Anne of Brittany

Anne of Brittany was duchess of the last great fief outside the French crown at eleven, was married by proxy to one king and in person to two others, spent her life trying to keep Brittany separate from the France she was queen of, and lost. She was born at Nantes in January 1477, the heir of Francis II, whose duchy had fought Louis XI and his daughter Anne of Beaujeu to stay independent and lost the war at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488; the treaty that followed forbade her to marry without the French king's consent, and her father died three weeks later. She was crowned duchess in 1489 and married by proxy in December 1490 to Maximilian of Habsburg, who did not come; a French army did, besieged Rennes in 1491, and the fourteen-year-old duchess agreed to marry Charles VIII instead, in December, with a contract that gave the duchy to the crown if she died childless and to her if he did. He did, in April 1498, hitting his head on a lintel at Amboise, and none of their children had lived. The contract obliged her to marry his successor if he wanted, and Louis XII wanted; he had his marriage to Louis XI's daughter annulled by the Borgia pope, and she married him in January 1499 at Nantes with a new contract: the duchy was hers, she governed it, and it would go to a second son. There was no son. She gave Louis two daughters, Claude and Renée, and fought for years to marry Claude to Charles of Habsburg so that Brittany would go out of France; Louis and the estates broke the betrothal in 1506 and gave Claude to his heir Francis of Angoulême. She held her own court at Blois, kept her own chancery and estates, had the Breton history written, and paid for the Hours that bear her name. She died at Blois in January 1514, of the stone, at thirty-six, and asked that her heart go back to Nantes in a gold box, where it is. Claude married Francis four months later, and Brittany went to their son and, by the union of 1532, to the crown for good.

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