General Notes

Louis XI was a highly successful French monarch whose enemies dubbed him the
Spider.  He was born on July 3, 1423, when his father, Charles VII, was at the
nadir of his political fortunes.  Louis did not get along with his father, and
at the age of 17 he joined an unsuccessful princely revolt called the
Praguerie.  In the 1440s he held a number of important commands, but in 1447
he retired to the Dauphine, the province that he held as heir to the throne
He ruled efficiently there until Charles seized the land in 1456 and drove him
into exile at the Burgundian court.  Louis's continuing feud with his father
was partly the product of misunderstandings purposely encouraged by their
respective advisors.

Louis returned from exile in 1461 to succeed Charles as king. Reversing many
of his father's policies, he soon antagonized a large part of the kingdom.  A
princely coalition called the League of the Public Weal rebelled in 1465, and
Louis had to make significant concessions to dissolve this group.  He then
realized that an effective monarchy required the weakening of the princes and
that this goal could be achieved more easily by capitalizing on their mutual
jealousies than by resorting to force.  In general he endeavored to cooperate
with the families of Bourbon and Anjou, to isolate Brittany, to crush the
dissident Gascon lords, and to break the power of the duke of Burgundy by
subsidizing the latter's other enemies, notably the Swiss.  Louis's greatest
successes derived from the death of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, in
1477 and the extinction of the princely house of Anjou in 1481, both of which
brought the crown substantial territory and eliminated dangerous rivals.

These successes were largely a matter of luck, a fact that makes assessing the
importance of Louis XI difficult.  His reign is rich in narrative
sources--mainly chronicles, memoirs, and the reports of Italian ambassadors.
These writings portray a king with many bizarre characteristics who enhanced
the greatness of his realm through guile and cunning;  he appears as an
inveterate schemer who earned the hatred of his subjects by tripling taxes but
who was able to liquidate serious threats to the monarchy without recourse to
costly wars.  Yet the vast administrative documents of Louis's reign have not
been carefully studied, and the memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, long the most
respected narrative source, has been discredited by recent scholarship.
Louis, who died on Aug.  30, 1483, remains an enigma.