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Genoese nobleman Guglielmo Spinola fails in an attempted coup d'état against the city-state's pro-papal Guelph magistrate (podesta), who sentences him and his fellow rebels to exile and the destruction of their houses and property, but the city's archbishop intervenes and the sentence is revoked. Blanche of Rossi fights beside her husband, Battista of Padua, to defend Ezzelino in a war between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. When her husband falls in battle, the victors demand Blanche as part of the booty, but she throws herself on his tomb, causing its stone door to collapse upon her.
A second Lombard League is shattered by the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II, who gains a great victory November 27 at Cortenuova. Friedrich has secured the election of his 8-year-old son Conrad as king of the Germans to succeed the imprisoned Hohenhaufen king Heinrich.
The Latin emperor of Constantinople Jean de Brienne dies at Constantinople in March at age 88 (approximate). The Nicaean emperor John III Vatatzes arranges a peace with the Bulgarian czar Ivan Asen II (see 1235; 1241).
Mongol forces use gunpowder and possibly firearms to conquer much of eastern Europe (see 1233). Led by their great khan Ughedei (Ogödei, or Subutai), now 65, and his son Batu Khan, they devastate Poland but will fail in their efforts at conquest (see 1240).
The Mongols will introduce eyeglasses and distilled alcoholic beverages to Asia from Europe.
The Teutonic Knights absorb the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and move to convert Russians from the Greek church to the Roman as Moscow falls to the Mongols (see 1230). Grand Master Hermann von Salza has engineered the merger (see politics, 1239; 1242).
An English ship founders off the French coast at a point near what later will be called Dinard. The captain reaches shore and supports himself by fishing and snaring the birds that fly low across the shore; in the evening, at low tide, he attaches his bird net to tall stakes set in the sand, and in the morning he finds that hundreds of young mussels, carried in by the sea, have attached themselves to his poles. The mussels grow to prodigious sizes and will be the basis of an industry.
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