Part1 The beginning

The mountain ranges of Europe and Asia

When the great land masses of Africa and India collide with Europe and Asia, about 100 million years ago, they cause the crust of the earth to crumple upwards in a long almost continuous ridge of high ground - from the Alps, through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to the Himalayas. This barrier will have a profound influence on human history.

To the south and east of the mountain range are various fertile regions, watered by great rivers flowing from the mountains. By contrast, north of the mountain range is a continuous strip of less fertile grasslands - the steppes, on which a horseman can ride almost without interruption from Mongolia to Moscow.

This unbroken stretch of land north of the mountains, reaching from the Pacific in the east to the Atlantic in the west, means that the boundary between Asia and Europe is a somewhat vague concept. Indeed Europe is really the western peninsula of the much larger mass of Asia.

In the south there is a natural barrier, long accepted as a dividing line - formed by the waters of the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. North from here the boundary is notional. In recent times it has been accepted as passing east from the Black Sea to the Caspian and then stretching north from the Caspian along the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains.

The first Europeans: 500,000 - 10,000 years ago

Early man - of the species Homo erectus - penetrates to the western extremity of Europe by about 500,000 years ago. Fossil remains from this time are known as far west as England.

From about 230,000 years ago the human inhabitants of Europe, descendants of Homo erectus, are sufficiently different in brain size and physique to be classed as an early form of Homo sapiens. Known as Neanderthal man, this species prospers for many thousands of years. But the Neanderthalers leave little trace of themselves other than their stone tools, their bones and the bones of their animal prey (though a recently discovered Neanderthal flute suggests some cultural life). They are extinct by about 35,000 years ago.

Modern man - anatomically similar to humans today - arrives relatively late in Europe. But the continent does provide the most extensive evidence of the early culture of our own species of Homo sapiens.

The Venus of Willendorf (about 25,000 years ago) and the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux (some 15,000 years ago) are merely the most famous examples of a vigorous palaeolithic art found in many parts of Europe. Similarly the exposed plains of eastern Europe contain traces of the earliest known free-standing dwellings - circular huts, semi-sunken, with stones or tusks supporting some form of superstructure.

From villages to towns in Europe: 7000 - 2000 BC

The Neolithic Revolution - introducing village life, the cultivation of crops and the rearing of animals - arrives in Greece in about 7000 BC from its region of origin in the Middle East. It will take about 3000 years to spread to the Atlantic coast and Britain, pushing back the way of life of the hunter-gatherers at an average rate of slightly more than a mile a year.

This slow rate of progress may partly reflect a reluctance of the hunter-gatherers to settle down to the hard labour of agriculture. But it is due also to the fact that here the labour is indeed hard. Europe, unlike the Middle East, is heavily forested. Clearing the ground for crops, with stone tools, is a massive undertaking.

In the Atlantic coastal regions, the transition to neolithic village settlement is marked by the world's most striking tradition of prehistoric architecture.

In most of Europe neolithic communities live in villages of timber houses, often with a communal longhouse as the central feature (one, discovered at Bochum in Germany, is some 65 metres in length). But along the entire Atlantic coast, from Spain to Britain and Denmark, the focus of village life is a communal tomb, around which simple huts are clustered. The tomb chambers of these regions introduce the tradition of stonework which includes passage graves and megaliths, also the very solid domestic architecture of Skara Brae.

By the time the whole of Europe has entered the neolithic age, the eastern Mediterranean - where Africa joins Asia - is literate and civilized. Like farming, civilization spreads by contagion from Asia to Europe. The point where the two continents meet, round the Aegean Sea, becomes from around 2000 BC the site of Europe's first civilization - that of Minoan Crete.

Minoan civilization, after several centuries, yields to an incoming group which eventually provides nearly all the peoples of Europe - the Indo-Europeans.

Indo-Europeans: from 2000 BC

Tribes speaking Indo-European languages, and living as nomadic herdsmen, are well established by about 2000 BC in the steppes which stretch from the Ukraine eastwards, to the regions north of the Black Sea and the Caspian.

Over the coming centuries they steadily infiltrate the more appealing regions to the south and west - occasionally in something akin to open warfare, and invariably no doubt with violence. But the process is much more gradual than our modern notions of an invading force.

Indo-Europeans in Europe: from 1800 BC

In Europe the first Indo-European tribes to make significant inroads are the Greeks. They move south into Greece and the Aegean from the 18th century BC.

Gradually other tribes speaking Indo-European languages spread throughout Europe. From an early date Germans are established in Denmark and southern Sweden. Balts settle along the southern and eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Tribes using an Italic group of languages descend into Italy. Across the centre of Europe the Celts move gradually west through Germany into France, northern Spain and Britain.

Another wave of migrating Indo-European peoples follows on behind, pressing westwards from Asia. The Slavs move into the region of Poland and western Russia, between the Vistula and Dnieper rivers. The Scythians establish themselves in the area to the north of the Black Sea.

Any map will oversimplify patterns of tribal migration, for it must attempt to separate groups which in reality intermingle and overlap. If there is not too much pressure on the available territory, different tribes often coexist within a region. Even so, in broad terms, the tribes mentioned here from the great majority of Europeans at the time when Greece and Rome dominate the Mediterranean region.

Source:Historyworld

The Mediterranean colonized: 8th - 3rd century BC

The Mediterranean is the chief arena of European development from the 8th century BC.

The focus at first is on the Aegean Sea. Here the civilization of Greece develops; from here Greek colonists move west to Italy and Sicily. Settlements of Phoenicians and Carthaginians also become established in the western Mediterranean. By the 3rd century Rome is firmly in control of central and southern Italy. Greece, Carthage and Rome are all involved in the Sicilian hostilities which in 264 provoke the first Punic War and which lead, eventually, to the dominance of the Roman empire throughout the region.

Rome's private sea: 1st century BC - 6th century AD

The gap between the establishment of Rome's first province outside mainland Italy (Sicily in 241 BC) and Roman control of the entire Mediterranean is little more than two centuries. With the annexation of Egypt in 30 BC, the Mediterranean becomes for the first time one political unit - a large lake within a single empire.

This situation lasts for four centuries, until Germanic tribes move round the western Mediterranean in the 5th century AD. This most historic of seas will continue to play a central role in human history, but never again under unified control. Tribal pressure from the north has been gradually building up throughout the heyday of Rome.

Germans on the move: from the 2nd century BC

In the 2nd century BC, Germanic tribes move south and east from Scandinavia. The Goths and the Vandals drive the Balts east along the coast of the Baltic. Other Germans press south along the Rhine as far as the Danube, forcing the Helvetii - a Celtic tribe - to take refuge among the Swiss mountains.

Two German tribes, the Teutones and the Cimbri, even strike so far south as to threaten Roman armies in southern France and northern Italy. They are finally defeated and pressed back in 101 BC. But from the Roman point of view a long-term threat has been identified - that of the German barbarians whose territory is now the region beyond the Rhine and the Danube.

The lull before the storm: 3rd century AD

By the 3rd century AD various German tribal confederations, all of whom will leave a lasting mark on European history, are ranged along the natural borders of the Roman empire. They have settled in the territories east of the Rhine and north of the Danube and Black Sea. From here, in the great upheavals of the 4th and 5th century (known as the Völkerwanderung, 'migration of the peoples'), they will move throughout western Europe.

In the northwest, beyond the lower reaches of the Rhine, are the Franks. Further south, around the Main valley, are the Burgundians. East of the Alps, near the Tisza river, are the Vandals. Beyond them, occupying a far greater range of territory than the others, are the Goths.

New dispensations: 6th century AD

By the year 500 the map of Europe has settled into a new pattern. The centre of the Roman empire is now unmistakably in the east, at Constantinople. The only parts of the empire to have survived with any degree of continuity are southeast Europe (the Balkans and Greece) and western Asia (on round the Mediterranean to Egypt). The rest is in new hands.

Italy, the old centre of gravity, is now ruled by Ostrogoths. The Visigoths are in Spain and southwest France. The Burgundians are in southeast France and the Franks are in the north. In Britain a struggle is beginning between the Celtic inhabitants and invading Angles and Saxons.

The change from the heyday of the Roman empire could hardly seem greater, yet time will reveal strong hidden continuities. For a millennium, from 500 BC, there have been two influential cultures in Europe - Greece in the east and Rome in the west. In a different guise, for another 1000 years, the same two influences prevail. For each has its own primacy in relation to Christianity, the religion which now shapes Europe.

Constantinople is founded in AD 330 as the great Christian imperial city. But Rome, the earlier imperial city, has its own different and prior claim - as the place where St Peter is believed to have been martyred, and the seat of his successors as pope.

Constantinople never falters as the centre of eastern Christianity. Rome has its ups and downs, but it gradually imposes on the barbarians its own idea of the Christian religion and, with it, the authority of the pope. Latin and Greek were the political and cultural languages of the classical centuries. Now they become the cult languages of the Christian era. The old European pattern, disturbed though it is by the barbarian incursions, reasserts itself.

The most profound difference after the 5th century is that Germanic peoples from the north begin to play a major role in western Europe, while new communities of Slavs establish themselves in the east.

The Franks in western Europe: 6th - 10th century AD

The Franks are the first of the Germanic peoples to develop a large and stable kingdom in northwest Europe. Clovis, pressing south from the modern region of Belgium, extends his rule in the early 6th century to the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean.

Three hundred years later the Frankish empire of Charlemagne reaches east over the Rhine, up to the Baltic in the north, as far as Austria in the east, and beyond the river Po in Italy. Europe has a new Christian empire as extensive in the west as the original Roman example - but one which will prove more short-lived.

The region united by Charlemagne includes, in modern terms, northeast Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, much of Germany, Switzerland, Austria and north Italy. In 840, on the death of Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious, war breaks out between his three sons over their shares of this inheritance.

A division between the brothers is finally agreed, in 843, in a treaty signed at Verdun. The dividing lines drawn on this occasion prove of lasting and dark significance in the history of Europe.


Three slices of Francia: AD 843

Two facts of European geography (the Atlantic coast and the Rhine) dictate a vertical division of the Frankish empire, known in Latin as Francia. The three available sections are the west, the middle and the east - Francia Occidentalis, Francia Media and Francia Orientalis.

It is clear that Francia Occidentalis will include much of modern France, and that Francia Orientalis will approximate to the German-speaking areas east of the Rhine. Francia Media, an ambiguous region between them, is the richest strip of territory. Allotted to Charlemagne's eldest son, Lothair I, it stretches from the Netherlands and Belgium down both sides of the Rhine to Switzerland and Italy.

This central Frankish kingdom is in subsequent centuries, including our own, one of the great fault lines of Europe. The northern section becomes known as Lotharingia (the territory of Lothair) and thus, in French, Lorraine; between it and Switzerland is Alsace.

As power grows or decreases to the west or the east, in the great regions emerging slowly as France and Germany, these Rhineland provinces frequently change hands. So, for many centuries, do the Low Countries, Burgundy and northern Italy.


The Slavs in eastern Europe: from the 6th century AD

The Slavs are first referred to by this name in AD 518 when they press into the Roman empire across the Danube, though they have been settled for more than a millennium in the region to the north (between the Vistula and Dnieper rivers).

After the collapse of the empire of the Huns, in the 5th century, the Slavs begin to expand their territory. They move west into what are now the Czech republic and Slovakia and south towards the Adriatic and Aegean - where their separate regional and religious development as Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians and Bulgarians later makes the peninsula of the Balkans one of the most politically complex regions on the face of the earth.


Magyars: 9th - 10th century AD

The lower Danube, before the river enters the Black Sea, has been Europe's doorway to tribal groups arriving from the north and east. Here the Visigoths and Ostrogoths and Slavs have first presented themselves to the Roman empire, requesting or demanding admission. And here there arrives, in AD 889, another group.

They differ from their predecessors in that they are not Indo-Europeans. They speak a Finno-Ugric language. They call themselves Magyars, but their federation of tribes is known as On-Ogur, meaning 'Ten Arrows'. The pronunciation of On-Ogur by their new Slav neighbours leads, eventually, to the name by which the Magyars are later known - Hungarians.

The Magyars have been living for several centuries near the mouth of the Don, as vassals of the Khazars. From 889 they spend a few years in the Balkans in the service of the Byzantine emperor, but soon they move on to the northwest, through the Carpathian mountains.

Since 890 their leader has been Arpad, elected prince by the chieftains of the seven Magyar tribes. His people number no more than 25,000, but together they subdue (within the space of a few years) the scattered population of the region now known as Hungary. So Arpad becomes the founder of a nation which somehow - in all the upheavals of central Europe - retains its identity and its language down through the centuries.

Source:HistoryWorld

Clashes in central Europe: 9th - 10th century AD

Central and eastern Europe, northwards from the Adriatic and the Aegean, is the arena in which many conflicting forces confront each other in the 9th and 10th centuries.

Germans, pressing towards the east, meet onslaughts from Slavs and Magyars moving westwards. Missionaries from Rome confront their rivals from Constantinople, competing for pagan souls with their rival brands of Christianity. The rulers of new kingdoms, emerging in this region at this period, decide which alliance and which religion to adopt. The frontiers established in these conflicts remain sensitive throughout European history.


Roman Catholic kingdoms: 9th - 10th century AD

The earliest large kingdom in central Europe is Moravia, the realm of a Slav dynasty which by the second half of the 9th century also controls Bohemia and adjacent parts of modern Poland and Hungary.

The struggle between Roman and Byzantine Christianity crystallizes here. The district is first evangelized by Roman missionaries from Bavaria, but the king of Moravia, resenting German pressure, wants his people to receive the faith in their own Slavonic tongue. He sends to Constantinople for missionaries, and receives (in 863) the brothers Cyril and Methodius. They introduce a Slavonic liturgy. It is later outlawed by German clerics, who in association with Rome impose the Latin rite on the region.

In neighbouring Hungary there are similar swings of faith, though here the Magyar royal family takes the opposite line. The Magyars, established in Hungary from about 896, overwhelm the Moravian kingdom soon after 900 and become a major threat to the Germans until defeated near the Lech river in 955.

By that time many of their chieftains are Greek Orthodox Christians. But the Hungarian king (Gezá, a great-grandson of Arpad) prefers to look westwards. In 975 he and his family are baptized in the Roman Catholic faith, initiating a lasting link between Hungary and Rome.

An even closer link with Rome is forged by Mieszko, the founder of the Polish kingdom. Deciding that his best hope of security lies in a western alliance, he adopts Roman Catholic Christianity in 966 and makes subtle use of the feudal system to win himself powerful protection.

He accepts the German emperor Otto I as his feudal lord, and shortly before his death goes one step better - placing Poland directly under the authority of the pope in Rome.

A much disputed border between Roman and Greek influence falls within the region known for much of the 20th century as Yugoslavia. Croatia, in the west, is Roman Catholic. Christian from the 7th century, it is an established duchy by 880; in 925 a Croatian ruler receives his crown directly from the pope. By contrast the ruler of Serbia, in the east, adopts the Greek Orthodox faith. In about 880 he invites disciples of Cyril and Methodius to educate his people.

This ancient division between two closely linked groups of Slavs is evident in their writing. Their shared language (called in recent times Serbo-Croatian) is written in the Roman script by the Croatians and in Cyrillic by the Serbians.


Greek Orthodox kingdoms: 9th - 10th century AD

The two great Slav kingdoms within the Greek Orthodox fold are Bulgaria and Russia. The rulers of both, according to tradition, weigh up the attractions of Rome and Constantinople. They choose the glories of the east.

The Bulgarian decision appears to be primarily political. The ruler, Boris I, is baptized in the Greek Orthodox church in 865, but for the next five years he plays Rome and Constantinople off against each other. In 870, when it is plain that Rome will not accept an independent Bulgarian patriarch, he brings his mainly pagan nation within the Byzantine fold (which allows greater independence to provincial churches).

The decision of the Russian ruler to embrace Greek Orthodoxy is presented in the traditional account as aesthetic rather than political. In about 987 the prince of Kiev, Vladimir, commissions a report which persuades him of the attractions of Byzantine Christianity.

It is a decision of profound importance for Orthodox Christianity, which in Russia finds its third great empire. Constantinople, the Christian seat of the Roman empire, becomes thought of as the second Rome. After its fall to the Turks, in 1453, Moscow is in place to take on the sacred mantle - describing itself proudly as the third Rome.


Source:HistoryWorld

Northwest Europe: 9th - 12th century AD

During the 9th and 10th century Scandinavia sends out the last great marauding group of Europeans, the Vikings. But the same period also sees the first settled kingdoms in the region.

By 811 Denmark has a king powerful enough to make a treaty with the Franks, and in the following century a Danish king, Harald Bluetooth, becomes the first Scandinavian ruler to convert to Christianity. He is baptized in about 960. A few years later a Norwegian king, Olaf I, takes the same step - between 995 and 999. Iceland becomes Christian in about 1000.

Denmark and Norway, linked in the 11th century in the empire of Canute, are by this time unshakably Christian kingdoms. But in the forests of Sweden the twin processes - unification and the defeat of paganism - begin later and take longer.

The first ruler of any part of Sweden to be baptized is Olaf, king of Götaland in the south, in about 1010. He and his successors struggle for more than a century against pagan rulers, whose most famous and jealously defended shrine is at Uppsala. Not until Uppsala is established as an archbishopric, in 1164, can Sweden be securely classified as Christian.


Feudal Europe: 10th - 15th century

Although feudalism develops as early as the 8th century, under the Carolingian dynasty, it does not prevail widely in Europe until the 10th century - by which time virtually the entire continent is Christian.

For the next 500 years, great accumulations of power and landed wealth pass between a few favoured players as if in a vast board game. The rules are complex, and to an outside eye deeply mysterious. But certain actions and qualifications bring a distinct advantage.

The top players in feudal Europe come from a small group of people - an aristocracy, based on skill in battle, with a shared commitment to a form of Christianity (at once power-hungry and idealistic) in which the pope in Rome has special powers as God's representative on earth. As a great feudal lord with moral pretensions, holding the ring between secular sovereigns, the pope can be seen as Europe's headmaster.

Bishops and abbots are part of the small feudal aristocracy, for they are mostly recruited from the noble families holding the great fiefs. Indeed bishops can often be found on the battlefield, fighting it out with with the best.

As in any other context, the strongest argument in feudalism - transcending the niceties of loyalty - is naked force. The Normans in England or in Sicily rule by right of conquest, and feudal disputes are regularly resolved in battle.

But feudalism also provides many varieties of justification for force. And the possession of a good justification is almost as reassuring to a knight as a good suit of armour.

One excellent excuse for warfare is the approval of the church. In 1059 the pope virtually commands the Normans to attack Sicily, by giving them feudal rights over territory not as yet theirs. Similarly Rome lets it be known that the Holy See is on the side of William when he invades England in 1066.

Another important form of justification is a dynastic claim to a territory. Generations of marriages, carefully arranged for material gain, result in an immensely complex web of relationships - reflected often in kingdoms of very surprising shape on the map of Europe.

A simple example is the vast swathe of land ruled over in the 12th century by Henry II. Stretching from Northumberland to the south of France, it has been brought together by a process of inheritance and dynastic marriage.

More complex, but equally typical of Christian feudalism, is the case of Sicily. In the 11th century the Normans seize it by invitation of the pope. In the 12th century the island is joined to distant Germany because the German king marries a Sicilian princess. And in the 13th century it is linked with France because the pope, intervening again, is now opposed to the Germans.


European prosperity: 12th - 14th century

The period differs profoundly from the previous five centuries in that it is no longer the people of Europe who are on the move. Since the declining years of the Roman empire, the Germanic tribes of the north have been jostling for space. Now they are settled. It is their leaders who are still restless for power, wealth and glory - within Europe but also to the east, where successive popes send them on crusades.

This change brings two contrasting results - a volatile scene of politics and warfare, with an underlying increase in stablity.

The shifting pattern of feudal alliances in medieval Europe is a process of surface adjustment. Corrections are made in long spasmodic conflicts, such as the Hundred Years War. Occasional victories between small numbers of heavily armed men redraw the map for succeeding generations.

Meanwhile the people of Europe are busy with matters of more basic importance - agriculture, crafts, trade and the development of commerce in towns of increasing wealth. Beneath the savage glitter of feudal Europe lies the steady growth of a continent capable once again of mighty achievements - evident, for example, in the spectacular Christian architecture of the period.


Intruders from the east: 13th - 14th century AD

The Russian steppes have long been vulnerable to invading groups of nomads, such as the Kipchak Turks. But from the 13th century Europe suffers much more violent incursions from the east.

In the long run the most successful intruders will be the Ottoman Turks, who first move into Europe through Gallipoli in 1354. But an earlier and more devastating destruction comes in the previous century with the arrival of the Mongols. They enter Russia in 1236. They sack Moscow in 1238 and Kiev in 1240. In 1241 they move further west and south.

One army from the Mongol horde advances into Poland in 1241. They defeat a joint force of German and Polish knights at Legnica in April. In the same month another Mongol army wins a crushing victory over the Hungarians at Mohi. The tribesmen spend that summer on the plains of Hungary, grasslands similar to their own steppes. Eastern Europe is ill-equipped to dislodge these fierce nomads. But a faraway event resolves the issue.

News comes in December that the great khan, Ogedai, has died in Karakorum. The leader of the horde, Batu, and other Mongol nobles must attend the quriltai which will elect his successor. Batu withdraws from Hungary, returning the horde to its grasslands around the Volga.


Ups and downs in the economy: 12th - 14th century AD

Throughout Europe the period from about 1150 to 1300 sees a steady increase in prosperity, linked with a rise in population. There are several reasons. More land is brought into cultivation - a process in which the Cistercians play an important part. Rich monasteries, controlled by powerful abbots, become a significant feature of feudal Europe.

In tandem with the improvement in rural wealth is the development of cities thriving on trade, in luxury goods as well as staple products such as wool.

Prominent among the trading centres of the 13th century are the coastal Italian cities, whose merchants ply the Mediterranean; Venice is particularly prosperous after the opportunities presented by the fourth crusade. In a similar way the cities of the Netherlands are well placed to profit from commerce between their three larger neighbours - England, France and the German states. And the Hanseatic towns handle the trade from the Baltic.

Together with this increase in trade goes the development of banking. Christian families, particularly in the towns of northern Italy, begin to amass fortunes by offering the financial services which have previously been the preserve of the Jews.

In the 14th century this economic prosperity falters. Land goes out of cultivation, the volume of trade drops. There are various possible reasons. There is an unusual run of disastrously bad harvests in many areas in the early part of the century. And social structures are painfully adjusting, as the old feudal system of obligations crumbles.

The final straw is the Black Death, which not only kills a third of Europe's population in 1348-9; it also ushers in an era when plague is a recurrent hazard. The 14th century is not the best in which to live. But in the 15th century - the time of the Renaissance in Europe, and the age of exploration - economic conditions improve again.

The economic troubles of the 14th century are reflected in disorder and unrest throughout much of Europe. This is true both at a grassroots level, in a series of peasants' revolts, and among great institutions of state. The papacy is unsettled, in exile in Avignon. France and England are engaged in the futile rivalry of the Hundred Years' War. The condottieri wreak havoc in Italy.

Bohemia is an exception, enjoying a period of stability under Charles IV. But the most significant political development, from the later part of the 14th century, is the accumulation of territory in the hands of the dukes of Burgundy.


The duchy of Burgundy: AD 1369-1491

Ever since the creation of Francia Media, Burgundy has been an important realm at the heart of western Europe - sometimes within the German empire, sometimes linked to the French kingdom, sometimes split between the two.

From the late 10th century the western part of Burgundy, lying to the west of the Saône river, is held as a dukedom by a junior line of the French royal family - first the Capetians and then, from 1363, the Valois.

Burgundy's rise to the status of a major European power begins in 1369 when the first Valois duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, marries Margaret, heiress to the county of Flanders.

The couple come into their Flemish inheritance in 1384. They and their descendants steadily increase their territories, aiming particularly to bridge the gap between Burgundy and the Netherlands with acquisitions such as Luxembourg (in 1443).

By 1470 their great-grandson Charles the Bold rules a vast territory stretching from Burgundy and Franche-Comté in the south through Alsace up to Friesland in the extreme north and then down the Atlantic coast as far as Calais.

In name Charles rules only a duchy. In reality he has an empire. But he has no son. The heir to these vast possessions is a daughter, Mary. As Europe's greatest marital prize she falls to a family, the Habsburgs, whose specialization is advantageous marriages. The Habsburgs bring dignity rather than territory. The head of their house, Frederick III, is the Holy Roman emperor.

From 1473 secret negotiations are undertaken between the Holy Roman emperor and Charles the Bold. The proposed bargain is that Frederick III will raise Burgundy from the status of a duchy to that of a kingdom, in return for which Charles's daughter Mary will marry Frederick's son Maximilian.

When Charles dies in battle in January 1477, neither plan has come to fruition. But it suits Burgundy to clinch this imperial alliance as security against its neighbour, France. The marriage plans are hurried through. Maximilian weds Mary by proxy in March and in person in August.

The French king, Louis XI, makes strenuous efforts to recover the part of the Burgundian inheritance which has been most closely linked to the French crown - the duchy of Burgundy to the west of the river Saône. He also covets the Franche-Comté ('free county' of Burgundy) to the east of the river, historically linked to the German empire but recently French.

The betrothal of his son to a Habsburg princess promises to secure both these territories for Louis. But in 1491 a different marriage is arranged for his son - bringing another prize, that of Britanny. The result is that only the duchy of Burgundy is merged with France, leaving everything east of the Saóne to the Habsburgs.


Source:HistoryWorld