ORLÉANS CAMPAIGN; RECONQUEST OF FRANCE; RICHEMONT, ARTHUR
DE; TREMOILLE, LA]
Beaucourt, Gaston du Fresne de. Histoire de Charles VII. 4 vols. Paris: Librairie de la Société
Bibliographique, 1881–91.
Lewis, Peter S. Later Medieval France: The Polity. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Perroy, Edouard. The Hundred Years War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951.
Vale, Malcolm G.A. Charles VII Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Vallet de Viriville, Auguste. Histoire de Charles VII, roi de France, et de son époque: 1403–
1461.3 vols. Paris: Renouard, 1862–65.
CHARLES VIII
(1470–1498). The son of Louis XI of France and Charlotte of Savoy, Charles VIII was
thirteen when his father and mother died; the young king’s guardian was his twenty-one-
year-old sister Anne, supported by her husband, Pierre de Bourbon, lord of Beaujeu.
Louis XI had been an effective but unpopular king, in whose reign the burden of taxation
had increased dramatically. The great magnates, led by Louis of Orléans, who was next
in line for the throne, wished to gain control of the government. The Estates General met
at the beginning of 1484, and Anne and Pierre managed the proceedings skillfully,
sacrificing some unpopular officials from the previous reign and accepting a large
reduction in the principal royal tax. Later, they overcame an uprising of the princes
known as the Guerre folle (“Mad War”).
After 1488, as Charles VIII gained increasing control over affairs, Anne and Pierre
slipped into the background. The death of François II of Brittany in the same year left the
duchy to his eleven-year-old daughter Anne. In 1491, Charles VIII married her in hopes
of securing Brittany for the crown. The young queen bore him several children but none
lived very long. To marry Anne of Brittany, Charles first had to divest himself of young
Margaret of Austria, to whom he had an unconsummated proxy marriage. He also wanted
her father, the emperor Maximilian, to stop interfering with his Italian ambitions, and in
order to appease the Habsburgs he had to surrender Artois and the Franche-Comté, both
parts of the former Burgundian state.
A pious monarch with a strong sense of the historic mission of the French kings to
reform the church and defend Christendom, Charles also had a tenuous claim to the
kingdom of Naples. These considerations and the urgings of Italian exiles led him to plan
a massive invasion of Italy. After careful preparations, he entered the peninsula in 1494
with a large army. He met little effective opposition and succeeded in taking Naples, but
a coalition of Italian and foreign powers intervened against him, and the French had to
fight their way back home. While planning a second expedition, Charles died at Amboise
on April 7, 1498, after suffering an apparently minor blow to the head. His Italian
invasion had ushered in the international wars of the early-modern period; his death
marked the end of the senior branch of the Valois line of kings.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: ANNE OF BRITTANY; ARISTOCRATIC REVOLT]
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