A Temper That Spoiled the Splendor
All this ferment and brilliance was dispersed by the violent temper of Charles the Bold. Rogier van der Weyden painted him as a serious, handsome, dark-haired young man, then Count of Charolais. He led his father's armies to bloody victories and waited impatiently for his father to die. Philip the Good, sensing his impatience, handed over the government in 1465 and took pleasure in the ambition, eagerness and youthful energy of his son.
The Dream of a Middle Kingdom
Charles resented that his lands were split into northern and southern provinces, divided by place and language. He was even more embittered that for some of them he owed allegiance to the King of France and for others to the German emperor. He dreamed of turning Greater Burgundy into a kingdom between France and Germany, joined geographically and a single state politically, like the Lotharingia of the ninth century.
At times he even imagined that the timely deaths of a few heirs would bring him the crowns of France, England and Germany and raise him to the rank of the greatest figures in history. To realize these dreams he built the best army in Europe, taxed his subjects ever more heavily, drove himself to hard labor and trials, and allowed neither body nor mind, neither friends nor enemies, a moment of rest.
War with Louis XI
Louis XI, however, still regarded Burgundy as a dependency of France and fought Charles with sharper military arts and craftier stratagems. Charles allied himself with rebel French nobles against Louis, seized several more towns and earned the lasting enmity of a king who feared nothing. In this struggle Liège and Dinant rose against Burgundy with French support. Some of the zealots of Dinant hanged an effigy of Charles and called him the bastard son of a wicked priest.
Charles shelled the town walls and gave his soldiers three days of plunder. He took the men captive, exiled the women and children, burned every building, and had eight hundred rebels thrown bound into the Meuse (1466). In June of the next year Philip died, and the Count of Charolais formally became ruler of Burgundy as Charles the Bold.
The Fall of Liège
He resumed the war with Louis and compelled him, once he was in Charles's hands, to take part in the siege of Liège, which had rebelled repeatedly. The townspeople, near death from hunger, offered all their property to save their lives. Charles would not accept the bargain. He looted the city down to the last house and altar. His soldiers snatched chalices from the hands of priests saying Mass, and all captives who could not pay a heavy ransom were drowned (1468).
A Neighborhood Turns Against Him
The world, though accustomed to such cruelties, could forgive neither Charles's severity nor, against feudal custom, his imprisoning and insulting his own liege lord. When he conquered Guelders and took Alsace, and then, by meddling in the affairs of Cologne and besieging Neuss, trampled on the toe of the German Empire, all his neighbors rose to stop him.
Peter von Hagenbach, whom Charles had made governor of Alsace, so enraged the townspeople by his tyranny, ferocity and insolence that they seized and hanged him. Swiss merchants were among his victims, French gold was spreading through Switzerland for strategic ends, and the Swiss cantons saw their liberties threatened by the growth of Charles's power. The Swiss Confederation therefore declared war on him (1474).
Grandson, Morat and Nancy
Charles left Neuss and marched south. He conquered Lorraine and so, for the first time, joined the two ends of his dominions. He led his army through the Jura into the Vaud. The Swiss were the bravest warriors of the century. They defeated Charles once near Grandson and again near Morat (1476). The Burgundian army fled in complete disorder, and Charles was nearly driven mad with grief. Lorraine rebelled as soon as it could. Switzerland sent soldiers and France sent money and fed the revolt.
Charles raised a new army and fought the allies near Nancy. He was defeated and killed (1477). The day after the battle his body was found, stripped by scavengers, half sunk in a pool of water, with the face frozen in the ice. He was forty-four. Burgundy was joined to France once more.