The Troubled Inheritance of Duke Charles II 85
fratricidal rivalries, and sheer incapacity.142 It is only necessary to recall that
Philippe II of Bresse, known as the ‘Landless’, who ruled only from 1496 to 1497,
notorious for his hatred of his cousins, did in fact during his brief reign seek to
take measures to cleanse the Augean stables of his court of placemen and time-
servers.143 The only problem was that another raft of ‘courtesans’ (as they were
known) was waiting in the wings to step into their shoes.
Duchess Yolande died in 1478 and was succeeded by her son Philibert I, then
only thirteen years old. He died childless in 1482, whereupon the duchy passed to
his younger brother, Charles I, himself a mere fourteen years of age. The latter’s
reign was also brief: he died in 1490, leaving an infant son, Charles II, who
survived until the age of seven. The latter never ruled, the duchy being administered
by his mother, Blanche of Montferrat, as regent. He was followed somewhat
unusually by his great-uncle, Philippe of Bresse, from a cadet branch of the family,
who in turn was succeeded by his son Philibert II, but his reign from the age of
seventeen only lasted seven years. Then, in 1504, he was succeeded by Charles III
(whom we now call Charles II), whose long reign ended in virtual exile in Vercelli
in 1553. In 1514 Duke Charles conferred upon his younger brother Philippe the
county of Genevois-Faucigny as an apanage, to which was added the duchy of
Nemours in the Île-de-France as a grant from France in 1528. In 1533 he was
succeeded by his son Jacques, then aged two, who was duke of Genevois-Nemours
until his death in1585.144 The principal territory of the apanage, which lay to the
south-east of Geneva with its capital at Annecy, was of great strategic significance
during the struggle over Geneva in the 1530s, and it is striking that neither the
Swiss nor the French armies made any attempt to conquer it.
Historians’ verdicts on Duke Charles II (who, after all, never expected to inherit
the throne) have been largely negative. In the seventeenth century Samuel
Guichenon in his genealogical history of Savoy described Charles as ‘craintif à
entreprendre, perplexe à résoudre, et mal à executer, plus propre pour le cabinet
que pour le trône, grand en esprit mais petit en courage’, an indictment echoed
more succinctly in modern times by Jacques Freymond who called him ‘un être
faible, perpétuel indécis’.145 Much of that indecision was inflicted on him through
142 A detailed survey, which also stresses the importance of providing apanages for numerous sib-
lings, is contained in Andrea Merlotti, ‘Disciplinamento e contrattazione. Dinastia, nobilità e corte
nel Piemonte sabaudo da Carlo II alla Guerra civile’, in Paolo Bianchi and Luisa C. Gentile (eds),
L’affermarsi della corte sabauda. Dinastie, poteri, élites in Piemonte e Savoia fra tardo medioevo e prima èta
moderna (Corte e Principi fra Piemonte e Savoia, 1) (Turin, 2006), 227–83, here at 231–6.
143 Réjane Brondy, Bernard Demotz, and Jean-Pierre Leguay, La Savoie de l’an mil à la Réforme
(Histoire de Savoie, 2) (Rennes, 1984), 431.
144 See Matthew A. Vester, Renaissance Dynasticism and Apanage Politics: Jacques de Savoie-Nemours,
1531–1585 (Early Modern Studies Series, 9) (Kirksville, MO, 2012), 21–2. Until Jacques’s majority
in 1549 the county-duchy was ruled by his mother, Charlotte of Orléans, as regent. Laurent Perrillat,
‘Justice and Politics: The Conseil de Genevois during the Early Sixteenth Century’, in Matthew
A. Vester (ed.), Sabaudian Studies: Political Culture, Dynasty and Territory, 1400–1700 (Early Modern
Studies Series, 12) (Kirksville, MO, 2013), 63–78, here at 65.
145 Samuel Guichenon, Histoire généalogique de la royale maison de Savoie, 4 vols in 5 (Lyon, 1660),
2, 228. Quoted in Jacques Freymond, ‘La politique de François Ier à l’égard de la Savoie’ (Diss. phil.
Lausanne, 1939), 30. Freymond’s own judgement ibid., 30.