Louis XI

Louis XI (born July 3, 1423, Bourges, Fr.—died Aug. 30, 1483, Plessis-les-Tours) was the king of France (1461–83) of the House of Valois who continued the work of his father, Charles VII, in strengthening and unifying France after the Hundred Years’ War. He reimposed suzerainty over Boulonnais, Picardy, and Burgundy, took possession of France-Comté and Artois (1482), annexed Anjou (1471), and inherited Maine and Provence (1481).

Early life and exile.

Louis was the son of Charles VII of France by his consort Mary of Anjou. When Louis was born, the English were ruling a large part of France, and he spent most of his childhood at the Loches in Touraine. Ugly and fat, Louis grew up in austere seclusion to become secretive, ruthless, and superstitious; yet, he was also devout, intelligent, and well informed, a cunning diplomat and a bold warrior who was able to command loyalty. Known as the “universal spider” because of his incessant machinations and intrigue, he could still claim to personify the French national consciousness; as he was later to say to his rebellious vassals, “I am France.”

Louis was married to Margaret, daughter of James I of Scotland, in 1436—an unhappy union formed solely for political reasons. In 1439 the King sent him to superintend the defense of Languedoc against the English and then to act as royal lieutenant in Poitou. Louis, however, was impatient to reign and was induced by malcontent princes to put himself at their head in 1440 during the revolt known as the Praguerie, named after a contemporary disturbance in Bohemia. Charles VII pardoned his rebellion and installed him as ruler of the Dauphiné.

Louis took part in his father’s campaigns of 1440–43 against the English, and in 1443 he forced the English to raise their siege of Dieppe. When the Anglo-French truce of 1444 left numbers of mercenary troops unemployed, he led a large body of them to attack Basel, in ostensible support of the German king Frederick V (later Holy Roman emperor as Frederick III) in his quarrel with the Swiss confederacy. Failing to take Basel, Louis attacked the Habsburg possessions in Alsace since Frederick would not grant him the promised winter quarters.

Meanwhile, Charles VII had invaded Lorraine and was holding court at Nancy. When Louis rejoined him there, Charles was completely under the influence of Agnès Sorel and Pierre de Brézé. Father and son became wholly estranged after the death (1445) of the dauphine Margaret, to whom the father had been attached. Detected in a plot against Brézé, Louis was exiled to Dauphiné. He was never to see his father again.

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In Dauphiné, Louis served his apprenticeship as a ruler. He set up a central chancellery, reconstituted the local administration, founded the University of Valence, instituted a parlement, reduced the nobles to obedience, and confirmed the privileges of the towns. He also started to exploit the country’s mines and forests and to promote its trade. Exercising full sovereignty, he pursued a foreign policy sometimes at variance with his father’s. After concluding a secret alliance with Savoy for a partition of the Duchy of Milan, Louis, recently widowed, married Charlotte, daughter of Duke Louis of Savoy, despite Charles VII’s prohibition (1451). Subsequently, however, Louis fell out with Savoy, and in 1456, when Charles approached Louis’s frontiers with an army and summoned him to his presence, he fled to the Netherlands to the court of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy.

King of France.

Installed as Philip’s guest, Louis could acquaint himself thoroughly with the working of the great Burgundian state, the ruin of which he was later to seek. (Charles VII remarked that Philip was feeding the fox that would eat his hens.) At the same time, Louis kept himself posted by spies with every detail of his father’s illness, thus laying himself open to the unsubstantiated accusation that he had hastened his death by poison. At last, after five years of impatient exile, Louis became king of France when Charles died in 1461.

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His first act was to strike at Charles VII’s ministers. Pierre de Brézé and Antoine de Chabannes were imprisoned, but they and some of their more serviceable colleagues were subsequently reinstated. Relying largely on men drawn from the lower nobility or from the middle class, Louis formed a circle of loyal advisers who helped him to impose his authority, to enlarge the royal domain, and to develop the wealth of the kingdom.

Louis XI’s major preoccupation was with the princes and great vassals of the kingdom, who were ready to form alliances with one another or with England against him. Former officers of Charles VII stirred up hostility against the King’s new men; Jean II, duc de Bourbon, and Francis II of Brittany emerged as the leaders of the malcontent nobility; Philip the Good’s son and future successor, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, supported the King’s enemies; and the King’s own brother, Charles de France, at first duc de Berry, became a tool of the rebels.

In 1465 the malcontent princes formed the League of the Public Weal to make war against Louis. All France seemed on the verge of anarchy, but the lesser gentry refused to rise against the King and the bourgeoisie rallied to him. After some fighting, the league was brought to an end by treaties with the Burgundians and with Brittany, but Louis had to yield much: the Somme towns were given back to the Burgundians, and Normandy was granted, in exchange for Berry, to Charles de France, so that all northern France, from Brittany to Burgundian Artois, was linked in the hands of the former rebels. In 1466, however, the King reoccupied Normandy.

Charles the Bold, having become duke of Burgundy on Philip the Good’s death (1467), allied himself with Francis of Brittany and with Edward IV of England, but in 1468 Louis invaded Brittany and detached Francis from the alliance. He then went to his disastrous interview with Charles the Bold at Péronne (October 1468). During the negotiations Charles learned of an insurrection in Liège, fomented by the French king’s agents. Furious, he put Louis under house arrest, forced him to make far-reaching concessions, and finally took him to Liège to witness the suppression of the revolt.

After his humiliation at Péronne, Louis attempted to nullify the Anglo-Burgundian alliance by assisting the ousted House of Lancaster against Edward IV, but the final defeat of the Lancastrians (May 1471) put an end to his hope. Having already attacked Burgundy, Louis found himself facing a new host of enemies, including not only Charles the Bold, Edward IV, and Francis of Brittany but also, in the southwest, Charles de France, to whom Louis had granted the Duchy of Guyenne in 1469, Jean V d’Armagnac, and John II of Aragon, who hoped to recover Roussillon. But, after Charles de France died in 1472, both Charles the Bold and Francis of Brittany signed truces; the royal army overran Armagnac, and France and Aragon agreed to suspend hostilities in Roussillon. Charles the Bold then began scheming for a partition of France between Burgundy, England, and other states, but Louis soon concluded truces with or bought off Charles’s allies.

After 1475 it remained for Louis to destroy the power of Burgundy. He subsidized the Swiss confederates and René II of Lorraine in their war against Charles the Bold, and Charles was defeated and killed in battle at Nancy on Jan. 5, 1477. Louis thereupon proceeded to dismember the Burgundian state, eager to reunite its French fiefs to the royal domain and to take as much else as he could. Charles’s daughter Mary, however, married the Austrian archduke Maximilian, who defended her inheritance against Louis. Finally, by the Treaty of Arras (1482), Louis retained full sovereignty over the Duchy of Burgundy, Picardy, and Boulonnais and possession of Franche-Comté and Artois as the dowry of Margaret of Austria, daughter of Mary and Maximilian, fiancée of his infant son and heir, the future Charles VIII.

Louis regarded war as a precarious enterprise and made it only with reluctance, though he maintained the standing army that Charles VII had instituted. Diplomacy and inheritance were the means that he preferred for extending the royal domain. Even so, Louis pursued an active policy in Spain and in Italy. After Charles the Bold’s death there was no one to prevent Louis from exercising a virtual protectorate over Savoy, where his sister Yolande was regent, and he made himself the arbiter of the affairs of northern Italy.