Chapter V: H. S (7)

LOUIS VI. (1081-1137), king of France, surnamed "the Fat," was the son of Philip I. of France and Bertha of Holland. He was also surnamed the "Wide-awake" and "the Bruiser," and lost none of his energy when he earned the nickname by which he is known in history. In 1098 Louis was made a knight, and about the same time was associated with his father in the government, which the growing infirmities of Philip left more and more to his son, in spite of the opposition of Bertrada, the queen, whose criminal union with Philip had brought the anathema of the church. From 1100 to 1108 Louis by his victorious wars on the English and brigands had secured the army on his side, while the court supported Bertrada. Unable to make headway against him in war she attempted to poison him, and contemporary chroniclers attributed to this poison the pallor of his face, which seems to have been in remarkable contrast to his stalwart, and later his corpulent figure. Louis' reign is one of the most important in the history of France. He is little less than the second founder of the Capetian dynasty. When the feeble and incompetent Philip I. died (29th of July 1108) Louis was faced by feudal barons as powerful as himself, and ready to rise against him. He was forced to have himself hurriedly crowned at Orleans, supported by a handful of vassals and some ecclesiastics. As king he continued the policy he had followed during the previous eight years, of securing the roads leading to Paris by putting down feudal brigands and destroying their strongholds in the Île-de-France. The castle of the most notorious of these, Hugues du Puiset, was three times taken and burned by the king's men, but Hugues was spared to go back each time to his robber life, until he died on a crusade. In the north, Thomas de Marle, son of Enguerrand de Coucy, carried on a career of rapine and murder for almost thirty years before the king succeeded in taking him prisoner (1130). Twenty-four years of continuous war finally rooted out the robber barons who lived on the plunder of the roads leading to Paris: the lords of Montlhéri, who commanded the roads to Orleans, Melun and the south, those of Montmorency near St Denis on the north (who had to restore what they had robbed the abbey of St Denis), those of Le Puiset toward the west, on the way to Chartres, and many others. Parallel with this consolidation of his power in the ancestral domains Louis met energetically the Anglo-Norman danger, warring with Henry I. of England for twenty-five years. After the victory of Tinchebray (1106) Louis supported the claims of William Clito, son of Robert, duke of Normandy, against Henry I. A ruthless war followed, in which Louis was at times reduced to the sorest straits. In 1119, at a council held at Reims under the presidency of Pope Calixtus II., the enemies were reconciled; but William Clito's claims were not satisfied, and in 1123 war began again on a larger scale. Henry I. induced the emperor Henry V. to join in the attack upon France; and, his heir having been drowned in the loss of the "White Ship," won the count of Anjou by marrying his only daughter Matilda to Geoffrey, the Angevin heir (1127). The invasion of Henry V. was met by something like a national army, which gathered under Louis at Reims. "For a few days at least, the lord of the Île-de-France was truly a king of France" (Luchaire). Suger proudly gives the list of barons who appeared. Henry V. came no farther than Metz. Royalty had won great prestige. Even Theobald, count of Chartres, the king's greatest enemy, the soul of feudal coalitions, came with his contingent. Shortly afterwards (1126), Louis was able to overawe the great count of Aquitaine, William IX., and force his vassal, the count of Auvergne, to treat justly the bishop of Clermont. In Flanders Louis interfered upon the assassination of Charles the Good. He caused the barons to elect as their count in Arras the same William Clito who claimed Normandy, and who was closely bound to the king. For a while Louis had Flanders absolutely at his disposal, but he had hardly left William alone (1127) when his brutal oppression roused both towns and nobles, who declared that Louis had no right to interfere in Flanders. The death of William Clito, and a savage war with his own seneschal, prevented Louis from effectually resenting this attitude; but Thierry of Alsace, the new count, consented in 1128 to receive from Louis the investiture of all his French fiefs, and henceforth lived on good terms with him. In all his wars--those mentioned are but a part of them--Louis fought in person. Proud of his strength, reckless in the charge as on the march, plunging into swollen rivers, entering blazing castles, he gained the reputation of a national hero, the protector of the poor, the church, the peasants and the towns. The communal movement grew during his reign, and he encouraged it on the fiefs of his vassals in order to weaken them; but the title "Father of the Communes" by which he was known in history is not deserved, though he did grant some privileges to towns on his domains. Neither was Louis the author of the movement for the emancipation of the serfs, as was formerly claimed. His attitude toward the movement was like that of his predecessors and contemporaries, to favour emancipation when it promised greater chance of profit, greater scope for exploitation of the peasants; otherwise to oppose it. He was a great benefactor to the church, aided the new, reformed monastic congregations of Cîteau, Prémontré and Fontevrault, and chose his two chief ministers from the clergy. Étienne de Garlande, whom Louis raised from obscurity to be archdeacon of Notre Dame at Paris, chancellor and seneschal of France, was all-powerful with the king from 1108 to 1127. His relatives monopolized the highest offices of the state. But the queen Adelaide became his enemy; both Ivo of Chartres and St Bernard bitterly attacked him; and the king suddenly stripped him of all his offices and honours. Joining the rebellious barons, Étienne then led a bitter war against the king for three years. When Louis had reduced him to terms he pardoned him and restored him to the chancellorship (1132), but not to his old power. Suger (q.v.), administrator of St Denis, enters the scene toward the close of this reign, but his great work belongs to the next. Louis VI. died on the 1st of August 1137, just a few days after his son, Louis the Young, had set out for the far south-west, the Aquitaine which had been won by the marriage with Eleanor. His wife was Adelaide, or Alice, daughter of Humbert II., count of Savoy, by whom he had seven sons and a daughter.

See A. Luchaire, _Louis le Gros, annales de sa vie et son règne_
(1890), and the same writer's volume, _Les Premiers Capétiens_, in E.
Lavisse's _Histoire de France._ (J. T. S.*)

LOUIS VII. (c. 1121-1180), king of France, son of Louis VI. the Fat, was associated with his father and anointed by Innocent II. in 1131. In 1137 he succeeded his father, and in the same year married at Bordeaux Eleanor, heiress of William II., duke of Aquitaine. In the first part of his reign he was vigorous and jealous of his prerogatives, but after his crusade his religiosity developed to such an extent as to make him utterly inefficient. His accession was marked by no disturbances, save the risings of the burgesses of Orleans and of Poitiers, who wished to organize communes. But soon he came into violent conflict with Pope Innocent II. The archbishopric of Bourges became vacant, and the king supported as candidate the chancellor Cadurc, against the pope's nominee Pierre de la Châtre, swearing upon relics that so long as he lived Pierre should never enter Bourges. This brought the interdict upon the king's lands. At the same time he became involved in a war with Theobald, count of Champagne, by permitting Rodolphe (Raoul), count of Vermandois and seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife, Theobald's niece, and to marry Petronille of Aquitaine, sister of the queen of France. The war, which lasted two years (1142-44), was marked by the occupation of Champagne by the royal army and the capture of Vitry, where many persons perished in the burning of the church. Geoffrey the Handsome, count of Anjou, by his conquest of Normandy threatened the royal domains, and Louis VII. by a clever manoeuvre threw his army on the Norman frontier and gained Gisors, one of the keys of Normandy. At his court which met in Bourges Louis declared on Christmas Day 1145 his intention of going on a crusade. St Bernard assured its popularity by his preaching at Vézelay (Easter 1146), and Louis set out from Metz in June 1147, on the overland route to Syria. The expedition was disastrous, and he regained France in 1149, overcome by the humiliation of the crusade. In the rest of his reign he showed much feebleness and poor judgment. He committed a grave political blunder in causing a council at Beaugency (on the 21st of March 1152) to annul his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, under pretext of kinship, but really owing to violent quarrels during the crusade. Eleanor married Henry II. of England in the following May, and brought him the duchy of Aquitaine. Louis VII. led a half-hearted war against Henry for having married without the authorization of his suzerain; but in August 1154 gave up his rights over Aquitaine, and contented himself with an indemnity. In 1154 Louis married Constance, daughter of the king of Castile, and their daughter Marguerite he affianced imprudently by the treaty of Gisors (1158) to Henry, eldest son of the king of England, promising as dowry the Vexin and Gisors. Five weeks after the death of Constance, on the 4th of October 1160, Louis VII. married Adèle of Champagne, and Henry II. to counterbalance the aid this would give the king of France, had the marriage of their infant children celebrated at once. Louis VII. gave little sign of understanding the danger of the growing Angevin power, though in 1159 he made an expedition in the south to aid Raymond V., count of Toulouse, who had been attacked by Henry II. At the same time the emperor Frederick I. in the east was making good the imperial claims on Arles. When the schism broke out, Louis took the part of the pope Alexander III., the enemy of Frederick, and after two comedy-like failures of Frederick to meet Louis VII. at Saint Jean de Losne (on the 29th of August and the 22nd of September 1162), Louis definitely gave himself up to the cause of Alexander, who lived at Sens from 1163 to 1165. Alexander gave the king, in return for his loyal support, the golden rose. Louis VII. received Thomas Becket and tried to reconcile him with King Henry II. He supported Henry's rebellious sons, but acted slowly and feebly, and so contributed largely to the break up of the coalition (1173-1174). Finally in 1177 the pope intervened to bring the two kings to terms at Vitry. By his third wife, Adèle, Louis had an heir, the future Philip Augustus, born on the 21st of August 1165. He had him crowned at Reims in 1179, but, already stricken with paralysis, he himself was not able to be present at the ceremony, and died on the 18th of September 1180. His reign from the point of view of royal territory and military power, was a period of retrogression. Yet the royal authority had made progress in the parts of France distant from the royal domains. More direct and more frequent connexion was made with distant feudatories, a result largely due to the alliance of the clergy with the crown. Louis thus reaped the reward for services rendered the church during the least successful portion of his reign.

See R. Hirsch, _Studien zur Geschichte König Ludwigs VII. von
Frankreich_ (1892); A. Cartellieri, _Philipp II. August von Frankreich
bis zum Tode seines Vaters, 1165-1180_ (1891); and A. Luchaire in E.
Lavisse's _Histoire de France_, tome iii. 1st part, pp. 1-81.
(J. T. S.*)

LOUIS VIII. (1187-1226), king of France, eldest son of Philip Augustus and of Isabella of Hainaut, was born in Paris on the 5th of September 1187. Louis was short, thin, pale-faced, with studious tastes, cold and placid temper, sober and chaste in his life. He left the reputation of a saint, but was also a warrior prince. In 1213 he led the campaign against Ferrand, count of Flanders; in 1214, while Philip Augustus was winning the victory of Bouvines, he held John of England in check, and was victorious at La Roche-aux-Moines. In the autumn of 1215 Louis received from a group of English barons, headed by Geoffrey de Mandeville, a request to "pluck them out of the hand of this tyrant" (John). Some 7000 French knights were sent over to England during the winter and two more contingents followed, but it was only after twenty-four English hostages had arrived in Paris that Louis himself prepared to invade England. The expedition was forbidden by the papal legate, but Louis set out from Calais on the 20th and landed at Stonor on the 22nd of May 1216. In three months he had obtained a strong foothold in eastern England, and in the end of July he laid siege to Dover, while part of his army besieged Windsor with a view to securing the safety of London. The pretexts on which he claimed the English crown were set down in a memorandum drawn up by French lawyers in 1215. These claims--that John had forfeited the crown by the murder of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, and that the English barons had the right to dispose of the vacant throne--lost their plausibility on the death of King John and the accession of his infant son as Henry III. in October 1216. The papal legate, Gualo, who had forbidden the enterprise, had arrived in England at the same time as Louis. He excommunicated the French troops and the English rebels, and Henry III. found a valiant defender in William Marshal, earl of Pembroke. After the "Fair of Lincoln," in which his army was defeated, Louis was compelled to resign his pretensions, though by a secret article of the treaty of Lambeth (September 1217) he secured a small war indemnity. Louis had assisted Simon de Montfort in his war against the Albigenses in 1215, and after his return to France he again joined the crusade. With Simon's son and successor, Amauri de Montfort, he directed the brutal massacre which followed the capture of Marmande. Philip II., suspicious of his son until the close of his life, took precautions to assure his obedience, narrowly watched his administration in Artois, which Louis held from his mother Isabella, and, contrary to the custom of the kings of France, did not associate his son with him by having him crowned. Philip Augustus dying on the 14th of July 1223, Louis VIII. was anointed at Reims on the 6th of August following. He surrounded himself with councillors whom his father had chosen and formed, and continued his father's policy. His reign was taken up with two great designs: to destroy the power of the Plantagenets, and to conquer the heretical south of France. An expedition conquered Poitou and Saintonge (1224); in 1226 he led the crusade against the Albigenses in the south, forced Avignon to capitulate and received the submission of Languedoc. While passing the Auvergne on his return to Paris, he was stricken with dysentery, and died at Montpensier on the 8th of November 1226. His reign, short as it was, brought gains both to the royal domains and to the power of the crown over the feudal lords. He had married in 1200 Blanche of Castile, daughter of Alphonso IX. of Castile and granddaughter of Henry II. of England, who bore him twelve children; his eldest surviving son was his successor, Louis IX.

See C. Petit-Dutaillis, _Étude sur la vie et le règne de Louis VIII._
(Paris, 1894); and E. Lavisse, _Histoire de France_, tome iii. (1901).
(M. Br.)

LOUIS IX. (1214-1270), king of France, known as Saint Louis, was born on the 25th of April 1214, and was baptized at Poissy. His father, Louis VIII., died in 1226, leaving the first minority since the accession of the Capetians, but his mother, Queen Blanche of Castile, proved more than a match for the feudal nobility. She secured her son's coronation at Reims on the 29th of November 1226; and, mainly by the aid of the papal legate, Romano Bonaventura, bishop of Porto (d. 1243), and of Thibaut IV., count of Champagne, was able to thwart the rebellious plans of Pierre Mauclerc, duke of Brittany, and Philippe Hurepel, a natural son of Philip Augustus. Mauclerc's opposition was not finally overcome, however, until 1234. Then in 1236 Thibaut, who had become king of Navarre, turned against the queen, formed an alliance with Brittany, marrying his daughter without royal consent to Jean le Roux, Mauclerc's son, and attempted to make a new feudal league. The final triumph of the regent was shown when the king's army assembled at Vincennes. His summons met with such general and prompt obedience as to awe Thibaut into submission without striking a blow. Thus the reign of Louis IX. began with royal prerogatives fully maintained; the kingdom was well under control, and Mauclerc and Thibaut were both obliged to go on crusade. But the influence of the strong-willed queen-mother continued to make itself felt to the close of her life. Louis IX. did not lack independence of character, but his confidence in his mother had been amply justified and he always acted in her presence like a child. This confidence he withheld from his wife, Margaret, daughter of Raymond Berenger, count of Provence, whom he married at Sens in May 1234. The reign was comparatively uneventful. A rising of the nobles of the south-west, stirred up by Isabella, widow of King John of England, and her husband, Hugh de Lusignan, count of the Marche, upon the occasion of the investment of Alphonse of Poitiers with the fiefs left him by Louis VIII. as a result of the Albigensian crusade, reached threatening dimensions in 1242, but the king's armies easily overran Count Hugh's territories, and defeated Henry III. of England, who had come to his aid, at Saintes. Isabella and her husband were forced to submit, and Raymond VII., count of Toulouse, yielded without resistance upon the advent of two royal armies, and accepted the peace of Lorris in January 1243. This was the last rising of the nobles in Louis's reign.

At the end of 1244, during an illness, Louis took the cross. He had already been much distressed by the plight of John of Brienne, emperor at Constantinople, and bought from him the crown of thorns, parts of the true cross, the holy lance, and the holy sponge. The Sainte Chapelle in Paris still stands as a monument to the value of these relics to the saintly king. But the quarrel between the papacy and the emperor Frederick II., in which Louis maintained a watchful neutrality--only interfering to prevent the capture of Innocent IV. at Lyons--and the difficulties of preparation, delayed the embarkation until August 1248. His defeat and capture at Mansura, in February 1250, the next four years spent in Syria in captivity, in diplomatic intrigues, and finally in raising the fortifications of Caesarea and Joppa,--these events belong to the history of the crusades (q.v.). His return to France was urgently needed, as Blanche of Castile, whom he had left as regent, had died in November 1252, and upon the removal of her strong hand feudal turbulence had begun to show itself.

This period between his first and second crusades (1254-1269) is the real age of Saint Louis in the history of France. He imposed peace between warring factions of his nobility by mere moral force, backed up by something like an awakened public opinion. His nobles often chafed under his unrelenting justice but never dared rebel. The most famous of his settlements was the treaty of Paris, drawn up in May 1258 and ratified in December 1259, by which the claims of Henry III. of England were adjusted. Henry renounced absolutely Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Poitou, and received, on condition of recognizing Louis as liege suzerain, all the fiefs and domains of the king of France in the dioceses of Limoges, Cahors and Perigueux, and the expectation of Saintonge south of the Charente, and Agenais, if they should fall to the crown of France by the death of Alphonse of Poitiers. In addition, Louis promised to provide Henry with sufficient money to maintain 500 knights for two years. This treaty was very unpopular in France, since the king surrendered a large part of France that Henry had not won; but Louis was satisfied that the absolute sovereignty over the northern provinces more than equalled the loss in the south. Historians still disagree as to its wisdom. Louis made a similar compromise with the king of Aragon in the treaty of Corbeil, 1258, whereby he gave up the claims of kings of France to Roussillon and Barcelona, which went back to the conquest of Charlemagne. The king of Aragon in his turn gave up his claims to part of Provence and Languedoc, with the exception of Narbonne. Louis's position was strikingly shown in 1264 when the English barons submitted their attempt to bind Henry III. by the Provisions of Oxford to his arbitration. His reply in the "Dit" or Mise of Amiens was a flat denial of all the claims of the barons and failed to avert the civil war. Louis was more successful in preventing feuds between his own nobles: between the counts of Brittany and Champagne over the succession to Navarre; the dauphin of Vienne (Guigues VII.) and Charles of Anjou; the count of Burgundy and the count of Châlons; Henry of Luxemburg and the duke of Lorraine with the count of Bar. Upon the whole he maintained peace with his neighbours, although both Germany and England were torn with civil wars. He reluctantly consented to sanction the conquest of Naples by his brother, Charles, duke of Anjou, and it is possible that he yielded here in the belief that it was a step toward another crusade.

On the 24th of March 1267, Louis called to Paris such of his knights as were not with Charles of Anjou in Naples. No one knew why he had called them; but when the king in full assembly proclaimed his purpose of going on a second crusade, few ventured to refuse the cross. Three years of preparation followed; then on the 1st of July 1270 they sailed from Aigues Mortes for Tunis, whither the expedition seems to have been directed by the machinations of Charles of Anjou, who, it is claimed, persuaded his brother that the key to Egypt and to Jerusalem was that part of Africa which was his own most dangerous neighbour. After seventeen days' voyage to Carthage, one month of the summer's heat and plague decimated the army, and when Charles of Anjou arrived he found that Louis himself had died of the plague on the 25th of August 1270.

Saint Louis stands in history as the ideal king of the middle ages. An accomplished knight, physically strong in spite of his ascetic practices, fearless in battle, heroic in adversity, of imperious temperament, unyielding when sure of the justness of his cause, energetic and firm, he was indeed "every inch a king." Joinville says that he was taller by a head than any of his knights. His devotions would have worn out a less robust saint. He fasted much, loved sermons, regularly heard two masses a day and all the offices, dressing at midnight for matins in his chapel, and surrounded even when he travelled by priests on horseback chanting the hours. After his return from the first crusade, he wore only grey woollens in winter, dark silks in summer. He built hospitals, visited and tended the sick himself, gave charity to over a hundred beggars daily. Yet he safeguarded the royal dignity by bringing them in at the back door of the palace, and by a courtly display greater than ever before in France. His naturally cold temperament was somewhat relieved by a sense of humour, which however did not prevent his making presents of haircloth shirts to his friends. He had no favourite, nor prime minister. Louis was canonized in 1297.

As a statesman Louis IX. has left no distinct monument. The famous "_Établissements_ of St Louis" has been shown in our own day to have been private compilation. It was a _coutumier_ drawn up before 1273, including, as well as some royal decrees, the civil and feudal law of Anjou, Maine and the Orléanais. Recent researches have also denied Louis the credit of having aided the communes. He exploited them to the full. His standpoint in this respect was distinctly feudal. He treated his clergy as he did his barons, enforcing the supremacy of royal justice, and strongly opposing the exactions of the pope until the latter part of his reign, when he joined forces with him to extort as much as possible from the clergy. At the end of the reign most of the sees and monasteries of France were in debt to the Lombard bankers. Finally, the reign of Saint Louis saw the introduction of the pontifical inquisition into France.

There are numerous portraits of St Louis, but they are unauthentic and
contradictory. In 1903 M. Salomon Reinach claimed to have found in the
heads sculptured in the angles of the arches of the chapel at St
Germain portraits of St Louis, his brothers and sisters, and Queen
Marguerite, or Blanche, made between 1235 and 1240. This conjectured
portrait somewhat resembles the modern type, which is based upon a
statue of Charles V. once in the church of the Celestins in Paris, and
which Lenoir mistakenly identified as that of Louis IX. The king had
eleven children, six sons and five daughters, among them being his
successor, Philip III., and Robert, count of Clermont, the ancestor of
Henry IV.

The best contemporary accounts of Louis IX. are the famous Memoirs of
the Sire Jean de Joinville (q.v.), published by N. de Wailly for the
_Soc. de l'Hist. de France_, under the title _Histoire de Saint Louis_
(Paris, 1868), and again with translation (1874); English translation
by J. Hutton (1868). See also William of Nangis, _Gesta Ludovici IX._,
edited by M. Bouquet in vol. xx. of the _Recueil des historiens des
Gaules et de la France_. Of modern works may be mentioned C. V.
Langlois in E. Lavisse's _Histoire de France_, tome iii., with
references to literature; Frederick Perry, _Saint Louis, the Most
Christian King_ (New York, 1901); E. J. Davis, _The Invasion of Egypt
by Louis IX. of France_ (1898); H. A. Wallon, _Saint Louis et son
temps_ (1875); A. Lecoy de la Marche, _Saint Louis_ (Tours, 1891); and
E. Berger, _Saint Louis et Innocent IV_ (Paris, 1893), and _Histoire
de Blanche de Castille_ (1895). See also _The Court of a Saint_, by
Winifred F. Knox (1909). (J. T. S.*)

LOUIS X. (1289-1316), king of France and Navarre, called _le Hutin_ or "the Quarreller," was the son of Philip IV. and of Jeanne of Navarre. He was born at Paris on the 4th of October 1289, took the title king of Navarre on the death of his mother, on the 2nd of April 1305, and succeeded Philip IV. in France on the 29th of November 1314, being crowned at Reims in August 1315. The origin of his surname is uncertain. Louis X. is a somewhat indistinct figure among the kings of France, the preponderating influence at court during his short reign being that of his uncle, Charles of Valois. The reign began with reaction against the policy of Philip IV. Private vengeance was wreaked on Enguerrand de Marigny, who was hanged, Pierre de Latilli, bishop of Châlons and chancellor, and Raoul de Presle, advocate of the parlement, who were imprisoned. The leagues of the lesser country gentry, formed in 1314 before the accession of Louis, continued to demand the ancient privileges of the nobility,--tourneys, private wars and judgment of nobles not by king's officers but by their peers--and to protest against the direct call by the king of their vassals to the royal army. Louis X. granted them charters in which he made apparent concessions, but used evasive formulas which in reality ceded nothing. There was a charter to the Normans, one to the Burgundians, one to the Languedocians (1315). Robert de Béthune, count of Flanders, refused to do homage, and his French fiefs were declared confiscate by a court of his peers. In August 1315 Louis X. led an army toward Lille, but the flooded Lys barred his passage, the ground was so soaked with rains that the army could not advance, and it was thrown back, without a battle, on Tournai. Need of money inspired one famous ordinance of this reign; in 1315 the serfs of the royal domains were invited to buy their civil liberty,--an invitation which did not meet with great enthusiasm, as the freedman was merely freed for further exploitation, and Philip V. was obliged to renew it in 1318. Louis X. died suddenly on the 5th of June 1316. His first wife was Margaret, daughter of Robert II., duke of Burgundy; she was accused of adultery and died a prisoner in the château Gaillard. By her he had one daughter, Jeanne, wife of Philip, count of Evreux and king of Navarre. By his second wife Clémence, daughter of Charles Martel, titular king of Hungary, he left a posthumous son, King John I.

See Ch. Dufayard, "La réaction feodale sous les fils de Philippe le
Bel," in _Revue historique_ (1894); Paul Lehugeur, _Histoire de
Philippe le Long, roi de France_ (Paris, 1897); and Joseph Petit,
_Charles de Valois_ (Paris, 1900). (J. T. S.*)

LOUIS XI. (1423-1483), king of France, the son of Charles VII. and his queen, Marie of Anjou, was born on the 3rd of July 1423, at Bourges, where his father, then nicknamed the "King of Bourges," had taken refuge from the English. At the birth of Louis XI. part of France was in English hands; when he was five years old, Joan of Arc appeared; he was just six when his father was crowned at Reims. But his boyhood was spent apart from these stirring events, in the castle of Loches, where his father visited him rarely. John Gerson, the foremost theologian of France, wrote a manual of instructions (still extant) for the first of his tutors, Jean Majoris, a canon of Reims. His second tutor, Bernard of Armagnac, was noted for his piety and humility. If, as has been claimed, Louis owed to them any of his tendency to prefer the society of the poor, or rather of the _bourgeois_, to that of the nobility, their example was his best lesson in the craft of kingship. In June 1436, when scarcely thirteen, he was married to Margaret (_c_. 1425-1445), daughter of James I. of Scotland, a princess of about his own age, but sickly and romantic, and in every way his opposite. Three years after this unhappy marriage Louis entered upon his stormy political career. Sent by his father in 1439 to direct the defence of Languedoc against the English, and to put down the brigandage in Poitou, he was induced by the rebellious nobles to betray his trust and place himself at the head of the Praguerie (q.v.). Charles VII. pardoned him this rebellion, due to his ambition and the seductive proposal of the nobles to make him regent. The following year he was fighting the English, and in 1443 aided his father to suppress the revolt of the count of Armagnac. His first important command, however, was in the next year, when he led an army of from 15,000 to 20,000 mercenaries and brigands,--the product of the Hundred Years' War,--against the Swiss of the canton of Basel. The heroism of some two hundred Swiss, who for a while held thousands of the French army at bay, made a great impression on the young prince. After an ineffective siege of Basel, he made peace with the Swiss confederation, and led his robber soldiers into Alsace to ravage the country of the Habsburgs, who refused him the promised winter quarters. Meanwhile his father, making a parallel campaign in Lorraine, had assembled his first brilliant court at Nancy, and when Louis returned it was to find the king completely under the spell of Agnes Sorel. He at first made overtures to members of her party, and upon their rejection through fear of his ambition, his deadly hatred of her and of them involved the king. The death in 1445 of his wife Margaret, who was a great favourite of Charles VII., made the rupture complete. From that year until the death of the king father and son were enemies. Louis began his rebellious career by a futile attempt to seduce the cities of Agenais into treason, and then he prepared a plot to seize the king and his minister Pierre de Brézé. Antoine de Chabannes, who was to be the instrument of the plot, revealed it to Charles, and Louis was mildly punished by being sent off to Dauphiné (1447). He never saw his father again.

Louis set out to govern his principality as though it were an independent state. He dismissed the governor; he determined advantageously to himself the boundaries between his state and the territories of the duke of Savoy and of the papacy; and he enforced his authority over perhaps the most unruly nobility in western Europe, both lay and ecclesiastical. The right of private warfare was abolished; the bishops were obliged to give up most of their temporal jurisdiction, the scope of their courts was limited, and appeals to Rome were curtailed. On the other hand, Louis granted privileges to the towns and consistently used their alliance to overthrow the nobility. He watched the roads, built new ones, opened markets, protected the only bankers of the country, the Jews, and reorganized the administration so as to draw the utmost revenue possible from the prosperity thus secured. His ambition led him into foreign entanglements; he made a secret treaty with the duke of Savoy which was to give him right of way to Genoa, and made arrangements for a partition of the duchy of Milan. The alliance with Savoy was sealed by the marriage of Louis with Charlotte, daughter of Duke Lodovico, in 1452, in spite of the formal prohibition of Charles VII. The king marched south, but withdrew again leaving his son unsubdued. Four years later, as Charles came to the Bourbonnais, Louis, fearing for his life, fled to Flanders to the court of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, leaving Dauphiné to be definitely annexed to the crown of France. The policy of the dauphin was reversed, his ten years' work was undone. Meanwhile he was installed in the castle of Genappe, in Brabant, where he remained until the death of his father. For this he waited impatiently five years, keeping himself posted by spies of every stage of the king's last illness, and thus laying himself open to the accusation, believed in by Charles himself, that he had hastened the end by poison, a charge which modern historians deny.

On the 15th of August 1461, Louis was anointed at Reims, and Philip of Burgundy, as _doyen_ of the peers of France, placed the crown on his head. For two months Philip acted as though the king were still his protégé. But in the midst of the festivities with which he was entertaining Paris, the duke found that Louis ventured to refuse his candidates for office, and on the 24th of September the new king left abruptly for Touraine. His first act was to strike at the faithful ministers of Charles VII. Pierre de Brézé and Antoine de Chabannes were captured and imprisoned, as well as men of sterling worth like Étienne Chevalier. But the king's shrewdness triumphed before long over his vengeance, and the more serviceable of the officers of Charles VII. were for the most part soon reinstated, Louis' advisers were mostly men of the middle class. He had a ready purse for men of talent, drawing them from England, Scotland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Such a motley throng of competent men had never before been seen at the court of France. Their origin, their previous crimes or virtues, their avarice or brutality, were indifferent to him so long as they served him loyally. Torture and imprisonment awaited them, whether of high or low degree, if he fancied that they were betraying him. Among the most prominent of these men in addition to Brézé, Chevalier and Chabannes, were Tristan Lermite, Jean de Daillon, Olivier le Dain (the barber), and after 1472, Philippe de Commines, drawn from the service of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who became his most intimate adviser and biographer. Surrounded by men like these Louis fought the last great battle of French royalty with feudalism.

Louis XI. began his reign with the same high-handed treatment of the nobles which had marked his rule in Dauphiné, going so far as to forbid them to hunt without his permission. He forced the clergy to pay long-neglected feudal dues, and intrigued against the great houses of Anjou and Orleans in Italy. The malcontent nobles soon began to plan revolt. Discharged officers of Charles VII. like Jean Dunois and John II. duke of Bourbon, stirred up hostility to the new men of the king, and Francis II. duke of Brittany was soon embroiled with Louis over an attempt to assert royal control over that practically independent duchy. The dissatisfied nobility found their greatest ally in Charles the Bold, afterwards duke of Burgundy, and in 1465 formed a "league of public welfare" and declared war on their king. The nominal head was the king's brother Charles, duke of Berry, then eighteen years old, a weak character, the tool of the rebels as he was later the dupe of the king. Every great noble in France was in the league, except Gaston de Foix--who kept the south of France for the king,--and the counts of Vendôme and Eu. The whole country seemed on the verge of anarchy. It was saved by the refusal of the lesser gentry to rise, and by the alliance of the king with the citizen class, which was not led astray by the pretences of regard for the public weal which cloaked the designs of the leaguers. After a successful campaign in the Bourbonnais, Louis fought an indecisive battle with the Burgundians who had marched on Paris at Montlhéry, on the 16th of July 1465, and then stood a short siege in Paris. On the 28th of September he made a truce with Charles the Bold, and in October the treaties of Conflans and Saint Maur-les-Fossés, ended the war. The king yielded at all points; gave up the "Somme towns" in Picardy, for which he had paid 200,000 gold crowns, to Philip the Good, thus bringing the Burgundians close to Paris and to Normandy. Charles, the king's brother, was given Normandy as an apanage, thus joining the territories of the rebellious duke of Brittany with those of Charles the Bold. The public weal was no longer talked about, while the kingdom was plundered both by royal tax gatherers and by unsubdued feudal lords to pay the cost of the war.

After this failure Louis set to work to repair his mistakes. The duke of Bourbon was won over by the gift of the government of the centre of France, and Dunois and Chabannes by restoring them their estates. Two months after he had granted Normandy to Charles, he took advantage of a quarrel between the duke of Brittany and his brother to take it again, sending the duke of Bourbon "to aid" Charles, while Dunois and Chabannes prepared for the struggle with Burgundy. The death of Duke Philip, on the 15th of June 1467, gave Charles the Bold a free hand. He gained over Edward IV. of England, whose sister Margaret he married; but while he was celebrating the wedding Louis invaded Brittany and detached Duke Francis from alliance with him. Normandy was completely reduced. The king had won a great triumph. It was followed by his greatest mistake. Eager as he always was to try diplomacy instead of war, Louis sent a gift of 60,000 golden crowns to Charles and secured a safe conduct from him for an interview. The interview took place on the 9th of October 1468 at Péronne. News came on the 11th that, instigated by the king of France, the people of Liége had massacred their bishop and the ducal governor. The news was false, but Charles, furious at such apparent duplicity, took Louis prisoner, only releasing him, three days later, on the king signing a treaty which granted Flanders freedom from interference from the parlement of Paris, and agreeing to accompany Charles to the siege of his own ally, Liége. Louis made light of the whole incident in his letters, but it marked the greatest humiliation of his life, and he was only too glad to find a scapegoat in Cardinal Jean Balue, who was accused of having plotted the treason of Péronne. Balue thereupon joined Guillaume de Harancourt, bishop of Verdun, in an intrigue to induce Charles of France to demand Champagne and Brie in accordance with the king's promise to Charles the Bold, instead of distant Guienne where the king was determined to place him. The discovery of this conspiracy placed these two high dignitaries in prison (April 1469). Balue (q.v.) spent eleven years in prison quarters, comfortable enough, in spite of the legend to the contrary, while Harancourt was shut up in an iron cage until 1482. Then Louis, inducing his brother to accept Guienne,--where, surrounded by faithful royal officers, he was harmless for the time being,--undertook to play off the Lancastrians against Edward IV. who, as the ally of Charles the Bold, was menacing the coast of Normandy. Warwick, the king-maker, and Queen Margaret were aided in the expedition which in 1470 again placed Henry VI. upon the English throne. In the autumn Louis himself took the offensive, and royal troops overran Picardy and the Maconnais to Burgundy itself. But the tide turned against Louis in 1471. While Edward IV. won back England by the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, Charles the Bold besieged Amiens, and Louis was glad to make a truce, availing himself of the double dealing of the constable, the count of Saint Pol, who, trying to win an independent position for himself in Picardy, refused his aid to Charles unless he would definitely join the French nobility in another rising against the king. This rising was to be aided by the invasion of France by John II. of Aragon, Yolande, duchess of Savoy, and Edward IV. of England, who was to be given the old Plantagenet inheritance. The country was saved a desperate civil war by the death of the king's brother, Charles, the nominal head of the coalition, on the 24th of May 1472. Louis' joy on receiving news of this death knew no bounds. Charles the Bold, who had again invaded France, failed to take Beauvais, and was obliged to make a lasting truce. His projects were henceforth to be directed towards Germany. Louis then forced the duke of Brittany to make peace, and turned against John V. count of Armagnac, whose death at the opening of March 1473 ended the power of one of the most dangerous houses of the south. The first period of Louis' reign was closed, and with it closed for ever the danger of dismemberment of France. John of Aragon continued the war in Roussillon and Cerdagne, which Louis had seized ten years before, and a most desperate rising of the inhabitants protracted the struggle for two years. After the capture of Perpignan on the 10th of March 1475, the wise and temperate government of Imbert de Batarnay and Boffile de Juge slowly pacified the new provinces. The death of Gaston IV. count of Foix in 1472 opened up the long diplomatic struggle for Navarre, which was destined to pass to the loyal family of Albret shortly after the death of Louis. His policy had won the line of the Pyrenees for France.

The overthrow of Charles the Bold was the second great task of Louis XI. This he accomplished by a policy much like that of Pitt against Napoleon. Louis was the soul of all hostile coalitions, especially urging on the Swiss and Sigismund of Austria, who ruled Tirol and Alsace. Charles's ally, Edward IV., invaded France in June 1475, but Louis bought him off on the 29th of August at Picquigny--where the two sovereigns met on a bridge over the Somme, with a strong grille between them, Edward receiving 75,000 crowns, and a promise of a pension of 50,000 crowns annually. The dauphin Charles was to marry Edward's daughter. Bribery of the English ministers was not spared, and in September the invaders recrossed to England. The count of Saint Pol, who had continued to play his double part, was surrendered by Charles to Louis, and executed, as was also Jacques d'Armagnac, duke of Nemours. With his vassals terrorized and subdued, Louis continued to subsidize the Swiss and René II. of Lorraine in their war upon Charles. The defeat and death of the duke of Burgundy at Nancy on the 5th of January 1477 was the crowning triumph of Louis' diplomacy. But in his eagerness to seize the whole inheritance of his rival, Louis drove his daughter and heiress, Mary of Burgundy, into marriage with Maximilian of Austria (afterwards the emperor Maximilian I.), who successfully defended Flanders after a savage raid by Antoine de Chabannes. The battle of Guinegate on the 7th of August 1479 was indecisive, and definite peace was not established until after the death of Mary, when by the treaty of Arras (1482) Louis received Picardy, Artois and the Boulonnais, as well as the duchy of Burgundy and Franche Comté. The Austrians were left in Flanders, a menace and a danger. Louis failed here and in Spain; this failure being an indirect cause of that vast family compact which surrounded France later with the empire of Charles V. His interference in Spain had made both John II. of Aragon and Henry IV. of Castile his enemies, and so he was unable to prevent the marriage of their heirs, Ferdinand and Isabella. But the results of these marriages could not be foreseen, and the unification of France proved of more value than the possession of so widespread an empire. This unification was completed (except for Brittany) and the frontiers enlarged by the acquisition, upon the death of René of Anjou in 1480, of the duchies of Anjou and Bar, and in 1481 of Maine and Provence upon the death of Charles II., count of Maine. Of the inheritance of the house of Anjou only Lorraine escaped the king.

Failure in Spain was compensated for in Italy. Without waging war Louis made himself virtual arbiter of the fate of the principalities in the north, and his court was always besieged by ambassadors from them. After the death of Charles the Bold, Yolande, duchess of Savoy, was obliged to accept the control of Louis, who was her brother. In Milan he helped to place Lodovico il Moro in power in 1479, but he reaped less from this supple tyrant than he had expected. Pope Sixtus IV. the enemy of the Medici, was also the enemy of the king of France. Louis, who at the opening of his reign had denounced the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, had played fast and loose with the papacy. When Sixtus threatened Florence after the Pazzi conspiracy, 1478, Louis aided Lorenzo dei Medici to form an alliance with Naples, which forced the papacy to come to terms.

More than any other king of France, Louis XI. was a "bourgeois king." The upper bourgeois, the aristocracy of his "good cities," were his allies both against the nobles and against the artisan class, whenever they revolted, driven to desperation by the oppressive royal taxes which furnished the money for his wars or diplomacy. He ruled like a modern capitalist; placed his bribes like investments in the courts of his enemies; and, while draining the land of enormous sums, was pitiless toward the two productive portions of his realm, the country population and the artisans. His heartlessness toward the former provoked even an accomplice like Commines to protest. The latter were kept down by numerous edicts, tending to restrict to certain privileged families the rank of master workman in the gilds. There was the paternalism of a Frederick the Great in his encouragement of the silk industry,--"which all idle people ought to be made to work at,"--in his encouragement of commerce through the newly acquired port of Marseilles and the opening up of market placed. He even dreamed of a great trading company "of two hundred thousand livres or more," to monopolize the trade of the Mediterranean, and planned to unify the various systems of weights and measures. In 1479 he called a meeting of two burgesses from each "good city" of his realm to consider means for preventing the influx of foreign coin. Impatient of all restraint upon his personal rule, he was continually in violent dispute with the parlement of Paris, and made "justice" another name for arbitrary government; yet he dreamed of a unification of the local customary laws (_coûtumes_) of France. He was the perfect model of a tyrant. The states-general met but once in his reign, in 1468, and then no talk of grievances was allowed; his object was only to get them to declare Normandy inalienable from the crown. They were informed that the king could raise his revenue without consulting them. Yet his budgets were enormously greater than ever before. In 1481 the _taille_ alone brought in 4,600,000 livres, and even at the peaceful close of his reign his whole budget was 4,655,000 livres--as against 1,800,000 livres at the close of his father's reign.

The king who did most for French royalty would have made a sorry figure at the court of a Louis XIV. He was ungainly, with rickety legs. His eyes were keen and piercing, but a long hooked nose lent grotesqueness to a face marked with cunning rather than with dignity. Its ugliness was emphasized by the old felt hat which he wore,--its sole ornament the leaden figure of a saint. Until the close of his life, when he tried to mislead ambassadors as to the state of his health by gorgeous robes, he wore the meanest clothes. Dressed in grey like a pilgrim, and accompanied by five or six trustworthy servants, he would set out on his interminable travels, "ambling along on a good mule." Thus he traversed France, avoiding all ceremony, entering towns by back streets, receiving ambassadors in wayside huts, dining in public houses, enjoying the loose manners and language of his associates, and incidentally learning at first hand the condition of his people and the possibilities of using or taxing them--his needs of them rather than theirs of him. He loved to win men, especially those of the middle class, by affability and familiarity, employing all his arts to cajole and seduce those whom he needed. Yet his honied words easily turned to gall. He talked rapidly and much, sometimes for hours at a time, and most indiscreetly. He was not an agreeable companion, violent in his passions, nervous, restless, and in old age extremely irascible. Utterly unscrupulous, and without a trace of pity, he treated men like pawns, and was content only with absolute obedience.

But this Machiavellian prince was the genuine son of St Louis. His religiosity was genuine if degenerate. He lavished presents on influential saints, built shrines, sent gifts to churches, went on frequent pilgrimages and spent much time in prayer--employing his consummate diplomacy to win celestial allies, and rewarding them richly when their aid secured him any advantage. St Martin of Tours received 1200 crowns after the capture of Perpignan. He tried to bribe the saints of his enemies, as he did their ministers. An unfaltering faith taught him the value of religion--as a branch of politics. Finally, more in the spirit of orthodoxy, he used the same arts to make sure of heaven. When the ring of St Zanobius and the blood of Cape Verde turtles gave him no relief from his last illness, he showered gifts upon his patron saints, secured for his own benefit the masses of his clergy, and the most potent prayers in Christendom, those of the two most effective saints of his day, Bernardin of Doulins and Francis of Paolo.