The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France

Louis XII returned to Italy in the summer of 1502. His presence raised the morale of his troops. They invaded Apulia in July and soon afterwards Calabria. By the end of the summer the Spaniards held only a few towns along the Adriatic coast, including Barletta, where Gonzalo had his headquarters. Though Nemours disposed of larger forces, he allowed them to succumb to disease, hunger and desertion. As his army dwindled in size, the Spaniards received reinforcements by sea. Gonzalo was not only a brave soldier but a brilliant tactician. His military reforms led to the creation of the tercio in the sixteenth century. Abandoning the use of light cavalry, he relied mainly on infantry and provided it with better protection than in the past. The old companies which were too small for modern warfare were grouped into larger coronelias, each supported by cavalry and artillery.

In April 1503, Gonzalo launched an offensive. He defeated d’Aubigny at Seminara on 21 April and a week later crushed Nemours at Cerignola. The duke was killed and the bulk of his army had to retreat to the Capua region where it awaited reinforcements. A relief army under La Trémoïlle arrived in Rome just as a new pope was being elected and remained there for three months, supposedly to protect the conclave. Meanwhile, the French position in the south crumbled away. In mid-July, Gonzalo entered Naples effortlessly. He failed, however, to capture Gaeta where the two French armies joined forces at the end of the summer. During the harsh winter that followed both sides suffered hardships. Eventually, Gonzalo offered the French generous surrender terms which they accepted, much to Louis XII’s dismay. He ordered Chaumont d’Amboise to detain troops returning from southern Italy who had served him ‘so badly’, and rounded on his own fiscal officials, accusing them of not paying the army. About twenty were tried and two at least were executed. The disaster in southern Italy, however, was irreversible. On 31 March 1504, Louis and Ferdinand signed a truce of three years.

The succession problem

By marrying Anne of Brittany, Louis XII had hoped to produce a son. So far, however, the queen had borne him only a daughter whom the Salic law debarred from the throne. The king’s nearest male heir was his second cousin, François d’Angoulême, who in 1500 was six years old. He was being brought up at Amboise by his mother, Louise of Savoy. Both were closely supervised by Pierre de Gié, a marshal of France of Breton origin. Being firmly committed to Brittany’s union with France, Gié hoped to see it maintained by a marriage between the king’s daughter Claude and François. But Anne was determined to protect her duchy’s independence and, for this reason, favoured an alternative match between Claude and Charles of Ghent, the infant son of Archduke Philip the Fair and grandson of the Emperor Maximilian. Finding himself caught in the crossfire between Anne and Gié, Louis pursued contradictory policies. Whether he did so out of weakness or duplicity is not easy to unravel.

On 30 April 1501 the king signed a secret declaration nullifying in advance any marriage between his daughter and another than François. Meanwhile, the idea of marrying Claude to Charles of Ghent was strongly canvassed by Anne with the backing of Georges d’Amboise. Claude’s dowry was to comprise Milan, Asti and Naples, the duchies of Burgundy and Brittany and the county of Blois. Had this marriage taken place, France would have been dismembered. That Louis XII should have entertained such a possibility is difficult to understand. He may have agreed to Anne’s proposal simply in order to extort the investiture of Milan from the emperor. He may also have felt covered by the secret declaration made in April 1501. Be that as it may, the betrothal of Claude and Charles was celebrated in August 1501, and Philip the Fair and his wife, Juana of Castile, visited France in November and met their prospective daughter-in-law. As for Maximilian, he promised to confer Milan’s investiture on Louis, but only verbally and within the secrecy of his own chamber.

Early in 1504, as Louis fell seriously ill, Gié persuaded him to confirm his declaration of April 1501. He also ordered a strict watch to be kept on all river traffic and roads leading to Brittany, so as to prevent Anne from returning there with her daughter in the event of Louis’s death. The king, however, recovered, and Gié came under fire from both Anne and Louise of Savoy. The latter’s servant, Pierre de Pontbriant, brought damaging charges to the king, which were subsequently used to prepare Gié’s indictment. He was accused inter alia of ordering the queen’s detention and of alienating her from Louise. In July a royal commission was appointed to investigate the charges.

Maximilian, in the meantime, drew closer to Louis. On 22 September the Treaty of Blois was concluded. It consisted of three separate agreements. The first was an alliance between Maximilian, Philip the Fair and Louis XII which Ferdinand of Aragon was conditionally invited to join. Louis renounced his claim to Milan in return for an indemnity of 900,000 florins, and Maximilian promised to give him the investiture of Milan within three months. The second agreement was a league against Venice which involved Pope Julius II. The third revived the projected marriage between Claude de France and Charles of Ghent. If Louis died without a direct male heir, the couple were to get Milan, Genoa, Brittany, Asti, Blois, Burgundy, Auxonne, the Auxerrois, the Mâconnais, and Bar-sur-Seine! On 7 April 1505, Maximilian conferred the investiture of Milan on Louis and his male descendants. However, the accord between the two rulers was upset in November by the death of Isabella of Castile. She bequeathed her kingdom to her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, thereby setting aside the rights of her daughter Juana. Philip the Fair, taking umbrage, assumed the title of king of Castile. He also accused Louis XII of betrayal, a development which naturally threatened the marriage recently arranged between his son and Claude. Another setback for Anne was the trial of Marshal Gié. He appeared before the Grand conseil in October 1504 and was relentlessly interrogated. The magistrates, impressed by his testimony, refused the queen’s demand for an additional enquiry to be held in Brittany. Once all the evidence had been gathered, the prosecuting counsel called for the death sentence to be passed on Gié, whom he accused of lèse-majesté. However, on 30 December, the marshal was set free, his case being adjourned till April.

In April 1505, Louis XII made his will. He ordered his daughter’s marriage to François d’Angoulême as soon as she was old enough, notwithstanding the earlier agreement with Charles of Ghent. He also forbade her to leave the kingdom in the meantime for any reason and set up a council of regency which included a number of royal servants capable of standing up to the queen. These arrangements infuriated Anne, and when the king had a relapse she again demonstrated her ducal independence by withdrawing to Brittany for five months. At the same time she brought pressure to bear on Gié’s trial. On 14 March it was transferred to the Parlement of Toulouse, a body noted for its severity. Anne employed an army of barristers to press her case against the marshal and sought the backing of jurists from as far afield as Italy. Her efforts, however, proved unavailing. Although Gié was found guilty of various offences, the sentence passed on him on 9 February 1506 was surprisingly mild. He lost the governorship of François d’Angoulême, his captaincies of the châteaux of Angers and Amboise and his company of a hundred lances. He was also suspended as marshal for five years and banished from court for the same length of time. Though he was refused a royal pardon, Gié was allowed to retire to his château at Le Verger, where he died in 1513.

The queen’s absence in Brittany gave Louis a chance to secure his position. In May he formally announced his daughter’s forthcoming marriage to François d’Angoulême whom he instructed to join him at Plessis-lez-Tours. The captains of all the kingdom’s fortresses were made to swear an oath to obey the king’s will when the time came. Before the marriage could take place, however, the Treaty of Blois had to be repudiated. It contained a penalty clause whereby Burgundy, Milan and Asti were to be forfeited to Charles if his marriage to Claude were broken off by Louis, Anne or Claude herself. Louis got round the difficulty by putting the responsibility for his breach of faith on the shoulders of his subjects. He called an Assembly of Notables consisting of representatives from the parlements and towns, which met at Plessis-lez-Tours in May 1506. Through their spokesman Thomas Bricot, a doctor of the University of Paris, the delegates implored the king, whom they addressed as ‘Father of the people’, to gratify them by marrying his daughter to François d’Angoulême, who, being ‘wholly French’ (tout français), was most acceptable to them. Simulating surprise, the king requested time for reflection and to consult the princes of the blood. A few days later, the chancellor signified Louis’s willingness to concede his subjects’ request. He asked them to promise in return to see that the marriage took place and to recognize François as king should Louis die without male issue. On 21 May, Claude and François were formally betrothed; Louis had averted the damage that the kingdom would have suffered if the Treaty of Blois had been implemented.

On 3 August 1508, François d’Angoulême left Amboise to settle permanently at court. At fourteen he was old enough for kingship, but could not yet be sure of the throne. In April 1510 the queen was again pregnant, but on 25 October she gave birth to another daughter, called Renée. Anne did produce a son in 1512, but he died almost at birth. The king, it seems, now abandoned hope of perpetuating his line. François, now known as the Dauphin, was admitted to the king’s council and made captain of a hundred lances.

Domestic policies

Historians have given so much attention to the Italian Wars that they have barely noticed the government of France under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Yet, as Russell Major has shown, it was under these kings that the monarchy which had begun to take shape under Charles VII was ‘cemented’. Louis XII’s contribution was especially notable: he provided France with ‘the most efficient government that it enjoyed during the Renaissance’. His reign produced a large number of edicts and ordinances aimed for the most part at improving the administration of justice. How far they represented his own ideas or those of his ministers is hard to say. There is not enough evidence to support the view of one historian (J.-A. Neret) that Louis came to the throne with a plan of reform inspired by Machiavelli. He certainly combined maturity with a long experience of variable political fortunes.

From the start of his reign Louis tried to be popular. This could best be done by sparing his subjects’ pockets. Charles VIII had left a treasury so empty that it could not even pay his funeral costs (estimated at 45,000 livres), so Louis announced that he would pay for them out of his private purse. He also paid for the festivities marking his own entry into Paris on 2 July and released royal officials and pensioners from the traditional obligation of making an accession gift. Louis announced that he would limit taxes to the minimum required by the defence of the realm, and kept his word for as long as possible. Except for a few years, he kept down the level of the taille almost till the end of the reign, and even lowered it on occasion. Around 1500, the taille amounted to only about 2.3 million livres annually, as compared with 3.9 million under Louis XI. Louis once ordered his agents to stop collecting a surtax when the reason for it – the Genoese revolt – had ended. When he came under pressure, he preferred to alienate parts of the royal domain or rely on loans or forced loans rather than raise taxes. He was able to do this because for many years his campaigns in Italy more than paid for themselves through plunder. At the end of his reign Louis ran into difficulties and taxes rose; yet he continued to be regarded, even as late as the seventeenth century, as a king who had spared his subjects.

Believing that a king should ‘live of his own’ (i.e. on the income from his domain), Louis avoided excessive expenditure on his court and on gifts to courtiers. He reduced the annual total of gifts and pensions from over 500,000 livres around 1500 to less than half that sum by 1510. However, in the last two years of the reign it went up again. Disappointed courtiers called Louis ‘le roi roturier’ (the commoner king) and his parsimony was mocked in satirical plays staged in Paris by the Basoche. But Louis was unrepentant. ‘I much prefer’, he said, ‘to make dandies laugh at my miserliness than to make the people weep at my open-handedness.’ Apart from curbing expenditure, he trebled the revenue from his domain by more efficient accounting. It reached a total of 231,000l. annually, or 6.3 per cent of the total royal revenues.

The sale of offices was a fiscal expedient used by Louis XII. By the end of the fifteenth century a distinction was made between financial and judicial offices: only the sale of the former was tacitly allowed. The ban on the sale of judicial offices had been affirmed by Charles VIII in July 1493: a candidate for office was only to be admitted after swearing an oath that he had paid nothing for it. Louis XII repeated the ban in March 1498. He admitted that he had allowed such sales in the past and foresaw that he might do so again ‘out of importunity or otherwise’. The chancellor was instructed not to seal such letters of provision, and royal officers were not to implement them if the letters had been sealed inadvertently. However, Louis could hardly expect his servants to obey a law which he had broken himself. In April 1499 he appointed Jean le Coq as conseiller général des aides ‘notwithstanding … his promise to pay a certain sum’. Office-holders, notably members of the Parlement of Paris, were allowed by Louis to resign their offices in return for a payment. Sometimes a fiction was used – such as the exchange of one office for another – to conceal an original payment.

Louis XII was one of the last kings of France to listen to pleadings in the parlement. The great Ordinance of Blois (March 1499) was aimed at ‘upholding justice, shortening trials and giving relief to the people’. Its 162 clauses dealt with many matters, not all judicial. While prescribing severe penalties for vagabonds and accepting the need for interrogation under torture, the ordinance sought to promote fair and prompt justice. Magistrates were to be worthy of their responsibilities; they were not to delegate them or be absent without leave. Proper legal qualifications were laid down for service on the judicial bench. No fathers, sons or brothers were to serve in the same court, and the sale of offices was banned, not for the first time. However, the ordinance seems to have been poorly enforced, for several of its provisions had to be repeated in another ordinance of 1510. This contained new clauses directed against usurers and regulations concerning notaries.

One of Louis XII’s major reforms was the reorganization of the Grand conseil, or king’s council acting as a lawcourt. It can be traced back to 1469 and a continuous series of archives, starting in 1483, shows that by then the council was meeting regularly and beginning to acquire a distinct identity. But it was Louis who, in August 1497, gave it a permanent staff of legal experts capable of coping with its growing legal business. Their competence included disputes between sovereign courts, complaints levelled at royal officials, quarrels over fiefs or ecclesiastical benefices, as well as appeals in civil and criminal cases. Being directly under the king, the council facilitated his intervention in criminal cases which touched him personally, such as that of Marshal Gié. Regarding the Grand conseil as a rival, the parlement showed its hostility on several occasions; but Louis placated it by giving it precedence and allowing its members to sit in the Grand conseil whenever they wished.

Louis’s concern to streamline the judicial system extended to France’s newest provinces. In Normandy the highest court of law, dating from the time of the dukes, was the Echiquier which met occasionally and had no permanent staff. Louis turned it into a permanent body with four presidents and 28 councillors. Under Francis I it became the Parlement of Rouen. In Provence, the Conseil éminent of the old counts of Provence was turned by Louis into a parlement with one president and eleven councillors. Finally, in Brittany justice was administered by the Grands Jours, a commission renewable each year. The members were partly Bretons and partly recruits from the Parlement of Paris. It functioned alongside a council, which was an administrative and judicial body. Gradually the commission developed at the expense of the council: in 1491 it acquired a permanent staff and fixed annual sessions. However, it did not become a parlement till 1554.

A major obstacle to judicial efficiency in early modern France was the survival of unwritten customary law. This varied from one locality to another; it was entirely pragmatic, serving particular needs as they arose. Because customs were variable and ill-defined, they needed to be validated by a judge before they could be used as evidence. In the Middle Ages attempts had been made by various kings to distinguish good customs from bad ones. Royal intervention took the form of a written declaration establishing what customs were to apply to a particular area. Professional jurists also produced coutumiers in which the customary law of whole provinces was written down. But it was only in the fifteenth century, when the kingdom was sufficiently unified politically, that the crown was able to think of providing an official, authenticated and coherent set of customs. The lead was given by Charles VII, but little further progress was made till 1497, when Charles VIII altered the procedure by which definitive customary laws were arrived at. Henceforth, a royal judge in a given area drew up a tentative list of customs after consulting his colleagues and local worthies. Representatives of the three estates then met to discuss the draft, which had to be approved by a majority of each estate’s representatives before being published in the king’s name. Much of this work was done under Louis XII, who commissioned two distinguished parlementaires – Roger Barme and Thibaut Baillet – to write down the customs of northern France. Till the end of the reign these two legists, acting in concert with the baillis, sénéchaux and representatives of the three estates in each area, verified and confirmed many customs after weeding out accretions. Georges d’Amboise signed the first rédaction at Tours on 5 May 1508 and many others quickly followed, but the task was unfinished when Louis died. Several provinces had to wait a century before their customs were verified.

In 1506, Louis was acclaimed by the spokesman of the notables at Blois as ‘father of the people’. He became renowned for his efforts to spare his subjects taxes, to give them justice and to provide them with security. His praises were sung throughout the sixteenth century. Even after Henry IV’s reign there were demands for a return to the time of Louis XII. His role, according to Russell Major, was ‘more to make the monarchy beloved than to change its character’.

The Genoese rebellion

Although Louis XII had relinquished his rights in Naples, he had not abandoned all his Italian interests. His authority as duke of Milan had been legitimized in April 1505 by the emperor’s investiture and he was also count of Asti and ‘protector’ of Genoa. Early in 1506 a popular rising in Genoa against the rule of the local patricians turned into a revolt against the French. At first Louis tried to temporize, but the rebels set up a new administration headed by a doge. On 12 March they massacred Frenchmen who had taken refuge in a fort. Taking this as a personal affront, Louis gathered a large army in the spring of 1507 and invaded Genoa. The doge fled and the city surrendered. Louis annexed Genoa to his domain, destroyed its charters, executed sixty rebels and threatened to impose a huge fine on the inhabitants. Later he relented: most of the citizens were allowed to keep their lives and property, and their fine was reduced. A new governor, Raoul de Lannoy, was ordered to run the city humanely and fairly. The king appreciated Genoa’s importance as a commercial and financial centre. He did not want to see it destroyed and therefore refused to allow the bulk of his army into it. He did, however, impose his authority in an entry acclaimed by contemporaries as the ceremonial climax of his reign. Wearing full armour, a helmet with white plumes and a surcoat of gold cloth, he rode a richly caparisoned black charger beneath a canopy carried by four Genoese notables dressed in black. Along the route young girls holding olive branches begged for mercy.

France and Venice had been allies since 1500. The Venetians had taken advantage of the French conquest of Milan by nibbling at the eastern edge of the duchy. But the long-term objectives of the allies were not necessarily identical. The Venetians were alarmed by the closeness of the French to their own terra firma. The two powers also differed about the emperor. In February 1508, Maximilian attacked the Venetians. Louis was about to send a force to help them, when he learned that they had signed a truce with Maximilian. He felt badly let down as they had not consulted him. The pope, meanwhile, had his own reasons for falling out with the Venetians. His desire to extend the States of the Church into the Romagna ran counter to Venice’s territorial ambitions. Moreover, Venetian policy towards the Turks contradicted the pope’s aim of mounting a crusade.

In December 1508 representatives of the emperor, the kings of France and Aragon, and the pope met at Cambrai. However divergent their individual aims may have been, they all wanted to abase the pride of Venice. Anticipating her defeat, they agreed to share the spoils: Verona and control of the Adige valley would go to Maximilian, Brescia to Louis XII, Ravenna to the pope and Otranto to Ferdinand of Aragon, now king of Naples. For some unknown reason, Louis decided to fire the opening shot, while his allies undertook to declare themselves one month later. The pope simply placed Venice under an interdict.

On 16 April 1509, three days after declaring war on Venice, Louis crossed the Alps to take charge of military operations. An important innovation was the decision to place infantry under the command of noblemen, who previously would have considered such a role beneath their dignity. In addition to 20,000 infantry (including 8000 Swiss mercenaries) the king disposed of about 2000 men-at-arms. His lieutenants included names familiar from earlier campaigns such as Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, La Trémoïlle, La Palice, Chaumont d’Amboise and San Severino. Among younger men, going into action for the first time, were the king’s cousin, Charles de Bourbon-Montpensier, and his nephew, Gaston de Foix. The Venetian army was larger: it comprised, according to Guicciardini, 2000 Italian lances, 3000 light cavalry (including Albanian stradiots) and 20,000 infantry. The commanders included Bartolomeo d’Alviano and Niccolò Orsini, count of Pitigliano.

On 14 May the two armies faced each other at Agnadello. Instead of attacking the French as they crossed the river Adda, Pitigliano preferred to wait for them within a well-fortified camp. He was ordered, however, to move to higher ground, and this gave the French a chance to attack him in the open. D’Alviano, commanding the Venetian vanguard, bore the brunt of the attack and repulsed it, but the rest of the Venetian army was too widely spread out to come to his aid. He and his cavalry were consequently surrounded and captured. His infantry fought on bravely, only to be annihilated by a much larger force of Swiss and Gascons.