The same thing can be said of the most famous war of the time, the Hundred Years' War.  We usually think of it as a war between two nations, nations called England and France.    Most of the time, however, national feeling was beside the point in this struggle.The goal of the English king was not to make France into a part of England, but to make himself king of France.  The course of the war depended very much on the relative strength and unity of the two families fighting for this honor.  It is a story worth looking at in detail, to see how the see-sawing back and forth is directly related to the personal and family situations of the main contestants.

In 1400, the war between the two kings was on hold.  Despite the stupendous early victories of Edward III, no decisive conquest of France had been attained, and  when the English stopped making easy profits out of the war, it ground to a halt.  When it did, the royal family (the Plantagenets) began to bicker and civil war and usurpation followed.

Henry IV (who took the crown from Richard II in 1399) and his son Henry V spent years fighting to hold their throne.  Only in about 1410 was it secure enough for Henry V to look seriously at France, which he still thought of as his own.  He was in luck, because now it was the French Valois dynasty that was in trouble.  The reigning king, Charles VI, was intermittently insane, and his relatives  were struggling to control the royal government.  One group, headed in theory by the Duke of Orleans, was called the Armagnacs, the other, headed by the Duke of Burgundy, was called the Burgundians.  What gave these groups power, besides Charles's weakness, was the fact that each side had extensive principalities that had been granted to them by earlier kings.

In the early 15th century, the family compact between the various branches of the French royal family had broken down
badly.  It was the existence of  two ducal parties and the deadly feud between them, as much as the undoubted military talents of Henry V, that made possible his famous victory at Agincourt and the resulting conquests.   Henry conquered Normandy in 1418 and 19 because the French parties were busy fighting each other.  When Henry marched on Paris, the two French parties opened negotiations with each other, but during the first parley, an Armagnac took the opportunity to kill Duke John of Burgundy in revenge for the Burgundian assassination of the duke Orleans twelve years before.  John's son Philip, the new Burgundian duke, swore vengeance, and made an immediate alliance with Henry.  Burgundy controlled old king Charles, and in 1420 was able to force him to sign a treaty with Henry.  This treaty disinherited his own son, Charles VII, and promised Henry the throne of France, when the old king died.

 It is interesting to pause at this point and see what the English thought of this victory.  They were very pleased, of course, but they also thought that the future position of their king in France was no longer their problem.  Prince Charles and the Armagnacs still controlled the southern half of France, and Henry would have to do something about that.  But the English parliament, representing the lords and wealthy commoners of England, would not pay for that conquest.  After all, the king's two realms were now officially at peace.  If there was trouble enforcing his will in parts of France, his loyal French subjects could pay the bills.

When Henry V died, his son Henry VI was only a year old.   The mad king Charles VI died soon after, which made the baby king of France, in theory at least.  But now the Lancastrian dynasty was weak, and the Valois one potentially strong.  The Valois claimant, Charles VII, was given the gift of Joan of Arc, who  appeared to give divine sanction to his cause, and that cause sprang to life.  When Henry VI's regent in France, his uncle the Duke of Bedford, died in 1433, Lancastrian control of France began to ebb away, especially after 1435, when the Burgundians deserted the alliance.

In 1449, Henry lost Normandy, and in the next year the ancient English connection with Gascony was broken.  It is interesting to note the dynastic consequences.  The Lancastrian hold on England was immediately imperilled
by its failure abroad, as the war party turned to the belligerent duke of York, who began the Wars of the Roses that would keep England busy for a quarter of a century.  The Valois dynasty, on the other hand, gained greatly in prestige and power.  During the years of successful war, Charles VII's government had gained the ability to make a variety of new demands on
the taxpayers and used the money to modernize his military establishment -- he assembled a standing army, something beyond the power of all of his predecessors.

Nevertheless, French politics at the highest level continued to pit the interests of one group of families against another.  With the English gone, Charles VII and his son Louis XI still had to deal with those lesser dynasties who were their vassals, who as a group had a significant degree of power in the country.  Royal power remained precarious in the face of noble unrest and even open revolt.  Important revolts took place in 1437, 1440, 1455, 1456, 1465, 1469, and 1474.

The most serious danger to the royal cause was the power of Burgundy, which was implicated in many of these incidents.  Burgundy had during the last stages of the Hundred Years' War, by adeptly changing sides, acquired extensive territories in the north of France and in bordering areas.  In the second half of the century, Burgundy threatened to become a state rivalling France in importance and by its close proximity the most dangerous enemy of the king.

 The duchy of Burgundy of the fifteenth century is a perfect example of the dynastic take-over game played at its best.    By marriage, purchase, agreement, or conquest, the dukes gained Namur in 1421; Holland, Hainault, Friesland and Zeeland in 1428;  Brabant and Limburg in 1430;  Luxemburg in 1435.  A number of alliances and protectorates comprised the rest of a chain of territories in the richest part of NW Europe.  The whole assemblage, although it was made up of districts that had their own identities and their own individual obligations to the duke, made a powerful bloc.  Altogether, the dynastic holdings made the dukes incredibly wealthy; during the reigns of Charles VII and Louis XI of France, when the two kings were often hard up for cash to meet their various committments, the contemporary dukes, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, were surrounded with the best of everything.  Some of the very best art of the period comes from their lavish court.
 
The art and literature of Burgundy has a particular feel to it, because it was a celebration and revival of the cult of chivalry.  (Details in class.)   The dukes reinforced the central myth that their court was one of chivalry by their sponsorship of the Order of the Golden Fleece.  The formal order of knighthood, with membership restricted to great champions and lords of the noblest blood, had been started by Edward III of England in the previous century.  Other monarchs had followed his example since.
By 1429, Philip the Good thought highly enough of himself as an uncrowned monarch to found his own order.  The original patron, besides the duke of course, was Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, and the symbol was a golden collar with a small fleece made of gold hanging from it.  (The dukes eventually reconsidered having a pagan patron, and found a way of
transferring their loyalty to the biblical champion Gideon.)  Something of the formality and magnificence that surrounded meetings of the order can be gathered by going to Vienna, where the embroidered robes worn by its chaplains are still preserved.

A prime example of the Burgundian ducal pageant is the famous feast of  the peacock, put on by Philip the Good in 1454.  Everyone invited to the feast was to dress in white, gray, and black, and to make sure they did,   the duke had his household design the clothing and supply the hundreds of yards of material, trim, and embroidery necessary for their clothes to all
attendees.  The feast included a play in which "Dame Church" appeared, weeping, in the company of the "Great Turk," and a live peacock, and reminded everyone present of the fall of Constantinople the previous year.  Then the Duke swore to God, the Virgin, and the pheasant that he would go on Crusade, unless circumstances prevented him.  His son Charles and everyone else followed suit.  It is a good thing that they added the disclaimer; circumstances, meaning intrigue at home, ended up negating the promise made in such a picturesque manner.

A common interpretation of the Burgundian court has been that it was decadent, because it pursued unrealistic ideals to the point of being ridiculous.  I am not so sure that the Burgundian manner of recreating an ideal chivalric past was inherently inferior to the Italian recreation of  an idealized antiquity, some of which took place in the courts of wealthy tyrants and popes, no less magnificent than the Burgundian dukes.  Italian poses could be as odd at times as Burgundian ones.  Perhaps we should recognize in Burgundy as sharing the cultural energy that Italy is so famous for, but expressing it in a way that gave more weight to chivalric lore than ancient humanism.   And humanism and the cult of antiquity had its influence with the dukes, too.  They looked back not just to Arthur, but to Caesar, Scipio and Alexander the Great.   Military reformers of the north had as much respect for Roman writers as the Italians did.

The Burgundian dukes did not invent this cultural energy, any more than Italian tyrants did, but they could afford to pay for some of its most beautiful manifestations.

The 15th century dukes were an impressive group, and no one was more impressed than themselves.    Philip the Good's son Charles, known as the Bold or the Rash, depending on your evaluation of him, began dreaming of a crown for himself.  His wealth, excellent, well-organized army, and family connections gave him an important role in European affairs, and he
saw no reason why he could not get his state elevated to the status of a kingdom.  The emperor of the time was his ally and considerably poorer than he was, and might listen to reason.  At the same time he plotted with Louis' enemies in France (which included Louis's ambitious brother Charles, who wanted a big principality carved out of the royal domain), and with the
Yorkist kings of England.  In 1474, Charles and Edward IV of England, his brother-in-law, struck a treaty that committed each of them to lead 10,000 men against Louis, and share the gains they hoped to make.

This plot, which might well have succeeded, since both Charles and Edward were good generals, failed because Charles overreached himself.  When Edward landed in France, fulling his committment to the letter and more, Charles was off in Lorraine fighting another set of enemies.  When after a long wait Charles did not bring up his army, Edward cut a deal with
Louis, who gave him a lot of money to go home.  With this rather sordid deal, the Hundred Years' War was truly over.

Charles, though hardly old, had only three more years to live.  His operations in Lorraine and Alsace had worried the Swiss, at that time the toughest infantry in Europe,   In 1477, after two major defeats by the Swiss, Charles was defeated again by the
Duke of Lorraine and the Swiss and killed.

That was the end of Burgundy.  Louis seized parts of it, and his son-in-law the Emperor Maximillian, duke of Austria, got the rest.  One wonders if a more moderate man might have created a brand new kingdom between France and Germany, and what might have happened afterwards.  But besides his rashness, Charles had another, even more unforgivable flaw, that negated all his other gains.  He had no son.  It was his daughter Mary who got what was left of the great duchy, and took it into another man's family, that of the Hapsburgs.  A purely personal circumstance prevented the coalescence of this new Burgundian realm -- although admittedly the Hapsburg possession of Flanders would make French kings miserable for centuries.

 I have been emphasizing the personal, almost accidental, aspects of fifteenth-century politics in this tale of France, England and Burgundy.  Other factors were important, but I think my emphasis is well-placed.   This medieval-seeming way of looking at the world, as an arena where princes and families fought for supremacy, using territories as counters, was a key factor, usually the key factor, not only in the fifteenth century, but in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, too.

As we go through the course, it is worth keeping this in mind.  If the politics seem irrational at times, that is no illusion.  Greed, family connections, and a desire for dynastic if not personal immortality were always there to mix things up.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
John Calmette,  The Golden Age of Burgundy

Denis Hay,  Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century 
 

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.