Louis XII was King of France from 1498 to 1515 and King of Naples from 1501 to 1504.
44 Facts About Louis XII
2.
At the royal victory in the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488, Louis XII was captured, but Charles VIII pardoned him and released him.
3.
When Louis XII became king in 1498, he had his marriage with Joan annulled by Pope Alexander VI and instead married Anne of Brittany, the widow of his cousin Charles VIII.
4.
Louis XII persevered in the Italian Wars, initiating a second Italian campaign for the control of the Kingdom of Naples.
5.
Louis XII conquered the Duchy of Milan in 1500 and pushed forward to the Kingdom of Naples, which fell to him in 1501.
6.
Louis XII did not encroach on the power of local governments or the privileges of the nobility, in opposition with the long tradition of the French kings to attempt to impose absolute monarchy in France.
7.
Louis XII, who remained Duke of Milan after the second Italian War, was interested in further expansion in the Italian Peninsula and launched a third Italian War, which was marked by the military prowess of the Chevalier de Bayard.
8.
Louis XII was succeeded by his cousin and son-in-law Francis from the Angouleme cadet branch of the House of Valois.
9.
Louis XII's father was almost seventy years old when Louis was born.
10.
Louis XII was only three years old when he succeeded as Duke of Orleans upon the death of his father in 1465.
11.
Louis XII was succeeded to the throne of France by his thirteen-year-old son, Charles VIII.
12.
Louis, the current Duke of Orleans and future Louis XII, attended as part of the Second Estate.
13.
Rather the reforms would only be acted on when Louis XII came to the throne.
14.
In religious policy, Louis XII reinstituted the Pragmatic Sanction, which established the Roman Catholic Church in France as a "Gallic Church" with most of the power of appointment in the hands of the king or other French officials.
15.
Louis XII was skilled in managing his nobility, including the powerful Bourbon faction, greatly contributing to the stability of French government.
16.
Louis, the current Duke of Orleans and future King Louis XII, joined Charles VIII on this campaign.
17.
Accordingly, even before he became King of France, Louis XII began to claim the Duchy of Milan as his own inheritance, which should have come to his by right of his paternal grandmother Valentina Visconti.
18.
However, before initiating any war Louis XII needed to deal with the international threats that he faced.
19.
Actually, Louis XII was merely seeking to revive the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland that had been in existence since King Philippe IV of France first recognised Robert the Bruce as King of Scotland in 1309.
20.
In exchange, Louis XII promised to protect the Confederation from any aggression from Maximillian and the Holy Roman Empire.
21.
Ever since becoming king, Louis XII had been rebuilding the French army.
22.
Marshall Trivulzio had been in the service of the French throne since the reign of Louis XII XI, but he had been born and raised in Milan.
23.
Louis XII had ordered his army to massacre the garrison and many civilians as a message to the other towns in the Duchy against resistance to the French army.
24.
Later, Louis XII appointed Georges d' Amboise as the permanent governor of Milan.
25.
Louis XII raised another army under Louis de La Tremoille and sent him to recapture Milan.
26.
However, Louis XII first had to deal with a recurring problem in northern Italy.
27.
Louis XII was severely criticized by contemporary historians including Niccolo Machiavelli; Machiavelli's criticism of Louis XII is contained in his work The Prince.
28.
King Louis XII was brought into Italy by the ambition of the Venetians, who expected by his coming to get control of half the state of Lombardy.
29.
Louis XII could have left in Naples a caretaker king of his own, but he threw him out, and substituted a man capable of driving out Louis himself.
30.
The division of Lombardy that she made with the Venetians was excusable, since it gave Louis XII a foothold in Italy; the division of Naples with Spain was an error, since there was no such necessity for it.
31.
Louis XII claimed the throne of Naples and pursuant to the sharing agreement with Ferdinand II shared half the income of Naples with Spain.
32.
Under Louis XII, there was an unprecedented explosion of propaganda and publicity for the French crown.
33.
Louis XII had numerous large ceremonies for the various marriages, funerals, and other events that occurred under his reign.
34.
Louis XII adopted the porcupine as his personal badge and as a royal beast.
35.
However, by the second half of his reign, Louis XII began to relegate the aggressive porcupine into a simple heraldic symbol for identification.
36.
Louis XII employed numerous artists to capture him and produce individualized, miniature portraits that can be found in manuscripts today.
37.
In spite of his military and diplomatic failures, Louis XII proved to be a popular king.
38.
Louis XII duly earned the title of Father of the People conferred upon him by the Estates in 1506.
39.
Louis XII did not, as one might have expected, argue the marriage to be void due to consanguinity.
40.
Likewise, Louis XII could not argue that he had been below the legal age of consent to marry: no one was certain when he had been born, with Louis XII claiming to have been twelve at the time, and others ranging in their estimates between eleven and thirteen.
41.
Accordingly, Louis XII claimed that Joan was physically malformed and that he had therefore been unable to consummate the marriage.
42.
Louis XII granted the annulment on the grounds that Louis did not freely marry, but was forced to marry by Joan's father Louis XI.
43.
Louis XII had an illegitimate son, Michel Bucy, Archbishop of Bourges, from 1505, who died in 1511 and was buried in Bourges.
44.
Louis XII is commemorated by the Tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany.