Charles the Bold

Charles the Bold
Rogier van der Weyden painted Charles the Bold as a young man in about 1460, wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece
Duke of Burgundy
Reign	15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477
Predecessor	Philip the Good
Successor	Mary
Born	(1433-11-10)10 November 1433 Dijon, Burgundy
Died	5 January 1477(1477-01-05) (aged 43) Nancy, Lorraine
Spouse	Catherine of France Isabella of Bourbon Margaret of York
Issue	Mary, Duchess of Burgundy
House	Valois-Burgundy
Father	Philip the Good
Mother	Isabella of Portugal

Double Briquet, struck under Charles the Bold in Bruges, 1475

Charles the Bold (French: Charles le Téméraire, Dutch: Karel de Stoute, 10 November 1433 – 5 January 1477), baptised Charles Martin, was Duke of Burgundy from 1467 to 1477. He was the last Valois Duke of Burgundy.

His early death at Nancy, at the hands of the Swiss fighting for René II, Duke of Lorraine, was of great consequence in European history: The Burgundian domains, long wedged between the growing powers France and the Habsburgs, were divided, but as neither side was satisfied with the results, the disintegration of the Burgundian state, together with the question of the boundary between the French and German spheres of political influence, was a factor in most major wars in Western Europe for the following two centuries and beyond.

Biography

Early life

Charles the Bold was born in Dijon, the son of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal. In his father's lifetime (1433–1467) he bore the title of Count of Charolais; afterwards, he assumed all of his father's titles, including that of "Grand Duke of the West". He was also made a Knight of the Golden Fleece just twenty days after his birth, being invested by Charles I, Count of Nevers and the seigneur de Croÿ.

He was brought up under the direction of Jean d'Auxy,^[1] and early showed great application to study and also to warlike exercises. His father's court was the most extravagant in Europe at the time, and a centre for arts and commerce. While he was growing up, Charles witnessed his father's efforts to unite his increasing dominions in a single state, and his own later efforts centered on continuing and securing his father's successes.

In 1440, at the age of seven, Charles was married to Catherine, daughter of Charles VII, the King of France, and sister of the Dauphin (afterwards Louis XI). She was five years older than her husband, and she died in 1446 at the age of 18. They had no children.

Charles as a boy stands next to his father, Philip the Good. Rogier van der Weyden's frontispiece to the Chroniques de Hainaut, c. 1447–8 (Royal Library of Belgium)

In 1454, at the age of 21, having been a widower for eight years (from the age of 13 to 21), Charles married a second time. He wanted to marry a daughter of his distant cousin, the Duke of York (sister of Kings Edward IV and Richard III of England), but under the Treaty of Arras (1435), he was required to marry only a French princess. His father chose Isabella of Bourbon, who was three years younger than him, for him: she was the daughter of Philip the Good's sister, and a very distant cousin of Charles VII of France. Isabella died in 1465. Their daughter, Mary, was Charles' only surviving child, Mary became heiress to all Burgundian domains prior to marrying Maximillian of Bavaria.

Charles was on familiar terms with his brother-in-law, the Dauphin, when the latter was a refugee at the Court of Burgundy from 1456 until Louis succeeded his father as King of France in 1461. But Louis began to pursue some of the same policies as his father; Charles viewed with chagrin Louis's later repurchase of the towns on the Somme, which Louis's father had ceded in 1435 to Charles's father in the Treaty of Arras. When his own father's failing health enabled him to take into his hands the reins of government (which Philip relinquished to him completely by an act of 12 April 1465), he entered upon his lifelong struggle against Louis XI, and became one of the principal leaders of the League of the Public Weal.

For his third wife, Charles was offered the hand of Louis XI's daughter, Anne; however, the wife he ultimately chose was Margaret of York (who was his second cousin, they both being descended from John of Gaunt). With his father gone, and being no longer bound by the Treaty of Arras, Charles decided to ally himself with Burgundy's old ally England. Louis did his best to prevent or delay the marriage (even sending French ships to waylay Margaret as she sailed to Sluys), but in the summer of 1468 it was celebrated sumptuously at Bruges, and Charles was made a Knight of the Garter. The couple had no children, but Margaret devoted herself to her stepdaughter Mary; and after Mary's death many years later, she kept Mary's two infant children as long as she was allowed. Margaret survived her husband, and was the only one of his wives to be Duchess of Burgundy, the first two wives having died before his accession and thus being known as Countesses of Charolais.

Coat of arms of Charles the Bold

Early battles

On 12 April 1465, Philip relinquished government to Charles, who spent the next summer prosecuting the War of the Public Weal against Louis XI. Charles was left master of the field at the Battle of Montlhéry (13 July 1465),^[2] but this neither prevented the King from re-entering Paris nor assured Charles a decisive victory. He succeeded, however, in forcing upon Louis the Treaty of Conflans (4 October 1465), by which the King restored to him the towns on the Somme, the counties of Boulogne and Guînes, and various other small territories. During the negotiations for the Treaty, his wife Isabella died suddenly at Les Quesnoy on 25 September, making a political marriage suddenly possible. As part of the treaty Louis promised him the hand of his infant daughter Anne, with Champagne and Ponthieu as dowry, but no marriage took place.

In the meanwhile, Charles obtained the surrender of Ponthieu. The Revolt of Liège against his father and his brother in law, Louis of Bourbon, the Prince-Bishop of Liège, and a desire to punish the town of Dinant, intervened to divert his attention from the affairs of France. During the previous summer's wars, Dinant had celebrated a false rumour that Charles had been defeated at Montlhéry by burning him in effigy, and chanting that he was the bastard of Duchess Isabel and John of Heinsburg, the previous Bishop of Liege (d.1455). On 25 August 1466, Charles marched into Dinant, determined to avenge this slur on the honour of his mother, and sacked the city, killing every man, woman and child within; perhaps not surprisingly, he also successfully negotiated at the same time with the Bishopric of Liège. After the death of his father, Philip the Good (15 June 1467), the Bishopric of Liège renewed hostilities, but Charles defeated them at the Battle of Brustem, and made a victorious entry into Liège, whose walls he dismantled and deprived the city of some of its privileges.

Treaty of Péronne

Territories of the house of Valois-Burgundy during the reign of Charles the Bold.

Engraving of Charles the Bold

Alarmed by these early successes of the new Duke of Burgundy, and anxious to settle various questions relating to the execution of the treaty of Conflans, Louis requested a meeting with Charles and daringly placed himself in his hands at Péronne. In the course of the negotiations the Duke was informed of a fresh revolt of the Bishopric of Liège secretly fomented by Louis. After deliberating for four days how to deal with his adversary, who had thus maladroitly placed himself at his mercy, Charles decided to respect the parole he had given and to negotiate with Louis (October 1468), at the same time forcing him to assist in quelling the revolt. The town of Liège was carried by assault and the inhabitants were massacred, Louis not intervening on behalf of his former allies.

At the expiry of the one year's truce which followed the Treaty of Péronne, the King accused Charles of treason, cited him to appear before the parlement, and seized some of the towns on the Somme (1471). The Duke retaliated by invading France with a large army, taking possession of Nesle and massacring its inhabitants. He failed, however, in an attack on Beauvais, and had to content himself with ravaging the country as far as Rouen, eventually retiring without having attained any useful result.

Domestic policies

Other matters, moreover, engaged his attention. Relinquishing, if not the stately magnificence, at least some of the extravagance which had characterized the court of Burgundy under his father, he had bent all his efforts towards the development of his military and political power. Since the beginning of his reign he had employed himself in reorganizing his army and the administration of his territories. While retaining the principles of feudal recruiting, he had endeavoured to establish a system of rigid discipline among his troops, which he had strengthened by taking into his pay foreign mercenaries, particularly Englishmen and Italians, and by developing his artillery.

Building a kingdom

Furthermore, he lost no opportunity to extend his power. In 1469, Archduke Sigismund of Austria sold him the County of Ferrette, the Landgraviate of Alsace, and some other towns, reserving to himself the right to repurchase.

In 1472–1473, Charles bought the reversion of the Duchy of Guelders (i.e. the right to succeed to it) from its duke, Arnold, whom he had supported against the rebellion of his son. Not content with being "the Grand Duke of the West," he conceived the project of forming a kingdom of Burgundy or Arles with himself as independent sovereign, and even persuaded Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III to assent to crown him king at Trier. The ceremony, however, did not take place owing to the Emperor's precipitate flight by night (September 1473), occasioned by his displeasure at the Duke's attitude. At the close of 1473, his duchy of Burgundy was anchored in France and extended to the edges of the Netherlands. Charles the Bold was now one of the wealthiest and most powerful nobles in Europe. His fortunes and landholdings rivaled those of many of the royal families.^[3]

Downfall

Charles the Bold by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1618).

Charles' flight after the battle of Grandson, by Eugène Burnand (1894).

The corpse of Charles the Bold discovered after the Battle of Nancy, by Auguste Feyen-Perrin (1862).

In the following year Charles involved himself in a series of difficulties and struggles which ultimately brought about his downfall. He successively embroiled himself, first with the Archduke Sigismund of Austria, to whom he refused to restore his possessions in Alsace for the stipulated sum; then with the Swiss, who supported free towns of Upper Rhine in their revolt against tyranny by ducal governor Peter von Hagenbach (who was condemned by a special international tribunal and executed on 9 May 1474); and finally, with René II, Duke of Lorraine, with whom he disputed succession in Lorraine, the possession of which had united two principal portions of Charles's territories—the County of Flanders, the Low Countries, the Duchy of Burgundy and the County of Burgundy. All these enemies, incited and supported as they were by Louis, readily joined forces against their common adversary Charles.

Charles suffered a first rebuff in endeavouring to protect his kinsman, Ruprecht of the Palatinate, Archbishop of Cologne, against his rebel subjects. He spent ten months (July 1474 – June 1475) besieging the little town of Neuss on the Rhine (the Siege of Neuss), but was compelled by the approach of a powerful imperial army to raise the siege. Moreover, the expedition he had persuaded his brother-in-law, the King of England, to undertake against Louis was stopped by the Treaty of Picquigny (29 August 1475). He was more successful in Lorraine, where he seized Nancy (30 November 1475).

From Nancy he marched against the Swiss, hanging or drowning, in spite of their capitulation, the garrison of Grandson, a possession of the Savoyard Jacques de Romont, a close ally of Charles, which the Confederates had invested shortly before. Some days later, on 2 March 1476, he was attacked before the village of Concise by the confederate army in the Battle of Grandson and suffered a shameful defeat, being compelled to flee with a handful of attendants, and leaving his artillery and an immense booty (including his silver bath) in the hands of the allies.

He succeeded in raising a fresh army of 30,000 men, with which he attacked Morat, but he was again defeated by the Swiss army, assisted by the cavalry of the Duke of Lorraine (22 June 1476). On this occasion, and unlike the debacle at Grandson, little booty was lost, but Charles certainly lost about one third of his entire army, the unfortunate losers being pushed into the nearby lake where they were drowned or shot at while trying to swim to safety on the opposite shore. On 6 October Charles lost Nancy, which René re-entered.

Death at Nancy

Making a last effort, Charles formed a new army and arrived in the dead of winter before the walls of Nancy. Having lost many of his troops through the severe cold, it was with only a few thousand men that he met the joint forces of the Lorrainers and the Swiss, who had come to the relief of the town, at the Battle of Nancy (5 January 1477). He himself perished in the fight, his naked and disfigured body being discovered some days afterward frozen into the nearby river. Charles' head had been cleft in two by a halberd, lances were lodged in his stomach and loins, and his face had been so badly mutilated by wild animals that only his physician was able to identify him by his long fingernails and the old battle scars on his body.

Charles' battered body was initially buried in the ducal church in Nancy, by René II, Duke of Lorraine.^[4][5] Later in 1550, his great-grandson, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, ordered it to be moved to the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, next to that of his daughter Mary.^[6] In 1562, Emperor Charles V's son and heir, King Philip II of Spain, erected a mausoleum in early renaissance style over his tomb, still extant.^[7] Excavations in 1979 positively identified the remains of Mary, in a lead coffin, but those of Charles were never found.^[8]

The wives of Charles the Bold.

Marriage and family

Charles married three times:

1. On 19 May 1440, he married Catherine of France (1428–1446), daughter of Charles VII of France and Marie of Anjou.^[9] At the time of the marriage, she was 12 and he 6. She died at 18.

2. On 30 October 1454, Isabelle of Bourbon (1437–1465), daughter of Charles I of Bourbon.^[9] He would have preferred to marry Anne of York (the daughter of Richard, Duke of York), but his father insisted that he fulfill the conditions of the Treaty of Arras, which committed him to marry a French princess. The marriage was a happy one and produced his only offspring, Mary of Burgundy 13 February 1457.^[9]

3. On 3 July 1468, Charles married Anne's sister, Margaret of York (1446–1503):^[9] her siblings also included Edward IV of England, George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard III of England. The marriage was solemnized at Damme, near Bruges, by the bishop of Salisbury.

The Burgundian possessions passed into the Habsburg empire on the marriage of his one child and heiress Mary to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.

Byname

Burgundian chroniclers described the personality of the duke as austere, virtuous but without pity, pious and chaste, and with an exacerbated sense of honour. His contemporaries named him le Hardi or der Kühne ("the Bold") or le Guerrier ("the Warrior") or le Terrible ("the Terrible"),^[10] among others, and the epithet that would become his byname in history, le Téméraire ("the Reckless"), is already found in Thomas Basin, bishop of Lisieux, who wrote around 1484. These bynames, however, in the 15th century were used as qualifications of his character, but not yet in any systematic fashion, the duke being simply known as Charles de Bourgogne.^[11] The process of the epithet le Téméraire acquiring the nature of a byname was gradual. In the 17th century, the Grand Dictionnaire Historique of Louis Moreri mentions Charles de Bourgogne, surnommé le Guerrier, le Hardi ou le Téméraire. In the 18th century, Dom Plancher still mentions him as Charles le Hardi. In the 19th century, the byname of le Téméraire became standard in France and Belgium.

Legacy

Map of France in 1477; the Burgundian territories are shown in orange

Charles left his unmarried nineteen-year-old daughter, Mary, as his heir; clearly her marriage would have enormous implications for the political balance of Europe. Both Louis and the Emperor had unmarried eldest sons; Charles had made some movements towards arranging a marriage between Mary and the Emperor's son, Maximilian, before his own death. Louis unwisely concentrated on seizing militarily the border territories, in particular the Duchy of Burgundy (a French fief). This naturally made negotiations for a marriage difficult. He later admitted to his councillor Philippe de Commynes that this was his greatest mistake. In the meantime the Habsburg Emperor moved faster and more purposefully and secured the match for his son Maximilian, with the aid of Mary's stepmother, Margaret.

Due to this marriage, much of the Burgundian territories passed to the Holy Roman Empire. Throughout the early modern Wars of Religion and down to 1945, the border between the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdom of France, and later between France and Germany (specifically, concerning Alsace, Lorraine and Flanders), would be a matter of dispute.

In literature

He is a main character in Sir Walter Scott's 1823 novel Quentin Durward.^[12] He is portrayed as intelligent, though brash. The timeline was manipulated by the author for dramatic purposes.^[13][14]

Ancestors

Duchy of Burgundy- House of Valois, Burgundian Branch
John the Good
Children Charles V of France Louis I of Anjou John, Duke of Berry Philip the Bold
Philip the Bold
Children John the Fearless Margaret of Burgundy, Duchess of Bavaria Catherine of Burgundy Anthony, Duke of Brabant Mary, Duchess of Savoy Philip, Count of Nevers
John the Fearless
Children Mary of Burgundy, Duchess of Cleves Margaret, Countess of Richemont Philip the Good Anne of Burgundy Agnes of Burgundy
Philip the Good
Children Charles the Bold Anthony the Bastard
Charles the Bold
Children Mary of Burgundy
Mary of Burgundy

Titles

• 1433 – 5 January 1477: Count of Charolais as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Duke of Burgundy as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Duke of Brabant as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Duke of Limburg as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Duke of Lothier as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Duke of Luxemburg as Charles II
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Margrave of Namur as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Count Palatine of Burgundy as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Count of Artois as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Count of Flanders as Charles II
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Count of Hainault as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Count of Holland as Charles I
• 15 June 1467 – 5 January 1477: Count of Zeeland as Charles I
• 23 February 1473 – 5 January 1477: Duke of Guelders as Charles I
• 23 February 1473 – 5 January 1477: Count of Zutphen as Charles I

See also

• Burgundian Netherlands
• Burgundian Wars
• Duchy of Burgundy
• Dukes of Burgundy family tree
• Jacques of Savoy, Count of Romont

References

Sources

Further reading

• Vaughan, Richard (1973), Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy, London: Longman Group, ISBN 0-582-50251-9 .

External links

• Media related to Charles the Bold at Wikimedia Commons

Valois Burgundy Dukes Family tree Philip the Bold John the Fearless Philip the Good Charles the Bold Mary the Rich Events Battle of Roosebeke, 1382 Crusade of Nicopolis, 1396 Battle of Othée, 1408 Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War, 1407-35 Assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orléans, 1407 Cabochien Revolt, 1413 Assassination of John the Fearless, 1419 Treaty of Troyes, 1420 Congress of Arras, 1435 Hook and Cod wars, 1417-90 Battle of Brouwershaven, 1426 Siege of Deventer, 1456 Revolt of Ghent, 1449–53 Siege of Oudenaarde 1452 Battle of Bazel, 1452 Battle of Gavere, 1453 Feast of the Pheasant, 1454 War of the Common Weal, 1465 Battle of Montlhéry, 1465 Treaty of Conflans, 1465 Wars of Liège, 1465-68 Battle of Montenaken, 1465 Battle of Brustem, 1467 Treaty of Péronne, 1468 First Utrecht Civil War, 1470-74 Burgundian Wars, 1474–77 Battle of Héricourt, 1474 Siege of Neuss, 1474-75 Battle on the Planta, 1475 Battle of Grandson, 1476 Battle of Morat, 1476 Battle of Nancy, 1477 War of the Burgundian Succession, 1477-82 Battle of Guinegate, 1479 Treaty of Arras, 1482 Second Utrecht Civil War, 1481-83 Battle of Westbroek, 1481 Siege of Utrecht, 1483 Treaty of Senlis, 1493 Domains Margraviate of Antwerp County of Artois Duchy of Bavaria-Straubing Duchy of Brabant Duchy of Burgundy County of Burgundy County of Charolais County of Eu County of Flanders Frisian freedom Duchy of Guelders County of Hainaut County of Holland Bishopric of Liège Duchy of Limburg Duchy of Lothier Duchy of Luxembourg County of Namur County of Nevers Duchy of Rethel Bishopric of Utrecht County of Zeeland County of Zutphen Institutions Cross of Burgundy Burgundian School Great Privilege Estates-General Order of the Golden Fleece

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