Louis Xi 1423-1483

LOUIS XI. (1423-1483), king of France, the son of Charles VII. and his queen, Marie of Anjou, was born on July 3, at Bourges, where his father, then nicknamed the "King of Bourges," had taken refuge from the English. At the birth of Louis XI. part of France was in English hands; when he was five years old, Joan of Arc appeared; he was just six when his father was crowned at Reims. But his boyhood was spent apart from these stirring events, in the castle of Loches, where he had as tutors Jean Majoris and Bernard of Armagnac. In June 1436, when scarcely thirteen, he was married to Margaret (c. 1425 '445), daughter of James I. of Scotland. Three years after this unhappy marriage Louis entered upon his stormy political career. Sent by his father in 1439 to direct the defence of Languedoc against the English, and to put down the brigandage in Poitou, he was induced by the rebellious nobles to place himself at the head of the Praguerie (q.v.). Charles VII. pardoned him this rebellion, and in 1440 he was fighting the English, and in aided his father to suppress the revolt of the count of Armagnac. In 1444 he led an army of from 15,000 to 20,000 mercenaries and brigands,—the product of the Hundred Years' War,—against the Swiss of the canton of Basle. After an ineffective siege, he made peace with the Swiss confederation, and led his robber soldiers into Alsace to ravage the country of the Habsburgs, who refused him the promised winter quarters. Meanwhile his father, making a parallel campaign in Lorraine, had assembled his first brilliant court at Nancy, and when Louis returned he found the king completely under the spell of Agnes Sorel. The death in 1445 of his wife Margaret, who was a great favourite of Charles VII., made the rupture complete. From that year until the death of the king, father and son were enemies. Louis prepared a plot to seize the king and his minister Pierre de Breze. The plot was revealed to Charles, who banished his son to Dauphine He never saw his father again.

Louis dismissed the governor ; he determined the boundaries between his state and the territories of the duke of Savoy and of the papacy; and he enforced his authority over perhaps the most unruly nobility in western Europe, both lay and ecclesiastical.

He made a secret treaty with the duke of Savoy which was to give him right of way to Genoa, and made arrangements for a partition of the duchy of Milan. The alliance with Savoy was sealed by the marriage of Louis with Charlotte, daughter of Duke Lodovico, in 1452, in spite of the formal prohibition of Charles VII. The king marched south, but withdrew again leaving his son unsubdued. Four years later, as Charles came to the Bourbonnais, Louis, fearing for his life, fled to Flanders to the court of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, leaving Dauphine to be definitely annexed to the crown of France. The policy of the dauphin was reversed, his ten years' work was undone. Meanwhile he was installed in the castle of Genappe, in Brabant, where he waited impatiently for five years for the death of his father, keeping him self posted by spies on every stage of the king's illness, and thus laying himself open to the unsubstantiated accusation, believed by Charles himself, that he had hastened the end by poison.

On Aug. 15, 1461, Louis was anointed and crowned at Reims. His first act was to strike at the faithful ministers of Charles VII. Pierre de Breze and Antoine de Chabannes were captured and imprisoned. But the more serviceable of the officers of Charles VII. were for the most part soon reinstated; Louis' advisers were mostly men of the middle class. He drew men of talent from England, Scotland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Among the most prominent of these men in addition to Breze, Chevalier and Chabannes, were Tristan Lermite, Jean de Daillon, Olivier le Dain (the barber), and after 1472, Philippe de Commines, drawn from the service of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who became his most intimate adviser and his biographer. Surrounded by men like these Louis fought the last great battle of French royalty with feudalism.