The Praguerie, named in memory of the Hussite revolt, occurred when peers acted to
restrain Charles VII, who had been emboldened by the Treaty of Arras and his recent
recapture of Paris. At the Estates General of 1439, Charles had threatened princely
autonomy by outlawing private armed forces. The duke of Bourbon and others seduced
the youthful dauphin, Louis, into joining them in open revolt. Skirmishes in Poitou,
Auvergne, and the Bourbonnais restored crown authority by June 1440, but the price of
peace was the delay of military reform as well as the provision of pensions and seats in
the royal council for many of the rebels.
In 1465, peers again united in an inaptly named Ligue du Bien Publique to restrain a
monarch whose reach exceeded his grasp. Nominally led by Louis XI’s brother, Charles
of France, the League was dominated by the dukes of Bourbon and of Brittany and by
Charles the Bold, then count of Charolais. Louis’s army restored his authority in the
Bourbonnais and succeeded in holding Paris after the indecisive Battle of Montlhéry
(July 16, 1465). Compelled to compromise nonetheless, Louis, in the treaties of Conflans
and Saint-Maur, promised to restore the pensions and positions of many he had
injudiciously ruined upon his accession to the throne as well as to grant his brother the
apanage of Normandy and to reconcile himself to the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy.
As late as 1488, a similar revolt occurred, in the so-called Guerre Folle, when the
dukes of Brittany and of Orléans challenged the regency of Anne of Beaujeu. The
subsequent attachment of Brittany to the royal domain, however, ended the era of armed
defiance of royal authority by eliminating the last great independent principality.
Henceforth, rebels, such as the duke of Bourbon in 1525, would be viewed not as
disobedient vassals but as traitors deserving exile or execution rather than reconciliation.
Paul D.Solon
[See also: CHARLES VII; CHARLES THE BOLD; FRANÇOIS II; LOUIS XI]
Cuttler, Simon H. The Laws of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Jouanna, Arlette. Le devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’état moderne,
1559–1661. Paris: Fayard, 1989.
Leguai, André. Les ducs de Bourbon pendant la crise monarchique du XVe siècle. Paris: Société
des Belles Lettres, 1962.
Lewis, Peter S. Later Medieval France: The Polity. New York: St. Martin, 1968.
——, ed. The Recovery of France in the Fifteenth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Vaughn, Richard. Valois Burgundy. London: Lane, 1975.
ARISTOTLE, INFLUENCE OF
. The importance of the introduction of translated works of the Greek philosopher
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) into medieval Christian thinking is one of the most often stated
and least clear aspects of 13th-century history.
Aristotle’s Categories (Praedicamenta), On Interpretation (Perihermeneias), Topics,
and Prior Analytics were widely known through the 6th-century Latin translations of
Boethius. With his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge, they were the source of Aristotelian
ideas in the West until the translation of Averroes’s commentary on Aristotle by Michael
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