(1470-1498). The son of Louis XI of France and Charlotte of Savoy, Charles VIII was thirteen when his father and mother died; the young king’s guardian was his twenty-one-year-old sister Anne, supported by her husband, Pierre de Bourbon, lord of Beaujeu. Louis XI had been an effective but unpopular king, in whose reign the burden of taxation had increased dramatically. The great magnates, led by Louis of Orleans, who was next in line for the throne, wished to gain control of the government. The Estates General met at the beginning of 1484, and Anne and Pierre managed the proceedings skillfully, sacrificing some unpopular officials from the previous reign and accepting a large reduction in the principal royal tax. Later, they overcame an uprising of the princes known as the Guerre folle (“Mad War”).
After 1488, as Charles VIII gained increasing control over affairs, Anne and Pierre slipped into the background. The death of Frangois II of Brittany in the same year left the duchy to his eleven-year-old daughter Anne. In 1491, Charles VIII married her in hopes of securing Brittany for the crown. The young queen bore him several children but none lived very long. To marry Anne of Brittany, Charles first had to divest himself of young Margaret of Austria, to whom he had an unconsummated proxy marriage. He also wanted her father, the emperor Maximilian, to stop interfering with his Italian ambitions, and in order to appease the Habsburgs he had to surrender Artois and the Franche-Comte, both parts of the former Burgundian state.
A pious monarch with a strong sense of the historic mission of the French kings to reform the church and defend Christendom, Charles also had a tenuous claim to the kingdom of Naples. These considerations and the urgings of Italian exiles led him to plan a massive invasion of Italy. After careful preparations, he entered the peninsula in 1494 with a large army. He met little effective opposition and succeeded in taking Naples, but a coalition of Italian and foreign powers intervened against him, and the French had to fight their way back home. While planning a second expedition, Charles died at Amboise on April 7, 1498, after suffering an apparently minor blow to the head. His Italian invasion had ushered in the international wars of the early-modern period; his death marked the end of the senior branch of the Valois line of kings.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: ANNE OF BRITTANY: ARISTOCRATIC REVOLT]
Labande-Mailfert, Yvonne. Charles VIIIet son milieu (1470-1498): lajeunesse aupouvoir. Paris: Klincksieck, 1975.
--. Charles VIII: le vouloir et la destinee. Paris: Fayard, 1986.
Major, J. Russell. Representative Institutions in Renaissance France 1421-1559. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960.
Pelicier, Paul. Essai sur legouvernment de la dame de Beaujeu (1483-1491). Paris, 1882.
--, ed. Lettres de Charles VIII, roi de France. 5 vols. Paris: Renouard, 1898-1905.
World History
