Intro
Louis XI, son of Charles VII, is a great king who is often poorly known. It aroused contradictory opinions, rather unfavorable towards the man, but laudatory as to the work accomplished. If we said he was cruel, it turns out that Louis XI was no worse than most of the kings of that sad time. His reign is mainly marked by his struggle with the powerful Duchy of Burgundy and its representative:Charles the Bold.
The work of Louis XI
A king at the dawn of modern times
Born in the dark of the Hundred Years War, in 1423, Louis XI saw the kingdom of his father Charles VII amputated from the territories located north of the Loire. He knew very young a devastated country, ravaged by the troops of the Duke of Burgundy and by the English. Yet sixty years later, at his death, the English no longer possessed Calais in France, the duchy of Burgundy had disappeared, the lords and soldiers of fortune were reduced to obedience. The royal domain had absorbed Burgundy, Artois, Picardy, Franche-Comté, Maine, Anjou and Provence. How can one deny the qualities of such a sovereign? And yet… a lord said of him:“the most terrible king that ever was” . For the Burgundians, he was "the universal spider", the spider that controls everything in the center of its web that it extends to the whole world. A Milanese ambassador reported that his interview with the king left him so impressed that he was bathed in the sweat of terror. Long after, 19th century writers such as the Scotsman Walter Scott emphasized the terrible aspect of his reign. Even when we wanted to do justice to the king's work, as the historian Michelet did, we spoke of him as a demonic genius. What can we do to judge, if not re-examine the reign of this astonishing sovereign?
Louis XI presides over the chapter of Saint-Michel
Louis XI presides over the chapter of Saint-Michel (Statutes of the order of Saint-Michel, illumination by Jean Fouquet, 1470 Paris, BnF, department of Manuscripts, French 19819, fol. 1)
An agitated Dolphin
The young prince had a hard apprenticeship. Before governing the Dauphiné, he experienced rides and battles against the Burgundians and the English. Louis does not have good relations with his father Charles VII. At 13, his father gave him Margaret of Scotland as his wife. This strategic union displeases the young Dauphin (Scotland is allied with France against the English). Louis XI will go so far as to beat Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII. He was even accused of having poisoned her. In 1440, at the age of 17, he joined the Praguerie, a revolt of disgruntled nobles against Charles VII, also including Dunois or la Trémoille (great combatants of the Hundred Years' War). At the same time, Louis continues the fight against the English and against the companies (mercenaries living off their plunder). He establishes a new nobility, marries Charlotte of Savoy, obtaining an alliance with the duke. From the birth of his daughter Jeanne, an ugly and lame child, he gives her in marriage to Louis d'Orléans (future Louis XII), son of the poet Charles d'Orléans. He thus hopes that the marriage remains sterile in order to extinguish this rival Capetian branch of his. While Louis XI continues to plot against his father, Charles VII sends an army to drive him out of Dauphiné. Louis is forced to take refuge with the Duke of Burgundy, Philippe le Bon, who welcomes him. In 1461, learning of the death of his father, he shows indifference, he will not attend the royal funeral in Saint-Denis.
Louis XI
Louis XI is above all a great diplomat. He knows how to show a lot of finesse and cunning. He, not being particularly physically advantaged, is also poorly dressed (his hat with medals has remained in history) and is very miserly, unlike Charles VII who lived lavishly. Moreover, he is not suited to a court life, he prefers to move around the kingdom. Moreover, he did not stay long in Paris, he settled in Tours, a city won over to his cause.
New methods
The first measures taken by Louis XI were to dismiss the officers of Charles VII and to rehabilitate those whom he had condemned. Like his father, Louis knows how to surround himself, but his most skilful advisers are also among the most cunning. He calls on henchmen from all social strata. He rewards them generously but demands the maximum from them, if necessary, he punishes them with exceptional severity. Upon his accession to power, it is still a medieval state that the king will govern. Louis XI will transform the country as none of these predecessors will have done. French society is then in decomposition, the hierarchical structures of class and rank are barely maintained. A head of state of the caliber of Louis XI was to find in this situation the ideal ferment to put his ideas into practice:a diluted monarchical absolutism mingling with progressive principles of economic, commercial and market development. He stuffed Paris with spies under his charge, he launched his henchmen on the roads of France, suppressed the ecclesiastical hierarchy and crushed the arrogant and powerful French nobility.
Francois Villon
Villon was one of the most turbulent subjects of Louis XI, always in conflict with his king. He was a hooligan, but cultured and refined. A criminal with a captivating pen who described the France of his time with an acuity and lucidity that very few chroniclers have achieved.
The ballad of the hanged men
The work of Louis XI
King in 1461, Louis XI is at the head of a kingdom in ruins, France has barely 15 million souls, ie 8 million less than at the beginning of the 14th century. The countryside is devastated, Paris has preserved ramparts which are suitable for a city populated by 200,000 inhabitants, but the Parisians are only 60,000 to 80,000 left. However, the war is over, France is rebuilding itself and reconstituting its forces. Louis XI helps in this raising, for that it is necessary to be obeyed. Against the undisciplined nobility, the king will struggle constantly by cunning or violence. In 1465, he defeated the army of feudal greats at Montlhéry, south of Paris. He killed rebels and traitors by assassination or exemplary death sentences:the Count of Armagnac, the Constable of Saint-Pol, the Duke of Nemours. Unheard of, he dares to imprison a man of the Church, Cardinal Balue, who is intriguing with the Duke of Burgundy. Slowly, the wounds were healed, the countryside was again highlighted. Linen in the North, hemp in the West, wool everywhere:France has started to produce fabrics exported throughout Europe. Rouen doubled its population in twenty or thirty years. Italian bankers settled in Lyon, where the first international fair was inaugurated in 1464. Better obeyed in a France emerging from poverty, the king quadrupled the weight of taxation (by restoring the Size, the Help and the Gabelle) and thus maintains the best army in Europe. In 1479, he created the office of "general controller of the riders", that is to say responsible for the post office, the first regular system of relays on the main roads of France. Finally, in this kingdom, which had been restored to order, it was necessary to ensure external peace, by definitively ruining the pretensions of the kings of England, and by breaking up the richest and most enterprising state in Europe, that of the Dukes of Burgundy.
“Girls” and iron cages
According to Philippe de Commynes, biographer of Louis XI, "girls" was the name given not to iron cages as is often said, but to the chains with which the king had his political prisoners loaded (Cardinal Balue for example) . These chains were provided with a heavy mass of iron at their end and fixed to rings enclosing the ankles of the condemned person. As for the iron cages themselves, they were low in height and often suspended in the air, which made the position of the prisoner particularly uncomfortable.
The fight against Burgundy
The Duchy of Burgundy
When Philippe le Hardi, son of King Jean II le Bon, became Duke of Burgundy in 1364, he founded a brilliant dynasty which took advantage of the English presence to escape the authority of the kings of France. After him, Jean Sans Peur and especially Philippe le Bon brought their power to its peak. By skilful diplomacy, by marriages, rarely by war, the dukes constitute a domain which extends from Burgundy and Franche-Comté to Holland. Only Lorraine escapes them and prevents this State from having its unified territory. The ambitious Charles the Bold will have the heart to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Lotharingia (created following the partition of Verdun in 843). The court of the Dukes of Burgundy is the most brilliant in Europe and is frequented by the most famous artists and writers of that time. In a well-administered State, with abundant finances, the dukes lead the way and the parties, tournaments and banquets far exceed the possibilities of the King of France. When the young Louis XI, intriguing against the king his father, fears being arrested, he then flees to Philippe le Bon. He then measures how dangerous this powerful vassal is for the kingdom of France. An ally of England, the duke can, in fact, afford all ambitions. This 15th century marked the era of the Princes. Besides the Duchy of Burgundy, there are also great principalities in Italy (the Milanese princes, the Republic of Venice, the Medici of Florence). At the end of the 15th century, when the golden age of princes was coming to an end, Italy fell prey to foreign sovereigns, the Burgundian State was integrated into the possessions of the Habsburgs. The whole of Europe was to be caught up in the great confrontation which was brewing between King Francis I of France and Emperor Charles V.
The Dukes of Burgundy
Charles the Bold
Charles the Bold, the son of Philip the Good, was a man of good stature, courageous and educated, but impulsive and much less endowed with common sense than the king. An amiable young man, an excellent dancer and a great drinker, Charles was a nobleman who lacked none of the qualities of loyalty and honor. For Louis XI, he represented this arrogant and bellicose nobility that the monarch tried to throw into the dustbin of history. In 1463, Louis XI had bought the cities of the Somme from Philippe le Bon, at the same time he had also obtained Roussillon from the King of Aragon. The news of the takeover had aroused strong hostility at the court of Burgundy. Charles the Bold and François II, Duke of Brittany, decided to join the feudal league of “Public Good”. Very comparable to Praguerie, it was headed by Charles, Duke of Berry, brother of the king, who demanded more power. Louis XI personally put himself at the head of a great offensive against the League of Public Welfare. He crushed the feudal lords at Montlhéry in 1465. Subsequently, he obtained peace by ceding Normandy to his brother Charles de Berry and returning the towns of the Somme to the Burgundians.
The fight against the Bold
In 1468, Charles Le Téméraire proposed to negotiate, and invited him in his castle of Péronne. Louis XI went there in person. During the talks, Liège rebelled against the Burgundian tutelage. It was soon reported that royal commissioners were among the rebels. Furious, the Bold makes the king his prisoner. Louis XI fears being imprisoned for life, or even assassinated. In order to save himself, he had to give up enormous advantages:he abandoned all of Champagne and, supreme humiliation, accompanied the Bold to chastise the people of Liège. But, two years later, Louis XI renewed his forces and had his councils cancel everything he had previously granted. It is now a life-and-death struggle. The Bold buys the south of Alsace, he disposes of Lorraine as he pleases. From Burgundy to Holland, the lands of the Duke of Burgundy are almost unified. Louis XI has a good army, good artillery, but the Téméraire has more money, more soldiers and more guns than him. The solution:temporize, intrigue. When Charles the Bold invaded northern France, he exhausted himself in taking small strongholds, only to be followed and harassed from a distance by the royal army. At Beauvais, the duke suffered a serious setback. He cannot capture the city that its inhabitants are heroically defending. Even the women fought on the ramparts and a certain Jeanne earned the famous nickname of Hachette there by killing a Burgundian standard-bearer with this tool.
Charles the Bold
The fall of the Bold
Allied to the Bold, King Edward IV of England in turn invaded Picardy. On the other hand, Louis XI arouses against the Burgundian the hostility of the emperor Frederic III, that of Savoy and that of the Swiss cantons. In Picquigny, under waves of gold, the King of England signs peace (1475):he renounces the throne of France forever (for some this treaty marks the true end of the Hundred Years' War). Louis XI did not lose a soldier. On the contrary, Charles the Bold wanted to punish the king's allies by force and for him it was the announcement of a series of disasters:the Burgundian army was destroyed in two battles against the Swiss, at Grandson and at Morat ( 1476). Charles wants to retake Nancy who has revolted, he is defeated and killed, his army exterminated and of the Grand Duke of the West there remains only a corpse half devoured by wolves. Nothing can oppose the strength of the King of France. His armies seize Picardy and Artois (where Arras is punished by the deportation of all its inhabitants), Burgundy and Franche-Comté (where French soldiers loot the cities and massacre the defeated populations). Only the Burgundian possessions of the Netherlands escape him. By marrying Maximilian of Habsburg, Marie, the daughter of Charles the Bold brings them to him as a dowry. Their grandson, Charles Quint will thus inherit, through the interplay of alliances, a vast kingdom. For the time being, Louis XI obtained Anjou and Maine in 1481.
Winning Without Fighting
In August 1475, Louis XI bought peace from King Edward IV of England, whose army was camped north of Amiens. Negotiations are on track, but the slightest mistake can make battle inevitable. The king had two vast tables laden with wine and food installed at the great gate of Amiens. Little by little, with or without arms, the English soldiers arrive in small groups, they stop at the main gate, taste the meal, then enter the town where the taverns, at the expense of the King of France, have orders to serve to the English soldiers whatever seems good to them. The party lasted three days. Commynes reports his words from Louis XI:“I chased the English out of the kingdom more easily than my father did; for my father put them out by force of arms, and I drove them out by force of pates of venison and good wine” . However unheroic it may be, gastronomy has since been considered one of our most formidable weapons.
Memoir establishing the rights of Louis XI over the Duchy of Burgundy, France, end of the 15th century (Paris, BnF, département des Manuscrits, Français 5079, fol. 1)
The end of direct Valois
The end of a reign
In 1470, Louis XI had a son, Charles, the future Charles VIII. He had married his two daughters, Anne de Beaujeu to Pierre de Bourbon, Jeanne the Crippled (she was lame) to Louis d'Orléans. Thus the two most powerful families of the kingdom were allies of the king. From 1480, the king hardly left Touraine. Ill, fearing death, he completes the future of fixing the features of a strange king:far from any luxury, he lives surrounded by a few familiars, his "comrades". The best known are Olivier le Daim, his barber and valet, and Philippe de Commynes, the faithful adviser, who was to write his memoirs. Very pious and even devout, the king manifests a superstitious religion, accumulating relics, pious images, lead medals which he attaches around his hat. With a pathological mistrust, he fears being kidnapped, or that schemers take advantage of his physical weakness to manipulate him. In his castle of Plessis-Lès-Tours, 300 Scottish guards protect him. But his personal residence is comfortable, with large windows, and the king plays his favorite music there day and night. Throughout his life, Louis XI was perpetually ill:"heartburn, liver attacks, gout, hemorrhoidal congestion that prevented him from walking, purulent eczema" . He died in 1483. In accordance with his will, his body was buried in the church of Notre-Dame de Cléry, and not in Saint-Denis, necropolis of the kings of France. On his tomb, a sculpture represents him simply dressed as a hunter, praying to the Virgin.
The reign of Charles VIII
Charles VIII is the only son of Louis XI and Charlotte of Savoy. At 13 he ascended the throne. He is still a minor and in accordance with his father's wishes, he accepts the guardianship of his older sister, Anne de Beaujeu. The government of the regents provokes a rebellion of the princes led by Louis II of Orléans, the future Louis XII, who, in order to remove the king from his guardians, undertakes the Mad War. On July 28, 1488, Louis d'Orléans was taken prisoner at the battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier. Imprisoned for three years, he was pardoned in 1491. Charles undertook heavy negotiations to marry Anne of Brittany (daughter of François II), initially promised to the powerful Maximilien de Habsbourg. None of the six children from this union survived. To have his full freedom in Italy, where he has claims on the kingdom of Naples, he signs three treaties with the king of England, the king of Aragon and the Germanic emperor. On the death of King Ferdinand I of Naples in 1494, Charles VIII took the title of King of Naples and Jerusalem and entered Italy. This is the beginning of the first Italian war (1494-1497). Without any resistance, the French entered Florence, Rome and then Naples. However, under the leadership of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Pope Alexander VI, the League of Venice was formed, an almost general alliance against France. The return to France of Charles VIII is perilous. However, he manages to cross the Apennines, and, fighting an indecisive battle at Fornoue, he succeeds in escaping his enemies. Charles VIII died on April 7, 1498 at the Château d'Amboise, after having violently struck his forehead against a stone lintel placed too low. After his death, the estate passed to his cousin, the Duke of Orléans Louis XII, who also married his widow. It's the end of direct Valois.
Charles VIII
Anonymous portrait