Episode 34: Returned to a Dream (An Unfancy Death in Nancy)
The final two years of Charles the Bold’s life would see him achieve one of his life’s ambitions, uniting his northern and southern domains as one continuous territory, before suffering a hattrick of defeats at the hands of the Swiss, which would leave him unrecognisably dead, naked and half-eaten in a frozen pool of water. Having come to peace terms with the Emperor when abandoning the siege of Neuss in mid-1475, Charles turned his attention to his plans with Edward IV of England to jointly conquer France. Louis XI successfully bribed Edward, however, foiling this plan. Charles instead decided to go and crush those who had crossed him by conquering Lorraine and getting his grip on Savoy, from which he could invade Switzerland. This was a great idea in theory, but his own infamous lack of mercy provoked a stronger-than-expected unity amongst his enemies, which compounded the financial problems he was facing after years of constant military campaigns. Defeats at Grandson, Murten and finally Nancy, saw the past glories of the House of Valois-Burgundy reversed and, as he was presciently warned by one of his advisors before crushing Liege, returned to a dream. Perhaps a more accurate description, though, is that they were thrust into a nightmare.
Flippin’ Philippe de Commines
One of the most important, primary sources we have been using when researching Charles the Bold, have been the ‘Memoirs of Philippe de Commines’. As a courtier to the Burgundian dukes, Philippe de Commines was close to Charles, who knighted him in 1468, and he was present at key moments in the Duke’s reign, such as fighting alongside him in the Liège wars. After 1472, however, Commines’ explicit inside knowledge of the Burgundian court ended and his memoirs, which were written much later, have long been recognised as having a certain untruthfulness to them and so we’ve been trying our best to take what he writes with a grain of salt. Commines’ was likely not always trying to provide an accurate account of events, but rather attempting to redeem his own legacy or to play down the severity of certain things he had done. Because, as close as he had been to Charles, in August, 1472, Commines suddenly abandoned Burgundy and went to serve at the court of Charles’ least-favourite person, the French king Louis XI.
Nobody knows exactly why this happened, but we’d we thought we’d share one particularly entertaining explanation about why Commines flipped sides, and this is one which you should take not with a pinch of salt, but a few kilos of it, written by Isaac D’Israeli, father of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. He wrote this 200 years ago, so 350 years after these events supposedly took place, and this story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it’s too funny not to share. According to D’Israeli, Charles and Philippe de Commines were out hunting one day and when they returned they were joking around together. As a part of the jest, Commines commanded Charles to remove his boots for him, flipping the roles between master and servant. Charles played along, taking off one of Commines’ boots. But suddenly he threw it into Commine’s face and smashed his nose. From that point on, Commines gained the nickname in the court as booted-head, which upset him so greatly that he decided to flip sides and head to France, where he could give his insider knowledge to the French king.
There is a 99% chance this is rubbish and most historians now agree that Commines probably flipped sides for the same reason many people do seemingly egregious things, which is, he got paid to do so.
Tenuous plans for a grand invasion, between Charles the Bold and Edward IV
Before beginning the siege of Neuss, Charles had agreed to support English king Edward IV’s tenuous claim to the throne of France and to help him invade the continent. The planned date for this invasion was some time before the 1st of July, 1475. Well after Charles was forced to finally abandon the siege of Neuss, it was towards this that he immediately turned his attention. But things did not exactly get off on the right foot and miscommunications and disagreements between the English and Burgundians began to hamper the invasion before it had even begun.
For starters, Edward had three options for where to land his armies; Guienne, in the south western part of France, Normandy or Calais. Charles had implored Edward to land at Normandy because, from his point of view, Guienne was simply too far away for his army to get there easily and the region around Calais would not be able to sustain both the English and Burgundian armies being there at the same time. Edward, however, ignored these considerations and decided that Calais was, in fact, the right place. With Charles wasting his time at Neuss, the English then also took their sweet time ferrying their troops across to Calais, spending the whole month of June, 1475, doing so with the help of ships from Holland. Finally, on the 6th of July, 1475, the king himself, Edward, arrived in Calais where he was greeted by his sister, Charles the Bold’s wife Margaret of York. As for the Duke himself, and the troops he had promised, well there was no sign of them yet.
Finally, belatedly, Charles did arrive at Calais on July 14, but without an army. Well, as you might guess all of these delays and the lack of Burgundian troops didn’t quite give the necessary impetus required to launch a successful invasion of France. Despite this, the English king and the Burgundian duke spent some time refining their plans. The general idea was a two-pronged attack, with the Burgundians attacking Lorraine and the English driving into Champagne. Charles was adamant on invading Lorraine so that he could teach a lesson to the young Duke of Lorraine, Rene who, you might recall from last episode, had forsaken his allegiance to Charles when he joined the treaty of Andernach alongside Louis XI and the Emperor. Rene had also joined the League of Constance, that alliance of Swiss eidgenossen, Alsatian towns and the Duke of Austria, meaning Rene had now risen very high on Charles’ long list of people he did not like at all. After invading Lorraine and Champagne, the Burgundian and English armies would then meet up at Rheims where Edward would be crowned.
Having agreed to all of this, Charles left Calais and returned towards his army so he could focus on conquering Lorraine. Edward, on the other hand, began to look at this whole military campaign against France as an exercise in hardship. It didn’t help that Charles would not even let the English army camp inside any of his towns. Edward sent a small contingent to a town called St Quentin, which was ruled by Charles’ ally, the Count of St Pol. Despite having given assurances otherwise, the Count of St Pol changed his mind as the English force approached to find succour and instead of opening the town’s gates, he sent out a sally against them. Another of Edward’s main allies, the Duke of Brittany, had completely failed to provide any help whatsoever. So Edward, who was not the most decisive character, found himself nowhere near as supported as had been assured and was probably wondering what he was doing there at all.
Those plans scuppered…
The French king, Louis XI, was well aware how much of a threat an Anglo-Burgundian invasion of France would pose to his own thinly stretched military, and realised that he would need to find some kind of alternative to fighting in order to get out of this pickle. Undoubtedly helped by those problems just mentioned, Louis XI employed all of his influence to convince Edward to abandon the campaign. He told everybody of any importance just how much he thought Edward was a top-notch king and a good bloke. As Charles was heading for Namur to join his invasion force around August 17, he learned that there were discussions happening between Edward and Louis, and set off as quickly as he could to find Edward and make sure that all was continuing as planned.
When Edward and Charles met again, this time in Peronne, Edward gave him the old ‘yea, nah, promise I won’t talk with Louis anymore’ and Charles once again headed off to Namur. But only one week later, Charles was handed a letter from Edward informing him that, actually, the French and English kings had come to terms. Ouch.
At nearby Picquigny, Louis had a bridge built over the river, with a special trellis in the middle where the two monarchs could meet but not come into direct contact with one another, and could not surprise stab each other. Philippe de Commines, now serving Louis XI, was part of the mission to bring Edward IV into an alliance and when telling this part of the story, explicitly references the occasion a few generations prior when John the Fearless had met the French Dauphin on a bridge and been slain. After finishing the story, he tells us:
“I shall speak of it no farther, only let me tell you, you have the story just as the king told it me himself, when he sent me to choose a place, commanding expressly, that there should be no door.”
The terms of this the Treaty of Picquigny were that Edward would receive from Louis 75,000 crowns to pay for the expedition thus far, an annual imbursement of 50,000 crowns and a marriage alliance between their daughters. As for Louis, well he would not worry about an Anglo-Burgundian invasion force anymore. To woo the English even more, he did what Charles had refused to do and opened up the town of Amiens for the English army, commanding the town’s taverns that they would not be charged. He basically gave them all a weeks-long free company trip in a French town, which I’m sure the innkeepers of Amiens were absolutely thrilled about.
And so it was that Edward IV returned to England and the planned Anglo-Burgundian invasion of France was cancelled before it even really began.
A royal, French gamble
With the signing of the Treaty of Picquigny, Charles was left with no choice but to also come to peace with Louis XI. If he did not, then his invasion of Lorraine would inexorably be countered by annoying French invasions of his own lands. By the middle of September he and Louis XI had signed their own nine-year peace treaty, which confirmed the border between them, returned a few towns to Burgundy which the French had grabbed and confirmed who their allies were and who could and could not be attacked by either side without the treaty being violated. Five people were explicitly excluded from its terms, which must have been quite demoralising for those five people. Two powerful and historically antagonistic states agree to a peace, but you, individually, are not included. Well, this is what Philip de Commines was confronted with, because he was one of them. The terms allowed Charles to go and conquer Lorraine and then the Alsatian towns and even to attack the Swiss if they joined in to help the other side. This in spite of the fact that Louis had been doing all he could to help the League of Constance come into being and remain a thorn in Charles’ side. Richard Vaughan suggests that this treaty was essentially a huge gamble by Louis XI, staying out of the on-coming conflict and hoping that Charles would get crushed by the League of Constance. If, on the contrary, Charles was to succeed in the upcoming wars, it would leave him more powerful than ever.
The Conquest of Lorraine
The truce between France and Burgundy must have been an ominous sign for the still relatively-new-to-the-job Duke of Lorraine, Rene. You’ll remember that during the siege of Neuss he had reneged on his alliance with Charles to pledge unity with the emperor and the French king, with them all promising not to sign separate peace treaties with the Burgundian duke. And what had happened since then? Well, Frederick and Louis had both signed separate peace treaties with Charles. It was no secret that Charles would now move against Lorraine and he sent a missive to Rene in early September basically telling him not to resist. His warning was clear and he advised the young duke to act carefully lest Charles ‘make him know the difference between his friendship and his enmity.’
By October, two Burgundian armies, one led by the Count of Campobasso and Charles, and the other by his half-brother Anthony, were waltzing through Lorraine, submitting town after town before arriving at and putting the capital, Nancy, to siege. If you are thinking that October is not the best time to be starting a siege, congratulations, you are less cocky than Charles the Bold. By this time, however, almost all of the rest of Lorraine had been conquered, so perhaps he had reason to think he would be inside Nancy before long. Doubtless, many in his large contingent had also recently spent a year bogged down outside Neuss and feared that they were settling in for much of the same here. The town’s leaders remained loyal to Rene and were fiercely determined to hold out against Charles. Unlike Neuss, however, they did not have the same natural defences, were less fortified and the leaders of the town’s defence were unable to spur the population on to sticking to a plan, as Herman von Hesse had done in Neuss. In less than a month, the tide of opinion within the town walls was flowing towards submission. Duke Rene, who had gone to France to try and get help from Louis XI, made little effort to encourage the stout resistance happening in his name; soon he had given up, writing a letter on the 25th of November giving the town permission to surrender. By the 28th they had and, two days later, Charles walked through the dismantled town gate in celebration of what had been a fairly easy endeavour. On the 18th of December he was inaugurated as the new Duke of Lorraine.
Ahoy, Savoy
Although conquering Lorraine was not the most exhaustive military campaign that Charles had ever undertaken, it did finally mark the moment when Charles fulfilled the ambitions of his predecessors by connecting the southern and northern Burgundian domains. At this point, you could conceivably have walked from the Alps and end up at the North Sea, and only ever pass through territory ruled by one person, being Charles. This had not been the case since way back in the tenth century, when it had been ruled by a single man, the duke of Lotharingia, Gislebert. Remember back when people had crazy names? I miss those days and, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go back to episode 5 when we got stuck into such wonderful nomenclature as Gerberga and Zwentibold. During the reign of Gislebert, Lothangia, the successor of old Middle Francia, had continuously switched sides between France and Germany until it was eventually consumed by the two of them, and split up into various parts; Alsace, upper Lorraine and lower Lorraine. But now, Charles had put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
When Charles was defeated by a Swiss army at Hericourt, it signified the beginning of his descent. It is worth pointing out that the argument has been made that, in fact, his submission of Lorraine marked the peak of his career, simply because of how much land he controlled. This, though, was more of a false summit. While he did rule vast domains and had finally connected them, he was hampered by the financial burden of the continual military campaigning needed to sustain it. A great alliance had formed against him and he would need to defeat them decisively if he was to come out on top.
Over the winter of 1475/76, Strasbourg, therefore, became convinced that it was next on the Burgundian hit-list and desperately began organising a defence. More than six-hundred buildings on the outskirts of the town were destroyed, creating a flat expanse. A moat was dug that encircled the entire city, vast amounts of artillery were brought in and provisions garnered; Strasbourg, when its turn came, was determined to do a Neuss.
Surprisingly though, Charles made a decision which subverted people’s expectations, and instead of going for Strasbourg, decided to wage war against the Swiss Eidgenossen. In the previous episode we mentioned how the Swiss had jumped on the “let’s declare war on Charles” bandwagon during the Siege of Neuss and an army had descended from the mountains to defeat the Burgundians at the battle of Hericourt. They did not stop there, however, and by the end of October, a collection of Swiss towns, led by Bern, had occupied and taken control of an area called the Vaud. The Vaud had been controlled by the Duchy of Savoy, whose Duchess, Yolanda, sister to Louis XI, was one of Charles’ few remaining allies. This was all crucial territory for Charles, because he was hiring Italian mercenaries for his armies and it was through here that they needed to travel in order to get over the mountains. This antagonised the Swiss, particularly Bern, whose animosity further threatened Charles, and so went the cycle of conflict. Soon, Charles was soon looking at Switzerland as his next target. One supposes that if he were able to get advice from his father, grandfather or great-grandfather, they would have probably that this was a pointless folly, but be that as it may, at the end of January, 1476, Charles began assembling an army at Besancon, preparing to launch a new invasion into Savoy and Switzerland. He ordered all his towns in the region to send him artillery and supplies and, in a letter to Dijon, justified this new campaign:
“...with the help of God and St. George, to deliver our lands and subjects of Burgundy and those of the house of Savoy from the Swiss...and other Germans who, up until now, have interfered in order to cause them various injuries, oppressions and damages.”
In another letter to Geneva, which remained allied to Savoy and had not jumped into bed with Bern and the other Swiss Eidgenossen, he told them he was going to deal with “The Bernese, Zurichers and their allies, your enemies and ours.”
Failure at Grandson
In the middle of February the Burgundian army set out to attack two places, with castles, at Yverdun and Grandson. When they got to Yverdun, though, they found it had been abandoned. The Swiss garrison there had decided to hole up in Grandson so that, all together, they could make one great stand against the army of Burgundy. On the 19th, Burgundians attacked Grandson, easily subjecting the town. Taking the castle at Grandson proved a more difficult objective, but after just a week and a half the several-hundred strong garrison there surrendered. This was impressive to say the least, as the castle - notwithstanding renovations that had taken place every hundred years or so - had been standing since the 11th century and should have been easily defended. Reports from some of the Bernese who escaped tell us that Charles’ artillery had made a huge impact, destroying the defenders' guns and killing the master of artillery. According to the ambassador of Milan, Panigarola, who was with Charles at the time, the garrison at Grandson had been assured that their surrender would be met with mercy. Another story tells that members of the Swiss army had managed to secretly row a boat close enough to the castle to catch the garrison’s attention from afar but, instead of correctly interpreting their frantic spear-thrusts as “Hold tight, we’re coming”, they interpreted it as “All’s lost, seek mercy”. The garrison surrendered - some sources are adamant that they had received assurance of mercy, while others that the surrender bore no conditions. Regardless, once they were taken into the control of the Duke of Burgundy, they received no mercy. He spent four hours having all 400 or so either hung on the many walnut trees that grew around, or drowned in Lake Neuchatel.
While this was going on, a force of Swiss troops had assembled at Neuchatel and marched out to meet Charles’ armies. At the nearby town of Concise - whose name we really appreciate for its ability to convey large amounts of information in a small amount of letters, a skill we sometimes find ourselves lacking - the Burgundians became aware of the Swiss presence but grossly underestimated the size and scale of it. The Burgundian cavalry surrounded the Swiss vanguard, thinking it was the entire force, after which Charles called them back to begin an artillery bombardment. At this point, when the Burgundians were pulling back, the rest of the Swiss army emerged, causing panic and confusion. A rout ensued and, even though Charles personally set about ordering his troops to hold fast, most fled. Although the Swiss could not inflict that much actual physical damage on Burgundian forces, the symbolic victory was immense. The greatest army in western Europe had been humiliated by a bunch of mountain people. Furthermore, the entire baggage train was captured, meaning a huge amount of Charles’ treasure and artefacts, which he took around with him, was captured by the Swiss. This included Charles’ throne, his jewelled hat which he used as a crown, a silver bathtub, so many jewels and diamonds, tents, banners, his personal seal and a whole bunch of cannons. This was a huge amount of booty, and for a guy who was already under severe financial pressures, this was undoubtedly an utter disaster.
One Swiss soldier who had been present when they had retaken Grandson and entered the town, Petermann Etterlin, later wrote of his experience seeing what Charles had done to the murdered garrison:
“There were found sadly the honorable men still freshly hanging on the trees in front of the castle whom the tyrant had hanged. It was a wretched, pitiable sight. There were hung ten or twenty men on one bough. The trees were bent down and were completely full. [H]ere hanged a father and a son next to each other, there two brothers or other friends. And there came the honorable men who knew them; who were their friends, cousins and brothers, who found them miserably hanging. There was first anger and distress in crying and bewailing.”
When the Swiss forces retook the castle, most of the Burgundians there were chucked out the window, being defenestrated all the way to their deaths. The result of the Battle of Grandson, and the anger and distress caused by the treatment of the garrison, has long been seen as an important one in the development of Swiss unity against Burgundy.
As for how much it affected Charles, well like any narcissist, he was able to define his own reality and completely ignore the severity of the defeat. Charles thought a bit too much of himself and his God given right to conquest to have been seriously curtailed by the loss, no matter how many tongues around Europe it set wagging. Slightly humiliated, yes, but certainly not greatly interrupted. He soon began to re-assemble armies to continue his invasion, which apart from Grandson, had actually been largely successful so far. He had managed to take most of the Vaud region, but for one town called Murten. This would be his next target.
Flirtin’ with Murten
The Burgundians set off for Murten on the 27th of May and laid siege to it some two weeks later. His army was split into four corps, each camped on specific positions surrounding the town. On the 18th of June the first attack occurred, accompanied by heavy bombardment, but it failed to break the town’s defense. In addition to their cannonade, the Burgundians shot bolts into the city with notes attached, telling the occupants that their cause was lost, that no relief was coming and that, soon, all of them would be hanging from rope.
On the 21st of June the Burgundians stood in battle formation, having been informed and being of full belief that the Swiss army was hurrying to the rescue of Murten and that an attack was imminent. Charles even went with a scouting party and viewed, with his own eyes, elements of the Swiss camp, not so far in the distance. But the attack did not happen.
Unbeknownst to Charles, the Swiss were going to attack when expected, but were delayed, waiting for a contingent from Zurich. When the attack did not happen, despite all their intelligence to the contrary, Charles inexplicably decided that the Swiss had decided upon a defensive war. This was completely incorrect. The very nature of the Swiss alliance made such a long-term campaign impossible. Its troops were regular people who had families and land to care for. Their only option was to attack. But after having had his troops standing around for a day waiting in vain for it, Charles convinced himself otherwise and allowed his troops some rest the next day. And that, of course, is when the Swiss did attack.
The day opened to rainy, dreary weather. But in the late morning, just as the sun began to poked out, so too did the Swiss forces, emerging from the forest about a kilometre from the Burgundian position. One of those in charge of the Swiss forces was none other than Rene, the Duke of Lorraine who Charles had deposed. The Burgundians had little time to organise, around twenty minutes, and could not make their formations which they had stood in for so long the day prior. English archers and some artillery were quickly arranged to take on the screaming assault of the Swiss vanguard, but the archers were soon overcome and the two armies locked horns.
It was chaos for Charles and his army. Soon they were routed in many different positions, thousands of his soldiers fleeing, many of them being picked off brutally. Between deserters, casualties and fatalities, Charles lost up to two thirds of his army. Vaughan puts it that he “...was the victim of one of the most destructive and decisive battles in the military history of the middle ages.” Estimates are that the Burgundian army lost anywhere between 10-20 thousand soldiers, whereas the Swiss lost only about 3000.
Despite yet another serious failure, Charles was still not as dispirited as one might think. His extreme faith that God was backing him left him adamant that he could endure countless such defeats and still be able to muster an army of 150,000 men even at his most unlikely hour. To do this, though, as we have seen time and again, Charles would need cash. So he went to his cash cows out in the paddock, being the estates of his rich territories, and asked them to once again open up their wallets and fork out cash for him. The last time he had done this had been in 1473 when he had taken the unique step of issuing six-years worth of taxes on his territories, but had promised that there would be no other demands made of them. Now that he was making yet another demand, however, Flanders and the other estates of his lowlander territories did not budge. Charles had no choice but to try and make promises of increased pay and booty, in order to stop his remaining army from abandoning him. By the latter half of 1476, this army totalled around 10 thousand.
Lorraine resurgence
In both Grandson and Murten, the Burgundians had been surprised, outnumbered and defeated, despite the top-of-the line planning and resources that Charles employed. News of the defeats echoed around Europe, serving to inspire people under the Burgundian thumb to do as the Swiss had done and shake it off. In Lorraine anti-Burgundian forces began taking back the duchy and, by the end of July, they had succeeded in all but the capital of Nancy.
This reconquest of Lorraine forced Charles to turn away his attention from Savoy, simultaneously throwing his alliance with the Duchess Yolanda to the flames. After his defeat at Murten, Charles had had Yolanda arrested, basically conducting a coup. This also failed, however, to reap the results he desired. There were several uprisings against Burgundian troops in Geneva. In October 1476, Louis XI organised the rescue of his sister. So that whole ploy having failed, Charles turned his attention back to Lorraine, where he now had to embark upon a re-re-conquest of it, this time without any allies of note, and a much smaller army which had already been defeated twice that year.
Charles the Bold’s final siege
Charles waited until the end of September 1476 to embark upon this campaign, which completely messed things up. By that time, Duke Rene had managed to retake the last town which the Burgundians had held, Nancy. This meant that Rene now had garrisons in all the main towns of Lorraine. For some reason Charles did not set about taking these strongholds back, but instead concentrated everything upon re-seizing Nancy, and began to put the town to siege on October 22.
Unfortunately there is little known about the siege of Nancy, as no good surviving documents have been found that specifically relate peoples’ experiences. Assumedly, like pretty much any siege, it would have been bloody awful. It does seem that, during the course of the siege, Charles got to experience a feeling of impending doom; probably not as intensely as those upon whom he had inflicted it in the past, but doom nonetheless. Letters that he was sending were getting no responses, which indicated that Lorraine forces had blocked off his supply chain and communications. Some sources tell us that, at around this time, he really started to emulate his hero Alexander the Great and began to drink a lot. Charles had never been a big drinker but supposedly he now found cause. He was alone, outnumbered, desperately needing more troops, and aware that the League of Constance would be sending an army to relieve Nancy.
Rene of Lorraine, meanwhile, was trying desperately to get the Swiss Eidgenossen do just that. Mostly, they refused, arguing that it was too cold for campaigning. But Rene threw some cash and promises around, buying as many mercenaries as he could, and also found willingness among those Alsatian towns who had no qualms about marching off to kill Burgundians. Over December these forces left Basel, including the main body on the 26th.
Charles went into a sort of denialism, becoming convinced that everything was ok because he was who he was. The confidence that had served him so well in expanding his power now became a weakness. When told that one of his chief commanders, the count of Campobasso, was going to betray him, he refused to believe it.
By the 31st of December, 1476, Charles could not deny the approach of the Swiss army. He wrote to the Lord of Fay on that date:
“...since we have now been truthfully informed of the approach of our enemies, we wish and we expressly command you that, as soon as you read this you come to us and in our service, and bring with you all the nobles with fiefs and sub-fiefs and all other troops both mounted and on foot that you can find in our land and duchy of Luxembourg. If you cannot come in person, send us with the greatest possible diligence those nobles and others both mounted and on foot. Do not fail in this in any way.”
The death of Charles the Bold
As the Swiss contingents made their way towards Nancy, Duke Rene ordered his garrisons in towns and forts along the way to join them, forming a great allied force that outnumbered Charles’ forces, camped outside Nancy. On the 4th of January, the assembled force that had come together to take down the Duke of Burgundy rendezvoused about 5km from where he and his besieging army were camped. Also there was the count of Campobasso, who Charles had not believed was going to switch sides. Well, he did.
The Swiss army was atypical for the time. It did not have a single commander-in-chief, nor was dominated by any one group within. It was, arguably, just a physical expression of general contempt for Burgundian rule.
The day of the battle was the 5th of January, 1477. It was snowing heavily and nobody could see anything at much distance. Charles made two telling, tactical errors, in how he prepared for the forth-coming battle. The first was engaging at all. Many of his captains were counselling that they withdraw, which he refused. That being the case, the second error he made was failing to have a nearby forest edge scouted or properly reconnoitred.
And it is into that forested area that a vanguard of the allied army veered, away from its course towards Nancy. Hundreds of men and horses began pushing through thick, cold and difficult terrain. It was worth it, as it brought them to Charles’ right flank. Around midday, the waiting Burgundians, who were none-the-wiser to this sneaky move made by the allies in the blinding snow, heard three blasts on a horn and a roaring scream as these men poured out of the forest and crashed unexpectedly into Charles’ cavalry. They had taken Charles’ artillery out of the equation, as it was aimed in the wrong direction and could not be moved in time. When they overtook the positions of the guns, the rest of the allied forces began their frontal assault. Soon, what had happened in Grandson and Murten, was happening outside of Nancy. Charles’ army disintegrated in blood and flesh and fire; but also in acts of desperate escape. As they fled towards the nearest city safe for a Burgundian, which was Metz, thousands were cut down, not only by the assaulting soldiers, but peasants and free-people who came across them along the way and took their own, personal revenge against the might of Burgundy.
The onslaught was so overwhelming that Charles, too, was quickly in the thick of it, doing his best to Alexander-the-Great-himself out of what was quickly becoming the most untenable situation in his life. Fighting furiously is the last thing that anybody saw Charles the Bold doing in his life.
Afterwards, nobody had any idea of what had become of him. Had he, too, fled? Or had his aggressive militarism finally caught up with him?
A chronicler in Metz, witness to the thousands who turned up pleading for refuge outside the city, wrote:
“The battle was indeed a woeful catastrophe for the said [ruler] of Burgundy, who was then the most feared and redoubtable prince one could think of and also the best loved by his subjects. This was well shown by the fact that they would not believe in his death, especially the people of Artois and several others of these Burgundians; for they stupidly and obstinately asserted that he had escaped from the battle into Germany and had there vowed to undertake a seven-year penance, after which he would return in great power and avenge all his injuries and insults. His subjects were so convinced that this was so that I knew several who, extremely obstinate in this credulity, put up for sale clothes and armour, horses, precious stones and other goods and, if anyone bought them, they sold them on credit at two or three times the right price, with payment deferred until their prince Charles returned after completing his penance.”
But Charles was not doing penance. Well, not in the earthly realm, anyway. Because he was dead. His body was not found until two days after the battle. Like all the corpses that littered the area, anything of value - jewellery, ornaments and whatnot - had been taken by scavengers. His head had been cleaved in twain, like his grandfather, John’s, had been on that bridge. Wolves and other creatures had apparently eaten his face and whatever other good bits they could get to. The only way that the Burgundians knew it was him is because of old battle scars that one of his physicians was able to identify.
But Charles’s demise - his life disappearing in a violent rage of anonymity - marked not only the end of his own life, but also that of the line of Valois-Burgundian Dukes. Charles had not had a legitimate son. So although his daughter, Mary, would now become the Duchess of Burgundy, due to the patriarchal nature of the society, it was whoever married her that would become their ruler, and any children they had would take his name. The effects of this would be enormous on the Netherlands, as the somewhat shell-shocked people in its towns, who had borne the financial burden and who had contributed so many of the troops that had been lost in the last years of Charles’ military follies, would quickly move to reassert their own desires and agendas, many of which Charles had ruthlessly quashed. In the tradition of transfers of power in the Burgundian state, Mary is going to have to quickly deal with a bunch of disgruntled subjects.
Sources
Charles the Bold by Richard Vaughan
The Promised Lands by Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier
Magnanimous Dukes and Rising States by Robert Stein
Charles the Bold, the Last Duke of Burgundy by Ruth Putnam
The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363-1477 by Kay Douglas Smith, Robert Douglas Smith, Kelly DeVries