Philip outlived his finest artist by two and a half decades, dying at the age of seventy in 1467. By the end of the fifteenth century his descendants had proven unable to transform Burgundy into a kingdom, nor even to maintain it as an independent state: in the 1490s Burgundy was split up and much of its territory rolled into what would become the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire. But the reputation of this fleeting European half realm for punching far above its weight as a cultural force would endure for centuries afterward.
