Valois dynasty .................................. V
A dynasty of thirteen kings of France who
reigned from 1328 through 1589. The
Valois dynasty began with Philip VI, who
succeeded the last king of the House of
Capet, Charles IV. At this time England
and France were in conflict over French
support of a rebellion in Scotland, and
over the English king Edward III’s claim to
the throne of France. The two countries
went to war in 1337, a contest that en-
dured for more than a century and
brought ruin to cities and estates through-
out France. The authority of the kings of
France was challenged by powerful French
nobles and tested further by the arrival of
the Black Death—the bubonic plague that
struck France in the late 1340s and killed
millions of its citizens. The plague and the
war drove many French nobles to break
away from the authority of the king, and a
peasant rebellion known as the Jacquerie
brought further chaos and violence to the
kingdom. At the Battle of Agincourt, in
1415, English longbowmen defeated the
armies of the king and devastated the
French knights.
The French cause and the Valois dy-
nasty found salvation in the person of Joan
of Arc, who convinced Charles VII to ap-
point her commander of the French forces
lifting the English siege of Orléans. Al-
though Joan was captured and executed in
1429, the French began scoring victories
against the English. Royal authority
strengthened under Charles and his suc-
cessors, who brought Normandy, Bur-
gundy, Guienne, and Brittany under cen-
tral control. The French nobles were
brought to heel through a system of sen-
eschals—representatives who enforced
royal laws and decrees—and by the actions
of royal courts known as Parlements that
were established throughout the nation.
At the end of the fifteenth century,
with central authority strengthened and
France recovered from the Hundred Years’
War, the Valois monarchs Charles VIII and
Louis XII involved the kingdom in the
many disputes burning in the Italian pen-
insula. In the end, France was expelled
from Italy by an alliance of the Habsburg
emperors and the Italian city-states, which
fielded effective mercenary armies.
The Valois line continued through the
reigns of Francis I from 1515 to 1547 and
Henri II, whose reign began in 1547. Fran-
cis I was a dedicated patron of writers and
artists, and made France a center of the
Renaissance. Both Francis I and Henri II
strongly resisted the Protestant Reforma-
tion, prosecuting Protestant heresy and
keeping France within the Catholic
Church. The conflict culminated during
the reign of Charles IX in a nationwide
assault on Protestants in 1572 known as
the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
The assassination of Henri II in 1559
touched off a bloody civil conflict known
as the Wars of Religion between Catholics
and French Protestants, also known as Hu
guenots. Henri III was murdered in 1589
and left behind no heir, bringing Henri IV