Louis XI. won by his favourite method, diplomacy rather than arms. At the time of the first league, the battle of Montlhéry (16th of July 1465) having remained undecided between the two equally badly organized Charles the Bold. armies, Louis XI. conceded everything in the treaties of Conflans and Saint-Maur—promises costing him little, since he had no intention of keeping them. But during the course of the second league, provoked by the recapture of Normandy, which he had promised to his brother in exchange for Berry, he was nearly caught in his own trap. On the 15th of June 1467 Philip the Good died, and the accession of the count of Charolais was received with popular risings. In order to embarrass him Louis XI., had secretly encouraged the people of Liége to revolt; but preoccupied with the marriage of Charles the Bold with Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV. of England, he wished to negotiate personally with him at Péronne, and hardly had he reached that place when news arrived there of the revolt of Liége amid cries of “Vive France.” Charles the Bold, proud, violent, pugnacious, as treacherous as his rival, a hardier The interview at Péronne. soldier, though without his political sagacity, imprisoned Louis in the tower where Charles the Simple had died as a prisoner of the count of Vermandois. He only let him depart when he had sworn in the treaty of Péronne to fulfil the engagements made at Conflans and Saint-Maur to assist in person at the subjugation of rebellious Liége, and to give Champagne as an appanage to his ally the duke of Berry.
Louis XI., supported by the assembly of notables at Tours (1470), had no intention of keeping this last promise, since the duchy of Champagne would have made a bridge between Burgundy and Flanders—the two isolated Ruin of the feudal coalitions. branches of the house of Burgundy. He gave the duke of Berry distant Guienne. But death eventually rid him of the duke in 1472, just when a third league was being organized, the object of which was to make the duke of Berry king with the help of Edward IV., king of England. The duke of Brittany, Francis II., was defeated; Charles the Bold, having failed at Beauvais in his attempt to recapture the towns of the Somme which had been promised him by the treaty of Conflans, was obliged to sign the peace of Senlis (1472). This was the end of the great feudal coalitions, for royal vengeance soon settled the account of the lesser vassals; the duke of Alençon was condemned to prison for life; the count of Armagnac was killed; and “the Germans” were soon to disembarrass Louis of Charles the Bold.
Charles had indeed only signed the peace so promptly because he was looking eastward towards that royal crown and territorial cohesion of which his father had also dreamed. The king, he said of Louis XI., is always ready. He wanted Charles the Bold’s imperial dreams. to provide his future sovereignty with organs analogous to those of France; a permanent army, and a judiciary and financial administration modelled on the French parlement and exchequer. Since he could not dismember the kingdom of France, his only course was to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Lotharingia; while the conquest of the principality of Liége and of the duchy of Gelderland, and the temporary occupation of Alsace, pledged to him by Sigismund of Austria, made him greedy for Germany. To get himself elected king of the Romans he offered his daughter Mary, his eternal candidate for marriage, to the emperor Frederick III. for his son. Thus either he or his son-in-law Maximilian would have been emperor.
But the Tarpeian rock was a near neighbour of the Capitol. Frederick—distrustful, and in the pay of Louis XI.—evaded a meeting arranged at Trier, and Burgundian influence in Alsace was suddenly brought to a violent end by the Fall of Charles the Bold. putting to death of its tyrannical agent, Peter von Hagenbach. Charles thought to repair the rebuff of Trier at Cologne, and wasted his resources in an attempt to win over its elector by besieging the insignificant town of Neuss. But the “universal spider”—as he called Louis XI.—was weaving his web in the darkness, and was eventually to entangle him in it. First came the reconciliation, in his despite, of those irreconcilables, the Swiss and Sigismund of Austria; and then the union of both with the duke of Lorraine, who was also disturbed at the duke of Burgundy’s ambition. In vain Charles tried to kindle anew the embers of former feudal intrigues; the execution of the duke of Nemours and the count of Saint Pol cooled all enthusiasm. In vain did he get his dilatory friends, the English Yorkists, to cross the Channel; on the 29th of August 1475, at Picquigny, Louis XI. bribed them with a sum of seventy-five thousand crowns to forsake him, Edward further undertaking to guarantee the loyalty of the duke of Brittany. Exasperated, Charles attacked and took Nancy, wishing, as he said, “to skin the Bernese bear and wear its fur.” To the hanging of the brave garrison of Granson the Swiss responded by terrible reprisals at Granson and at Morat (March to June 1476); while the people of Lorraine finally routed Charles at Nancy on the 5th of January 1477, the duke himself falling in the battle.
The central administration of Burgundy soon disappeared, swamped by the resurgence of ancient local liberties; the army fell to pieces; and all hope of joining the two limbs of the great eastern duchy was definitely lost. As for Ruin of the house of Burgundy. the remnants that were left, French provinces and imperial territory, Louis XI. claimed the whole. He seized everything, alleging different rights in each place; but he displayed such violent haste and such trickery that he threw the heiress of Burgundy, in despair, into the arms of Maximilian of Austria. At the treaty of Arras (December 1482) Louis XI. received only Picardy, the Boulonnais and Burgundy; by the marriage of Charles the Bold’s daughter the rest was annexed to the Empire, and later to Spain. Thus by Louis XI.’s short-sighted error the house of Austria established itself in the Low Countries. An age-long rivalry between the houses of France and Austria was the result of this disastrous marriage; and as the son who was its issue espoused the heiress of a now unified Spain, France, hemmed in by the Spaniards and by the Empire, was thenceforward to encounter them everywhere in her course. The historical progress of France was once more endangered.
The reasons of state which governed all Louis XI.’s external policy also inspired his internal administration. If they justified him in employing lies and deception in international affairs, in his relations with his subjects they led him The administration of Louis XI. to regard as lawful everything which favoured his authority; no question of right could weigh against it. The army and taxation, as the two chief means of domination within and without the kingdom, constituted the main bulwarks of his policy. As for the nobility, his only thought was to diminish their power by multiplying their number, as his predecessors had done; while he reduced the rebels to submission by his iron cages or the axe of his gossip Tristan Lermite. The Church was treated with the same unconcerned cynicism; he held her in strict tutelage, accentuating her moral decadence still further by the manner in which he set aside or re-established the Pragmatic Sanction, according to the fluctuations of his financial necessities or his Italian ambitions. It has been said that on the other hand he was a king of the common people, and certainly he was one of them in his simple habits, in his taste for rough pleasantries, and above all in his religion, which was limited to superstitious practices and small devoutnesses. But in the states of Tours in 1468 he evinced the same mistrust for fiscal control by the people as for the privileges of the nobility. He inaugurated that autocratic rule which was to continue gaining strength until Louis XV.’s time. Louis XI. was the king of the bourgeoisie; he exacted much from them, but paid them back with interest by allowing them to reduce the power of all who were above them and to lord it over all who were below. As a matter of fact Louis XI.’s most faithful ally was death. Saint-Pol, Nemours, Charles the Bold, his brother the duke of Berry, old René of Anjou and his nephew the count of Maine, heir to the riches of Provence and to rights over Naples—the skeleton hand mowed down all his adversaries as though it too were in his pay; until the day when at Plessis-les-Tours it struck a final blow, claimed its just dues from Louis XI., and carried him off despite all his relics on the 30th of August 1483.
There was nothing noble about Louis XI. but his aims, and nothing great but the results he attained; yet however different he might have been he could not have done better, for what he achieved was the making of France. Charles VIII. and Brittany (1483-1498) This was soon seen after his death in the reaction which menaced his work and those who had served him; but thanks to himself and to his true successor, his eldest daughter Anne, married to the sire de Beaujeu, a younger member of the house of Bourbon, the set-back was only partial. Strife began immediately between the numerous malcontents and the Beaujeu party, who had charge of the little Charles VIII. These latter prudently made concessions: reducing the taille, sacrificing some of Louis XI.’s The Mad War, 1483. creatures to the rancour of the parlement, and restoring a certain number of offices or lands to the hostile princes (chief of whom was the duke of Orleans), and even consenting to a convocation of the states-general at Tours (1484). But the elections having been favourable to royalty, the Beaujeu family made the states reject the regency desired by the duke of Orleans, and organize the king’s council after their own views. When they subsequently eluded the conditions imposed by the states, the deputies—nobles, clergy and burgesses—showed their incapacity to oppose the progress of despotism. In vain did the malcontent princes attempt to set up a new League of Public Weal, the Guerre folle (Mad War), in which the duke of Brittany, Francis II., played the part of Charles the Bold, dragging in the people of Lorraine and the king of Navarre. In vain did Charles VIII., his majority attained, at once abandon in the treaty of Sablé the benefits gained by the victory of Saint-Aubin du Cormier (1488). In vain did Henry VII. of England, Ferdinand the Catholic, and Maximilian of Austria try to prevent the annexation of Brittany by France; its heiress Anne, deserted by every one, made peace and married Charles VIII. in 1491. There was no longer a single great fief in France to which the malcontents could fly for refuge.
It now remained to consolidate the later successes attained by the policy of the Valois—the acquisition of the duchies of Burgundy and Brittany; but instead there was a sudden change and that policy seemed about to be A policy of “magnificence.” lost in dreams of recapturing the rights of the Angevins over Naples, and conquering Constantinople. Charles VIII., a prince with neither intelligence nor resolution, his head stuffed with chivalric romance, was scarcely freed from his sister’s control when he sought in Italy a fatal distraction from the struggle with the house of Austria. By this “war of magnificence” he caused an interruption of half a century in the growth of national sentiment, which was only revived by Henry II.; and he was not alone in thus leaving the bone for the shadow: his contemporaries, Ferdinand the Catholic when delivered from the Moors, and Henry VII. from the power of the English nobles, followed the same superficial policy, not taking the trouble to work for that real strength which comes from the adhesion of willing subjects to their sovereign. They only cared to aggrandize themselves, without thought of national feeling or geographical conditions. The great theorist of these “conquistadores” was Machiavelli. The regent, Anne of Beaujeu, worked in her daughter’s interest to the detriment of the kingdom, by means of a special treaty destined to prevent the property of the Bourbons from reverting to the crown; while Anne of Brittany did the like for her daughter Claude. Louis XII., the next king of France, thought only of the Milanese; Ferdinand the Catholic all but destroyed the Spanish unity at the end of his life by his marriage with Germaine de Foix; while the house of Austria was for centuries to remain involved in this petty course of policy. Ministers followed the example of their self-seeking masters, thinking it no shame to accept pensions from foreign sovereigns. The preponderating consideration everywhere was direct material advantage; there was disproportion everywhere between the means employed and the poverty of the results, a contradiction between the interests of the sovereigns and those of their subjects, which were associated by force and not naturally blended. For the sake of a morsel of Italian territory every one forgot the permanent necessity of opposing the advance of the Turkish crescent, the two horns of which were impinging upon Europe on the Danube and on the Mediterranean.
Italy and Germany were two great tracts of land at the mercy of the highest bidder, rich and easy to dominate, where these coarse and alien kings, still reared on medieval traditions, were for fifty years to gratify their love of conquest. Italy was their The wars in Italy. first battlefield; Charles VIII. was summoned thither by Lodovico Il Moro, tyrant of Milan, involved in a quarrel with his rival, Ferdinand II. of Aragon. The Aragonese had snatched the kingdom of Naples from the French house of Anjou, whose claims Louis XI. had inherited in 1480. To safeguard himself in the rear Charles VIII. handed over Roussillon and Cerdagne (Cerdaña) to Ferdinand the Catholic (that is to say, all the profits of Louis XI.’s policy); gave enormous sums of money to Henry VII. of England; and finally, by the treaty of Senlis ceded Artois and Franche-Comté to Maximilian of Austria. After these fool’s bargains the paladin set out for Naples in 1494. His journey was long and triumphant, and his return precipitate; indeed it very nearly ended in a disaster at Fornovo, owing to the first of those Italian holy leagues which at the least sign of friction were ready to turn against France. At the age of twenty-eight, however, Charles VIII. died without issue (1498).
The accession of his cousin, Louis of Orleans, under the title of Louis XII., only involved the kingdom still further in this Italian imbroglio. Louis did indeed add the fief of Orleans to the royal domain and hastened to divorce Louis XII. (1498-1515). Jeanne of France in order to marry Anne, the widow of his predecessor, so that he might keep Brittany. But he complicated the Naples affair by claiming Milan in consideration of the marriage of his grandfather, Louis of Orleans, to Valentina, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan. In 1499, appealed to by Venice, and encouraged by his favourite, Cardinal d’Amboise (who was hoping to succeed Pope Alexander VI.), and also by Cesare Borgia, who had lofty ambitions in Italy, Louis XII. conquered Milan in seven months and held it for fourteen years; while Lodovico Sforza, betrayed by his Swiss mercenaries, died a prisoner in France. The kingdom of Naples was still left to recapture; and fearing to be thwarted by Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XII. proposed to this master of roguery that they should divide the kingdom according to the treaty of Granada (1500). But no sooner had Louis XII. assumed the title of king of Naples than Ferdinand set about despoiling him of it, and despite the bravery of a Bayard and a Louis d’Ars, Louis XII., being also betrayed by the pope, lost Naples for good in 1504. The treaties of Blois occasioned a vast amount of diplomacy, and projects of marriage between Claude of France and Charles of Austria, which came to nothing but served as a prelude to the later quarrels between Bourbons and Habsburgs.