[Illustration: Meeting between Charles VIII, and Anne of Brittany----282]
Charles VIII. was pleased with and proud of himself. He had achieved a
brilliant and a difficult marriage. In Europe, and within his own
household, he had made a display of power and independence. In order to
espouse Anne of Brittany, he had sent back Marguerite of Austria to her
father. He had gone in person and withdrawn from prison his cousin Louis
of Orleans, whom his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, had put there; and so far
from having got embroiled with her, he saw all the royal family
reconciled around him. This was no little success for a young prince of
twenty-one. He thereupon devoted himself with ardor and confidence to
his desire of winning back the kingdom of Naples, which Alphonso I.,
King of Arragon, had wrested from the house of France, and of thereby
re-opening for himself in the East, and against Islamry, that career of
Christian glory which had made a saint of his ancestor, Louis IX.
Mediocre men are not safe from the great dreams which have more than once
seduced and ruined the greatest men. The very mediocre son of Louis XI.,
on renouncing his father's prudent and by no means chivalrous policy, had
no chance of becoming a great warrior and a saint; but not the less did
he take the initiative as to those wars in Italy which were to be so
costly to his successors and to France. By two treaties concluded in
1493 [one at Barcelona on the 19th of January and the other at Senlis on
the 23d of May], he gave up Roussillon and Cerdagne to Ferdinand the
Catholic, King of Arragon, and Franche-Comte, Artois, and Charolais to
the house of Austria, and, after having at such a lamentable price
purchased freedom of movement, he went and took up his quarters at Lyons
to prepare for his Neapolitan venture.
|