Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll Read Free Book Online

individual’s status was furthered by working for the collective, meaning that women too had an important role to play in the formulation and implementation of policy. Cooperation was not achieved by the enforcement of patriarchal discipline alone, since this could never by itself ensure harmonious affective relationships. Rather, wealth and power was distributed in such a way as to ensure equilibrium between family members, so good provision was made for younger sons and daughters, who were expected to show deference and loyalty in return. Ecclesiastical property and patronage were crucial to the maintenance of this strategy. The Guise aspired and lived up to their motto, engendering a clan mentality, the nature of which was reinforced by their distinctive origins and status among the princely houses of France.
    The Guise descended from the most ancient surviving House of the Franco-Imperial borderlands. During the sixteenth century, genealogists would fancifully trace that descent as far back as the Carolingians and the creation of the kingdom of Lotharingia, the territory that lay between the Meuse and the Rhine, in 855—the implication being that the pedigree of the House of Lorraine was greater than that of the ruling House of Valois, who had replaced the ruling Capetian dynasty as recently as 1328, when the innovation of the Salic law had conveniently prevented succession in the female line. However, in the struggle with the House of Lancaster over this legal technicality, which came to be known as the Hundred Years’ War, the dukes of Lorraine were faithful allies of the Valois. An early example was Raoul, Duke of Lorraine, who acquired in 1334, among other French possessions, the seigneury of Guise when he married the niece of King Philip IV; he was killed by the English at Crécy in 1346.
    The true origins of the Guise were more recent. The lineage was the product of the dynastic convolutions of the Houses of Lorraine and Anjou in the fifteenth century. The extinction of the elder ducal line of Lorraine in 1428 triggered a conflict into which the great powers of Valois, Lancaster, and Burgundy were drawn: the duchy was recurrently the focus of Franco-Burgundian power politics right down to 1477. The succession war was a classic confrontation between the heir in the female line, Good King René of Anjou, Count of Provence and King of Naples and Sicily; and the heir in the junior male line, Antoine de Lorraine, Count of Vaudémont and sire of Joinville.
    Despite crushing the Angevins at the battle of Bulgnéville in 1431, Vaudémont could not unseat René. Nonetheless, the very favourable terms which he secured for ending his challenge were the roots of the close association which developed between the two lineages. Particularly important was the marriage of Antoine’s eldest son Ferry and René’s daughter Yolande d’Anjou: it was through Yolande’s right that her son René II claimed the duchy on the death of Nicolas d’Anjou, the last surviving son of Good King René, in 1473.
    René II’s title was not secure and he now had to confront the greatest power in the region, the Duke of Burgundy. It was only in 1477, after the great triumph of the Lorraine and their Swiss allies at the battle of Nancy, where the body of Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy, lay humiliatingly unclaimed for two days, that René enjoyed undisturbed possession of Lorraine. René owed much of his success to the support of King Louis XI, and because of this alliance he was unable or unwilling to secure recognition as heir to the duchy of Anjou and county of Provence when Good King René finally died in 1480. Nevertheless, Angevin claims to Provence and the kingdom of Naples and Sicily were never forgotten and were incorporated into his coats of arms. How far his pretensions depended on French support was demonstrated in 1485 when an attempt to remove the Aragonese, who had installed themselves in Naples, ended in dismal failure.