Charles the Bold

Duke of Burgundy (r. 1467-1477)

• Born: November 10, 1433
• Birthplace: Dijon, Burgundy (now in France)
• Died: January 5, 1477
• Place of death: Near Nancy, Lorraine (now in France)

Charles the Bold attempted to build the duchy of Burgundy into a unified kingdom. He was considered a serious threat to the stability and centralization of the French state.

Early Life

Charles was the son of the immensely popular duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, and his third wife, Isabella of Portugal. Perhaps because Charles was the only son of three to survive, Isabella zealously protected the infant. She tended to his needs personally, refusing to relinquish him to wet nurses, as was the normal custom of the age. As a youth, Charles received the education properly fitting for a future military leader and political ruler. Charles became a skilled horseman, having received his first lessons at the age of two on a specially constructed wooden horse. Charles avidly pursued knowledge of military affairs as well during his early years.

The future duke was familiar with Latin, although he was by no means a Humanist. He read Sallust, Julius Caesar, and the deeds of Alexander the Great, although he was more interested in their martial activities than their literary style. Charles had an aptitude for languages and could conduct himself in Italian and Flemish as well as in his native French. He had limited knowledge of English as well. In appearance, he was tall, fleshy, and well proportioned. His hair, eyes, and coloring were dark, favoring his mother over his father.

Charles was most revealing in his character traits. Like his mother, he was always suspicious, was slow to embrace friends, and seldom had confidantes. He possessed an enormous ego and reveled in excessive flattery. Above all, as his name, Charles the Bold, indicates, he was an impulsive and rash man who followed courses unrelentingly without accepting or listening to prudent advice.

Life’s Work

Charles became the duke of Burgundy on the death of his father in June, 1467. He inherited a large network of territories that consisted of Franche-Comté, Nevers, Bar, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Artois, and Picardy. His domain lacked cultural, linguistic, and geographic unity. Charles governed his regional conglomeration through a complex feudal system of political, ecclesiastical, and military appointees. Much depended on personal loyalty to the duke on the part of his underlords and his subjects. Charles was a product of his age and his culture. He believed in the feudal concepts of chivalry. Chivalric virtues emphasized military prowess, personal loyalty to one’s overlord, courtesy to one’s peers, generosity, and intellectual gentility. Charles and his court at Dijon reflected a chivalric society. Burgundian dukes patronized the outstanding artists of the fifteenth century, including Claus Sluter, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden. Their generosity as patrons was well known. Tapestries depicting heroic feats of Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Charlemagne lined the walls of Dijon. Charles continued this benevolent tradition by supporting the historians Georges Chastellain, Olivier de La Marche, and Philippe de Commynes.

Unfortunately, early in his reign, he learned that reality was less pleasant than the courtly activities at Dijon. Urban centers, in particular, had little time for chivalry. Their citizens preferred practicality, and they resented excessive taxation and deprivation of privileges. With an eye toward independence, the cities Ghent and Liège rebelled in 1468. Charles responded quickly and forcefully with an army that brought both cities to heel. Because he suspected that the citizens of Liège had conspired against him with the French king Louis XI , Charles planned ruthless punishment for the city. Louis, in the meantime, had come to Peronne, which was within the duke’s lands, in October, 1468. The king hoped to negotiate with Charles. The French monarch found himself a virtual prisoner at the castle of Peronne after Charles had received what he regarded as evidence of the king’s treacherous complicity with Liège. Louis was forced to watch the systematic pillage, carnage, and burning at Liège at the hands of the fully enraged duke. Louis witnessed Charles’s impetuosity, a lesson he learned to put to good use in his future dealings with the duke.

Events at Peronne and Liège merely provided the necessary impetus for descent into formalized warfare between the ambitious duke of Burgundy and his natural rival, the equally acquisitive Louis, correctly called the universal spider. In order to outwit the monarch, his legal overlord, Charles activated his political design. In 1468, Charles was married to Margaret of York, the sister of Edward IV, the king of England. Through his marriage, Charles hoped to keep the English alienated from any potential alliance with the French. With the English federation under his control, the duke actively pursued his grander plan. Charles embarked on his dream of creating an independent Burgundian kingdom as a buffer state between France and Germany. This conceptualized kingdom would extend from the North Sea to Switzerland.

Alsace and Lorraine, the heart of the old Carolingian Lotharingia, were to become the nucleus of the future Burgundian realm. In 1469, under the conditions of the Treaty of Omer, Charles happily received the mortgage of Upper Alsace from the impoverished and improvident Duke Sigismund of Austria-Tirol. The fifty thousand Rhenish florins loaned to Sigismund permitted Charles to take a firmer step toward further aggrandizement.

At his next juncture, he negotiated with Frederick III, the Holy Roman Emperor. These transactions were seriously conducted from 1469 to 1471. His goal was to secure the emperor’s promise that Charles would receive the imperial coronation on the abdication or the death of the old emperor. Part of the diplomatic arrangements ensured the hand of Mary of Burgundy, Charles’s only child, to Frederick’s son, Maximilian I. A planned meeting between the emperor and the duke in November, 1473, at Trier was intended to seal the negotiations as far as Charles was concerned. Charles may have expected the coronation on November 18, 1473. The emperor delayed and then slipped away from Trier, almost secretly, on November 24, without crowning Charles and without finalizing the marital arrangements between Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian.

Charles was disappointed, and gravely so, but did not sulk for long. He proceeded to expand his territory in Alsace and then to secure Lorraine by force toward the end of 1475. His aggressive movements alarmed the Swiss, who were neighbors of Alsace and Lorraine. The spider king, Louis, managed to spin a web of intrigue around the oblivious Charles. Louis fed the fears of the Swiss and, simultaneously, managed to ally them with Sigismund of Austria-Tirol in 1474, after the transactions with the emperor and Charles had failed and before Charles’s final aggression against Lorraine. Then Louis added René II of Lorraine to the federation. René was a willing cohort since his territory had been snatched by the duke in 1475. Open warfare erupted between the German and Swiss league on one side and Charles the Bold on the other. Charles was soundly defeated at Grandson, Morat, and, finally, Nancy. The Battle of Nancy, fought in freezing cold on January 5, 1477, claimed Charles’s life.

Charles’s page later reported that the duke’s horse had come to the edge of a ditch, stumbled, and unseated his rider. The duke died during the carnage of battle. His body was found several days later. It was an ironic and cruel trick of fate that the last of the proud and glorious house of Burgundy should come to an ignoble end, lying nude, stripped of clothing, weapons, and jewels, mutilated, and partly eaten by animals in a land that he coveted.

Significance

The political situation in Europe during the last half of the fifteenth century was in a process of rapid change. The balance of power between the monarchs and their magnates teetered in a precarious manner. Both sides battled furiously for control within and outside geographical boundaries. Louis and Charles the Bold were locked in such a conflict. Charles, in some ways, was a Janus-like figure. He idealized the chivalric virtues of military prowess and personal obligations. Yet he combined these with the Renaissance characteristics of fame and glory. He looked back to the Carolingian middle kingdom of Lotharingia with nostalgia as he tried to remold it into a new state. Yet he hoped that this new kingdom would balance the power between Germany and France. At the beginning of his reign, it seemed quite possible to political observers (including Louis) that Charles might very well succeed.

He reached his peak with the submission of Ghent and Liège. The acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine represented an anticlimax since rapid defeats in Switzerland and Lorraine caused the death of the duke and the collapse of the Burgundian state in 1477. Charles was to blame, in part. He often acted rashly and consistently refused to follow the advice of his seasoned advisers, a fact that writers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and even Desiderius Erasmus would find troubling.

Fortune turned against him as well. He had no sons. The male line, consequently, ended with Charles. His daughter, Mary, was married to Maximilian I, the German emperor’s son, in 1477. While this seemed a prudent move at the time, Mary died five years later, and the entire Burgundian inheritance disappeared into the domain of either Germany or France.

Two significant historical developments resulted from Charles’s career and his ambitions, neither of which was intentional. First, Charles provided the setting for the last stage of the Franco-Burgundian struggle, with the monarch winning over the magnate. Centralization of France was completed with the fall of Burgundy. Second, a more remote result was the eventual independence of the Low Countries from German and French competition. The seeds of discontent were originally sown during Charles’s era but did not fully blossom until the seventeenth century, when the Netherlands attained the formal status of independence.

Bibliography

Bennett, Adelaide Louise. Medieval Mastery: Book Illumination from Charlemagne to Charles the Bold, 800-1475. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002. Catalog from an exhibition charting the evolution of illuminated manuscripts and the cultural contexts within which they were produced. Discusses Charles the Bold’s society and the function of the book within it. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and indexes.

Calmette, Joseph. The Golden Age of Burgundy: The Magnificent Dukes and Their Courts. Translated by Doreen Weightman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Places Charles in the environment of the age of Burgundian power. Calmette is the only historian to treat the Burgundian court within the context of its intellectual and artistic milieu.

Kirk, John Foster. History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. 3 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1864-1868. A detailed and straightforward account of the life of Charles. Generous quotes from letters, reports, and treaties. Strictly conforms to the nineteenth century historiographical emphasis on factual information. Would be most useful as a source for an in-depth study of the duke, even though its interpretation is dated.

Putnam, Ruth. Charles the Bold, Last Duke of Burgundy, 1433-1477. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908. Standard biography that is part of a larger series dealing with heroic individuals. A lively account of the duke’s life and an equally vivid portrayal of the mores of the fifteenth century. The author stresses the role of the individual as hero in history.

Small, Graeme. George Chastelain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy: Political and Historical Culture at Court in the Fifteenth Century. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1997. Study of Charles the Bold’s official chronicler, who was also the official chronicler of Philip the Good. Begins with a biography of Chastelain, then reads his chronicle to gain insight into the courts of Philip and Charles and their impact on the history of France and Burgundy. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Vaughan, Richard. Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy. New ed. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 2004. An excellent interpretation of Charles and his complicated relationship with his lands. The author penetrates the political motives of Charles, Louis, and other major figures. Ample quotes from diaries, dispatches, histories, and letters. Contains a full and detailed bibliography.

Velden, Hugo van der. The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold. Translated by Beverley Jackson. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000. Close study of the portraits of Charles commissioned as votive gifts for various churches. Includes analysis of Charles’s representation in the portraits, as well as his motives for commissioning and donating them. Illustrated, with bibliographic references and index.