The Regency of Isabelle d'Aragon : 1501-1505
"Paris is like a chair in which a rat died. You can get comfortable in it, even come to like it... but by God does it stink." Isabella de Aragon
France in 1500-1501
At the end of the Italian Wars, France was the next thing to bankrupt. It had undergone four major wars in the past 10 years, and had had to recruit significant amounts of new troops to cover for the losses. In addition, lots had been spent on colonising Atlantis, building up a sizeable navy, making a few Tortues and expanding the artillery park. Then again, France was a modern centralised state with extensive lands and thus a large income.
As such, while the treasury was exhausted and the French people tired of high taxes, the end of the Fourth Italian War was followed by Isabella de Aragon taking the reigns of the regency. Of course, the Bourbons could also claim it due to Anne de Bourbon being young Philippe's great-aunt. However, a working agreement was rapidly reached, with Anne de Beaujeu coming to accept the complex diplomatic task of finding brides for the various Valois and Bourbon bachelors while Isabella de Aragon grabbed with a firm hand the finances and the administration.
It had become obvious over the years that while Touraine was great from all points of view - climate, constructible area, trade - it just couldn't replace Paris. Champagne, Touraine and Lyon might have been the economic hearts of France, but Paris was just too big to ignore. Hence her decision, taken in November, that every year she would spend the winter in the Louvre palace, in Paris, before returning to the marvelous castles of the Loire. Her entry in Paris was struck by horrible weather - as she would write in her journal, Paris "was that day the most rainy, stinky, overpopulated and chaotic city she had ever seen". During her days in the Louvre, the Francisation of her name - Isabelle d'Aragon - would become dominant in most of her still Aragonicised personal court.
Taxation and Administration
The first measure taken by the Regent was to call in the États Généraux, in order to set a sustainable peacetime tax rate. It took a few months of backseat haggling, but finally the taxes were indeed lowered, but to a level high enough to give the Crown a lot of slack. While of course a lot of said slack would go into restoring the armed forces to their previous state of efficiency, a significant portion would serve to embellish the Louvre and the castles of Touraine and Anjou. The rest would be spent in what has been remembered as the main achievement of the Regency : the Parisian Sewage.
Like most of the cities of the era, Paris had open-air sewage. Which meant whenever people had personal waste to get rid of, they just threw it in the streets. As such, many of the streets of Paris and other cities had slight slopes to make it flow downhill, down into the Seine.
As such, what the Queen Regent ordered in 1502 was the replacing of the closest gutters by closed metallic pipes with regularly placed holes - lead being the chosen metal - that would release the fertilising agents into the river directly. The streets next to the Louvre rapidly got cleaner. In June 1503, a delegation of Parisian merchants visited Amboise to plead to the Queen for her to expand her system to the rest of Paris, the stench becoming even worse in summer and only being manageable where the sewage existed.
The Parisian Sewage would progressively be built during the Regency, only being completed in 1509.
Military evolution.
The battle of Zähringen had been catastrophic for France, losing hundreds of thousands of Écus' worth of artillery in a few days. The main issue spotted by Isabelle was the lack of mobility. Indeed, even when horse-drawn, the artillery pieces were not fast enough and could easily be caught up with by infantry, never mind cavalry. In the early few years of her regency, instead of renewing the artillery park to its pre-Zähringen size, the Crown's Ecus were instead spent trying to find a way to reduce the weight of the artillery. However, this mostly failed due to the lack of improvements in material quality and in cannon technology. As a consequence, though, a large amount of purpose-designed carts were built to carry around the artillery at a slightly faster pace. Of course, it still had to be dismounted to be fired, but that was a given.
Also, the Tortues had been deemed while a significant advantage, likely not as cost-effective as regular artillery. Hence the construction of further Tortues, as was that of Vinci's caravels, was suspended for a five-year period.
Diplomatic tractations
After the agreement with Isabelle d'Aragon, Anne de Beaujeu had gone looking for potential suitors for the King and his elder sister. A Savoyard and a Neapolitan alliance were both discussed, but the Savoyards finally got to engage Charlotte de France with the Duke's son, Philibert de Savoie.
However, a much more prestigious alliance was to be negotiated for Philippe VIII. After many exchanges with Buda, a match between Katalin Korvin and Philippe would be arranged.
In the meantime, she had also arranged a significant alliance for herself, as her elder son, Charles de Clermont, married in 1501 Katalina Naffaroakoa, the Queen of Navarre. This would drag Navarre into the French sphere due to the significant Auvergnat holdings of the Bourbons.
The other politically significant marriages would be that of Charles d'Angoulême, Duke of the Caroline Isle, with Ippolita Sforza, eldest daughter of the Duke of Emilia Gian Galeazzo in 1505, and that of François de Longueville, Governor of Genoa, with Philippe de Bresse's daughter Louise.
