Did Charles the Bold create the Burgundian state, or did he dig its grave? During the twelve years stretching from 1465, when he took over as his father’s lieutenant, to 1477, when he met his death in battle, Charles subjected the lands under his rule to extensive institutional reform. At the same time, the rapid evolution of new structures brought this state first to its apogee and then to its destruction.
Charles, son of Philip the Good and Isabel of Portugal, had always been interested in matters of politics, his intervention in affairs of state leading him into direct confrontation with his father. This was not simply the result of a generation gap. In the 1460s and, in particular, from the accession of Louis XI as king of France (1461), Charles feared a French policy aimed at the dismantling of the Burgundian defensive system in Picardy. In 1463—4 a crisis occurred, provoked by the repurchase, negotiated by Louis XI, of the ‘Somme towns’ ceded to Burgundy by the Treaty of Arras of 1435. To Charles, then count of Charolais, this was a major political error committed by his father, now well advanced in years and ill advised by members of the Croy family who favoured the king of France. The crisis over, the services of that family were dispensed with, and Philip the Good ceded the reality of power to his son, who chose to intervene actively in France by adhering to the ‘League of the Public Good’. This league brought together those French princes (Charles de France, the king’s brother, Frangois II, duke of Brittany, Jean II, duke of Bourbon, and others) who were concerned by the new king’s first political acts. In October 1465, by the terms of the Treaty of Conflans, Louis XI, compelled to negotiate with the members of the League, restored the ‘Somme towns’ to Duke Charles.
This first confrontation underlined the importance of the control of Picardy to both the French and the Burgundians. The matter was always to remain one of Duke Charles’s main preoccupations. Another important matter, one which concerned the maintenance of the internal cohesion of the Burgundian state, was the degree of control to be exercised over the towns. The problem of Liege soon came to the fore. Ever since the time of John the Fearless, this episcopal principality had been within the zone of Burgundian influence, which the towns, notably Liege and Dinant, rejected. Between 1465 and 1468, Duke Charles organised four campaigns against the people of Liege, sacking first Dinant and then Liege and, from 1467, imposing the authority of a ducal lieutenant-general, Guy de Brimeu, lord of Humbercourt. The episcopal principality became simply a Burgundian protectorate.
Once he had become duke of Burgundy on his father’s death (15 June 1467), Charles faced the opposition of towns within his own territories. His predecessors had had considerable experience of urban uprisings: Philip the Bold had led a war against Flanders between 1382 and 1385, while Philip the Good had only with difficulty regained control first of Bruges in 1437 and then of Ghent in 1453. From the autumn of 1467 Charles was confronted by far-reaching demands from Ghent, Antwerp and Malines, all related to the defence of urban privileges which had been ignored by the house of Burgundy since the acquisition of its lands in the Low Countries. The new duke had to come to terms, but gradually his institutional reforms and the imposition of a heavy fiscal burden led to opposition by the towns. Yet, in spite of the difficulties which characterised the start of his rule, Duke Charles threw himself resolutely into the political enterprise which was to lead to the creation of a centralised and independent Burgundian state. This was in no sense an easy task, for a successful outcome required the breaking down of local particularism, keeping the king of France at arm’s length, achieving significant territorial expansion in imperial territory, while at the same time bringing about widespread and fundamental reforms of an institutional nature within the lands which he had inherited.
Charles the Bold’s first ambition was to break the juridical bond which bound his lands in the kingdom to the crown of France. An opportunity to achieve this occurred in October, 1468. On the occasion of his interview with Louis XI at Peronne, Charles took advantage of an uprising in Liege allegedly provoked by French agents to demand from the king, then at his mercy, a treaty specifying that the Burgundian lands would, in future, no longer be subject to the authority of the parlement in Paris. This was a direct challenge to the royal authority and, once free of his opponent’s control, Louis would denounce the terms of the Treaty of Peronne, whose terms Duke Charles none the less used to prohibit ‘appeals to France’.
The struggle for independence was to lead to armed conflict punctuated by periods of truce. During these years Charles the Bold experienced great difficulties in protecting his frontiers in Picardy, Burgundy, Charolais and Maconnais. Several important towns were lost, notably Amiens, retaken by the French in 1471, but in September 1475 he was able to bring a measure of peace to the situation by an agreement made at Soleuvre which enforced a truce which was maintained until 1477.
In Burgundian thinking, policy towards France was always associated with that to be pursued towards England, whose civil troubles were closely followed in both France and Burgundy. In the conflict confronting Lancaster and York, the French crown, while pursuing a policy of realism, preferred to lend its support to Lancaster, mainly on account of its links with the house of Anjou.
So it was that Duke Charles, while being equally prudent, none the less gave diplomatic and financial support to the house of York. In 1468, at Bruges, he married Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV, the occasion being an opportunity for sumptuous celebrations. In October 1470, he welcomed his royal brother-in-law, expelled from his own kingdom, and gave him hospitality at The Hague before providing him with money, men and ships to help him regain his English kingdom. Edward’s successful venture provided Charles the Bold with a trump card which he tried to use to good effect in his struggle against the king of France. In July 1474, through the Treaty of London, he made an alliance directed against France which, however, he was not able to follow to its conclusion. Taken up by his policy in the Empire, he could not give military support to Edward IV when, in July 1475, the large English army landed in France. Disappointed by this, Edward abandoned his Burgundian ally, secured an agreement with Louis XI at Picquigny (29 August) and then sailed for home.
The setback for Charles the Bold may only be explained by the scale of the enterprise he was undertaking in the Empire. Not only was he attempting to secure his independence of France; he was pursuing an ambitious policy towards the east, a policy characterised by intense diplomatic activity and by a movement aimed at territorial expansion. To the links already uniting the house of Burgundy to certain German princes (those of Bavaria and Cleves, for instance) who were traditional allies were added attempts to secure alliances with the kings of Bohemia and Hungary and the duke of Austria. Charles did not hide his ambitions in the Empire: to achieve them he chose the road of expansionism. By the Treaty of Saint-Omer (1469) he acquired Upper Alsace, the Sundgau and the Breisgau from the duke of Austria as a pledge for 50,000 Rhenish florins. In 1473, under pretext of a conflict which was tearing apart the ducal family of Guelders, he took over that duchy. In the same year he arranged a meeting with the Emperor Frederick III at Trier. This meeting should have marked the high point of Burgundian policy vis-a-vis the Empire, for Duke Charles hoped to negotiate the title of ‘king of the Romans’ or, at least, an imperial vicariate and the up-grading of his ducal territories into royal ones. But nothing came of the meeting. Frederick was anxious to keep the imperial dignity within his family, and it is very likely that the advance of the house of Burgundy into the Empire was already worrying a number of German princes and imperial cities, notably in the valley of the Rhine. Although he proposed a marriage between Mary, his sole heir, and Maximilian, son of the Emperor, Charles found his ambitions thwarted. All that he secured was the imperial investiture to the duchy of Guelders, after which Frederick left Trier in haste.
This diplomatic setback failed to stop Charles, who was in the process of creating a new state. The year 1473 marked the high point of his reforming activity. Malines was chosen as the capital of the Burgundian Low Countries. In June, his council (the ‘Grand Conseil’), granted official status in 1446 but hitherto itinerant, was established there. This was soon followed by the creation of a parlement to act as sovereign court for all the Low Countries. In December 1473, the ordinance of Thionville completed the process of reorganisation by abolishing the two chambres des comptes in Brussels and Lille in favour of a single one in Malines.
The judicial and financial institutions were not the only ones to be reformed: a complete shakeup of military institutions was also planned. Up to that moment, the Burgundian state had only had access to an army composed of feudal contingents and companies of volunteers and mercenaries. According to this tradition the soldiers were summoned and disbanded as need arose: permanent forces were rare. Such a military system, however, while adequate for the needs of John the Fearless and Philip the Good, failed to meet the needs and ambitions of Duke Charles, for it could not rival the French royal army with its compagnies d’ordonnance. Charles thus decided to give his state an army similar to the French one. Three military ordinances, issued at Abbeville in 1471, Bohain in 1472 and Saint-Maximin-de-Treves in 1473, established the details of this development. In theory, the army was to number twenty compagnies d’ordonnance, each with 900 soldiers.
To pay for these reforms, the duke was obliged to develop the taxation system. From the duchy’s earliest days to the end of the rule of Philip the Good, its dukes had been obliged to negotiate annually the rate of taxation with the estates, both in the two Burgundies and in the north. Charles the Bold, on the other hand, tried to secure taxes for periods of several years and from his principalities as a whole. In May 1470, he requested 120,000 crowns for three years from his northern principalities, but negotiated separately with the estates of each. In March 1473 he chose to do things differently; calling the estates of all the lands in the north to meet him together in Brussels, he secured from them taxation worth 500,000 ecus per year for six years. In the following October the estates of the two Burgundies, Charolais, Maconnais and Auxerrois granted taxation to the annual value of 100,000 livres for six years. This was clearly the first step towards the institution of permanent taxation which Duke Charles was not to have time to put into force.
So, by the beginning of 1474, the Burgundian state appeared to have come into being, at least at the level of the creation of judicial, financial and military institutions. That state was a great European power, and its prince was held in great respect. Yet, at that very moment, it began to fall apart. The crisis started in the region of the Rhine. Burgundian expansionismin Upper Alsace, in the direction of Mulhouse and Basle, posed a direct threat to the political and economic interests of the Swiss Confederation and its allies, and was causing concern in the Rhineland towns, notably in Strasburg. Tension rose in the region and soon led to confrontation. In the spring of 1474, a broad anti-Burgundian alliance, the League of Constance, uniting the Swiss, some of the Rhenish towns and the duke of Austria, came into being. This diplomatic development was followed by a general uprising in Burgundian lands in the region of the Upper Rhine, and then by an armed confrontation with the Swiss who attacked Franche-Comte, which led to a Burgundian defeat at Hericourt in November 1474.
At that moment Charles could attempt neither the reconquest of Upper Alsace nor a counter-attack against the Swiss, since he was engaged in military activity in the archiepiscopal principality of Cologne. This undertaking has been seen as a response to the setback suffered at his meeting with the emperor at Trier. Having determined to assert himself in the Empire, Duke Charles decided that the use of force was necessary. He came to the rescue of his ally, the archbishop of Cologne, against whom his subjects, helped by the landgrave of Hesse, were in revolt. Duke Charles decided to besiege the town of Neuss, the very centre of the revolt. The enterprise was a failure; for more than ten months, from 29 July 1474 to 13 June 1475, the Burgundians pursued a fruitless siege. After an attempt by the emperor to relieve the town, Charles negotiated his departure and retired to Luxemburg.
He then turned his attention to Lorraine. Ever since the beginning of the century successive dukes of Burgundy had been interested in the duchy which linked the south of Luxemburg to the north of the county of Burgundy. It thus held a strategic position in the internal links of the Burgundian state, its importance ever increasing as the dukes gradually abandoned France to turn towards the Empire. At the beginning of the century Charles, duke of Lorraine, had wisely remained on good terms with the Burgundians. But on his death (1431) the accession of Rene, brother-in-law of King Charles VII and a member of the house of Anjou, to both the duchies of Lorraine and Bar had created considerable tensions which had led to Burgundian military intervention (battle of Bulgneville, July 1431). As a result, the Angevin dukes of Lorraine had allied themselves to Burgundy until that alliance was broken by Duke Rene II in 1475. In a period of crisis, as the Swiss, notably those from Berne and Freiburg, threatened not only Burgundian territories but the duchy of Savoy, too, Charles the Bold could not allow the north-south axis of his principalities to be cut. He thus over-ran the duchy of Lorraine and, after a brief siege, captured the town of Nancy in November 1475.
He now had his sights on the Vaud. The people of Berne had invaded the region, held by two Burgundian allies, Yolande, duchess of Savoy, and Jacques de Savoy, count of Romont. Charles the Bold immediately intervened but, to the general surprise, suffered two defeats, the first at Grandson on 2 March 1476, the second at Morat on 22 June. After this second defeat, the Burgundian state fell into a crisis from which it never recovered. The system of alliances crumbled when Milan and Savoy abandoned it. The demands for money submitted by ducal representatives both in the two Burgundies and in the northern lands were greeted with reticence, even outright refusal. To complete the process, the duchy of Lorraine rose in revolt against Burgundian domination. It was while attempting to regain control of Nancy and to keep open the road which, passing through Lorraine, united the northern and southern areas of his dominions, that, on 5 January 1477, Charles the Bold was killed in battle outside the town fighting against a coalition uniting forces from Lorraine, Alsace and Switzerland.