in a ditch.
Kyoto Devastated in Onin War
The first year of the Onin War reduced much of Kyoto to smoking ashes and rubble. Rival armies of the Hosokawa and Yamana clans built crude fortifications across the imperial capital's elegant streets, burned ancient temples and aristocratic mansions, and turned centuries of accumulated cultural refinement to charcoal. The delicate world of court poetry and Noh drama survived only in provincial refuges, carried there by fleeing monks and displaced courtiers.
Sesshu Toyo Travels to Ming China
The Japanese ink wash painter Sesshu sailed to China to study landscape painting at its original source, spending two years in Ming monasteries and imperial studios. He was reportedly disappointed by the quality of contemporary Ming artists but deeply influenced by the Southern Song masters' works he studied in monastic collections. Returning to Japan, he transformed suiboku-ga ink painting into something distinctly Japanese: spare, spiritually charged, and devastatingly precise in its brushwork.
Philip the Good Dies in Bruges
The Burgundian duke who had built the most sophisticated princely court in Europe died in Bruges after a thirty-year reign. His son Charles the Bold would inherit the greatest composite state in western Europe and squander it within a decade through military ambition. Burgundy was entering its final golden catastrophe.