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The plague likewise, which raged at Lisbon in 1438, contributed to the suspension of the patriotic enterprizes of Don Henry. At length, in 1440, Don Henry resumed his project of maritime discovery, and dispatched two caravels from Sagres, which were forced back by unfavourable weather, apparently without even reaching the coast of Africa.
It was registered at the Parliament of Paris, July 13, 1439; but the King ordered its execution from the day of its date, 1438. The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had a little defect; it was radically null; for every contract is null which is not consented to by both of the contracting parties.
In 1438 the Council of Ferrara was held, and was transferred in the following year to Florence, when the Greek emperor and all the bishops of the Eastern Church, except the bishop of Ephesus, adopted the doctrines of the Roman Church, accepted the papal supremacy, and the union of the two Churches was solemnly ratified in the cathedral of Florence on July 6, 1439. But little came of the union.
His brother Duarte meantime endeavored to raise the country for his deliverance; but the plague was still desolating Portugal, so that it was impossible to collect an army, and the infection at length seized on the King himself, from a letter which he incautiously opened, and he died, in his thirty-eighth year, in 1438, the sixth year of his reign and the second of his brother's captivity.
Yet even so, the king often relapsed into indolence and apparent indifference to his kingly duties, and it was not till after 1438, when he summoned a national Council at Bourges, that Charles showed himself to be a new man. It is also not long after this that we read of favours granted by the king to Agnes’s relations.
Both the cantorie Donatello's, begun in 1433 and finished in 1439, and Luca's, begun in 1431 and finished in 1438 fulfilled their melodious functions in the Duomo until 1688, when they were ruthlessly cleared away to make room for large wooden balconies to be used in connexion with the nuptials of Ferdinand de' Medici and the Princess Violante of Bavaria.
It had two columns at each angle, of which only the inner one remains, and a marble cupola surrounded by statues. The aqueduct which supplies it and the other fountains is eight miles long, and brings the water from Gionchetto. It was only completed in 1438, after many discouraging incidents.
When Dom Duarte died in 1438, or when Huguet himself died not long after, the work had only been carried out as far as the tops of the surrounding chapels, and so remained all through his son's and his grandson's reigns, although in his will the king had specially asked that the building should be carried on.
When in the year 1438 duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan forced Ostasio da Polenta, the fifth of that name, into an alliance and the Venetians thereupon invited him to visit them, Venice had decided for her own safety to annex Ravenna and Ostasio soon learned that the new government had proclaimed itself in his old capital.
Printing, after numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was first made of cotton in Europe about 1000, and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of which to move the world.
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