When Beneke was commissioned by Lübeck,[1] head of the Hanseatic League, to captain the ship Peter von Danzig, he chose to become part owner instead of taking pay.
In 1473 in the North Sea, he followed and boarded the galley St. Matthew, which had a registered owner's name of Tommaso Portinari, but was actually owned by England.
The painting had been commissioned for the chapel of a branch manager of the Medici Bank, Angelo Tani,[2] and included a head portrait of Portinari.
The Burgundian Duke, under whose flag the St. Thomas had run, brokered a peace between war-weary England and the Hanseatic League, restoring their trading rights.
He is one of the historical characters who appear in Dorothy Dunnett's novels To Lie With Lions and Caprice and Rondo in the House of Niccolò series.