Louis XI. had watched the events of the last twelve months, at first with anxiety, and later with feverish attention. Ever since his accession he had been haunted by the |Louis seizes Burgundian territories.| sense of Charles’s hostility, and the dangers which it involved; and now his great rival had been slain by the agency of an unforeseen and apparently unequal opponent. The only claimant of the vast inheritance left vacant by the death of Charles the Bold was an unmarried girl of twenty-one years. Various schemes were debated in the royal council as to the best way of profiting by so favourable a contingency. One very obvious plan was to effect a marriage between Mary of Burgundy and the dauphin. But there were several objections to this. The dauphin was only in his eighth year; he was already betrothed to an English princess, and Edward IV. was not likely either to pardon an insult to his daughter, or to acquiesce in the absorption of the Burgundian inheritance by the French monarchy. To the alternative scheme of marrying Mary to a French noble of royal blood, such as Charles of Angoulême, it could be objected that the new dynasty thus created might be as dangerous and disloyal as that to which it would succeed. Louis determined to keep the possibility of either marriage as a card to be played, if necessary or expedient, but in the meantime to take measures for the occupation of those Burgundian territories which France could acquire without serious opposition. The revival of such a power as that of Charles might be prevented, and the adhesion of German princes might be purchased, by a partition of the fiefs which the late duke had held of the empire. No preparations had been made to resist Louis, and his promptness ensured a considerable measure of success. He had an unquestionable claim to the Somme towns, whose transfer had been limited to male heirs; and the duchy of Burgundy could be reasonably claimed as an escheated fief. But Flanders, Artois, and Franche-Comté had come to the Burgundian house through an heiress, so that Mary’s right of succession could hardly be disputed. Regardless of this consideration, and of the fact that Franche-Comté was an imperial fief, Louis proceeded with the work of annexation. Both the duchy and the county of Burgundy submitted to French rule. From Picardy, which returned willingly to its former allegiance, the forces of Louis entered Artois and succeeded in reducing its capital, Arras.

The occupation of Artois brought the French to the frontier of Flanders, the most wealthy and important of the Burgundian possessions. The Flemish citizens, and especially |Conduct of the Flemings.| those of Ghent, where Mary of Burgundy was residing, were not likely to allow the choice of their future ruler to be settled without their participation. Their policy in the matter was quite distinct. They had hated Burgundian rule and the Burgundian ministers whom Charles and his predecessors had appointed to govern them. As long as their sovereign had been a mere count of Flanders, they had enjoyed a large measure of independence and self-government, but they had lost this under the too powerful Valois dynasty. They therefore welcomed the occupation of the Burgundies, and had no objection to a further weakening of Mary’s inheritance. But they would not be annexed to France, and the aggressive measures of Louis XI. drove them into opposition to him. The Burgundian ministers, whom Charles had left in authority, were seized by the mob on the discovery that they were conducting separate negotiations with France, and in spite of the passionate entreaties of Mary, were put to death. The plan that commended itself to the people of Ghent was to marry Mary to Adolf of Gelderland, the youthful monster who had been imprisoned and disinherited for brutal ill-treatment of his father. Adolf was released and sent to oppose the French before Tournay; where, to Mary’s great relief, he was killed in an unsuccessful attempt to relieve the town. This event, and the necessity of gaining support against the encroachments of France, forced the Gantois to revive the scheme of marrying Mary to |Maximilian marries Mary of Burgundy.| Maximilian of Hapsburg, the son of the emperor Frederick III. Mary herself, naturally frightened and aggrieved by the conduct of Louis since her father’s death, was not averse to the proposal, and the marriage was solemnised in August 1477. Louis was extremely chagrined by the news of an event, which not only frustrated his plans for a further partition of the Burgundian inheritance, but also compelled him to fight for the provinces he had already seized. Maximilian undertook the championship of his wife’s claims with his usual impetuosity. But he was hampered by his want of money—Commines calls his father ‘the most perfectly niggardly man of his time’—and by the obstruction of the Flemish citizens, who had taken advantage of the weak government since Charles the Bold’s death to recover much of their old independence. In 1482 Mary died, leaving two infant children, Philip and Margaret. This was a great blow to Maximilian, who had no longer any formal authority in the Netherlands, except so far as the estates of the various provinces recognised him as his son’s guardian. In these circumstances he was not unwilling to come to terms with Louis, and the treaty of Arras |Treaty of Arras, 1482.| gave to the king most of the territories he had contended for. The dauphin, Charles, was to be betrothed to Margaret, the daughter of Maximilian and Mary, and she was to be brought up in France as its future queen. Artois and Franche Comté were to be regarded as her dowry. The treaty made no mention of the Somme towns or of the duchy of Burgundy, and thus tacitly conceded Louis’s contention that his legal rights to these provinces were indisputable. It was fortunate for Louis that Edward IV., who had good reason to regard this treaty as both injurious and insulting, was not able to give practical expression to his displeasure. He died in 1483, and the disturbances which followed kept England from any idea of intervention on the Continent. But though the treaty of Arras appears, at first sight, to be a considerable triumph for the policy of Louis, the permanent gain to the French monarchy was not very great. Artois and Franche-Comté were lost again before very long; and the annexation of the Netherlands to the Hapsburg possessions, together with the subsequent further aggrandisement of that house, involved France in even greater dangers than those which had been threatened by the Valois dukes of Burgundy. But the subsequent struggle which thus arose differed from its predecessor in one very important respect. The Hapsburgs of Spain and Austria were more powerful sovereigns than Philip the Good or Charles the Bold, but they were complete foreigners to France, and had none of that traditional and family alliance with French nobles and French parties which gave to the Valois-Burgundian dynasty such a unique position. The contest with the Hapsburgs served to strengthen, not to destroy, the national unity of France.

The relations with Burgundy constitute by far the most important episode of the reign of Louis XI.; and he could |Successes of Louis XI.| boast of no more conspicuous achievement than the defeat of Charles the Bold, and the annexation of a considerable share of his dominions. But he gained other successes and acquired other lands. By intervening to support John II. of Aragon against the rebellious Catalans (1462), he obtained the cession of Roussillon and Cerdagne, and for a time extended the French frontier to the Pyrenees. And the Angevin inheritance was almost as great a windfall to the monarchy as the duchy of Burgundy. Réné le Bon had hastily abandoned the cause of Charles the Bold, after the latter’s defeats in 1476; and Louis XI. succeeded in extorting from his uncle an arrangement by which the latter’s territories were to pass, in the first place, to his nephew, Charles of Maine, and on the extinction of his line to the crown. The successive deaths of Réné in 1480 and of Charles of Maine in 1481, gave to Louis the possession of Anjou and Maine, with the duchy of Bar and the imperial fief of Provence. Equally important, from the point of view of the French monarchy, were the signal humiliations inflicted by Louis upon the great feudatories who had ventured, in the early years of his reign, to identify themselves with the cause of opposition to the monarchy. The duke of Alençon was kept a prisoner till his death in 1476. The count of Armagnac, the restless leader of the southern nobles, was attacked in his chief town of Lectoure and perished in the sack which followed its capture. His cousin, the duke of Nemours, who had been a favourite companion of Louis in his youth and had since been twice pardoned for ungrateful treachery, was executed in 1477 after having suffered the most horrible tortures. The fate of St. Pol has been already related. With regard to the nobles who were more closely related to the royal family, Louis took precautions to ensure their loyalty or to disarm their opposition. The duke of Bourbon abstained from further rebellion after the War of the Public Weal. His brother and heir, Pierre de Beaujeu, was married to the king’s eldest daughter, Anne, with the proviso that if they left no male heirs the succession should pass to the crown. For Louis of Orleans, the heir-presumptive to the throne after the dauphin, a bride was found in another daughter, Jeanne, who was deformed in person and was regarded as unlikely to have issue.

The government of Louis XI., though in many ways advantageous to France, was too obviously selfish to be popular. His death in August, 1483, transferred the crown to his only son, Charles VIII., but as |Regency of Anne of Beaujeu.| he was too young to rule, the actual government was assumed by Anne of Beaujeu. She had much of her father’s ability and all his love of power, but her position was insecure and she was obliged to conciliate support by measures which Louis XI. would never have adopted. The States-General were convoked at Tours in January 1484, and for the first time the rural districts were represented in the third estate, which had hitherto included only delegates from the towns. Although the estates recognised the regent, their cahier of grievances showed an obvious hostility to the despotic rule of the late king. Among other things they demanded that they should meet regularly every second year. But the States-General, having lost all efficient control over taxation, had no power to extort concessions, and the crown reserved absolute discretion as to the redress of grievances. A more serious danger to Anne was a coalition of nobles, including the duke of Brittany and headed by Louis of Orleans, who deemed it a wrong that he was excluded from the regency. There was some risk that the confederates might receive support from Richard III. of England, who had good reason to divert the attention of his subjects to a foreign war, and from Réné of Lorraine, who advanced a well-founded claim to his grandfather’s dominions of Bar and Provence. Anne of Beaujeu showed notable ability in meeting her opponents. To prevent English intervention, Henry of Richmond, whose mother was the last of the Beauforts, was encouraged to prosecute the enterprise which placed the house of Tudor on the throne (1485). The duke of Lorraine was partially satisfied by the cession of Bar, and the prospect of gaining Provence was dangled before his eyes in an artfully prolonged law-suit, which was not decided against him until all danger was over. Meanwhile, the princes, deprived of external aid, proved powerless to resist the forces of the crown. The Bretons were defeated, and Louis of Orleans, carried a prisoner to Bourges, found it to his interest to reconcile himself with his cousin.

A few days after the defeat of the Bretons the death of duke Francis II. extinguished the male line of the Montforts, and left the one great province which had retained |Succession in Brittany.| its old independence in the hands of his daughter Anne (September 9, 1488). The disposal of the hand of so important an heiress was naturally a matter of great political interest, and Anne of Beaujeu, who wished to use the opportunity for the gain of the monarchy, was chagrined to learn in 1490 that the young duchess had been married by proxy to Maximilian of Austria, who had been a widower since the death of Mary of Burgundy. Declaring the marriage to be null without royal consent, she despatched an army into Brittany, and Anne of Brittany was compelled to give her hand to Charles VIII. A double injury was thus inflicted upon Maximilian. Not only was he deprived of a wife, but his daughter, who had been educated in France since 1482 as the future queen, was sent back to him. The archduke, however, was too distant and too busy elsewhere to be immediately formidable, and it was worth while to risk his displeasure in order to secure possession of Brittany. But the children of Charles VIII. and Anne did not survive their parents, and two subsequent marriages were necessary before the union of Brittany with France was complete.

The marriage of the king was the last achievement of Anne of Beaujeu, whose regency came to an end when her brother assumed the reins of government, while she herself |The question of Naples.| became duchess of Bourbon by the death of her brother-in-law. In 1493 a wholly new problem was presented to the French government by the arrival of Neapolitan exiles with an invitation to Charles VIII. to claim the crown of Naples on the same grounds as he already held Provence. The late regent and the more experienced councillors were resolute in opposing the scheme. But Charles himself and his younger associates were dazzled by the prospect of an Italian kingdom, and the proffered support of Ludovico Sforza seemed to give a reasonable prospect of success. Before Charles could venture to quit his kingdom it was necessary to secure it against the hostility of jealous neighbours. Henry VII. of England, who had come forward as the champion of Anne of Brittany, was bought off by the peace of Etaples which offered him a large money bribe (1492). The treaty of Barcelona restored Roussillon and Cerdagne to Ferdinand of Aragon (January 1493); while the enmity of Maximilian was appeased by the treaty of Senlis and the cession of Artois and Franche-Comté, which had been the stipulated dowry of Margaret (May 23, 1493). In September 1494, Charles set out on his journey towards the Alps. The resources of the revived French monarchy were to be employed in an enterprise of which no one could foresee the end, but which was destined to usher in a new epoch in the history of Europe.