Charles the Bold

Charles was born in Dijon on November 10, 1433, the only surviving legitimate son of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy and Isabella of Portugal ^[1]. His father ruled one of the wealthiest political complexes in Europe, a collection of lands that included the duchy and county of Burgundy in the east of France alongside Flanders, Brabant, Holland, and other prosperous territories in the Low Countries. From birth Charles carried the title Count of Charolais, the customary designation for the Burgundian heir ^[2].

His upbringing combined the chivalric training expected of a great prince with an unusually bookish streak. He learned Latin, read histories of Alexander the Great and the ancient Romans, and developed a lifelong taste for music; contemporaries noted that he composed songs and kept one of the finest chapels of singers in Europe ^[3]. He was made a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the prestigious chivalric order his father had founded, while still an infant, and grew up surrounded by the elaborate court ceremonial that made Burgundy famous ^[2].

In 1440, at the age of six, he was married to Catherine of France, a daughter of King Charles VII, as part of the settlement that followed the Treaty of Arras between Burgundy and the French crown. Catherine died in 1446 while both were still children. A second marriage, to Isabella of Bourbon in 1454, proved more consequential: it produced his only child, Mary, born in 1457 ^[1].

Relations between Charles and his aging father deteriorated during the late 1450s, largely over the growing influence of the Croÿ family at the Burgundian court. Charles regarded the Croÿ brothers as agents of the French king and pressed Philip to dismiss them, a quarrel that at times drove father and son into open estrangement ^[2]. The dispute sharpened when King Louis XI of France, who had spent years of his own exile as a guest at the Burgundian court, bought back the towns of the Somme valley from Philip in 1463, a transaction Charles bitterly opposed ^[4].

Charles answered Louis by joining the League of the Public Weal, a coalition of French princes formed in 1465 to resist the king's centralizing policies. He commanded troops at the battle of Montlhéry near Paris in July of that year, an untidy engagement that both sides claimed as a victory, and emerged from the war with the Somme towns restored to Burgundy under the Treaty of Conflans ^[4]. The campaign established his reputation as a soldier and confirmed the hostility toward Louis XI that would dominate the rest of his life.

By this point Philip the Good had handed effective control of government to his son. Charles crushed a revolt by the town of Dinant in 1466, ordering the city sacked and burned, and put down unrest in Liège, whose prince-bishopric had long resisted Burgundian influence. When Philip died at Bruges on June 15, 1467, Charles succeeded to the whole Burgundian inheritance at the age of thirty-three ^[1]. Almost immediately he faced a rising in Ghent, a warning of the friction between the dukes and the proud, self-governing towns of Flanders that ran throughout his reign ^[2].

Any account of Charles the Bold achievements has to begin with his work as a state-builder rather than simply as a warrior. He pushed the loose Burgundian assemblage toward something resembling a unified state, establishing a central Parlement at Mechelen in 1473 to act as a supreme court for his Netherlandish lands and reorganizing the financial administration ^[5]. He also created one of the first standing armies in western Europe outside France, issuing detailed military ordinances between 1471 and 1476 that organized his troops into permanent companies with fixed pay, regular musters, uniform equipment, and a strong artillery train ^[6].

Territorial expansion accompanied administrative reform. In 1469 Duke Sigismund of Austria pledged Upper Alsace and neighboring lands to Charles under the Treaty of Saint-Omer, extending Burgundian reach toward the Rhine ^[5]. In 1473 the childless Duke Arnold of Guelders ceded his duchy to Charles, who took possession by force, adding Guelders and Zutphen to the Low Countries bloc ^[2]. That same year Charles met the emperor Frederick III at Trier to negotiate his elevation to the rank of king. The talks collapsed when Frederick slipped away down the Moselle before any coronation could take place, but the episode showed how close Charles came to reviving a middle kingdom between France and Germany ^[4].

His most theatrical assertion of power came against Liège. After the city rebelled again in 1468 with French encouragement, Charles confronted Louis XI at Péronne, where the king had unwisely come to negotiate just as news of the revolt arrived. Charles held Louis in effective custody, forced him to sign a humiliating treaty, and compelled the king to accompany him to watch the destruction of Liège, which was sacked and burned in October 1468 ^[4]. For readers asking who was Charles the Bold at the height of his power, the answer is a prince who could detain the King of France and dictate terms to him.

Charles married three times. After the early deaths of Catherine of France and Isabella of Bourbon, he wed Margaret of York, sister of King Edward IV of England, in July 1468. The wedding festivities at Bruges lasted more than a week and became a byword for Burgundian magnificence, with pageants, tournaments, and banquets recorded in detail by chroniclers ^[3]. The marriage sealed an Anglo-Burgundian alliance directed against Louis XI, though it produced no children. Margaret proved a capable partner, later serving as a steadying influence on her stepdaughter Mary ^[1].

His only child, Mary of Burgundy, remained his heir throughout his reign, and the question of her marriage became one of the great diplomatic prizes of the age. Charles dangled her hand before a series of suitors as bargaining material, most significantly Maximilian of Austria, son of the emperor, during the kingdom negotiations at Trier ^[5].

In temperament Charles differed sharply from his pleasure-loving father. Sources close to the court, including the memoirist Philippe de Commynes who served him before defecting to Louis XI, describe a ruler who worked long hours, drank little, sat through interminable audiences, and demanded exact obedience ^[7]. He was proud of his descent, through his mother Isabella of Portugal, from the English house of Lancaster, and steeped himself in tales of ancient conquerors. The nickname le Téméraire, often rendered as the Bold but closer to the Rash, was applied later; in his lifetime admirers spoke of him as the Warrior or the Terrible ^[2].

The final phase of the reign opened with an embarrassment. From July 1474 to June 1475 Charles besieged the small Rhineland town of Neuss in support of his ally the Archbishop of Cologne. The town held out for nearly eleven months, an imperial army marched to its relief, and Charles withdrew with nothing to show for an enormous outlay of men, money, and time ^[5]. While he was pinned at Neuss, his enemies organized: Louis XI, the Swiss Confederacy, Duke René II of Lorraine, and the Alsatian towns drew together against him. An English invasion of France led by Edward IV in 1475, intended to coordinate with Burgundy, ended instead with Edward accepting a French pension at Picquigny, leaving Charles isolated ^[4].

He conquered Lorraine in the autumn of 1475, taking Nancy and linking, at last, his northern and southern lands. The achievement lasted barely a year. In February 1476 he moved against the Swiss, who had overrun his protectorate in the Vaud, and stormed the castle of Grandson, executing its garrison. Days later, on March 2, 1476, the Swiss army routed his forces at the battle of Grandson, capturing his camp, his artillery, his treasury, and even his jewels, several of which survive in Swiss museums ^[6].

Charles rebuilt his army with remarkable speed and besieged Morat (Murten) that summer. On June 22, 1476 the Swiss and their allies attacked his siege lines and destroyed his army, killing thousands of Burgundian soldiers, many of them drowned in the lake ^[6]. Lorraine rose behind him, and René II retook Nancy. Refusing all advice to wait for spring, Charles besieged the city through a bitter winter. On January 5, 1477 the relieving army of René II, stiffened by Swiss mercenaries, broke the weakened Burgundian force outside the walls. Charles was killed in the rout; his body, stripped and disfigured, was found days later frozen in a pond and identified by his physicians from old scars ^[1].

The consequences of that January morning were immediate and immense. Louis XI seized the duchy of Burgundy and the Somme towns within weeks, while nineteen-year-old Mary of Burgundy, facing invasion and urban revolt, married Maximilian of Austria in August 1477. Their union carried the Low Countries and the Franche-Comté into the House of Habsburg, and their grandson, the emperor Charles V, would rule an empire built in part on the Burgundian inheritance. The rivalry between France and the Habsburgs that dominated European politics for more than two centuries descends directly from the scramble over Charles's lands ^[1].

Historians have argued about him ever since. Nineteenth-century writers often treated him as a doomed romantic, a reading reinforced by Walter Scott's novels Quentin Durward and Anne of Geierstein, in which he appears as a brilliant, self-destructive antagonist of the cunning Louis XI ^[7]. Modern scholarship, led by Richard Vaughan's full-length study, presents a more exacting picture: an intelligent administrator and military innovator whose ordinances influenced later European armies, but a ruler whose refusal to compromise multiplied his enemies faster than his resources could bear ^[5].

Among Charles the Bold facts that still draw visitors, his tomb in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges ranks first: the emperor Charles V had his great-grandfather's remains moved there in the sixteenth century to lie beside Mary of Burgundy under matching bronze effigies ^[8]. The booty the Swiss carried off from Grandson and Morat, tapestries, plate, and gems, remains a highlight of museum collections in Bern and elsewhere, physical evidence of the splendor that vanished with him. Any serious Charles the Bold biography ends where contemporaries did, with astonishment that so much power could dissolve in ten months of fighting ^[6].