Charles VIII of France

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles VIII of France was born on the 30th of June 1470 at the Château d'Amboise, and he died in that same place under circumstances that still puzzle historians today. He was thirteen years old when he inherited the French throne in 1483. His father, Louis XI, had left behind a kingdom that needed a firm hand. What the boy king offered instead was a pleasant disposition and, by the accounts of his own contemporaries, an unfitness for the demands of statecraft.

  Yet this same young man would go on to invade the Italian Peninsula with 25,000 soldiers, march virtually unopposed through Florence and Pisa and Naples, and terrify the rulers of Europe into forming a coalition just to force him back across the Alps. He would maneuver the Duchess of Brittany away from a rival marriage and absorb her duchy into France. He would acquire the title "the Affable" while spending his kingdom into debt. And he would die at the age of twenty-seven, reportedly after hitting his head on a low doorway, though a study published in 2021 suggests the real cause may have been far grimmer.

  How did a sickly teenager under the thumb of his sister become the man who upended Italian politics? And what did he actually leave behind when the door finally closed?

• 2. The Regent and the Mad War

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  Louis XI described his daughter Anne as "the least foolish woman in France," and he trusted her enough to write that assessment into the terms of his son's regency. Anne ruled alongside her husband Peter of Bourbon from the moment Charles took the throne in 1483, and she brought to that task a shrewdness her younger brother conspicuously lacked.

  The great lords of France did not welcome her administration. Between 1485 and 1488, they mounted what became known as the Mad War, a rebellion against the centralizing ambitions of the royal government. Anne and Peter held firm. The revolt was defeated, and the crown's authority emerged intact from the conflict.

  Charles himself remained on the margins of these events, physically fragile and regarded by those around him as a pleasant but limited figure. His health was poor enough that his survival into adulthood was not a certainty anyone could bank on. Anne governed in the gap between what the kingdom required and what her brother could provide, and she did so until Charles turned twenty-one in 1491.

• 3. The Brittany Gamble

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  Francis II, Duke of Brittany, died in a riding accident in 1488, leaving behind an eleven-year-old daughter named Anne as his heir. The young duchess feared what France might do to her duchy's independence and made a calculated move: in 1490 she arranged a marriage to Maximilian of Austria, the widowed Habsburg heir.

  Anne of France and her husband Peter refused to accept it. A marriage of that kind would place the Habsburgs on two French borders simultaneously. The French army invaded Brittany. Maximilian, already tied up with the contested succession in Hungary following the death of King Matthias Corvinus, could not press his claim against the French advance. The proxy marriage to Maximilian was annulled under pressure.

  In December 1491, in an elaborate ceremony at the Château de Langeais, Charles married the fourteen-year-old Anne of Brittany. She arrived for her wedding with her entourage carrying two beds, an unmistakable signal of her feelings about the arrangement. Charles, for his part, gained something more immediately useful than a willing bride: independence from his sister's oversight. He now managed the kingdom according to his own inclinations. The marriage also made him administrator of Brittany, creating a personal union that shielded France from encirclement by Habsburg territories.

  There remained the complication of Margaret of Austria, the three-year-old girl to whom Charles had been formally betrothed back in 1483 as part of the Peace of Arras. She had been raised at the French court as a future queen and had even brought the counties of Artois and Franche-Comté to France as her dowry. Charles eventually sent her home to her family in 1493, though the Treaty of Senlis confirmed that the Duchy of Burgundy would not be going with her.

• 4. The Italian Invasion

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  Pope Innocent VIII offered Charles the Kingdom of Naples in 1489, when the Pope was at odds with Ferdinand I of Naples. The offer lodged somewhere in Charles's imagination. By 1493, Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, came asking for French help against Pope Alexander VI, who was carving out a new state for his son Cesare Borgia. Alfonso II of Naples then threatened the Milanese duchy from the south. Charles's favorite courtier, Étienne de Vesc, encouraged the adventure.

  Before he could commit forces to Italy, Charles needed his borders secured. He signed three treaties in quick succession: the Treaty of Étaples with England on the 3rd of November 1492, the Treaty of Barcelona with Ferdinand II of Aragon on the 19th of January 1493, and the Treaty of Senlis with Maximilian on the 23rd of May 1493. The English king Henry VII had already made his position clear by laying siege to Boulogne, forcing Charles to drop his support for the pretender Perkin Warbeck. Each treaty cost France real concessions, but together they bought the neutrality Charles needed.

  In September 1494, Charles crossed into Italy with 25,000 men, among them 8,000 Swiss mercenaries, along with gunpowder artillery powerful enough to demolish Italian fortifications that had never been designed with such weapons in mind. He arrived in Pavia on the 21st of October 1494 and entered Pisa on the 8th of November. Florence was subdued in passing. On the 22nd of February 1495, the French army took Naples without a pitched battle or siege. Alfonso was expelled. Charles was crowned King of Naples.

  The friar Girolamo Savonarola interpreted the French advance as the hand of God. He believed Charles had been sent to purge Florence of corruption and that the city, once cleansed, would become the moral center from which the Church itself would be reformed. His calls for the king's intervention set him on a collision course with Pope Alexander VI. That conflict would eventually lead to Savonarola being charged with heresy and executed.

• 5. Fornovo and the Retreat

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  The speed of the French advance alarmed rulers who had initially stood aside. On the 31st of March 1495, the major Italian states, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire formally united into the League of Venice. The coalition included the Duchy of Milan, whose duke Ludovico had originally invited the French in, the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Mantua, the Republic of Florence, the Kingdom of Spain, and the Kingdom of Naples. Together they appeared to have trapped Charles in the south of Italy, blocking every route back to France.

  Charles marched north anyway. At Fornovo in July 1495, the League tried to stop him. They lost around 2,000 men against roughly 1,000 French casualties. Charles lost almost everything he had plundered, but he crossed their territory and returned to France. Meanwhile, Aragonese forces sent by Ferdinand II of Aragon subdued Charles's remaining garrisons in Naples on the 6th and the 7th of July 1495.

  Back in France, Charles tried for several years to rebuild his forces and resume the campaign. The debts incurred during the 1494-95 campaign were crippling. He never managed anything substantive. The Italian enterprise, so swift in its conquest, left him with no lasting territorial gain and a kingdom carrying the financial weight of his ambition.

• 6. Death and What Followed

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  On the 7th of April 1498, Charles was making his way through the Château d'Amboise to watch a game of jeu de paume, a form of real tennis. He struck his head on a door lintel. At around 2:00 in the afternoon, while returning from the game, he fell into a coma. He died nine hours later, twenty-seven years old, in the same château where he had been born.

  The long-accepted account of death by accidental head injury has been challenged by a 2021 study, which concluded that a blow of that kind would likely cause only minor trauma. The same study proposed that Charles may actually have died of severe brain injuries stemming from an epileptic condition, which itself could have resulted from neurosyphilis.

  None of Charles's six children with Anne of Brittany outlived him. Their son Charles Orlando, Dauphin of France, died of measles on the 16th of December 1495 at three years old. A daughter was stillborn in March 1495. A second son, also named Charles, lived only from the 8th of September to the 2nd of October 1496. The last child, a daughter named Anne, died on the day of her birth, the 20th of March 1498, just weeks before Charles himself.

  With no male heir, the throne passed to Louis XII, Charles's second cousin once removed and brother-in-law, from the Orléans cadet branch of the House of Valois. Anne of Brittany returned home and began working to reassert her duchy's independence. Louis XII blocked her by having his own twenty-four-year childless marriage to Joan of Valois, Charles's sister, annulled, and then marrying Anne himself.

  The Italian campaign left France deep in debt. But it also opened France to Italian Renaissance culture in lasting ways, shaping French art and literature through the end of the Renaissance. Charles's court poet Publio Fausto Andrelini, the Italian humanist from Forlì, had already been spreading that influence long before the armies marched south.