Duchy of Burgundy

A French duchy that assembled the richest state in fifteenth-century Europe out of inheritances and marriages, and lost it in a single winter campaign. John II of France gave Burgundy to his youngest son Philip in 1363; Philip married the heiress of Flanders, and the Valois dukes spent a century adding Artois, Hainaut, Holland, Brabant and Luxembourg until they held most of the Low Countries. That made them the wealthiest princes in Europe, drawing on Flemish cloth towns and Antwerp's trade, and their court set the standard everyone else copied - the Order of the Golden Fleece, the painting of van Eyck and van der Weyden, the polyphony of Dufay and Binchois. It also made them a third power between France and the Empire, which they exploited in the Hundred Years' War: John the Fearless murdered the king's brother in a Paris street in 1407, was murdered in turn on a bridge in 1419, and his son allied with England and sold Joan of Arc to it. Charles the Bold tried to convert the collection into a kingdom, fought the Swiss for it, and was killed at Nancy in 1477. France took the duchy; his daughter married a Habsburg and took the Low Countries into the inheritance that made Charles V. The duchy is the standard example of a state that never quite became a country. It had no single name, no common language and no capital: the dukes governed from Dijon, Lille, Bruges and Brussels in turn, and each province kept its own estates and privileges. Charles the Bold's attempt to have himself made a king failed at Trier in 1473 when the emperor left in the night rather than perform the ceremony. What survived the collapse was the administration and the ceremony rather than the territory: Habsburg court ritual, the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Netherlands as a single unit of government all came out of it.

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