Charles the Bold
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
Duke of Burgundy, son of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, was born at Dijon, Nov. 10, 1433. While his father yet lived Charles left Burgundy, and forming an alliance with some of the great French nobles for the purpose of preserving the power of the feudal nobility, he marched on Paris with 20,000 men, defeated Louis XI. at Montlheri, and won the counties of Boulogne, Guines, and Ponthieu. Succeeding his father in 1467, he commenced his reign by severe repression of the citizens of Liege and Ghent. In 1468 he married Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV. of England. Liege having rebelled, the duke stormed and sacked the town. In 1470 the war with France was renewed, and though the duke was forced to sue for a truce he soon took up arms anew, and, crossing the Somme, stormed and fired the city of Nesle. Louis meanwhile involved him in greater embarrassments by exciting against him Austria and the Swiss. Charles, ever ready to take up a quarrel, threw himself on Germany with characteristic fury, and lost 10 months in a futile siege of Neuss. He was successful, however, in conquering Lorraine from Duke Rene. Charles now turned his arms against the Swiss, took the city of Granson, putting 800 men to the sword. But this cruelty was speedily avenged by the descent of a Swiss army, which at the first shock routed the duke's forces at Granson, March 3, 1476. Mad with rage and shame Charles gathered another army, invaded Switzerland, and was again defeated with great loss at Morat. The Swiss, led by the Duke of Lorraine, now undertook the reconquest of Lorraine, and obtained possession of the city of ver it, Nancy. Charles marched to recover but was utterly routed and himself slain, in 1477.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The narrative Collier's gave in 1921 still holds: Grandson and Morat in 1476, then death outside Nancy on 5 January 1477. What historians now stress is what the account leaves out — Charles's only child, Mary of Burgundy, married Maximilian of Habsburg later that year, which carried the Low Countries into Habsburg hands and set up the Habsburg-French rivalry that shaped the next two centuries. Twentieth-century scholarship, above all Richard Vaughan's multi-volume study of the Valois dukes, also softened the older picture of a duke simply "mad with rage and shame", reading his campaigns as an ambitious if overreaching attempt to weld a kingdom between France and Germany; his French epithet, le Téméraire, is better rendered "the Rash" than "the Bold". The Burgundian tapestries and plate his army lost to the Swiss are still on show in Bern, and his tomb stands beside Mary's in the Church of Our Lady at Bruges.
Written for this edition, 2026.