Duchy of Burgundy

The bridge of Montereau

formationDrafted from Kirk, History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Volume I (1864)

John the Fearless had spent twelve years as the most powerful, and most hated, man in France, his own rivalry with the House of Orleans having already produced one assassination - his own hand behind the murder of the king's brother in 1407. By 1419, weary of the civil war that had followed and genuinely anxious for peace, he agreed to meet the dauphin in person on the bridge at Montereau, to settle at last the terms neither side had honored. "I desire peace at any sacrifice," he told the advisers who warned him against going.

He kept the appointment. A wooden barrier had been built across the bridge; John passed through it with ten unarmed attendants, knelt before the dauphin, and had begun a courteous exchange when the gate behind him was quietly reopened. Armed men rushed from concealment near the river. Tanneguy Duchatel, the plot's chief author, struck the duke from behind with a hatchet; others followed with swords before he fell, and a final man knelt to drive a sword the rest of the way through a body that still showed signs of life. "The vengeance that had waited twelve years for its opportunity was satisfied."

Your brother has assassinated my father

Philip, John's son and heir, was at Ghent when the news reached him. "Michelle," he told his wife, the French king's own daughter, "your brother has assassinated my father." He summoned his friends and the Estates of his provinces to decide his course, and the choice before him was neither difficult nor slow: an alliance with England against the French crown whose own heir had just arranged his father's murder. That alliance - and the English king's own claim, pressed with Burgundian support, to the throne of France itself - would define the whole of Philip's reign and the character of the state he built out of his father's revenge.

A vassal outshines his king

expansionDrafted from Kirk, History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Volume I (1864)

The state Philip the Good spent his reign assembling had no single name that matched its reach. Duke of Burgundy in the kingdom of France, he was also count of Flanders, Artois and Hainaut, duke of Brabant and Limburg, and lord of a widening arc of Low Countries territory acquired by marriage, purchase and inheritance rather than conquest - lands under the nominal authority of two different crowns, French and imperial, answering in practice to neither. No other prince in Europe, sovereign or vassal, commanded a court as wealthy or as widely admired.

That wealth had a use beyond magnificence for its own sake. Twice widowed and without a legitimate heir, Philip sent an embassy to Portugal in 1428 to negotiate marriage with Princess Isabella, sending with it the painter Jan van Eyck to bring back her likeness before he committed himself to the match. She landed at Sluys in November 1429 to a welcome so large the road to her lodgings had to be cleared by force, and on the 10th of January, 1430, the day of their wedding, Philip founded a new order of chivalry in her honor: the Order of the Golden Fleece.

Founded by a vassal, not a sovereign

No other institution of its kind in Europe was created by a prince who was not himself a crowned king, and none outshone it in the prestige it came to carry. The chroniclers who served Philip's court

• Chastellain foremost among them - wrote of it and of the duke's own magnificence in language meant to rival the courts of kings outright, and largely succeeded: the Golden Fleece was sought after by sovereign princes who held no fief of Burgundy at all. It was, in its way, the clearest possible statement of what Philip had built - a vassal state whose own duke could found an order of chivalry that a king might envy, and could not.

The price of an ally

expansionDrafted from Kitchin, 3 vols (1873-1899)

Philip's alliance with England had never been unconditional. In 1434 he warned that if Henry VI refused the peace terms offered by Charles VII, he would abandon the English cause entirely - his price named in advance as the towns of Amiens, Ponthieu and a scattering of other places in the north. The test came the following year, at a congress so large that all Europe watched it: on the 5th of August 1435, two cardinals presided over an assembly at Arras that brought together the English, the French, the Duke of Burgundy, ambassadors of the Emperor, and delegates from across the continent, all hoping to end what was already, by then, a war of a century's standing.

A defection sold dearly

The French offered to cede Normandy and Aquitaine as English fiefs if the English king would give up his claim to the French crown outright; England refused, and the congress broke apart. It was then that Philip made good on his warning. Bound as he still was by solemn oaths to England, he hesitated - but on the 21st of September 1435 he signed the Treaty of Arras and went over to the French side. He did not come cheaply: in exchange for recognizing Charles VII as king, he secured Auxerre, Macon, Peronne, Montdidier and the towns of the Somme for himself, along with a release, for his own lifetime only, from the feudal homage a duke of Burgundy owed the French crown. Days after the news reached him, the English regent in France, the Duke of Bedford - by common judgment the one man capable of holding the English cause together - died at Rouen. Paris, tired of English occupation, opened its gates to the French crown the following spring.

Ghent broken at Gavere

Philip's reign was not spent only in diplomacy. The great cloth cities of Flanders had never fully accepted Burgundian rule, and in 1452 their leading city, Ghent, rose against him outright. Philip crushed the revolt on the bloody field of Gavere, a defeat so complete that it marked the final subjection of the powerful and turbulent cities of Flanders to Burgundian authority - even as those same cities' own wealth and sophistication were quietly preparing them for the different role they would play in Europe a century afterward.

An iron frame in tears

peakDrafted from Kirk, History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Volume I (1864)

Philip's final years were spent, by his own choice, at a remove from the harder business of ruling. Content with the punishment his forces had already inflicted on the rebellious town of Dinant, he left the subsequent campaign against Liege to his son and heir Charles, count of Charolais, and withdrew to a life of quiet religious observance - the duke who had built the wealthiest court in Europe ending his days in contemplation rather than in state. In June 1467, while staying at Hinges, he was struck by a sudden, fatal illness.

Charles received the news at Ghent and left immediately, riding so hard that he outstripped his own escort and arrived at Bruges alone. What followed startled everyone who witnessed it. Charles's own reputation was for a coldness and severity that spared no one, friend or dependent; at his father's bedside he wept without restraint, a violence of grief that seemed to those present entirely out of character for a man of such deliberate and unyielding temperament. It was not performance. Those who knew him best recognized that the tears were as genuine as the harshness they were used to seeing from him instead.

A different kind of duke

Philip's death made Charles duke of Burgundy in fact as well as in waiting, and the state he inherited was, on paper, stronger than it had ever been - richer, wider, and more feared than at any point in his father's own reign. But the qualities that had built it were not the qualities Charles brought to ruling it. Where Philip had preferred negotiation, marriage and purchase to force, Charles preferred force outright, and the wars he chose to fight in the years that followed would test the strength his father had spent a lifetime accumulating against enemies his father had always found some way to avoid.

The body of Charles

endDrafted from Kirk, History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Volume III (1864)

By the winter of 1476 the wars Charles had chosen - against the Swiss, against Lorraine, against half his own neighbors at once - had worn his army down without breaking his own resolve to fight them. Besieging Nancy in the depths of that winter, he learned that a relieving force of Lorrainers under Duke Rene and Swiss mercenaries, together more than twice the size of his own exhausted command, was marching to break the siege. Rather than abandon it or wait to be attacked in his camp, Charles resolved to meet them in the field.

On Sunday, the 5th of January, 1477 - what the chroniclers called the Vigil of the Kings - he drew his troops up behind a frozen stream south-east of the town: artillery forward, infantry massed in a single square in imitation of the Swiss, cavalry thin on both wings. It was, by every account, the only arrangement that gave so small a force any chance against so large a one. It was not enough. The Lorrainers and Swiss, confident after two earlier battles that had already broken Charles's army without destroying it, closed in overwhelming numbers and shattered what remained. Charles himself disappeared in the rout, and for two days no one - not his own officers, not the enemy - could say with certainty whether he was dead, in hiding, or fled.

Identified by her tears

The search that found him was led by men who could recognize him on sight: his Portuguese physician, a valet, and a laundress who had prepared his baths. In a ditch outside the town, among a small knot of men who had fallen fighting together, they found a body stripped naked, mutilated past easy recognition, the cheek eaten away by wolves or dogs. The nails were longer than any other man's - Charles had never had them pared. Two teeth were missing, from a fall years before. A scar in the neck matched a sword-thrust taken at an earlier battle. The laundress broke first, throwing herself on the body with a cry of "My lord of Burgundy!" It was him - the Great Duke, the destroyer of Liege, the Terror of France, dead in a frozen ditch at forty-three. The state his father had spent a lifetime assembling by marriage, purchase and patient negotiation ended, in an afternoon, by the one method Philip had always been careful to avoid.