The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France
1483–1610
R. J. KNECHT

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Published by Fontana Press 1996

Copyright © R. J. Knecht 1996

R. J. Knecht asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Dedication

In memory of Germaine Ganier

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

General Editor’s Introduction

A Note on Coinage and Measures

Map of France (1494)

Map of France (1585–98)

PREFACE

1 France in 1500

2 The minority of Charles VIII and the Breton marriage (1483–94)

3 Charles VIII and the Italian Wars (1494–8)

4 Louis XII, ‘Father of the people’ (1498–1515)

5 The church in crisis

6 Francis I: The first decade (1515–25)

7 The New Learning and heresy (1483–1525)

8 Defeat, captivity and restoration (1525–7)

9 War and peace (1527–38)

10 The court and patronage of Francis I

11 Francis I: The last decade (1537–47)

12 The absolutism of Francis I

13 Henry II, the victor of Metz (1547–52)

14 The arts and literature under Henry II

15 Henry II: The tragic peace (1553–9)

16 France overseas

17 The mid-century crisis

18 The failure of conciliation (1559–62)

19 The First Civil War (1562–3)

20 The fragile peace (1563–6)

21 The Second and Third Civil Wars (1566–70)

22 The St Bartholomew’s day massacres (1572)

23 Literary responses

24 Fraternal discord (1573–83)

25 Henry III and his court

26 The Catholic League (1584–92)

27 The triumph of Henry IV (1593–1610)

CONCLUSION

Bibliography and Rtiferences

Glossary

Genealogies

Index

About the Author

The Fontana History Series

About the Publisher

General Editor’s Introduction

If one stands by the west wall of the church at Penmarc’h, by the Atlantic coast in south-west Brittany, one sees how this building was intended to be on a grand scale. Founded in 1508, it was to be paid for by the shipbuilders and shipowners of the parish, a testimony to their wealth as well as to their faith. The heads of three of them are depicted on the wall. Penmarc’h was then one of the most important and flourishing ports of France, sending ships south to Portugal and north to Britain, trading in fish and wine. It was natural that carvings of ships, fish, seagulls and sailors should decorate the church walls. But the great tower which was to crown the west wall was never completed. No statues were erected. Penmarc’h’s prosperity rapidly disappeared as the discovery of Newfoundland brought activity to the Normandy coast and as larger ships, some as large as 300 tons, took over the trade. The flat-bottomed boats of Penmarc’h, which were beached on the sand and on the river-beds, could not compete. Penmarc’h fell into obscurity, its only fame being its legends. A sad song tells how at night its people used to set up decoy lights to lure ships on to the rocks. One night they wrecked a ship only to discover that it had on board their own children, who drowned before their eyes.

Penmarc’h tells us about France in the early modern period. We see how people in a distant part of the country successfully organized an inland as well as an external trade, supplying fish and seaweed as well as wine. We see how they could move rapidly from prosperity to poverty. Penmarc’h had its own town council to look after its affairs. In 1508 their ambition was to build a monumental church which would rival that of Quimper. They used to meet in the south porch and discuss all matters that concerned their locality, a practice that was encouraged by the senior clergy. The cult of saints was very specific. The church was dedicated to St Nonna, who had been archbishop of Armagh in the sixth century, and nearby, within Penmarc’h, the sixteenth-century chapel of Kerity was dedicated to the obscure St Thumette, who was a follower of St Ursuline and was beheaded. Penmarc’h was by no means isolated from the rest of France. In 1595, Fontenelle and his followers broke into the church by the north door and massacred some 3000 people who had taken refuge there. Fonetenelle was an adventurer, fighting against Henry IV. Thus Penmarc’h was acquainted with the Wars of Religion.

Sixteenth-century France has to be seen in the context of the world beyond its borders. But Michelet meant more than this when, lecturing at the collège de France in 1841, he said that at the beginning of the sixteenth century France discovered that she was essential to Europe. There could be no Europe without France. France was always young and modern, and by the middle of the century was the most populous country in Europe. Towards the end of the previous century observers had lamented the desolation of a deserted countryside; now everything changed. By the 1550s it was said in Languedoc that men were multiplying like mice in a barn. But this large population was encircled by foreign countries. The powerful Charles V, master of territories that surrounded France, sought to reduce her power and to seize Burgundy, the country of his ancestors. France could not accept these limitations imposed by the Habsburgs. For some eighteen years, from 1541 to 1559, France was at war with Charles V and his successor Philip II. National sentiment grew and by the time of Ronsard’s poetry, the evocation of the strength and virtues of France had become one of the great themes of its literature. This at a time when the French language was becoming the language of medicine, science and history.

This was the time, too, when the Venetian ambassadors reported that while France was not necessarily the richest or the most powerful of countries, it was the easiest to govern. The strength of France lay in its unity and the obedience of its inhabitants, who had given all power to the throne. Professor Knecht shows how such a judgement was far from being accurate. But the most famous work of the Savoyard bishop Claude de Seyssel was entitled La Monarchie de France. The power of kings did increase. The monarch was the agent who would preserve the harmony of the kingdom. A series of kings who ruled majestically and responsibly acquired a reserve and a stock of power that even the most foolish ruler could not exhaust. Yet central government retained its uncertainties, as when Henry II was killed while jousting, or Henry IV, in August 1589, found himself without subjects, without an administration, without money, obliged to undertake the conquest of his kingdom. Central government retained its limitations, since while the territorial unity of the country made progress, certain provinces retained their institutions along with their traditions.

The court was large and populous, even when it was itinerant. Sometimes as many as 16,000 required accommodation and the chateaux of Chambord, Fontainebleau and the Louvre were constructed. Francis I was the reflective patron of the arts; Henry II became the great bibliophile of his time; and Henry IV imposed a sense of order and design on the construction of Paris, replacing the restlessness of earlier design and ornament.

The Wars of Religion made for a dramatic revision of nationalism. France was torn apart, and even though the Protestants rallied to the royalism of Navarre and allied with their Catholic associates, the relations of church and state could never be the same again. Francis I protected the humanists – Calvin had dedicated the Latin edition of his Christian Institutes to him – but he could not tolerate those who attacked the mass.

Thus the history of Renaissance France is rich and varied. Henry IV is supposed to have said, once he had accepted the Catholic faith in 1593, ‘France and I both need time to draw breath.’ That he might well have said it is understandable. There are those students of French history who are loyal to certain individuals, such as Clovis, or St Louis or Joan of Arc. Others prefer the Age of Classicism or the Age of the Enlightenment. Still others believe that French history only began with the Revolution of 1789. But Renaissance France is perhaps the richest period in French history. We are fortunate that Professor Knecht, the biographer of Francis I and a great expert on these years, is our guide. In studying this history we are only following the precepts of Francis I himself, who in 1527 told Jacques Colin how he wished his subjects to read history books and learn from the past.

DOUGLAS JOHNSON, November 1995

A Note on Coinage and Measures

Two types of money existed side by side in sixteenth-century France: money of account and actual coin. Royal accounts were kept in the former; actual transactions carried out in the latter. The principal money of account was the livre tournois (sometimes called the franc) which was subdivided in sous (or sols) and deniers. One livre = 20 sous; 1 sou = 12 deniers. This was the French equivalent of the English system of pounds, shillings and pence. The livre tournois was worth about two English shillings.

Actual coin was either gold, silver or billon: e.g. the écu au soleil was gold, the teston silver and the douzain billon. From 1500 to 1546 gold coins constituted on average two-thirds of the total annual coinage of the royal mints; thereafter till the end of the century that average fell to 17 per cent. Rulers who did not have enough coin at their disposal were naturally tempted to devalue the money of account and also to debase the precious-metal content of the coinage itself. Francis I’s successors resorted with mounting frequency to devaluation. Thus the gold écu which was valued at 40 sous in 1516, was set at 46 sous in 1550, 50 sous in 1561 and 60 sous in 1575. Over the same period, the value of the teston rose from 10 sous to 14 sous. In addition to royal coins, provincial and foreign coins circulated in France.

France had no unified system of weights and measures in the sixteenth century. Each region had its own. In Paris the setier of grain = 156 litres. Twelve setiers = 1 muid.

Map of France (1494)

Map of France (1585–98)

Preface

The title of this book requires a gloss. ‘Rise’ may be construed as a move towards political order, economic prosperity and social contentment; ‘fall’ as a lapse into political confusion, economic depression and social unrest. France in the sixteenth century experienced both conditions. This book attempts to describe and, I hope, to explain this duality in the period often called ‘the Renaissance’. Fixing the chronological limits has not been easy, for history can never be strictly compartmentalized. The division traditionally drawn between the Middle Ages and modern times is nothing more than an academic convenience; historically it makes no sense. French institutions in the sixteenth century were rooted in the Middle Ages. The significance which historians have traditionally attached to the year 1494 as ending the Middle Ages has little validity. It was then that King Charles VIII invaded Italy, setting in train a series of French wars in the peninsula which lasted on and off until the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. I have chosen to begin my story with Charles VIII’s accession in 1483. Ideally, I should have traced the origins of the ‘rise’ back to the formative reign of Louis XI, often regarded as the founder of French national unity, but this would have lengthened the book too much. As for the ‘fall’, I might have ended with the assassination of the last Valois king in 1589. Henry IV’s reign that followed is often taken to mark the recovery of France, but there is a strong case for thinking that the real recovery did not start till 1651, after the Fronde.

In the early sixteenth century France seemed set to become the most powerful nation in Europe, yet by 1600 she had sunk to one of the lowest points in her history. Half a century of more or less continual civil conflict, allegedly over religion, had brought desolation and despair to her inhabitants. Her economy had been almost destroyed, her society was in disarray and her political system was on the brink of collapse. The very origins of a monarchy, which had once been revered as God’s lieutenancy on earth, were being questioned. Much of the interest that springs from studying sixteenth-century France resides in probing the causes of her precipitous decline. Was religion the only cause of dissension among her people, or were they responding to other factors? Why was a monarchy which had seemed so strong under Francis I and Henry II reduced to little more than an impotent figurehead? These are merely two questions among many that the reader might care to ponder. I hope to provide some answers, but the subject is vast and controversial.

The past cannot change, but history does. The last fifty years have seen considerable changes in historical thinking, particularly in France, where the Annales school has turned away from ‘the history of events’ (histoire évènementielle) to that of a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of the past. This has led to a greater preoccupation with socio-economic issues, mentalités and other aspects of human activity which historians traditionally had overlooked or not seen as their concern. Recently, however, there has been a reaction. A new school of historians, less doctrinaire than their elders, have returned to the ‘history of events’ with a sharpened awareness of its complexities. The massacre of St Bartholomew’s day, for example, is no longer seen simply as the slaughter of Protestants by Catholics. The sociology of denominational violence as well as its psychological context have come under close scrutiny.

This book along with its companions in the series adheres to a chronological, not a thematic, plan, for the reader needs to be made aware of the sequence of events. However, I have tried, wherever possible, to feed analysis into the narrative, taking into account modern research. For example, the nature and effectiveness of the French monarchy has become controversial. Was it ‘absolute’, as the kings often claimed, or was it subject to limitations? The crucial importance of finance at a time when the technology of war was making unprecedented demands on the traditional resources of the state is now recognized. The French Reformation is no longer seen simply as a German import; its indigenous roots have been brought to light. We also know far more about the problems posed for the crown by the upsurge of religious dissent and about the policies by which it hoped to solve them. Religion was once dismissed as a cause of the civil wars that bear its name. It was alleged that the nobility used religion as a cover for their internecine greed. Modern research has demonstrated that religion was indeed a major source of conflict, and also an important component of popular culture, which until recently was virtually a closed book. Those pages have now been opened, and historians are better able to probe the thoughts of ordinary French men and women during the Renaissance. The psychology of denominational conflict, as reflected in a vast pamphlet literature, has been exhaustively analysed. The Wars of Religion also provided a fertile soil for political thinkers. While some upheld the doctrine of absolutism, others championed resistance to a monarchy they viewed as ungodly and therefore tyrannical. Under the cumulative impact of persecution, Protestants, who had for long adhered to the Pauline doctrine of obedience to ‘the powers that be’, turned into revolutionaries willing to condone even tyrannicide.

During the past half-century French historians have been more interested in looking at French society and mentalités than at political events. Two great pioneering works by E. Le Roy Ladurie (Les Paysans de Languedoc) and Jean Jacquart (La Crise rurale en Ile-de-France, 1550–1670) have revolutionized knowledge of the countryside and its inhabitants who made up the bulk of the population. We know far more now about the economic difficulties they had to face and also about the impact on their lives of natural disasters and war. The towns too have received much attention lately. Their social structure has been examined as well as their administrative, economic and religious role. Demographic historians have considered the reasons for the growth of towns during the century. Notarial registers have yielded information about humble Frenchmen who, one might have assumed, had vanished without trace. Scholars now know that the Parisian League, which was once identified with the rabble, was far from proletarian. Another major source of interest has been the nobility. The old notion of a complete economic collapse of the class under the mounting pressure of inflation has been exploded, while the importance of clientage as a bond between great and lesser nobles has been stressed. So has the importance of provincial governors in either buttressing the crown’s authority or undermining it. The careers and fortunes of several individual noblemen have recently been the subject of detailed studies. Another welcome development of recent years has been the use which art historians have made of history. No longer are they content to judge style without reference to the historical context. Patronage and iconography are now seen as crucially important to the study of Renaissance art. A royal château was designed for use, not merely as decoration.

In the course of writing this history I have incurred debts to many scholars. Among them are Bernard Barbiche, Joseph Bergin, Richard Bonney, Monique Chatenet, Denis Crouzet, Robert Descimon, Mark Greengrass, Philippe Hamon, Jean Jacquart, Anne-Marie Lecoq, Nicole Lemaitre, David Nicholls, David Parker, David Parrott, David Potter, and Penny Roberts. John Bourne and W. Scott Lucas have guided me through the mysterious world of the computer. My copy-editor, Betty Palmer, has been a model of efficiency and tact. They all have my warmest thanks, as does my old friend and colleague Douglas Johnson, who kindly invited me to contribute to this series and for his helpful advice as general editor. I am also deeply grateful to Philip Gwyn Jones of HarperCollins for his patience and generosity. My biggest debt, as always, is to my wife, Maureen, without whose tolerance this book could never have been written.

Note

The names of French kings are given in French before their accession and in English thereafter: e.g. François d’Angoulême becomes Francis I, Henri duc d’Orléans becomes Henry II and Henri de Navarre becomes Henry IV.

BIRMINGHAM, February 1996

ONE France in 1500

At the beginning of the sixteenth century France was still only partially developed as a nation. She still lacked well-defined borders, a common language and a unified legal system. The eastern frontier, in so far as it existed at all, followed roughly the rivers Scheldt, Meuse, Saône and Rhône from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. People living west of this line were vassals of the French king; those to the east owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. French suzerainty over Artois and Flanders was purely nominal, effective control of these areas having passed to the house of Burgundy. Further east, the frontier cut across the duchy of Bar whose ruler, the duke of Lorraine, did homage for half the territory to the king of France and for the other half to the emperor. In the south, Dauphiné and Provence, being east of the Rhône, were still not regarded as integral parts of the French kingdom: the king was obeyed as ‘Dauphin’ in the one, and as count in the other. The south-west border more or less followed the Pyrenees, avoiding Roussillon, which belonged to the kingdom of Aragon, and the small kingdom of Navarre, ruled by the house of Albret. Within France, there were three foreign enclaves: Calais belonged to England, the Comtat-Venaissin to the Holy See and the principality of Orange to the house of Chalon. Some great fiefs also survived, including the duchies of Brittany and Bourbon.

France also lacked a common language. Modern French is descended from langue d’oïl, a dialect spoken in northern France during the medieval period; in the south, langue d’oc or occitan was used. The linguistic frontier ran from the Bec d’Ambès in the west to the col du Lautaret in the east, passing through Limoges, the Cantal and Annonay. South of this line, even educated people used the local idiom or Latin; langue d’oïl was spoken by feudal magnates when addressing the king. After 1450, as the French crown asserted its authority following the expulsion of the English, langue d’oïl began to make deep inroads in the south-west. The parlements of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Aix used it, and noblemen from the south who took up offices at court adopted it. They continued to speak it when they returned home, passing the habit to their servants. By 1500 the southward expansion of langue d’oïl was gathering pace, at least among the upper classes, but the linguistic unity of France still lay far in the future. Nor was the divide simply between north and south. Within each linguistic half there were whole families of provincial patois, not to mention such peripheral languages as Breton, Basque or Flemish.

The law was another area lacking national unity. Each province, each pays and often each locality had its own set of customs. Broadly speaking, Roman law prevailed in the south while customary law existed in the north, but patches of customary law existed in the south, while Roman law penetrated the north to a limited extent. For a long time customs were fixed only by practice, which made for flexibility but also uncertainty; so from the twelfth century onwards charters were drawn up listing the customs of individual lordships or towns. The first serious attempt to codify customs was made by Charles VII, but no real progress was made till Charles VIII set up a commission in 1495. It was under Louis XII, however, that codification really got under way.

The surface area of France in 1500 was far smaller than it is today: 459,000 square kilometres as against 550,986. Yet it must have seemed enormous to people living at the time, given the slowness of their communications. The speed of road travel may be assessed by consulting the guidebook published by Charles Estienne in 1553. One could cover 15 or 16 leagues in a day where the terrain was flat, 14 where it rose gently and only 11 to 13 where it rose steeply. Thus it took normally two days to travel from Paris to Amiens, six from Paris to Limoges, seven and a half from Paris to Bordeaux, six to eight from Paris to Lyon and ten to fourteen from Paris to Marseille.

The social and political implications of distance were far-reaching. Fernand Braudel has suggested that it made for a fragmented society in which villages, towns, pays, even provinces ‘existed in sheltered cocoons, having almost no contact with one another’. Yet the immobility of French life in the late Middle Ages should not be exaggerated. In spite of the distances involved, people were continually moving in and out of towns. ‘We would be wrong to imagine’, Bernard Chevalier has written, ‘our ancestors as immobile beings, riveted to their fields or workshops.’

By 1500, France had largely rid herself of the two great scourges of plague and war which had proved so devastating between 1340 and 1450. Outbreaks of plague did still take place, but there were no pandemics of the kind that had swept across the kingdom between 1348 and 1440. Epidemics were limited to one or two provinces at most, and destructive ones were less frequent. War had also largely receded: except for certain border areas, there was little fighting within France between the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453 and the start of the Wars of Religion in 1562. Large companies of disbanded soldiers and brigands continued to terrorize the countryside from time to time, but in general the fear and uncertainty that had discouraged agricultural enterprise before 1450 were removed. Nor was there any major grain famine between 1440 and 1520.

The recession of plague, war and famine served to stimulate a recovery of France’s population after 1450. In the absence of a general census for this period it is impossible to give precise figures. We have to rely on evidence supplied by a relatively few parish registers, mainly relating to Provence and the north-west, which are often in poor condition, do not provide complete baptismal lists, seldom record burials and mention marriages only occasionally. But certain general conclusions may be drawn. It is unlikely that France’s population exceeded 15 million around 1500, but it was growing. Having been reduced by half between 1330 and 1450, it seems to have doubled between 1450 and 1560. In other words, the numerical effects of the Black Death and Hundred Years War were largely made up in the century after 1450. The rise was by no means uniform across the kingdom: some villages, even regions, maintained a high annual growth rate over a long period, while others made more modest advances.

The need to feed more mouths stimulated agricultural production after 1450. This was achieved by means of land clearance and reclamation rather than by improved farming techniques. The reconstruction began in earnest about 1470 and lasted till about 1540. The initiative rested with individual seigneurs, who had to overcome enormous obstacles. On countless estates nothing was visible except ‘thorns, thickets and other encumbrances’; the old boundaries had vanished and people no longer knew where their patrimonies lay. The compilation of new censiers and terriers was costly and time-consuming. Labour was also in short supply to begin with, forcing lords to offer substantial concessions to attract settlers on their lands.

Reclamation, like the resettlement of the countryside, was subject to many regional variations. It began sooner in the Paris region and the south-west than in the Midi, where it took up almost the entire first quarter of the sixteenth century. Pastoral farming was often damaged in the process, as many village communities, anxious to maximize their arable production, tried to restrict grazing. Peasants were forbidden to own more than a specified number of animals, but the need for manure precluded a complete ban on livestock. In mountain areas, where arable farming was less important, steps were taken to protect pastures from excessive land-clearance.

The rise of France’s population after 1450 was reflected in urban growth. Although evidence for this is often selective (like tax returns) or incomplete, all of it points upwards. Thus at Périgueux the population rose gently between 1450 and 1480, then steeply, reaching a peak in 1490. Using the base index of 100 for the number of known families, this had fallen to 29 in 1450, before rising to 87 in 1490 and levelling off at 79 in 1500. Paris, which was by far the largest town in France, had some 200,000 inhabitants by 1500. A document of 1538 distributing the cost of 20,000 infantry among the cities in accordance with their ability to pay enables us to rank them in order of size. Below Paris were four towns (Rouen, Lyon, Toulouse and Orléans) of between 40,000 and 70,000 inhabitants, then perhaps a score of towns of between 10,000 and 30,000 inhabitants, then another forty or so of between 5000 and 10,000. Finally there were many more small towns with fewer than 5000 inhabitants. The line distinguishing a small town from a large village was often difficult to draw. A town was usually walled. It also possessed certain privileges and comprised a wider variety of occupational and social types than a village.

The character of a town was determined by its main activity. Trade was important to all of them, but some were also administrative, intellectual and ecclesiastical centres. Seven had parlements; about 90 were capitals of bailliages and sénéchaussées, 15 (Paris, Toulouse, Montpellier, Orléans, Cahors, Angers, Aix, Poitiers, Valence, Caen, Nantes, Bourges, Bordeaux, Angoulême and Issoire) had universities, and about 110 were archiepiscopal or episcopal sees. Virtually the only industrial towns were Amiens, where the making of cloth kept half the population employed, and Tours, where silk was important.

By 1500 the walled towns, commonly described as ‘good towns’ (bonnes villes) to distinguish them from the large villages or villes champêtres, were active politically. In 1482, King Louis XI asked the people of Amiens to endorse a treaty, giving as his reason ‘the need to secure the consent and ratification of the men of the estates and communities of the bonnes villes of our kingdom’. The towns have been described as a fourth power in the kingdom along with the king, the church and the nobility. The crown and the towns worked together as allies, while watching each other closely.

The walls of many towns had fallen into disrepair by the thirteenth century and, consequently, many had been taken by the English during the Hundred Years War. To protect themselves, many towns by 1500 had repaired their walls at their own cost and the process continued in the sixteenth century. In order to qualify as a bonne ville a town needed not only a curtain wall, but also human and material resources with which to defend itself. In the words of Claude de Seyssel, writing in 1510: ‘a bonne ville or place forte that is well supplied, well equipped with guns and with all things necessary to sustain a siege and nourish a garrison and relief force is the safeguard of an entire kingdom.’ A recent survey has traced the remains of 1700 places-fortes in France dating from before 1500.

The topography of Paris was determined by the River Seine, which divided it into three parts: the Cité on the island in the middle of the river; the Ville on the right bank and the Université on the left bank. The city was encircled by medieval walls, but only the left bank remained within the wall built in the twelfth century by King Philip Augustus. The right bank had outstripped it long ago, and was now hemmed in by a fourteenth-century wall. Beyond the walls lay suburbs or faubourgs, the most important having grown around the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The area within the walls was small and densely built up, the inhabitants crammed into narrow houses of two or three storeys. All the streets, except a few axial ones, were narrow and virtually impassable to wheeled traffic. They also stank because of the ordure that was thrown into them. Among the few open spaces were the Cemetery of the Innocents and the Place de Grève, both on the right bank. Two bridges linked the Ville to the Cité: the Pont-au-Change, a wooden bridge built in 1296 which was lined with shops owned by goldsmiths, jewellers and money-changers, and the Pont Notre-Dame, which collapsed in 1499 and was rebuilt. Two bridges linked the Cité to the left bank – the Petit Pont and Pont Saint-Michel. In addition to being a thriving business community, the Cité was also a judicial and ecclesiastical centre. At the eastern end of the island stood the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Close by were the fortified bishop’s palace and a gated close of 37 canons’ houses. At the opposite end of the island stood the Palais or old royal palace, now occupied by the parlement, which was the highest court of law, and other sovereign courts. Its business attracted a vast number of councillors, barristers, procurators, solicitors, ushers and so on, in addition to the many litigants and people who came to shop at the stalls set up by tradesmen within the palace. Also on the island was the Hôtel-Dieu, the city’s main hospital.

The Ville was the business quarter of Paris. It comprised the markets of the Halles, expensive shops in the rue Saint-Denis and mixed commerce around the rue Saint-Martin. Many streets were organized by trades. The Place de Grève, in addition to being a port, was the place where the militia assembled and the site of civic ceremonies and public executions. On the square’s east side stood the Maison aux Piliers, the seat of the municipal government or Bureau de la Ville. Other important secular buildings in the Ville were the Louvre, a medieval fortress with a tall central keep, and the Châtelet, seat of the prévôt of Paris and his staff. The palace of the Tournelles was the only royal residence within the capital that was still used by the king and his court.

The University of Paris, which had been founded in the twelfth century, was best known for its faculties of theology and arts. It also had faculties of canon law and medicine. In the fifteenth century its reputation declined and it ceased to attract as many foreign students as in the past. While degrees were conferred by the faculties, teaching was done in fifty or so colleges. The most famous were the Sorbonne and the colleges of Navarre, Cardinal Lemoine, Sainte-Barbe and Montaigu. Not all students lived in them; many lodged in ‘digs’ some of which were run by their tutors. For physical exercise the students could use the Pré-aux-Clercs, a large meadow just outside the Porte de Nesle.

The rise in population, growth of urbanization and a general rise in the standard of living were mainly responsible for an economic boom that lasted from the 1460s until the 1520s. France was fortunate in being largely self-sufficient in respect of basic necessities. Grain was her chief product. Though she sometimes had to import foreign grain, this was only in times of famine; normally she produced enough for her own needs and exported any surplus. Wine consumption increased hugely during the sixteenth century, as shown by the rapid expansion of vineyards around Paris, Orléans, Reims and Lyon, by the yield from duties on wine and by the multiplication of taverns. Then as now, wine was produced not only for the home market, but for export. Several major vineyards were developed along the Atlantic coast around Bordeaux, La Rochelle and in the Basse-Loire. England and the Netherlands were the best customers.

Salt, like wine, was produced for markets at home and abroad. From marshes along the Mediterranean coast, it was sent up the Rhône and Saône to south-east France, Burgundy, Switzerland and Savoy. Another group of salt marshes along the Atlantic coast supplied a much wider area, including northern France, England, the Netherlands and Baltic states.

Metalware, especially of iron or steel, was not widely used in late medieval France. Agricultural and industrial tools were still usually made of wood. Apart from a few basic iron pots, the greatest demand was for nails and pins. For non-ferrous metals, France depended largely on foreign imports: copper, brass and tinplate from Germany, pewter and lead from England and steel from Italy.

As trade developed in France around the close of the Middle Ages, no fewer than 344 markets and fairs were set up under royal licence between 1483 and 1500. A fair was given privileges designed to attract foreign merchants: for example, foreign money was allowed to circulate freely, the goods of aliens were guaranteed against seizure and distraint, and the droit d’aubaine, whereby an alien’s inheritance was liable to forfeiture by the crown, was set aside. Some fairs were exempted from entry or exit dues and sometimes special judges were appointed to hear the suits of merchants, thereby sparing them the delays of ordinary justice.

By 1500 most big towns and many smaller ones had fairs. The most famous were the four annual fairs of Lyon, which drew many foreigners, especially Italians, Germans and Swiss. They were also important to the history of banking. Though banks had existed in France since the thirteenth century, they only became important as agencies of credit and exchange in the fifteenth century. They fixed themselves in Lyon because of the large amount of business transacted there, and threw out branches in other trading centres. The use of bills of exchange eliminated the need to carry large amounts of cash, and the fairs of Lyon became a regular clearing house for the settlement of accounts. At the same time, bankers took money on deposit, lent it at interest and negotiated letters of credit.

French overseas trade had recovered from the stagnation it had suffered during the Hundred Years War. The annexation of Provence in 1481 was extremely significant for French trade in the Mediterranean. Although Marseille failed to wrest the monopoly of Levantine trade from Venice, it established useful links with the ports of the Ligurian coast, Tuscany, Catalonia, Sicily, Rhodes and the Barbary coast. The chief traders were Italians who looked to the bankers of Lyon for capital. The French Atlantic and Channel ports also recovered in the late fifteenth century and traded actively with England, Spain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. As land communications were poor, harbours developed along the west coast, along navigable rivers and even far inland. As many as 200 ships might be seen at any time along the quays at Rouen. The most important port of the south-west was Bordeaux which was visited by an English wine-fleet each year.

The expansion of trade was linked to industrial growth. Cloth-making, which was centred in northern France but becoming entrenched in other areas, notably Languedoc, was France’s chief industry. Although often named after the towns from which the cloth-merchants operated, the various kinds of cloth were produced mainly in the countryside. French cloth was, generally speaking, of ordinary quality and cheap, serving the day-to-day needs of the lower social strata. Even the best French cloth could not compete with such foreign imports as Florentine serges. The finest wool was imported from Spain, England, the Barbary coast and the Levant. An important development was the establishment of a luxury textile industry, first at Tours, then at Lyon. But France alone could not satisfy the increasingly sophisticated tastes of the court and nobility. For the finest linen she looked to the Netherlands and South Germany and for silks to Italy – velvet from Genoa, damask and satin from Florence and Lucca, and cloth of gold from Milan.

An industry that was developing fast in France around 1500 was printing. After its importation from Germany in 1470, it spread to Lyon in 1473, Albi in 1475 and Toulouse and Angers in 1476. By 1500 there were 75 presses in Paris alone. France still lagged behind Italy in book production, but it was catching up fast. Thus between 1480 and 1482, Venice produced 156 editions and Paris 35; between 1495 and 1497, Venice produced 447, Paris 181 and Lyon 95. Whereas in 1480 only nine French towns had printing presses, by 1500 the number had risen to 40. Although French printers began by targeting academic clients, they soon branched out in pursuit of bigger profits. In addition to classical and humanistic texts, they published all kinds of religious works and also secular works, like tales of chivalry.

French society in the late Middle Ages was far simpler structurally than it is today. It consisted mainly of peasants, who lived in the kingdom’s 30,000 villages. A village was largely self-contained: if it looked outwards at all, it was only to the neighbouring parishes or to the nearest bourg with its market and lawcourt. Yet some peasants did venture further afield. Each year, for example, thousands of Auvergnats took up seasonal work in Spain while teams of Norman peasants helped to bring in the grain harvest in Beauce and the Ile-de-France. But most peasants stayed in or near their birthplace.

Each village had its own hierarchy. At the top was the seigneur, who was usually but not always a nobleman, for a seigneurie was purchasable like any other piece of property. It comprised a landed estate of variable size and a judicial area. The estate was usually in two parts: the demesne, which included the seigneur’s house and the tribunal as well as the lands and woods he cultivated himself; and the censives or tenures, lands which he had entrusted in the past to peasants so that they might cultivate them more or less freely in return for numerous obligations, called redevances. The main one was the cens, an annual rent, often quite light, which was paid on a fixed day. The seigneur usually retained the mill, wine-press and oven, and expected to be paid for their use. He took a proportion of any land sold, exchanged or inherited by a censitaire, and exacted champart, a kind of seigneurial tithe, at harvest time. The seigneur also had certain judicial powers. Usually he had surrendered his criminal authority to the royal courts, but he continued to act in civil cases through his bailli and other officials. His court judged cases arising among the censitaires but also between them and himself. Almost inevitably in a country as large as France, seigneuries did not exist everywhere: in the centre and south there were freehold lands (alleux) which were totally free of seigneurial dominance. By contrast, Brittany and Burgundy were oppressively seigneurial.

The closing years of the Middle Ages witnessed two important social changes in the French countryside: a reduction in the wealth and authority of the seigneur, and the rise of a village aristocracy. During the period of agricultural recovery the seigneur had been obliged to make concessions to his tenants: new leases laid down precisely their obligations to the seigneur. By 1500 serfdom had all but disappeared. However, as the demographic rise created land hunger, the seigneurs tried to back-track on concessions, usually without success. At the same time, their authority was being eroded by the crown. A long series of royal enactments rode roughshod over local customs. The king’s judges heard appeals from decisions taken in the seigneurial courts and pardons were often granted by the crown. Another blow to seigneurial prestige was the responsibility assigned to most village communities to allocate and collect the main direct tax, the taille.

The peasantry, too, underwent a significant transformation in the century after 1450. At the top of their social scale were the fermiers or coqs de village, who frequently acted as intermediaries between the seigneur and the rest of the peasants. With at least thirty hectares at his disposal, the fermier could produce in a year more than he needed to feed his family and pay his dues to the seigneur. The surplus enabled him to set up as a grain-merchant or cattle-breeder. He lent tools, seed and money to less fortunate peasants and offered them seasonal work or artisanal commissions. At the same time, the fermier collected leases, levied seigneurial dues and monopolized positions of influence in the village or parish. The rise of this village aristocracy did not affect the whole of France. The west, for example, was hardly touched by it; yet it was a development of great importance for the future.

Urban society was more varied, open and mobile than rural society. For one thing, it was continually being renewed: the death rate in towns was higher than in the countryside because of overcrowding and poor standards of hygiene. Even a mild epidemic could decimate a town, so that a regular flow of immigrants was essential to maintain and increase its population. Such incomers might include apprentices, journeymen, domestic servants, wet-nurses, students and clerics. They would converge on a town each day from the rural hinterland looking for a better life and perhaps opportunities of social advancement. Beggars came expecting more effective alms-giving, and the rural poor looking for work, when the rise in population reduced the chances of employment on the land. The number of immigrants could be huge. At Nantes, for example, the population might jump in one year from 20,000 to 30,000. Most immigrants helped to swell the ranks of the urban poor which remained vulnerable to any famine.

Contemporaries tended to divide urban society into two groups: the aisés, or well-to-do, and the menu peuple, or proletariat. The reality, however, was more complex. The well-to-do were themselves divided between merchants and office-holders. In towns like Bordeaux or Toulouse, which were important trading centres as well as having a parlement, these two groups were fairly evenly balanced, but in Lyon, where trade was all-important, merchants were pre-eminent. They lived in comfortable town houses and added to the profits of their trade the revenues from their estates in the neighbouring countryside. In towns which were primarily administrative centres, the office-holders were preponderant. They were often as rich as merchants, from whose ranks many of them had risen. The core of urban society consisted of artisans and small to middling merchants. They worked for themselves, served in the urban militia, paid taxes, participated in general assemblies of the commune, and owned enough property to guarantee their future security. Artisans were mainly of two kinds: those who employed large numbers of workmen and those who employed no labour other than their own families.

The lower stratum of urban society – the menu peuple – consisted of manual workers, who were excluded from any share in local government and lived in constant fear of hunger. They included journeymen, who were paid in money or money and kind, manoeuvres (paid by the day) and gagne-deniers (paid by the piece).

Whereas we tend to divide society into groups according to their place of residence, occupation or wealth, Frenchmen in the early sixteenth century used quite different criteria. They classified people, great and small, rich and poor, into one of three estates: clergy, nobility and third estate, which were regarded as divinely ordained and permanently fixed. Each estate had its distinctive function, life-style and privileges, which were acknowledged in both law and custom. Social peace rested on respect for this sacred hierarchy, yet the possibility was admitted that merit and/or wealth might enable an individual or family to pass from one estate into another.

Of the three estates, the most clearly defined was the clergy, whose members had to be ordained or at least to have taken minor orders. It had its own hierarchy and code of discipline. At the top were the archbishops, bishops, abbots and priors. Then came the canons of cathedrals and collegiate churches, and below them the great mass of parish priests, unbeneficed clergy, monks, friars and nuns. In terms of wealth the gulf between a prelate and a humble parish priest or curé was enormous. The bishop often disposed of large temporal revenues. Thus the bishop of Langres was also a duke, the seigneur of 100 villages and he owned seven châteaux. Seigneuries were also held by cathedral chapters and collegiate churches. By contrast, the humble curé was often desperately poor. The dîme or tithe paid to him by his parishioners was so meagre that he was often obliged to run a small business on the side or to serve as the seigneur’s agent in order to make ends meet. Theoretically, under the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), bishops and abbots were elected by their chapters, but in practice the church had difficulty resisting the demands of royal patronage. When the crown did not directly dispose of major benefices, elections were often disputed and the crown had to act as arbiter. Many lesser benefices were in the gift of a patron, ecclesiastical or lay. The secular clergy may have numbered 100,000, made up of about 100 bishops, many suffragan bishops and canons, about 30,000 parish priests and a huge crowd of unbeneficed clergy. The regular clergy cannot be quantified but was obviously substantial: there were 600 Benedictine abbeys, 400 mendicant houses, more than 100 commanderies of St John and 60 charterhouses.

The second estate, or nobility, was widely envied for its prestige and life-style. The noble condition was identified with perfection, while juridically and politically it implied a special status. Heredity was essential to the concept: a nobleman was born rather than made. Many nobles flaunted pedigrees going back to ‘times immemorial’. Yet it was also possible for a nobleman to be created. The king could ennoble someone who had served him well. At first this was an exceptional favour, but in the fifteenth century the holders of certain offices (for instance royal notaries and secretaries) were automatically ennobled and the practice spread to other offices. This development was accompanied by the widespread acquisition of seigneuries by office-holders. Some nobles simply usurped their status by ‘living nobly’ (i.e. avoiding any business activity), holding a public office, fighting for the king, owning a fief or seigneurie and living in a house large enough to be a manor. But a false nobleman had to ensure that his name was dropped from the tax rolls over a long period so that, if his claim to tax exemption was challenged, he could summon witnesses who would testify that his family had lived nobly for as long as anyone could remember. It is impossible to quantify the nobility exactly, but it may have numbered between 120,000 and 200,000.

The bulk of France’s population consisted of the third estate, made up of people of widely different fortunes and occupations. Seyssel in his La Monarchie de France (1519) made a useful distinction between middling people (peuple moyen) and the lesser folk (peuple menu). The former, he explained, were merchants and officers of finance and justice. The peuple menu were people principally engaged in ‘the cultivation of the land, the mechanical arts and other inferior crafts’. Seyssel believed that such people should not be ‘in too great liberty or immeasurably rich and especially not generally trained in the use of arms’, otherwise they might be tempted to rise against their betters. The third estate had its own hierarchy defined by custom and expressed in certain honorific titles, such as noble homme or honorable homme, in notarial documents, but most Frenchmen did not qualify for such titles. As one historian has written: ‘four-fifths of Francis I’s subjects fell into anonymity’.

The government of France

At a meeting of the Estates-General in 1484 Philippe Pot, representing the Burgundian nobility, described kingship as ‘the dignity, not the property, of the prince’. The crown, according to the jurists, was handed down to the nearest male kinsman of the deceased monarch. The king was not free to give it away or to bequeath it to anyone; he was only the temporary holder of a public office. Yet the concept of the king as head of the state already existed. The word ‘state’ did not come into current usage till the mid-sixteenth century, but the idea existed under the name of ‘commonwealth’ (chose publique) or ‘republic’. Although official documents distinguished between the king and the state, the interests of both were closely identified. Thus in 1517, Chancellor Duprat said: ‘The kingdom’s interest is the king’s interest, and the king’s interest is the kingdom’s interest. For it is a mystical body of which the king is the head.’ As head of state, the king was not bound to assume the obligations entered upon by his predecessors; the debts of a king could be legitimately repudiated by his successor. A corporation or individual holding privileges from the crown needed to have them confirmed at the start of a new reign. The same rule applied to office-holders.

‘The king never dies’. This adage embodied an important principle of French constitutional law: the king succeeded from the instant of his predecessor’s death. No interregnum, however brief, was deemed possible. Nor could a lawful king be denied the full exercise of his authority for reasons of age or health. If he were a minor or unfit to rule for some other reason, his authority was exercised in his name by his council, although in practice a regent was appointed. Contemporary opinion favoured the king’s nearest adult male kinsman for this role, but in the sixteenth century it was repeatedly filled by a woman: Louise of Savoy under Francis I and Catherine de’ Medici under Charles IX.

In the sixteenth century the coronation or sacre at Reims was no longer regarded as essential to the exercise of kingship, yet it remained important as a symbol of the supernatural powers of kingship and of the close alliance between church and state. The coronation service began with the oath. Standing over the Gospels, the king promised to promote peace in Christendom, to protect Christians against injury, to dispense justice fairly and mercifully, and to expel heretics from his dominions. This was followed by the anointing, the most important part of the ceremony. Thrusting his hand through slits in the king’s garment, the archbishop of Reims anointed his body with a chrism allegedly handed down from heaven by a dove at the baptism of King Clovis in 496 and used ever since to consecrate France’s kings. The anointing set the king apart from other men, giving him a quasi-sacerdotal character. Although no French king ever claimed the right to celebrate mass, he did take communion in both kinds, a privilege enjoyed only by priests.

By virtue of his anointing the king of France, who bore the title of ‘Most Christian King’, was deemed to possess thaumaturgical powers, that is to say powers of healing the sick. The only other Christian ruler to claim this power was the king of England. In time, it became restricted to the curing of scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes on the side of the neck, a disease more repulsive than dangerous and subject to periods of remission. The king touched the victim’s sores and tumours with his bare hands, and, making the sign of the cross, said: ‘The king touches you and God cures you.’ Each victim was then given two small silver coins.

France at the end of the Middle Ages was still a largely feudal country: many towns, corporations and individuals enjoyed a degree of autonomy, regarding themselves as parties to a contract in which mutual obligations were laid down and complete submission to the king was ruled out. But a school of thought existed which advocated royal absolutism. Its chief exponents were the royal jurists, who found in Roman law the idea of absolute power vested in one man and of subjects equally subservient to him. The doctrine was backed up by the Christian concept of the king as God’s vicegerent on earth. It was claimed that he could legislate, dispense justice, revoke all lawsuits to his own court, levy taxes and create offices. He could also annul any concession detracting from his authority, and local privileges could survive only if he chose to renew them at his accession. The authority of Cicero was invoked to show that the king was entitled to sacrifice private interest to the public good.

Roman legal concepts, as elaborated by medieval commentators, were accepted in sixteenth-century France. Jurists identified the king with the Roman princeps and declared him to be emperor within his own kingdom. This simply meant that he was independent of both pope and Holy Roman Emperor in temporal matters. The idea of his absolute authority was universally accepted in French law, but he was not expected to rule absolutely without his subjects’ consent as expressed through certain institutions, notably the Parlement of Paris, which was commonly regarded as the modern equivalent of the ancient Roman Senate.

The best-known statement of the constitutionalism that prevailed in sixteenth-century France was La Monarchie de France by Claude de Seyssel, who became bishop of Marseille after long years of service to the crown as a councillor, administrator and diplomat. Like Machiavelli he was a realist, who viewed politics as a science distinct from morality and religion. Being an Aristotelian, he valued moderation in a constitution, and believed that the French kings owed their greatness to their voluntary acceptance of three constraints (freins) – religion, justice and la police – on their power. Writing of justice, Seyssel affirms that it is ‘better authorized in France than in any other country we know in all the world. This is especially owing to the parlements, which have been instituted to put a bridle on the absolute power that our kings would have wished to use.’

However absolute, the monarch needed an administrative machinery at the centre of the kingdom and in the localities, to carry out his policies. Its chief component was the king’s council, which in 1500 was still evolving. In theory its members comprised the princes of the blood, the peers of the realm and the great officers of state, but in practice admission was by royal invitation. Before 1526 the council was a large body. Between August 1484 and January 1485 there were 120 councillors, but only a small proportion of them attended with any degree of frequency. It is likely that a core of working councillors existed within the larger body. In 1502 this core consisted of only four members, of whom three belonged to the house of Amboise. Financial business was apparently dealt with separately by experts, who nevertheless continued to attend the council when non-financial matters were being discussed, The council might also divide for administrative convenience. Thus in 1494 part of the council followed Charles VIII to Italy while the rest stayed in Moulins with Pierre de Bourbon. The situation has been described as ‘one of relative informality and of response to immediate royal needs. Some councillors were specialists and the disposition of personnel in terms of location was fluid, but these were not structural arrangements within the council as an institution.’

There were many routes to membership of the council: birth, skill in law, diplomacy or administration, regional importance, ecclesiastical dignity and the influence of patrons and relatives. Councillors served at the king’s pleasure, not for life, and membership was not hereditary. Some councillors served under all three kings from 1483 to 1526, but membership was usually for shorter periods. The council was not only a point of contact between the crown, the nobility and local communities; it was also a tool which the crown used to secure the obedience of the governing classes and to arbitrate between them.

The body responsible for turning the council’s decisions into laws was the chancery, headed by the Chancellor of France. He was invariably an eminent jurist, who had served his apprenticeship in a parlement, and sometimes he was also a high-ranking churchman. His powers and duties ranged more widely than those of any other great officer of the crown. In effect, he was a kind of prime minister. As head of the royal chancery, he kept the Great seal and other seals of state. All documents emanating from the king and his council were drawn up in the chancery and sealed in the chancellor’s presence. He had to ensure that the text of each document matched the orders received, and could refuse to seal any that seemed incorrect. This power, moreover, extended to all the other chanceries in the kingdom, including those of the ‘sovereign courts’. The chancellor’s authority was, therefore, nation-wide. His influence on legislation was also crucial. He exercised it not only as a councillor but also by drafting royal edicts himself. As head of the judicial administration, he was by right entitled to preside over any sovereign court, including the parlement. He appointed judges and received their oaths of office unless they had already sworn them before the king. The chancellor attended the king’s council regularly and took the chair in the king’s absence. He helped to determine policies and explained them, if necessary, to the parlement. Now and again he served on major diplomatic missions. He was appointed for life by the king, but, if necessary, his functions could be performed by a Keeper of the Seals, who did not have his prestige or influence.

The chancery was the nearest equivalent to a modern ministry. In 1500 it had a staff of 120 which grew even larger during the sixteenth century. Unlike the ‘sovereign courts’, it continued to follow the king on his travels. Originally, all the chancery clerks drew up documents to be sealed by the great seal, but during the Middle Ages they began to specialize: the clercs du secret drafted documents emanating directly from the king; in time they became known as secretaries. Under an ordinance of 1482 notaries of the chancery were effectively granted a monopoly of drawing up and signing all royal acts, chancery letters, conciliar decisions and decrees of the ‘sovereign courts’. They were automatically ennobled and enjoyed the privilege of committimus as well as numerous tax exemptions. The quantity of documents processed by them was enormous.

Closely associated with the chancellor were the masters of requests (maîtres des requêtes de l’hôtel). There were eight of them about 1500, but their number increased rapidly thereafter. Under an edict of 1493 they were authorized to preside at the courts of the bailliages and sénéchaussées, to receive complaints against local officials and to correct abuses. They could preside at the Grand conseil and sit in the parlement, where they ranked immediately below the presidents. The masters of requests were often given temporary commissions in financial, diplomatic and judicial affairs. They were the ancestors of the intendants, who became the principal agents of royal centralization in the seventeenth century.

The Great Council (Grand conseil) was an exclusively judicial body which had taken over part of the work formerly exercised by the king’s council: it investigated complaints against royal officials, intervened in conflicts of jurisdiction between other courts and could revoke enactments that the parlement had registered. It also acted as a court of appeal and of first instance for a wide range of lawsuits. Though the Great Council’s procedure was fairly simple and relatively cheap, it had one serious disadvantage for suitors: like the king’s council, it continued to follow the king on his travels through the kingdom. It carried its records around, and suitors had to change their lawyers as it moved from place to place. Because of its closeness to the king’s person, the Great Council was more susceptible to his influence than was the parlement, and he often used it to bend the law to his interest.

The king of France was first and foremost a judge, and the earliest form of royal intervention at the local level had been the establishment of officials charged with exercising justice in his name. At the bottom of the hierarchy, but above the judges of the feudal courts, were magistrates, called prévôts, viguiers or vicomtes, whose powers were limited to the simplest cases. The basic unit of local government was the bailliage (sometimes called sénéchaussée). The kingdom comprised about 100 such units, which could vary enormously in size. By the sixteenth century, the official in charge of the bailliage, the bailli (or sénéchal), had purely honorific or military duties (for example, he summoned the feudal levy, called the ban et arrière-ban), but the tribunal of the bailliage, under the bailli’s deputy or lieutenant and his staff, was a hive of activity, bustling with barristers, solicitors, sergeants and ushers. The bailliage judged on appeal cases sent up from inferior courts and in first instance cases concerning privileged persons or cas royaux. These were crimes committed against the king’s person, rights and demesne, ranging from treason and lèse-majesté to rape and high-way robbery. In addition to their judicial competence, the bailliages had important administrative powers: they published royal statutes and issued decrees of their own.

Above the bailliages were the parlements of which there were seven in 1500: Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen and Aix-en-Provence. The oldest and most prestigious was the Parlement of Paris which had ‘gone out of court’ in the thirteenth century and was now permanently based in Paris in the old royal palace on the Ile de la Cité. Though separate from the king’s council, the parlement was still considered to be part of it: thus peers of the realm were entitled to sit in it and when the king came to the parlement, accompanied by his ministers and advisers to hold a lit de justice, the old Curia regis was in effect reconstituted for the occasion. The parlement’s view of royal absolutism differed from the king’s: while admitting that authority resided in the king’s person, it did not believe that he could treat the kingdom as he liked. He was its administrator, not its owner, and was bound to observe the so-called ‘fundamental laws’ governing the succession to the throne and preservation of the royal demesne. The parlement’s view implied a distinction between the sovereign as an ideal and the fallible creature who occupied the throne. It saw its own function as that of protecting the interests of the ideal sovereign from the errors that the human king might commit. The parlement’s magistrates liked to compare themselves to the senators of ancient Rome, an analogy resented by the king. In 1500 the Parlement of Paris consisted of five chambers: the Grand’ chambre, two Chambres des enquêtes, the Chambre des requêtes and the Tournelle criminelle, with a combined personnel of about sixty lay and clerical councillors.

Originally, the parlement’s ressort or area of jurisdiction had been the whole kingdom, but as this had been enlarged a number of provincial parlements had been created. Yet the Parlement of Paris retained control of two-thirds of the kingdom. It was responsible for the whole of France, excluding Normandy, as far south as the Lyonnais and Upper Auvergne. Within this area it judged a wide variety of cases in first instance and on appeal. But it was not just a court of law: it regulated such matters as public hygiene or the upkeep of roads, bridges and quays; it ensured that Paris received enough grain and fuel, controlled the quality, weight and price of bread, fixed wages and hours of work, punished shoddy workmanship, and intervened in academic matters. As printing came into its own, the parlement began to control the book trade. Not even the church escaped its vigilance. No papal bull could be applied to France if it had not been registered by the parlement. The court also kept an eye on the conduct of royal officials in the provinces.

Finally, the parlement played a significant role in politics by ratifying royal legislation. If it found an enactment satisfactory, this was registered and published forthwith; if not, the parlement submitted remonstrances (remontrances) to the king, either verbally or in writing, whereupon he would either modify the enactment or issue a lettre de jussion ordering the court to register the act as it stood without delay. Such a move might lead to more remonstrances and more lettres de jussion. In the end, if the parlement remained obdurate, the king would hold a lit de justice, that is to say, he would resume the authority he had delegated to the parlement by coming to the court in person and presiding over the registration of the controversial measure himself. Only the Grand’ chambre was entitled to register royal enactments or issue decrees (arrêts). Its official head was the chancellor of France, but its effective head was the First President (Premier président) of the parlement, who was assisted by three other presidents and about thirty lay and clerical councillors.

The provincial parlements developed out of the courts that had existed in the great fiefs before their absorption into the kingdom. Modelled on the Paris parlement, they exercised a similar jurisdiction within their respective areas. All claimed equality of authority and jurisdiction with the Parlement of Paris, but the latter had privileges that made it unique. Each parlement was sovereign within its own area in respect of registering royal enactments: thus a law registered by the Parlement of Paris could not be applied in Languedoc unless it had been registered by the Parlement of Toulouse.

A major figure in French local government around 1500 was the provincial governor. There were eleven governorships (gouvernements) corresponding roughly with the kingdom’s border provinces. The governors were normally recruited from princes of the blood and high nobility. Although closely identified with the person and authority of the monarch, the governor was only a commissioner who could be revoked at the king’s will. His powers, as laid out in his commission or letters of provision, were seldom clearly defined. While it was customary for his military responsibilities, such as the securing of fortresses and the supplying or disciplining of troops, to be stressed, there was also often a clause open to wide interpretation. Thus in 1515, Odet de Foix, governor of Guyenne, was instructed ‘generally to do … all that we would see and recognize as necessary for the good of ourselves and our affairs …’ which amounted to a general delegation of royal authority. But the commissions lacked uniformity: the king, it seems, was more concerned with adapting to local circumstances than establishing functional harmony among his senior provincial representatives. A governor seldom resided in his province as he was often at court or fighting for the king. The exercise of his local duties was therefore delegated to a lieutenant, who was usually a lesser nobleman or prelate. But a governor could still do much for his province, even at a distance. He could, for example, ensure that its grievances received the attention of the king’s council.

A governor’s presence at court gave him unique opportunities of patronage which he might use to build up a powerful clientele within his province. This comprised three elements: the regular army (compagnies d’ordonnance), household officers and servants, and local gentlemen. Nearly all the governors were captains of the gendarmerie – the heavily armoured cavalry – and as such controlled recruitment and promotion within its ranks. A governor also had a large private household which provided employment for local noblemen and education for their children. All of this clearly made him potentially dangerous to the crown, for he might use his personal following within his province to undermine royal authority.

The most complex and least efficient part of French government at the end of the Middle Ages was the fiscal administration. This was built essentially around two kinds of revenue: the ‘ordinary’ revenue (finances ordinaires), which the king drew from his demesne, and the ‘extraordinary’ revenue (finances extraordinaires) which he got from taxation. The ‘extraordinary’ revenue owed its name to the fact that originally it had been levied for a special purpose and for a limited time, usually in wartime. By 1500, however, it came from regular taxes levied in peace and war. The ‘ordinary’ revenue consisted not only of fixed and predictable feudal rents, but also of a wide range of variable dues owed to the king as suzerain.

The ‘extraordinary’ revenue comprised three main taxes: the taille, the gabelle and the aides. The taille was the only direct tax. It was levied annually, the amount being decided by the king’s council, and it could be supplemented by a crue or surtax. There were two sorts of taille: the taille réelle was a land tax payable by everyone irrespective of social rank, and the taille personnelle fell mainly on land owned by unprivileged commoners. The former was obviously fairer, but it was found only in a few areas, notably Provence and Languedoc. The nobility and clergy were exempt from the taille, but it does not follow that all the rest of society was liable. Many professional groups (for example, royal officials, military personnel, municipal officials, lawyers, university teachers and students) were exempt, as were a large number of towns, called villes franches, including Paris. Thus if the peasantry was taillable, the same was not true of the bourgeoisie as a whole.

The gabelle was a tax on salt. By the late Middle Ages the salt trade had become so important in France that the crown decided to take a share of the profits by controlling its sale and distribution. But royal control was strongest in the northern and central provinces (pays de grandes gabelles), which had constituted the demesne of King Charles V (1346–80). Here the salt was taken to royal warehouses (greniers à sel), where it was weighed and allowed to dry, usually for two years. It was then weighed again and taxed before the merchant who owned it was allowed to sell it. As a safeguard against illicit trading in salt, the crown introduced the system of sel par impôt, whereby every household had to purchase from a royal warehouse enough salt for its average needs. Outside the pays de grandes gabelles, the salt tax was levied in different ways: in the west of France it was a quarter or a fifth of the sale price, while in the south a tariff was levied as the salt passed through royal warehouses situated along the coast near areas of production.

The aides were duties levied on various commodities sold regularly and in large quantities. The rate of tax was one sou per livre on all merchandise sold wholesale or retail, except wine and other beverages which were taxed both ways. An important aide was the levy on livestock raised in many towns; another was the aide on wine, called vingtième et huitième. But indirect taxation was, like the taille, subject to local variations; several parts of France were exempt from the aides.

The usual method of tax collection in respect of the taille was for the leading men of a parish to elect from among themselves an assessor and a collector. The assessment, once completed, was read out in church by the local priest; a week later the parishioners paid their taxes to the collector as they left church. The assessor and collector were not inclined to be lenient, for they were liable to be imprisoned or to have their property sequestered if the sum collected fell short of the anticipated total. Indirect taxes were usually farmed by the highest bidder at an auction.

The most lucrative tax was the taille, which amounted to 2.4 million livres out of a total revenue of 4.9 million in 1515. It was followed by the aides, which brought in about a third of the taille. As for the gabelle, it was bringing in 284,000 livres (about six per cent of the total revenue).

The fiscal administration in 1500, like the tax system, had not changed since the reign of Charles VII (1422–61). It comprised two administrations corresponding with the two kinds of revenue. The Trésor, which was responsible for the ‘ordinary’ revenue, was under four trésoriers de France who had very wide powers. Each was responsible for one of four areas, called respectively Languedoïl, Languedoc, Normandy and Outre-Seine-et-Yonne. The trésoriers supervised the collection and disbursement of revenues, but did not handle them. This task was left to the receveurs ordinaires, who were each responsible for a subdivision of the bailliage. The receiver-general for all revenues from the demesne was the changeur du Trésor, who was based in Paris, but only a small proportion of the revenues actually reached him, for the crown settled many debts by means of warrants (décharges) assigned on a local treasurer. This avoided the expense and risk of transporting large amounts of cash along dangerous, bandit-infested roads, while passing on the recovery costs to the creditor.

The four généraux des finances, who had charge of the ‘extraordinary’ revenues, had virtually the same powers as the trésoriers de France, each being responsible for an area, called généralité. These were subdivided into élections, of which there were 85 in 1500, but in general there were no élections in areas which had retained their representative estates (pays d’états). The élection owed its name to the élu, an official whose main function was to carry out regular tours of inspection (chevauchées) of his district, checking its ability to pay and the trust-worthiness of his underlings.

The personnel responsible for the administration of the gabelles varied according to the different kinds of salt tax. In the pays de grandes gabelles; each royal warehouse was under a grenetier assisted by a contrôleur, elsewhere the tax was farmed out by commissioners.

On the same level as the changeur du Trésor and performing the same duties, though in respect of the ‘extraordinary’ revenue, were the four receveurs généraux des finances, one for each généralité.

The two fiscal administrations were not entirely separate, for the trésoriers de France and généraux des finances (known collectively as gens des finances) were expected to reside at court whenever they were not carrying out inspections of their respective areas. They formed a financial committee, which met regularly and independently of the king’s council, and were empowered to take certain decisions on their own. They also attended the king’s council whenever important financial matters were discussed. However, their most important duty was to draw up at the start of each year a sort of national budget (état général par estimation), based on accounts sent in by each financial district.

Popular representation

The French monarchy after the Hundred Years War was stronger than it had been earlier, when it had had to share power with the great feudal magnates, yet it was not strong enough to ignore the traditional rights and privileges of its subjects. The king’s army rarely reached 25,000 men in peacetime and twice that number in war. Such a force could not be expected to hold down a population of around 15 million, particularly as the king could not depend on the loyalty of his troops; mercenaries were notoriously unreliable. The royal civil service was also minute by modern standards. In 1505 there were only 12,000 officials, or one for each 1250 inhabitants. Consequently, the monarchy could be effective only by enlisting the co-operation of its subjects. This could be done in various ways: by protecting their privileges, by keeping in close contact with them, by controlling a vast system of patronage and by using representative institutions.

At the national level the only representative institution was the Estates-General, made up of elected representatives of the three estates: clergy, nobility and third estate. But the king was under no statutory obligation to call them and in 1484 during the minority of Charles VIII they met for the last time before 1560. It does not follow that the people ceased to have a voice. At the national level, the king often called meetings of one or two estates to discuss particular questions, although such assemblies seem to have been primarily intended for propaganda purposes. As Russell Major has written, they ‘served more to keep alive the idea that the wise king acted only upon the advice of his leading subjects than they did to develop new deliberative techniques’.

However, many French provinces continued to have representative estates of their own during the long period when the Estates-General were in abeyance. They were known as pays d’états and the principal ones were Normandy, Languedoc, Dauphiné, Burgundy, Provence and Brittany. Most of the estates consisted of prelates, nobles with fiefs and representatives of the chief towns, but there were numerous exceptions. In Languedoc, for instance, only the bishops and 22 noblemen were allowed to represent their respective estates. At the opposite end, there were local assemblies where only villages and small towns were represented. The estates depended for their existence on the king: he called them, fixed the date and place of their meeting, appointed their president and determined their agenda. Royal commissioners put forward demands, negotiated with the delegates and met some of their demands. Usually the estates met once a year, but they could meet more often. The estates did not exist simply to vote taxes demanded by the king. Through the petitions they submitted to him, they could have an influence on his policies. They played a major role in legal, legislative and administrative matters. The codification of customs, for example, was done in assemblies of the estates. They had their own permanent staff supported out of special taxes. The estates apportioned and collected royal taxes within their province; they also voted money to build roads and bridges and to support various activities beneficial to the local economy. They raised troops, repaired fortifications, built hospitals and engaged in poor relief.

TWO The minority of Charles VIII and the Breton marriage(1483–94)

When Louis XI died on 30 August 1483, his son Charles was only thirteen years old – ten months short of the age of majority for a king of France as laid down by an ordinance of 1374. It was consequently necessary to provide a regent for the intervening period. Four people could claim this role: the queen mother, Charlotte of Savoy; the king’s cousin, Louis duc d’Orléans; and the king’s sister and brother-in-law, Anne and Pierre de Beaujeu. Charlotte could point to the precedent set by Blanche de Castille during the minority of Louis IX, but she was a meek woman who had been allowed only a minor political role by the late king. Orléans was old enough to rule (he was twenty-two years old), but lacked the necessary qualities, being flighty, dissolute and a spendthrift. Anne and Pierre de Beaujeu were better qualified. Anne, who was also twenty-two years old, was intelligent and proud, albeit vindictive and grasping. Her husband Pierre was her senior by twenty-one years and had gained administrative experience under Louis XI. The Beaujeus had important advantages over their rivals: they had custody of the young king and enjoyed the support of the royal civil service; but they could not be sure of the military backing of the great nobles.

Not much is known about the first year of Charles VIII’s reign. Historians have generally assumed that the Beaujeus kept a tenuous hold on the government till the duc d’Orléans fled from the court in 1485. This has been questioned by J. Russell Major, who believes that the Beaujeus were ‘supplanted’ by a council made up of great nobles and their protégés. ‘Supplanted’ seems too strong a word. The Beaujeus retained control while having to co-operate with members of the nobility. Their rival, Louis d’Orléans, became president of the king’s council and lieutenant-general of the Ile-de-France. His uncle, Dunois, was appointed governor of Dauphiné, Valentinois and Diois. Within their orbit were Charles comte d’Angoulême, who was next in line to the throne after Louis, and Jean de Foix, vicomte de Narbonne and comte d’Etampes. Jean duc de Bourbon, elder brother of Pierre de Beaujeu, was showered with favours: he became lieutenant-general of the kingdom, constable of France and governor of Languedoc. Among other prominent nobles who flocked to the court of Charles VIII in 1483 in quest of offices, privileges, gifts and pensions were René II, duc de Lorraine, Alain le Grand, sire d’Albret and Philippe of Savoy, comte de Bresse.

The Estates-General of 1484

The decision to call the Estates-General was taken soon after the death of Louis XI, no one knows by whom. Some historians believe that it was taken by Louis d’Orléans at the instigation of Dunois; others ascribe the responsibility to the Beaujeus. Both parties needed popular support. The estates were due to meet at Orléans on 1 January 1484, but they were moved to Tours because of the threat of plague and did not begin till 15 January. The 287 deputies were drawn from all parts of the kingdom. They were elected in the various bailliages and sénéchaussées without, it seems, any undue pressure being exerted on the electors by Orléans or the Beaujeus. ‘When all is said’, writes Major, ‘neither side made a concerted effort to influence all the elections or to bribe all the deputies when once they were chosen.’ Among them was Jean Masselin, who has left us a uniquely detailed, if somewhat one-sided, account of the proceedings; another was Philippe Pot, sénéchal of Burgundy, who made a remarkable speech on 9 February.

The estates opened, as was the custom, with a speech from the Chancellor of France, Guillaume de Rochefort. The French people, he said, had always been devoted to their rulers, unlike the English who had just crowned the murderer of Edward IV’s young sons, Richard III. He tried to calm the deputies’ fears about the age of their own monarch. Such was the trust that the king placed in them that he would ask them to share in the government: they were to inform him of their grievances, report any oppression by public officials, and advise on how peace, justice and good government might be achieved.

After dividing into six sections, the deputies set up a committee to prepare a general cahier for presentation to the king. This was read out on 2 February. It contained a sweeping denunciation of the government of Louis XI and a call for a return to the practices of Charles VII. The clergy wanted the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges to be enforced. The nobility complained that they were being impoverished by excessive use of the feudal levy (ban et arrière-ban). They wanted to see foreigners excluded from military commands and from offices in the royal household. They also complained of infringements of their hunting rights by royal officials. Poverty loomed large in the third estate’s submission: the current scarcity of money was blamed on wars and the export of bullion to Rome; taxation was described as excessive. The king was urged to remove the need for the taille by revoking all alienations of domain made by his father, reducing the size of the army, stopping or curbing pensions and decreasing the number and pay of royal officials. The longest chapter of the cahier was concerned with justice: it called for the replacement of officials who had been appointed by Louis XI out of favour rather than on merit.

The government of the kingdom was also considered by the estates. The Beaujeus were anxious to prevent Louis d’Orléans becoming regent and their cause was championed by Philippe Pot on 9 February. ‘The throne’, he declared, ‘is an office of dignity, not an hereditary possession, and as such it does not pass to the nearest relatives in the way a patrimony passes to its natural guardians. If, then, the commonwealth is not to be bereft of government, its care must devolve upon the Estates-General of the realm, whose duty is not to administer it themselves, but to entrust its administration to worthy hands.’ A Norman deputy put forward Orléans’s claim: ‘If the king needs a governor and tutor, or, as it is said, a regent, the duke intends no one other than himself to hold that office.’ Having listened to both sides, the deputies decided that ‘the lord and lady of Beaujeu should remain with the king as they have been hitherto’. The king was given neither regent nor tutor, his intellectual maturity being deemed sufficient. In the chancellor’s words: ‘Our king, young as he is, is of an extraordinary wisdom and seriousness.’ On 6 February the estates were given a list of possible members of the king’s council, but they left the choice to the monarch and the princes.

The assembly of 1484 exerted relatively little influence on the future development of France, but the deputies were reasonably satisfied with their achievements. The taille, which had reached 4.5 million livres under Louis XI, was reduced to 1,500,000 livres. The nobility regained hunting rights on their own lands. Only the clergy were disappointed: their efforts to get the Pragmatic Sanction reinstated were successfully opposed by a pro-papal lobby of cardinals and prelates.

The Estates-General came to an end on 7 March. Orléans felt disgruntled that he had not been given the regency. In May he was awarded the lands of Olivier le Daim, Louis XI’s hated barber, but this was not enough to satisfy him. He continued to intrigue with the duke of Brittany, Richard III of England and Maximilian of Habsburg, who ruled Austria and the Netherlands. However, the threat inherent in such a coalition was temporarily averted by the recall of the nobles to attend the coronation of Charles VIII on 30 May. But a new danger arose for the Beaujeus. The young king became infatuated with Orléans’s athletic prowess and may have pleaded to be rid of his sister’s domination. The duke plotted to abduct Charles, but was forestalled by the Beaujeus who fled with the king from Paris to the security of the small fortified town of Montargis. Here various members of the Orléans faction were dismissed from court. The duke, after protesting about this action, retired to his gouvernement of Ile-de-France.

The ‘Mad War’

The princely revolts, which cast a shadow across the early years of Charles VIII’s reign, have sometimes been read as the sequel to the War of the Public Weal of 1465. The two movements, however, were quite different. The rising of 1465 had been aimed at Louis XI’s overthrow and had lasted only a few months. The Mad War (Guerre folle), by contrast, was not directed at Charles VIII but at the Beaujeus; it also developed surreptitiously over a period of two years, erupting in 1487. A major reason for the long gestation was the independence of the duchy of Brittany, which offered a safe haven to malcontents from the French court. The rising was given its pejorative name soon afterwards by the contemporary historian Paolo Emilio, in his De rebus gestis Francorum.

Brittany’s independence of France manifested itself in various ways. Duke Francis II had paid only a simple homage to King Louis XI which entailed none of the obligations customarily incumbent on a vassal to his suzerain; he had not even gone this far in respect of Charles VIII. Brittany seemed bent on becoming a second Burgundy. Yet it was poor, and militarily far inferior to its French neighbour; it could only hope to defend itself by calling in foreign help, especially from England. But paradoxically the duchy’s independence was undermined by its own subjects, for many Breton nobles chose to serve the king of France, attaching themselves to his court. They retained important estates in Brittany and longed to unite the duchy to the kingdom which provided them with offices, honours and wealth. Another Breton weakness was Duke Francis II, a feckless dilettante who became senile about 1484. His only offspring were two daughters, Anne and Isabeau. The affairs of the duchy fell into the hands of Pierre Landais, its treasurer and a much hated parvenu.

In October 1484 the Breton exiles in France came to an agreement at Montargis with the French government. They swore to recognize Charles VIII as their duke’s successor, should the latter die without male issue. The king, for his part, promised to respect Breton privileges and to arrange good marriages for the duke’s two daughters. Francis’s riposte was to take an oath from his subjects acknowledging his daughters as his heirs. On 23 November he also made a treaty with Louis d’Orléans aimed at freeing Charles VIII from Beaujeu tutelage. The duke, at the same time, won the support of a number of French malcontents and courted the Parisians. Early in 1485, Dunois, Orléans’s evil genius, produced a manifesto condemning the government’s financial management. Orléans begged Charles to emancipate himself from the Beaujeus and return to Paris. The king refused, whereupon Orléans left the capital and started raising troops. He appealed to all his friends, including Francis II, for armed assistance, but the first fires of rebellion were soon put out by the Beaujeus. In February, Charles VIII returned to Paris and measures were taken against the rebels: Orléans was deprived of his governorships of Ile-de-France and Champagne, and Dunois of that of Dauphiné. On 23 March the duke made his submission and was readmitted to the council.

Orléans, however, was biding his time. On 30 August he issued a new manifesto critical of the government’s financial policy. In league with him were Beaujeu’s brother Jean, Constable of Bourbon, the comte d’Angoulême, the comte d’Etampes, Cardinal Pierre de Foix, the sire d’Albret and, of course, Dunois. The rebels hoped to have a larger army than the Beaujeus, who had just sent 4000 men to help Henry Tudor gain the English throne; but their hopes were soon dashed. Charles VIII besieged Orléans and Dunois in Beaugency and within a week the revolt was over. By mid-September the duke was again penitent and had to accept royal garrisons in the towns of his apanage. Dunois lost his office of great chamberlain and was banished to Asti for a year. Bourbon and the other rebels also capitulated. The Peace of Bourges (2 November) gave France several months of domestic tranquillity.

In June 1486, Maximilian of Habsburg, who had recently been elected King of the Romans, launched a surprise attack on France’s northern border. It soon ran out of steam because Maximilian was, as usual, unable to pay his troops, but it triggered off another rebellion within France. The pretext was again fiscal: the Beaujeus had imposed a new crue de taille of 300,000 livres in October. In January 1487, Orléans joined Dunois in Brittany, but Charles VIII and Anne de Beaujeu decided to deal with the rebels in Guyenne before attending to Brittany. Their campaign, which lasted a month and a half, comprised a series of successful sieges. The leading rebel in the south-west, Charles d’Angoulême, surrendered on 19 March and was married off to Louise of Savoy. The future King Francis I was their son.

The Breton Wars

In March 1487 an important treaty was signed at Châteaubriant between the king of France and some sixty Breton nobles, led by Marshal de Rieux. The king promised to supply them with an army of not more than 400 lances and 4000 foot, and to withdraw it once the French rebels left Brittany. Charles also undertook not to attack Duke Francis in person or any town where he might be residing. The Bretons, for their part, agreed to serve in the king’s army. But the Beaujeus were keen to overrun Brittany swiftly before any foreign power could come to its aid. In May a French army, much larger than that envisaged in the treaty, moved into the duchy. By 1 June it had reached Vannes, forcing the dukes of Brittany and Orléans to escape by sea to Nantes. On 19 June the French broke the treaty again by laying siege to Nantes. The operation was directed by Charles VIII from his headquarters at Ancenis. On 6 August, however, the siege was lifted, possibly because word had reached the king of Rieux’s impending betrayal. On 20 February, after returning to Paris, Charles presided over a meeting of the parlement which sentenced Orléans to the confiscation of all his property and also punished his accomplices. From the government’s point of view these were timely confiscations, since it was in urgent need of money.

Early in 1488, Rieux recaptured most of the Breton towns that had fallen into French hands. On 11 March, La Trémoïlle was appointed by Charles as his lieutenant-general in the duchy. Their correspondence survives, revealing the king, though still only eighteen, in full charge of military operations from his headquarters in Anjou: he gathered in supplies, armaments and troops and sent them into Brittany. The decisive phase of the campaign began when La Trémoïlle captured Châteaubriant. Fougères, which was reputed impregnable, fell to the French on 19 July. The Bretons received some armed assistance from the sire d’Albret, but nothing from Henry VII of England or from Maximilian. On 28 July the French won a decisive victory at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, capturing the duc d’Orléans along with many Bretons.

The Bretons sued for peace soon afterwards, but a majority of the French king’s council wanted to press on with the war; they reckoned that Brittany would be conquered in a month. The chancellor, however, warned against alienating the Bretons by using violence instead of investigating the legal rights of both sides, and the king, rather surprisingly, accepted this view. Peace was accordingly signed at Le Verger on 20 August. In exchange for the withdrawal of the French army from Brittany, Francis II promised to expel all foreign troops from his own soil. He also agreed not to marry his daughters without Charles VIII’s consent and to hand over four Breton towns to the French as securities, pending an examination of the claims of both parties. A few days later he died.

Anne, the duke’s elder daughter, was only eleven and a half at this time and the question of her guardianship immediately caused friction between the Bretons and the French. Francis II in his will had entrusted his daughters to the custody of Marshal de Rieux and the sire de Lescun; but on 18 September, Charles VIII claimed it for himself by virtue of his kinship with the girls. Matters were complicated further when Anne fell out with Rieux, who was planning to marry her off to Alain d’Albret. While Anne shut herself up in Rennes with Dunois and a force of German mercenaries, Rieux occupied Nantes, seizing the ducal treasury.

The French threat to the independence of Brittany was a matter of serious concern to other European powers, especially Spain, Maximilian of Habsburg and England. They used the respite provided by the Treaty of Le Verger to draw closer together. The Iberian peninsula had recently become more unified as a result of the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabella of Castile. As each was a monarch in his or her own right, they were known as ‘the Catholic Kings’. But the unification of Spain still had a long way to go. It needed to annex the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the south, and the counties of Cerdagne and Roussillon, not to mention the small kingdom of Navarre in the north. Ferdinand had claimed Roussillon since the accession of Charles VIII, but France did nothing to oblige him as long as she knew that the bulk of his army was engaged in the conquest of Granada. Yet if Ferdinand could not act himself, he could obstruct French designs by using other European powers, such as England. Though Henry VII was indebted to the French government for assistance in gaining his throne, he was unable to resist Ferdinand’s tempting offer of a matrimonial alliance. This was concluded in 1489, when Ferdinand’s daughter Catherine married Arthur Prince of Wales.

Maximilian of Habsburg viewed himself as the heir to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy (d. 1477), who had built up a powerful state stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland and sandwiched between France in the west and the Holy Roman Empire in the east. He had been succeeded by his daughter Mary, but some of her territories, notably Burgundy, had been forcibly annexed by Louis XI of France. He had wanted to win her by any means for his son, the future Charles VIII, but she would marry only Maximilian who thus acquired his claim to the old Burgundian territories. His efforts to regain those that had been taken by France, however, were hampered by his chronic insolvency and by the need to defend his patrimonial domain in central Europe (Austria and Bohemia) against the Hungarians and Turks. France, for her part, sought to embarrass Maximilian by meddling in the Low Countries. When he attacked France in 1484, the Beaujeus sent troops into Flanders. Some had to be recalled at the start of the Mad War, but in 1487 the French captured Saint-Omer and Thérouanne. In an engagement at Béthune on 27 July they captured the count of Nassau and the duke of Guelders, narrowly missing Maximilian himself. In the following year, Flanders rose in revolt. The inhabitants of Ghent declared themselves subjects of the king of France, while the people of Bruges seized Maximilian; they kept him prisoner for a few months and put to death his Flemish councillors. In May 1488 he regained his freedom as a result of French arbitration, and in 1489 he signed the Peace of Frankfurt.

England kept a close watch on continental events from her vantage point in Calais. In 1485 the Beaujeus had helped to place Henry Tudor on the English throne: they had supplied him with ships, troops and money. He was not ungrateful, but his subjects regarded the independence of Brittany as essential to their security. As the archbishop of Sens reported in 1489: ‘The English, in their king’s presence, told them [the French ambassadors] that Brittany was “little England”. They will send there up to the last man in England in spite of the king.’

On 11 December 1488, France declared war on Brittany. Within a few weeks her troops overran the duchy, occupying Brest, Concarneau and Vannes, but swift as it was, the French campaign was not quite swift enough. Troops sent by Brittany’s allies – Henry VII, Ferdinand of Aragon and Maximilian – soon arrived in the duchy. Encouraged by this help, Breton resistance stiffened; and by May all of Lower Brittany save Brest had reverted to the duchess Anne. Yet the Bretons were by no means united: several nobles went over to the French side during the year, while Rieux tried to win power for himself by isolating Anne from her allies. On 22 July 1489, Maximilian signed a peace treaty with France in which the question of Brittany was referred to a court of arbitration in Avignon chaired by the papal legate, Giuliano della Rovere, who at this time was a notorious Francophile. In October 1490 a truce ended the fighting in Brittany until 1 May 1491.

Rieux now abandoned Albret as a prospective husband for Anne and rallied to the idea of marrying her off to Maximilian, King of the Romans. This project became something of a reality in March 1490 when Maximilian appointed four proxies to marry the duchess. The ceremony, which had the approval of the Breton estates, took place in Rennes cathedral on 19 December. Such a marriage was in breach of the Treaty of Le Verger, which had forbidden the duchess to marry without the consent of the king of France, and gave serious offence to Alain d’Albret who had hoped to marry her himself. As captain of Nantes, he was well placed to influence events in the duchy. He began secret talks with Charles VIII and, on 2 January, offered him the keys of Nantes in return for major concessions which the king was unlikely ever to implement. French troops entered Nantes on 19 March and, after elaborate preparations, Charles made his own entry on Palm Sunday (4 April). As soon as the truce expired the French resumed their military operations in the duchy, capturing Vannes on 19 May and Concarneau on 6 June. La Trémoïlle, who had once again become lieutenant-general, took Redon and Guingamp. Only Rennes and the duchess remained independent.

Charles VIII now staged a coup d’état. Realizing that Louis d’Orléans might help a settlement of the Breton question, he ordered his release from prison in Bourges and pardoned his treason. The duke, for his part, was glad to make his peace with Charles. Much as they disliked this turn of events, the Beaujeus resigned themselves to it. On 4 September, Pierre de Beaujeu (now duc de Bourbon) and Orléans were formally reconciled and, according to Commynes, became inseparable. Meanwhile, the war in Brittany drew to a close. In mid-June 1491, 15,000 French troops encircled Rennes, and Anne, finding herself without money or effective allies, had to seek a settlement. On 27 October she was advised by the Breton estates to marry the king of France, but Anne was only prepared to exchange Rennes for her own personal freedom. Charles, meanwhile, waited patiently. On 15 October, Rennes capitulated. Under a treaty the town was declared to be neutral and handed over to the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and the prince of Orange, Anne’s freedom being respected.

The king did not ask for Anne’s hand. Instead, he offered her an escort should she wish to join Maximilian and 120,000 livres for her upkeep. He even offered to settle the wages of her foreign auxiliaries. When Anne refused to go into exile, Charles, invoking his rights of suzerain, offered her marriage to a high-ranking French nobleman, but she declared that she would marry only a king or the son of a king. Eventually, under strong pressure from members of her entourage, Anne, who was not yet fifteen, agreed to meet the French king. He came to Rennes on 15 November and, although his first impressions of the duchess were unfavourable, he agreed to take her as his wife. After the betrothal on 17 November, Charles returned to Plessis-lez-Tours.

His conscience was not, it seems, untroubled. In 1483 he had solemnly promised to marry Margaret of Austria, the daughter of Maximilian, and he was afraid that his breach of promise might stain his honour as head of the knightly Order of St Michael. What is more, he seems to have had tender feelings for the princess, who reciprocated them. She wept bitterly on hearing of the king’s marriage and kept his portrait for the rest of her life. When she eventually left France he gave her a valuable chain symbolizing eternal friendship. Another source of anxiety for Charles was the proxy marriage between Anne and Maximilian. Theologians were divided on its validity, though all agreed that an unconsummated marriage could easily be annulled by the church. The necessary dispensation was obtained without difficulty from Pope Innocent VIII.

Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany were married at the chateâu of Langeais on 6 December 1491. Both parties renounced their rights of ownership in Brittany. If Charles predeceased Anne, she was to remarry his successor. If he died without male issue, she was to regain possession of her duchy. On 4 January a Milanese diplomat reported from the French court: ‘There is no sign of rejoicing over this marriage on the part of the king or anyone else.’ Yet Bretons and Frenchmen were evidently pleased to see an end to their conflicts. Anne was welcomed by her French subjects, though doubts regarding the validity of her marriage were not immediately dispelled. They were confirmed by the accidental death of Dunois, one of its architects, shortly before it took place. Doubts were also to be raised by the premature deaths of children born of the marriage.

The Breton marriage, which effectively destroyed Brittany’s independence of France, was naturally viewed with concern by France’s neighbours. However, Maximilian was too preoccupied in central Europe to react forcefully. He was, it seems, far more irritated by the slowness with which the French returned Margaret of Austria and her dowry than by the overthrow of his own Breton marriage. Instead of resorting to arms, he tried to turn international opinion against Charles by branding him as an adulterer. Ferdinand of Aragon also was too busy besieging Granada to react strongly to the Franco-Breton marriage. He gladly accepted an offer from Charles to open serious talks on the future of Roussillon. By contrast, Henry VII of England protested at the marriage and assembled a fleet, but, as a French observer pointed out, this did not necessarily presage an English invasion of France.

Three peace treaties

In 1492 and 1493, Charles VIII signed three important treaties with neighbouring powers in which he gave away some territories and rights. Historians have commonly assumed that these sacrifices were intended to clear the path for his invasion of Italy in 1494. This explanation, however, may be too simple. While the treaties may have contributed to a European peace essential to the launch of Charles VIII’s campaign, they were concerned with problems unconnected with Italy.

In January 1491, soon after his marriage with Anne of Brittany, Charles VIII disbanded his army in the duchy. This was as much for financial as for political reasons: the Breton wars had been a heavy drain on his resources. Only by periodically appealing to the generosity of the ‘good towns’ had he been able to keep the taille at a constant level since 1489 (i.e. 2,300,000 livres per annum). Yet England continued to threaten French security. In the autumn of 1491, Henry VII announced his intention of asserting his claim to the French crown and persuaded Parliament to vote him subsidies. During the following summer an English invasion of northern France seemed imminent. Charles reluctantly levied a crue de taille and again called on the ‘good towns’ to help. On 2 October, Henry VII landed at Calais with a large army and soon afterwards laid siege to Boulogne; but the campaigning season was almost over and it soon became clear that the king had come to bargain, not to fight. He was fortunate to find Charles similarly disposed. On 3 November they signed the Peace of Etaples, the first perpetual peace between England and France since the Hundred Years War. In 1478, France had agreed to pay England an annual pension of 50,000 gold écus for the lifetime of the signatories and for a hundred years after the death of either of them. This pension had lapsed on the death of Louis XI so that France owed England 450,000 écus in 1492. This matter was now settled to France’s advantage. She agreed to pay 750,000 gold écus in twice-yearly instalments of 25,000 écus and her obligation to pay a tribute over a much longer period than fifteen years was dropped. All of this was in addition to an earlier undertaking by Charles to settle his wife’s English debt of 620,000 gold crowns.

Though expensive, the Treaty of Etaples was beneficial to France. Apart from its financial provisions, which represented a reduction of the burden incurred in 1478, it entailed no loss of French territory. The settlement of Brittany’s English debt freed the duchy’s towns that had served as securities for this debt, while denying Henry VII any pretext for intervention in Brittany’s affairs. In the words of an English historian: ‘The treaty of Etaples was a major setback to English interests. Brittany’s independence was gone. The entire southern shore of the Channel, except for Calais, had become French.’

On 3 November 1492, Charles VIII informed the inhabitants of Perpignan of his intention to hand back Roussillon and Cerdagne to Spain. His move may have been prompted by his father’s deathbed wish that the two counties, which he had seized unlawfully in 1463, should be restored to their rightful owner. Spanish prestige was riding high at the French court in 1492 following the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella. Yet negotiations between France and Spain dragged on into the autumn and, losing patience, Ferdinand urged his allies Henry VII and Maximilian to invade France. It was partly to avert the danger of a triple invasion that Charles concluded the Treaty of Barcelona on 19 January 1493. The perpetual alliance between France and Castile was renewed and given precedence over all other treaties entered upon by the parties, save with the Holy See. No marriage was to be arranged between the children of the Catholic Kings and any of France’s enemies without her permission. Roussillon and Cerdagne were ceded to Spain without prejudice to the rights and claims of future kings of France. The Catholic Kings did not promise to remain neutral in the event of a French invasion of Naples. Such a commitment was requested by Charles VIII in March 1493 and conceded in August; it was additional to the treaty, not part of it.

The King of the Romans was displeased by the treaties of Etaples and Barcelona. In December 1492 he claimed the whole of his Burgundian inheritance and invaded Franche-Comté. He did not advance into the Lyonnais, however, and in March 1493 agreed to negotiate with France. The upshot was the Treaty of Senlis, published on 23 May. Charles promised to return Margaret of Austria to her father and the bulk of her dowry, including Artois and Franche-Comté, to her brother, the archduke Philip. The king retained the county of Auxonne and provisionally Hesdin, Aire, Béthune and Arras. These towns, except Arras, were to be returned to Philip on his twentieth birthday (23 June 1498). A court of arbitration was to decide who owned the counties of Mâcon, Auxerre and Bar-sur-Seine. The treaty was completed by clauses guaranteeing freedom of trade and restoring property lost in the wars since 1470. An important aspect of the treaty was the implicit recognition of the marriage of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany. The Treaty of Senlis, like that of Barcelona, contained no agreement in respect of a future French intervention in southern Italy. Maximilian did allow Charles VIII a free hand in Naples, but this was not part of the treaty which was mainly prompted by the need to regularize Margaret of Austria’s position in the wake of the Franco-Breton marriage. However, it did not solve all the issues dividing the parties. Neither Maximilian nor Margaret ever forgot that Burgundy was the cradle of Charles the Bold’s power. All their efforts were later directed towards its reconquest, but, as long as Charles VIII was alive, Burgundy was not seriously threatened. The Peace of Senlis gave France five years of peace on her eastern frontier.

Although France did not as yet think of pushing her eastern frontier to the Rhine, Charles did not ignore the eastern and northern borders of his kingdom. Like his father and sister, he sought allies in Flanders, first the large communes, then the nobles running the government. In 1494, Philip the Fair, governor of the Low Countries, paid homage to the king for Flanders, thereby effectively guaranteeing much of France’s northern frontier. In 1492, Charles VIII was offered the suzerainty of Liège, but he wisely refused. Had he accepted, he would have had to intervene countless times in Flemish and German affairs.

A comparison of the three treaties of 1492 and 1493 suggests that the best for France was the Treaty of Etaples, for it disposed of England’s traditional enmity without loss of territory. France’s acquisition of Brittany made up for the loss of Franche-Comté and Artois in the Treaty of Senlis. She also scored a diplomatic triumph by obtaining implicit recognition of Charles VIII’s marriage. Only the Treaty of Barcelona was seriously damaging. The return of Roussillon and Cerdagne to Spain, though legally justified, failed to ensure stable Franco-Spanish relations: the two powers were soon to fall out in Italy. Yet, in exchange for her sacrifices, France, including Brittany, gained domestic peace for the remainder of Charles VIII’s reign.

THREE Charles VIII and the Italian Wars(1494–8)

In 1494, King Charles VIII invaded Italy and conquered the kingdom of Naples. His action marked the beginning of a series of French campaigns south of the Alps which have come to be known as the Italian Wars. They lasted on and off till the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559.

Italy at the end of the fifteenth century was a tempting prey to a more powerful neighbour, for it was divided into a large number of more or less independent states which could be played off against each other. The most important were Venice, Milan, Florence, the States of the Church and Naples. The Venetian republic, though threatened by the westward expansion of the Ottoman empire, was at the height of its power. In addition to an extensive territory on the mainland, it controlled lands along the Adriatic seaboard, in the Aegean and in the eastern Mediterranean. The Venetian constitution was the most stable in Italy, being vested in an aristocratic oligarchy and exercised through a well-balanced system of councils. To the west lay the duchy of Milan which the house of Visconti had created out of a collection of cities; it was now ruled by the house of Sforza under which it continued to prosper economically. A strong Milan was regarded by other Italian states as a necessary bulwark against foreign invasion and Venetian expansionism. Florence was ruled in theory by a popular government, but effective authority was in the hands of the Medici family. Though weak militarily, the republic was influential among the other Italian states on account of the Medicis’ extensive banking connections and genius for diplomacy. The States of the Church stretched diagonally across the Italian peninsula from the Tiber to the Po and comprised a number of virtually autonomous towns and districts. The city of Rome was continually disturbed by the feuds of its leading families, while dreams of republican government still stirred among its inhabitants. A principal aim of the Renaissance popes was to establish their authority firmly throughout their territories, a policy which often led them into nepotism. Naples, the only feudal monarchy in the peninsula, was a land of large estates ruled by turbulent barons. It was divided into two parts: Sicily belonged to the house of Aragon, while Naples and the mainland were ruled by an illegitimate branch of the same house. Notable among the lesser Italian states were the duchy of Savoy, sitting astride the Alps and under the shadow of France; the republic of Genoa, which had lapsed into political insignificance as a result of domestic squabbles; and the duchy of Ferrara, serving as a buffer state between Venice and the States of the Church.

Following the Peace of Lodi (1454) the preservation of order in Italy was made to depend on a close understanding between Milan, Florence and Naples, which Lorenzo de’ Medici strove untiringly to maintain. His son Piero, however, who succeeded him in 1492, lacked political judgement. By leaning too heavily on the side of Naples he upset the tripartite axis and precipitated a breakdown of relations between Milan and Naples. Isabella of Aragon, duchess of Milan, was the daughter of Alfonso duke of Calabria and granddaughter of Ferrante I, king of Naples. She and her husband, Giangaleazzo Sforza, felt overshadowed by the regent, Lodovico Sforza. Alfonso was always looking for an opportunity to extend his power in Italy. He also remembered that his grandfather, Alfonso I of Naples, had been named by Filippo Maria Visconti duke of Milan (d. 1447) as his heir. As the duke prepared to attack Milan, Lodovico turned to France for help. He probably did not wish to bring the king of France into the peninsula, only to shelter beneath the threat of a French invasion. But there were others, apart from Lodovico, who were urging the king of France to make good his own claim to the kingdom of Naples.

French intervention in the area had a long history. The emperor Charlemagne had carried the defence of Christendom to the heart of Italy. The Capetian kings, on the other hand, had been content to observe Italian affairs from afar. St Louis refused the kingdom of Sicily, but allowed his brother Charles comte d’Anjou to respond to calls for help from the papacy and to accept for himself and his heirs territories in southern Italy. In 1481, Louis XI inherited the Angevin lands, including the county of Provence and the kingdom of Naples, but was too near death to take possession of them. In 1486 the annexation of Provence to the kingdom of France was formally ratified by the Parlement of Paris; but the claim to Naples was disputed between the king of France and the duke of Lorraine.

An additional complication was the fact that Naples was a papal fief. Its hereditary transmission was determined by a bull of investiture of 1265 which conferred the kingdom on Charles d’Anjou and his heirs in the direct or collateral line up to the fourth degree of kinship. Charles VIII was too far removed in kinship from Charles d’Anjou to qualify, but this did not deter him from pressing his claim. In 1493, Naples was ruled by Ferrante I, the brother-in-law of Ferdinand of Aragon, as part of a kingdom comprising the whole of Italy south of the States of the Church except Sicily which belonged to Ferdinand. Ferrante was hardly a docile vassal of the papacy: he had been excommunicated by Pope Innocent VIII and had opposed the election of Alexander VI, who repeatedly called on the French king to attack Naples.

Charles VIII wanted Naples not only for itself but as a springboard from which to launch a crusade against the Turks. The fifteenth century had seen a rapid expansion of Turkish power westward under Sultan Mehmet II. After capturing Greece and Albania, the Turks established a foothold in southern Italy in August 1480. The death of Mehmet in May 1481 was followed by a respite. In 1482 the Turks were driven out of southern Italy, but they remained a threat. There was general agreement among the Christian powers of the need for a new crusade aimed ultimately at freeing Constantinople and the Holy Places; but there was no consensus as to who should lead it. Two possible candidates were Charles VIII and Maximilian, King of the Romans. Although Philippe de Commynes doubted Charles’s sincerity in proposing a crusade, ample evidence suggests otherwise. As Robert Gaguin, on an embassy to England, explained: the king, his master, was anxious to follow the example set by Henry IV of England, who at the end of his life had planned to lead an expedition to the Holy Land. He was also much impressed by the efforts of Ferdinand of Aragon to wrest the kingdom of Granada from the Saracens. A Venetian envoy wrote from Rome in June 1495: ‘You may be sure that the king’s intention is to attack the Turks. He has made the vow to God and would already have launched his enterprise if so many troubles had not befallen him. I, who have spoken to His Majesty, know this to be true.’

In planning a crusade Charles was almost certainly influenced by a number of legends. One was that of Charlemagne, who had allegedly freed the Holy Places and handed them over to the emperor in Constantinople. Another was that of a king of France, called Philip ‘le despourveu’, who had travelled incognito to Naples in order to rescue the king of Sicily and his daughter from the Saracens. A prophecy popular in the 1490s forecast that a French prince called Charles, crowned at fourteen and married to Justice, would destroy Florence and be crowned in Rome after purging it of bad priests. He would then sail to Greece, become its king, defeat the Turks and end his life as king of Jerusalem.

Charles was also subject to less fanciful influences. There were Neapolitan exiles at his court, such as Antonello San Severino, who wanted his help to return to their native land. He gave them pensions and the use of a fortress in Burgundy until he could raise an army in support of their cause. Alongside the Neapolitans were Frenchmen, like Etienne de Vesc or Guillaume Briçonnet, who could see opportunities of personal enrichment or advancement arise out of a French intervention in Italy. Briçonnet was anxious to get a red hat. Even outside the court there was support for a French expedition south of the Alps. The bankers of Lyon and the merchants of Marseille wanted to expand their commercial interests in the Mediterranean at the expense of the Venetians and Aragonese.

Even within Italy there were forces working for a French intervention. Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, the effective ruler of the duchy of Milan, urged the king of France as early as 1491 to make good his claim to Naples. He suggested that Genoa might serve as a base for an attack on the southern kingdom. In January 1494 he was much alarmed when Alfonso, who had tried several times to have him assassinated, became king of Naples. His appeals to the king of France became desperate. Among Italian states, Florence was the only ally of the king of Naples, for the silk trade on which much of its prosperity depended passed through his territories, yet even there support for a French invasion existed. Many Florentines, who resented the autocratic ways of Piero de’ Medici, looked favourably towards France. For example, the Dominican preacher Savonarola prophesied Charles VIII’s coming in his Lenten sermon of 1493. ‘I have seen’, he exclaimed, ‘in the sky a suspended sword and I have heard these words: Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter. The sword fell bringing about wars, massacres and numberless ills.’ As for the Venetians, their foreign policy was primarily dictated by commercial interests: they wanted to maintain the status quo in the Adriatic and were, in general, opposed to any move which might antagonize the Turks. Yet they needed French help against the Habsburgs, who, having gained control of Trieste and Fiume, were entertaining maritime ambitions. Thus the Venetians were among the first to encourage Charles VIII to seize Naples. Another Italian who exerted similar pressure upon the king was Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. He came to France shortly after his defeat in the papal conclave of 1492. Hoping to use a French invasion to topple his successful rival, Pope Alexander VI, he assured the French of the support of the Colonna faction which controlled the port of Ostia and several castles in the Roman Campagna.

Yet if Charles was under heavy pressure at home and abroad to invade Italy, support for such an enterprise among his own subjects was far from unanimous. According to a Florentine envoy it was opposed by the princes of the blood, most other nobles, royal councillors, prelates, finance ministers and all the people. Belgioioso, the Milanese ambassador, remarked: ‘It is truly a miracle that the king, young as he is, has persevered in his design in spite of all the opposition he has encountered.’ Charles himself informed the Italians in 1494 that he had left his kingdom ‘against the wishes of the princes and great nobles’. The opposition, however, was not united. Some great nobles resented the influence exercised by de Vesc and Briçonnet over the king. Louis d’Orléans wanted to divert the expedition from Naples to Milan, to which he had inherited a claim from his grandmother Valentina Visconti. The Bourbons showed no enthusiasm for the enterprise, yet took part in it. Nobles generally believed that the costs of equipping themselves for such a distant campaign would not be offset by the results. However, the main focus of opposition lay in the towns of northern France which refused royal demands for a subsidy. Many French people disapproved of the king leaving his kingdom when the Dauphin was still only an infant.

Commynes tells us that the French invasion of Italy in 1494 was poorly prepared. ‘All things necessary to so great an enterprise’, he writes, ‘were lacking.’ But Guillaume de La Mare, a usually reliable eyewitness, wrote on 27 March: ‘the Neapolitan campaign … is being prepared with the utmost prudence and zeal …There is nothing that the king is not putting into execution with extreme activity and care.’ Collecting the funds necessary to such a campaign was a matter of primary importance. Marshal d’Esquerdes informed Charles that he would need one million gold écus before the start of the campaign and another million once the army had crossed the Alps. The king managed to raise the first million by resorting to various expedients. The great nobles were asked for a loan of 50,000 ducats and contributions were also requested from the Chambre des comptes and other state departments. What the clergy offered is unknown, but a number of bonnes villes responded with varying generosity. Lyon offered 10,000 livres, while Paris refused to give anything. Amiens gave 3000 livres, half as much as the king had demanded. Parts of the royal domain were sold or mortgaged to the tune of 120,000 livres. The wages of royal officials and pensioners were delayed for six months. Finally, the taille was increased to 575,000 livres. As far as the second million was concerned, Charles relied mainly on contributions from various Italian cities.

On 13 February 1494, shortly after the death of Ferrante of Naples, Charles VIII travelled to Lyon and assumed the title of King of Sicily and Jerusalem. He dispatched an ambassador to the pope asking for the investiture of Naples, but on 18 April, at a secret consistory, Alexander conferred it on Ferrante’s son Alfonso. This volte-face by the pope, who had previously been hostile to Ferrante, did not cause the king to change his plans. On 29 July he reaffirmed his determination to go to Italy and appointed Pierre de Bourbon as lieutenant-general of the kingdom in his absence. Meanwhile, Charles assembled his army.

At the start of the summer of 1494 the king’s gendarmerie comprised slightly more than 1500 lances: that is to say, about 6000 to 8000 troops reinforced by the cavalry, archers and crossbowmen of the royal household. In addition there were some Italian lances, comprising fewer men than the French ones (one auxiliary and one page per man-at-arms). The infantry consisted of 4000 to 5000 men raised in France and about as many Swiss mercenaries. Thus it was an army of about 16,000 to 20,000 men which Charles led into Italy. To this number must be added the sizeable amount of non-combatants such as valets and pages, secretaries, merchants, camp followers and vagabonds in quest of loot. An important component of the French army was the artillery, which was larger and more advanced technically than any other and accounted for 8 per cent of the king’s total military expenditure. In 1489, Charles had about 150 pieces, dozens of gunners and large quantities of gunpowder. He was allegedly the first to use in Italy cannon balls made of iron instead of stone.

Charles crossed the Alps at the end of August, using the Mont Genèvre pass. His principal lieutenants were Stuart d’Aubigny, Louis d’Orléans and Gilbert de Montpensier. The army’s passage through the mountains was eased by the fact that the artillery was sent to Genoa by sea. On reaching Piedmont the army marched on Asti, which belonged to the duc d’Orléans, before advancing on Turin. The house of Savoy had for some time distanced itself from France, but the duke was a child and his mother, Blanche, could only welcome her cousin the French king, backed, as he was, by such a considerable force. On 5 September he was magnificently received in Turin. Meanwhile, at Rapallo, the first serious engagement of the campaign took place, when a Neapolitan attack on Genoa was repulsed by a fleet commanded by Louis d’Orléans. After spending nearly a month in Asti, Charles moved to Milan. On 22 October, following the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, the citizens asked Lodovico to become their duke. Although there were other claimants to the duchy, including Louis d’Orléans, Charles did not oppose Lodovico for fear of prejudicing his own campaign.

Meanwhile, in Florence, news of the French invasion revived the myth of liberty so closely associated with the French crown. Piero de’ Medici, unlike his father, had failed to remain primus inter pares. His government had become increasingly arbitrary. Without the consent of the Signoria he had drawn closer to Naples and broken the city’s alliance with France, a move seen by the Florentines as a serious abuse of power. Their civic tradition was deeply rooted in the Carolingian legend. According to Villani, Charlemagne had given them independence and freedom while Charles d’Anjou had caused the Guelf cause to triumph over imperial tutelage. Charles VIII was regarded as their descendant and his coming was taken by the Florentines as an opportunity to demonstrate their unshaken loyalty to the French alliance. As the French army penetrated Tuscany there was panic in Florence. On 30 October, after a show of resistance, Piero handed over to Charles the Signoria’s fortresses. His caution or cowardice precipitated his downfall. On 9 November the Medici regime was toppled.

The French invasion of Italy also coincided with a widely felt eschatological vision. Many people believed that the old world was coming to an end and a new Golden Age was about to begin. This seemed confirmed by a profusion of natural phenomena such as eclipses, floods and thunderbolts. Charles VIII appeared as the man of Providence chosen to bring peace, liberty and justice, to purify the church, to drive the infidel out of Jerusalem and to rid Italy of her shame. He was still in Pisa when he was visited by a deputation from Florence headed by Savonarola, who, claiming to be God’s spokesman, acclaimed him as ‘an instrument in the hands of the Lord’. The friar urged Charles to fulfil his divine mission of purification, begging him at the same time to show mercy to the people of Florence. Meanwhile, the Pisans asked to be released from Florentine tutelage, but Charles would give them only vague promises; the support of Florence was more precious to him at this moment than the gratitude of the Pisans. On 17 November he entered Florence in triumph. However, his accord with the republic alienated the duke of Milan who had hoped to recover two former Genoese towns – Sarzana and Pietrasanta – which Florence had seized in the past. He recalled 6000 troops who were serving alongside the French and began to intrigue against them with other powers.

From the moment Charles crossed the Alps until his arrival in Naples, his march through Italy was a triumphal progress. Wherever he passed, large crowds flocked to acclaim him. Each town received him in the same way: an official deputation, made up of senior churchmen and representatives of the local government, would come forward to meet him, they would hand him the keys of the town, and a length of its wall would be destroyed as a mark of subservience. Great efforts were also made to decorate the streets in the king’s honour. Precious hangings adorned the façades of houses and temporary monuments, such as triumphal arches, were erected in his path. Inscriptions comparing him to Caesar or Alexander the Great stressed the sacredness of his mission as well as his invincibility. Many coins bearing his effigy were struck. Wherever the king made his entry he was accompanied by a large military contingent. Italian spectators were much impressed by the sheer size of the French army and by the colourful costumes worn by the king and his nobles.

The unanimous capitulation of towns to Charles VIII was inspired not only by his reputation as a divinely appointed liberator but also by fear of the force at his disposal. The size of the French army, its formidable armament and the fighting qualities of its troops were awesome to the Italians. Although the invasion met with little resistance and was, therefore, largely bloodless, a few incidents, such as the sack of a fortress at Fivizzano, revealed the cruelty of the French. They took no prisoners, and massacred everyone regardless of sex or age. They seemed to have respect neither for God nor the devil. The furia francese was compared by some observers to a tempest. Not content with shedding blood, the French liked to set fire to everything. An eyewitness, Passaro, described them as worse than the Turks and the Moors, worse even than savages.

The French invasion divided Italy rather than helping to unify it. The various states fell into two camps as they sided with or against Charles. His coming created a climate of tension in the peninsula in which antagonisms hitherto latent became manifest. A wind of revolt blew across the peninsula, reviving old conflicts between Guelfs and Ghibellines. Mercenary captains offered their services to the highest bidder. Towns of the contado rid themselves of the tutelage of the Signoria. In Tuscany, revolts broke out in Pisa, Montepulciano and Arezzo. The fragile edifice of the States of the Church also collapsed: at Perugia, the Baglioni strengthened their authority at the pope’s expense. The towns of the papal states capitulated to the French in rapid succession. Partisans of the Colonna harried the pope up to the gates of Rome. Alexander VI, finding himself abandoned by his court and the people of Rome, prepared to fortify Castel Sant’Angelo in self-defence.

The pope had every reason to be fearful as the French drew closer to Rome. He was not unduly worried about the threat to the Aragonese regime in Naples, which had not always been submissive to his suzerainty, but he did not wish to see the French permanently established in the southern kingdom. On the other hand, he could not risk opposing the king of France for fear of provoking a Gallican reaction and reviving an earlier threat that a General Council would be created bent on reforming the church in its head and members. Charles, for his part, did not wish to incur excommunication which would harm his international standing. So both sides played a devious game. In a bid to avoid Charles’s presence in Rome, Alexander offered to meet him on the way, but the king declared himself unworthy of such an honour. His Christian duty, he explained, was to do the pope reverence in his own apostolic palace. He assured him of his desire to lead a crusade against the Turks after reconquering his Neapolitan inheritance.

As the king pressed on through Orvieto, Viterbo and Bracciano, his army occupied Civitavecchia. On 20 December the French vanguard was joined outside Ostia by 2000 infantry that had come from Genoa by sea. The talks with the pope, meanwhile, dragged on. Charles wanted the investiture of Naples and the surrender into his own hands of Djem, the sultan’s brother, who was being held hostage in Rome. Alexander wriggled for as long as possible, but eventually gave way. On 29 December the French army entered Rome as a few Neapolitan troops who had come to defend the pope left the city. Charles made his entry by torchlight on the night of 31 December. He had cause to feel satisfied with his progress to date. Within four months he had reached the Holy City without encountering any major obstacle; his army was more or less intact.

On 15 January, Charles and the pope came to an agreement and next day the king knelt before the Vicar of Christ after attending mass at St Peter’s. On 20 January, Alexander celebrated mass in the basilica before the king and a congregation of 15,000 people. Among the cardinals present was the newly created Guillaume Briçonnet. The service lasted five hours, after which the pope blessed the French troops and gave them general absolution. Charles took his leave of the pope on 28 January. He had gained right of passage for his army through the States of the Church, but Alexander had not given him the investiture of Naples.

The French now resumed their southward advance. On 4 February they attacked the fortress of Monte San Giovanni. As the king wrote:

My cousin Montpensier had arrived before me with my artillery … and after firing for four hours my said artillery had made a breach wide enough for an assault. I ordered it to be made by men-at-arms and others, and though the place was held by 5–600 good fighting men as well as its inhabitants, they went in in such a manner that, thanks to God [the town] has been taken with little loss to me, and to the defenders great loss, punishment and great example to those others who might think of obstructing me.

As the French were entering the kingdom of Naples, its people rose in rebellion. King Alfonso fled to Sicily after abdicating in favour of his son Ferrandino, who, finding himself abandoned by most of his followers, shut himself up in the Castel Nuovo in Naples. On 19 February the first French troops entered the city. Soon afterwards Ferrandino accepted the offer of honourable retirement in France.

Charles VIII had improved on Caesar’s achievement for, as Guicciardini wrote, the king had conquered even before he had seen. This he owed largely to the reputation which had preceded him, clearing obstacles from his path. Without exception every town on his march south had opened its gates to him, making possible the spanking pace of his progress. In the words of Marsilio Ficino, Charles ‘had shaken the world by a nod of his head’. Chroniclers were dumbfounded by the effortlessness of his victory. One remarked that he had conquered Naples with a falcon on his wrist. Some contemporaries looked for rational explanations of his triumph; others just called it a miracle.

The king’s first task was to reward all the people who had assisted him in his campaign. They were showered with offices and lands. Eleven Frenchmen and only one Neapolitan were appointed to the council of state (sacro consilio). Frenchmen also acquired the principal offices of state, the only notable exceptions being the prince of Salerno and Giacomo Caracciolo, who recovered their offices of admiral and chancellor respectively. The governorships of provinces and towns were distributed in the same way. Etienne de Vesc, one of the main promoters of the Neapolitan expedition, acquired a veritable principality: he became duke of Nola and Ascoli, count of Avellino, great chamberlain and president of the Sommaria or chamber of accounts. The Colonna family was rewarded with dozens of fiefs. Several profitable marriages were also concluded between French noblemen and Neapolitan heiresses. Thus Louis de Luxembourg married Eleonora de Guevara, whose lands in Apulia yielded an annual income of 30,000 to 40,000 ducats, and Pierre de Rohan, marshal de Gié, married Eleonora’s younger sister.

However, the French conquest of Naples was not acceptable in the long term to other Italian states. In March 1495, as the king of France and his troops were enjoying the pleasures, reputable and disreputable, of Naples, four states – Milan, Venice, the papacy and Mantua – formed a league aimed at their expulsion from the peninsula. They planned to sever Charles’s communications with France. The king’s position was made all the more critical by the material aid promised to the league by Maximilian (who had succeeded as emperor in 1493) and King Ferdinand of Aragon. Maximilian recalled that the French expedition had been intended as a crusade, not a conquest, while Ferdinand argued that Charles had broken the Treaty of Barcelona. The league was the beginning of official interference by Spain in Italian affairs and more generally of foreign domination of the peninsula; it soon reached out beyond Italy, becoming a European coalition. Not all the Italian states joined the league. Florence and Ferrara abstained, and the hostility that divided the latter from Venice showed that the league could not eradicate internal rivalries. In spite of the challenge posed by the French conquest of Naples, Italian politics continued to focus on local interests. However, contemporary historians and chroniclers argued that the Italian states needed to work more closely together. As from 1494 the political outlook of many Italians, notably Machiavelli, was not entirely devoid of a certain national consciousness.

Charles wisely decided not to linger in his southern kingdom but to return home as quickly as possible. He divided his army into two parts: one to defend Naples under Gilbert de Montpensier as viceroy, the other to escort him back to France. On 20 May, Charles left Naples and travelled to Rome in only ten days. To avoid meeting him the pope retired first to Orvieto, then to Perugia. Meanwhile, in northern Italy, Louis d’Orléans, acting on his own authority, pre-empted a move by Lodovico Sforza against Asti by attacking the Milanese town of Novara. As this was an imperial fief, Louis’s move offered Maximilian a legitimate pretext for armed intervention. Charles, much alarmed by this turn of events, asked Pierre de Bourbon to send reinforcements in haste to Asti. Meanwhile, the king continued his march northward: he was at Siena on 13 June and at Pisa on the 20th, having by-passed Florence. While part of his army moved on Genoa, the bulk crossed the Appenines. Waiting for them on the north side was the league’s much larger army commanded by the marquis of Mantua. Charles was inclined to seek terms for a free passage, but Marshal Trivulzio argued successfully in favour of engaging the enemy. On 6 July the armies collided at Fornovo during a thunderstorm. Charles was nearly captured several times in the course of the battle which was extremely bloody, especially for the league. The marquis of Mantua claimed it as a victory, but it was really a draw; the French got through, admittedly with the loss of much baggage.

After covering 200 kilometres in seven days, Charles reached Asti on 15 July. Although annoyed with his cousin Louis for his unauthorized attack on Novara, he went to his assistance early in September. As he marched on Vercelli, the league opened talks which ended in a treaty (9 October): Novara was handed back to Milan, Orléans kept Asti, and Genoa was ‘neutralized’, though the French were still allowed to use its harbour facilities. Even more important, however, was Lodovico’s decision to abandon the league which promptly fell apart. On 15 October the situation in north Italy was sufficiently settled for Charles to undertake his homeward journey across the Alps.

Meanwhile, in the kingdom of Naples, the French under Montpensier found themselves subjected to mounting pressure as the Venetians attacked several towns along the Adriatic coast, and Ferrandino reoccupied Naples itself and laid siege to a number of fortresses within the city. Charles sent a fleet to Naples, but it was scattered by storms and never reached its destination. On 5 October, Montpensier signed a truce which prepared for his capitulation on 2 December unless he received help by that date. When it failed to materialize, several French garrisons surrendered. Gaeta and a few strongholds in Apulia held out longer, but they gradually fell to Ferrandino. Charles VIII clung to his rights in the kingdom, but the death of his infant son, Charles-Orland, prevented him from leading a rescue operation, for the king was traditionally bound to stay at home as long as his succession was not assured. He was also short of money. Even so, he spent the spring of 1496 in Lyon trying to organize two expeditions: one to relieve Montpensier, who was besieged in Atella, the other to defend Asti against attack by the duke of Milan. Early in 1498, Charles managed to win over his erstwhile opponent, the marquis of Mantua; but the king died on 7 April, before he was able to send a new expedition to Italy.

It is difficult to regard Charles’s Italian campaign as anything other than a disaster for France. One of its consequences was the demystification of the French king in Italian eyes. They had looked up to him as the heir of Charlemagne and as a benefactor chosen by God to bring them freedom and liberty. Instead, they had found him to be a repulsively ugly little man betraying a character not much better than his physique. His policies too upset them by their waywardness. The Florentines, in particular, felt betrayed by his apparent encouragement of the Pisan rebellion. In Naples he came to share in the execration aroused by the viciousness of his entourage. Italians everywhere believed that Charles had failed in his mission: he had brought them neither liberty nor justice; he had not reformed the church; and, far from leading a crusade, he had exacerbated the Turkish threat. The war he had unleashed had brought famine and inflation in its wake. In brief, Charles now appeared not as a benefactor but as an oppressor. As for the French soldiers and their captains, they had shown themselves to be worse than Turks or Moors: they were barbarians without regard for human life, who desecrated churches and turned palaces into pigsties.

The French were to pay a heavy price for their debauches in Naples. They brought home a new and terrible disease, syphilis, which they called the ‘Neapolitan sickness’ while the Italians called it the ‘French sickness’. The first descriptions of it date from the battle of Fornovo. Cumano, a military doctor to the Venetian troops, relates that he saw ‘several men-at-arms or foot soldiers who, owing to the ferment of the humours, had “pustules” on their faces and all over their bodies’. Benedetto, another Venetian doctor, reported: ‘Through sexual contact, an ailment which is new, or at least unknown to previous doctors, the French sickness, has worked its way in from the West to this spot as I write. The entire body is so repulsive to look at and the suffering is so great, especially at night, that this sickness is even more horrifying than incurable leprosy or elephantiasis, and it can be fatal.’ Charles VIII’s mercenaries, who were disbanded in the summer of 1495, spread the new disease when they returned to their own countries. France was the first affected. Jean Molinet, the official historian of the house of Burgundy, blamed the king for bringing home the ‘pox’. In Lyon an agreement was made in March 1496 between the city magistrates and the king’s officers to expel from the city ‘persons afflicted with the great pox’. In Besançon, in April, the municipal authorities granted compensation to several victims of ‘what is known as the Neapolitan sickness’. Paris was affected by the autumn of 1496 at the latest, as we are informed by a ledger at the Hôtel-Dieu. Although by 1497 almost the entire kingdom was experiencing the epidemic, certain towns were particularly badly hit, such as Bordeaux, Niort, Poitiers and Rouen. Less than ten years after Fornovo the whole of Europe was affected. The scourge stimulated various theories as to its origin. Ambroise Paré, along with many others, was to invoke ‘God’s wrath, which allowed this malady to descend upon the human race, in order to curb its lasciviousness and inordinate concupiscence’.

FOUR Louis XII, ‘Father of the people’(1498–1515)

Louis duc d’Orléans was 36 years old when he succeeded his cousin as king of France on 7 April 1498. He was physically unattractive and subject to frequent bouts of ill-health, yet he was always a keen huntsman and took part in much violent exercise. From the start of his reign he sought popularity. He showed goodwill to the house of Bourbon by allowing the marriage of Suzanne, daughter of Pierre and Anne de Beaujeu, to her cousin, Charles de Bourbon-Montpensier, and he sought the loyalty of former opponents like Louis de La Trémoïlle. When delegates from Orléans excused themselves for not giving him more support in the past, Louis said that a king of France ought not to avenge the quarrels of a duc d’Orléans.

Louis XII ruled with a small council of less than ten members. Foremost among them was Georges d’Amboise, archbishop of Rouen, an old friend of the king whom he had served in various capacities. He had been imprisoned for two years (1487–90) for his part in Louis’s rebellion against the Beaujeus, and during Charles VIII’s Italian campaign he had helped to relieve Louis in Novara. Amboise became one of Louis XII’s most influential advisers. He combined a long experience of public affairs with dogged loyalty, but he lacked the duplicity needed for success in politics. That may be why he failed in his ambition to become pope. Another important member of the council was Florimond Robertet, an experienced civil servant with an unusual competence in foreign languages. After serving Charles VIII as a notary and secretary, he was drawn into the orbit of the house of Orléans by his marriage to the daughter of the treasurer, Michel Gaillard. Louis XII confirmed him as councillor and maître des comptes and Robertet later became secrétaire des finances and trésorier de France; but it was as the king’s personal secretary that he exercised an influence which may have been at least equal to that of Georges d’Amboise.

The king’s remarriage

One thought preoccupied Louis XII at his accession: to rid himself of his barren and deformed wife, Jeanne de France, and remarry Charles VIII’s widow, Anne of Brittany. He had been forced to marry Jeanne by her father Louis XI as a sinister ploy to ensure the early termination of the Orléans branch of the royal family and the absorption of its lands into the royal domain. For a long time Louis had refused to live with Jeanne, preferring a life of unrestrained debauchery, but eventually he had accepted the marriage to the extent of seeing his wife from time to time. He even slept with her, despite the physical revulsion which she inspired in him. He made no attempt to repudiate her during her father’s lifetime or that of her brother, Charles VIII, but only his conscience could stop him now that he was king if the pope would declare his marriage null and void.

Fortunately for Louis, Pope Alexander VI was prepared to subordinate spiritual values to his own temporal interests, notably the advancement of his illegitimate son Cesare Borgia, who was looking for a wife and rich fiefs. France could provide both, so Alexander sent Cesare to congratulate Louis on his accession and acceded to his matrimonial designs: on 29 July he issued a brief listing eight reasons for regarding the king’s marriage as null and void and Louis expressed his gratitude by making Cesare duc de Valentinois. The pope next set up a tribunal in France. It was generally assumed that Queen Jeanne would not face up to the ordeal of litigation, but she decided to defend herself. Many people, however, refused to assist her for fear of offending the king. When the tribunal met at Tours on 10 August 1498, the procureur du roi asked for the annulment of Louis’s marriage and that he should be allowed to remarry. Jeanne denounced the procureur’s statements as unworthy of refutation. Even so, she answered intimate questions with dignity. She denied that violence had been used to extort Louis’s consent to the marriage and, while conceding that she lacked the beauty of most other women, denied that she was incapable of sexual intercourse. While the tribunal was still sitting, Cesare Borgia arrived in Lyon bearing papal gifts: a cardinal’s hat for Georges d’Amboise and the dispensations required by Louis XII to marry Anne of Brittany. But, perhaps deliberately, Cesare did not reach the French court till judgement had been given in the king’s matrimonial suit.

Between 25 September and 15 October the tribunal examined witnesses – four for the queen and twenty-seven for the king. Jeanne’s counsel pointed out that Louis had frequently slept with her. He also produced a dispensation from Sixtus IV which had removed impediments to their marriage. On 27 October, Louis was himself interrogated, but his answers were so inconclusive that he had to be questioned again, this time under oath. He solemnly swore that he had never had intercourse with Jeanne. Since royal perjury was unthinkable, the tribunal felt bound to accept his word.

On 17 December the cardinal of Luxemburg announced the court’s verdict: the king’s marriage had never taken place. Not everyone, however, would accept this outcome. Some well-known preachers spoke in support of Jeanne, who had won much public support during her ordeal. Rather than stifle such opinions, Louis allowed time to silence them. He was also generous to Jeanne. She was promised for the rest of her life ‘the fine and honest train’ due to the daughter, sister and ex-wife (even though the marriage was allegedly non-existent) of three successive monarchs. She was also given the duchy of Berry and devoted the rest of her life to the service of God. She founded an order of nuns, the Annonciades, and began building a convent in Bourges. In 1503 she took the veil herself and won admiration by her self-mortification. She died two years later and was canonized in 1950.

Louis was now free to marry Charles VIII’s widow. Anne attracted him for at least two reasons: first, she was only twenty-two years old and had proved herself capable of childbearing; secondly, by marrying her he would retain control of Brittany. While mourning her late husband, Anne asserted her independence as duchess. She appointed Jean de Chalon, prince of Orange, to administer Brittany in her name and instructed various towns in the duchy to send representatives who would accompany her to Paris for her meeting with the king.

Anne could drive a hard bargain. When Louis first proposed to her, she reminded him that he was not yet free to marry and seemed doubtful about his chances of getting his marriage annulled. She even declared that no verdict on this matter, however authoritative, would satisfy her conscience. Yet Anne’s religious scruples were, it seems, less strong than her desire to become queen for the second time. On 19 August she and Louis reached an agreement at Etampes. He promised to hand over to her representatives three Breton towns which had been under French occupation. Anne, for her part, promised to marry Louis as soon as he was free. Shortly afterwards she returned to Brittany.

On 7 January 1499, Anne and Louis signed their marriage contract in Nantes. This laid down that in the event of issue from the marriage, the second male child, or a female in default of a male, would inherit Brittany. If only one son were born, the heir to the duchy would be his second son. In any event, Anne would administer the duchy in her lifetime and draw its revenues. If she died first, Louis was to administer Brittany during his life; it would then revert to Anne’s relatives and heirs exclusively. On 19 January, Louis undertook to respect all the rights and privileges traditionally enjoyed by the Bretons.

Meanwhile, on 8 January, Louis and Anne were married in the château of Nantes. Though often praised for her beauty, Anne had one leg shorter than the other, an infirmity which she concealed by wearing a high heel. Her genetic antecedents were poor, which doubtless explains why so many of her pregnancies failed. Her first child by Louis, Claude, born on 13 October 1499, was for eleven years the only child in the royal nursery and the pivot of Louis’s matrimonial diplomacy. Though plain, Claude was a desirable match on account of her rich dowry which included the Orléans patrimony, the duchy of Brittany, and the French claims to Asti, Milan, Genoa and Naples.

The conquest of Milan

On becoming king, Louis XII acquired the Angevin claim to Naples. He also regained the county of Asti which he had ceded to Charles VIII in 1496; but he was mainly interested in the duchy of Milan, to which he had a personal claim dating back to the marriage of his grandfather Louis to Valentina, daughter of Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan. The house of Sforza now ruled Milan and Louis XII, as duc d’Orléans, had tried on several occasions to make good his claim.

Milan was among the richest, most powerful states in Italy. It had a flourishing agriculture and its arms industry enjoyed a reputation equalled only by that of Germany. Strategically, the duchy was well situated: in the north it controlled the mountain passes leading to the rich cities of south Germany; in the east its influence extended to the middle Po valley; and in the south it exercised a semi-protectorate over Genoa, giving it an outlet to the Mediterranean and access to Genoese banking facilities. For all these reasons, Milan was the envy of its neighbours. The Swiss wanted to annex the area near Lake Como controlling access to the Alpine passes; and Venice, having seized Brescia and Bergamo, was not averse to a further westward expansion of her terra firma.

In seeking to make good his claim to Milan, Louis needed allies in Italy. He won over Pope Alexander VI by conniving at the creation of a new principality in the Romagna for Cesare Borgia, at the expense of lesser Italian states. From his own resources Louis gave Cesare the duchy of Valentinois, as we have seen, and also a pension and the hand of Charlotte d’Albret. He secured the neutrality of Venice by agreeing to her annexation of Cremona. Success also smiled on his diplomatic efforts outside Italy. Henry VII of England, who needed to consolidate his position at home, was easily persuaded to renew the Treaty of Etaples. Ferdinand of Aragon was glad to see the French king concerning himself with Milan rather than Naples. Philip the Fair, who ruled the Netherlands, took the unusual step in July 1499 of doing homage to Louis for the fiefs of Flanders, Artois and Charolais. The Swiss allowed him to raise troops in the cantons in return for a perpetual pension and an annual subsidy. As for Philibert duke of Savoy, he granted the king free passage through his territories in return for an annual pension of 22,000 livres payable after the conquest of Lombardy and a monthly payment of 3000 gold écus during the campaign. Within Milan itself, Lodovico Sforza was seen by many as a usurper. He claimed that he had assumed the dukedom in 1494 by popular invitation, but was widely suspected of having poisoned his predecessor. Unlike the king of France, he could count on little outside support.

While Louis’s diplomats paved the way for a new French invasion of Italy, he reorganized his army. Some companies were disbanded and new ones formed. In the spring of 1499 he recruited infantry, mainly in Switzerland: eventually he built up an army of more than 6000 horse and 17,000 foot. After coming to Lyon on 10 July 1499, Louis inspected his troops but decided not lead them himself. His council apparently thought it would be beneath the dignity of a king of France to measure himself against a mere Sforza, but perhaps more important was the tradition that the king should not leave France as long as he had no direct male heir to succeed him. Command of the army was accordingly entrusted to three captains: Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, Stuart d’Aubigny (soon to be replaced by Charles de Chaumont) and Louis de Ligny.

The vanguard entered the Milanese on 18 July, on the same day as the artillery and the rest of the cavalry left Lyon. A fortnight later the whole army regrouped in the Lombard plain. Sforza played for time by offering Louis the Milanese succession. His proposal, however, was rejected, and the French penetrated the Milanese from Asti. Their savage sacking of two small towns, Rocca d’Arezzo and Annona, was calculated to spread terror across the duchy. At Valenza they employed a different tactic. Three captured Italian captains were set free without a ransom being exacted, an act of royal clemency which encouraged other towns to surrender. Alessandria, however, after resisting a three-day siege, suffered terribly at the hands of the Swiss. Meanwhile, Genoa rallied to Louis, the Venetians marched on Lodi and a number of Lombard towns rebelled. On 2 September, Sforza fled to the imperial court. The citizens of Milan, anxious to avoid a sack, capitulated soon afterwards. Amidst popular rejoicing, the arms of Sforza were replaced by those of King Louis.

On 6 October, Louis made his entry into ‘his city of Milan’ for the first time. He passed under a triumphal arch bearing the inscription: ‘Louis king of the Franks, duke of Milan’. Representatives of various Italian states came to congratulate him. Louis spent barely two months in the Milanese during which he tried to win the hearts of the people by severely punishing his troops for any excesses. He also abolished some old hunting laws, which were resented by the local nobility. While important families that had been persecuted by the Sforzas were given back their privileges and property, favours were showered on Sforza’s followers in the hope of winning them over. But Louis showed less concern for humble folk. He reduced direct taxation but raised indirect taxes. He also distributed offices, lands and lordships to captains who had distinguished themselves in the recent campaign.

With men of trust occupying key posts in the duchy and a sizeable number of garrisons planted in various towns, Louis felt able to return home. But no sooner had he left Milan than his troops began to misbehave. The Milanese soon regretted Sforza’s rule and when he invaded in January 1500 he was acclaimed almost everywhere as a liberator. On 25 January the people of Milan threw out the French (except for a garrison in the castle), forcing them to withdraw to Novara, but Sforza obliged them to go further still. Early in March a new French army commanded by La Trémoïlle invaded Italy and advanced on Novara, where Sforza lay in wait. A battle seemed imminent, but his Swiss soldiers refused to fight their compatriots on the French side. La Trémoïlle allowed them to return to Switzerland. Sforza tried to conceal himself among them, but was recognized, taken to France and imprisoned at Loches, where he died a few years later.

Georges d’Amboise, meanwhile, reorganized the administration of Milan. He pardoned the citizens in the king’s name and reduced the fine they had been asked to pay. A new French-style government was set up comprising two governors – one civil, one military – working alongside a senate with a Franco-Italian membership, its functions similar to those of a parlement in France. In May 1500 he handed over the government of Milan to his nephew, Chaumont d’Amboise.

The reconquest of Naples

Louis next turned his attention to Naples, where many of his courtiers had lordships they hoped to recover. He revived the idea, first mooted under Charles VIII, of taking the king of Aragon into partnership. In the secret Treaty of Granada (11 November 1500) the two monarchs agreed to conquer Naples jointly and then divide it between them. Louis was to get Naples, Campania, Gaeta, the Terra di Lavoro, the Abruzzi and the province of Campobasso along with the titles of king of Naples and of Jerusalem; Ferdinand was to get Apulia and Calabria and the titles of king of Sicily and duke of Calabria and Apulia. However, for some unknown reason, two provinces – Basilicata and Capitanata – were overlooked in the treaty.

In the spring of 1501, Louis raised a new army and placed it under the command of Stuart d’Aubigny. After a general muster at Parma on 25 May, the army crossed the Appenines. Meanwhile, Ferdinand sent an army under Gonzalo da Cordoba to establish a foothold in Calabria and along the coast of Apulia. Early in July, the French invaded the kingdom of Naples using the same terror tactics as in the Milanese. Any town offering resistance, however slight, was brutally sacked. The worst massacre was at Capua where all the defenders were put to the sword and the entire population – estimated at 8000 – was wiped out. The streets flowed with blood as the French and Swiss raped, looted and burned. Against such barbarity Federigo III of Naples offered no resistance. On 4 August the French entered Naples. Federigo, who threw himself on their mercy, was better treated than Sforza had been. He was allowed to travel to France in regal style and given a pension and the county of Maine, spending his last years peacefully in the Loire valley.

While planting garrisons in the kingdom of Naples, d’Aubigny sent La Palice to occupy the Abruzzi and the provinces of Capitanata and Basilicata. The period between August 1501 and June 1502 was marked by the greatest expansion of French power in Italy. Louis XII’s Italian dominions, including Milan and Asti, covered an area of 75,000 square kilometres. No king of France had ever owned as much territory since the start of the Capetian dynasty in AD 887; none was to have as much again before 1789. Realizing the economic potential of his new dominions, Louis took steps to exploit them. Early in August 1501 he appointed Louis d’Armagnac, duc de Nemours, as viceroy in Naples. Nemours, however, was a mediocrity incapable of standing up to his Spanish rival, Gonzalo da Cordoba.

The Spaniards had carefully avoided collaborating with the French in the conquest of Naples. Working strictly for themselves they had occupied the territories – the two Calabrias and Apulia – given to them by the Treaty of Granada. Soon, however, squabbles developed between the allies. A major difficulty concerned the two provinces that had been overlooked by the treaty. After the French had occupied them, Gonzalo claimed them for Aragon. In the spring of 1502 he entered Capitanata and expelled the French from several forts. Following the breakdown of talks between Nemours and Gonsalo, on 9 June the Spaniards captured Tripalda. There followed months, even years, of desultory warfare without, it seems, any overall strategy. Each captain did more or less as he thought best. Certain engagements caught the imagination of chroniclers. One was the famous duel between the French knight Bayard and the Spanish captain Alonso de Sotomayor, which ended in the latter’s death. Another was the epic encounter between French and Spanish knights – eleven on each side – which was watched by a thousand people from the walls of Trani.

Louis XII returned to Italy in the summer of 1502. His presence raised the morale of his troops. They invaded Apulia in July and soon afterwards Calabria. By the end of the summer the Spaniards held only a few towns along the Adriatic coast, including Barletta, where Gonzalo had his headquarters. Though Nemours disposed of larger forces, he allowed them to succumb to disease, hunger and desertion. As his army dwindled in size, the Spaniards received reinforcements by sea. Gonzalo was not only a brave soldier but a brilliant tactician. His military reforms led to the creation of the tercio in the sixteenth century. Abandoning the use of light cavalry, he relied mainly on infantry and provided it with better protection than in the past. The old companies which were too small for modern warfare were grouped into larger coronelias, each supported by cavalry and artillery.

In April 1503, Gonzalo launched an offensive. He defeated d’Aubigny at Seminara on 21 April and a week later crushed Nemours at Cerignola. The duke was killed and the bulk of his army had to retreat to the Capua region where it awaited reinforcements. A relief army under La Trémoïlle arrived in Rome just as a new pope was being elected and remained there for three months, supposedly to protect the conclave. Meanwhile, the French position in the south crumbled away. In mid-July, Gonzalo entered Naples effortlessly. He failed, however, to capture Gaeta where the two French armies joined forces at the end of the summer. During the harsh winter that followed both sides suffered hardships. Eventually, Gonzalo offered the French generous surrender terms which they accepted, much to Louis XII’s dismay. He ordered Chaumont d’Amboise to detain troops returning from southern Italy who had served him ‘so badly’, and rounded on his own fiscal officials, accusing them of not paying the army. About twenty were tried and two at least were executed. The disaster in southern Italy, however, was irreversible. On 31 March 1504, Louis and Ferdinand signed a truce of three years.

The succession problem

By marrying Anne of Brittany, Louis XII had hoped to produce a son. So far, however, the queen had borne him only a daughter whom the Salic law debarred from the throne. The king’s nearest male heir was his second cousin, François d’Angoulême, who in 1500 was six years old. He was being brought up at Amboise by his mother, Louise of Savoy. Both were closely supervised by Pierre de Gié, a marshal of France of Breton origin. Being firmly committed to Brittany’s union with France, Gié hoped to see it maintained by a marriage between the king’s daughter Claude and François. But Anne was determined to protect her duchy’s independence and, for this reason, favoured an alternative match between Claude and Charles of Ghent, the infant son of Archduke Philip the Fair and grandson of the Emperor Maximilian. Finding himself caught in the crossfire between Anne and Gié, Louis pursued contradictory policies. Whether he did so out of weakness or duplicity is not easy to unravel.

On 30 April 1501 the king signed a secret declaration nullifying in advance any marriage between his daughter and another than François. Meanwhile, the idea of marrying Claude to Charles of Ghent was strongly canvassed by Anne with the backing of Georges d’Amboise. Claude’s dowry was to comprise Milan, Asti and Naples, the duchies of Burgundy and Brittany and the county of Blois. Had this marriage taken place, France would have been dismembered. That Louis XII should have entertained such a possibility is difficult to understand. He may have agreed to Anne’s proposal simply in order to extort the investiture of Milan from the emperor. He may also have felt covered by the secret declaration made in April 1501. Be that as it may, the betrothal of Claude and Charles was celebrated in August 1501, and Philip the Fair and his wife, Juana of Castile, visited France in November and met their prospective daughter-in-law. As for Maximilian, he promised to confer Milan’s investiture on Louis, but only verbally and within the secrecy of his own chamber.

Early in 1504, as Louis fell seriously ill, Gié persuaded him to confirm his declaration of April 1501. He also ordered a strict watch to be kept on all river traffic and roads leading to Brittany, so as to prevent Anne from returning there with her daughter in the event of Louis’s death. The king, however, recovered, and Gié came under fire from both Anne and Louise of Savoy. The latter’s servant, Pierre de Pontbriant, brought damaging charges to the king, which were subsequently used to prepare Gié’s indictment. He was accused inter alia of ordering the queen’s detention and of alienating her from Louise. In July a royal commission was appointed to investigate the charges.

Maximilian, in the meantime, drew closer to Louis. On 22 September the Treaty of Blois was concluded. It consisted of three separate agreements. The first was an alliance between Maximilian, Philip the Fair and Louis XII which Ferdinand of Aragon was conditionally invited to join. Louis renounced his claim to Milan in return for an indemnity of 900,000 florins, and Maximilian promised to give him the investiture of Milan within three months. The second agreement was a league against Venice which involved Pope Julius II. The third revived the projected marriage between Claude de France and Charles of Ghent. If Louis died without a direct male heir, the couple were to get Milan, Genoa, Brittany, Asti, Blois, Burgundy, Auxonne, the Auxerrois, the Mâconnais, and Bar-sur-Seine! On 7 April 1505, Maximilian conferred the investiture of Milan on Louis and his male descendants. However, the accord between the two rulers was upset in November by the death of Isabella of Castile. She bequeathed her kingdom to her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, thereby setting aside the rights of her daughter Juana. Philip the Fair, taking umbrage, assumed the title of king of Castile. He also accused Louis XII of betrayal, a development which naturally threatened the marriage recently arranged between his son and Claude. Another setback for Anne was the trial of Marshal Gié. He appeared before the Grand conseil in October 1504 and was relentlessly interrogated. The magistrates, impressed by his testimony, refused the queen’s demand for an additional enquiry to be held in Brittany. Once all the evidence had been gathered, the prosecuting counsel called for the death sentence to be passed on Gié, whom he accused of lèse-majesté. However, on 30 December, the marshal was set free, his case being adjourned till April.

In April 1505, Louis XII made his will. He ordered his daughter’s marriage to François d’Angoulême as soon as she was old enough, notwithstanding the earlier agreement with Charles of Ghent. He also forbade her to leave the kingdom in the meantime for any reason and set up a council of regency which included a number of royal servants capable of standing up to the queen. These arrangements infuriated Anne, and when the king had a relapse she again demonstrated her ducal independence by withdrawing to Brittany for five months. At the same time she brought pressure to bear on Gié’s trial. On 14 March it was transferred to the Parlement of Toulouse, a body noted for its severity. Anne employed an army of barristers to press her case against the marshal and sought the backing of jurists from as far afield as Italy. Her efforts, however, proved unavailing. Although Gié was found guilty of various offences, the sentence passed on him on 9 February 1506 was surprisingly mild. He lost the governorship of François d’Angoulême, his captaincies of the châteaux of Angers and Amboise and his company of a hundred lances. He was also suspended as marshal for five years and banished from court for the same length of time. Though he was refused a royal pardon, Gié was allowed to retire to his château at Le Verger, where he died in 1513.

The queen’s absence in Brittany gave Louis a chance to secure his position. In May he formally announced his daughter’s forthcoming marriage to François d’Angoulême whom he instructed to join him at Plessis-lez-Tours. The captains of all the kingdom’s fortresses were made to swear an oath to obey the king’s will when the time came. Before the marriage could take place, however, the Treaty of Blois had to be repudiated. It contained a penalty clause whereby Burgundy, Milan and Asti were to be forfeited to Charles if his marriage to Claude were broken off by Louis, Anne or Claude herself. Louis got round the difficulty by putting the responsibility for his breach of faith on the shoulders of his subjects. He called an Assembly of Notables consisting of representatives from the parlements and towns, which met at Plessis-lez-Tours in May 1506. Through their spokesman Thomas Bricot, a doctor of the University of Paris, the delegates implored the king, whom they addressed as ‘Father of the people’, to gratify them by marrying his daughter to François d’Angoulême, who, being ‘wholly French’ (tout français), was most acceptable to them. Simulating surprise, the king requested time for reflection and to consult the princes of the blood. A few days later, the chancellor signified Louis’s willingness to concede his subjects’ request. He asked them to promise in return to see that the marriage took place and to recognize François as king should Louis die without male issue. On 21 May, Claude and François were formally betrothed; Louis had averted the damage that the kingdom would have suffered if the Treaty of Blois had been implemented.

On 3 August 1508, François d’Angoulême left Amboise to settle permanently at court. At fourteen he was old enough for kingship, but could not yet be sure of the throne. In April 1510 the queen was again pregnant, but on 25 October she gave birth to another daughter, called Renée. Anne did produce a son in 1512, but he died almost at birth. The king, it seems, now abandoned hope of perpetuating his line. François, now known as the Dauphin, was admitted to the king’s council and made captain of a hundred lances.

Domestic policies

Historians have given so much attention to the Italian Wars that they have barely noticed the government of France under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Yet, as Russell Major has shown, it was under these kings that the monarchy which had begun to take shape under Charles VII was ‘cemented’. Louis XII’s contribution was especially notable: he provided France with ‘the most efficient government that it enjoyed during the Renaissance’. His reign produced a large number of edicts and ordinances aimed for the most part at improving the administration of justice. How far they represented his own ideas or those of his ministers is hard to say. There is not enough evidence to support the view of one historian (J.-A. Neret) that Louis came to the throne with a plan of reform inspired by Machiavelli. He certainly combined maturity with a long experience of variable political fortunes.

From the start of his reign Louis tried to be popular. This could best be done by sparing his subjects’ pockets. Charles VIII had left a treasury so empty that it could not even pay his funeral costs (estimated at 45,000 livres), so Louis announced that he would pay for them out of his private purse. He also paid for the festivities marking his own entry into Paris on 2 July and released royal officials and pensioners from the traditional obligation of making an accession gift. Louis announced that he would limit taxes to the minimum required by the defence of the realm, and kept his word for as long as possible. Except for a few years, he kept down the level of the taille almost till the end of the reign, and even lowered it on occasion. Around 1500, the taille amounted to only about 2.3 million livres annually, as compared with 3.9 million under Louis XI. Louis once ordered his agents to stop collecting a surtax when the reason for it – the Genoese revolt – had ended. When he came under pressure, he preferred to alienate parts of the royal domain or rely on loans or forced loans rather than raise taxes. He was able to do this because for many years his campaigns in Italy more than paid for themselves through plunder. At the end of his reign Louis ran into difficulties and taxes rose; yet he continued to be regarded, even as late as the seventeenth century, as a king who had spared his subjects.

Believing that a king should ‘live of his own’ (i.e. on the income from his domain), Louis avoided excessive expenditure on his court and on gifts to courtiers. He reduced the annual total of gifts and pensions from over 500,000 livres around 1500 to less than half that sum by 1510. However, in the last two years of the reign it went up again. Disappointed courtiers called Louis ‘le roi roturier’ (the commoner king) and his parsimony was mocked in satirical plays staged in Paris by the Basoche. But Louis was unrepentant. ‘I much prefer’, he said, ‘to make dandies laugh at my miserliness than to make the people weep at my open-handedness.’ Apart from curbing expenditure, he trebled the revenue from his domain by more efficient accounting. It reached a total of 231,000l. annually, or 6.3 per cent of the total royal revenues.

The sale of offices was a fiscal expedient used by Louis XII. By the end of the fifteenth century a distinction was made between financial and judicial offices: only the sale of the former was tacitly allowed. The ban on the sale of judicial offices had been affirmed by Charles VIII in July 1493: a candidate for office was only to be admitted after swearing an oath that he had paid nothing for it. Louis XII repeated the ban in March 1498. He admitted that he had allowed such sales in the past and foresaw that he might do so again ‘out of importunity or otherwise’. The chancellor was instructed not to seal such letters of provision, and royal officers were not to implement them if the letters had been sealed inadvertently. However, Louis could hardly expect his servants to obey a law which he had broken himself. In April 1499 he appointed Jean le Coq as conseiller général des aides ‘notwithstanding … his promise to pay a certain sum’. Office-holders, notably members of the Parlement of Paris, were allowed by Louis to resign their offices in return for a payment. Sometimes a fiction was used – such as the exchange of one office for another – to conceal an original payment.

Louis XII was one of the last kings of France to listen to pleadings in the parlement. The great Ordinance of Blois (March 1499) was aimed at ‘upholding justice, shortening trials and giving relief to the people’. Its 162 clauses dealt with many matters, not all judicial. While prescribing severe penalties for vagabonds and accepting the need for interrogation under torture, the ordinance sought to promote fair and prompt justice. Magistrates were to be worthy of their responsibilities; they were not to delegate them or be absent without leave. Proper legal qualifications were laid down for service on the judicial bench. No fathers, sons or brothers were to serve in the same court, and the sale of offices was banned, not for the first time. However, the ordinance seems to have been poorly enforced, for several of its provisions had to be repeated in another ordinance of 1510. This contained new clauses directed against usurers and regulations concerning notaries.

One of Louis XII’s major reforms was the reorganization of the Grand conseil, or king’s council acting as a lawcourt. It can be traced back to 1469 and a continuous series of archives, starting in 1483, shows that by then the council was meeting regularly and beginning to acquire a distinct identity. But it was Louis who, in August 1497, gave it a permanent staff of legal experts capable of coping with its growing legal business. Their competence included disputes between sovereign courts, complaints levelled at royal officials, quarrels over fiefs or ecclesiastical benefices, as well as appeals in civil and criminal cases. Being directly under the king, the council facilitated his intervention in criminal cases which touched him personally, such as that of Marshal Gié. Regarding the Grand conseil as a rival, the parlement showed its hostility on several occasions; but Louis placated it by giving it precedence and allowing its members to sit in the Grand conseil whenever they wished.

Louis’s concern to streamline the judicial system extended to France’s newest provinces. In Normandy the highest court of law, dating from the time of the dukes, was the Echiquier which met occasionally and had no permanent staff. Louis turned it into a permanent body with four presidents and 28 councillors. Under Francis I it became the Parlement of Rouen. In Provence, the Conseil éminent of the old counts of Provence was turned by Louis into a parlement with one president and eleven councillors. Finally, in Brittany justice was administered by the Grands Jours, a commission renewable each year. The members were partly Bretons and partly recruits from the Parlement of Paris. It functioned alongside a council, which was an administrative and judicial body. Gradually the commission developed at the expense of the council: in 1491 it acquired a permanent staff and fixed annual sessions. However, it did not become a parlement till 1554.

A major obstacle to judicial efficiency in early modern France was the survival of unwritten customary law. This varied from one locality to another; it was entirely pragmatic, serving particular needs as they arose. Because customs were variable and ill-defined, they needed to be validated by a judge before they could be used as evidence. In the Middle Ages attempts had been made by various kings to distinguish good customs from bad ones. Royal intervention took the form of a written declaration establishing what customs were to apply to a particular area. Professional jurists also produced coutumiers in which the customary law of whole provinces was written down. But it was only in the fifteenth century, when the kingdom was sufficiently unified politically, that the crown was able to think of providing an official, authenticated and coherent set of customs. The lead was given by Charles VII, but little further progress was made till 1497, when Charles VIII altered the procedure by which definitive customary laws were arrived at. Henceforth, a royal judge in a given area drew up a tentative list of customs after consulting his colleagues and local worthies. Representatives of the three estates then met to discuss the draft, which had to be approved by a majority of each estate’s representatives before being published in the king’s name. Much of this work was done under Louis XII, who commissioned two distinguished parlementaires – Roger Barme and Thibaut Baillet – to write down the customs of northern France. Till the end of the reign these two legists, acting in concert with the baillis, sénéchaux and representatives of the three estates in each area, verified and confirmed many customs after weeding out accretions. Georges d’Amboise signed the first rédaction at Tours on 5 May 1508 and many others quickly followed, but the task was unfinished when Louis died. Several provinces had to wait a century before their customs were verified.

In 1506, Louis was acclaimed by the spokesman of the notables at Blois as ‘father of the people’. He became renowned for his efforts to spare his subjects taxes, to give them justice and to provide them with security. His praises were sung throughout the sixteenth century. Even after Henry IV’s reign there were demands for a return to the time of Louis XII. His role, according to Russell Major, was ‘more to make the monarchy beloved than to change its character’.

The Genoese rebellion

Although Louis XII had relinquished his rights in Naples, he had not abandoned all his Italian interests. His authority as duke of Milan had been legitimized in April 1505 by the emperor’s investiture and he was also count of Asti and ‘protector’ of Genoa. Early in 1506 a popular rising in Genoa against the rule of the local patricians turned into a revolt against the French. At first Louis tried to temporize, but the rebels set up a new administration headed by a doge. On 12 March they massacred Frenchmen who had taken refuge in a fort. Taking this as a personal affront, Louis gathered a large army in the spring of 1507 and invaded Genoa. The doge fled and the city surrendered. Louis annexed Genoa to his domain, destroyed its charters, executed sixty rebels and threatened to impose a huge fine on the inhabitants. Later he relented: most of the citizens were allowed to keep their lives and property, and their fine was reduced. A new governor, Raoul de Lannoy, was ordered to run the city humanely and fairly. The king appreciated Genoa’s importance as a commercial and financial centre. He did not want to see it destroyed and therefore refused to allow the bulk of his army into it. He did, however, impose his authority in an entry acclaimed by contemporaries as the ceremonial climax of his reign. Wearing full armour, a helmet with white plumes and a surcoat of gold cloth, he rode a richly caparisoned black charger beneath a canopy carried by four Genoese notables dressed in black. Along the route young girls holding olive branches begged for mercy.

France and Venice had been allies since 1500. The Venetians had taken advantage of the French conquest of Milan by nibbling at the eastern edge of the duchy. But the long-term objectives of the allies were not necessarily identical. The Venetians were alarmed by the closeness of the French to their own terra firma. The two powers also differed about the emperor. In February 1508, Maximilian attacked the Venetians. Louis was about to send a force to help them, when he learned that they had signed a truce with Maximilian. He felt badly let down as they had not consulted him. The pope, meanwhile, had his own reasons for falling out with the Venetians. His desire to extend the States of the Church into the Romagna ran counter to Venice’s territorial ambitions. Moreover, Venetian policy towards the Turks contradicted the pope’s aim of mounting a crusade.

In December 1508 representatives of the emperor, the kings of France and Aragon, and the pope met at Cambrai. However divergent their individual aims may have been, they all wanted to abase the pride of Venice. Anticipating her defeat, they agreed to share the spoils: Verona and control of the Adige valley would go to Maximilian, Brescia to Louis XII, Ravenna to the pope and Otranto to Ferdinand of Aragon, now king of Naples. For some unknown reason, Louis decided to fire the opening shot, while his allies undertook to declare themselves one month later. The pope simply placed Venice under an interdict.

On 16 April 1509, three days after declaring war on Venice, Louis crossed the Alps to take charge of military operations. An important innovation was the decision to place infantry under the command of noblemen, who previously would have considered such a role beneath their dignity. In addition to 20,000 infantry (including 8000 Swiss mercenaries) the king disposed of about 2000 men-at-arms. His lieutenants included names familiar from earlier campaigns such as Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, La Trémoïlle, La Palice, Chaumont d’Amboise and San Severino. Among younger men, going into action for the first time, were the king’s cousin, Charles de Bourbon-Montpensier, and his nephew, Gaston de Foix. The Venetian army was larger: it comprised, according to Guicciardini, 2000 Italian lances, 3000 light cavalry (including Albanian stradiots) and 20,000 infantry. The commanders included Bartolomeo d’Alviano and Niccolò Orsini, count of Pitigliano.

On 14 May the two armies faced each other at Agnadello. Instead of attacking the French as they crossed the river Adda, Pitigliano preferred to wait for them within a well-fortified camp. He was ordered, however, to move to higher ground, and this gave the French a chance to attack him in the open. D’Alviano, commanding the Venetian vanguard, bore the brunt of the attack and repulsed it, but the rest of the Venetian army was too widely spread out to come to his aid. He and his cavalry were consequently surrounded and captured. His infantry fought on bravely, only to be annihilated by a much larger force of Swiss and Gascons.

Following their victory the French captured Cremona, Crema and Brescia. The pope, meanwhile, pushed towards Ravenna with his army, but Maximilian failed to appear in Italy. So Louis returned to France after celebrating his triumph in Milan. Venice, for its part, allowed imperial troops to occupy Treviso, Verona and Padua, handed over ports in southern Italy to Ferdinand of Aragon, released the people of the terra firma from their allegiance and accepted the pope’s occupation of towns in the Romagna. The Venetians, however, had enough experience of foreign affairs (their diplomats were the best in Europe at the time) to know that time was on their side: they felt sure that sooner or later the coalition against them would break up.

Early in July the Venetians recaptured Padua from the emperor. He appealed for help to Louis XII, who promptly sent a force under La Palice, which was soon joined by a large army led by Maximilian himself; but he did not lay siege to Padua till mid-September. After breaching its wall, he prepared an assault, but the French nobles refused to fight as infantry as long as the German nobles remained mounted. In the end, the assault was abandoned. On 30 September, Maximilian angrily lifted the siege. He left that night for Austria, soon to be followed by the rest of his army. La Palice and his men returned to Milan.

Julius II, meanwhile, began to detach himself from the league; he did not wish to see Venice destroyed, for her maritime co-operation was essential to his crusading plans. Nor was he keen to see France or the Empire strongly entrenched in north Italy. In February 1510 he lifted the interdict on Venice. He then detached Ferdinand of Aragon from the coalition. In return for the investiture of Naples, Ferdinand agreed to be neutral for the present. Henry VIII of England was also won over. But the pope’s most resounding diplomatic coup was to persuade the Swiss to debar France from raising mercenaries in the cantons. In the summer of 1510, Julius attacked Ferrara, seemingly an easy prey. The duke, Alfonso d’Este, appealed to Louis XII for help. Having recently abandoned the siege of Padua, the French army under Chaumont returned to the Milanese. They had to face a Swiss invasion, but it did not last long. Fighting around Ferrara continued for more than a year without giving the pope a decisive victory. Following the death of Chaumont on 11 February 1511, command of the French army in Italy was given first to Trivulzio, then to Gaston de Foix, duc de Nemours. He was young, handsome and brave, and his presence in Italy raised French morale, putting new life into the campaign.

So far the pope had failed to detach Maximilian from his alliance with France. What is more, Louis and Maximilian were in agreement over the need to reform the church in its head and members. They supported the idea, put forward two hundred years earlier, that a General Council of the church was superior in authority to the pope. At their bidding five cardinals who had fallen out with the pope called a General Council to Pisa for the autumn of 1511. Julius was ordered to appear before this body under threat of deposition, but he was not easily intimidated: he replied by summoning an alternative council to Rome for April 1512.

The battle of Ravenna

Meanwhile, the French army in north Italy, now commanded by Gaston de Foix, invaded the Romagna, relieving Ferrara and capturing Mirandola. As it drew near to Bologna, the pope’s army fell back on Ravenna. Early in October 1511 a so-called Holy League was formed between the pope, Ferdinand of Aragon and Venice. Its avowed aim was to reconquer the lands recently taken from the Holy See, but its real purpose was to drive the French out of Italy.

Gaston reorganized his army to face the threat of a triple invasion of Lombardy: by the Swiss in the north, by papal and Spanish forces from the south and by the Venetians in the east. The Swiss were the first to attack, capturing Bellinzona in December; but Gaston wisely remained inside Milan instead of coming out to meet them. He knew that if he left the city, the people of Milan would rebel. His caution was justified when the Swiss returned home of their own accord. The army of the Holy League, meanwhile, tried to win back lost ground in the Romagna, prompting Gaston to send reinforcements to Bologna. In February he marched to the relief of Brescia which was under attack from the Venetians. A fierce struggle ended in their defeat. When the pope heard the news, he is said to have torn off his beard. He could draw comfort, however, from the dismal failure of the Council of Pisa. It had been unable to gather international support and was disbanded soon after moving to Milan.

In November, Henry VIII joined the Holy League and prepared to invade Picardy. The threat of such an attack, coupled with indications that Maximilian might change sides, impressed upon Louis XII the need for a decisive victory in Italy. While Gaston de Foix had been fighting near Brescia, a Hispano-papal army under Ramon de Cardona, viceroy of Naples, had reconquered most of the Romagna. Gaston marched on Ravenna in the hope of luring the enemy into the open. Although the viceroy’s army was smaller than that of the French, he came down from Imola and pitched camp on marshy ground outside Ravenna. It was protected by a deep trench, behind which was arrayed a battery of thirty guns and strange war machines which contemporaries compared to the scythed chariots used in antiquity. Gaston’s artillery consisted of thirty French guns and twenty-four supplied by the duke of Ferrara.

At dawn on 11 April, Gaston, after crossing the River Ronco, formed his army into a crescent with infantry in the middle and cavalry on the wings. Closing in on the viceroy’s camp, he began a fierce bombardment. The Spanish guns responded, inflicting heavy losses on the French infantry. Eventually the Spanish cavalry came out and engaged the French men-at-arms in a bloody encounter which ended in a Spanish rout. The infantry, meanwhile, moved into action. More fierce fighting ended in victory to the French. But as Gaston tried to intercept some Spaniards who were fleeing from the field, his horse stumbled, enabling the enemy to fall on him and wound him fatally. Thus ended the career of a military leader of great promise. His death, Bayard wrote, made the victory seem like a defeat.

The battle of Ravenna was one of the bloodiest on record. Both sides suffered heavily. Ramon de Cardona returned to Naples with only 300 horse and 3000 foot, having started out with 16,000 men. Among Spaniards taken prisoner were Fabrizio Colonna, general of the horse, and Pedro Navarro, general of the foot. A more unusual captive was the papal legate, Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII. French losses, though fewer, were none the less severe: 3000 to 4000 infantry, 80 men-at-arms, several gentlemen of the king’s household and nine archers of his guard. From the tactical standpoint, Ravenna is remembered as the first Italian battle in which cannon decided the day. Gaston de Foix saw that Spanish tactics could be overcome by superior artillery strength. His only serious mistake was to bring his infantry too far forward at the start so that it suffered heavier losses than necessary.

Even if Gaston had survived, it is doubtful if the French could have taken advantage of their victory, for the odds were heavily against them. On 6 May, 18,000 Swiss troops led by Cardinal Schiner descended into Italy and joined the Venetian army near Verona. Together they marched on Milan. La Palice, the new French commander, retreated westward from Ravenna with an army much reduced in size after the recent battle to which disease and desertion had added their toll. The retreat soon turned into a headlong flight. By the end of June, France had lost the Milanese and her army was back in Dauphiné. The few French garrisons that had been left behind in Italy gradually capitulated.

Ferdinand took advantage of Louis’s difficulties to invade Navarre in pursuit of the claim which his wife, Germaine de Foix, had inherited from her brother Gaston. Louis, who had supported Gaston’s claim against the ruling house of Albret, was obliged to support the rival claim of Jean d’Albret. However, Ferdinand, having occupied Spanish Navarre, declared himself its lawful sovereign. Louis despatched an army under the nominal command of François d’Angoulême, the effective commanders being marshals La Palice and Lautrec. They laid siege to Pamplona, but the arrival of Aragonese reinforcements forced them to withdraw. Spanish Navarre was irretrievably lost. All that remained to Jean d’Albret was a small portion of his kingdom on the French side of the Pyrenees.

In Italy, meanwhile, important political changes were taking place. In November 1512 the emperor joined the Holy League, causing the Venetians to abandon their hostility to France. Within the Milanese, the departure of the French released the conflicting ambitions of former allies. The Swiss wanted Como and Novara; the marquis of Mantua claimed Peschiera; the pope wanted Parma and Piacenza; the duke of Savoy asked for Vercelli; and the Venetians were keen to recover Brescia. In December 1512 the Swiss set up Massimiliano Sforza, the son of Lodovico il Moro, as duke of Milan. Soon afterwards, in February 1513, Pope Julius II died. He was succeeded by Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who took the name of Leo X. Although no friend of France, he was more peaceable than his predecessor. Louis skilfully exploited the changed situation. In March 1513, Venice reached an agreement with him regarding the partition of north Italy. France renewed her ‘Auld Alliance’ with Scotland in the hope of containing Henry VIII, who was anxious to cut a dash on the Continent. Louis also signed a truce with Ferdinand: each agreed to respect the status quo in Navarre. All that remained of the Holy League was a coalition of England, the Empire and the Swiss Confederation.

A disastrous year

Louis XII might have been expected to leave Italy alone after his last disastrous campaign, particularly as Henry VIII and Maximilian were now threatening his northern frontiers, but he would not accept the loss of Milan. His new treaty with Venice encouraged him to launch another trans-Alpine campaign. He gathered an army 12,000 strong in April 1513 and placed it under the command of Louis de La Trémoïlle, who was assisted by d’Aubigny and Trivulzio. It crossed the Alps in May and captured Alessandria. Four thousand Swiss shut themselves up in Novara. The French, meanwhile, seized Milan with the help of the anti-Sforza faction within the city. Heartened by this success, La Trémoïlle laid siege to Novara. The town was bombarded and its walls breached, but, hearing that a Swiss relief army was approaching, La Trémoïlle withdrew to Trecate. Here he pitched camp and, believing that he was not being pursued, allowed his troops some rest. The Swiss, however, launched a furious attack, taking the French by surprise. The main blow fell on the German mercenaries, the landsknechts, who were nearly all wiped out. One of the few survivors was the future Marshal Florange, who allegedly received forty-six wounds. The gendarmerie was never seriously engaged in the battle. La Trémoïlle, it seems, waited for an attack that never came, allowing his infantry to be cut to pieces. When he realized that all was lost, he ordered his men to retreat. By the end of June they were back in France. After the French débâcle all the towns in the duchy of Milan, except those under Venetian occupation, submitted to Sforza.

The French defeat in Italy coincided with an invasion of northern France. In mid-June a huge English army commanded by the earl of Shrewsbury and the duke of Suffolk landed in Calais. After joining an imperial army, it laid siege to Thérouanne. Louis XII hurriedly sent an army to Artois under the seigneur de Piennes with orders to relieve Thérouanne but to avoid a pitched battle. He managed to get supplies through to the beleaguered garrison, but as his men-at-arms were returning from their mission, they were intercepted near Guinegatte. Obeying orders, they avoided an engagement, but as they retreated they spread confusion among the French reserve. The retreat became a headlong flight, hence the name ‘Battle of the Spurs’ given to the action. Among the captains who fell into English hands were the duc de Longueville and Bayard. Thérouanne surrendered on 23 August, but instead of marching on Amiens and Paris, the English seized Tournai which they kept until 1521.

More misfortunes soon befell Louis XII. Early in September, 20,000 to 30,000 Swiss invaded Burgundy and laid siege to Dijon. The town’s governor, La Trémoïlle, knowing that his men were outnumbered and that no relief could be expected soon, opened talks with the enemy. They were strong enough to bid for high stakes. Under the Treaty of Dijon, which La Trémoïlle signed in his master’s name, Louis gave up all his claims to Milan and Asti. He also promised to buy off the Swiss for 400,000 écus. La Trémoïlle handed over hostages as security for the treaty’s execution, and the Swiss returned to their cantons. Dijon and Burgundy had been saved, but Louis disavowed La Trémoïlle and refused to ratify the treaty. His breach of faith was not soon forgiven by the Swiss.

The winter of 1513 brought no relief to France’s ailing monarch. Anne of Brittany died without giving him the son he had wanted so much. Her claim to Brittany passed to her daughter, Claude. On 18 May 1514 she married François d’Angoulême. The ceremony at Saint-Germain-en-Laye was a simple affair, as the court was still in mourning for the queen. Eyewitnesses, noting Louis’s sickly appearance, did not give him long to live, but he was about to spring a surprise. In January 1514 he drew closer to Pope Leo X by recognizing the Fifth Lateran Council and in March he renewed his truce with Ferdinand of Aragon. His master stroke, however, was to drive a wedge between Henry VIII and Maximilian. An Anglo-French treaty, signed in London in August, was sealed by a marriage between Louis and Henry’s sister Mary. Public opinion was shocked that a girl of eighteen, universally acclaimed for her beauty, should marry a gouty dotard of fifty-three, but she was ready to pay a heavy price to become queen of France. Henry had also promised to allow her to choose her second husband, a likely prospect, given Louis’s age and health.

Louis and Mary were married at Abbeville on 9 October. After the wedding night Louis boasted that he had ‘performed marvels’, but few believed him, least of all François d’Angoulême, who stood most to lose from the king’s remarriage. ‘I am certain,’ he declared, ‘unless I have been told lies, that the king and queen cannot possibly have a child.’ Within a short time, Louis began to show signs of wear and tear. The Basoche put on a play in which he was shown being carried off to Heaven or to Hell by a filly given by the king of England. Soon after Christmas, Louis fell ill at the palace of the Tournelles in Paris. He died on 1 January 1515 and was immediately succeeded on the throne by François d’Angoulême. Soon afterwards Mary Tudor secretly married the duke of Suffolk, whom Henry VIII had sent to France to congratulate François on his accession.

FIVE The church in crisis

The French or Gallican church faced a serious crisis at the end of the Middle Ages, which was constitutional as well as moral. The papacy had become an absolute monarchy: it controlled appointments to ecclesiastical benefices by means of ‘provisions’ and ‘reservations’ and it taxed the clergy by means of annates, tenths, and so on. All this caused much discontent among the clergy. Cathedral and monastic chapters resented the loss of their traditional right to elect their bishops and abbots; the clergy begrudged paying taxes to the papal Curia. The demand arose for the reform of the church in its head and its members. But who was to carry out that reform? Could the papacy be trusted to reform itself?

During the fourteenth century some churchmen began to argue that the responsibility for reform lay not with the papacy but with a General Council. The Dominican John of Paris put forward the theory that a council, since it represented the whole church, was superior in authority to the pope and might depose him if he misused his power. Marsilio of Padua, in his Defensor Pacis, denied Christ’s institution of the papal primacy and argued in favour of the superiority of a council since it represented the people. Supporters of the conciliar theory were able to put it into practice following a disputed election to the papacy in 1378. The only way of solving the problem of two rival popes seemed to be to call a General Council. This offered a chance, not merely of healing the Great Schism, but also of bringing about reform through a limitation of papal authority. The Council of Constance (1414–18) managed to heal the schism, but otherwise was a disappointment. It issued two decrees: one laid down that a General Council derived its authority directly from Christ; the other provided that such a council should meet at regular intervals. Both decrees represented a victory for the conciliar party, but not a decisive one. It was difficult to see how a General Council, meeting occasionally, could assert its authority over a permanent and powerful papacy. The traditional concept of the papacy remained intact, and the new pope, Martin V, did not confirm the decrees of the council. By banning appeals from the pope to another tribunal, he implicitly rejected the doctrine of conciliar supremacy.

This, however, was not the end of attempts to put a General Council above the pope. The decisive battle between the pope and the conciliarists was fought at the Council of Basle (1431–49). In May 1439 it declared as a dogma of the Christian faith that ‘the General Council is above the pope’. It deposed Pope Eugenius IV, replacing him with Felix V; it abolished annates and reservations; and it passed a decree providing for regular provincial and diocesan synods. Yet it failed to defeat the pope for two reasons. First, the radicalism of the council alienated some of its best members; many bishops withdrew when they saw representatives of the lower clergy and universities gaining the ascendancy. Secondly, the princes of Europe failed to give the council their full support, knowing that they could secure more political advantages from the pope than from a council. A few European states, including France, adopted some of the reform decrees of the Council of Basle without even considering the papacy.

Representatives of the Gallican church, meeting at Bourges in 1438, drew up a constitution called the Pragmatic Sanction, which King Charles VII promulgated in July. It declared a General Council to be superior in authority to the pope, abolished annates, forbade appeals to Rome before intermediate jurisdictions had been exhausted, abolished papal reservations, except in respect of benefices vacated at the Curia, and restored the election by chapters of bishops, abbots and priors. The papacy was allowed to collate to a small proportion of benefices, but all expectatives were banned save in respect of university teachers and students. The Pragmatic Sanction guaranteed the latter a third of all prebends while regulating their rights. It also tried, albeit more timidly, to protect the church from royal interference in its affairs: the king was asked to avoid imperious recommendations and to desist from violence in supporting his protégés. Yet he was allowed to present ‘benign solicitations’ from time to time on behalf of candidates showing zeal for the public good.

The Pragmatic Sanction, however, was not strictly applied after 1438. The French crown used it to check papal pretensions without showing respect for the liberties it enshrined. The king commonly disposed of benefices as he wished, his ‘benign solicitations’ all too often being brutal commands. Louis XI abolished or restored the Pragmatic for his own political ends. A delegate at the Estates-General of 1484, after the accession of Charles VIII, complained that under the late king the church had declined: elections had been annulled, unworthy people had been appointed to benefices, and holy persons had been relegated to a ‘vile and ignominious’ condition. The deputies demanded the restoration of the Pragmatic Sanction, but the government of the Beaujeus was unwilling to renounce Louis XI’s authoritarian ways. Equally opposed to the Pragmatic were the bishops who owed their sees to royal favour. In May 1484 the Beaujeus sent a delegation to Rome with the aim of securing a Concordat. The pope, however, insisted on a formal condemnation of the Pragmatic Sanction; and in November 1487, Innocent VIII demanded its abolition. The French crown was unwilling to give way – the Pragmatic was potentially useful against the papacy without seriously threatening royal authority – and the talks with the Holy See accordingly foundered. In the absence of an agreement, the crown did as it wished, sometimes allowing the Pragmatic to operate, sometimes conniving with the papacy at its violation.

Meanwhile, the idea of a General Council lived on. During the second half of the fifteenth century people in many European countries demanded one. The appeal to a council in France came mainly from two directions: first, from the Gallican church whenever the king for political reasons violated the Pragmatic Sanction or threatened to replace it by a Concordat with the papacy; secondly, from the crown itself, whenever it wanted to put pressure on Rome. This had unfortunate consequences: the more the conciliar idea was exploited for political ends, the less the papacy felt inclined to call a council, fearing that it would revive the old question of authority in the church. In 1460, Pius II forbade any future appeal to a council in the bull Execrabilis.

On 12 November 1493, King Charles VIII summoned a reform commission to Tours. The members, who were drawn from abbeys and university colleges where discipline had been maintained or restored, called for the enforcement of the Pragmatic Sanction, but failed to get the support of high-ranking churchmen who had a vested interest in the old order. In 1494 the Gallican church was as sick as it had been at the end of Louis XI’s reign. The pope and the king continued to dispose of benefices without regard for the rights of chapters or patrons. While rival candidates for benefices fought each other in the parlements, the benefices themselves were sometimes left vacant for years. Bishops, who were often primarily courtiers, soldiers and diplomats, enriched themselves by accumulating benefices, including monasteries which they could hold in commendam.

Charles VIII wrote to the French bishops from Italy on 29 October 1494: ‘We hope to go to Rome and be there around Christmas. Our aim is to negotiate over the Gallican church with a view to restoring its ancient liberties and to achieving more if we can.’ In Florence he met Savonarola, who urged him to rescue Christendom from its current distress, and in Rome he was pressed by Cardinal della Rovere to depose Pope Alexander VI and call a General Council. But the king’s position in Italy was too precarious to allow him to tackle church reform seriously. Louis XII was also hamstrung at the start of his reign. He needed the pope to obtain the annulment of his marriage to Jeanne de France, and was therefore obliged to give up the idea of a General Council at least for the time being. He was also unwilling to allow free elections to church benefices or to abstain from imposing his own candidates on chapters. His chief minister, Georges d’Amboise, archbishop of Rouen, belonged to one of those rich bourgeois families which were accustomed to securing the finest abbeys and wealthiest bishoprics for their members. He was devoted to the king’s person and opposed any reduction of his authority.

In March 1499 an Assembly of Notables, meeting at Blois, was asked by Louis to look into ways of improving the administration of justice; but the ordinance that resulted from its deliberations failed to address the questions of burning concern to church reformers. While proclaiming the king’s determination to uphold ‘the fine constitutions contained in the sacred decrees of Basle and the Pragmatic Sanction’, it made no mention of elections, reservations, expectatives and commends. When the parlement registered the ordinance, the university, whose objections had been disregarded, went on strike. The chancellor ordered the strike to be lifted unconditionally and the parlement imposed sanctions on the university, which appealed directly to the king without success. In the end the university capitulated and the sanctions were lifted.

A matter of serious concern to Gallicans was the authority conferred on Georges d’Amboise as papal legate. The parlement registered his powers in December 1501, provided he undertook in writing not to prejudice the king’s rights and prerogatives. In February 1502 the legate made a speech in the parlement in which he declared his commitment to monastic reform. By so doing he may have hoped to gain support for his candidature to the papacy following the death of Alexander VI; but he was unable to rally enough support within the Sacred College. After the brief pontificate of Pius III, Giuliano della Rovere became Pope Julius II. As a consolation prize, Amboise asked for more than a limited extension of his legateship. Julius duly obliged by extending it indefinitely, thereby conferring on Amboise an almost absolute authority over the Gallican church.

On 19 March 1504 the university opposed registration of the legate’s new powers by the parlement and pressed the court to foil any attempt by Amboise and other prelates to give benefices to their own protégés. The parlement refused to extend the legate’s powers beyond the limit previously set by Alexander VI and demanded his written consent to the limitations previously imposed on him. But Louis XII insisted on the papal bull being registered without further discussion or delay. On 20 April the parlement confirmed the legate’s powers, but made them depend on the king’s pleasure. Amboise was asked for a written undertaking that he would respect the Gallican liberties and the Pragmatic Sanction. During the last six years of his life he carefully avoided offending Gallican feelings. His powers, however, were merely tolerated and the old animosities of the French clergy towards the Holy See continued to feed on the same grievances as before.

Meanwhile, agitation for a new council continued, forcing the popes to take evasive action. They developed the idea of a council of selected prelates under papal control in Rome. The popes could not ignore the demand for a council. Even within the college of cardinals there was a strong movement of opposition to papal absolutism. In 1511, as we have seen, a group of mainly French cardinals summoned a General Council to Pisa and, after proclaiming its own superior authority, suspended Julius II. But the pope took the wind out of its sails by calling a council of his own at the Lateran. The question was no longer ‘council or no council?’ but ‘which council?’ The majority of Christendom declared in favour of the Lateran council, and the council of Pisa petered out.

The Pre-Reformation

At the Estates-General of 1484, Jean de Rely, who spoke for the Parisian clergy, painted a grim picture of the contemporary French church. ‘Everyone knows’, he declared, ‘that among the monks of Cîteaux, St Benedict and St Augustine, as among the rest, there is no longer any rule, devotion or religious discipline.’ Among the secular clergy, he went on, pastoral duties were generally neglected. The clergy ought to be setting an example to the laity, yet the roles were now reversed.

The disorderly state of the Gallican church was exemplified in Paris, where the chapter of Notre-Dame claimed exemption from all episcopal jurisdiction. When Tristan de Salazar, metropolitan archbishop of Sens, tried to assert his authority, he was violently attacked by the canons. As he left the cathedral on 2 February 1492, after celebrating mass in the king’s presence, two canons seized the processional cross. In the ensuing scuffle the cross was damaged, the archbishop butted in the stomach and his mitre torn to shreds. The incident prompted a lawsuit in the parlement which lasted thirteen years. In 1504 the archbishop’s right to officiate at Notre-Dame was recognized and the canons were ordered to restore the damaged cross.

The authority of the bishop of Paris, though less feeble than that of his metropolitan, was none the less weak. His jurisdiction was undermined by appeals to Rome or to the parlement and by the judicial activities of the cathedral chapter. His right to nominate to benefices in and around Paris was strictly limited. The chapter and most religious houses were exempt from his jurisdiction. In 1492 the canons refused to accept the king’s nominee, Jean de Rely, as bishop. They elected Gérard Gobaille, who was himself challenged by Jean Simon. As the two rivals fought over the episcopal revenues, their quarrel came before the parlement. When Gobaille died in September 1494 the pope, acting at the king’s request, confirmed Simon as bishop, but the chapter set about electing a new bishop. Only Simon’s willingness to stand as candidate averted a major confrontation between the crown and the chapter. Even after he had won, however, some canons refused to obey him.

There was also much disorder among the parish clergy of the diocese. Within Paris itself priests seemed more interested in their revenues than in the discharge of their spiritual duties. These they habitually unloaded on vicars whose disorderly conduct was a matter of continual concern to the bishop’s official. Rural parishes were even worse off. Their incumbents tended to reside in the capital, leaving indigent clergy to perform their duties. As yet there were no seminaries for the training of rural clergy. They picked up the rudiments of Christian dogma haphazardly while retaining the manners and tastes of their social background. The upper clergy despised them for their ignorance and uncouth ways.

Deficient as it was, the secular clergy was far superior to the regular one. Yet Paris and its suburbs had some of the wealthiest abbeys in the kingdom. During the Hundred Years War suburban monasteries and the rural estates of the great Parisian abbeys had been ravaged by passing armies. Though some had managed to repair their losses, many monasteries and convents in the countryside around Paris were ruinous and poverty-stricken. Even in Paris, except among the Cordeliers and Jacobins, the number of regular clergy had declined, and the monastic rule was no longer being generally observed. At Saint-Martin des Champs, a reform commission in 1501 noted that life in common had vanished: the monks owned property without regard for their rule. The same was true of Benedictine houses. There was disorder too among the Cordeliers and in 1502 the Jacobins claimed the right to seek refreshment outside the cloister. A similar state of affairs existed among the Carmelites and the Augustinians. Everywhere monks deserted the dormitory and refectory: each had his own room where he entertained friends. Apostolic poverty and the common ownership of goods were memories; everyone had his own purse. Monks roamed the streets mingling with boatmen and jugglers.

How far could the French crown be relied upon to assume responsibility for church reform in the absence of a serious papal initiative? King Charles VIII, unlike his father, was interested in reform. He sponsored the Synod of Sens (July – August 1485), which produced a comprehensive programme of reform covering worship, monastic discipline, fiscal abuses and disorder among the secular clergy, but a renewal of political troubles in France between 1485 and 1491 prevented that programme from being implemented. In November 1493 a reform commission met at Tours. It proposed a number of sensible practical remedies for the church’s ailments. Avoiding doctrine or worship, it concentrated on clerical discipline and the results were not insignificant. The French government sent the proposals to the pope with a demand that he should back the reform movement. In July 1494, Alexander VI empowered three abbots to visit and reform the Benedictine houses in France. Charles VIII’s interest in church reform could not be sustained once he had decided to invade Italy, yet the impetus he had provided was not lost: in many parts of France reformist activity continued till the end of the reign. Although no concerted action was taken by heads of the Gallican church, a number of bishops did reform their dioceses. At Langres, Chartres, Nantes and Troyes, they called synods and drew up or renewed episcopal statutes.

One of the loudest voices for reform in late fifteenth-century Paris was that of Olivier Maillard, a Franciscan friar, whose brutal frankness in the pulpit earned him enormous popularity. He poured scorn on unworthy priests and bewailed the decline of the church. Other champions of reform were Jean Raulin, principal of the collège de Navarre, Jean Quentin, penitentiary of Notre-Dame, and Jean Standonck. All three had come under the influence of Francis of Paola, an Italian hermit who had been invited to France in 1482 by Louis XI. He had founded in Italy a new order of friars, called Minims, who, in addition to the normal vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, promised to observe a perpetual Lent. In 1491, Charles VIII built a monastery for Francis at Montils-lès-Tours and another at Amboise. In the same year two Minims were allowed to set up a house in Paris. Francis was canonized in 1519, only twelve years after his death.

While preachers in Paris demanded reform, a slow movement of renewal was taking place in provincial monasteries. At Cluny in 1481, the abbot Jacques d’Amboise, brother of the cardinal, continued reforms that had been undertaken some twenty years earlier by his predecessor, Jean de Bourbon. Cluny’s example was followed by the nuns of Fontevrault where a reform programme initiated in 1458 by the abbess, Mary of Brittany, was continued by her successors and extended to other houses in 1475. In 1483, Charles VIII gave the convent of the Filles-Dieu in Paris to the abbess Anne d’Orléans, the sister of duke Louis. Benedictine reform also reached Marmoutier, near Tours, and Chezal-Benoist in Berry. Among the Cistercians a revival was also under way: in 1487, Innocent VIII commissioned Jean de Cirey, abbot of Cîteaux, to reform the order. He reorganized studies at the Cistercian college in Paris in August 1493, and laid down new rules for all the order’s houses at a general chapter in February 1494.

Reform among the mendicant orders was weaker. The Franciscans were bitterly divided between the Observants and Conventuals and the ferocity with which they fought each other in the courts seriously damaged their moral authority. Among the Dominicans reform was imported from the Low Countries. The Dutch Dominicans attached less importance to theological speculation than to mystical contemplation. In this respect they differed from the Jacobins, who adhered to the scholastic tradition. The missionary activities of the Dutch Dominicans tended to be excessively militant and consequently encountered stiff opposition.

In 1496, Standonck visited the canons regular of Windesheim, who practised the ideals of the Brethren of the Common Life. Following his visit, six brothers from Windesheim led by Jean Mombaer went to Château-Landon. They encountered resistance but, with the support of powerful patrons, they gained the upper hand, Mombaer becoming prior. In March 1497, Jean Simon, bishop of Paris, looked to Windesheim as he tried to reform the abbey of Saint-Victor. Writing to the general chapter of his order, Mombaer underlined the importance of the task in hand: ‘It is not simply a matter of reforming a once famous abbey,’ he said, ‘but eventually the entire Gallican church.’ In October, Windesheim sent seven brothers to Saint-Victor and two others visited the Augustinian house at Livry. Their rule gradually penetrated the French kingdom, although they suffered some serious setbacks under Louis XII: at Saint-Victor they made themselves so unpopular by their tactlessness that they had to leave.

Louis XII appreciated the urgent need to reform the French church. To bring this about he relied on Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, who, as papal legate, was empowered to visit religious houses, to depose and replace delinquent heads and to impose discipline on the monks. Although the reform programme of November 1493 had envisaged a reform of the whole Gallican church, Amboise concentrated his efforts on the regular clergy. With the help of energetic men like Maillard, reform of religious houses in Paris was carried out promptly, often in the face of stiff resistance. This was particularly strong among the Jacobins and Cordeliers. Sometimes the legate had to impose order by armed force. As for the nunneries, where reform had marked time in the face of countless difficulties, they too were visited, reformed and repaired. The famous abbey of Fontevrault received special attention. Under Amboise, communal life was restored, visitors sent out to daughter houses and reformed nuns introduced where necessary. New rules recently adopted at Fontevrault were extended to daughter houses between 1502 and 1507. Among other important abbeys reformed at this time were Chelles, Montmartre and Roye. In 1506 it was the turn of the great abbey of Poissy. Finally, the legate fought against the isolation of monasteries. They were grouped together and placed under the control of large and wholesome ones. In 1508, for example, the Jacobins of Paris, Rouen, Blois, Compiègne and Argenton were linked to the Dutch congregation.

Thus much was done to improve conditions in the Gallican church under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Although both kings backed reform, the initiative was mainly taken by individual churchmen, including some prelates. Georges d’Amboise, in his dual capacity of royal minister and papal legate, was a powerful force. In a large number of monasteries discipline was restored. Yet the results, as many contemporaries complained, did not go far enough. Only the surface wounds of the church had been bandaged; the real sickness within the body remained to be cured. The main cause of trouble was the government of the church itself. Although the Renaissance popes paid lip-service to the cause of church reform, they were generally far more interested in advancing their family or princely interests. The Fifth Lateran Council, which Julius II had called, was too unrepresentative of the church as a whole to be an effective vehicle of reform. It produced only half-measures aimed at reducing, not extirpating, abuses. Once the council had been dissolved, its decisions were quickly forgotten.

Reform in France was strongly resisted and frequently overturned. Monks and nuns took refuge in endless lawsuits, piling appeal upon appeal, in defence of their exemptions. In many places they rose against the reformers, driving them out by force. At every turn, episcopal agents were obstructed, threatened or subjected to physical abuse. Among the mendicants a positive state of war existed between the Conventuals and the Observants – they fought each other in the courts, with their fists or by means of censures and pamphlets. In 1506, Julius II tried to reconcile the two branches of the Franciscan order. No sooner had this been accomplished than the effort had to begin afresh. In 1511 the convent of Saint-Pierre in Lyon was reformed by the grand prior of Cluny; two years later, royal officials noted that the abbess and the nuns had destroyed the walls, scrapped the new rules and sued the archbishop and his officials. Only by deporting the nuns could order be restored. At Saint-Sansom in Orléans, in 1514, the monks refused to live in common. Only after five years of quarrels, lawsuits and revolts was reform imposed by royal decree in January 1519. Almost everywhere reform had to fight every inch of the way. Even where it struck root, it often needed to be replanted.

In the past the church had put its own house in order. Now the reformers were frequently obliged to seek the assistance of the secular authorities. Municipal bodies were sometimes asked to help, but they seldom wanted to be drawn into a situation likely to trigger off public disturbances. They were particularly cautious regarding the mendicants, who, even in their unreformed state, had much popular support. Nor could the parlements be depended upon to assist reform. They were traditionally suspicious of any interference by Rome, as they showed by challenging the powers of legates. They also denied bishops freedom of action. In 1486 the avocat du roi Le Maistre denied that bishops could exercise any jurisdiction over exempt churches. The parlement claimed the right to judge all suits involving privileged monasteries. In 1483 it demanded the reinstatement of the Conventual friars who had been expelled from Tours by Maillard and the Observants. In 1501 it received an appeal from the monks of Saint-Victor against the bishop of Paris who was trying to reform them. All too often, reform of the French church degenerated into a kind of police operation. By placing too much reliance on force and not enough on conversion, it created a large body of discontent among regular clergy who were forced to accept a life-style with which they had grown unfamiliar or be thrown out of their monasteries and convents.

By 1515, therefore, much still remained to be done. The constitutional argument between conciliarism and papalism was unresolved. The Pragmatic Sanction, though still in force, was often disregarded by the king. Disputes over appointments to benefices were still coming before the parlement with undue frequency. Abuses among the clergy were still rife, offering much scope to popular satirists like Pierre Gringore. His Folles Entreprises (1505) and Abus du monde (1509) attacked the debauchery and avarice of the secular clergy, the ambition of prelates and the corruption of monks. He even accused reformers of hypocrisy. As for the theologians, they remained divided into two broad camps: the schoolmen and the humanists. While the former dispensed the dry subtleties of Scotus and Ockham, the latter tried to build a new faith on a basis of sound scriptural studies. At the same time a wave of mysticism, reaching back to Thomas à Kempis, Cusa, Lull and beyond, caused many Christians to turn away from the formal observances of the church in favour of private prayer and ecstasy. It was this partially reformed, often rebellious and ideologically divided Gallican church which was soon to be faced by the Protestant challenge.

SIX Francis I: The first decade(1515–25)

‘Kingship is the dignity, not the property, of the prince.’ These words spoken by a deputy at the Estates-General of 1484 embody the theory of royal succession which prevailed in late mediaeval France. The king, however absolute he might deem himself to be, was not free to dispose of the crown; he had to be succeeded by his nearest male kinsman. It was in accordance with this principle that François duc de Valois and comte d’Angoulême, Louis XII’s cousin, succeeded to the throne on 1 January 1515 at the age of twenty-one. His right to do so was unimpeachable, for it was a clearly established principle that ‘the king never dies’; he was to be followed immediately by his lawful successor. There was no possibility of an interregnum.

In the words of the English chronicler Edward Hall, Francis I was ‘a goodly prince, stately of countenance, merry of chere, brown coloured, great eyes, high nosed, big lipped, fair breasted and shoulders, small legs and long feet’. Ellis Griffith, a Welsh soldier in the service of Henry VIII, who was able to observe the French king closely at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, tells us that he was six feet tall. His head was rightly proportioned for his height, the nape of his neck was unusually broad, his hair brown, smooth and neatly combed, his beard of three months’ growth darker in colour, his nose long, his eyes hazel and bloodshot, and his complexion the colour of watered-down milk. He had muscular buttocks and thighs, but his legs below the knees were thin and bandy, while his feet were long, slender and completely flat. He had an agreeable voice and, in conversation, an animated expression marred only by the unkingly habit of continually rolling up his eyes.

Contemporaries often remarked on Francis’s eloquence and charm. He would talk easily on almost any subject, though sometimes with more self-assurance than knowledge; he could also write well. The letters he wrote to his mother during his first Italian campaign are spontaneous and vivid; his verses display emotional sincerity. But Francis was first and foremost a man of action: he delighted in hunting, jousting and dancing. Dangerously realistic mock battles capable of inflicting serious injuries were a stock entertainment at his court. In hunting, as in war, Francis showed outstanding courage. During celebrations at Amboise in June 1515 he had to be dissuaded from engaging a wild boar in single combat.

Francis has gone down in history as a great lover. Women certainly loomed large in his life, though many stories about his amours are pure fantasy. That is not to say that his morals were irreproachable. He was dissolute and had probably contracted syphilis before 1524. About the time of his accession he was having an affair with the wife of Jacques Disomme, a distinguished parlementaire. Truth, however, is not easily distilled from gossip. Even the king’s first official mistress, Françoise de Foix, comtesse de Châteaubriant, is a shadowy figure. She seems to have had little or no political influence.

Three women were pre-eminent at Francis I’s court in the early part of his reign: his mother, his sister and his wife. Louise of Savoy, being a widow in her early forties, was free to devote herself to her son’s service. She was given a powerful voice in government and her influence was felt especially in foreign affairs. The king’s sister Marguerite was intelligent, vivacious, and quite attractive. In 1509 she married Charles duc d’Alençon, but the match proved unhappy. Marguerite found consolation in pious meditation and good works. She became attracted to the ideas of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, leader of an evangelical group known as the Cercle de Meaux, and wrote religious poems which offended the narrowly orthodox ‘Sorbonne’, as the Paris Faculty of Theology is commonly known. Marguerite shared her mother’s interest in public affairs; foreign ambassadors often mentioned her in their dispatches. As for Queen Claude, she was widely renowned for her sweet, charitable and pious nature. Over a period of nine years she bore the king three sons and four daughters.

The new administration

The funeral of Louis XII took place at the abbey of Saint-Denis on 12 January 1515. Francis meanwhile organized his administration. Though not bound by the obligations of his predecessor, he chose to confirm many existing office-holders and privileges. On 2 January, for example, he confirmed members of the Parlement of Paris. Among members of Louis XII’s administration who were kept in office was Florimond Robertet, ‘the father of the secretaries of state’. The new reign also brought new blood into the administration. Antoine Duprat became Chancellor of France. The son of a merchant of Issoire, he had entered the law and had risen from the Parlement of Toulouse to that of Paris, becoming its First President. He gained the favour of Anne of Brittany and, after her death, joined the service of Louise of Savoy. It was doubtless with her support that he became chancellor. Duprat was hard-working and shrewd, but also ruthless and grasping. He became almost universally unpopular. Another great office that had fallen vacant was the constableship of France. Charles III duc de Bourbon, the king’s most powerful vassal, was now given the office. He had a distinguished war record, having fought bravely at Agnadello in 1509 and against the Swiss in 1513. Bourbon was also governor of Languedoc and Grand chambrier de France. The marshals of France, though subordinate to the constable, were on a par with dukes and peers. At Francis’s accession they numbered only two: Stuart d’Aubigny and Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. Francis created two more: Odet de Foix, seigneur de Lautrec, and Jacques de Chabannes, seigneur de Lapalice. On becoming marshal, Lapalice relinquished the office of Grand Master of France (Grand maître de France), which was given to Francis’s erstwhile governor, Artus Gouffier, seigneur de Boisy.

In distributing favours Francis did not forget his relatives and friends. He allegedly handed over to his mother all the revenues accruing from the confirmation of existing office-holders. Her county of Angoulême was raised to ducal status and she was also given the duchy of Anjou, the counties of Maine and Beaufort-en-Vallée and the barony of Amboise. Her half-brother René, ‘the great bastard of Savoy’, was appointed Grand sénéchal and governor of Provence. Francis’s brother-in-law, Charles d’Alençon, officially recognized as ‘the second person of the kingdom’, was made governor of Normandy. The house of Bourbon was also honoured: the vicomté of Châtellerault, which belonged to François, the constable’s brother, was turned into a duchy. The county of Vendôme, belonging to a second brother called Charles, was likewise elevated in status. Guillaume Gouffier, seigneur de Bonnivet, one of Francis’s childhood companions at Amboise, was appointed Admiral of France, though at this time the office did not imply service at sea.

On 25 January, Francis was crowned in Reims cathedral. Though no longer regarded as essential to the exercise of kingship, the coronation or sacre remained an important symbol of the monarchy’s supernatural quality and close alliance with the church. From Reims, Francis went first to the shrine of Saint-Marcoul at the priory of Corbeny, a pilgrimage closely connected with his thaumaturgical powers, then to the shrine of the Black Virgin at Notre-Dame de Liesse. At Saint-Denis, burial place of his royal predecessors, he confirmed the abbey’s privileges and underwent another, less elaborate, coronation. Finally, on 15 February, he made his joyful entry (entrée joyeuse) into Paris.

Marignano (13–14 September 1515)

By January 1515, France had lost all her Italian conquests. The house of Sforza held Milan in the person of Massimiliano Sforza, Genoa was an independent republic, and the kingdom of Naples belonged to Aragon. Francis I was expected to regain the ground lost by his immediate predecessors and to avenge the defeats recently suffered by French arms. Veterans of the Italian wars whose reputations had been dented and young noblemen anxious to show their valour looked to him for satisfaction. His youth and powerful physique seemed perfectly suited to the part they expected him to play. But before he could launch a new Italian campaign, Francis needed to neutralize his more powerful neighbours. Charles of Habsburg, a shy and unprepossessing youth of fifteen, was the son of Archduke Philip the Fair and the grandson of the Emperor Maximilian and Ferdinand of Aragon. On his father’s death in 1506 he had inherited the territories of the house of Burgundy (Franche-Comté, Luxemburg, Brabant, Flanders, Holland, Zeeland, Hainault and Artois) as well as a claim to the duchy of Burgundy, which France had annexed in 1477. A Burgundian by birth and upbringing, Charles longed to rebuild his mutilated inheritance, hoping eventually to be buried in Dijon cathedral. He was encouraged by his aunt Margaret of Savoy, who ruled the Low Countries in his name. Shortly after Francis’s coronation, ambassadors from Charles came to Compiègne with their master’s homage for Flanders and other fiefs. An alliance soon followed: under the Treaty of Paris (24 March 1515), Charles was promised the hand of Louis XII’s infant daughter Renée.

Henry VIII, king of England, a robust young man of twenty-four, was anxious not to be outshone by the new king of France, yet did not wish to pick a quarrel with him at this stage. Having recently tasted victory on the Continent, he was content to enjoy himself at home and leave policy-making to his chief minister, Thomas Wolsey. On 5 April the Anglo-French Treaty of London was given a new lease of life, Francis promising to honour his predecessor’s debt to England of one million gold écus over ten years.

In Italy, Francis’s diplomacy was less successful. The Venetians agreed to help him militarily in return for assistance against the emperor, and the Genoese reverted to their allegiance to France in exchange for local concessions, but other powers proved less co-operative. The Swiss, in particular, had not forgotten Louis XII’s refusal to ratify the Treaty of Dijon; nor were they prepared to surrender territories in Lombardy which Sforza had ceded to them or the pension they received from him in return for their armed protection. Sforza was also supported by Ferdinand of Aragon and Pope Leo X. Ferdinand did not wish to see any change in the Italian situation which might endanger his hold on Naples, while Leo was anxious to avoid a repetition of the events of 1494 which had led to the overthrow of his Medici kinsmen in Florence. He was also keen to retain the towns of Parma and Piacenza which Sforza had ceded to him. As for the emperor, being at war with the Venetians, he was not prepared to treat with their ally the king of France.

The most urgent military task facing Francis I in 1515 was to raise enough infantry. France had the largest standing army in Christendom, but it consisted almost entirely of cavalry. By the early sixteenth century wars could no longer be won by cavalry alone, as had been demonstrated by the victories of the Swiss infantry over the Burgundians in the late fifteenth century. But infantry of good fighting quality was not easily raised. The king could rely to some extent on native volunteers, called aventuriers, but the best infantry were foreign mercenaries. Until 1510, France had been able to hire the Swiss, but, as they were now employed by the enemy, he had to look elsewhere. In 1515 he raised 23,000 German landsknechts, who were less disciplined than the Swiss.

Mercenaries made heavy demands on the royal purse. The main source of royal revenue was the taille which fell on commoners, especially the peasantry. The king also asked his subjects for a contribution of 2,900,000 livres in celebration of his accession, but this took a long time to collect. Francis thus had to resort to various expedients: his gold plate was melted down, forced loans were exacted from the ‘good towns’, financial officials advanced loans to the crown, and parts of the royal domain were mortgaged. By such means the king managed to create a sizeable army, which in April began to assemble near Lyon and Grenoble. It consisted of about 6000 cavalry and 31,500 infantry, but its pride was the artillery, comprising some sixty large cannon and many lighter pieces.

On 26 June, Francis informed the ‘good towns’ of his imminent departure for Italy and of his mother’s regency in his absence. At the same time he obtained from his wife Claude formal cession of her rights to Milan. Next day the king left Amboise for Lyon, where a spectacular entry awaited him on 12 July. Francis spent nearly three weeks there putting the finishing touches to his invasion plan. On 15 July he appointed his mother as regent, but her powers were limited as the chancellor accompanied the king to Italy, taking the Great seal with him. The enemy, meanwhile, prepared to bar the king’s way. They assumed that he would cross the Alps by way of either the Mont Genèvre or Mont Cenis pass. On 17 July the duke of Milan, the pope, the king of Aragon and the emperor signed a league for the defence of Italy. As the Swiss had no cavalry, the pope sent 1500 horse under Prospero Colonna to Piedmont. Francis had either to fight his way past the Swiss or by-pass them. He decided to use the Col de Larche, a pass frequented only by peasants, and sent a force of sappers ahead of the army to bridge torrents and remove obstacles. On 11 August the vanguard under Bourbon crossed the mountains and, entering the plain of Piedmont, surprised and captured the papal commander Colonna and his men at Villafranca. The Swiss thus lost their cavalry support.

The king of France, in the meantime, set off with the rest of the army. He found the crossing of the Alps arduous. The descent into Italy was so precipitous that many horses and mules fell into ravines, while cannon had to be dismantled and lowered on ropes. On reaching the plain, Francis advanced rapidly eastward. The Swiss, meanwhile, fell back to Lake Maggiore and Francis agreed to negotiate with them through his uncle, René of Savoy. A treaty was drafted, but a new round of talks began at Gallarate. The king, meanwhile, drew closer to Milan, hoping to effect a junction with the Venetian army under d’Alviano. On 9 September, Francis received the text of a treaty signed at Gallarate. The Swiss agreed to give up their Milanese territories, except Bellinzona, in return for a subsidy of one million gold écus of which 150,000 were to be paid in cash immediately. Sforza was to surrender Milan in exchange for the duchy of Nemours. Francis was to be allowed to raise troops in Switzerland in return for a subsidy to each canton. He immediately obtained the sum of 150,000 écus from his entourage and sent it to Gallarate. Meanwhile, he encamped at Marignano (now Melegnano), a village situated between Milan and Pavia.

However, not all the Swiss wanted peace. While the men of Berne, Fribourg and Solothurn were keen to go home, those from other cantons refused to give up the fruits of their recent victories without a fight. They were encouraged by Cardinal Schiner, a bitter enemy of France, who made a stirring speech in Milan on 13 September. A minor skirmish with French scouts outside the city precipitated an armed decision. About midday the Swiss, most of them barefoot, hatless and without armour, swarmed out of the city. Their artillery consisted of only eight small guns; Schiner and about 200 papal horse followed in the rear. Hoping to catch the French by surprise, the Swiss marched briskly and in silence, but inevitably they threw up a cloud of dust.

A party of French sappers, spotting the cloud, alerted the French camp, which was soon ready for action. As usual, the Swiss advanced in an echelon of three compact squares of 7000 or 8000 pikemen each. The first crossed a ditch protecting the French guns and scattered the infantry, leaving the gunners isolated. The landsknechts then moved forward, and two gigantic squares of pikemen collided. Once again the Swiss broke through. A counterattack by the French cavalry was thrown back. The fighting continued until midnight, when the moon vanished, plunging the field into complete obscurity. The two armies then separated, the French responding to shrill trumpet calls and the Swiss to the deep bellowing of their war-horns. Francis used the interval to redeploy his army. Duprat, meanwhile, wrote to Lautrec, instructing him not to hand over the money to the Swiss at Gallarate. When battle was resumed at dawn, the Swiss adapted their tactics to the new French formation. Instead of advancing in echelon, they engaged the entire French line. Braving the fire of the French guns, they forced back the landsknechts in the centre, but were themselves driven back by Francis and the gendarmerie. On the left, however, the Swiss overwhelmed the French guns, scattered the infantry and lunged into the landsknechts. The French left was about to collapse when the Venetian cavalry arrived, shouting: ‘San Marco! San Marco!’ Their spirits revived, the French mounted a counterattack. By 11 AM the Swiss had been routed.

Marshal Trivulzio, a veteran of seventeen battles, described Marignano as a ‘battle of giants’ beside which the others were but ‘children’s games’. The gravediggers reported burying 16,500 corpses, but the exact number of French and Swiss losses is not known. Many French noblemen lost their lives; their bodies were embalmed and sent back to their estates for burial. Reviewing the battle, Francis singled out for praise Galiot de Genouillac, whose guns had slowed down the Swiss attack, and Pierre du Terrail, seigneur de Bayard. The king allegedly crowned his victory by having himself knighted by Bayard on the battlefield as a tribute to his bravery.

The immediate result of Marignano was the capitulation of Milan on 16 September. Sforza gave up its castle on 6 October and retired to France, where he died in May 1530. Francis entered Milan in triumph on 11 October and stayed there till the end of the month, when he entrusted the city to Bourbon and Duprat. The latter was appointed chancellor of Milan in addition to his existing office, and the Senate originally set up by Louis XII was revived. The citizens were asked to pay a huge fine as a punishment for their rebellion and to surrender hostages.

No sixteenth-century ruler could afford to alienate the Swiss. As Charles V once said, the ‘secret of secrets’ was to win them over. In October, therefore, Francis sent an embassy to thank the cantons that had pulled out of the war and to seek a settlement with the others. On 7 November the Treaty of Geneva was signed with ten cantons, but only eight ratified it; the rest offered their services to the emperor.

No one was more upset by Francis’s victory than Pope Leo X, who had backed the wrong horse; but he had nothing to fear as Francis needed his friendship. Recent history had shown that a king of France could not establish a lasting foothold in Italy without papal co-operation. Despite his victory, Francis’s position in Italy remained precarious. He was faced by the possibility of a coalition between the hostile Swiss cantons, the emperor and England. This threat made it all the more urgent for Francis to gain the pope’s friendship, or at least his neutrality. Thus a treaty was soon arranged: in exchange for Parma and Piacenza, the king gave the duchy of Nemours to Leo’s brother Giuliano, along with a fat pension, and another pension to the pope’s nephew Lorenzo. This, however, was only the first step. The two rulers needed to discuss other matters, notably the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) whose abrogation the papacy had long demanded. They arranged to meet in Bologna.

Francis reached Bologna on 11 December, three days after the pope. Both resided at the Palazzo Pubblico. Though shrouded in secrecy, their talks were, it seems, much concerned with Italian affairs. Leo may have hinted at the possibility of Francis being given Naples on the death of Ferdinand of Aragon in return for a promise of French aid to the Medici in Florence. Agreement was also reached on the need for a crusade, Francis being allowed to levy a clerical tenth, but the most important decision taken at Bologna was to substitute a Concordat for the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges.

The Concordat of Bologna (1516)

The Concordat of Bologna was approved by the pope on 18 August 1516, but before it could become law in France it had to be registered by the Parlement of Paris, and Francis I was allowed six months in which to get this done. The parlement, however, was deeply suspicious of a settlement which threatened to undermine, if not to destroy, the liberties of the Gallican church, as enshrined in the Pragmatic Sanction. Although it was asked on 5 February 1517 to register the Concordat, it took more than two years to comply and Francis had to obtain an extension of the deadline he had been given. The parlement’s delaying tactics angered him so much that in June 1517 he ordered his uncle, René of Savoy, to attend the court’s debates. The parlement protested at this infringement of its liberties, but had to submit when Francis threatened to replace its members by ‘gens de bien’ (worthy men). Despite René’s presence, the parlement still would not register the Concordat. Its refusal was conveyed to the king at Amboise by two parlementaires, who had to face his wrath. There would be only one king in France, he declared, and no Senate as in Venice. He threatened to make the parlement ‘trot after him like the Grand conseil’ and accused it of neglecting its judicial duties. When the envoys asked for permission to delay their departure until local floods had subsided, they were told that if they had not left by morning they would be thrown into a deep pit and left there for six months. On 6 March 1518 the king again demanded registration of the Concordat. He was said to be planning to set up a rival parlement at Orléans. The threat achieved its purpose and on 22 March the parlement finally gave way: the Concordat was registered, albeit with the addition of a phrase indicating duress. At the same time, the parlement secretly declared that it would continue to apply the Pragmatic Sanction in ecclesiastical disputes.

No sooner had the parlement capitulated than the University of Paris began to agitate, fearing that its graduates would lose the privileged position given to them by the Pragmatic Sanction in respect of collation to ecclesiastical benefices. The university suspended its lectures, forbade anyone to print the Concordat, and appealed to a future General Council. A memorandum denouncing the Concordat was circulated to preachers for use in their Lenten sermons. Placards to the same effect were put up in colleges and public places. Francis ordered the parlement to intervene; otherwise, he threatened to apply the severest measures. A few days later he appointed a special commission to enquire into the disorders. College principals were ordered to restrain their students. On 25 April the university was forbidden to meddle in state affairs under pain of loss of its privileges and banishment from the kingdom.

It is commonly assumed that the main purpose of the Concordat was to increase the king’s control of the Gallican church and that, having won the battle of Marignano, he had imposed his terms on Leo X. Both assumptions, however, are questionable. The crown, as we have seen, already had extensive control of the church before 1516. After 1438 the church was governed in theory by the Pragmatic Sanction, which allowed chapters the right to elect bishops and abbots; but the monarchy often determined the outcome of elections. By 1515 royal control of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was an accepted fact. This was acknowledged by the president of the parlement in March 1515, when he begged Francis to appoint worthy men of sufficient years to administer sees and religious houses.

Marignano did not give Francis mastery of Italy. He remained vulnerable in the north, nor could he impose terms on the pope. The king needed Leo not merely to safeguard his own gains in north Italy but also to acquire territory farther south. In February 1516, on learning of the death of Ferdinand of Aragon, Francis ‘decided to try to recover the kingdom of Naples’. To achieve this, however, he needed the pope’s help. As temporal ruler of the States of the Church, Leo controlled the overland route south; as suzerain of Naples, he alone could grant its investiture. So Francis decided to satisfy the long-standing papal demand for the annulment of the Pragmatic Sanction, even though this meant offending his subjects. It was primarily to win papal support for his Italian policy that he signed the Concordat.

As a political move, the Concordat was a failure. After supporting the king of France, Leo X ditched him in 1521. Yet Francis was never tempted to revoke the Concordat. As long as he hoped to re-establish his rule in Italy he tried to remain on good terms with the Holy See. As an ecclesiastical settlement, the Concordat was a bargain struck by the king and the papacy at the expense of the Gallican liberties. It restored papal authority in France while legalizing and enlarging royal control of church appointments. Yet the king was not given unlimited control: the pope retained the right of instituting royal nominees and of setting aside any whose qualifications fell short of the canonical requirements. Some churches were also allowed to continue electing their superiors. In practice, however, the Concordat was not strictly applied: the king imposed his candidates on churches claiming the privilege of election, and in June 1531 he obtained from the pope the annulment of this privilege, except in respect of religious houses. Francis also sometimes ignored canonical requirements. Very occasionally the pope refused to institute a royal nominee, but this was exceptional. In general the Concordat strengthened royal control of the Gallican church.

Naples and Navarre

On 23 January, after Francis had returned to the south of France, Ferdinand of Aragon died leaving his kingdom to his grandson Charles. This upset the balance of power in Europe, for Charles already ruled the Netherlands and Franche-Comté. By gaining the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Naples, he became France’s most powerful neighbour. What is more, Francis had an interest in Naples and Navarre, two of the territories now acquired by Charles. Having inherited the Angevin claim to Naples, he ordered the archives of Provence to be searched for documentary proof of his title. Part of the small Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre had been seized by Ferdinand from its king, Jean d’Albret, in 1512 and had since been absorbed into Castile. Jean looked to the king of France for redress. As duke of Burgundy, Charles had implicitly recognized Jean’s claim to Navarre, but he was unlikely to do so in his new role of Spanish monarch. He was equally unlikely to give up Naples.

For a time, however, trouble between Francis and Charles was contained. For Charles, who was in the Netherlands at the time, still had to take possession of his Spanish realm, where, as a Fleming by birth, he could expect opposition. He needed assurance that France would not invade the Netherlands during his absence in Spain. On 13 August, therefore, he and Francis signed the Treaty of Noyon. Charles was promised the hand of Louise, Francis’s infant daughter, and Naples was to be part of her dowry. Pending the marriage, Charles was to pay Francis an annual tribute for Naples of 100,000 gold écus thereby implicitly recognizing the French claim to that kingdom. He also promised to compensate Jean d’Albret’s widow, Catherine de Foix, for the loss of Spanish Navarre.

The ‘Perpetual’ Peace of Fribourg (29 November 1516)

In Austria, meanwhile, Cardinal Schiner had been urging the Emperor Maximilian to invade Milan and restore the Sforzas to power. The emperor could count on the support of some Swiss and of Henry VIII, whose jealousy had been aroused by the French victory at Marignano. Early in March 1516, Maximilian invaded north Italy. He reached the outskirts of Milan, but two days later he suddenly decamped, leaving his troops in the lurch. His ignominious flight enabled Francis to come to terms with the Swiss. On 29 November the so-called ‘Perpetual Peace of Fribourg’ was signed. Francis agreed to pay a war indemnity of 700,000 écus to the cantons. He also promised them 300,000 écus for the castles of Lugano and Locarno and fortresses in the Valtelline, and an annual subsidy of 2000 écus to each canton. The Swiss, for their part, promised not to serve anyone against France. Although less than a complete alliance, the treaty gave Francis the right to hire Swiss mercenaries in the future. The peace was called ‘perpetual’ because it was never formally broken. Swiss troops still guarded the king of France during the French Revolution.

On 11 March 1517, Francis, Maximilian and Charles of Spain signed the Treaty of Cambrai in which they agreed to assist each other if attacked and to join a crusade. Christendom needed to unite against the westward expansion of the Turks. Under Mehmet II they had captured Constantinople, penetrated deep into the Balkans and expelled the Venetians from Euboea. Now, under Selim the Grim, they were advancing once more: after overrunning Syria in August 1516, they invaded Egypt early in 1517. ‘It is time’, Leo X declared, ‘that we woke from sleep lest we be put to the sword unawares.’ In March 1518 he proclaimed a five-year truce among Christian powers and sent nuncios to the courts of Europe to gather support for a crusade, but they were more interested in problems nearer home than in the Balkans or eastern Mediterranean.

In September 1517, Charles arrived in Spain with an entourage of Flemings and took control of his kingdom. The Treaty of Noyon had become an embarrassment to him: he could not afford to pay the Neapolitan tribute and seemed disinclined to honour his pledge regarding Navarre. Yet Charles continued to assure Francis of his good intentions. In May 1519 a conference was held at Montpellier to sort out differences between the two monarchs, but it soon became a slanging match over the question of Navarre and collapsed altogether following the death of Boisy, who had led the French delegation.

The imperial election (1519)

On 12 January 1519 the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, died, causing another major upheaval of Europe’s power structure. The Empire was an elective dignity, not a hereditary one, the emperor being chosen by seven Electors: the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, the king of Bohemia, the Elector-Palatine, the duke of Saxony and the margrave of Brandenburg. They were not obliged to choose a Habsburg or even a German, for the Empire was a supra-national dignity, the secular counterpart of the papacy. Thus it was possible for a Frenchman to be a candidate.

In 1516, even before Maximilian’s death, the archbishops of Mainz and Trier had invited Francis to stand for election, promising him their votes. They had soon been joined by Joachim of Brandenburg and the Elector-Palatine, so that the king could reasonably expect a majority in his favour in the electoral college. The Empire attracted him not only for its international prestige, but also because he wanted to keep it out of the hands of Maximilian’s grandson Charles, who was already powerful enough. As he explained, ‘The reason which moves me to gain the Empire … is to prevent the said Catholic King from doing so. If he were to succeed, seeing the extent of his kingdoms and lordships, this could do me immeasurable harm; he would always be mistrustful and suspicious, and would doubtless throw me out of Italy.’

The Electors were less interested in Francis’s candidature than in promoting a contest. Under rules laid down in the Golden Bull, an imperial election was supposed to be free of corruption. In practice, however, it resembled an auction. As the Habsburgs marshalled their resources, Francis did likewise. He sent envoys to the Electors with 400,000 écus to distribute as bribes. When Charles Guillart suggested that persuasion might be preferable to bribery, Francis strongly disagreed. He was better placed than his rival to win the election, for he was closer to Germany and allowed his agents a free hand, whereas Charles was far away in Spain and would not allow his agents to concede anything without his prior approval. But Francis was denied the co-operation of the German bankers, who sided with the Habsburgs if only because they controlled the silver mines of central Europe. Consequently, he was denied exchange facilities and obliged to send ready cash to Germany at a time when the roads were infested with brigands.

German public opinion was also strongly anti-French. Habsburg agents used every means, including sermons and illustrated broadsheets, to stir up suspicion and hatred of the French. Germans were led to believe that the bribes Francis was distributing had been forcibly taken from his subjects and that a comparable fate would befall themselves if he were elected. Francis countered this propaganda by claiming that he, rather than Charles, would be the more effective champion of Christendom against the Turkish Infidel.

On 8 June 1519 the Electors gathered at Frankfurt under the shadow of the army of the Swabian League. No Frenchmen, said Henry of Nassau, would enter Germany save on the points of spears and swords. At the eleventh hour Leo X, who had so far supported Francis as the lesser of two evils (he did not wish to see a union of the imperial and Neapolitan crowns), changed his mind. Even Francis gave up hope of winning. On 26 June he withdrew his candidature and, two days later, Charles was chosen unanimously.

Historians have often assumed that the rivalry which developed between Francis and Charles stemmed from the imperial election. Francis was undoubtedly vexed by the result, particularly as he had wasted some 400,000 écus on bribes. But his disappointment was dwarfed by the political implications of the election. Before Charles could be a fully-fledged emperor, he needed to be crowned by the pope in Italy. He was likely to go there in force and would almost certainly threaten Francis’s hold on Milan, particularly as the emperor was the duchy’s suzerain. The pope, too, had reason to fear Habsburg domination of the peninsula. On 22 October he signed a secret treaty with Francis. While the king promised to defend the States of the Church against Charles, Leo undertook to deny Charles the investiture of Naples.

The Field of Cloth of Gold (June 1520)

The imperial election brought France and England closer together. Whereas in the past there had been four major powers in Europe, France, Spain, England and the Empire, now there were only three, Spain and the Empire having become joined in the person of Charles V. As France and the new Habsburg state seemed of roughly equal weight, England’s position was enhanced. Cardinal Wolsey, who directed Henry VIII’s foreign policy, revived the idea, first mooted in 1518, of a meeting between Henry and Francis. On 12 March he laid down the conditions of what has become known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. Charles, whose aunt Catherine of Aragon was Henry’s queen, tried hard to prevent the meeting or to secure its postponement. He visited England on his way from Spain to Germany and held talks with Henry VIII, but no one knows what they decided.

The Anglo-French meeting took place in June at a site between the English town of Guînes and the French town of Ardres. Providing suitable accommodation for the large number of participants was probably the biggest headache for the organizers. Henry erected a large temporary palace outside Guînes castle, while Francis put up a superb tent covered with gold brocade and striped with blue velvet powdered with gold fleur-de-lys. It was the tallest of some 300 or 400 pitched in a meadow outside Ardres.

The Field of Cloth of Gold consisted of two events: the initial meeting of the kings on 7 June and a tournament or feat of arms scheduled to last twelve days. Henry and his court crossed the Channel on 31 May. Soon afterwards, Wolsey with a magnificent escort called on Francis at Ardres and signed a treaty which provided for the marriage between the Dauphin and Mary Tudor. On 7 June, at an agreed signal, the two kings, each accompanied by a large escort, moved towards the Val Doré, where they faced each other on two artificial mounds. After a fanfare, Henry and Francis rode towards the bottom of the valley. They spurred their mounts as if about to engage in combat, but instead embraced each other. After dismounting, they retired to a tent where they were joined by Wolsey and Bonnivet. An hour later they emerged and presented their respective nobles to each other.

The ‘feat of arms’, which began on 11 June, lasted till the 24th. Complicated regulations had been drawn up to prevent accidents. The two kings did not fight each other: they competed each with his own team. The famous story of Henry being worsted by Francis in a wrestling match is probably apocryphal. What is certain is that the king of France soon tired of the rigid etiquette that had been prescribed. On 17 June he paid Henry a surprise visit. Bursting into his chamber, he exclaimed: ‘Brother, here am I your prisoner!’ Not to be outdone, Henry turned up in Francis’s bedroom two days later. This put everyone in a good mood. On 23 June mass was celebrated by Wolsey amidst great pomp on the tournament field. The two royal chapels sang alternate verses of hymns accompanied by an organ, trombones and cornets. Afterwards the pope’s blessing was conferred on both kings. Louise of Savoy announced that her son and Henry intended jointly to build a palace in the Val Doré where they might meet each year, and also a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Friendship.

Money matters

Francis I incurred heavy expenses from the start of his reign. Having inherited a deficit of 1.4 million livres from Louis XII, he had to pay for that king’s funeral and for his own coronation. The overall cost of the Marignano campaign has been estimated at 7.5 million livres. The Peace of Fribourg cost the French crown one million écus and inaugurated a system of pensions to the Swiss. In 1518, Francis paid 600,000 écus for the return of Tournai. The imperial election campaign may have cost him another 400,000 écus and the Field of Cloth of Gold at least 200,000l. In June 1517 the king’s council decided to levy supplementary taxes worth 1,100,0431. in an attempt to reduce the government’s deficit of 3,996,5061.

Francis did not substantially change either the burden or the structure of taxation during his reign. Royal income from taxes rose by an annual average of 1.44 per cent, which is moderate by comparison with the average of 2.38 per cent per annum under Louis XII and 5.7 per cent per annum under Henry II. The taille rose most in absolute terms: from about 2.4 million livres in 1515 to some 4.6 million in 1544–5 with a fall to 3.6 million in 1547. The rate of the gabelle in north and central France trebled during the reign, but over the whole kingdom its value was only 700,000l. in 1547 as compared with less than 400,000 in the early part of the reign. The aides and other indirect taxes are said to have risen from about 1.2 million to 2.15 million. Domainal revenues did not rise at all. The only tax created by Francis was one on walled towns to pay for infantry.

However, taxation estimates based on the central records are misleading, for a high proportion of the receipts were disbursed at the collection point and never reached the royal treasury. The actual burden of taxation was also heavier than is suggested by the central records, the sums imposed by local collectors being often in excess of the legal limits. The yield was also eroded by the costs of collection.

Although in theory the French church was exempt from direct taxation, the reality was different. In theory the clerical tenth or décime was a voluntary gift to assist the king in an emergency, yet in practice it became virtually a regular tax. Following the Concordat of Bologna, the pope allowed Francis to levy a tenth on the French clergy and he did so again in 1527 and 1533, but papal authorization was not regarded as essential; the initiative was often taken by the king alone. Altogether 57 tenths were levied under Francis and may have yielded a total of 18 million livres.

It was outside his regular income that Francis innovated most. To meet his immediate needs, he borrowed from merchants and bankers, most of them Italians who had settled in Lyon. They lent to the crown sometimes under constraint or in exchange for commercial concessions, but usually as a result of free speculative choice. The king was often prepared to pay high rates of interest. For example, a loan of 100,000 écus raised for the Field of Cloth of Gold carried an annual interest of 16.2 per cent. By 1516 the crown was already heavily in debt to the Lyon bankers.

Francis also borrowed heavily from his own tax officials, who were invariably men of substance. If for some reason the tax yield was lower than expected, a tax official might be asked to advance money from his own pocket. In return, he would be allowed to reimburse himself from the next year’s tax receipts. This was how taxes were ‘anticipated’. On a number of occasions the king helped himself to the inheritance of a wealthy subject. His first victim was the seigneur de Boisy who died in May 1519.

Although many towns were exempt from the taille, they were often asked for forced loans, which could be even more burdensome. In 1515 and 1516, for example, Francis asked for sums ranging from 1500 to 6000 livres each from Toulouse, Lyon, Troyes and Angers. Paris was asked for 20,000l. to help pay for the defence of the kingdom. Sometimes a town was allowed to recoup by levying a local tax or octroi on some commodity such as wine. An expedient much used by Francis was the alienation of crown lands by gift or sale. This was repeatedly opposed by the parlement, which pointed to the adverse effect on the king’s ‘poor subjects’ of any diminution of his ‘ordinary’ revenue, but Francis always managed to get his way.

Two other expedients were the sale of titles of nobility and of royal offices. As far as is known, Francis issued 183 letters of ennoblement during his reign of which 153 were sold. They cost between 100 and 300 écus before 1543 and considerably more afterwards. As for offices, Francis turned their sale into a veritable system. They were sold directly to bourgeois anxious to acquire them as a means of social advancement (for many offices conferred noble status on the holders) or were given away as rewards for services rendered or as repayment of loans, leaving the recipients free to sell them if they wished. Francis also sold résignations and survivances which enabled office-holders to nominate their successors. The price of a councillorship in the Parlement of Paris was fixed by 1522 at 3000 écus; other offices commanded variable amounts. The sale or venality of offices created a dangerous situation in the long term as they tended to be monopolized by a limited number of families.

The trésoriers de France and généraux des finances (known collectively as gens des finances), who administered the crown’s finances between 1515 and 1527, were closely related to each other and shared their interests. Alongside their royal duties they ran very profitable businesses of their own. Consequently, their public and private functions overlapped, offering speculative temptations. An outstanding member of this financial oligarchy was Jacques de Beaune, baron of Semblançay, the son of a rich merchant of Tours, who became the king’s chief financial adviser after serving his mother and, before her, Anne of Brittany. As général of Languedoïl, he played a leading role in funding the Marignano campaign. In January 1518 he was given overall powers of supervision over all the king’s revenues, but it was probably as an agent of credit that he proved most useful to the crown. Important as they were, the gens des finances did not have ultimate control of the crown’s financial policy. This was vested in the king’s council among whose members one, usually the Grand Master, was singled out to oversee financial business. The king himself was by no means uninterested in such business. In April 1519 he spent three days with his gens des finances looking for ways to fund the army.

War with the emperor (1521)

Charles of Habsburg was crowned King of the Romans at Aachen on 23 October 1520. Two days later Pope Leo X allowed him to use the title of ‘Roman emperor elect’. Charles hoped to go to Italy soon for his imperial coronation, but various matters detained him in Germany, among them the Lutheran Reformation. Francis hoped to return to Italy himself, but was prevented by a serious accident. However, he added to Charles’s problems in order to keep him out of Italy. Among visitors to the king’s bedside were Robert de La Marck, seigneur de Sedan, and Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre. Soon afterwards they invaded Luxemburg and Navarre respectively. Francis disclaimed any responsibility for their actions, but Charles was not deceived. He accused the king of waging war covertly and warned him of the risks involved. Soon afterwards an imperial army led by the count of Nassau threw La Marck out of Luxemburg, overran Sedan and threatened France’s northern border. In the south, Marshal Lescun’s army was routed at Ezquiros, and Spanish Navarre, which he had invaded, reverted to Castilian rule.

In Italy, too, Francis ran into serious trouble. On 29 May, Leo X came to terms with Charles V. The latter promised to restore Parma and Piacenza to the Holy See, to assist the pope against the duke of Ferrara and to take the Medici under his protection, while Leo promised to crown Charles emperor in Rome and signified his willingness to invest him with Naples. The treaty, however, was kept secret until Leo was given a pretext to break his alliance with France. In June, Lescun, who had been left in charge of Milan, invaded the States of the Church in pursuit of some rebels. His action gave the pope the pretext he had been waiting for. When an ammunition dump in Milan exploded, killing many French soldiers, Leo acclaimed the event as an act of God and made public his treaty with Charles. Soon afterwards they formed a league for the defence of Italy. Denouncing the pope’s ingratitude on 13 July, Francis banned the export of all ecclesiastical revenues to Rome and imposed heavy fines on Florentine merchants in France. He boasted that before long he would enter Rome and impose laws on the pope.

By the summer of 1521, Francis had cause to rethink his policies. The emperor was threatening his northern border, Navarre was again under Castilian rule, the pope had turned imperialist and the French hold on Milan was precarious. On 9 June the king accepted an offer of mediation from Henry VIII, and in July an international conference met at Calais under Wolsey’s chairmanship. Francis wanted peace, not a truce, but Mercurino di Gattinara, the imperial chancellor, wanted neither. He was anxious to prove that Francis had been the aggressor as the first step towards forming an Anglo-imperial alliance.

On 20 August the emperor invaded northern France. For three weeks Mézières was heavily bombarded, but the garrison, commanded by Bayard, put up a stout resistance. This gave Francis time to gather an army near Reims. He still hoped for peace, but the Calais conference was getting nowhere. Wolsey, who had paid a mysterious visit to the emperor in Bruges, seemed to be playing for time. In late September the title of war suddenly turned in France’s favour. On 26 September, Nassau lifted the siege of Mézières and retreated into Hainault; in Italy, Lautrec relieved Parma; and on 19 October, Bonnivet captured Fuenterrabía on the Franco-Spanish border. These French victories naturally affected the talks in Calais. When Wolsey suggested a truce, Francis was no longer interested. He planned to relieve Tournai which was being besieged by the imperialists, but on 23 October he missed a unique opportunity of defeating the enemy, and on 1 November he began retreating towards Arras. Nine days later he disbanded his army; soon afterwards Tournai capitulated. Francis was hoping for better news from Italy, but on 19 November the league’s army captured Milan. The French were then driven out of other towns in the duchy. The Calais conference, meanwhile, came to an end. On 24 November, in the Treaty of Bruges, Wolsey committed England to enter the war on the emperor’s side in 1522.

The financial crisis of 1521–3

It was only in 1521, after Francis had gone to war with the emperor, that the gap between his income and expenses became almost unbridgeable. For war had become very expensive, especially the hire of Swiss mercenaries. ‘These people’, wrote Anne de Montmorency, ‘ask for so much money and are so unreasonable that it is almost impossible to satisfy them.’ Yet Francis could not dispense with them. Within a few months his indebtedness to moneylenders rose alarmingly. By the spring of 1522 he owed them one million livres. At the beginning of 1521, Semblançay had in his keeping 300,000 écus which the king had received from Charles V as part of the Neapolitan pension and 107,000 livres belonging to Louise of Savoy. When she implored Semblançay to do everything in his power to assist her son, he assumed that she meant him to use her savings as well as the king’s. But this money was very soon swallowed up. On 13 September, Semblançay informed the king that he had only enough money left for one month. As the war dragged on through the winter, Francis created offices, and in February 1522 alienated crown lands worth 200,000 livres. The taille of 1523 was anticipated to the tune of 1,191,1841. The king called on a number of towns to pay for infantry. He also seized church treasures worth 240,000l. The silver grille enclosing the shrine of St Martin at Tours was torn down by royal agents, melted down and turned into coin. At Laon cathedral four statues of apostles in gold were given the same treatment.

On 22 September the government raised a loan of 200,000l. from the Parisian public against the security of the municipal revenues. This marked the beginning of the system of public credit, known as the Rentes sur l’Hôtel de Ville. Each contributor to the loan was assured of a life annuity or rente, carrying a rate of interest of 8¹/₃ per cent which was paid out of the receipts from various local taxes. As the interest was paid by municipal officials of the same social background as the lenders, the system rested on a fair measure of mutual trust, yet Parisians showed little enthusiasm for the scheme.

The battle of La Bicocca (27 April 1522)

The sudden death of Leo X on 1 December 1521 changed the situation in Italy. As the flow of money from papal coffers to Colonna’s army dried up, the French under Marshal Lautrec reorganized themselves. Much, however, hung on the result of the next papal conclave. Francis threatened to sever his allegiance to the Holy See if Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, leader of the imperial faction in the Sacred College, were elected. In the event, the cardinals chose Adrian of Utrecht, Charles V’s old tutor and regent in Spain. Francis was understandably furious, but Adrian, who took the name of Hadrian VI, approached his new duties in a truly Christian spirit. Denying that he owed his election to Charles, he refused to be drawn into the anti-French league. His main objective was to pacify Christendom as the first step towards arranging a crusade against the Turks, who now threatened Rhodes, the last Christian outpost in the eastern Mediterranean. Francis, however, was more interested in regaining Milan.

In March 1522, Lautrec, whose army had been reinforced by 16,000 Swiss, laid siege to Milan, but, finding the city too strong, he turned his attention to Pavia. Francesco Sforza was thus able to put more troops into Milan, much to the chagrin of Francis who accused his captains in Italy of incompetence. He declared his intention of returning there himself, but was overtaken by events. Emerging from Milan, Colonna threatened Lautrec’s rear, whereupon the marshal lifted the siege of Pavia and marched to Monza. Colonna followed at a safe distance and encamped in the grounds of a villa north-west of Milan, called La Bicocca. He fortified his camp with ditches, ramparts and gun platforms. Lautrec saw the madness of attacking it, but his Swiss troops, who had grown tired of marching and counter-marching to no purpose, threatened to leave unless he engaged the enemy at once. He begged them to think again, but eventually conceded their demand. On 27 April they attacked the imperial camp only to be decimated. Some 3000 were killed, leaving the rest to return to Switzerland utterly humiliated. Lautrec, after a vain attempt to hang on to Lodi, returned angrily to France. His brother Lescun surrendered Cremona soon afterwards. On 30 May, Genoa capitulated. Only the castles of Milan and Cremona remained in French hands. The French débâcle in Italy was soon followed by England’s entry into the war. On 29 May an English herald appeared before Francis in Lyon and declared war in Henry’s name. Hostilities began in July when the earl of Surrey raided Morlaix. In September he led an army out of Calais and tried unsuccessfully to provoke the French into giving battle. Within a month, however, his supplies ran out, forcing him to withdraw to Calais.

While the princes of Christendom were fighting each other, Rhodes fell to the Turks. Hadrian VI urged the princes to sink their differences and join a crusade; but Francis insisted on Milan being restored to him first. The pope, he said, had no canonical right to impose a truce under threat of spiritual sanctions. He reminded Hadrian of the fate that had befallen Pope Boniface VIII in the fourteenth century when he had opposed the French king Philip the Fair. In June he banned the export of money from France to Rome and dismissed the papal nuncio from his court. These measures only served to drive Hadrian into the imperial camp. On 3 August he joined a league for the defence of Italy.

The enquiry commissions of 1523–4 and fiscal reform

By 1523 there was not enough money in the king’s coffers to pay for the war. Francis had to look for new sources of income. He suspected that he was being cheated by his own fiscal officials, and set up a commission to audit their accounts and to punish any malpractices. Not even Semblançay, who had done so much to assist the king out of his difficulties, was spared, yet his only fault had been not to distinguish between the king’s purse and his mother’s. At the end, the commissioners found that he owed Louise 707,267 livres, but that he was owed 1,190,374 livres by the king.

Francis and his ministers also began reforming the fiscal administration. The revenues most susceptible to corruption were the irregular ones, which were collected and handled in an ad hoc way by many officials. A measure of centralization was needed to ensure that they were properly collected, used and accounted for. The first step taken in this direction was the creation on 18 March of the Trésorier de l’Epargne with powers to collect and disburse all royal revenues save those from the demesne and from regular taxation. Alone among the fiscal officials, he was exempt from supervision by the trésoriers de France and généraux des finances. He took his oath of office to the king alone. The first man appointed to the post was Philibert Babou. In December his powers were considerably enlarged. He was now to receive all royal revenues after deduction of customary local expenses and authorized to make disbursements sanctioned only by royal warrants. This, however, was too heavy a burden. In June 1524, Babou was made responsible only for revenues from the demesne and taxation, while another official, called Receveur des parties casuelles, was put in charge of the rest.

In July 1524 an edict claimed that the new fiscal system had proved a success. The king had apparently been spared the need to cut back wages and pensions and had cleared many debts. Although part of his revenues continued to be spent locally, the fact that all payments now had to be authorized by a single official instead of a dozen meant that the king had a tighter control of expenditure. He was also better able to know how much cash he disposed of for emergencies. Another effect of the reforms was the destruction of the influence of the trésoriers de France and généraux des finances. Their offices survived, but their powers were drastically reduced: they continued to carry out inspections in their respective districts, but policy-making was left firmly in the hands of the king and his council.

The treason of Bourbon (1523)

Francis now prepared to lead a new invasion of Italy. On 23 July he went to Saint-Denis and, as was the custom, placed the relics of the patron saint on the high altar, where they were to remain for the duration of the military campaign. On 12 August, at Gien, he appointed his mother as regent for the second time. Four days later, however, he received a letter from Louis de Brézé, sénéchal of Normandy, warning him of a treason plot by the Constable of Bourbon.

Charles duc de Bourbon was Francis I’s most powerful vassal. He owned three duchies, seven counties, two vicomtés and seven seigneuries. All these territories, save three, formed a compact bloc in central France. In addition to his French fiefs, Bourbon also had three lordships within the Holy Roman Empire, making him the vassal of both the emperor and the king of France. Within his domain he was virtually all-powerful: he raised troops, levied taxes, dispensed justice and summoned the estates. His chateau at Moulins was one of the finest in France. As constable, Bourbon had charge of the king’s army in peacetime: he enforced discipline, supervised supplies, appointed commissioners of musters, authorized military expenditure and allocated troops to garrison towns. In wartime he commanded the army in the king’s absence or the vanguard in his presence. On ceremonial occasions he carried the king’s naked sword. Bourbon was also Grand chambrier, responsible for the smooth running of the king’s chamber, and governor of Languedoc, where he represented the king though he delegated his functions to a lieutenant. The duke was related to Francis by marriage, for his wife Suzanne was Louise of Savoy’s first cousin.

Relations between Francis and Charles de Bourbon were good, if not intimate, during the first five years of the reign. No special significance need be attached to the fact that Bourbon was recalled from Milan in 1516 and replaced as lieutenant-general by Marshal Lautrec. He continued to appear at court fairly often. In 1521, however, he was not chosen to lead the vanguard during the campaign in northern France, his rightful place being taken by the king’s brother-in-law, Alençon. This was a snub, which it is tempting to link to the death of Bourbon’s wife in April of that year. She had made a will in her husband’s favour, which was challenged by the king and his mother.

Charles de Bourbon belonged to the younger branch of the house founded in the fourteenth century by Robert de Clermont, sixth son of King Louis IX. In 1443 its lands were divided between the two sons of duc Jean I and it looked for a time as if the two branches would go their separate ways; but in 1488 the lands of the elder branch passed into the hands of Pierre de Beaujeu, who, having no son, bequeathed them to his daughter Suzanne. When she married Charles the lands of both branches were reunited. Even so, her inheritance comprised lands of three kinds: first, lands which had originally been detached from the royal demesne as apanages and which, in theory, were to revert to it on the extinction of the family for which they had been created; secondly, lands due to escheat to the crown in the event of a failure of the direct or male line; and thirdly, lands that could be passed on to heirs male or female, direct or collateral.

In April 1522, Louise of Savoy claimed Suzanne’s inheritance as her first cousin and nearest blood relative. At the same time Francis claimed the return to the crown of all her fiefs that were only transmissible to male heirs. The two claims were contradictory, but Francis and his mother were obviously working towards the same end: the dismantling of the Bourbon demesne. As the duke was a peer of the realm, it was up to the parlement to decide the rights and wrongs of the various claims, but on 7 October, before it could pass judgement, Louise paid homage to the king for most of the disputed lands. By accepting her oath, he implicitly recognized her claim, and soon afterwards he gave her lands and revenues pertaining to the inheritance of Suzanne’s mother, Anne de France, who had died in November. On 6 August 1523 the parlement ordered the sequestration of Bourbon’s lands.

The death of Suzanne had also created another problem. As her only son had died, Charles needed to remarry in order to perpetuate his line. At thirty-one he was a most eligible widower. Even in Suzanne’s lifetime he had been offered the hand of one of the emperor’s sisters, an offer that was now renewed. Such a marriage would seriously threaten the territorial integrity of France. At the same time, it seems, Bourbon found himself under pressure to marry a French princess of royal blood. Louise herself may have been a suitor. Be that as it may, the duke grew increasingly restless. Early in 1523, during a visit to Paris, he allegedly quarrelled with the king, who had accused him of planning a secret marriage. In fact, Bourbon had been dabbling in treason for some time.

In August 1522 the imperial chamberlain, Beaurain, was informed that Bourbon was prepared to lead a rebellion and eight months later was empowered to negotiate with him on behalf of Charles V and Henry VIII. He met the constable secretly at Montbrison on 11 July and signed a treaty. Bourbon was promised the hand of one of Charles’s sisters and a dowry of 100,000 écus. The emperor was to invade Languedoc from Spain and place 10,000 landsknechts at Bourbon’s disposal. Henry was to invade Normandy and subsidize the constable to the tune of 100,000 écus. Bourbon’s plan was to wait for Francis to invade Italy, then to rise in his rear, using the emperor’s landsknechts. But news of the plot soon leaked out. Two noblemen informed their confessor, the bishop of Lisieux, who passed the information to Louis de Brézé. On 10 August he wrote the letter which Francis received as he was travelling south to join his army.

The king’s reaction to the disclosure of Bourbon’s plot was remarkably cool. He went to Moulins with an armed escort and, finding the duke ill in bed, told him of the warning he had received. Pretending not to believe it, he made various promises to Bourbon on condition that he accompanied him to Italy. The constable agreed, but asked for time to recover from his illness. This was granted and the king continued his journey to Lyon. A few days later Bourbon left Moulins, only to turn back almost at once. On 6 September he met Henry VIII’s envoy, Sir John Russell, at Gayette and formalized his relations with England. By now Francis was convinced of the duke’s treason. On 5 September three of Bourbon’s accomplices – Jean de Poitiers, seigneur de Saint-Vallier, Antoine de Chabannes, bishop of Le Puy, and Aymar de Prie – were arrested. Two days later Bourbon, who had retired to the fortress of Chantelle, severed his allegiance. Next day he fled with a few companions and, after wandering through the mountains of Auvergne, crossed the Rhône into imperial territory.

The plot had failed, but Francis was unsure of its extent. He decided to remain in France to face developments and handed over his command in Italy to Bonnivet. The wisdom of his change of plan was soon demonstrated when a large English army under the duke of Suffolk invaded Picardy on 19 September. Suffolk’s initial objective was Boulogne, but he was persuaded to march on Paris instead. By late October he was only fifty miles from the capital. Francis dispatched Philippe Chabot to reassure the panic-stricken population, but the English withdrew of their own accord. By mid-December they were back in Calais. Bourbon, meanwhile, prepared to invade Franche-Comté, but he failed to receive the landsknechts he had been promised by Charles V. So he retired to Italy, hoping eventually to join the emperor in Spain.

In the meantime, a special commission was set up by Francis to try Bourbon’s accomplices. The four judges were ordered to use torture if necessary to gain information and to mete out exemplary punishments to all the plotters save the constable, whose fate was reserved to the king’s judgement. The commissioners thought the parlement was the appropriate tribunal, and Francis eventually deferred to their wishes. In December, Bourbon’s accomplices were moved from their prison at Loches to Paris for trial. Saint-Vallier was sentenced to death on 16 January, but was reprieved just as he was about to be beheaded and remained a prisoner at Loches until his release in 1526. Legend has it that his daughter, Diane de Poitiers, had given her favours to the king in return for her father’s life. Other plotters were treated even more leniently, presumably because they incriminated friends who had fled abroad.

Francis needed to regain the confidence of Parisians, who felt that he had left them defenceless while pursuing his Italian adventures. On 6 March, at the Hôtel de Ville, he presented himself as the innocent victim of Bourbon’s treachery. Many Parisians, it seems, sympathized with the constable, whose trial in absentia opened in the parlement on 8 March. Pierre Lizet, the avocat du roi, demanded that he be sentenced to death and all his property confiscated, but the parlement merely ordered his arrest and imprisonment along with the seizure of his property. At a lit de justice on 9 March, Francis expressed dismay that the property of Bourbon’s accomplices had not been seized. Their crime, he said, ought not to be treated merely as a civil case. On 16 May he ordered a retrial and appointed nineteen new judges to sit alongside the original ones. Yet Bourbon’s accomplices were not sentenced till July. While De Prie, Popillon and d’Escars were lightly punished, savage, albeit unenforceable, sentences were passed on the constable’s men who had fled abroad. The only sentence left outstanding was Bourbon’s own which had to await the king’s pleasure.

Meanwhile, Bonnivet made some headway in northern Italy: after crossing the Ticino on 14 September, he forced the imperialists under Colonna to fall back on Milan. But, failing to press home his advantage, he allowed Colonna time to prepare Milan’s defences. When Bonnivet resumed his advance, the city was too strong to be stormed; he tried to starve it out, but, as winter closed in, he withdrew to Abbiategrasso. In March 1524, Charles de Lannoy, viceroy of Naples, launched a powerful counteroffensive. After suffering terrible hardship during the winter, Bonnivet’s army lacked food and ammunition; so many horses had died that the men-at-arms were reduced to riding ponies. As Bonnivet retreated across the River Sesia, he was badly wounded by a sniper’s bullet and had to hand over his command to the comte de Saint-Pol. On 30 April, Bayard, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, was fatally wounded. On reaching the Alps, the French and the Swiss parted on the worst possible terms. Their defeat had been truly crushing.

In May 1524, Henry VIII and Charles V signed a new treaty. Each agreed to contribute 100,000 crowns towards an invasion of France led by Bourbon, who somewhat reluctantly agreed to put the crown of France on Henry’s head. On 1 July, acting as the emperor’s lieutenant-general, he invaded Provence from Italy. The French under Lapalice were too weak to offer resistance. Town after town fell to the invaders. Bourbon entered Aix on 9 August and declared himself count of Provence. Ten days later he laid siege to Marseille as Francis brought an army to Avignon. On 21 September the constable ordered his men to storm Marseille through a breach in its wall which his guns had opened up, but, seeing the obstacles that awaited them beyond, they refused. On the brink of despair, Bourbon thought of engaging Francis in battle, but was persuaded by his captains not to be so reckless. So, lifting the siege of Marseille, he retreated along the coast towards Italy, leaving the way clear for Francis to cross the Alps once more.

Success can smile on a monarch too soon. The victory Francis had won at Marignano in 1515 had given him an inflated view of his generalship. Believing that only the incompetence of his lieutenants had lost him Milan, he now imagined that he would only need to reappear in Italy at the head of his troops to win back all the lost ground. Events were to prove him wrong.

SEVEN The New Learning and heresy(1483–1525)

The late fifteenth century was marked by a deep spiritual malaise throughout Christendom. It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the Renaissance had created a mood of scepticism among the laity in respect of the traditional teachings of the church. Piety still flourished. Pilgrimages and the cult of saints were as popular as ever. However, on a more sophisticated level, that of the theologians in the universities, sharp differences existed regarding the philosophical foundations of Christian belief. Three currents of thought existed simultaneously: scholasticism, mysticism and humanism.

The University of Paris on the eve of the Reformation

The University of Paris comprised four faculties: Theology, Canon Law, Medicine and Arts. The first three were graduate faculties, whose members had to be doctors. The Faculty of Arts was made up of those who had obtained the degree of Master of Arts, a prerequisite for doctoral study in the other faculties. The beginner in arts was usually about fifteen years old. He attached himself to a master, registered with one of four ‘nations’ and paid a means-tested fee. By 1500 nearly all the teaching took place in one of about forty secular colleges. The mendicants were taught in their own convents, while other religious orders maintained residential colleges (studia) where their members lived while pursuing the arts course. The usual period of study in arts was three and a half years, which was commonly followed by a trial regency of a year and a half, making five in all. Following this quinquennium, the student became a regent master. A Master of Arts who wished to become a doctor of theology had to study for another thirteen or fifteen years. The Bible and the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1100–64) formed the core of the long curriculum. Lectures took place in several colleges and in the studia of the religious orders. Each bachelor lectured in the college or convent to which he was affiliated.

In theory, doctors of theology were licensed to ‘read, dispute, deliberate, and teach’ in the faculty; in practice, few did all of these things. Many were content to give simply one annual lecture on the feast of St Euphemia. Their main function was to preside over the disputations and inaugural lectures of students. Another major duty was attendance at regular meetings of the faculty, especially those called to deal with important matters. From 1506 to 1520 the average number of meetings was 27 per annum and they normally took place in the chapel or refectory of the convent of Saint Mathurin. A doctor’s income, made up of fees from students and fringe benefits, barely compensated for his long years of training. The main attraction of the doctorate in theology was prestige: it enabled the holder to deliberate on the highest matters of faith and to help decide matters of religious and political significance. Both church and state were in the habit of consulting the university’s theologians on various issues. They were consulted about 70 times on matters of doctrine or morals between 1500 and 1542 and such deliberations sometimes led the doctors to challenge papal authority.

Scholasticism

The Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris was, by virtue of its teaching, the preaching of its masters and the doctrinal judgements of its assembly, the sovereign interpreter of dogma. All its learning was drawn from the Bible, the only source of divine knowledge, and Lombard’s Book of Sentences. However in the fifteenth century all notion of a critical study of Scripture had been lost. A decision of the council of Vienne of 1311 that oriental languages should be taught in the principal European universities had been ignored, so theologians were unable to read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew or the New in the original Greek. They were content instead with the quadruple method of exegesis: historical, allegorical, analogical and tropological. In applying this method they preferred the interpretations of medieval scholars, like Nicholas of Lyra, to those of the early church fathers. Above all they relied on the Book of Sentences, a compendium of answers to metaphysical and ethical problems written in the twelfth century.

The Faculty of Arts regarded Aristotle’s writings as the fount of all knowledge, but, as the Parisian masters knew no Greek, they had to rely on mediocre Latin versions. They used the gloss by Averroes, the twelfth-century Arab philosopher, to build up their own theories on the world and on man. Outstanding among thirteenth-century doctors at the university was St Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy was largely shaped by Aristotle’s metaphysical writings. In his judgement, knowledge of God was attainable through reason with the assistance of Scripture and the traditional teaching of the church. However, the certainties inherent in his teaching were challenged by Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308) and, more recently, by William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347). The latter denied that spiritual concepts could be grasped merely through reason. Divine truth, in his opinion, lay beyond the reach of the human intellect; obscurely expressed in Scripture, it was held in trust by the church and could only be apprehended through its teaching.

The new doctrine, called Nominalism as distinct from the Realism of Aquinas, seemed to demote knowledge into a mere study of ideas and for this reason it was twice condemned by the University of Paris, but during the second half of the fourteenth century it managed to gain dominance. The Nominalists, instead of building on Ockham’s ideas, were content merely to repeat them. They even narrowed their scope, withdrawing into a study of formal logic that was both abstract and sterile. They created a new philosophy, called Terminism, which became for the sixteenth-century humanists the epitome of intellectual backwardness and confusion. The triumph of Nominalism effectively paralysed the study of theology in the university. Christianity was reduced to a collection of affirmations that had to be accepted without thought or love, and the Christian life to the observance of formal practices and performance of good works.

By the second half of the fifteenth century the University of Paris no longer had the philosophical mastery which for three centuries had been its glory and pride. It seemed uninterested even in publishing the works of its greatest doctors. Scholars who wanted them had to turn to printers outside France. Biblical studies also languished. The first Bible to be printed in Paris appeared in 1476, twenty-five years after Gutenberg’s Mainz edition. Studying the Bible occupied less of the working time of teachers and students of theology than debating Lombard’s Sentences. Nor did patristic studies make up for the poverty of speculation. The Parisian presses largely neglected the writings of the Fathers. Theologians seemed interested only in the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine that had gained wide popular currency since the thirteenth century.

Mysticism

Terminism was too dry and formal a doctrine to satisfy many Christians; sooner or later it was bound to provoke a reaction. A strong mystical tradition existed in Paris, reaching back to such fourteenth-century teachers as Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson, but it was in the Low Countries that late medieval mysticism underwent a remarkable flowering. A major ascetic movement which drew large numbers of laity was the Devotio Modema. Its followers, the Brethren of the Common Life, avoided formal vows while sharing a life in common dedicated to poverty, chastity and obedience. Their founder, Geert Groote (1340–84), wanted religion to be simple, devout and charitable. By the early fifteenth century the Brethren had numerous houses in the Low Countries, Germany and the Rhineland. Their ideals were best expressed in the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. The Brethren were closely associated with a house of Canons Regular founded at Windesheim in 1387. Rejecting the Nominalists’ dumb acceptance of the church’s teaching, they found the truth of Christianity in the Bible and liked to read St Augustine and St Bernard, the two great exponents of the inner life and divine love.

An important link between the mysticism of the Low Countries and France was Jean Standonck, a pupil of the Brethren who eventually settled in Paris. After completing the arts course, he entered the collège de Montaigu to study theology and in 1483 became its principal. Though French was not his native tongue, he became a popular preacher. He relinquished the personal use of money and, chastising his body relentlessly, gave all he had to the poor. At Montaigu he imposed a harsh discipline on the students, hoping to develop among them an active and mystical piety. The rule he drew up for a college of poor students which he set up alongside Montaigu has been described as ‘one of the capital monuments of the Catholic reformation at the start of the sixteenth century’.

While the Faculty of Theology continued its arid Nominalist teaching, many Parisian clergy turned to St Bernard and St Augustine for spiritual comfort. The mystical writings of d’Ailly and Gerson were also popular, as were books produced by the Brethren of the Common Life and the canons of Windesheim. However, it was mainly through the Imitation of Christ that theologians in Paris were influenced by Dutch religious thought. Many editions were available after 1490: a partial French version was printed in 1484 and a full translation in 1493. It was the antidote to the arid discipline of the the Terminists and Scotists; it sustained and satisfied the desire for a more personal faith which scholastic teaching threatened to stifle.

Humanism

Scholasticism and mysticism were only two components of Parisian thought at the close of the Middle Ages. The third was humanism. Parisian teachers of the fourteenth century were not ignorant of classical antiquity, but it was only gradually that Italian humanism penetrated the University of Paris. An early sign was the appointment of Gregorio di Città di Castello, also known as Tifernate, to a chair of Greek. Around 1470, Guillaume Fichet, who visited Italy several times, was the central figure of a group professing a love of ancient Rome. Its members keenly felt the need for accurate texts of the Latin classics, especially the works of Cicero, Virgil and Sallust. In 1470 the first Parisian press was set up in the cellars of the Sorbonne. It was entrusted to two young Germans, Ulrich Gering and Michael Friburger, who within three years printed several humanistic texts, including Fichet’s Rhetoric. Fichet’s aim was to introduce to Paris not simply the eloquence of humanism but also its philosophy. He and his followers combined a respect for the two traditions of Aquinas and Scotus with a love of Latin letters and an interest in Platonic ideas.

Among Fichet’s heirs in Paris the most important was Robert Gaguin (b. 1433), general of the the Trinitarian order. Around him gathered a small number of scholars sharing an interest in ancient letters. They discussed literary and ethical questions and, when writing to each other, tried to recapture the charm of Cicero’s letters. Yet they never allowed their enthusiasm for ancient letters to undermine their adherence to Christian dogma. Many were churchmen who retained a strict, almost monastic, ideal. They were helped in their labours by a number of Italian humanists. In 1476, Filippo Beroaldo, a young scholar from Bologna, came to Paris where he remained for two years, lecturing on Lucan. Paolo Emilio, who came to Paris in 1483, was patronized by Cardinal Charles de Bourbon, received at court and did a little teaching at the university. He was followed in 1484 by Girolamo Balbi, who soon became famous for his teaching, his Latin epigrams and his edition of Seneca’s tragedies. A vain and quarrelsome man, he became involved in a bitter dispute with Fausto Andrelini, another Italian who came to Paris. When Balbi took flight in January 1491 after being charged with sodomy, Andrelini celebrated his triumph in an elegy.

The early Parisian humanists also developed an interest in ancient philosophy, but, as they did not know enough Greek to read the original works of Plato and Aristotle, they had to obtain good Latin translations from Italy. A few were also published in Paris. These developments, however, were only first steps. Parisian teachers and students also needed to become acquainted with the philosophical speculations of the leading Italian humanists. One of them, Pico della Mirandola, visited Paris between July 1485 and March 1486. His major goal was to reconcile and harmonize Platonism and Aristotelianism. He was well acquainted with the traditions of medieval Aristotelianism, and also with the sources of Jewish and Arabic thought.

Parisian teachers and students needed to know Greek before they could become seriously acquainted with the ancient philosophers. In 1476, Greek studies received a boost when George Hermonymos, a Spartan, settled in Paris. For more than thirty years he lived by copying Greek manuscripts and teaching the language. His pupils included Erasmus, Beatus Rhenanus and Budé, who all complained of his mediocre teaching and avarice. In 1495, Charles VIII brought back from Italy an excellent Hellenist in the person of Janus Lascaris (c. 1445–1535) who taught Greek to a number of humanists, Budé being among his pupils. Lascaris also began organizing the royal library at Blois. After about 1504 excellent teachers of Greek were available in Paris. The first Greek printing there was in 1494, but until 1507 it consisted only of passages in a few works. The most significant were in Badius’s edition of Valla’s Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (1505). Greek typography began in 1507 with François Tissard’s edition of the Liber Gnomagyricus (published by Gilles de Gourmont). He stressed the necessity of Greek to men of learning and urged Frenchmen to combat Italian charges of barbarism. In May 1508, Girolamo Aleandro arrived in Paris recommended by Erasmus and began giving private lessons in Greek to people rich enough to afford the expensive books produced by the Aldine press. In 1509 he went public, and published three small works by Plutarch. His intention, as he grandly announced, was to edit all the works of Greek authors.

Despite the humanists, scholasticism remained firmly entrenched at the University of Paris in the early sixteenth century. Outstanding among the new generation of teachers was the Scottish theologian John Mair or Major (c. 1470–1550), who taught at the collège de Montaigu. He resented the charge of barbarousness levelled at the schoolmen by humanists, yet his works exemplified some of the worst traits of scholasticism, notably the endless chewing over of insignificant problems. Statutes drawn up for Montaigu by Noël Béda in February 1509 did not forbid humanistic texts, but they provided for the teaching of only Latin, not Greek. No attempt was made to develop an enthusiasm for the ancient world among the students.

In the autumn of 1495, Gaguin acquired a new disciple: Erasmus of Rotterdam. He first came to Paris in 1493 to study theology and entered the collège de Montaigu, where Standonck’s regime instilled in him a deep and lasting aversion to abstinence and austerity. His Colloquies contain a grim description of life at Montaigu: bad sanitation, poor and inadequate food, and infected water undermined the health of the students, some becoming blind, mad or leprous within a year. Many promising young minds were, according to Erasmus, blighted by such terrible privations. During his stay at Montaigu, Erasmus attended lectures on the Bible and the Book of Sentences, gave some lessons on Scripture, and preached a few sermons, perhaps in the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève. But he derived no satisfaction, intellectual or spiritual, from the teaching of the schoolmen. ‘They exhaust the mind’, he wrote, ‘by a certain jejune and barren subtlety, without fertilizing or inspiring it. By their stammering and by the stains of their impure style they disfigure theology which had been enriched and adorned by the eloquence of the ancients.’

The schoolmen, however, were not entirely to blame for Erasmus’s attitude: his mind was not well suited to philosophical or dogmatic speculation. For the present, he was interested in ancient letters, not in philosophy or theology. He attached himself to the circle of Gaguin whose Latin history of France, De Origine et gestis Francorum Compendium, was in the press. It was the first specimen of humanistic historiography to appear in France. The printer had finished his work on 30 September 1495, but two leaves remained blank. Erasmus helped to fill the gap by providing a long commendatory letter, his earliest publication.

By the spring of 1496, Erasmus had had enough of the rigours of Montaigu. He fell ill and returned to the Low Countries, but in the autumn he reappeared in Paris. This time, however, he gave the collège de Montaigu a wide berth and earned his living by teaching rich young men. Among them was William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who took him to England in the summer of 1499. At Oxford, Erasmus met John Colet, under whose influence he broke with the theological systems of the Middle Ages and with the monastic ideal. But Colet’s intuitive interpretation of Scripture, without knowledge of the original languages, failed to satisfy him and he decided to improve his own knowledge of Greek. Following his return to Paris in February 1500, he completed the first edition of his Adages. In the preface, he castigated the schoolmen for their ignorance of ancient culture and their conceit.

While staying at Saint-Omer in 1501, Erasmus met Jean Vitrier, the warden of the Franciscan monastery, whom he grew to admire as much as Colet. It was under his influence that he composed his Enchiridion Militis Christiani, first published in Antwerp in February 1504. In this work Erasmus developed for the first time his theological programme, calling essentially for a return to Scripture. Every Christian, he argues, must strive to understand Scripture in the purity of its original meaning. Before he can do so, he must study the ancient orators, poets and philosophers, especially Plato. Avoiding the Scotists, he must follow the guidance of St Jerome, St Augustine and St Ambrose. Assisted by grammar and languages, he will seek the precise meaning, both literal and allegorical, of Scripture. Erasmus also develops his concept of the Christian life as a continual meditation on Scripture, not as a series of external observances. He no longer identifies Christian holiness with strict observance of the monastic rule, and rejects the notion that the perfect Christian needs to shun the world. Above all, he calls for the wider diffusion of the Gospel.

At the end of 1504, Erasmus returned to Paris after two years spent in Louvain. He set about restoring the New Testament to its original purity, and in March 1505, Badius printed Valla’s Annotationes as a kind of model for him. But in the autumn of 1505, Erasmus went back to England. Henry VII’s physician was looking for a master to accompany his sons to Italy. Erasmus accepted the post and in June 1506 found himself once more among his humanist friends in Paris. He translated two dialogues by Lucan and resumed work on his Adages. Two months later he continued his journey to Italy. As he crossed the Alps, he wrote a poem for Guillaume Cop in which he declared his intention to devote himself wholly to sacred studies.

In April 1511, Erasmus was back in Paris mainly in order to see his Encomium Morae (Praise of Folly) through the press. This famous work contains a satiric attack on current abuses, especially on worthless monks, vain schoolmen and warring popes. The message of the book is similar to that of the Enchiridion: we should look to realities rather than names, to a man’s life rather than his words, to the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Erasmus makes merciless fun of the schoolmen with their ‘Magisterial Definitions, Conclusions, Corollaries, Propositions Explicit and Implicit’, and of ignorant and conceited monks with their meticulous observance of tiny rules of dress and their total disregard of purity of life or apostolic example. The Praise of Folly was a huge popular success. Erasmus left Paris in June, never to return, but his influence lived on. His works continued to be published and read in the French capital for many years.

Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples

A leading French humanist of the late fifteenth century was Jacques Lefèvre. He was born at Etaples in Picardy about 1450, but we know little about his early life. After becoming an MA in Paris, he learnt Greek from Hermonymos while studying mathematics, astronomy and music. Like all keen scholars of his day he travelled to Italy, visiting Pavia, Padua, Venice, Rome and Florence. Wherever he went, he made friends with humanists and other scholars. After teaching in Paris for a few years, he returned to Rome, then visited Germany. On his return he took up a lodging at the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés under the protection of the abbot, Guillaume Briçonnet, the future bishop of Meaux.

At first Lefèvre devoted himself mainly to the study of philosophy. In his approach to the subject he combined mystical tendencies with the precision of a mathematician. In February 1499 he published an edition of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, a work that describes the ascent of the soul to union with God. Lefèvre’s admiration for Dionysius was unbounded: ‘Never’, he wrote, ‘outside Scripture, have I met anything which has seemed to me as great and as divine as the books of Dionysius.’ In April he published some works by Raymond Lull expressing the horror which he himself felt for Islam and Averroistic materialism. By 1501, Lefèvre had fallen under the influence of the fifteenth-century German cardinal and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, from whom he learnt that Truth is unknowable to man and that it is only by intuition that he can discover God wherein all contradictions meet.

Lefèvre gave himself heart and soul to Aristotle, whom he translated and explained with boundless enthusiasm and whose many texts he edited after careful expurgations. He wrote commentaries for nearly all the Aristotelian works on the curriculum of the Paris schools. His aim was to set Christian doctrine on the firm foundation of an Aristotelianism freed from scholastic sophism. Yet, even as he explained Aristotle, his mysticism expressed itself. ‘While Aristotle writes of things that are deciduous and transitory’, he explained, ‘he is also treating of the divine mysteries. All this philosophy of tangible nature tends towards the divine things, and, starting from elements that can be sensed, opens the way to the intelligible world.’

He also looked to Plato. During his visit to Florence in 1492 he fell under the influence of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), founder of the Florentine Academy, who interpreted the contemplative life as a gradual ascent of the soul towards always higher degrees of truth and being, culminating in the immediate knowledge and vision of God. Closely related to Ficino’s moral doctrine were his theories of the immortality of the soul and of Platonic love. Another Florentine humanist much admired by Lefèvre was Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), who sought to reconcile ancient philosophy with modern doctrines and Christian dogma. With Pico, as with Marsilio, philosophical speculation was fused with divine love. Like many of his contemporaries, Lefèvre was fascinated by the Hermetic Books. Thus, in 1494, he published Ficino’s Latin translation of the Liber de potestate et sapientia Dei, attributed to the Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus.

The ideas and theories which Lefèvre drew from so many sources ancient and medieval turned him from a philosopher into a theologian, but he remained a humanist. He was firmly committed to textual purity, proclaiming that ‘one should only ascribe to God what Scripture teaches about Him’. Thus he looked for the precise meaning of Scripture after ridding it of the barbarous language and useless subtleties of the schoolmen. Yet Lefèvre’s command of Latin was always heavy and clumsy. He also condemned most pagan poets, even preferring Battista Spagnuoli to Virgil.

Lefèvre placed his learning at the service of religion. His purpose was ‘to give souls the taste for and understanding of Scripture’. He saw philosophy and learning not as ends in themselves but as assisting the triumph of a purer, more enlightened faith. In an edition of Aristotelian works (August 1506) he set out a complete educational programme, but one that was very different from that contained in Erasmus’s recently published Enchiridion. Lefèvre and Erasmus stood for different Christian ideals. Both wanted their students to write pure and correct Latin, but their attitude to ancient writers differed. Whereas Erasmus believed that their wisdom could lead to a reception of Christian revelation, Lefèvre regarded them simply as models of style. Whereas Erasmus found in Plato the most suitable introduction to the Gospel, Lefèvre regarded Aristotle as the superior teacher. Both men wanted to return to the Bible as interpreted by the church fathers, not by the schoolmen. But Erasmus was no mystic; he turned to Scripture for practical counsel. He ceased to believe in the virtues of monasticism, while Lefèvre wished that his health would allow him to enter a Benedictine or Carthusian monastery and neglected none of the traditional religious observances which Erasmus dismissed as useless.

In July 1509, Lefèvre published his edition of the Psalter. Like Erasmus, he insisted on the need for doctrine to be based on accurate editions of Scripture, but he was not content with a purely literal interpretation, believing that a reading of Scripture had to be prepared by meditation and prayer; also by a close familiarity with the writings of the prophets and apostles. In December 1512 his edition of St Paul’s Epistles was published. This set out to explain the apostle’s ideas simply, rejecting the scholastic notion that every passage in Scripture requires a quadruple interpretation. In Lefèvre’s opinion, Scripture has a literal and a spiritual meaning. Before this can be grasped, it is essential to enter the mind of St Paul, an exercise calling for divine inspiration. Lefèvre read St Paul as a mystic committed to the inner life rather than as a dogmatic theologian or logician. He did not deduce the idea of predestination from his work. His aim was to reconcile grace and free will; not to abolish the autonomy of the human will.

Lefèvre’s study of St Paul did not lead him to the same conclusions as those drawn by Erasmus or Luther. He remained loyal to Roman observances. Good works, he says, cannot save by themselves, but they are not useless: they attract, hold and enlarge grace. Nor does faith ensure salvation: it opens the way to God who alone justifies and absolves. Good works make us better men, faith converts us, justification illuminates us. At the same time, his interpretation of dogma was at times extraordinarily free. He denied the magical properties of the sacraments, seeing them rather as signs of spiritual grace, and viewed the mass not as a sacrifice but as a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Yet he timidly accepted the new doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and was surprisingly conservative regarding church reform. He did not suggest the abolition of clerical celibacy or the introduction of prayers in the vernacular.

Guillaume Budé

In 1497, Lefèvre’s circle of friends and disciples at the collège du cardinal Lemoine was joined by Guillaume Budé. He belonged to a family of the well-to-do Parisian bourgeoisie, which over three generations had risen to the highest offices in the royal chancery. About 1483 he had been sent to study civil law at Orléans. On returning to the capital he seemed only interested in hunting and other pleasures, but in 1491 he became disgusted with his way of life. Resuming his studies, he began to learn Greek. He also got to know Andrelini, who in 1496 dedicated a work to him. Even after becoming a royal secretary in 1497, Budé continued to read classical and patristic texts. He translated some works of Plutarch, dedicating one to Pope Julius II.

In November 1508, Budé published his Annotations on the Pandects which laid down the principle that Roman law can only be understood through the study of Roman history, literature and classical philology. It was also a scathing attack on scholastic jurisprudence as represented by the work of Accursius and Bartolus. Using both philology and history, Budé undermined their assumption that the Corpus Iuris was an authoritative system of law adaptable to the needs of all time. The effect of this onslaught on current legal thinking was comparable to that on theology of Valla’s exposure of the ‘Donation of Constantine’ (a document fabricated in the 8th–9th century to strengthen the power of the Holy See). Yet Budé was more interested in restoring the text of Justinian’s Digest as literature than in using it for legal education and practice. His polemic against contemporary jurisprudence was the first of many similar legal works of the sixteenth century, the best known being Rabelais’s caricature of legal terminology and practice. Almost the entire legal profession was attacked by Budé. He accused its members of using the law not to establish equity or justice but simply to sell and prostitute their words. Deploring the lack of public spirit among his compatriots and the loss of ancient virtues, he expressed the hope that a revival of letters would reawaken their consciences. A theme which assumed importance in Budé’s later work – his absolutist theory of the state – was already present in his Annotations. While refuting Accursius, he showed the invalidity of equating the parlement with the Roman senate.

The Annotations was France’s first great work of philology and its impact, notably on Alciati’s teaching of law at the University of Bourges, was considerable. Budé followed Valla in his use of a philological-historical method and in his opposition to the Bartolists, but he went further by reviving the Aristotelian concept of equity. This was to have a lasting effect on legal practice in France and elsewhere. Budé’s scholarship, though profound, was long-winded and undisciplined. His De Asse (1515), a treatise on ancient coinage, is full of absurdly patriotic digressions in which he seeks to elevate Paris above Athens as a centre of ancient learning.

Like Lefèvre d’Etaples, Budé repudiated the vocabulary and methodology of the schoolmen and wanted Christianity to rest solely on the correct study of Scripture. But he did not share Lefèvre’s mysticism. He despised devotions that were purely formal or smacked of superstition. He equated Christianity with obedience to Christ’s commands and the imitation of His life on earth. As a scholar Budé was well aware of errors in the Latin Vulgate and favoured a return to the original Greek text of the New Testament. His objective was to revivify religion by uniting the Christian faith and humanism. His admiration for the classics did not persuade him that compromise was possible between Hellenism and Christianity. Given the choice, he preferred the latter and in his last work, De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum, he even denied the value of ancient philosophy.

The Reuchlin affair

In 1514 the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris was drawn into a conflict which had been raging for three years between the German humanist Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) and the German Dominicans. Reuchlin had promoted the Talmud, the Cabala and other Jewish studies as essential to a true understanding of biblical revelation; he also believed that the Bible and all its traditional glosses and interpretations should be re-examined in the light of recent exegetical advances and of the new expertise in Greek and Hebrew. His programme, however, if implemented, was likely to disrupt the traditional curriculum of theological faculties. He was accordingly censured by a special inquisition at Mainz in October 1513, and by another in Cologne four months later. The bishop of Speyer, however, acting for the pope, cleared Reuchlin of all charges and ordered an end to the inquisition, whereupon the Cologne theologians decided to consult their colleagues in Louvain and Paris.

The Parisian doctors received the message from Cologne at the end of April 1514 and promptly set up a committee comprising representatives of the scholastic tradition and friends of humanism to examine extracts from Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel. Numerous meetings followed in the course of which the Cologne theologians sent another book by Reuchlin for examination. There was also an intervention by Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, who asked the faculty to drop its proceedings. On 2 August, however, the faculty decided against Reuchlin. His writings were described as ‘strongly suspect of heresy, most of them smacking of heresy and some actually heretical’. The faculty asked for the suppression of the Augenspiegel and the author’s unconditional retraction. What happened next is not clear. The faculty received a letter from the papal Curia in April 1515, which probably expressed surprise at the decision passed in August, and it ceased to discuss Reuchlin after 2 May. Traditionally, historians have seen the Reuchlin affair as marking a decisive break in the University of Paris between the ‘Old Learning’ and the ‘New’. It was the first serious conflict between schoolmen and humanists. Henceforth Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Etaples were seen by their friends as pursuing the same quest for a deeper faith, and by their enemies as sharing the same heresy.

‘Father of Letters’

Francis I was anxious to be seen as a great patron of learning as well as a great soldier. Though primarily a man of action, he liked books and enjoyed being read to at mealtimes. His baggage train included two chests of books whose titles point to his main interests: Roman history and the heroic deeds of antiquity. Like many other princes of his day, he was also interested in astrology, alchemy and the Cabala, occult sciences which were believed to hold the key to the universe. Francis asked Jean Thenaud to write two works for him on the Cabala, but the author warned him of its dangers: ‘It is far better’, he wrote, ‘to be ignorant than to ask or to look for what cannot be known without sinning.’

In the early sixteenth century the crying need for humanists in France was an institution in which classical languages that were excluded from the universities’ curriculum could be taught. In February 1517, Francis announced his intention to found such a college. He invited Erasmus to take charge of it, but the great Dutchman was far too keen on his own intellectual freedom to tie himself to the service of any prince. So Francis had to fall back on Janus Lascaris, who was now head of the classical college recently founded in Rome by Pope Leo X. As a first step towards establishing a college in France, the king asked Lascaris to set one up in Milan and provided him with some funds, but these soon ran out and Lascaris had to abandon the venture. In January 1522, Francis decided to establish a college for the study of Greek at the Hôtel de Nesle in Paris, but before this could get under way, his attention was absorbed by his war with the emperor which had begun in 1521.

The beginnings of heresy

Heresy was not unknown in France at the close of the Middle Ages, but except in parts of the south which had been infiltrated by Waldensianism (see below p. 221), it was not an organized movement. Thus Erasmus was broadly correct when he described France in 1517 as the only part of Christendom that was free of heresy. But this happy state was short-lived. In 1519, only two years after Martin Luther had posted up his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg, Lutheranism first appeared in Paris. John Froben, the Basle printer, reported on 14 February that he had sent 600 copies of Luther’s works to France and Spain. They were being avidly read, even by members of the Paris Faculty of Theology. In July 1519, Luther and Eck held their famous debate in Leipzig, and soon afterwards they agreed to submit their propositions to the judgement of the universities of Erfurt and Paris. While the Paris theologians were pondering the matter, Luther gave them further food for thought by publishing three radical tracts. On 15 April 1521 the faculty published its Determinatio condemning 104 Lutheran propositions. On 13 June the faculty and the parlement assumed joint control of the book trade in and around Paris. It became an offence to print or sell any religious book without the faculty’s prior approval. On 3 August a proclamation was read out in the streets to the sound of trumpets, calling on all owners of Lutheran books to hand them over to the parlement within a week on pain of imprisonment and a fine.

Whatever his private beliefs may have been, Francis I repeatedly expressed his opposition to heresy, sharing the view, almost universally held in his day, that religious toleration undermined national unity. The oath he had taken at his coronation bound him not only to defend the faith, but to extirpate heresy from the kingdom. However, at this early stage of the Protestant Reformation heresy was not easily recognized; the boundary between Christian humanism, as expressed in the works of Erasmus or Lefèvre, and Lutheranism was far from clear. Nor was the king obliged to endorse any definition of heresy, not even that of the Faculty of Theology. Having already committed himself to the cause of humanism, Francis must have found it difficult to accept Béda’s view that ‘Luther’s errors have entered this [kingdom] more through the works of Erasmus and Lefèvre than any others.’ The king was also much influenced by his sister Marguerite, a deeply devout person, who corresponded with Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, from June 1521 until October 1524, and through his teaching imbibed the ideas of Lefèvre.

Sooner or later trouble was likely to break out between the king and the faculty. While Francis was ready to suppress Lutheranism, he was unwilling to silence the voice of Christian humanism. The first sign of conflict occurred in November 1522, when Guillaume Petit, the king’s confessor, complained to the faculty about the sermons of Michel d’Arande, an Augustinian hermit who had become Marguerite’s almoner. By 1523 the Faculty of Theology and the parlement were seriously worried about the growth of heresy. Lutheran books were being reported from many parts of the kingdom, and evangelical preachers were increasingly active. In June 1523 the faculty was told of scandals provoked by the publication of Lefèvre’s Commentarii initiatorii in IV Evangelia, but it decided not to examine the work after a warning received from Chancellor Duprat. In July it summoned Mazurier and Caroli, two members of the Cercle de Meaux, to answer a complaint arising from their sermons. This marked a change of policy by the faculty: hitherto it had been content to judge doctrine; now it was encroaching on episcopal jurisdiction. The faculty’s action was, in effect, an attack on the entire Cercle de Meaux. In August, prompted by the publication of Lefèvre’s edition of the New Testament, Béda forced through the faculty a condemnation of all editions of Scripture in Greek, Hebrew and French, causing Francis to intervene again. In April 1524 he forbade any discussion of Lefèvre’s work, alleging that he was a scholar of international renown. In October he nipped in the bud a move by the faculty to condemn Erasmus.

By 1523 heresy was so firmly entrenched in France that the Faculty of Theology and the parlement decided that censoring books was not enough: it was time to make an example of the heretics themselves. On 13 May the home of Louis de Berquin, a young nobleman-scholar, was searched by the parlement’s officials. On his shelves they found books by Luther and other reformers as well as Berquin’s own writings. These the faculty was asked to scrutinize, but the king, after giving his consent, changed his mind: he appointed a special commission, headed by Duprat, to carry out the examination. But the faculty, having already examined Berquin’s books, condemned them, and on 1 August he was imprisoned by the parlement. Four days later he was sent for trial on a heresy charge by the bishop of Paris, but Francis evoked the case to the Grand conseil. Meanwhile, Berquin was set free by royal command and allowed to go home. His books, however, were burnt outside Notre-Dame.

EIGHT Defeat, captivity and restoration(1525–7)

In September 1524 everything seemed set fair for the king of France. The threat of internal rebellion had been removed; Bourbon was beating a hasty retreat to Italy after failing to capture Marseille. Though advised to wait until the spring before invading Italy, Francis was keen to reach Lombardy before the imperial forces could regroup. On 17 October he appointed his mother as regent and soon afterwards led a powerful army across the Alps. The weather being exceptionally mild, he accomplished the crossing in record time. As he pressed forward into Lombardy, the imperialists retreated to Lodi, abandoning Milan. Francis now had the choice of either pursuing them to Lodi or besieging Pavia. He chose the latter, prompting the imperial captain, the marquis of Pescara, to exclaim: ‘We were defeated, soon we shall be victorious.’ For Pavia was a hard nut to crack, protected on three sides by a wall and on the south side by the River Ticino. The garrison, consisting of German and Spanish veterans, was commanded by Antonio de Leyva, one of the ablest captains of his day.

The battle of Pavia (24 February 1525)

The French began bombarding Pavia on 6 November. Within three days they had breached the wall, but an assault by them was repulsed with heavy losses. They then tried to divert the Ticino by building a dam, but it was washed away by torrential rains. The siege degenerated into a blockade punctuated by skirmishes and artillery duels. Francis then made a controversial move: he detached 6000 troops from his army and sent them under the duke of Albany to conquer Naples. The idea may have been to draw the viceroy of Naples away from Lombardy, but he chose to stay put. Had Albany moved faster, he might have taken advantage of popular unrest in Naples; but instead he allowed himself to get bogged down in Sienese politics. His expedition, however, did help to bring the new pope into the war on the French side. Clement VII had so far remained neutral in order not to jeopardize the rule of his Medici kinsmen in Florence, but on 25 January 1525 he allowed Albany free passage through the States of the Church.

The siege of Pavia was a grave tactical error. Though Francis was advised to retire to Milan for the winter, he refused on the ground that no king of France had ever besieged a town without capturing it. Believing that Pavia would soon capitulate, he sentenced his men to spend four months in appalling conditions outside the town. Their main camp on the east side of Pavia was strongly fortified. They also occupied the walled park of Mirabello to the north of the town. Within the park the terrain was open and rolling with clumps of trees and shrubs; it was also criss-crossed by numerous brooks and streams. On 22 January the imperialists marched out of Lodi as if they intended to attack Milan. Then, as the French failed to react, they veered south-west and pitched camp within a stone’s throw of the French. Only the Vernavola, a small tributary of the Ticino, kept the two armies apart.

On 23 February the imperial commanders, Charles de Lannoy, viceroy of Naples, and Bourbon, tried to break the deadlock. They moved out of their camp after nightfall, leaving only a token force behind, and marched north along the east wall of the park. Two hours later they halted near the north side, and sappers, using only picks and battering rams, opened up three gaps in the wall. At dawn the first troops entered the park. Despite a heavy mist they were spotted by the French, who opened fire with their guns. The rest of the imperial army, meanwhile, had entered the park. The sequel is not clear, but it seems that Francis and his cavalry had formed up within the park. As the imperialists advanced, the king led a cavalry charge and got in the way of his artillery which had to stop firing. His infantry was left far behind. After breaking through the enemy line, Francis and his men-at-arms came within range of Spanish arquebusiers who had been carefully concealed in copses around the northern edge of the park. The French nobles with their suits of armour, plumed helmets and distinctive horse trappings offered easy targets. As they were picked off by the arquebusiers they crashed to the ground like so many helpless lobsters. After the king’s horse had been killed, he continued to fight on foot, valiantly striking out with his sword (now on display at the Musée de l’Armée, Paris), but was gradually surrounded by enemy soldiers anxious to earn a king’s ransom. In their eagerness to snatch pieces of his armour as evidence for their claim, they might easily have killed him. At this juncture Lannoy appeared and Francis surrendered to him. Meanwhile, the battle raged in various parts of the field. As huge blocks of French and imperial infantry collided there was terrible carnage, and many Swiss troops were drowned as they tried to ford the Ticino. By noon on 24 February the battle was over. The imperialists had won the day and Francis was their prisoner.

Pavia was the greatest slaughter of French noblemen since Agincourt. Among the dead were many illustrious captains and also close friends of the king. They included Bonnivet, Giangaleazzo da San Severino, Marshal Lapalice, François de Lorraine and Richard de la Pole, the so-called ‘White Rose’. Marshal Lescun and the king’s uncle, the Bastard of Savoy, had been fatally wounded. Apart from the king, prisoners included Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre, Louis comte de Nevers, Anne de Montmorency, and the seigneurs of Florange, Chabot de Brion, Lorges, La Rochepot, Annebault and Langey. Among important French nobles only the king’s brother, Charles d’Alençon, escaped death and capture. He died on 15 April, soon after returning to France, some said of shame, others of sorrow. About 4000 French prisoners who were not worth a ransom were freed on parole.

After the battle, Francis was taken to the Certosa at Pavia and allowed to write to his mother. ‘All is lost’, he said, ‘save my honour and my life.’ He asked Louise to take care of his children and allow free passage to a messenger whom he was sending to the emperor in Spain. In his letter, Francis appealed to Charles’s magnanimity: by accepting a ransom, he said, Charles would turn his prisoner into a lifelong friend.

The emperor was in Madrid when he received news of his victory on 10 March. He instructed the viceroy of Naples to treat Francis well and to give Louise frequent news of him. The king was, in fact, well treated. He was imprisoned at first in the castle of Pizzighettone, near Cremona, where he remained for nearly three months in the custody of a Spanish captain called Fernando de Alarçon. He was allowed companions, visitors and physical exercise. Montmorency, who shared the king’s captivity, kept his sister Marguerite informed about his health. She urged Francis to stop fasting and sent him the Epistles of St Paul to read. On 18 May he was taken to Genoa, where a fleet of Spanish galleys waited to carry him off to Naples. The prospect terrified Francis, for Naples had the reputation among Frenchmen of being a graveyard. He begged Lannoy to take him instead to Spain, where he hoped to win over the emperor by exercising his charm. The viceroy agreed on condition that French galleys were placed at his disposal. This was duly arranged, and on 19 June Francis landed at Barcelona to a tumultuous welcome. He attended mass in the cathedral and hundreds of sick people came to be touched by him. The king was then taken by sea to Tarragona, where he was nearly killed by a stray bullet as he looked out of a castle window. At the end of June he was moved to Valencia, then to an agreeable Moorish villa at Benisanó.

In the meantime, Montmorency carried three requests from Francis to the emperor in Toledo. The first was for a safe-conduct for the king’s sister Marguerite d’Angoulême to come to Spain as a peace negotiator; the second was for Francis to be brought nearer to the peace table so that he might be more easily consulted; and the third was for a truce to last as long as the talks. All three requests were conceded. At the end of July, Francis was taken to Madrid. His journey, which lasted three weeks, was like a royal progress. At Guadalajara he was lavishly entertained by the duke of Infantado, a leading Spanish grandee; at Alcalá de Henares he visited the university recently founded by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros. In Madrid, where he arrived on 11 August, the king was given a room in the Alcázar, which stood on the site of the present royal palace.

The regency of Louise of Savoy

Francis’s captivity lasted just over a year, until 17 March 1526. In his absence France was governed by his mother from the abbey of Saint-Just, near Lyon, assisted by Duprat and by Robertet. Their first task was to provide for the kingdom’s defence. Pavia had not ended the war. France continued to be threatened with invasion for several months, mainly from England. ‘Now is the time’, Henry VIII wrote, ‘for the emperor and myself to devise means of getting full satisfaction from France. Not an hour is to be lost.’ He sent an embassy to Spain with proposals for the dismemberment of France. Henry hoped to be crowned in Paris and to recover all that was his ‘by just title of inheritance’. At the very least, he expected to acquire Normandy or Picardy and Boulogne.

Henry assessed the situation correctly: France had been largely denuded of troops, armaments and supplies in the interest of Francis’s Italian campaign. Such troops as remained in the north were unpaid and lived off the countryside, striking terror in villages and even in the suburbs of Paris. In the south the situation was less critical, as remnants of the royal army drifted back across the Alps. In April, Albany’s troops returned home by sea almost intact. But the regent could only pay some of them; the rest she sent north to swell the marauding bands. A joint invasion by Henry VIII and Charles V would almost certainly have brought the kingdom to its knees; but Henry failed to get the co-operation of Charles, who had to cope with many urgent problems in various corners of Europe. His troops in Italy were unpaid and mutinous, if they had not already deserted. In Germany the Peasants’ War was threatening the very fabric of society, while further east the Turkish threat loomed large. The Sultan Suleiman, having conquered Rhodes in 1522, was preparing to attack Hungary whose king, Louis II, was Charles V’s brother-in-law.

In providing for the defence of France, Louise of Savoy concentrated her efforts on Burgundy. She posted lookouts along the River Saône and sent the comte de Guise to inspect the province’s fortifications. However, in June 1525 her cousin Margaret of Savoy, governor of the Netherlands, renewed the truce neutralizing the frontier dividing the two Burgundies. In the north, Louise relied on help from the parlement. It purchased and sent grain to towns in Picardy and persuaded the Parisian authorities to send arms and ammunition.

Perhaps the most important task facing the regent was to maintain the king’s authority. Some people believed that the regency should be exercised by the king’s nearest adult male kinsman and an attempt was apparently made to put the duc de Vendôme in Louise’s place, but he refused to act in a way likely to divide the kingdom. In March 1525 the parlement assured Louise of its support, but it was keen to reverse the trend towards a more absolute, less consultative, monarchy.

On 23 March the parlement set up a commission to draw up remonstrances for presentation to the regent. Normally, remonstrances were concerned with a particular piece of legislation, but the commissioners chose to examine a wide range of royal policies. They saw the hand of God in the misfortunes that had befallen the kingdom. Penitence and prayer were needed to put matters right, but also measures to root out heresy. Here the parlement was tilting at Marguerite d’Angoulême’s protection of the Cercle de Meaux and at royal interference with the Berquin trial. The parlement also called for the annulment of the Concordat with the Holy See and for a return to the Pragmatic Sanction. It objected to the government’s use of évocations whereby lawsuits were referred to the Grand conseil, which was under the king’s immediate influence. Another area of concern was the fiscal administration. The parlement believed that fiscal officials were thieves and that public money was being wasted. It deplored alienations of the royal demesne regardless of the ‘fundamental law’ that forbade the practice.

When the regent received the remonstrances on 10 April she described them as ‘to the honour of God, exaltation of the faith, and very useful and necessary to the good of the king and commonwealth’. She explained that the Concordat could be revoked only by the king, but promised to satisfy the parlement’s other demands. However, Louise never again spoke about the remonstrances, and only in respect of heresy did she go some way towards meeting the parlement’s wishes. Recent disturbances at Meaux had alarmed the parlement. Bishop Briçonnet was ordered to set up a tribunal comprising two parlementaires and two theologians to try heresy cases. Its competence, which was at first limited to his diocese, was soon extended to include all dioceses within the parlement’s ressort or area of jurisdiction, in effect removing heresy cases from the episcopal courts which had traditionally judged them. The parlement also wanted the new court to try bishops suspected of heresy, but this required papal consent. On 29 April, Louise asked Clement VII for the necessary rescript, which he duly conceded. As the new judges thus exercised papal jurisdiction, they became known as the juges délégués (delegated judges). An appeals procedure was set up from them to the parlement, which consequently achieved overall control of heresy cases.

The parlement took advantage of the king’s absence to launch an attack on religious dissenters. In February 1526 heresy was defined so broadly as to take in even the smallest deviation from religious orthodoxy. The censorship of books was tightened up, printers and booksellers being forbidden to publish or stock religious works in French. The parlement was particularly anxious to seize copies of Lefèvre d’Etaples’ Epitres et évangiles des cinquante et deux dimanches which had been published anonymously. However, books were not the only victims of the persecution. The juges délégués were asked to prosecute Lefèvre, Caroli, Mazurier and Roussel. This attack on the Cercle de Meaux prompted Francis’s only known intervention in the domestic affairs of his kingdom during his captivity. In November 1525 he ordered the parlement to suspend proceedings against Lefèvre, Caroli and Roussel, holding them to be innocent victims of persecution by the ‘Sorbonne’. But the parlement stuck to its guns: on 29 November the juges délégués were instructed by the court to press on with their activities regardless. Lefèvre and Caroli fled to Strassburg, while Mazurier recanted. As for Briçonnet, he decided to fall into line with orthodoxy. Another victim was Berquin, who was rearrested in January 1526, found guilty of heresy and sent to the parlement to be sentenced, but the court desisted when it learned that Francis was about to come home.

A serious bone of contention between the regent and the parlement was the Concordat. On 24 February 1525, Etienne Poncher, archbishop of Sens and abbot of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, died. In response to a request from Chancellor Duprat, who had recently taken holy orders, Louise appointed him to both benefices. However, both Sens and Saint-Benoît were exempt from the Concordat’s provisions and the chapters proceeded to elect their superiors: Jean de Salazar at Sens and François Poncher (Etienne’s nephew) at Saint-Benoît. Duprat promptly appealed to the papacy which quashed the elections; the chapters appealed to the parlement. A protracted legal struggle ensued which was inflamed when Duprat sent an armed force to occupy Saint-Benoît, and the parlement tried to dislodge it. The regent evoked both lawsuits to the Grand conseil which consequently found itself in dispute with the parlement. On 24 June the two courts were ordered to hand over the lawsuits to a special commission appointed by Louise. At the same time she sent troops to Paris, presumably to force the parlement’s compliance.

The quarrel was given a dangerous new twist in July, when the parlement mounted an attack on Duprat, whom it had never forgiven for his part in securing the Concordat. He was summoned to Paris to answer certain charges, but the regent would not let him go. She asked for an explanation of the parlement’s conduct and kept its representatives waiting several weeks before granting them an audience. Her procrastination paid off. The parlement dropped its attack on the chancellor and agreed not to judge the affairs of Sens and Saint-Benoît if the Grand conseil would do likewise. This satisfied Louise, who allowed matters to rest there until her son’s return.

The Treaty of Madrid (January 1526)

Foreign policy was the most successful aspect of Louise of Savoy’s regency. While negotiating with Charles V for her son’s freedom, she worked to break up the Anglo-imperial alliance and stirred up trouble for the emperor in Italy and elsewhere. His terms for the release of Francis were anything but generous. The king was to give up Burgundy and all other territories owned by Charles the Bold in 1477; also Thérouanne and Hesdin. Bourbon’s property was to be restored; an independent kingdom, including Provence, was to be created for him; and his accomplices were to be pardoned. Henry VIII’s French claims were to be satisfied and Francis was to settle an indemnity owed by the emperor to Henry. The prince of Orange, whom the French had taken prisoner, was to be released and his principality restored. Peace was to be sealed by a marriage between Charles’s niece Mary and the Dauphin. Finally, the king’s release was to be conditional on the peace treaty being ratified by the French estates and parlements.

When these terms were laid before Francis in April 1525, he refused to discuss them, and referred the imperial envoy Beaurain to Louise. She appointed François de Tournon, archbishop of Embrun, as ambassador. His instructions stated that no part of France was to be ceded to the emperor. Tournon was soon joined in Spain by Jean de Selve. Both men saw Charles V in Toledo on 17 July, when he refused ever to accept a ransom for Francis. Burgundy was the main stumbling-block in the negotiations. On 16 August, Francis made a secret declaration to the effect that he would never cede the duchy of his own free will, and that if he were compelled to do so his action would be null and void.

Louise, meanwhile, set about destroying the Anglo-imperial alliance. The English government, fearing a separate peace between Francis and Charles, resumed secret negotiations with the regent which Pavia had interrupted. On 30 August the Treaty of the More was signed, restoring peace between England and France and drawing them together in a defensive alliance. Henry VIII undertook to use his influence with Charles to obtain Francis’s release. Francis, for his part, promised to pay Henry two million écus in annual instalments of 100,000 écus. Maritime disputes between the two countries were to be settled. The Scots were to stop armed raids across the border and Albany was banned from Scotland during James V’s minority. France agreed to indemnify Louis XII’s widow Mary, now duchess of Suffolk, for losses she had incurred during the war. Because Francis was not free to ratify the treaty, the English demanded special guarantees in the form of registration by four parlements and two provincial estates as well as financial pledges from nine major towns, including Paris, and eight noblemen. Louise asked the parties concerned to signify their acceptance of these terms, but they viewed them as a serious breach of their privileges. The Parlement of Paris waited till 28 October before ratifying the treaty and the estates of Normandy never did so. The eight noblemen complied with the regent’s request, but the towns, especially Paris, proved troublesome. Fortunately for Louise, she was able to persuade the English government to postpone the deadline for the surrender of the pledges.

In June 1525, Louise offered the pope and Venice an alliance aimed at driving the imperialists out of Italy and forcing Charles to release her son. It was not concluded, however, because Louise was only willing to give financial help to her allies: she was afraid of alienating the emperor permanently by offering them military aid. Her diplomacy also encompassed the eastern Mediterranean. John Frangipani was dispatched to the sultan with an appeal for aid from Francis and his mother. Suleiman promised in reply to lead an expedition against the emperor.

On 11 September, Francis fell gravely ill and the emperor, who so far had avoided seeing him, hastened to his bedside. The two rivals embraced and exchanged friendly greetings. Next day Marguerite arrived, after travelling post-haste from France. On 22 September, Francis lapsed into a semi-coma, but a ‘miracle’ suddenly occurred: an abscess inside the king’s head burst, his fever dropped and his spirits revived. His companions were soon able to inform the regent and the parlement that he was out of danger.

Marguerite now went to Toledo to negotiate her brother’s release; but the imperial council held out no hope of concessions. Francis declared that he would rather remain a prisoner for good than dismember his kingdom. In November he abdicated in favour of his seven-year-old son, the Dauphin François, but the deed of abdication was not sent to the parlement for registration. It was almost certainly nothing more than a ploy aimed at frightening Charles into making concessions. In November, after Marguerite had decided to go home, Louise instructed her envoys to make peace at any price. ‘What was the point of losing a kingdom’, she asked, ‘for the sake of a duchy?’ Francis apparently came round to this view: he accepted the emperor’s terms on condition that his release preceded the surrender of Burgundy; as he explained, he alone could persuade his subjects to give up the duchy. Going against Gattinara’s advice, Charles agreed to this condition in return for guarantees: Francis had to swear on the Gospels and give his word as a nobleman that he would hand over the Dauphin and his brother as hostages and would return to prison in the event of the treaty not being fulfilled. Charles needed peace, for he was in dire financial straits. He also knew that a new coalition, including England, Venice and the papacy, was being formed against him. The German situation remained bleak and, further east, the Turks were preparing the offensive which was to destroy the Hungarian monarchy on the field of Mohácz.

On 14 January 1526 the text of the Treaty of Madrid was brought to Francis. In it, he agreed to abandon Burgundy and Tournai, give up his rights in Italy, and rehabilitate Bourbon and his accomplices. He also deserted his allies, the king of Navarre, the duke of Guelders and Robert de La Marck. His two sons were to replace him as hostages in Spain. However, on the eve of signing the treaty, Francis formally protested before several French witnesses, including two notaries, that the concessions he was about to make were null and void. That afternoon, in front of all the plenipotentiaries, he swore to observe the treaty and to return to prison within four months if its ratification failed to materialize.

Francis was detained at the Alcázar, probably for health reasons, till mid-February. On 20 January he was betrothed by proxy to Charles’s sister Eleanor, and on 13 February, Charles came to Madrid and spent six days in his company. The two monarchs went to Illescas where Francis was introduced to Eleanor. On 19 February, Charles left for Seville to marry Isabella of Portugal, while Francis set off on his journey back to France. He was exchanged for his sons on 17 March on an island in the River Bidassoa. After setting foot on French soil, he rode full tilt to Bayonne where his mother, sister, ministers and friends were waiting for him. On 20 March he attended a service of thanksgiving in Bayonne cathedral.

The second accession

Following his return home, Francis spent several months touring south-west and central France. It was probably at Mont-de-Marsan in March 1526 that he first met Anne de Pisseleu, who was to replace Françoise de Châteaubriant in his affections. She was eighteen and admired for her beauty, intelligence and vivacity. By 1527 she had joined the king’s ‘fair band’ of ladies. In 1531 she became the governess of his daughters, Madeleine and Marguerite, and about 1534 Francis married her off to Jean de Brosse, soon to become duc d’Etampes. Thus did Anne become duchesse d’Etampes, the name by which she is best remembered. Depite her marriage, she remained at court where she came to exert a powerful political and artistic influence.

In October 1526 the bodies of Queen Claude and her infant daughter Louise, whose funerals had been postponed on account of the war, were taken from Blois to the abbey of Saint-Denis, where they were buried on 7 November. And on 30 January 1527 the king’s sister Marguerite took as her second husband Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre, who had escaped from prison in Pavia. The marriage was politically significant, since Henri’s claim to Spanish Navarre had yet to be satisfied by the emperor. After visiting her small kingdom, Marguerite returned to court where in June 1528 she attended the wedding of her sister-in-law Renée with Ercole d’Este. On 16 November, Marguerite gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne, who was to become the mother of King Henry IV.

Francis’s homecoming in March 1526 was followed by a distribution of honours comparable to that of 1515. Bourbon’s treason and the slaughter of so many noblemen at Pavia had created numerous vacancies in the royal administration. The king also wished to reward people who had been loyal to him during his captivity. Foremost among the new appointees were Anne de Montmorency and Philippe Chabot de Brion. Both had been brought up with Francis, had shared his captivity and had helped to bring about his release. Montmorency was thirty-one years old and a scion of one of the oldest and richest aristocratic houses. In August 1522, after serving in several military campaigns, he had become a marshal of France, a knight of the Order of St Michael, and a royal councillor. Now, on 23 March 1526, he was appointed Grand maître de France (in place of René of Savoy) and governor of Languedoc (in place of Bourbon). As the official head of Francis’s household, Montmorency became one of his principal advisers. He was a strict disciplinarian and a religious conservative. In January 1527 he married Madeleine of Savoy, daughter of the king’s deceased uncle, René. She brought Anne a large dowry which increased his already considerable fortune.

Philippe Chabot, seigneur de Brion, was appointed Admiral of France on 23 March 1526 in succession to Bonnivet, the king’s deceased favourite. Early in the reign Chabot had become a gentleman of the king’s chamber, captain of a company of lances, a knight of the Order of St Michael and mayor of Bordeaux. Among his military exploits was the successful defence of Marseille against Bourbon in 1524. In addition to the admiralship of France, he became governor of Burgundy. Though he received many gifts of land and money, he never became as wealthy as Montmorency. In January 1527 he married Françoise de Longwy, daughter of Francis I’s bastard sister.

Among other important appointments made by Francis in 1526, Galiot de Genouillac became Grand écuyer (Master of the Horse) in place of Giangaleazzo da San Severino; Robert de La Marck, seigneur de Florange, became a marshal of France; Jean de La Barre became comte d’Etampes and prévôt of Paris; and François de Tournon was promoted to the archbishopric of Bourges.

The king breaks his word

The first clear indication of Francis’s intentions regarding the Peace of Madrid was his refusal to ratify it. The imperial envoy, de Praet, who came to fetch the ratification, was sent home empty-handed. On 2 April 1526 the king complained that the treaty had been prematurely published in Antwerp, Rome and Florence. His subjects, he said, were angry and asked to be heard before the treaty was ratified. Early in May the viceroy of Naples, to whom Francis had surrendered at Pavia, came to Cognac hoping to persuade Francis to ratify the treaty. He was warmly welcomed by the king, who had not forgotten that he owed him both life and freedom, but he did not allow gratitude to stand in the way of his interests. On 10 May, Lannoy was informed by the king’s council that Burgundy could not be handed over because the king’s subjects would not allow such a diminution of his patrimony. Francis also argued that promises made under duress were null and void. However, since he wished to remain the emperor’s friend, he was willing to honour parts of the treaty which were acceptable to him and to pay a cash ransom. On 4 June the estates of Burgundy, meeting under the presidency of Chabot, endorsed the decision taken by the king’s council. Denouncing the treaty as ‘contrary to all reason and equity’, the deputies affirmed their wish to remain French. A similar declaration was made a few days later by the estates of Auxonne. In July a royal apologia intended for international consumption was published. It stressed the ‘fundamental law’ which forbade the king to alienate any part of his demesne, and enunciated the novel principle that no province or town could change ownership without the consent of its inhabitants. In addition to justifying his breach of faith, Francis acted to prevent an imperial conquest of Burgundy. Chabot inspected the province’s defences and put them on a war footing, but this proved unnecessary as Charles V lacked the means to invade. After an unsuccessful attempt by the prince of Orange to capture Auxonne, Charles disbanded his army. His dream of reuniting the two Burgundies had vanished for ever.

The League of Cognac (22 May 1526)

Francis’s repudiation of the Treaty of Madrid did not imply a readiness to resume hostilities with Charles V, at least for the time being. His chief aim was to recover his sons. To do this, he needed to put pressure on Charles by drawing closer to other European powers. On 15 May he ratified the Treaty of the More and on 22 May formed the ‘Holy’ League of Cognac with Venice, the papacy, Florence and Milan. Though ostensibly directed against the Turks, its real purpose was to expel imperial forces from Italy. Charles V had intended to go there to be crowned emperor by the pope. Now, because of the league, he felt obliged to stay in Spain and prepare for a new conflict. The allies were confident of success: the imperial army in Italy was penniless and disorganized, so Francis still hoped to recover his sons for a cash ransom. Charles, however, would not hear of this. ‘I will not deliver them for money,’ he declared. ‘I refused money for the father: I will much less take money for the sons. I am content to return them upon reasonable treaty, but not for money; nor will I trust any more the king’s promise, for he has deceived me, and that like no noble prince.’

By the autumn of 1526, Francis had come to realize that he needed to step up pressure on Charles. He made warlike noises, which encouraged the pope to act against the pro-imperial Colonna family in the States of the Church. French assistance, however, failed to materialize, and Clement VII’s situation soon grew desperate. In March 1527 he made a truce with the viceroy of Naples, who had landed in Tuscany with 9000 troops. Meanwhile, Francis looked to friendship with England rather than military involvement in Italy as the most economical way of bringing the emperor to heel. On 30 April, in the Treaty of Westminster, he and Henry VIII agreed to send a joint embassy to Charles to negotiate the release of Francis’s sons. If Charles refused their terms, war was to be declared on him.

From the pope’s point of view, the Anglo-French entente came too late. Despite his truce with Lannoy, the main imperial army under Bourbon invaded the States of the Church. On 6 May the Sack of Rome began. Bourbon was fatally wounded as he scaled the walls of the city, but his troops poured into it like a torrent, destroying everything in their path. Clement and some cardinals took refuge in the castle of Sant’ Angelo. On 5 June the pope signed a humiliating treaty which left him virtually a prisoner in imperial hands.

Francis restores his authority

Although the king’s authority had not been seriously threatened during his captivity, various bodies, notably the Parlement of Paris, had caused the regent enough embarrassment to justify a tightening up of that authority.

One of Francis’s first moves on returning home was to intervene in Berquin’s trial for heresy. He forbade the parlement to pass sentence and tried to alleviate Berquin’s prison conditions. The parlement submitted without demur when Jean de La Barre, acting for the king, released Berquin from prison. Francis also came to the rescue of the Cercle de Meaux. Lefèvre, Caroli and Roussel returned from exile: Lefèvre became the king’s librarian, Caroli resumed preaching in Paris and Roussel was appointed almoner to Marguerite de Navarre. The king also defended Erasmus after the Faculty of Theology had condemned his Colloquies. He ordered the parlement to ban publication of any work by the faculty which had not been previously examined and approved by the court and early in 1527 he abolished the juges délégués.

Reformers imagined that the king of France was coming over to their side. ‘The king favours the Word,’ Capito wrote to Zwingli, but Francis was simply reasserting his authority after the parlement and Faculty of Theology had tried to deal with heresy in their own way. While they defined heresy narrowly, he was evidently prepared to tolerate a fair measure of evangelicalism, especially within his court.

Francis also vindicated his authority in another sphere. In April 1526 he authorized Duprat to take possession of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire and soon afterwards confirmed the Grand conseil’s decree conferring the see of Sens on the chancellor. In December, during a debate between representatives of the parlement and Grand conseil in front of the king’s council, Duprat tried to justify the government’s action at Saint-Benoît. On 10 December the king’s council decided that the parlement had acted illegally and nullified its decrees regarding Saint-Benoît. In January 1527, Francis ordered the parlement to hand over the minutes of its debates during his captivity. The court complied after deleting passages about Duprat. Among churchmen involved in the Saint-Benoît affair, the most severely punished was Duprat’s rival, François Poncher, bishop of Paris. He was charged with sedition and imprisoned at Vincennes, where he died in September 1532.

Following his return from Spain, Francis did not reappear in Paris till 14 April 1527. He may have wanted to show his displeasure with the inhabitants’ behaviour during his absence. They had obstructed his mother’s peace-making efforts and had indulged in various disloyal pranks. When the king did eventually reappear, he did not give the customary notice. His entry was preceded by the arrest of eight citizens who had opposed the guarantees required under the Treaty of the More – a canon of Notre-Dame, three parlementaires, a notary and three merchants. The notary and merchants were soon freed, but the others were left to languish in prison for two years.

The quarrel between king and parlement was finally settled at a lit de justice on 24 July 1527. It has been suggested that this was, in fact, the first lit de justice, that all previous meetings of the parlement in the king’s presence had been merely ‘royal séances’, and that the phrase lit de justice was used in the Middle Ages simply to describe the trappings – throne, drapes and cushions – associated with the royal presence. Yet there is ample evidence that the medieval lit de justice had a distinctive judicial purpose. In July 1527, Francis acted as supreme judge, as his predecessors had done before him. The notion that he was creating a new forum dedicated to upholding ‘French public law’ is false. Francis needed to punish the parlement for its opposition to the regent during his captivity, to vindicate his own authority and that of his chancellor, and to remind the parlement of its rightful place in the constitution. The full majesty of kingship was reflected in the elaborate staging. Francis appeared on an elevated throne beneath a blue canopy embroidered with gold fleur-de-lys. On either side of him on raised tiers sat peers, nobles and prelates, maîtres des requêtes, and the three presidents of the parlement. Beneath the king, sharing in his majesty sat the chancellor. The floor of the Grand’ chambre was occupied by 75 councillors of the parlement and numerous courtiers. As the king took his throne, the parlementaires fell upon their knees until ordered to rise.

In a long opening speech, the president Charles Guillart criticized many aspects of royal policy, especially the evocation of lawsuits from the parlement to the Grand conseil.

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