BURGUNDY

BURGUNDY. The early modern state of Burgundy was the product of a historical accident. When Charles the Bold (1433–1477), the last Valois duke of Burgundy (1467–1477), was murdered in 1477, his various and sundry lands and estates were divided up between the king of France and the Holy Roman emperor. While the large duchy of Burgundy was soon incorporated into the kingdom of France, the free county of Burgundy just across the Saône River (Franche-Comté) was quickly absorbed into the empire. Moreover, all the territories that made up the Burgundian Netherlands—the counties of Flanders, Holland, Zeeland, Hainaut, and Namur as well as the duchies of Brabant, Limburg, and Luxembourg—also swore allegiance to the emperor. Thus what had once been a politically powerful buffer state that separated France and the empire and stretched from the North Sea to the Franco-Swiss border was now divided between these two European powers. With its twin courts at Brussels and Dijon permanently separated, Burgundy's political influence was no longer as significant as it had once been, when it held the balance of power between England and France in the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453).

These Franco-Habsburg tensions intensified less than two decades after Charles the Bold's death, when the French king Charles VIII (ruled 1483–1498) invaded Italy in a dispute over the emperor's claim to the vacant duchy of Milan, starting the Habsburg-Valois Wars (1494–1559). Charles V (1519–1556), the grandson and heir of Maximilian I (ruled 1493–1519), later tried to reunite the duchy to the rest of the Burgundian state under Habsburg control. Having captured King Francis I of France (1515–1547) on the battlefield at Pavia in Italy in 1525, Charles succeeded in getting him to renounce the duchy of Burgundy as part of the deal to release him. Francis reneged on his promise once he acquired his freedom, however, and the duchy remained in French hands. Moreover the Burgundian political elites of the duchy made it known to all that they were loyal Frenchmen and had no desire to be transferred to the sovereignty of the emperor to reunite with the other former Burgundian territories in the empire. Although neither Francis I nor Charles V managed to gain any permanent territorial advantage in Italy from the Habsburg-Valois Wars, this conflict served as a backdrop to the foreign policies of both states for the rest of the early modern period. Indeed even after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis formally ended the wars in 1559, Habsburg-Valois tensions continued to ferment, a situation not helped by the advent of Protestantism in both states.

With the coming of the Reformation in France, the duchy of Burgundy became a bastion for the traditional religion and a bulwark against the new Calvinist faith, which most Burgundians, like most French Catholics, tended to see as heresy. The royal governor of Burgundy from the 1530s to the 1590s was a member of the militantly Catholic Guise family, so the many patronage networks of the Guises worked long and hard in the province to prevent the spread of heresy. Calvinism nevertheless managed to gain a foothold in some of the principal Burgundian towns by 1560, and tensions between the two faiths broke out in violence, as it did in many towns throughout the kingdom in the early 1560s. Most Burgundians had supported the attempts of Kings Henry II (ruled 1547–1559) and Francis II (ruled 1559–1560) to suppress Protestantism, by force if necessary. But they were explicitly hostile to the edict of January 1562, since it gave legal recognition to the French Protestants for the first time. When the French Wars of Religion officially broke out in 1562, Burgundy fought against both the Protestants and the crown's continuous attempts to make peace with them over the next four decades. Burgundy remained a bastion of Catholicism and became a stronghold of the Catholic League after the death of the last Valois heir in 1584 made Henry of Navarre (Henry IV; ruled 1589–1610), the leader of the French Protestants, presumptive heir to the throne.

The battles with the crown over religion in the sixteenth century turned to politics in the seventeenth century. First Henry IV began to intervene in local elections for mayor in several Burgundian towns in 1609, altering a process of independence that had originated under the Valois dukes. Then in the 1630s his son and successor, Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643), attempted to take away the province's traditional right to assess and collect its own taxes through its provincial Estates. When Louis tried to suppress the Estates and replace them with royal tax officials, many in the province fought back. A band of citizens in Dijon—mainly winegrowers and artisans—actually burned down the houses of several members of Dijon's parlement (sovereign court) who spoke out in favor of the king's plan. Louis went in person to Dijon to punish the culprits as well as to chide the elites for not fully supporting his venture. By the time of the Fronde in 1648, Burgundy's elites had been won over to the crown's wishes on virtually all political matters, as the king continued to reward them handsomely for their cooperation. As a result there was no opposition to the crown in Burgundy when parlements in other regions revolted in 1648. And for the most part Burgundy's elites continued to support French kings right up to the Revolution of 1789.

Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) managed to reunite the free county of Burgundy with the duchy in 1674, when his troops occupied Franche-Comté and brought the county under French control. Thus the two Burgundies, as contemporaries were still referring to the duchy and the county, were both under the authority of one prince for the first time since 1477. Like their fellow subjects in the duchy, the elites of Franche-Comté tended for the most part to be willing, loyal subjects of the king of France in return for largesse, rewards, and perquisites. From one-time enemies of France during the Hundred Years' War, Burgundians by the late seventeenth century had become some of the most ardent defenders of the Catholic Church and the French crown.

BURGUNDY

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