Louis XII

King of France (r. 1498-1515)

• Born: June 27, 1462
• Birthplace: Blois, France
• Died: January 1, 1515
• Place of death: Paris, France

Louis helped to make France the European state with the greatest potential political power and most centralized government in all Europe by the mid-sixteenth century. To many in France, Louis came to be regarded as the ideal monarch.

Early Life

Louis (loo-ee) was born the son of Charles d’Orleans and Mary of Cleves. He was on an indirect path to the throne because his house was several bloodlines removed from the royal family. As duke of Orleans, Louis never expected to become king of France. He had hoped to become the regent for the underage Charles VIII when Charles became king in 1483, but was rebuffed and instead led a rebellion against the young Charles. After a period of imprisonment, he returned to the king’s good graces and campaigned with him in his invasion of Italy of 1494-1495.

By the time Charles died childless in 1498, Louis had emerged as the presumptive heir. Louis mounted the throne with a life full of experiences already behind him: He had been imprisoned for treason, been captured in battle, commanded a fleet at sea, and led the defending force of a city under siege.

Life’s Work

As king, Louis’s style of rule was hardworking and economical, and he displayed a keen interest in administration. He had an open manner with those at his court, but his stubborn streak and lack of patience and subtlety often frustrated his advisers. His reputation for plain speaking was not necessarily an asset in the cutthroat world of Renaissance politics. Louis himself seemed to regard the primary purpose of kingship as the dispensation of justice rather than the accretion of power, but some features of his reign nonetheless predict the absolutist experiment characteristic of the early modern French monarchy.

The open sales of offices in parlement began under Louis XII, and his reign can be seen as a part of the ongoing process of territorial consolidation and centralization under the French monarchs that reduced eighty great fiefs of the French realm in 1480 to less than forty by 1530. These were achievements that would crumble in the religious and civil bloodletting of the second half of the century.

Early in his reign, Louis set out to secure the annulment of his marriage to Jeanne de France, the homely daughter of King Louis XI, who had pressured the younger Louis into the match. Louis desired to marry the widow of the recently deceased Charles VIII, Anne of Brittany , largely to prevent her from withdrawing her duchy of Brittany from the French crown’s jurisdiction. After a lengthy and dubious inquest into the legal status of his marriage, Louis received an annulment and was free to marry Anne.

Louis’s rule was characterized chiefly by domestic tranquility and prosperity. The taille, the most important of French taxes, remained at a low level until the exigencies of war required him to raise it in 1512. He held consultative assemblies regularly and acknowledged the right of provincial bodies to consent to the imposition of new taxes. An oft-repeated tale, most likely apocryphal, had it that Louis would weep when he had to impose a tax. For the king, such active consultation was a means of creating loyal subjects, without compulsion, which was probably beyond the capacity of the Crown to do anyway.

Louis provided France with perhaps the most efficient government of any of the French Renaissance monarchs. There was an air of professionalism about Louis’s rule, as he appointed a great many middling nobles and members of the haute bourgeoisie to government offices close to him, especially in the fiscal and judicial spheres.

Louis also solidified the territorial integrity of France, assuring that newly acquired Brittany, Burgundy, and the lands of the House of Orléans would become integrated into the French state.

Louis’s wisdom and pragmatism in domestic affairs was not replicated in his foreign policy, and he found himself repeatedly involved in the quicksand of Italian politics. Louis continued the obsession of his predecessor Charles VIII in an Italian venture. He inherited Charles’s claims to the Kingdom of Naples and brought his own Orleanist claims to the duchy of Milan. J. X. Hexter remarked that Louis, like Charles before him and Francis I after, was intent on “pouring the human and material resources of his kingdom down the rat hole of Italy.” His ventures in Italy led to nothing but failure and frustration.

Two unsuccessful invasions of Italy during his reign left France increasingly isolated politically. Louis ultimately saw his army routed by the Swiss at Novara in 1513, and the French were subsequently driven out of northern Italy almost completely, while at the same time facing invasions by the Aragonese in Navarre and the English in Picardy.

The death of Louis’s implacable foe, Pope Julius II , helped rescue the king from his predicament, as did a peace treaty with Henry VIII of England, by which he agreed to marry Henry’s daughter Mary (Anne died in 1514). Louis was succeeded as king by his cousin Francis of Angoulěme, who would reign as Francis I.

Significance

Louis XII was labeled the father of the people during a meeting of the estates in 1506. His reign represents a bridge in the history of the French monarchy, situated somewhere between the feudal regimes of the Middle Ages and absolutist kings of the early modern period. Louis’s rule was in fact a mixture of the two models of rule.

Louis mortgaged many of these achievements with his ill-fated interventions in the Wars of Italy. Here he continued the ongoing dynastic struggle with the king of Spain, a conflict that would dominate European politics for the next several decades. The gap between Louis’s successes at home and his failures abroad is a distinctive feature of his reign. To some extent, this foreign policy was forced on Louis, for, like many monarchs of his age, he had to give his nobility an outlet for their martial energies and the opportunity to win honor and glory. Thus, Louis’s reign represents a prime example of how the task of creating a modern monarchy came up against, and was complicated by, the enduring social structures of the Middle Ages.

Bibliography

Baumgartner, Frederic. Louis XII. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. A biography of Louis and a reasonably sympathetic portrait that incorporates French and English-language historiography.

Cruikshank, C. G. Army Royal: Henry VIII’s Invasion of France. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1969. A military and diplomatic history of the English invasion of Picardy in 1513.

Holt, Mack, ed. Renaissance and Reformation France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Part of the Oxford Shorter History of France series, a collection of thematic essays by top scholars of sixteenth century French history. Maps, lengthy bibliography.

Lewis, P. S. Late Medieval France. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968. This survey examines the social, cultural, and economic milieu of France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Major, J. Russell. From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles, and Estates. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Traces the political and institutional challenges to the extension of state power in the early modern period. Written by one of the leading experts in the field.

Potter, David. A History of France, 1460-1560: The Emergence of a Nation State. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1995. A survey of French history from the end of the Hundred Years’ War to the Wars of Religion, focusing primarily on the relationship between the Crown and the people and the expansion of the state in this period. Maps, genealogical tables.