The Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War
France fought a civil war inside its own royal family for thirty years, and it is why the English won at Agincourt. Charles VI had suffered his first attack of madness in 1392, riding into a forest and killing four of his own men, and from then on he alternated between lucidity and episodes in which he did not recognise his wife or believed he was made of glass. That left the government to his relatives. His brother Louis of Orléans and his cousin John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, competed for the regency, the treasury and the queen's favour, and John had Louis murdered in a Paris street in November 1407 — then had a theologian argue publicly that the killing of a tyrant was lawful, and was pardoned. The Orléans party gathered round the Count of Armagnac, whose daughter married the murdered man's son, and gave the faction its name. Both sides raised armies, allied with the English against each other, and fought for control of Paris, where a butchers' rising in 1413 and a massacre in 1418 killed thousands. The disunity is the direct explanation for 1415: the French army at Agincourt was commanded by committee, and Burgundy's forces largely stayed away. John the Fearless was then murdered on a bridge at Montereau in 1419 in the presence of the dauphin, which drove Burgundy into a formal English alliance and produced the treaty disinheriting the dauphin. Burgundy changed sides again in 1435, and the war ended. The quarrel also made Burgundy into something close to an independent state. Its dukes accumulated Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Luxembourg and ran the richest territory in northern Europe for a century, until Charles the Bold was killed at Nancy in 1477 and the inheritance went to the Habsburgs by marriage.
- Year: 1407 CE
- Category: Political
