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The Ottoman sultan Murad II dies of apoplexy at Adrianopole (Edirne) February 2 at age 48 after a 30-year reign. His eldest son is 21 and will reign until 1481 as Mehmet II, driving the Venetians and Hungarians out of Rumelia and Anatolia, reasserting Ottoman authority over rebellious Turkish emirs, and taking the rich Byzantine city of Constantinople, which has been surrounded by Ottoman territory for decades (see 1453).
French forces regain Guyenne and Gascony from English rule, but the inhabitants have become accustomed to the English and soon take exception to the French administration (see 1453). Charles VII deprives his son Louis the dauphin of his pension for having married without royal permission.
Jacques Coeur says to his wife, "Whatever people may say . . . I am as well with the king as ever I have been." He is thrown into prison a few days later on the preposterous charge of having poisoned the late Agnès Sorel. Coeur has built a Gothic mansion at Bourges with his family motto etched in stone: "To valiant hearts nothing is impossible" (but see 1453).
Fiction: Liber Facetiarum by papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini is a collection of jokes that will be widely reprinted in various languages for centuries. Now 70, Poggio fathered 14 children with a mistress before he was 55, when he married an 18-year-old beauty who has given him six more.
Sculpture: The Ascension by Luca della Robbia is a glazed polychrome terracotta work above a portal of the cathedral at Florence.
Florence's Palazzo Rucellai is completed for a rich Tuscan mercantile family (date approximate). Inspired by the Colosseum at Rome, architect Leon Battista Alberti has employed three classical orders to indicate upward progression and given the palace's façade a balanced, symmetrical treatment.
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