The Land of Wine and Beer - Story-Only thread

The Land of Wine and Beer - Story-Only Thread


"My threads are undead, in that, they're never completely dead. I occasionally come back and think «Hey, I should make a new update!»"OP, for the obligatory quote.​

Hey everybody, I was thinking it would be nice to have the past chapters of Land of Wine and Beer all in one thread, so as to gain time. The chapters here will have a slightly different layout, there may be some minor modifications in names/titles and to the army compositions, but overall, the timeline will remain sensibly the same.

Context
But first, let me recapitulate the basis of this timeline. In the end of the XVth century, several royal houses went extinct in Western Europe : the Yorks, the Trastamaras, the Valois cadet houses of Bourgogne and Anjou. This left three major houses in Western Europe : the Habsburgs, suddenly a juggernaut, the Tudors, well-entrenched in England, and the Valois(-Orléans and -Angoulème). No less than three major West European powers (not including Hungary and Bohemia in the XVIth century) ended up inherited by a fourth one. This is monstrous, and has remained unequaled in the times that followed.
It is possible to date back the beginning of that post-medieval Game of Thrones to the Treaties of Péronne and Picquigny, which ended the French civil war and the French Succession war (ATL name for the Hundred Years War), in 1470 and 1475, or, more precisely, to the breaking of the treaty of Péronne by the King of France Louis XI "the Spider", one of the major protagonists of the first part of this TL. The breaking provisions of the Treaty of Péronne basically made the Duchy of Burgundy and the various other French lands owned by Charles the Bold independent from France.

POD(s)
The POD chosen is that Louis XI, instead of having his lawyers invalidate the Treaty of Péronne for having been signed under constraint, decides to stick to the treaty so as to keep Burgundy at hand, and perhaps get lucky in a later war. This makes Charles the Bold and Louis XI keep better relations that they had OTL, and allows (2nd POD) Louis XI to offer a partition of the domains of the Valois-Anjou. This is obviously interesting to both parties, since it allows Burgundy to have peace and France to use its money for better purposes than buying out enemies to fight Burgundy. Furthermore, it allows Burgundy to invade Lorraine without French interference.
The 3rd POD is described in the prelude : Charles of Burgundy goes fully anti-Habsburg and disinherits his daughter if she was to get married with one.

Timeline aims
Overall, the aim of this TL is stopping the formation of the monstrous Habsburg Empire, and instead use those conditions to allow a very powerful France to come into existence. Therefore, the decks are stacked for France during the whole end of the XVth century.
Of course, humor and a Rule of Cool are implemented randomly, including a French discovery of Atlantis (America), a sand throne in Catalonia, hidalgos charging windmills in Castille, and amusing quotes at every chapter/update.

The posts here will be closely linked to those in the original thread (see my sig) but will cover each one or two years instead of a variable time-span in a delimited area. Any comments should be posted there : THE MAIN THREAD

Next update : the Cast as of 1473 (This will be completely redone. There are quite a few missing characters there)
 
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Cast as of 1473

The Cast as of 1473 : TTL's characters and countries between 1473 and 1485
"Any resemblance with historical characters is purely intentional", OTL American wartime propaganda animated cartoon​

Iberia
In 1473, there are still 5 states in Iberia : the Kingdom of Castilla y Leon, the Kingdom of Portugal, the Kingdom of Aragon (which also includes various titles like Count of Barcelona, King of Majorca, King of Valencia, King of Sicily and King of Sardinia), the Kingdom of Navarra (tiny Navarra is in personal union with Aragon for now) and the Emirate of Granada.

Kingdom of Castilla y Leon (house of Trastamara)
While the kingdom is clearly dominant in the Iberian peninsula, it is on the brink of civil war, since the King Enrique IV de Castilla y Leon, a weak-willed old man who did a little crusading in Andalucia earlier in his reign, has no male heir. It is therefore divided between the partisans of his daughter Juana de Castilla and his half-sister Isabella de Castilla.
Notable among the Juanistas are the Archbishop of Toledo and the Marquess of Villar, while the Archbishop of Sevilla Cardinal Mendoza is a known Isabellista.
Kingdom of Portugal and the Algarves(Capétien house of Aviz)
While a few traders already start exploring from the Western kingdom, the country prospers. Alfonso V, the King, has led a few campaigns in Morocco and conquered archipelagoes. He is getting interested in the threatening civil war in Castilla y Leon. His son Joao is known as 'the perfect prince', and is in good way to becoming a very good king.
Kingdom of Aragon, Majorca, Valencia, Sicily and Sardinia, County of Barcelona (House of Trastamara)
The Mediterranean trading kingdom is ruled by an old man with two adult sons. Not much has happened there, apart from a civil war against the Capétien house of Valois-Anjou led by René de Provence when Juan II was only 60. Only. The King's sons, Fernando and Alfonso de Aragon, are correct generals.
Kingdom of Navarra
It is in personal union with Aragon, after the King of Aragon usurped the kingdom of his eldest son at his death.
Emirate of Granada
Currently catching its breath after the last Castillan crusades over there.

Italy
Italy doesn't take much part in the first part of the story, apart from Savoy.
Duchy of Savoy (House of Savoy)
The mountain duchy is one of the Burgundians' loyal allies. It is currently in a regency for Duke Philibert under his mother Yolande de France, the King of France's sister. Philibert has a brother Charles and an uncle Philippe "Lackland" de Bresse.
Kingdom of Peninsular Sicily (Naples) (house of Trastamara)
The Kingdom of Naples is not a nice place to live. The King, Ferrante, is the bastard of the previous King of Aragon, and is a brutal and ruthless man who only reigns through coercion and terror. As a consequence, his neighbors strongly dislike him, seeing him as a cruel and dissimulating King. A while ago, he defeated Jean de Calabre, the Valois-Anjou claimant as son of René d'Anjou.

France & Lowlands
Kingdom of France (land of Wine)
(House of Valois)
The Kingdom of France is led by Louis XI 'the Careful', who is known as "l'universelle aragne" or Louis the Spider King. He has spent the few first years of his reign trying to grab Burgondian lands and trying not to have his grabbed. This has stopped after the treaty of Péronne which instaured an uneasy peace between the cousins. (POD : Péronne is not invalidated) Since then he grabs others of his vassals' lands. He is certainly the most machiavelian king around, and is also a very competent administrator.
Economically speaking, France is still recovering from the not-yet-finished Hundred Years' War, but this is militarily speaking covered up by the well-trained, well-organized troops France inherited the previous King Charles le Bien Servi. The Dauphin is Charles de Valois, and is a weak kid which isn't very brilliant either. France has two good generals available, Philippe de Crèvecoeur and Jean de Comminges. Aside from them, there is also the Duke of Orléans, Louis, who is Charles's cousin and brother-in-law, since he married Jeanne de France.
Duchy of Anjou (in personal union with the County of Provence) (house of Valois-Anjou)
The Duke of Anjou is a very popular old man, René aka the "Good King René" since he is titular king of Aragon and Naples. His daughters have married Charles du Maine and Louis the Spider. His son Jean de Calabre died in Naples and his grandson Nicolas is now Duke of Lorraine.
Duchy of Burgundy (lands of Beer) (house of Valois-Bourgogne)
The country is led by Charles the Bold, who only has a daughter named Mary.
The Duke's nickname is well-deserved, being excessively brave and a bit rash. In his person he shows both the best and the worst of the Valois-Burgondy, as he is too pushy for fine diplomacy, but a very chivalrous duke, and his sponsoring of artists stained by his utter ruthlessness, as when he burnt and pillaged the rebellious city of Dinant. Ever heard of it ? It's because he burnt it.
The Duchy is a massive prosperous realm whose main inconvenient is its being split in halves, the Burgondies and Netherlands. Had Charles a reason, or simply an occasion to invade Lorraine or Champagne, he would doubtlessly seize it.
Duchy of Lorraine (house of Anjou)
The Duchy is at war with the Bishopric of Metz Nicolas d'Anjou is trying to take Metz from. He has been promised Marie of Burgondy. His death on July 27th, 1473, while trying to take Metz to round up his realm, will kick the butterfly flower. His heir is René de Vaudémont of the House of Lorraine.

Germanic lands of the HRE
Archduchy of Hither Austria
(House of Habsburg)
The Duchy of Hither Austria is the personal fief of the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich von Habsburg, who is very, very busy losing a war against Mathias Corvin and is considering getting help everywhere he can. The Emperor is a bit weak-willed and deeply admires Charles de Bourgogne.
His son Maximilian however shows great promise.
Archduchy of Further Austria (House of Habsburg)
The Archduchy of Further Austria is made of the lands of the Habsburg dynasty outside Austria and Styria proper. It includes the counties of Sundgau (Southern Alsace), Brisgau (on the other side of the Rhine), Austrian Swabia, and Tyrol. It is led by Sigismund von Habsburg. Brisgau and Sundgau are currently under Burgundian occupation before Sigismund pays war debts to Burgundy.

Britain
Kingdom of England
(House of York)
Currently owned by Edward IV of England. His brother Richard of Gloucester eyes the throne. The Prince of Wales is also called Edward and also has a brother named Richard. Still owns Calais, and still hasn't ended the French Succession War with France. Henry Tudor will occasionally try to claim the throne.

Next chapter : 1473
 
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Chapters for 1473

1473​
"There is an amount of death flags in stories. Like saying it's the last day before you retire, for example, or writing one's will." alt-Tvtropes.​

Timeline
30th October - 25th November : Conference of Trier. See "The Running Emperor".
10th December : Death of René de Lorraine under the walls of Metz.
19th December : Treaty of Reims between Louis XI and Charles de Bourgogne. See "The Parts in Partitions".
25th December : Charles de Bourgogne writes his will. See the Prelude.

The Running Emperor (as per OTL)

Charles de Bourgogne's chivalrous, flamboyant personnality gave him numerous admirors, among which the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich III von Habsburg. The Emperor had once offered Charles' father Philippe "le Bon" de Bourgogne to make the Duchy of Brabant, "one of the oldest and most renowned in Christendom", a kingdom. Philippe had refused, wanting to be king of all his lands and not just part of them. Now Charles and Friedrich were in Trier negociating a resurection of the Kingdom of Burgundy.
This kingdom would include, besides Burgundian lands in the Holy Roman Empire, the duchies of Lorraine, Savoie and Kleve as well as the episcopates of Liège, Toul, Verdun, Metz, and Utrecht as dependencies. In exchange Charles's daughter Marie of Bourgogne would marry Maximilian von Habsburg. However, Charles insisted the Swiss should also be paying allegiance to him, which Friedrich could not offer, having lost all control on these lands in the past decade.
As discussions got increasingly heated, Friedrich's admiration for Charles progressively turned to fear. As a consequence, on the eve of the crowning Friedrich and Maximilian ran away by horse, leaving Charles let down uncrowned at the altar.

The Part in Partition

Charles had returned to Dijon furious. He started thinking of putting siege to the imperial city of Neuß, as a perhaps petty form of revenge, but which would still help him enlarge his demesne. It was at that moment that he received a messenger from his cousin of France, Louis XI. Charles wasn't exactly fond of Louis due to repeated family squabbles on the ownership of the Somme river cities and because he considered him a traitorous coward. However, seeing the letter made a reference to Lorraine as a land ripe for the grabbing, he accepted to meet the Spider as soon as possible in Reims. After all, Louis had proved he could occasionally be true to his word when Charles's allegiance was at stake.
Thus they met on December 14th in Reims. Louis smilingly greeted his "good cousin the Prince of Burgundy", thus raising his title (The title would only be officially confirmed at the New Year of 1474) as a means of soothing Charles before directly reaching the core of the subject : the House of Valois-Anjou was going extinct. Of this branch only remained René d'Anjou; his son had died long ago and his grandson four days before the meeting. The members of the House of Anjou had obtained various titles which could easily be extracted from the old Duke, notably claims to the thrones of the Aragonese Trastamara. Besides that, Lorraine, Provence and Anjou could also be taken over.
Anjou, being an apanage, would return to Louis at René's death, and so would Provence (after a passage in Charles du Maine's hands) as Louis was René's nephew. Lorraine, on the other hand, was going to another granddaughter.
Louis was not interested in Lorraine, having a claim which was at best whacky, and he knew Charles would do anything to land-grab it. On the other hand, Charles was not interested in any far-away kingdom as these kingdoms had large ressources, and an attempted conquest would give his gueux more occasions to revolt.
Therefore, the contents of the treaty of Reims the French King and the Duke of Burgundy signed on December 19th are unsurprising. Indeed, it leaves most of the Angevin claims and lands to the Spider - except for the Duchies of Bar and Lorraine. Of course, René d'Anjou would have to be "relieved" of these before any sort of conquest. In case a power that wasn't claimed by the Angevins was declaring war to either of the signatories (which was intended as being England), the other one would come to the rescue.
Charles returned to Dijon unusually satisfied with his cousin's behavior and offers, yet still mad against Friedrich. This explains the will described in the Prologue.

Prologue
Dijon, Christmas 1473.
Some room in the ducal palace.

"Bring me some parchment, a feather and some ink!" yelled a man wearing a hat full of various jewels, as he entered the room. He took off his hat, turned to the chair, and the materials were there. Then he started writing. After all, a will is a cheaper way to get avenged than a siege.
"I, Charles, Duke of Burgundy, Flanders, Brabant, Limbourg, and Luxembourg, Palatine count of Hainaut, Burgondy, Holland, Zeeland, Frisia and Namur, count of Artois, Picardy, Charolais and Rethel, sane in body and mind, hereby declare the following to be my will :
1) Should I have no son, I wish that all my lands go to my daughter Marie, unless she marries a member of the house of Habsburg.
2) Should Marie marry a member of the house of Habsburg, these lands shall be inherited according to salic law, to my cousin Louis XI or his heirs on the French throne
."
Followed a long list of varied donations to the artists that, like his illustrious ancestors, the Duke was protecting, and a hefty one to the Chartreuse of Champmol where he was to be buried alongside his father and grandfather.
"In Dijon, 25th December of 1473,
Charles
"
He stopped, scratched his head, and had his willed be registered and copied twice by his chambellan. Then he applied his seal, the lion of Burgondy, on each of the copies.
One copy was sent to Brussels, the heart of Brabant and of his Northern provinces. A second one stayed in Dijon, the capital of his Southern estates, and he carried the third one with himself.
 
1474​
"Vis bellum, para bellum." Jacques de La Palisse, who didn't know he spoke latin​


Timeline
March : Annexation of Armagnac
24th July : Coup of Les Ponts de Cé
11th December : Death of Enrique IV de Castilla, King of Castille-Leon.


War Preparations
1474 saw both France and Burgundy prepare for war, but what was new is that it wasn't for warring each other. While the French army was permanent, well-trained and well-organized, it was a small peacetime army, only fit for warring feudal lords - which was it was being used for in Aquitaine and Armagnac - and not invading neighboring Great Powers. To war the Aragonese Trastamara, Louis needed to expand his army. Burgundy didn't have this problem. The series of rebellions in the Netherlands it unexplicably had had to quell had ensured the Burgondian army was large. However it was mostly made of mercenaries, which were costly and occasionnally disorderly. Burgondy thus trained local troops as a cheaper and more disciplined alternative to mercenaries.
In summer 1474, Charles reminded to his cousin lost in paperwork that he was supposed to meet his uncle. As a consequence Louis made his move on July 21st. He sent a messenger to René d'Anjou informing him that to deal with the reorganisation of Armagnac and Aquitaine, he needed to spend a few nights in Anjou before reaching Poitou. He then started heading to René's castle of Les Ponts de Cé. René however had a bad surprise waiting for him. While he was glad to provide a house for his royal nephew, he had opened the doors of his castle wide open. Meanwhile, Louis had come with quite a few men-of-arms. René was way too old to fight his nephew, so he tried to break a deal pointing at how indignated he was to have been betrayed by his nephew.
Louis had started by asking all of the inheritance, right now. Of course, he knew René would never agree. It was simply a way to show he was open to compromise, by dropping Provence temporarily.
Anjou, however, was a very rich province. Louis obtained Anjou and Angevin claims to the Aragonese Trastamara lands and to Lorraine as well as a favored situation in the Provençal succession. Of course, it was what Louis had wanted all along. René then left to Provence, where the people of Aix-en-Provence greeted their "Bon Roi René".
The last noteworthy event of the year was the death of Enrique IV de Castilla on December 11th. The day after his burial, his half-sister Isabella had herself crowned Queen of Castille and Leon, forcing Enrique's daughter Juana to seek help in Portugal. This triggered the Castillan Succession War and degenerated with French intervention. The French called it the War of the Iberian March.
 
1475​

"There's only one thing more destructive than a civil war. A succession war." Louis the Spider, on the War of the Roses
"Sand, Rock, Iron, whatever ! A king only sits on thrones and beds."
Louis the Spider


Timeline
Ongoing : War of the Iberian March / Castillan Succession War
_______ : Second Hungarian-Imperial War
_______ : Wallachian civil war.
February : the Poles agree to make peace at Breslau
15th May : Portugal invades the Kingdom of Castille-Leon
13th September : France declares war on Aragon
Mid-October : Burgundian invasion of Lorraine.
31st October : Battle of L'Escala
End-October - 28th November : 1st Siege of Nancy.

The Castillan Succession War : Context and beginning
The Castillan Succession War is a tricky affair. Both sides had at least some legitimacy to their claim and a reason not to be left in power. On the Western side you had Juana de Castilla (therefore leading the Juanistas), the rightful heir to the Castillan throne, which enjoyed the support of numerous powerful Castillan nobles. However not only was she still quite young, but neither did she have a husband to help her handle the affairs of State. On the Eastern side throned Isabella de Castilla. A treaty in 1470 had made her the heir to the Castillan throne and she was the one who had already been crowned, late in 1474. However, the treaty's provisions included she was to remain sterile and unmarried; her marriage with Fernando de Aragon was a breach of the treaty which left her little more than an usurper. However, while Juana was dependent on the nobles' ressources, Isabella could rely on the royal demesne and more importantly Aragonese ressources.
Alfonso V de Avis, King of Portugal and the Algarves was very rapidly a game-changer. While Juana had decided to throne in Toro for the duration of the civil war, she had also decided she needed to marry him. As a consequence, on May 15th Alfonso invaded Castille and Leon. Ten days later, Alfonso married Juana in Toro. However, this move lost Juana some noble support, as Castillans were afraid of the power it would give to Portugal over Castille. That opinion could (and would) be used easily to erode even further Juanista support by skillful negociation. Still, the main contribution of Alfonso was bringing the French to intervene. France had been concerned by the whole shebang as while Castille was a staunch French ally, Aragon was an enemy of France, so an Isabellista victory would simply turn an annoyance into a full-fledged threat. On the other hand, a Juanista victory would be interesting to France as it would maintain the balance of power in Iberia, since Alfonso was old and could die any moment. What's more, he already had a son. This would break apart the Castillan-Portuguese personnal union and restore the balance.
To be able win the succession war, France needed it to be seen as a "family matter". Invading Castille would be counter-productive as it would alienate too many nobles for Juana to ever have a stable rule in case of a victory, which wasn't even guarantied. On the other hand, to wreck Isabellista support, all that was needed was invading Aragon.
On September 10th, Juan II of Aragon received word that many French companies were gathering near Montpellier. Three days later, he received a formal declaration of war from Louis the Spider. The French army numbered 15 thousand men, more than what France had fielded at the battle of Châtillon, and still had many more in training. Perpignan and Cerdagne were easily taken over by the Valois army as the Spider King was count of Roussillon and Cerdagne. The French army then followed the coast, stopping to seize Empuries, and went on towards Girona. An emergy army of 10000 men was raised by Juan II to stop the French before Girona, and it was channelled by boat to the fishing village of L'Escala. The French army was close enough to force the Aragonese to fight on the beach, but only on the following day, All Hallow's Eve. The battle would be known as the Battle of l'Escala/L'Escale.
L'Escale is considered a typical example (albeit on smaller scale than the 1477 and 1478 campaigns) of French war doctrine in the 1470s. Unsurprisingly, its reliance on obvious advantages (including the colossal French numerical advantage) simply hid the few flaws of the system.

Battle of l'Escale : Settings


The battlefield in L'Escale was an average mediterranean beach, that is a tilted plane with a slope of 2 or 3 % for approximately a hundred meters followed by bushy maquis.
The French forces, which had arrived from the North, were made of 8000 missile troops (3000 longbowmen, 4000 crossbowmen, 1000 arquebusiers), 3800 footmen (one-third halberders, one third pikemen, and one third morgensterns), 2000 knights, 1000 lancers and fifty canons with 4 servants each. They were led by King Louis himself on a special sand throne he built with a few foot soldiers. The small proportional amount of footmen and the large amounts of cavalry come because of the longer training time of the footmen with respect to the crossbowmen, whereas the cavalry had been easier to levy from the nobility. There were still 7000 more missile troops and 8000 more foot soldiers in training in the French provinces.
They were deployed as followed : the bulk of the French foot soldiers and missile troops were on the center and West of the beach. In front of them had been placed the canons. On the East were deployed the knights and 900 lancers. The remaining lancers as well as 300 foot soldiers and 150 crossbowmen had been deployed in the maquis in case an occasion appeared or simply to make the Aragonese more bloody. They were to move from Northwest to Southwest.
On the other side, the Aragonese, led by Alfonso de Aragon, counted 1500 missile troops (mostly crossbowmen), 30 canons, 6400 foot soldiers, 1500 knights, and 500 lancers. The Aragonese had managed to scrape together using the bushes, boats' materials and a few logs from the fisher village to make a hemispheric hedgehog fortification oriented towards the Northwest. A few traps had been placed North of it. The canons had been placed in the West, the cavalry tasked with protecting the waterline in the East and the foot soldiers and missile troops were manning the small fortification.

Battle


King Louis was far from being a novice general. However, he decided to take careful action, based on the following general rules : flanking an army reduces its chances of victory. Taking or destroying its canons makes it more vulnerable. And finally only your cavalry should be allowed to charge.
The French attacked at dawn, using a rain of arrows and canonballs which disorganised the Aragonese for a small while. Most of the rain was concentrated against the cavalry, hoping to take it out before it could do anything. It didn't. The Aragonese cavalry charged headlong towards the French infantry. The canonballs delayed the Aragonese along with the Aragonese traps for long enough to see the Aragonese cavalry half attacked from up front and half flanked by the French cavalry. The Aragonese were pushed into their own traps and on their own pikes. After scattering the enemy knights, the French returned to their position to regroup. At this moment the Aragonese missile troops started running out of arrows. A few minutes later, a small French party appeared from the bushes and seized the canons and fired it at the Aragonese. The fierce fighting around the canons distracted most Aragonese infantry for a while. The French cavalry used the occasion to charge on the remains of the Aragonese cavalry through the shallow water so as to avoid traps, while the French guns finally breached the Aragonese fortification. The foot soldiers were then sent on a massive assault. The three-pronged attack shattered Aragonese morale, and the Aragonese forces half-melted down, half were killed standing. Alfonso de Aragon is captured, the Aragonese are running to Girona without any supplies nor artillery.

Aftermath and casualties' count


The French have taken in the battle 23 canons to their 8 lost in anti-battery fire. They have lost 250 cavalry, among which 200 lancers, 700 foot soldiers and 1100 missile troops. An estimated 450 knights have been taken as prisonners to be released for ransom at the next truce. On the opposite side, the Aragonese are down to 300 knights, 100 lancers, 2500 foot soldiers and 650 missile troops.
The French have not been capable of building on this battle, having spent too many supplies before the siege of Girona. However, their return to Perpignan and Empuries allows them to integrate large amounts of reinforcements, reaching a total strength of 20000 men.
The Spider's Sand Throne, now a stone statue, still sits in the middle of the village of l'Escale thanks to the Spider King, knowing the importance of propaganda, paying the villagers to maintain it.

Meanwhile, in Wallachia
Meanwhile, in Wallachia, the civil war goes on. The Moldavian candidate, Basarab III Laiotă del Bătrân, has recovered the title of Voivode of Wallachia from the Ottoman candidate, Radu III cel Frumos, which dies not in battle but from Syphilis in January. This was helped by Moldavian troops led by Stefan cel Mare, Voivode of Moldavia, scoring a decisive victory against the Ottomans at Vaslui despite being at a 3:1 force ratio. Despite that, Basarab finds himself unable to resist the Ottoman strength, and turns his back on his former ally.

And, in Burgundy and Lorraine

Burgundy had run into a lot of enemies in the past, and since de facto truces didn't always transfer into a full-fledged peace treaty (or truce agreement), Charles de Bourgogne was more or less at war with quite a lot of people, notably with the Swiss. However, not much had happened until then, as most of the fighting had taken place between his ally, the Count of Romont and lord of Vaud, Jacques de Savoia, and the Swiss. Meanwhile, he had built up an army from mercenaries and a small, cheaper core of Burgondian troops. Just as his cousin Louis had felt the time was ripe to invade Aragon, he saw the opportunity to invade Lorraine, which would link Alsace he had bought (or rather he temporarily occupied while waiting for money), the Burgondies and the Netherlands.
This is why his troops entered Lorraine in mid-October 1475. His troops marching quickly, Nancy was being lain siege to by the end of the month, and it fell between November 24th and 29th of that year. He very rapidly decided to make Nancy his capital, forcing René de Lorraine to flee to Bern.
 
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1476
"Oncques Aragon ne vit d'armée plus décourageante que celle de la France, car plus elle vaincquait, plus elle croissait." Histoire de France : 1470-1490, Where the Spider dwells
"The main proof of Barcelona's decline from the XIVth century onwards is that it was conquered in 1476 by the French. Not that it could do much about it", Histoire de la Catalogne, tome 2 : la chute de l'Aragon
"The Lotharingia of old can and will be recreated by the Burgondians, sooner or later." Charles de Bourgogne


Timeline
Ongoing : Castillan Succession War
_______ War of the Catalan March
_______ Wallachian Civil War
Early January : War between the Swiss and Burgundy
1st March : Battle of Toro
2nd March : Battle of Grandson
11th March - 1st April : Siege of Girona
June : Battle of Morat
26th July : Battle of Valea Albă
2nd October - 6th November : Siege of Barcelona
18th December : Treaty of Zaragossa
December : Death of Vlad III "Țepeș" Basarab.

Introduction : the Fall of Catalonia


The winter of 1476 was a quite short one in Iberia. Military operations in Castille and Aragon were hardly even stopped, and even French moves were able to restart as early as March. Had they known of the expression, the Aragonese would've blamed the global warming. Either way, two decisive operations took place in March : the battle of Toro, in Leon, demoralized the Isabellista party and was arguably the turning point of the Castillan Succession War; and the Siege of Girona, which started ten days later, completed the humiliation suffered by the Aragonese at l'Escala.

Battle of Toro

The Battle of Toro is arguably the turning point in the Castillan Succession War. Not only did it ruin the Isabellista party's morale, but even worse, since even as the Aragonese support waned under the heavy blows of the French, the casualties taken by the Isabellista party were such that never more would the combined Isabellista forces equal the Juanistas' total numbers, never mind the Portuguese. The few victories here and there by the Isabellistas would not prove sufficient.
On the Juanista side, the Portuguese and Castillans had fielded approximately 5 000 infantrymen, including missile troops, and 3 500 horsemen. The army center was built around the Castillan and Portuguese knights, by adding to this core 4 bodies of footmen. The Archbishop of Toledo and a few Portuguese nobles manned a relatively weak left wing while the elite forces of the Portuguese army under Prince Joao of Portugal cover ed the right wing.
On the Isabellista, the mostly Castillan army fielded 4000 footmen and missile troops with 2500 horsemen. While popular milicias, hidalgos' troops and the Royal Guard made up the center, the left wing was made of heavy cavalry (mostly knights) and the right wing of 6 divisions of light cavalry.
Joao was the first one to send his troops into the battle, directly onto the heavy cavalry, pinning it and slowly butchering it. The fight was more or less equal, but slowly turned to Joao's favor, until the knights broke. Quarter of Joao's men were left to the center, while the rest with Joao pursued the heavy cavalry. The loss of his heavy cavalry disturbed Fernando enough for him to return to the Isabellista city of Zamora. He thus handled the command of Isabellista troops to Cardinal Mendoza, which sent his men against the rest of the Juanista army. While the left wing ended up fighting a delaying action, the elite troops of the Portuguese army helped the Juanista center block, and then repel the Isabellista center. When Joao finished mopping up the knights, gaining large amounts of prisoners in the meantime, he returned to the battlefield and ended up attacking the Aragonese-Castillan force in the back, which ultimately finished it as a fighting force.
The Juanistas then enjoyed a regular sacking of the Isabellistas' camp, and returned to theirs.
It took both the stature of Cardinal Mendoza and Prince Fernando of Aragon for the Isabellistas to regroup. The next day of the battle was basically a hour-long staring contest the Juanista force won.
While the Juanistas took something like 1 300 casualties, the Isabellista ones, including the captured knights, ranged in the 1 900. Far from being a bloodless battle, it still proved less bloody than L'Escale. The propaganda hit scored by the Portuguese allowed to keep themselves in the war by reducing their people's disgust for the war, while the Isabellistas were discredited and slowly the Juanistas started growing in numbers all across Castille.

Siege of Girona

The French army had not remained idle during the last few months after L'Escale. While the 10 thousand-strong Aragonese army had suffered from a casualty rate of 70%, the French 15% still was a dent in their army they had to recover from. This is where the troops in training were handy : there were more than 10 thousand troops still in training when the French army entered Catalonia, and an additionnal 3 thousand started training after the battle of L'Escale.
It is a 20-thousand strong French army that left Perpignan and Empuries under Jean de Comminges in early March to lay siege to Girona. A large garrison of 1 000 had been kept in Empuries in case the Aragonese try to attack them while busy in their siege, and 5 000 more had been left in Dax should the Navarrese attack.
The French army that left to Girona counted 70 canons, 9 000 missile troops, 3 000 knights, 2 000 lancers and 5 700 foot soldiers. This was half more than whatever population and troops probably laid in Girona.
The first step of the siege was gathering ressources. The French bought whatever they could in the days before the siege started and brought from Languedoc the rest. The city, after winter, was far from having stored all the food it could, and when the 3000-strong remains of the Aragonese army of L'Escale were counted, it was obvious that Girona wouldn't last long. Meanwhile, Juan II de Aragon hadn't managed to recruit troops enough to challenge or even significantly distract the French force.
On April 1st, Girona surrendered. The remains of the Aragonese army were treated as prisoners of war, but the city wasn't looted as the French had only spent a short siege with abundant foodstuffs and correct climate conditions and the French general had forbidden to loot the city.

French progress in Catalonia
Early in the war, the French had only taken over the coast. Now, they had to take over the mainland. The French army, with reinforcements, split into three equivalent groups of 7000 men. They were to take minor cities in inner Catalonia.
De Comminges sent the following orders to his men :
- Offer them money to surrender, up to 20 000 livres.
- If they surrender without actual fighting taking place, they can keep their walls and don't get looted.
- If they surrender after some fighting, the walls will have to be destroyed.
- If the walls are breached and the guards surrender, same as above.
- If the guard fights, kill all the guard.
- If civilians attack (only the captain is allowed to decide what is attack), the city gets looted.
The scheme worked well enough that before September ended, only Tarragona and Barcelona weren't kept by a small French guard. Berga, in Cerdagne, had been looted.
Some cities in Aragon had also been seized , but they were kept undefended as the French army had to be ready for the next step : the Siege of Barcelona.

Background for the Siege of Barcelona

Barcelona held a very particular value for both the French and the Aragonese. To the French, it was a major port which could challenge Venice or Genoa and which held one-tenth of the Catalan population. To the Aragonese Crown, it was their capital, more than Zaragossa, in Aragon proper.
For this, the French had gathered a massive army of 16 000 men, including all those who had previously been training. There was a secondary army group of 7 000 tasked with seizing Tarragona and then cities in the Kingdom of Valencia. But this was not all the French had in their sleeve. Louis the Spider was known as such because he used the large incomes of the French royal demesne to spend large amounts of money as a very special form of diplomacy, and he had paid 200 000 livres tournois for renting a very large Venitian fleet to blockade the city for the duration of the siege.
The city itself had a small amount of guards (~500) coming from the civilian population, and a larger amount (~4 000) that had been sent there from the Kingdom of Valencia. It was obvious that they could not hope to defeat the whole French army, especially when all the towns (not the villages, but the towns) had been seized by France. However, getting through at least once would allow to reach a village, buy and/or steal all the food they can carry, and return to Barcelona with food enough to wait until the Venitians get tired of the siege.
The French were well aware of the fact that the Venitians would only stay for so long. This is why of their 16 000 force, only 12 000 were holding the siege. The remaining 4 000, mostly made of their cavalry, were sent to strip the surrounding villages of their foodstuffs.

Chronology of the Siege

October 2nd : Beginning of the Siege of Barcelona.
October 19th : Rationing is introduced in the city; the guards start preparing an exit. Meanwhile French cannons were concentrated on the part of the wall that seems to be the weakest.
November 3rd : News arrive that Tarragona has fallen. The French send Occitan nobles to yell it at the guards to taunt them. Fearing the siege would be unbreakable as soon as the French reinforcements arrived (while they were de facto going to Castellon), they re-schedule their exit to November 5th.
November 5th (day) : 3000 guards of the Aragonese army cross through one of the Southern doors of Barcelona, without meeting any fierce resistance from the French, which basically just let them through. The guards end up wandering into a barren countryside. When they return to Barcelona, they plan to cross through the exact same gate. They meet unexpectedly a very fierce resistance, as the French have prepared for the possibility of an attack from the outside and the knights and lancers have come to reinforce the small garrison of the door.
500 Aragonese soldiers die in front of the door, and a dozen or so Occitan soldiers in disguise hide in the remaining of the force.
November 5th (night) : The Occitan open the northernmost door to the French, where the French garrison is the largest, and these soldiers pour into the city. When the fighting in the city and on the walls dies out, Barcelona is firmly under French control. Even the citadel has fallen, notably due to fifty cannonballs crushing the door. The artillery captain responsible for this claims it was absolutely not a way to ease his frustration.

Won the War, won the Peace : the Treaty of Zaragossa.

The Aragonese Trastamara were obviously no longer in the city, having left before the beginning of the siege by boat. However, a large part of the treasury had been left in a hurry. This welcome addition to the French coffers was used to reduce slightly taxes that year.
However, this is not what prompted Louis to drop the fighting instead of taking over the whole Aragonese realm. On the one hand, if Louis got too heavy-handed, Portugal and Castille-Leon might end up joining the Aragonese side, which would be disastrous for France. On the other hand, France needed its soldiers to help Charles which was in trouble in Lorraine with the Swiss. Thus the Spider sent a diplomat to Zaragossa on November 25th to make peace. He arrived in Zaragossa on December 17th, on the same day as the news of the fall of Castellon.
The terms he offered were as followed :
Louis de Valois took over Catalonia (aka the County of Barcelona) as part of France and becomes King of Majorque. His son, the Dauphin Charles, is to marry Fernando de Aragon's eldest daughter Isabella.
In exchange, any cities taken over by the French army in the Kingdom of Aragon or the Kingdom of Valencia (which meant expressly Castellon) are returned to the Aragonese Trastamara, and Louis abandons all claims to Aragon, Valencia or Insular Sicily.
Those terms were widely accepted as quite lenient, compared to the Treaty of Troyes which was the precedent when a major nation lost its capital, and the Treaty of Troyes was signed on the 18th by the Aragonese King Juan II and on New Year 1477 by Louis the Spider.

Cutting the Middle Man : Burgundian amusements.

Shortly after settling in his new capital, Charles de Bourgogne soon learnt that the Swiss had defeated Jacques de Savoia, Count of Romont, Lord of Vaud, an ally and a general of his. This left him no other choice than to war the Swiss, which he declared on January 11th 1476. Taking with him his mercenaries, which were much less war-weary than his Burgundian soldiers, he entered Switzerland.
The Swiss and Burgondians met in Grandson on March 2nd. The Burgundian army numbered 18 000, the Swiss 20 000. The mercenaries seemed to be winning thanks to . However, when Charles had part of his troops move back to lure the Swiss, they thought it was a retreat and panicked, especially when Swiss reinforcements arrived from behind. This panic spread to the rest of the troops, and the army collapsed, leaving behind it large amounts of treasure, his trusty ducal hat, and 110 cannons and serpentines.
An other attempt three months later to crush the Swiss with additional Italian mercenaries ends up even more disastrously in Morat, and after this battle the Coalition (Lorraine, Switzerland and some Imperial cities of Lower Alsace) moved on to the offensive. Meanwhile Charles was in Nancy, trying to raise new troops. As per Treaty of Reims, he requested help from his cousin Louis the Spider, which sent him the only thing he had in relatively large amounts : money. He then moved to Gex (in Savoy) to raise more troops. The Lorrain forces of the Coalition reached Nancy on August 22nd. There were approximately 2000 English mercenaries which surrendered on October 7th to René de Lorraine's 5 000 men. After finishing raising his army, Charles returned with some 15 000 men, among which 5 000 were home-trained Burgundian troops paid with French gold. He started the siege of Nancy on October 23rd, but the winter and the Coalition forces took a heavy toll on his men.
On January 5th, 1477, the Coalition troops moved out of the city and took reinforcements for the Battle of Nancy. The Coalition had 19 000 troops, the Burgundians 7000. While a curb-stomp battle was expected, the Burgundian troops enter the city and fight from every house. The result is a bloody slaughter. The Burgundians had won, but they only had 1000 men left, and most importantly, Charles de Bourgogne was dead. The Coalition was down to even less men (500), was stuck out of Nancy in the middle of the winter, but René de Lorraine had survived, despite taking several bullets.
Charles de Bourgogne's corpse was only found on January 8th, half-eaten by a dog. A piece of parchment was found in what remained of his clothes, but the dog's saliva had made much of the text unreadable.

Meanwhile, in
the Balkans
The Ottomans wouldn't be happy with the Wallachians being under a Moldavian Voivode. Through skilled diplomacy (or brutal threats, depending on the source), they were able to turn around Basarab III against his ally, to then launch an offensive into Moldavia, with 200 000 men. They were ambushed by the Moldavian troops of Voivode Stefan cel Mare in the Valea Albă, and lost many troops. This battle however was turned around by the Sultan sending in the janissaries. This would lead to the Moldavians being nearly wiped out (with total casualties remaining far higher amongst the Ottomans) and the Ottomans being free to rampage.
However, the Ottoman supply train would soon be interrupted by a new invasion of Wallachia by the Transylvanians led by the Count Bathory and Vlad Tepes, who manages to keep the throne for one month before dying in a fight against Basarab III. Basarab then recovers his throne.
 
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1477​

"Castille is very hilly and windy. They should definitely build more windmills." Fernando de Aragon, before the battle of Aranjuez
"No! No! No more windmills!" Fernando de Aragon, after the battle of Aranjuez
"Who do you think I was expecting? The Habsburg Dynasty?"
"Everybody expects the Habsburg Dynasty!"
The Monty Python, the Habsburg Dynasty


Timeline
Ongoing : Castillan Succession War
1st January : France signs the Treaty of Zaragossa (see annex post, map n°=1)
Early January : Battle of Nancy
8th January : Charles de Bourgogne confirmed dead.
12th January : French troops enter Dijon. Beginning of the Burgundian Inheritance War. (map at the end of 1477 see annex post, map n°=2)
21st April : Marie de Bourgogne marries Maximilian von Habsburg.
2nd April - 5th May : Siege of Tournai
Late April : Battle of Aranjuez.
23rd July : treaty of Cartagena. End of the Castillan Succession War.
Mid-August : France declares war on the Swiss-Tyrolian-Lorrain coalition
Mid October : England declares war on France and Burgundy.
17th November : France publishes the Will of Charles.
November : Basarab III overthrown by his nephew Basarab IV.

1477 was a very busy year as the death of the Prince of Burgundy triggered another inheritance war. The French initially had claims on the Principalty of Burgundy, Artois, Vermandois, Boulonnais since, being apanage lands, they were to return to the main house (the French Crown) at the end of the ruling dynasty. Meanwhile the Princess of Burgundy, Marie de Bourgogne, claimed all the Burgundian land was rightfully hers, since the Duchy of Burgondy had been increased by the buying of various lands without masculine-only succession. The Coalition entered the melee in September during the Campaigns of Lorraine, and the English arrived in October to continue the French Succession War.

The French Hope
The news of Charles de Bourgogne's death had very rapidly reached Paris, as on the 12th Charles d'Amboise entered Dijon and published royal letters published on the 5, day the Prince supposedly died, reminding the Burgundians they were French. He notably offered the suppression of the Prince's special taxes and an amnesty. Despite legal efforts from Marie's part, in early March the Burgundians declared themselves faithful French subjects. On March 18th, the King created the Parlement de Bourgogne. Thus assured of the Principalty of Burgundy, Louis sent his troops forward to the County of Burgundy, which he claimed was for "the Burgondies be united inside the Principality". Meanwhile he also occupied Artois, Boulonnais, Vermandois and Eu. Dole, the capital of the County of Burgundy was reached on March 30th; on April 4th, Eu and Ponthieu had fallen; the French Army was under the walls of Amiens, which opened them of its own free will.
The French arrived in Artois in mid-April, while some 5000 veterans of the Catalan campaign crossed through Flanders to lay siege to Tournai.
Legally speaking the Spider King was active too, as Louis XI held a kangaroo court to convict Charles of lese-majesty for his behaviour in Péronne - an excuse to seize Bar, Burgundy, Picardy, Artois and Flanders, all lands legally owned by the Burgundians inside the de jure Kingdom of France.
His men were also busy looking in the Prince's archives in Dijon to find any convicting evidence. Meanwhile the rumor of a will that Charles had been wearing when he died spread in both Burgundies.

Burgundystrikes back.
Meanwhile from Brussels, Marie was preparing to strike back. On February 11th, Marie signed the "Grand Privilège des pays de par-deçà" or Great Privilege, which restored all the privileges the Burgundian Netherlands had been deprived from by her father and grandfather. The next day, she signed the formal annexation of Lorraine and Bar. On April 21st, she married by procuration Maximilian von Habsburg, King of the Romans, through Louis of the Palatinate. She then restored the claiming Duke of the rebelling Guelders to his throne under the condition that he liberated Tournai from the French siege. Maximilian von Habsburg set out to recruit troops, arriving four months later. By then, he had much more pressing issues.

The Siege of Tournai
Tournai was an enclave inside Burgundian Flanders, which the French were going to occupy as an advanced post to move inside Burgundy more easily. They laid siege to it from April 2nd onwards with little artillery and started building two-way fortifications as per Barcelona. They had been brought along with a large supply train, which allowed them to store lots of food.
The Duke of Guelders, with some 7000 troops and Burgundian soldiers, had been sent by Marie to break the siege and crush the French and arrived on May 4th. He soon found out the French had built some fortifications of their own - and he had to lay siege to them too. His troops had little experience in sieges too, and he was unlucky enough that his tent was within longbow range of the French veterans. The French soldiers had a good morale, as the word spread that "Ce n'est qu'une Escale", and a couple hours before dawn, they started a heavy artillery and arrow barrage on the Burgundian tents, spending about half their stocks but killing a couple thousand Burgundian and Adolf of Egmont, duke of Guelders. The remaining soldiers were disorganised enough that the French sortie broke the Burgundian troops to tatters. They then looted the Burgundians' supplies, artillery and money.
The guards of Tournai then woke up to see a massive camp ruined, a massive smell of smoke and blood being thrown by the wind upon the city walls. Tournai surrendered in the morning of the 5th May 1477.

Meanwhile, in Iberia : Evolution since Toro
After the battle of Toro, the Portuguese and Juanistas had been able to further their invasion of Castille quite easily. Several ports and cities had opened their doors to Juanista troops, including Burgos and Oviedo, the old capitals of Leon and Old Castille. The Basque counties had also been captured, allowing access to then-cheap French supplies.
When the short winter of 1477 arrived on Iberia, Castille had undergone a North/South split : the Northern half of the Kingdom of Castille was occupied by the Juanistas and Portuguese while the Aragonese and Isabellistas held Andalucia, Extremadura and New Castille.
The winter allowed the Isabellistas to muster new troops to attack the Juanistas, reducing the Juanista advance to a crawl. Meanwhile, French war operations in Burgondy meant their supplies, that had been forming a large portion of Portuguese approvisionment, got scarcer and more costly. Still, the Juanista party had the advantage both in propaganda due to its countless victories and on the terrain thanks to skilled Portuguese and Castillan troops being opposed by a fresh Aragonese-Castillan army.
The operations started again in early April after a three-month break. The Juanistas decided to attack New Castille through the province of Madrid. After the city fell, in late April, they found out that to continue, they would have to defeat a large Isabellista army which had regrouped in the south of the province. The two armies met in the Battle of Aranjuez.

The Battle of Aranjuez : positioning

The Battle of Aranjuez pitted a 10000-strong Juanista army against 12000 Isabellistas. The later had chosen a defensive position on the top of a hill and their western flank covered by a windmill, while the former were on another hill quarter a league further North.
The Juanista army deployed as followed : the center was formed by various foot soldiers and Castillan missile troops, accompanied by a thousand light cavalry. The Eastern flank, that is, their left one, was mostly made of heavy cavalry, mostly Castillan hidalgos. The Western, right, flank, was constituted like in Toro of the elite Portuguese troops : a little heavy cavalry, many crossbowmen and well-disciplined foot soldiers.
The center was led by King Alfonso, the right flank by the Perfect Prince, Joao de Aviz, and the left flank by the Marquess of Villar.
Meanwhile the Isabellistas had an army poor in missile troops, which regrouped in the left flank and ind the windmill with their light cavalry. The center was made up of poorly-trained footmen and city militias. What heavy cavalry they had was on their right flank. This time, Fernando de Aragon was in charge of the heavy cavalry while the Bishop of Mendoza controled the rest.

Aranjuez : the Battle itself
The Portuguese and Juanista arrived in the morning to the bottom of the Isabellista-held hill while those awakened from their slumber. A scarce, half-hearted rain of arrows started falling on the Juanista center and right, from which the soldiers protected with light wooden shields, while these forces started climbing the hill. When they arrived at the middle of the hill, near ten o'clock, the bulk of the Isabellista army had finished eating breakfast and the rain of arrows started intensifying slowly. At this moment, the Marquess of Villar ordered an uphill charge against the center, in order to surprise them, which was to be deflected at the last minute aganist the Isabellista left flank. Unaware of this, Fernando ordered a counter-charge of his heavy cavalry which was to deflect the Juanista force from the center to the left flank where, fighting for their lives, the missile troops and light cavalry would eliminate them. The consequence was that those two deflections summed up. Before the Marquess understood what had happened, his heavy cavalry was charging the windmill. The charge slowed down due to the reticence of the horses to run into the windmill, but the kinetic energy of the charge was sufficient to bring the windmill down, part of it falling on the Isabellista left. The heavy cavalry, now without horses, had to dismount, which turned it into an outnumbered heavy infantry. However, Joao had seen it coming, and rushed into the melee with the elite Portuguese troops. Before long, the Isabellista arrows had stopped flying.
Meanwhile, Mendoza had taken a most decisive action : the Isabellista were to go on an all-out attack - which meant the centers were to face each other, since he would soon be flanked, while his master's heavy cavalry was still in the middle of the battlefield. The large yell of the Isabellistas running downhill triggered an instinctive reaction from the Juanista center : stop moving towards them. Instead a heavy rain of arrows made the first, then the second and the third, rows of Isabellista infantry fall victims to the crossbowmen. When the fighting started, the Isabellista charge had lost all its momentum trampling its own heavy cavalry and the bodies of their fallen comrades. As a consequence, the greater skill of the Portuguese and Juanista soon showed, and near 2 o'clock, the Bishop of Mendoza ordered the army to retreat, knowing hsi forces were about to break, and were flanked by an even more powerful forces : the combined flanks of the Juanista army. Except they hadn't gone for flanking. Joao had spread his troops to encircle completely the Isabellista center as it was breaking. It took a large charge from the heavy Aragonese cavalry to break the encirclement and save part of the center. Long story short, Aranjuez was a disaster.

Aftermath and consequences

On the short term, the Isabellista army was integrally destroyed as a fighting force. The Aragonese were out of reserves, the Castillans were tired of supporting such a lost war, and before the spring ended Andalucia and Extremadura had revolted against the Isabellista authority while New Castille, which was ripe for the plucking, had fallen to the Juanistas. Fernando of Aragon was soon convinced it was an utter disaster and offered a peace settlement in which Aragon would pay Castillan and Portuguese debts that came from the war and Isabella would abandon the Kingdoms of Castille, Leon and Galicia to Juana, but would keep the Kingdom of Murcia and the lordship of Carthagena in the middle of July.
Alfonso and Juana had been extremely dependent on some French supplies, especially grain, and the increase in scope of the Burgondian Inheritance War meant these supplies would be increasingly hard to get to wage war. As a consequence, this peace treaty was accepted, albeit reluctantly by Juana and Alfonso, at Carthagena on the 23rd of July.
However, the most durable consequence of the battle was the new stereotype of "Castillan hidalgos live to charge windmills", which was at the center of the Castillan Miguel de Cervantes' masterpiece "El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha".

Back to Gaul : a Prince's Will

Tournai could be said to be a turning point. Except that it wasn't much of a turning point, the French having been continuously invading more Burgundian lands since the beginning of the war. It was only the first battle of the war, and it's because of completely different reasons that France didn't push much more towards the North. The real impact it had was Adolf of Egmont's death. This turned definitely the Guelders against the Burgundian as his death was since it was seen by the Guelderians as the consequence of a rash Burgundian decision, which it wasn't.
The real turning point was the discovery in mid-August of a "Will of Charles", a document found in the Burgundian archives, which was said to be the Prince's will. After a couple weeks necessary to ensure it wasn't a fake created to make France go bankrupt from invading all of Burgondy, it finally reached Louis. Meanwhile French spies had confirmed that Maximilian von Habsburg and Marie de Bourgogne were married. All that was needed was ensuring the marriage was consumed - which needed Maximilian to go and confirm the marriage - before the document could be published. It still prompted Louis to start the Campaign of Lorraine by sending another 10000 troops to invade Bar and Lorraine. This prompted the entry of the Coalition into the war against France, but when it learnt it had happened because Marie had signed an act of annexation of Lorraine (that act being the French Casus Belli), it declared it continued the war against Burgundy too.
One month later, the English, with claims on Zeeland, Holland and Hainaut, after Humphrey of Pembroke's death, entered the massive war.
On November 11th a French spy in Brussels, Brabant, found a copy of the Will of Charles in the Burgundian archives. While he placed it where a loyal servant could easily see it and show it to his mistress, the Princess, he sent to the King a confirmation of the Will's authenticity. On November 17th, the French published the Will of Charles. While this would alienate the English to the French even more than to the Burgundian, this left some room for compromise between the French and the Coalition.
When the fighting stopped for the Winter, the French had seized all of Northern France, the Burgundies, Bar, and much of HRE Flanders.

Meanwhile, in the Balkans
As always in the Balkans, throne usurpations went on as Basarab III Laiotă cel Bătrân lost his throne in November to his ambitious nephew Basarab IV Țepeluș cel Tânăr.
 
Annex to 1477 : Maps.

Annex n°=1 : the Treaty of Zaragossa.


The provisions of the treaty of Zaragossa were as followed :
- Annexation of the County of Barcelona by the Kingdom of France
- Louis XI becomes King of Majorca. The Kingdom of Majorca includes the entirety of the Balearic Islands and nothing else.
- The Dauphin de France, Charles de Valois, is engaged to Fernando de Aragon's elder daughter Isabella de Aragon, who is the same age as him.
- France abandons all claims to the Kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia, Sardinia and Sicily.
Map :
attachment.php


In hatches : land ceded to Louis XI. The County of Armagnac is incorrectly represented as a vassal of France, it is de facto integrated to the royal demesne. Tyrol is not shown as being independent from Austria but it is.

Annex n°=2 : map at the end of 1477

The dark blue represents lands under French occupation.

mdOPkPB.png

 
1478

"Yes, you took my bishop. But I can buy another one, and it comes with an additionnal knight. Right?" Louis XI, the Spider, trying to learn Chess​
Timeline

Ongoing : Burgundian Inheritance War (last avatar of the French Succession War)
15th January : Ivan III annexes the Republic of Novgorod to Muscovy.
March : First Campaign of Lorraine is started by de Crèvecoeur.
May : Battle of Étain.
June : English capture of Gravelines and Boulogne sur Mer.
May - 27th July : Carinthian Confederalist revolt.
August : the Duchy of Savoy enters an alliance with France.
6th December : peace of Olomouc.

The First French Campaign of Lorraine
The spring of 1478 was as eventful as the winter had been uneventful : the icy weather and the sufferings of the Burgondian forces under Nancy had proven winter campaigns in Western Europe to be less than agradable, but the war started all over again as soon as thaw became permanent. The first French initiative in early March was an attack through Northwestern Lorraine. The objective of this attack was simple : not allowing the Burgundians to intervene in Lorraine from Luxembourg, and seizing the Bishopric of Verdun as a supply base to launch the next attacks in Lorraine and Alsace.
For this endeavour, the French had an army of 20 000 men, the other 13 000 being on the front in Flanders. These were separated in 3 different army groups, one going through Montzéville, west of Verdun, one through Verdun and Douaumont from Bar-le-Duc, and the third one through Saint-Mihiel, south (and then East) of Verdun. Meanwhile, the Coalition, constituted of Lorraine, Switzerland and Further Austria (Tyrol), had prepared a force of 10 000 men in order to take back Guise and Bar-le-Duc, in the French parts of Lorraine.
The Coalition had planned to move through Metz to get additional troops , which they didn't obtain, and supplies, which they did. As a consequence of this, the French Eastern force, led by Philippe de Crèvecoeur, met with the Coalition forces led by the Duke of Lorraine in Étain.
The French army was made of some 2 500 Franc-archers, 1 500 foot soldiers, 1 500 of the Lances' crossbowmen, and 500 lancers, and also included a dozen canons. On the other side the Coalition had 250 Lorrain knights, 7 000 Swiss pikemen, 1 000 Austrian soldiers (lansquenets) and 1 500 missile troops. There was no light cavalry to speak of.
The French had seen the Lorrain troops arrive and knew they were outnumbered. Therefore, Philippe took his lancers and a few foot soldiers which he hid in a bush. When the Lorrain army arrived, he started firing the cannons. After a few minutes, the Coalition started firing back. He then left his infantry to go with his lancers shake up the Lorrain knights and the missile troops. Meanwhile French archers had started to "make it rain".
The lancer charge did badly shake up what little cavalry the Coalition had and its missile troops, but the Swiss pikemen joined in the foray and the infantry started fighting. When Philippe de Crèvecoeur returned, his infantry was in a really bad shape. He thus called a retreat.
The defeat at Étain was not a massacre nor a disaster for either side, and the Coalition took more casualties than the French - while they could not wield as much money as the French. However, it pointed out to a massive flaw - the Franc-archers were extremely disorderly, which had caused the damage to the French infantry.
The first consequence, obvious, is that the French had to return to Bar before doing anything else - but the Coalition had to reconcentrate, especially after a few attacks had come through Triers from Limbourg, a Burgundian province, on Sarre.
This also forced the French to reconsider their campaign in Luxembourg, as the Coalition was, after all, going to attack that year. While the Western force had to go on towards Luxembourg, the Center one had a very tempting prize under its eyes : Verdun. The Bishop of Verdun was asked if he had chosen with whom he would take sides : the King of France, the Duke in Nancy, or the Princess in Brussels. The Bishop chose France to avoid to have his city besieged and sacked. As a consequence, the French had enlarged their alliances in Lorraine. Meanwhile, the western force took Montmédy and settled there.

Annoyances in Artois and Flanders
The English, led by their king, Edward IV, had decided they would go to war for Holland, Zeeland and Hainaut. Well, at least to get the first two. Their first method was landing a large army in Calais unsuspiciously and use it to get a foothold, and then move towards their targets. Except Calais was nowhere near Hainaut, and it was way easier to reach Holland and Zeeland by sea. Hell! you needed to go by zee to reach Zeeland.
As a consequence, the English decided they would need a strong base from which to attack from when they would war the Burgondians.
This is why they started raiding and capturing cities near Calais. Their first target was Gravelines, in the Flanders, as it controled the mouth of the Aa which could be used to get faster to Ypern/Ypres. Just afterwards, considering supply issues, they went in a turning move after Boulogne sur mer, capturing Saint Omer in mid-June and taking Boulogne after a three-week siege. Whereas King Edward IV wasn't as ruthless as his ancestor Edward III, he still was displeased by seeing the city resist for so long. After all, the bulk of the French army could arrive pretty much anytime. Seing as the French weren't coming for him, he went to besiege Arras. But he was warned a "large force" was moving out of Lens when under Arras. So he moved to besiege Lens. A similar messenger told him that "the French King had arrived in Arras with his ost". And thus the two cities made the English king burn supplies uselessly for one month, before reinforcements arrived in large enough numbers to make the English move back to Calais.
The English were not the only annoyance. The Burgundians had reorganized despite several defeats such as Tournai, and were now making several inroads in French-occupied lands to free cities and liberate income to pay their mercenaries. Gand/Gent and Mons were the main cities that fell to the Burgundians, making the new frontline more linear.

Map of the different planned offensives in annex (first map)

Negociation is always useful
Louis the Spider was not the kind of man who would only let brutal force ratios apply. While France was able to crush any of its three enemies - England, Burgondy and the Coalition - one-handedly, it would probably be curb-stomped if all three of them allied to get rid of France so as to be left to squabble alone. For this, he had to take steps to weaken his enemies and strengthen France. One of them is having minor powers recognise the French claims are rightful. In June 1478, the County of Kleve and that of Montbéliard recognized French claims, and Montbéliard decided to support them.
The second action was getting papal approval. This was a little harder, but news of heavy-handed Burgundian behaviour in Liege and Utrecht did go in Louis's favor despite his lack of prominent virtues. This could only go better as time went by, thought the King.
And finally, raising allies against the Coalition was necessary, as they were a mostly defensive alliance. Varying the pressure could only reduce the probability that they can put up a sufficient joint force with the English or Burgondians. The obvious ally was Savoy, which had seen the Swiss recently raiding its lands in Vaud. In August of 1478, his sister Yolande de France, duchess dowager of Savoy and its regent, accepted to join the war against the promise of subsidies and of protecting her children, as her health was ailing. She immediately started raising Savoyard troops and recruiting mercenaries, but without effect until the end of the year.

Map of Europe at the end of 1478 : see annex (2nd map)

Finally, it is worth noting that Jeanne de France, Louis XI's 14-year-old and handicapped daughter, can barely walk after she fell down stairs in the abbey of Lignières. Her marriage with Louis d'Orléans is cancelled after it is implied she might never bear children.

Meanwhile, in East Europe

The Republic of Novgorod had always had tense relations with its southern neighbor, the Principality of Muscovy, but its strength had been slowly decreasing due to repeated setbacks. Therefore, the day would come where the citadel of Novgorod would fall. This day was the 15th of January. That same day, the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan III the Great, declared the full annexation of Novgorod.
In Austria, some peasants, seeing the relative success of the Swiss confederation at defeating even the mightiest of enemies (namely Burgundy and France) decided to rise in rebellion against the Emperor to make their own confederation. They wanted to be able to defend themselves when the Ottomans would come and try and conquer Austria. Of course, this didn't pan out as planned. After pillaging Frioul, the Ottomans entered Carinthia on the 26th of July and completely wiped out the Carinthian peasants the following day.
On the 6th of December, the Hungarians and Poles-Bohemians made peace at Olomouc. It was basically a white peace, except for financial compensations which were to be given to Hungary. These compensations were to be made safe on the ground by giving temporarily the apanages of the Kingdom of Bohemia, that is, the three Duchies of Silesia, Lusatia and Moravia, to the King of Hungary Màtyàs Hunyadi.
The Ottomans have made notable progress in their reconquest of Albania against the heirs of Gjergj Kastrioti, known by the Turks as Iskander Bey (or Skanderbeg). Only the fortress of Shköder/Scutari remains in the hands of the Albanian resistance.
 
Annex to 1478 : Maps.

Annex : Campaigns of the Burgundian Inheritance War.

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Annex n°=2 : map at the end of 1478

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1479

"Our deadly enemies are two : the French and the Hungarians. And the English. Three! Three deadly enemies..." The Monty Pythons in the Habsburg Dynasty​
"For the dark heroes of the zee,
cross the bloody Channel they did,
For our lost brothers' memory,
whose long tears flowed like acid,
Always lost in the Zee
Always lost in the Zee
"​
English parachutists' hymn
"Turkish soldiers seem to fear the very sound of accordions. You did a great job." Màtyàs Hunyadi to Vuk Grgurevic, Despote of Serbia​



Timeline :

Ongoing : War of the Burgundian Inheritance
French Succession War
Ottoman conquest of Albania
January : Alfonso V de Aviz, King of Portugal, abdicates in favor of his son Joao.
June : Beginning of the Campaign of the Zee.
6th August : Battle of Caen.
9th September : Truce of Grand-Fort-Louis.
Mid-October : "Battle of the Accordions" at Szaszvaros
3rd November : Battle of Sarrebourg
4th November : Battle of Saarburg
December : Death of Juan II "the Unlucky" of Aragon.

One Bishopric to split them all

During the winter, the French had continued their games of influence. The bishopric of Liège had agreed not to give subsidies or pay taxes to Princess Marie de Bourgogne and to let French troops cross without trouble in exchange for some of the lands of the Duchy of Limbourg, while the amount of French troops in Verdun and Toul had convinced the Bishop of Metz that the French were probably more to be feared than the Lorrain and the Coalition. These were two major bishoprics which joined the French side, one through bribing and the one through fear. While Liège separated Limbourg and Luxembourg from the bulk of the Burgondian Netherlands, Metz reduced the Northern half of the Duchy of Lorraine to a series of patches of land. Metz saw French troops arrive a couple weeks after joining the French, ostensibly for "protection".
Meanwhile, the French envoyé to the Pope Sixte IV kept trying to have the Pope choose sides, if possible with the French. However, in order not to risk to break his intended alliance with the Swiss, Sixte remains elusive. It is clear he won't choose sides until one power is clearly winning.

Edward's council
King Edward IV of England was no fool, and although he was by himself a very competent general, (albeit one sensible to disinformation) and a great statesman, he had a handful of advisers he occasionnally listened to. One of his problems was capturing the three counties he wished to take over. While it was obvious that if Edward faced an army of equal size to his, he would probably win, his main problem was logistics. He could not decently live of the countryside in lands he wanted to conquer. As a consequence, the year of 1478 had aimed to give him a base of operations in Flanders from which he could support his troops campaigning. It had been successful in this regard, earning him the ports of Boulogne and Dunkerque aside Calais.
Hainaut was inland, and was of little use to the English except as a trading peg, to be traded later with the winner of this little war for other lands, like Boulonnais or Cotentin. On the other hand, Zeeland and Holland were coastal provinces that would bring in lots of money to the English crown, therefore to be captured as soon as possible. However, the Dutch counties were way further from Calais than Hainaut was, and it was well known capturing Zeeland required a large amount of ports to capture every single island. As King Edward pointed that out, one of his advisors suddenly thought of England as the possible lot of ports. It would take even more ports as larger ships would be necessary, but England was way larger than anything Edward could take in Northern France. Therefore the English started preparing for the Campaign of the Zee, also known in some history books as Operation Zee Leeuw.

French reorganisation
The French Franc Archers had proved in Étain to be too ill-disciplined to be useful. Instead of trying to bring some disciplin into the corps, Louis decided to create a new corps to replace them, the "Bandes Françaises", later known as the "Bandes du Luxembourg". He built these troops out of his numerous veterans of the Catalan March, notably the 5 000 that had taken Tournai, and some 12 000 adventurers and pioneers. By April, he had more or less reorganised his force in 20 000 troops in the Bandes Françaises - among which 40% were missile troops - an estimated 3 000 Lances - a group of 1 lancer for 3 crossbowmen and 2 foot soldiers - and some 4000 knights, not forgetting the hundred or so cannons owned by the King, with its servants. All in all, this represented perhaps 39 500 men. Quarter of these were in Flanders and Hainaut trying to slow down the advance of the 18 000 Burgondian troops, another half was sent to Lorraine to seize the patches in Northern Lorraine and the Duchy of Luxembourg. The remaining troops went to the Boulonnais to seize back the large port without English interference.

Boat people

Operation Zee Leeuw started in June. By then, the English fleet had assembled in Dover and Calais and had started taking up most of the English army, that is some 14 000 soldiers, including cavalry and artillery. The remaining 6 000 were sent towards Arras, Lens and Cambrai to prepare an invasion of Hainaut for the following year.
The English set sail towards Den Haag (in Holland) and Middelburg (in Zeeland) and arrived close to the coasts of Zeeland on June 25th. The large fleet split, each subfleet moving up one of the arms of the Schelde (Escaut) and Rijn (Rhine)'s common delta. Island after island fell to the English troops, which were too numerous and too mobile for the defensors. In this point of view, Zee Leeuw was a total victory - even Middelburg, the largest city in Zeeland at the time, fell before July 25th. The fleet later debarked two thirds of its men in Holland, which later took Den Haag and barricaded in it, but the cavalry remained on board, including a lot of English nobles but not the King or his brother Richard. The English fleet faced a massive storm on the way back, and then met the ragtag bunch of boats Louis the Spider had called his fleet near Caen. The English fleet won, but was in such a terrible state that when it returned home, only one third of the galleons and galleys could be repaired, and the rest was sunk. Quarter of the English boats sunk in the battle of Caen, mostly the largest ones which were the main French target, taking with them 2 000 of the English cavalry and the best English admirals. Meanwhile, the French fleet had not even been obliterated, having had 40% of its boats sunk or captured, but the rest were almost in acceptable condition. There laid the main catastrophe of Zee Leeuw : the English fleet was destroyed as a naval fighting force for the following decade, and discredited for another half century. This would lead to large consequences on the other side of the Atlantic.

Lens-lease
After the disaster of Zee Leeuw, Edward and Louis met in St-Pol. They agreed that the French were unable to keep control over Flanders and Hainaut for the time being, and that the English were in a much better position to fight the Burgondians and delay them than the French. While wandering in Artois, the two kings finally found terms satisfying to them both :
- The French and the English armies would not fight each other for the duration of the truce (two years) and would concentrate on the Burgondians in Flanders and Hainaut (for the English) and the Coalition and Luxembourg (for the French).
- To help the English reach Hainaut, the French lent them Lens, Arras and Cambrai (neither of which were captured yet) and the use of the port of Boulogne (already seized back by the French).
- the English abandon all pretentions to Aquitaine, Guyenne, and Normandy except Cotentin.
- the French abandon all pretentions to the English Crown per virtue of Louis the Lion (an empty threat for Louis the Spider) and to Zeeland.
- Should the English seize Hainaut, the French will trade the English renunciation to Hainaut and returning it to France for the renunciation to Holland and the land of Holland itself, or, if Holland is already English, for Cotentin.
- Should the Burgondian offer a truce to either side, they would both reject it.
- Should the Burgondians be defeated before the end of the truce, the French and the English will sign a peace treaty to end the state of war that existed between their countries since 1337.
These were the terms of the Truce of Grand-Fort-Louis, signed as the French and English kings crossed the fishing outpost on the mouth of the Aa, on September 9th.

Sarrebourg and Saarburg : an Eye and an Ear

While Louis was in Artois making a truce with the English in the West and the French slowly retreated in Flanders, abandoning Tournai in mid-August and into Artois by the end of October, he had sent his best commanders, Comminges (the leader of the French in Catalonia) and Crèvecoeur (who almost won at Étain, and was in charge of the Bandes Françaises) to take over Northern Lorraine and Luxembourg. While Crèvecoeur takes 500 lances and 6 000 troops of the Bandes and moves into Lorraine, Comminges takes the rest to take over Luxembourg. The French first ensure the land bridge between Verdun and Metz, centered on Étain, and then start uprooting the Lorrains all around. Crèvecoeur finally meets René again in Sarrebourg, east of Metz, who was raising troops there. The forces in presence are quite similar to what had happened in Étain, but this time Crèvecoeur has his infantry build some small fortification. One of the veterans of Catalonia and Tournai asks sarcastically "Is this really what they call «Escalade» (climbing in French)?" as the Lorrains, surprised by yet another attack by Crèvecoeur, a daredevil should you ask them, find themselves retreating into the Bandes' pikes. What happens is «Escalade» indeed, as the following melée is broken repeatedly by French cavalry and infantry charges. René manages to escape, but he has lost an eye in the battle, being now called René le Borgne, and his troops have shrunk from 8 000 to 2 000, most of which are deserters.
Meanwhile in Luxembourg, Maximilian has taken his army of 15 000 against the French, which number 4 000 Bandes Françaises, 1000 lances, 2000 knights, and 50 canons, near . Saarburg sees a very bloody battle where an attentive observer could see a couple carts linked together roll down the French-held hill covered with horseless knights and men-at-arms, a couple Burgondian forces starting to fight each other after a failed partial retreat and a French canonball shave Maximilian's cheek, removing an annoying ear on its way from Europe's most indebted prince.
The Battle of Saarburg ends not because of the lack of ammunition for the missile troops, nor because the troops break, but because the night fell too early for the battle to end properly because of the lack of fighters to fight it. Despite the French losing "almost" as many men as he did (4500 to 6000), Maximilian is forced to retreat the following day by a menace of mutiny. The French therefore stay masters of the battlefield. By the time Maximilian returns to Luxembourg, the capital of the Duchy has fallen and the French forces now include Crèvecoeur's. Outnumbered, the Burgondians abandon Luxembourg.

Meanwhile, in Iberia
Whereas Portugal was in a reasonably prosperous state, such could not be said of Castille which had seen quite a bit of fighting in the previous decade. Therefore, seeing his death approaching, Alfonso V de Aviz, King of Portugal, the Algarves and jure uxoris King of Castille decided to abdicate his titles in Portugal and the Algarves to his son, the 'Perfect Prince' Joao in January 1479. He would then move to the Kingdom of Castilla y Leon to consolidate his and his wife Juana's grip on the country, rooting out the remaining Isabellistas and any opportunist rebels.
Aragon was itself in a terrible state. The death of Juan II "the Unlucky" in December was a further hit to the country, since it made the Kingdom of Navarre Juan had usurped from his first son split away. François Phébus became King of Navarre, under his mother's regency. In Aragon, meanwhile, Fernando became King as Fernando II "the Catholic". He soon was to face another threat to his Kingdoms : his uncle Ferrante de Trastamara, King of Peninsular Sicily, wanted to claim the domains of the Aragonese Trastamaras.

And, in the Balkans
In April, the last of the Albanian bastions, Shkodra/Scutari fell to the Ottomans. This marked the end of the independent Albanian principality that had been built by Georgj Kastriot Skanderbeg.
This frees enough troops to launch in autumn two big raiding expeditions, one towards Hungarian Transylvania and the other one in the West Balkans. Both are met and defeated by Christian forces in mid-October, the first ones being the Voivode of Transylvania Stephen Bàthory on the 13th of October, followed closely by the Serbs led by their Despot Vuk Grgurevic in the famed "Battle of the Accordions", in Szaszvaros. It is not as much the massacre of the Turkish soldiers and raiders as the fact that, because the Despot's guards kept playing the accordion for the duration of the battle, Ottoman troops would keep a phobia of accordion music for the following decade that made the battle so famous.
 
1480


"The Coalition tried to turn its trickle of troops into a flood. Except that only God can flood the ocean." Jean de Comminges, after the Battle of Colmar.
"Actually, the real reason is that the Swiss, the Austrians and the Lorrains couldn't see eye-to-eye." Phillippe de Crèvecoeur, upon hearing Jean's words.
"I heard the Burgondians managed to keep up a force of 30 000. According to me, one third of it is in Guelders or in garrisons, one third of it isn't even paid, and the remaining third doesn't exist." Edward IV
"Can Khan into can?" Russian joke.​



Timeline :

Ongoing : War of the Burgundian Inheritance
French Succession War
2nd January : beginning of the 3rd Austro-Hungarian war.
February : Death of Charles d'Anjou, count of Maine and of Yolande de France, duchess dowager of Savoy.
14th April : Battle of Amsterdam.
Mid-May : death of René d'Anjou, count of Provence.
6th June : Battle of Mons.
17th June : Battle of Colmar.
20th July : Death of Edward IV of England.
10th August : beginning of the Siege of Otranta.
11th September : Death of Alfonso V de Aviz, jure uxoris King of Castille.
31st October : Treaty of Colmar.
11th November : Great Battle on the River Ougra.
13th November : disappearance of Edward V of England.

L'Hiver Terrible.

The winter of 1480 saw many deaths. This could be explained as coming from a variety of factors : the global cooling that had started after the Mongol conquests led to an exceptionnally cold winter; the large amounts of money drained by the Burgondian War had left even less food for the peasants than usual; starved peasants chopped firewood for themselves first, and their lords second, and a series of intricated factors that led to high-ranking deaths among the nobles in Europe. Notably, the cold caught in January led slowly to René d'Anjou's death in mid-May; Charles d'Anjou, Count of Maine, was found in his bedroom intoxicated by fire fumes in February; and in the very Louvre, Yolande de France, duchess dowager of Savoy, was found dead. Although she had been pretty sick for all of 1479, she finally died because of the palace's rich winter foods.
These deaths had many consequences. First of all, the death of the two last Angevins made Provence a French county, which would throw into the war additionnal amounts of money and men, not that it would tip the scales much, as seen with the forces that the warring powers had set into motion. What's more, Yolande's death effectively made Louis the Spider the tutor of the heirs of Savoy. He would not imprison his nephews, unlike a neighbouring Yorkist soon would, but the Savoyard troops which had been sent into Western Switzerland would join the French Army for the Lorrain Campaign that was planned by the Spider King.
Meanwhile, to simplify the administration of the Burgundies, Louis the Spider signed an edict which integrated the Counties of Auxerre, Charolais and Mâcon to the Principalty of Burgundy, hereby unifying the Burgundies in France into the Principalty.
In England too, the winter of 1480 took its toll on the nobles, albeit more lightly than in France (because of the battle of Caen, there weren't that many left to kill). Notably, King Edward caught tuberculosis.
Winter didn't only kill people : Switzerland, Tyrol and Lorraine, having proved they couldn't fight separate wars against the Franco-Savoyard Alliance, decided to pool their armies into one, which was then planned to move into France until the French King decided to let Lorraine and Sundgau-Breisgau alone.
The English, as of 1480, planned two massive campaigns in Hainaut and Holland to break the Burgondians and their one-eared leader.

French plans : the Second Campaign of Lorraine
The French had laid plans for a two-pronged attack on Southern Alsace and Lorraine starting on April 1st : one half of the troops, led by Crèvecoeur, would come from Metz and seize Western Lorraine's cities, while Comminge's second half would take over Southeastern Lorraine's cities with a starting point in the Abbey of Luxeuil. The two forces, of 15 000 men each - a 6 000 men force remained in Luxembourg to guard it from the rest of Burgondy and seize Limbourg - would meet under Nancy, which they would then besiege, only to leave the city after the Savoyard army of 8 000 arrived. Afterwards, they would launch a massive attack into Sundgau. Together, these armies represented some 38 000 men which could classify as follows :
- 2 000 Lances, which correspond to 2 000 lancers, 6 000 crossbowmen and 4 000 foot soldiers
- 2 500 French knights (typical heavy cavalry, but the finest of the French nobles. Slightly more careful than they used to be, though).
- 500 Savoyard knights
- 200 Savoyard lancers, 400 footmen and 400 crossbowmen
- 6 500 Savoyard mercenaries, ~2 000 of them missile troops.
- 15 000 Bandes Françaises, including some ~9 000 missile troops.
- one hundred canons with some 5 servants per canon.
- 2 skilled generals

The Combined Coalition
The Lorrain army had assembled its remainders in Nancy and the Confederation and Siegmund von Habsburg had agreed to bring all their forces in Colmar to prepare a counter-attack. It was obvious a French attack would come the following spring, and that the French would go for Nancy. However, this would leave the Coalition time to work out any possible difficulties. The three armies were to meet in Colmar on June 15th, for a counter-attack before the end of June to catch the French off their feet.
The armies :
Switzerland :
- 6 000 elite pikemen in Swiss Bands.
- 110 canons and couleuvrines captured at Morat.
- 2 500 cavalry, mostly lancers
- 3 500 crossbowmen
Further Austria :
- 1 000 knights
- 20 canons.
- 10 000 foot soldiers
- 7 000 missile troops, mostly crossbowmen
- 2 000 lancers
Lorraine :
- 500 Lorrain knights
- 5 000 hastily raised foot soldiers
- 5 000 missile troops
- 280 lancers
- 1 one-eyed Duke
All in all, some 41 300 men.

"Two cold water ports! And the Roman road to connect them! And Sundgau-Lorraine!"

From the beginning, all seemed to go even better than according to plan. Épinal and Lunéville fell each in less than a week; Nancy didn't even need a siege, surrendering the moment it saw the French army (to be fair, the series of sieges it had suffered in 1476-1477 had badly wrecked it), and the Savoyard arrived one week ahead of schedule, on May 23rd. Meanwhile, René de Lorraine was in Colmar, preparing supplies for the Combined Coalition army. The Franco-Savoyard force was reinforced on June 6th by 2 000 of René d'Anjou's Provençal troops, all of them men-at-arms. Crèvecoeur and Comminges both felt there was something wrong, as the Duke had not sent any troops to take back lost cities or wreck supply lines like he should have done. Therefore, the 40 000 Franco-Savoyard army entered Sundgau very carefully. Some éclaireurs (scouts) were sent and disclosed that a large Swiss force was moving rapidly Northwards in North Sundgau, and that rumors of an even greater Tyrolian one in Breisgau had crossed the Rhine. The meeting point had to be somewhere near Colmar. On the evening of June 17th, three days after the three Coalition armies linked, the French arrived within sight of the Coalition camp. The Battle of Colmar was about to start.

Starting positions of the armies

The French had some small hills in their back, and split the army in two separate blocks instead of three. The right wing, in the North, commanded by Crèvecoeur, consisted in the Savoyard and Provençal armies complemented by 8 000 Bandes Françaises and 400 Lances. His 8 000 missile troops were placed on his left flank, where it would be protected at first by Comminges, while his 1 100-strong cavalry was on his right flank where it would be able to manoeuvre more efficiently than the rest in any flanking moves. The left, Southern, French wing, consisted in the bulk of the French army, with additionnal cavalry - Comminges' favorite force - and the artillery. His 9 000 missile troops were left on top of a small hill where they could defend themselves, along with the canons, far on his left, while the bulk of his force was a classical center made of foot soldiers and right and left wings made of cavalry. His 2500 knights were on his right wing to be able to charge any enemy center, while his lancers, more mobile, would control access to his missile troops.
On the other side, René tried frantically to organise his troops whose back was on the river Lauch. While he managed to work with the Swiss, which had arrived earlier, to make two more or less functionning wings made of a mix of Swiss pikemen, crossbowmen and cavalry, the Tyrolians spoke a hardly understandable Germanic dialect. He could only recuperate the crossbowmen and left his foot soldiers in the center the Tyrolan forces made up.

Main Operations

The French attacked first, with a rain of arrows coming from the center-right of the army and its far left. The Swiss and Tyrolians answered with crossbow bolts, most of which fell on Comminges' cavalry. As a consequence, he decided that, whatever, he'd have his knights charge the center while canonballs were to try and break the wings. Meanwhile, Crèvecoeur started to rotate his troops to attack the enemy flank. While his cavalry would have loved a furious charge like Comminges', they were not capable of distancing the infantry and enjoyed breaches in the pikemen's pike wall before their charge.
While Crèvecoeur's cavalry behaved in a disorderly fashion, Comminges' knights behaved "like a mounted phalanx", according to René de Lorraine's own words - that is, their disciplin was equivalent to that of the Byzantine's army despite being nobles. The result of that was complete disorganisation in the Tyrolian center, despite the orders in Alsatian the Duke kept yelling, and the Lorrain foot soldiers properly deserting, only to find out that they had a river behind them, and it wasn't that shallow...
All connection with his flanks being lost, it didn't take long for their lines to waver, on his left due to Crèvecoeur's charge, on the right upon seing the very rigorous disciplin in Comminges' Lances at the front of his center. Yet the Coalition attacked the left flank of the French army, with charges of cavalry and all that was required to break French lines. Except the French line didn't break. It bent, and the Swiss found themselves flanked twice and having 1 800 lancers eager to enter the fight behind them.
Afterwards, all strategy and tactics disappeared as only survival mattered.
The bloodbath only ended when the sun set. The ground was brown and sticky, the Lauch was red, flooding and carried cut-off limbs and corpses.
The amount of casualties in Colmar was disproportionate. The French knights had 26 dead and 194 wounded. The Coalition center had perhaps as many survivors. Louis d'Orléans was made a knight after Colmar and earned a lot of pocket change by capturing Duke René.
All in all, the French lost approximatively 10 000 soldiers : 3 000 on the left wing (Comminges), and 7 000 on the right wing (Crèvecoeur). The Coalition lost 38 000 soldiers, its artillery (stored in a nearby warehouse), its military commander, and its prestige. When news of Colmar arrived at Freiburg im Breisgau, it immediately surrendered. By the end of June, Sundgau and half of Breisgau were in French hands.

Treaty of Colmar
The treaty of Colmar was signed by Louis the Spider and One-Eye René (which represented the Coalition) on October 31st, with Louis d'Orléans lobbying for the ransom he was to be paid. The terms were as followed :
- The Kingdom of France, the Archduchy of Further Austria and the Swiss Confederation will stop all hostilities from November 1st onwards.
- René de Lorraine, Duke of Bar, Guise and Lorraine, renounces these titles in favor of Louis de Valois, King of France, and is to pay a ransom of quarter a million livres to Louis d'Orléans.
- The counties of Sundgau and Breisgau are turned in to France. However, it is possible for the Archduke of Further Austria to buy back Breisgau, city of Freiburg excepted, for the sum of half a million livres, within 10 years.
- The County of Vaud is and remains a possession of the House of Savoy.
- René de Lorraine is offered a small county, vassal of France, in Digne-les-Bains.
- The city of Sarrebourg and the surrounding lands are returned to the Bishopric of Metz.
- The Bishoprics of Metz, Verdun and Toul become vassals of France.

The situation in Spring.
When the year started, one could say neither the English or the Burgondian situations were very good. In the South, the English held Cambrai, Calais and Artois with 8 000 men, but the poor state of their fleet made them dependent on French good will to supply their troops through Calais, Dunkerque and Boulogne. In the North, the English held the isles of the mouth of the Escaut and Rhine (that is, Zeeland) and Southernmost Holland up to Den Haag, where some 10 000 footmen had spent the winter.
Meanwhile, the Burgondian situation was no better. Hungary was once again warring in Friedrich's Austrian lands, which definitely cut his father's subsidies to Maximilian by 100%. Furthermore, the loss of Luxembourg to the French troops and Zeeland to the English was barely compensated by the recovery of the missing halves of Hainaut and Flanders, which were suffering badly from the war. Finally, Guelders kept rebelling, which tied up many men. On the overall, Maximilian only had 15 000 available men, whose pay had been severely reduced. Globally, Edward IV's assessment was a simple overstatement, but he had identified the main problems that Brussels faced.

Going for Holland
The first campaign of the year took place in Holland. The English troops, which had been paid for one year before Zee Leeuw, were sent to seize Amsterdam and its fleet to be able to return home. They didn't have a general nor a correct supplying chain, therefore it was a rampaging band, even worse than the Chevauchées of the Black Prince in the 1370s, that left to besiege Amsterdam. It took them a fortnight to reach the city, only stopping to burn windmills and heaps of cheese. However, Maximilian had reacted quickly enough, and while they found Amsterdam an open city, there was something annoying in front of them. Militias, 2 000 of them. While the latter were heavily outnumbered, their mission was to stall the English for long enough that Maximilian, who was already well on his way, would come and rescue the city.
The battle started on April 14th. The militia had a little more discipline and could retreat on order than the English had, and it allowed to survive for the day, despite with heavy casualties (half of them died), the English had even more deaths with 1 500. The second day of the battle saw the militia encircled by enraged English soldiers and fighting for their own lives when Maximilian"s force arrived. The English found themselves flanked twice, fighing an enemy both around them and inside them. At this moment, the only officer in the English force, Captain Henry Fitzedward, said to descend from a bastard of the Black Prince, had the English army surrender.
On the 10 000 English army, 1 000 had deserted and regrouped in Den Haag - they would only leave and surrender the city when their pay and their comrades' would stop arriving - 3 500 had died, and the rest had been captured. The militia had fallen to 20% of its initial size, and Maximilian had lost 1 000 men.

The Campaign of Hainaut.

Edward IV had chosen to lead his army in Hainaut. His 8 000 men which he had left in Artois the previous year and some 4 000 reinforcements left Cambrai on April 10th. If his calculations were right, he had a window of approximately one month, no matter if the troops of Den Haag won or not.
His troops had been split, so that within one week, they had reached Maroilles and Valenciennes. These cities fell after a couple weeks' siege, and then they all left to besiege Mons, in central Hainaut. The siege was set before the end of the "window" in the way the French had besieged Tournai (some French veterans had been bragging) : one ring of pikes directed outwards, a half-circle of pikes in front of every door, and soldiers to man mostly the doors' pikes to avoid a sortie.
However, the Burgundians didn't come, as Marie de Bourgogne had fallen from her horse and was badly wounded. Maximilian had had to turn back from Enghien which he was crossing to go check on his wife's health. It turned out the found wasn't fatal, although she would probably never be giving birth again. Meanwhile, Edward started having gastric trouble a few days after his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, reached Mons, and his tuberculosis slowly worsened in the muds of Hainaut.
Therefore, Maximilian had arrived one month late, while Mons was still standing and the English soldiers played with dices. However, he didn't do the same mistake as the not much regretted Duke of Guelders : instead of besieging the English, he just waited in the way of their supply train. After a couple days, the English, having prepared for a battle outside Mons, sortied out of their fortifications. Despite having a small cavalry, and only heavy cavalry, they had some quality heavy infantry and extremely well-trained Welsh longbowmen, which allowed the English to compensate the difference in numbers. Little is remembered from the battle of Mons as a fire starting on the English pikes drowned the battlefield in smoke. The only assessments that can be confirmed is that the Burgondians lost 3 000 men to Welsh arrows, that Maximilian and Edward dueled with swords, the former losing his other ear, and that the Burgondian cavalry charge was faced headlong and routed by English knights.
On the overall, the Burgundians lost 5 000 men, and the English 3 000. Their forces were now equal in number, but not in quality as the English had top-notch archers, a larger artillery train and better infantry. Mons fell later in the day because the guards had been intoxicated by the smoke which had burnt some hemp - that is, they were high - didn't react to the English turning their canons towards the doors. It would take another two centuries for the locals to understand what exactly had happened and start smoking hemp.

The Snake of Albion Rises
While new troops were being raised in Namur and Brabant by Burgundy, the English seized Enghien, Ath and Binche, thus completing their conquest of Hainaut in mid-July 1480. Two days later, Edward IV died, officially of food poisoning.
Immediately, the English army (except for garrisons left in the various English-held cities) returned home. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became regent, and imprisoned his nephews in the Tower. He then took various measures to make his power as strong as it could be, "for the good of the Kingdom". Meanwhile, the Burgondians had by the end of October recovered all of Hainaut, taken Cambrai and were moving into Artois. On November 13th, it was discovered Edward V and his brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, had disappeared. While Richard of Gloucester considered them dead, they had been smuggled out of the Tower and England by a foreign spy. Therefore, he had himself crowned king as Richard III.
The year ended with the fall of Lens to the Burgundians after Arras. Needless to say, the French were quite pissed at the English for letting the Burgundians take the cities they, the French, had lent them...

Meanwhile, in Iberia
On the 11th of September, the new Castillan King, Alfonso de Aviz, died in his sleep, out of old age probably. This led to a short interregnum for Castille during which it was unknown whether Juana would be crowned, she would marry someone else who would get crowned jure uxoris, or if Leonor, the daughter she had given birth to on the 18th of June, would be crowned. It ended with the crowning of Juana on October 30th. The interregnum was short enough for the nobles and commoners not to harm the integrity of the state, but long enough to induce a certain lack of comfort for the diplomats in the court of Castille. The Spider's man (OOC : :D) offered the French support if need be the day after the official mourning of Alfonso V de Portugal ended. It proved unnecessary, but it proved to Juana de Castilla that the Spider's intent to meddle was universal. Steps had to be taken so that Castille wouldn't be seen as just the bloated Iberian middle kingdom. First of all, renewing the alliance with Portugal seemed necessary as well as securing her daughter's status in the Portuguese succession, since she was legally the heir to Portugal if Joao had no children. As a consequence, she married Manuel de Viseu, the King of Portugal's cousin, which happened to have approximately the same age as her.

And, in the East
On the 2nd of January, Matyàs Hunyadi declared war on Friedrich III von Habsburg to get that bloody Habsburg to pay the war indemnities he owes him.
On the 10th of August, the Ottomans invade Puglia, and, more precisely, the city of Otranta. Meanwhile, other of their troops rampage through Austria.
Russia wasn't devoid of events neither. Indeed, as the Prince of Moscow decided to stop paying his tribute to the Khan of the Golden Horde, Ahmad Khan decided to walk in on the river Ougra. The arrival of the Polish contingents in November started the battle after a month's wait, in which the muslim Horde contingents rapidly crumbled. Soon the Poles turned against the Golden Horde, in order to save their arses, and before long Ahmad Khan was dead. It was the end of the Horde's sway over Russia.
Of course, the Poles and the Lithuanians would not accept this state of affairs for long...
 
1481


"A spider has this advantage above the snake that at least, its webs are works of art, unlike snake hisses." Louis XI, the Spider, after the demise of Richard III, the Viper.
.​



Timeline :

Ongoing : War of the Burgundian Inheritance
French Succession War
Ottoman incursion in Puglia.
January : Accordion-incited fall of Otranta.
13th April - 27 May : Burgundian siege of Calais.
27th May - 22nd August : English siege of Calais.
10th September : Death of Henry Tudor.
10th September - 12th October : French siege of Calais.

Springtime for Burgondy.

The winter and spring of England and France were quite busy : while Richard the Snake was raising taxes and his own power, Louis the Spider organized the new additions to his kingdom (Lorraine, Provence and Sundgau) and raised new troops to complement his losses at Colmar. He had notably made his generals Jean de Comminges Grand Maître de la Cavalerie and Philippe de Crèvecoeur Grand Maître de l'Infanterie - which effectively left the Lances as Comminges's troops and the Bandes Françaises as Crèvecoeur.
These five months were a window of opportunity for Maximilian von Habsburg. The earless King of the Romans had a chance to obtain a good peace deal with England, he only needed to make Calais fall. Therefore, on March 28th he gathered his 15 000 troops in Brussels after the winter to lay siege to the portuary city.
Calais being a port, it was very difficult to lay a proper siege to the city and wait until it starved. The Burgundians never had made many efforts to get a proper fleet, and even the remnant of the English fleet was sufficient to discourage any naval blockade for the moment. This meant that the besiegers would have to undermine the walls, wait for a breach, and only then pour into the city. Although the undermining work started very rapidly, Calais held on, because its walls were massive constructions undertook by the French, and then the English, to make the city as impregnable as was humanly possible (some insinuate even inhumanly possible). When the Viper and his army debarked in Boulogne according to the soon-ending truce's terms, they used the opportunity to cut Burgundy's supply lines. Soon, the Burgondians were starving more than those they besieged. The large-scale assault they launched on May 26th, trying to canonball the main doors of the city open and with ladders on every wall, was a disaster, losing 2 000 soldiers without breaching the city's perimeter. The walls had been slowly fragilised, but they remained strong enough to keep Burgondy at bay.
At this moment Richard struck at the Flemish and Brabantin troops. The odds were numerically worse for England than at Mons, but Richard relied on the quality and quantity of his longbowmen, thinking numbers were nothing, since France had lost at Crécy and Azincourt despite overwhelming numerical superiority. The enemy was exhausted, and after a couple hours of fighting, the Burgundian troops disappeared. Except they soon reappeared on the top of Calais's walls, a breach having been made by underminers. The rain of arrows prompted the English into retreat, while Burgundian engineers immediately started repairing the wall.

Summertime for France and England

June saw the French armies, reinforced and having gone through a series of drills to enhance disciplin, start moving again. It started by Crèvecoeur positionning into Limbourg, while Comminges moved to Southern Luxembourg. On June 8th, the French armies, which had returned to a nominal strength of 20 000 men each, crossed the frontier into the bishopric of Liège. A couple days later, they crossed the frontier out of Liège. Crèvecoeur had arrived into the troubled Duchy of Guelders (and its provinces, the counties of Veluwe and Zutphen), while the County of Namur was the prey of Comminges. Namur being the only city in the County worth besieging, as soon as it fell, on the 30th, Comminges moved on to Hainaut, which didn't prove troublesome in any way as all cities opened their doors, tired of being besieged, starved and having their walls and doors ruined. Hainaut fell integraly in less than two weeks' time to the French, and more than once guards who wanted to keep the city in Burgundian hands were slaughtered.
Meanwhile, in Guelders, Crèvecoeur heard tales of the English being stalled for two days in Amsterdam by a militia force one fifth of their size. The general used his prerogatives as Grand Maître de l'Infanterie to offer any Guelderian cities who wished to fight against the Burgundians and be part of France the right to make a militia, at first unpaid, and which would be paid by the King as soon as the war would be over. These militia soon numbered 5 000 men, which proved instrumental in that they allowed to make every single city in Guelders fall or turn sides in the time alloted by Louis : two months. He then moved to Holland to encircle completely Brabant (with the exception of Flanders).
Richard the Viper, meanwhile, started besieging Calais. The bulk of the Burgundians had left, and the remnant of their fleet smuggled people and provisions out of the city, but not into the city, to hasten its fall.
In one of the first days of July, Richard was stuck by an idea. His ships he used for smuggling people out could smuggle soldiers into the city... The highly dangerous command of this operation could be given to any possible dynastic enemy... why not Henry Tudor?
The operation went on smoothly, although Tudor was wounded (which the Viper would have considered to be part of the smoothness) and Calais fell in the end of August. The Burgondian attack to relieve the siege failed because the English had no supply lines to speak of anymore - everything came by boat or was bought from France.

Family matters
In the end of 1480, a commonner dressed in black had arrived in Amboise to meet the Spider. He was accompanied by two young boys, the older one the age of the Dauphin. After a few discussions, the two kids were left to the Spider's household, and soon were left with the Dauphin and Charles de Savoie.
In April 1481, the royal household moved from Amboise to Barcelona for the engagement ceremony. However, this caused a disagreement between the Aragonese queen Isabella and the Spider King, since Queen Isabella wanted her daughter to stay in Aragon to complete her education until she grew old enough for the marriage, while Louis wanted his son's bride-to-be to stay with his son in Amboise. A compromise was finally reached : young Isabella de Aragon would stay in Zaragossa until the age of fourteen. She would then go with her fiancé in Amboise, where her education would be finalised by Anne de France, which Isabella had deemed "quite refined, albeit too ambitious for a mere duchess".

Weather forecast for Calais this autumn : Rainy, with a chance of canonballs.
Comminges had used a couple months for his troops to rest, consolidate the fortifications in Hainaut and generally work for the reconstruction of the County after four series of sieges. Now, he was ready to pounce on Artois. The mood in Artois was globally similiar to that in Hainaut, and thus it only took two weeks for Calais to be reached. He stopped in front of the city, and checked the date. The two years had been over the previous day. Therefore, the third siege of Calais started. It didn't last long, since the English, fighting the Burgondians near Dunkerque, rapidly returned to Calais.
The trick was that most of the French army hadn't been put into position for the siege. Notably, the 2 500 knights, which were mostly of very limited use in a siege, and the 2 000 lancers, were still mounted and around the camp. Therefore, the English arrival was confronted by the "Mounted Phalanx of Doom", as the English archers called it after the battle. In a few minutes, the English archers lost 30% of their numbers and 90% of their accuracy. Meanwhile, the French artillery was still shooting canonballs in the air and the walls of the city, with mixed results.
The English heavy infantry and cavalry immediately reacted, and the battle turned into a melee. The Viper got dismounted after an hour or so. He looked around him, uttered "A horse. I need a horse." and then, louder, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!". Both Henry Tudor and Louis d'Orléans heard it, but Louis was closer, and had just killed a mounted enemy. He answered "Je vous prends au mot", smiled, and then, in English, "You are now my prisoner." while giving the horse to the Viper. One minute later, Henry Tudor rushed to kill the Viper. Louis cut his arm without even thinking. "'Tis but a scratch!" answered the infuriated Lancastrian, while charging back. The Viper raised his sword and beheaded him with a large grin. Still dumbfounded by what had just happened, Louis returned to the French campment to show Comminges his second high-ranking prisoner. Soon, the French lancers pressed the English infantry back while the knights bludgeoned the English knights - there was a reason for the French reputation for having the best heavy cavalry in Europe.
Calais surrendered a whole month after the battle outside its walls. Comminges ordered the same conditions be given to the English that the English had given to the French in the earlier episodes of the French Succession War, but that any English lawyer or judge would become a French prisoner, knowing that his king would probably want to inculpate the Viper for usurpation.
The year ended with England prostrated in its islands and archipielagoes, French diplomats drafting a treaty to end the French Succession War, and Maximilian von Habsburg falling into depression.

Meanwhile, in Iberia
After one year and a half of continuous rampage, Ferrante de Napoli finally gives up on claiming the throne of Aragon, his enemy Fernando being out of his reach. This means Aragon will be able to recover. However, the country is still badly mauled, and the treasury of Aragon hardly even gets one third of its 1474 revenues.

And, in the East
After his successes in Transylvania and Serbia, it was becoming necessary for the Ottomans to be kicked out of Puglia, especially after they captured Otranta. Therefore, Matyàs Hunyadi sent his general Balàzs Magyar as a measure of support for the Kingdom of Peninsular Sicily with a few troops, among which some Serbs. This led to Otranta rapidly (January) falling back into Neapolitan hands, after a few accordions were played.
The loss of Otranta so easily soon gave Mehmed the Conqueror a heart attack, since he planned to conquer Naples easily and then grab Rome, thus annihilating the Christians on the field of faith, and confirming he truly was the Sultan of Rum. His son Bayezid succeeded him. However this led to a civil war, since Djem was Bayezid's older brother, and simply didn't arrive to Constantinople in time to be proclaimed Sultan after the death of his father due to the message sent to him in his provinces of Konya and Karaman being intercepted by one of his brothers' allies, the governor of Sivas, Tokat and Amasya. He therefore raised an army and conquered some small places, like Inegöl. This emboldened him enough for him to crown himself Sultan of Anatolia, with his capital being Bursa. However, his troops lost a decisive battle at Yenisehir, forcing him to flee to Cairo.
 
1482


"Ten! Ten deadly enemies : the French, the Hungarians, the English, the Turks, the Swiss, the Italians, the Commonwealth, the Germans, the Russians and the Scandinavians. And the Austrians. Eleven!"
"Damn it, everybody's our enemy. Even ourselves."
The Monty Pythons, in The Habsburg Dynasty
.​



Timeline :

Ongoing : War of the Burgundian Inheritance
French Succession War
Ottoman Civil War
5th -19th February : Richard III's trial.
10th March : Death of Richard III
17 June : Battle of Ankara.
19th August : Battle of Malines.
5th September : Treaty of Calais. End of the French Succession War
10th September : Treaty of Dijon. End of the War of the Burgundian Inheritance.

Winter : the King's share

The Winter of 1482, after the Battle of Calais, saw heated tensions between the two Louis. While the Spider exiged his nephew handed him his royal prisoner as Comminges had done with the judges and lawyers of Calais, said nephew refused abruptly. Indeed, the Spider wanted a cheap ally in England. The best way to do so was restoring Edward V to his throne by trying Richard the Viper for lèse-majesté and usurpation. Meanwhile, Louis d'Orléans wanted one thing : power. Although he knew he couldn't have England just like this, he would need some maneuvering, he had a shot if the Viper was true to his word. The two Louis finally met in Angers to discuss. The Spider reminded his nephew that Richard of Gloucester was a backstabbing treacherous bastard, or in short, a wannabe version of himself, and that he could foresee that the Viper, once back in England, would neither pay his ransom nor hand him over England. Therefore, it was more interesting to discuss with him, the Spider, with whom you could easily do business as long as land wasn't involved. Louis d'Orléans finally came to reason, and started negociating. First of all, should he trade with his uncle, he would have his marriage annuled. Then, a sum of money would be paid to him - his first demand was two million livres tournois, the ransom he would have asked from Richard. After fierce negociating for a week (his uncle insisting at first on choosing between money and marriage), Louis left with one million livres, a promise to have his marriage annuled (which was done by the Archbishop of Paris a few months later) and one less person to eat at his table. Meanwhile, the Spider had completely emptied his coffers, and he had what he liked most : a trial.
The trial started on the 5th of February, the day after annexing the County of Burgundy to the Principalty of Burgundy, and lasted for two weeks. While the accusation of usurpation was founded, it had no punition to speak of in the archives, unless it was counted as open rebellion and high treason, for which the punishment was beheading. The accusation of lèse-majesté was dismissed as "being like accusing a mass murderer of petty theft". Edward V refused his uncle royal pardon, and the Viper was beheaded in Calais on March 10th. Now, it was time to go to crush the Flanders and Brabant.

Spring : the Final Campaign.

The year of 1481 had seen the French take very few losses, even at Calais, due to quality armours and lack of large battles. Therefore, at the beginning of 1482, the French army was made as followed :

Armée de Brabant : Phillippe de Crèvecoeur
2 000 Provençal Comtal Guard (halberders)
65 canons
25 serpentines
500 Savoyard knights
350 Savoyard Lancers
700 Savoyard footmen
1 050 Savoyard crossbowmen.
5 500 varried Savoyard mercenaries
8 000 Bandes Françaises
5 000 Guelderian Militia

Armée des Flandres : Jean de Comminges
3 000 knights (the Iron Finger)
2 000 lancers
4 000 Lances' footmen
6 000 Lances' crossbowmen
6500 Bandes Françaises
65 canons
25 serpentines

Meanwhile, the Burgondian army was smaller than either of the two Franco-Savoyard armies with only 15 000 men, most of them grossly underpaid and poor quality, hastily-raised troops. The writing was already on the wall when on March 11th Comminges sent his men, stationned in Calais and Artois, to attack Gravelines, Dunkerque, Lille and other cities in Southern Flanders. This move was answered two weeks later by Crèvecoeur laying siege to Breda and Eindhoven in Northern Brabant. The ports in Flanders falling rapidly, Ypern and Nieuwport were taken before Crèvecoeur even started attacking. It took only two months for Flanders to fall thanks to a few bribes, some French debt, canonballs, and finally one Iron Finger charge before the doors closed in Ghent. Meanwhile, Crèvecoeur faced a much stiffer opposition, as the Burgondians had repeatedly massively supplied cities and forts, forcing the French to split to reach their objectives and leaving them vulnerable to a Burgondian army attack. The battle of Antwerp saw the French army reduced to 6 000 be attacked by a 10 000 strong Burgondian army. Except the Burgondians went on strike, and the French attacked in the night, burning the camp and the strikers. As a consequence, when Brussels fell, it was not to the Army of Brabant but to that of Flanders. A small party of knights led by Louis d'Orléans notably was among the first to penetrate the keep, to capture the Princess of Burgondy and her children before they could escape to Malines. The Battle of Malines, the Burgondians' last stand, saw "Close Shave" Maximilian and his last 5 000 men encircled by 45 000 Frenchmen. Needless to say they didn't last long, or that the one to catch the Prince of Burgondy was... Louis d'Orléans. The guy had flair.

Autumn : One peace to end this all
With the capture of the Princes, the war was ready to end, and the peace Burgondy would get promised little more than pure and simple annexation.
First, France needed to end the French Succession War with England.
The treaty draft (which became the Treaty of Calais) was accepted at the first look by the young King, being very lenient given the condition England was in :
-> France keeps Calais and the surrounding lands as its own, and annexes Jersey and Guernesey.
-> England annexes Burgondian Zeeland and the isles of the mouthes of the Rhine and Escaut that are part of Holland.
-> The Plantagenêt dynasty abandons all claims to the Kingdom of France in its entirety and any other lands of the Burgondian Netherlands, the Duchy of Lorraine, the Counties of Provence, Burgondy and Sundgau.
-> The Capétiens abandon any claims on England and Wales and will help Edward V's safe return to his throne.
Meanwhile, the Burgondian Princes were forced to sign the treaty of Dijon, which way less lenient, although the pills did have a sugar coating :
-> The lands of Artois, Picardy, Vermandois and Flanders become part of the Royal Demesne
-> The Duchies of Brabant, Luxembourg, Guelders and the counties of Flanders, Hainaut, Namur and Holland become possessions of the French Crown, submitted to the Salic Law.
-> The Duchy of Limbourg is annexed by the Bishopric of Liège.
-> The Bishoprics of Liège, Cambrai and Tournai become vassals of the French Crown.
-> All Burgondian possessions in Switzerland are handed to Savoy.
-> The remainder of the Burgondian lands, the Principalty of Burgondy, becomes integrally part of France. It will be leased to Marie de Bourgogne for 100 years, to be transmitted exclusively from mother to elder daughter. Should the Princess of Burgondy marry a Capétien prince, the lease will be turned into an apanage to the prince.
-> Any privileges given to Bourgogne must be respected.
-> All lands of the Principalty of Burgondy cease being part of the Holy Roman Empire.
-> All debts of the Burgondian state and Savoy as of the date of signing the treaty are taken up by France.

Autumn : the King returns
The news from the Continent, the past year, had been atrocious for the English. Not only had the treacherous French attacked them, but worse, they had captured their King, beheaded him after a trial for open rebellion against the King, and killed the claimant to the throne. As a matter of fact, the English were, for a while, short of a King.
Therefore, one can imagine the way the English felt when a large French ship entered the port of Dover and demanded the governor of the city to come, and the surprise of hearing the French yelling with their terrible accent "lédies and gèntlemens, Édouard V, ze raïteful king of England".
This king, which was thought to have died with his brother in the Tower, had with his brother spent a year on holidays in France. After a few squabbles due to the large French guard Louis the Spider had lent him, Edward finally reached London, where some surviving servant acknowledged it was really their king. He was crowned on November 1st.

Meanwhile, in Anatolia
Djem Osmanli had come back from Cairo with troops to support his cause. There was a large amount of cities available for sieging, and Konya felt like a good choice. Still, it allowed Bayezid to gather his troops, and come the real fight, the Sultan was capable of routing his brother at the battle of Ankara. This forced him to flee once again, to Rhodes since it was the last way to Cairo. Unfortunately, Rhodes was under the control of the Knights Hospitaliers, and therefore so did Djem. The troublesome prince was sent to France, where the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid agree to pay a pension for his brother's life and not to allow him to go back.

And, in the Balkans
Meanwhile, in Wallachia, the game of thrones continues as the various Christian powers (mostly Stephen Cel Mare's Moldavia and Màtyas Hunyadi's Hungary) try to influence the principality by picking its voivode. This leads to the arrival on the Wallachian throne of Vlad IV Călugărul (the Monk). This would usher a short period of peace.

Annex : Of Mappings.
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1483-1485
Author's note : These 3 years being relatively peaceful compared to the previous ones, they have been merged in one post. Don't blame it on author sloth (although it definitely plays a part).

"Capturing a prey and devouring it isn't all that is needed to grow big : you must also digest it." Louis the Spider
"Grenada will be a hard nut to crack, but it must be cracked to secure Iberia." Juana de Castilla, before the end of the Reconquista​



Timeline :

Ongoing :
May 1483 : Ottoman integration of Herzegovina.
1484 : Isabella de Aragon arrives in France.
September 1485 : Anne de Bretagne and Louis d'Orléans get engaged.
25th December 1485 : Death of Louis XI "the Spider" of France.

French integration of acquired territories

During the eight previous years, large realms had been annexed to the Royal Demesne : Anjou in 1474, Roussillon, Cerdagne, and Catalonia in 1476, Maine, Lorraine, Sundgau and Provence in 1480, as well as the whole Burgundian Netherlands in 1482. The Kingdom of Majorca was considered a nominally independent French province - that is, subject to French laws but with separate administration. Furthermore, large privileges had been granted, such as the militias in Guelders. Now France needed a round of integration.
The first step was a reorganisation of the provinces, counties and duchies part of the French Crown. The goal was the diminution of the amount of provinces in France on the one hand, and making them more centralized on the other hand.
The following changes were made : Picardie became the name of Vermandois and Southern Duchy of Picardy, while Pas-de-Calais or Calaisis was given to Northern Duchy of Picardy, Calais and Artois. Bar was integrated to the Duchy of Champagne. Guyenne and Armagnac were reunited into Aquitaine. The limit between Languedoc and Catalogne was set on the Pyrreneans. Maine and Anjou were fused into a single province, Anjou. Sundgau was renamed as Sudgau, and an ultimatum was sent to the Republic of Mulhouse. The Bishoprics of Cambrai (Cambrésis) and Tournai (Tournaisis) were made part of Hainaut. The various Guelderian Counties and Duchies were merged into one Duché de Guèldres. These changes allowed to make more manageable provinces.
The provinces were gradually integrated into the French system, and before long Catalonia (1483) and the Angevin lands (1485) were effectively managed and were in relatively good condition. The same couldn't be said of the Burgondian Netherlands, which suffered from some pretty big war damage...
To centralise the country even further, the system of Relais de Poste was expanded and densified, since the Spider craved information just as much as lands.

Reconstruction of the North.
The Burgondian Netherlands were in large parts pretty damaged. Den Haag / La Haye had been utterly sacked and burnt by some English soldiers, as well as most of Southern Holland. Calais had its wall in ruins and the city itself had been depopulated. The manpower available in Lorraine was pretty low. Hainaut and Calaisis had seen lots of fighting, to the point that those once-rich provinces had their economies in tatters. There was one big advantage however to being French provinces : France was generally a net food exporter, and had massive manpower. As a consequence, reconstruction work could be prioritized over harvests, and southern population could be sent to replace the dead Northerners. This had the secondary effect of making Hainaut and Flanders definitively Oil-speaking places.
The army was also used to rebuild the countryside. Of course, the knights weren't involved and the work was mostly infrastructural (a Roman road was started from the outskirts of Brussels to Paris, only reaching Mons in 1485) and fortifications, as Comminges had used his men in 1481. Of course, it required a slightly higher pay, but it also gave some skills outside war to retiring soldiers. By 1485, one could say the toughest half of reconstruction was over, now only gradual repopulation and regrowing of trade were to be waited for. However, an unforeseen consequence was that the Netherlands (Brabant, Hainaut, Hollande, Flandres and Calaisis) had been neglected administration-wise, since soldiers there had done a lot of work in those regions, effectively closing the need for administration temporarily.

The Economy, fools! (No comet sighted)
However, the growth of administration, the reorganisation, and the reconstruction didn't come cheaply. They were a pretty large drain on the treasury. Meanwhile, one of the biggest problems of France was that it had to deal with the monstrous debts Maximilian von Habsburg had accumulated, plus the Savoyard ones and the costs of buying the Viper from Louis d'Orléans. It seemed pretty clear that France might go bankrupt any minute. However, it enjoyed several factors that delayed the bankrupcy :
- Catalonia and Provence were unusually rich provinces. This gave the Spider approximately twelve months' time.
- The relative opening of the English as a potential market. The extra trade (since England was an ally, ships weren't pirated) staved off the bankrupcy for another six months.
- Reconstruction means taxes increase, and so does integration. This gave the Spider eighteen months.
- Italian and Jewish merchants decided to show the administration how much their businesses meant to them with subsidies. This finally allowed the Spider to stay clear of bankrupcy.

Making old matters new : Brittany and succession.
In the end of the War of Brittanian Succession, the Treaty of Guérande had given the Duchy of Brittany to the Montforts. However, when the Montforts would run out of men, the Duchy would go to the Penthièvre family.
The Duke of Brittany, François II de Montfort, had no sons, and in the beginning of the 1480s he decided his daughter should inherit the Duchy. Meanwhile in 1483 Louis the Spider paid 50 000 écus to buy to Nicole de Penthièvre her rights to the Duchy of Brittany.
In 1485, François II has his States of Brittany officially make Anne the heir to Brittany. As a consequence, Louis threatens François with war. It is globally an empty threat, since Louis is in no financial position to declare war, but François started, as a consequence, looking for a husband for his daughter. There were two possible husbands : Edward V, the young King of England, and Louis d'Orléans. However, Louis was the one which was allowed to come and meet the young duchess (while Edward was not allowed to leave England or Ireland except when on a war). Therefore, in the end of September, Anne de Bretagne and Louis d'Orléans are engaged to each other.

Family matters.
Seeing as his health slowly worsens, Louis the Spider asks in July 1483 the Pope to send him Saint Francesco de Paola who is said to have healed several other nobles. Saint Francis arrives in Bormes after an epidemic of plague stroke at Provence, healing there several people, and starts going North, following the Rhône. He gets greeted as the Popes' equal in Lyon by the King's orders, and then turns around the Massif Central to reach Amboise, where the Spider and his family live. According to some historians, he said that Louis's disease would only worsen with time and that he should prepare to die. According to others, he said the King could expect to live for "at most three more years". Either way, there was nothing he could really do. Saint Francesco remained in France for another quarter of a century, being very popular with the people, but much less with the court.
While one may point out the Spider's landgrabbing didn't cease (although he started massively appeasing all nations on the left bank of the Rhine, Hungary and Castille) after this meeting, it sure had some interesting effects. Notably, he concentrated on educating his son to a great extent. When Isabella de Aragon arrived in Amboise, her education and culture were also extended to "political manoeuvering" by her father-in-law to complement her slightly airheaded husband.
Worth noting is that Philibert de Savoie took his throne in 1483, but died rather quickly and suspiciously when hunting with his uncle Philippe "Lackland" de Bresse. When Charles de Savoie arrives in Savoy on 1484, he immediately has Philippe Lackland exiled. He marries Blanche Paleologos, the daughter of the Marquess of Montferrat. He also turned the name of the family into Valois-Savoia to avoid any conflicts with France and cement the alliance.
Louis "The Spider" de Valois, King of France and Majorca, died on Christmas 1485 of a cerebro-vascular accident. His son ordered a three-week national mourning for the king who, according to modern historians, "chewed all he could bite". His legacy inspired "De Principatibus", by Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavegli and its consequence, the politique de réalisme, also known in France as the politique de l'Araignée.

Meanwhile, in Iberia
Juana de Castilla had been looking for a while to assert her kingdom as the dominant nation in the Iberian Peninsula. To this end, there was only one thing she could do to massively raise her kingdom's prestige internationally : eliminate once and for all the tiny states South of her Kingdom, the largest going by the name of Emirate of Grenada. In other words, it meant finishing the Reconquista. While she kept her kingdom religiously open, even giving perks to Grenadan knowledged classes to emigrate to Castille, she prepared an army she would throw at Grenada when it would be empty of anything interesting.
The occasion finally came in August 1485 when two Saracen nobles were arrested when crossing into Castillan Andalusia with their men-at-arms "to captured an escaped prisoner". The 30 000 men she raised, plus 10 000 lent by Portugal and as many by France, set to capture the capital of the last Muslim state in Europe. While the armies captured most of the Grenadan fortifications and cities that year, the capital didn't fall in 1485, before the French and Portuguese hosts returned home. The siege of Grenada went on until the end of March, when a massive sortie by the Saracen army led to the Battle of Grenada…
In the meantime, the Kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon found themselves in an absolutely terrible situation, since no rebuilding had taken place during the end of King Juan's reign, and the provinces left untouched by the French offensive had been those which had taken most damage from the pillaging of Ferrante di Napoli. It was obvious Aragon had been neutralized as a local power for at least a decade. In 1485, figures for the tax revenues of the Kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia proper gave income 20% lower than it had been in 1474 but 60% higher than its lowest in 1478. In Sardinia and Sicily, the figures were respectively 30% and 75%. When France would offer Aragon a chance to exact revenge on Ferrante's Naples, one could expect Fernando not to drop it...

And, in the Balkans
Hungary and the HRE

Friedrich von Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor, was not a man to be trifled with, or so he thought. His dynasty had suffered badly from the War of the Burgondian Inheritance, France grabbing all of the Burgondian Netherlands, and the Burgondian heartland not even remaining the Habsburgs after his daughter-in-law's death. Furthermore, Maximilian had ruined himself in that war, and as a consequence, Austria was unable to pay the huge war indemnity demanded by Hungary. After a few years of lenience, Màtyàs finally got tired of the situation, and declared once again war on Austria. Fortress after fortress fell to the experienced Hungarians, as the Austrians were incapable of fielding an army capable of pressing back the Hungarians. As a consequence, after two years of war, Màtyàs Hunyadi and 8 000 of his most experienced soldiers entered Vienna on August 1st, 1485. He then prepared expeditions to seize Carniola, Carinthia and Styria from the Austrians. It seemed the Holy Roman Empire was failing to keep its frontiers safe once again.

Maintaining Moldavian independence
Wallachia was now more or less stable under the Turkish yoke, as Vlad IV Calugarul (the Monk), illegitimate son of Vlad II Drakul, ruled the Principality. This meant the Ottomans were at the door of the Principality of Moldavia, as they had been ever since the fall of the Despotate of Dobrougea. Now, it was Coastal Bessarabia which was threatened by the Ottomans. In order to defend itself, Stephen cel Mare first decided to strengthen ties with Russia by having his first daughter marry the Russian prince's son. He then made peace with the Ottomans, pledging vassality. However, they kept taking the Moldavian ports, and even burnt down the Moldavian capital Suceava in July 1485. The Poles finally decided to intervene, and in October 1485 the Ottomans are defeated by Stephen. After a couple months, Chilia is finally retaken. Moldavian independence had been maintained, but for how long?

Turkish matters
The years between 1483 and 1485 were pretty busy as always for the Ottomans. One of the first decisions of Sultan Bayezid was indeed to integrate Herzegovina (the lower third of Bosnia-Herzegovina) into his empire, and was formally annexed in May 1483. Aside from the Moldavians, which were no real threat, the Turks also declared war on the Mameluks which had provinces up to Adana. However, this one war proves to be of no real interest as the Ottomans cannot break the Mamelukes decisively, but neither can the Egyptians.
 
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