Charles the Bold
Charles the Bold was the last Valois Duke of Burgundy, tried to turn his father's collection of provinces into a kingdom from the North Sea to the Alps, lost three battles to Swiss pikemen in a year, and was found naked in a frozen pond outside Nancy with his face eaten by wolves. He was born at Dijon in 1433, the only surviving son of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, and was the opposite of his father: austere, violent, a reader of Roman history, tireless and incapable of delegating. He took the government from the old duke in 1465 and led the League of the Public Weal against Louis XI, whom he detained at Péronne in 1468 and made watch the destruction of Liège, the city the king had incited against him. He became duke in 1467, married Edward IV's sister Margaret of York in 1468 with a festival that lasted nine days, and set about making a state. He built a standing army on the French model with printed ordinances, a supreme court at Mechelen, and a plan to be crowned king by the Emperor Frederick III, who came to Trier in 1473 for the purpose and left in the night before the ceremony. He bought Upper Alsace, took Guelders, besieged Neuss on the Rhine for ten months in 1474 and 1475 for nothing, and took Lorraine in 1475 to join his northern and southern lands. That brought him against the Swiss Confederation, which Louis XI had paid. At Grandson in March 1476 he lost his artillery and his treasure, at Morat in June he lost his army in the lake, and at Nancy on 5 January 1477, with a few thousand men against René of Lorraine and the Swiss, he lost his life. His body was identified two days later by his physician from old scars. He left one child, Mary, nineteen, whom Louis XI moved at once to dispossess; she married Maximilian of Habsburg within the year, and that marriage is how the Netherlands became Spanish and the Habsburgs became the enemy of France for two centuries. The duchy proper went to the French crown.
- Lived: 1433 CE – 1477 CE
- Nationality: Burgundian
- Roles: duke, monarch, general
