(1342-1404). The first of the Valois dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold was the fourth son of King John II of France and Bonne de Luxembourg. Born at Pontoise on January 17, 1342, he fought beside his father at the age of fourteen and was captured with him at the Battle of Poitiers (1356). After he and the king secured release in 1360, he became, duke of Touraine, but he surrendered this duchy in 1363 when John II made him duke of Burgundy and first peer of France. In May 1364, the new king, Philip’s brother Charles V, confirmed these titles.
After complex diplomatic maneuvering, Philip became an international figure with his marriage, in 1369, to Marguerite, daughter of the count of Flanders and heiress to five counties in northern and eastern France. The deaths of her grandmother (1382) and father (1384) brought these lands to her and Philip, but they needed military force to secure the most important of them, Flanders, which had been in rebellion since 1379. Marguerite also had a claim to the duchy of Brabant, and in 1385 she and Philip arranged the marriage of their son and daughter to members of the Wittelsbach family that ruled the counties of Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland, thereby laying the foundations for a Burgundian state that eventually included most of the Low Countries.
Despite his expanding role in the Netherlands, Philip was above all the most powerful French prince of his generation. At the death of Charles V in 1380, he led a coalition that ousted from the regency his older brother Louis of Anjou, and he dominated the French government for the next eight years. He played an active diplomatic role in the Anglo-French war, the papal Schism, and imperial politics, and he secured the services of the French royal army to crush the Flemish rebels at Roosebeke in 1382 and to intimidate his enemy the duke of Guelders in 1388.
Philip supported his projects with vast sums drawn from the receipts of the French crown, as did his brother, John, duke of Berry. In the fall of 1388, Charles VI dismissed his uncles from the royal council at the urging of a reforming coalition of royal officials and military commanders, known as the Marmousets. Four years later, Charles VI’s first attack of mental illness enabled the duke of Burgundy to regain his dominant position, which he held for another decade before gradually losing power at court to his nephew Louis of Orleans. He died near Brussels on April 27, 1404.
Besides establishing Burgundian power in the Netherlands, Philip the Bold began the tradition of lavish support for the arts by the Burgundian dukes. He also was the primary organizer of the abortive crusade of 1396 led by his eldest son, John, count of Nevers. His great achievements were to a large degree accomplished at the expense of the French taxpayers, but he gave his native land nearly twenty years of statesmanlike, if sometimes self-serving, leadership.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: BURGUNDY]
Nieuwenhuysen, Andree van. Les finances du duc de Bourgogne Philippe le Hardi (1384-1404).
Brussels: Editions de I’Universite de Bruxelles, 1984.
Palmer, John J. N. England, France and Christendom, 1377-99. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
Petit, Ernest. Dues de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois, 1: Philippe le Hardi. Paris: Champion, 1909.
Richard, Jean. Les dues de Bourgogne et la formation du duche. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1954. Vaughan, Richard. Philip the Bold: The Formation of the Burgundian State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.
World History
