Louis XII

Louis XII (born June 27, 1462, Blois, France—died January 1, 1515, Paris) was the king of France from 1498, noted for his disastrous Italian wars and for his domestic popularity.

Son of Charles, duc d’Orléans, and Marie de Clèves, Louis succeeded his father as duke in 1465. In 1476 he was forced to marry Jeanne of France, daughter of his second cousin King Louis XI. During the minority of King Charles VIII, he launched a revolt and was imprisoned (1488). Restored to royal favour, he commanded troops at Asti during Charles’s invasion of Italy (1494–95).

He ascended the throne on the death of Charles, becoming the only French king to represent the Valois-Orléans branch of the Valois dynasty. Pope Alexander VI annulled Louis’s marriage to Jeanne so that Louis could marry Charles’s widow, Anne of Brittany, and thereby reinforce the personal union of her duchy and the French kingdom. Louis’s next concern was to make good his claim to the duchy of Milan. His army, spreading terror deliberately, drove his rival Ludovico Sforza from Milan in the summer of 1499, but Sforza reoccupied it the following winter.

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Pursuing Charles VIII’s claims to the kingdom of Naples, Louis concluded the Treaty of Granada (1500) with Ferdinand II of Aragon for a partition of that kingdom, which was conquered in 1501, but a year later the two kings were at war over the partition, and by March 1504 the French had lost all of Naples. By the Treaty of Blois of September 1504, instigated by Anne of Brittany, the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I recognized Louis as duke of Milan in return for a promise that Milan and also Burgundy should go to Maximilian’s grandson, the future Charles V, and his fiancée, Claude of France, daughter of Louis XII and Anne, unless Louis should have a son. Claude was the natural heiress to Brittany. The French were enraged, however, at the possibility of losing Brittany, and representatives of the three estates were assembled by Louis at Tours in May 1506 to insist on Claude’s betrothal to his heir presumptive, Francis of Angoulême.

Crossing the Alps again to subdue rebels in Genoa, Louis met Ferdinand at Savona in June 1507 to consolidate a new entente formalized in 1508 as the League of Cambrai against Venice, with the inclusion of Maximilian and Pope Julius II. In 1510, however, Julius turned against France. Louis retorted by sponsoring a general council of the Roman Catholic Church, to meet at Pisa in 1511. Maximilian made a separate truce with Venice in April 1511, and the pope, Spain, and Venice formed a Holy League against France that October. Henry VIII of England promptly joined it, further isolating Louis. The French victory at Ravenna in April 1512 proved fruitless—the Holy League’s Swiss allies took Milan in the summer, and Maximilian joined the League in November. Louis secured an alliance with Venice and a truce with Ferdinand in the spring of 1513. The French attack on Milan was defeated by the Swiss at Novara on June 6; Henry VIII won the Battle of the Spurs, in Artois, on August 16; and the Swiss invaded Burgundy in September. The Anglo-French Peace of London (August 1514) was cemented by the marriage of Louis, a widower since January 1514, with Henry’s sister Mary in October. Louis XII’s overambitious enterprises ended in catastrophe. Diplomatically, he had been outwitted twice by Ferdinand and once by Julius, and his deception of Maximilian over Claude’s marriage had been repaid by Maximilian’s final desertion of him.

In France itself Louis XII was highly popular. From the time of the assembly at Tours (1506) he was known as the “Father of the People.” He simplified and improved the administration of justice; sought to protect his lowest subjects against oppression; financed his wars, up to 1509, without increase in direct taxation; and kept his kingdom free from civil war and, until the end of the reign, from invasion.