This fortunate capture put an enormous advantage in the hands of the English; for John, a facile and selfish prince, was ready to buy his freedom by almost any concessions. He signed two successive treaties which gave such advantageous terms to Edward III. that the dauphin Charles, who was acting as regent, and the French states-general refused to confirm them. This drove the English king to put still further pressure on the enemy; in 1359 he led out from Calais the largest English army that had been seen during the war, devastated all northern France as far as Reims and the borders of Burgundy, and then--continuing the campaign through the heart of the winter--presented himself before the gates of Paris and ravaged the Île de France. This brought the regent Charles and his counsellors to the verge of despair; they yielded, and on the 8th of May 1360, signed an agreement at Brétigny near Chartres, by which nearly all King Edward's demands were granted. These preliminaries were ratified by the definitive peace of Calais (Oct. 24, 1360), which brought the first stage of the Hundred Years' War to an end.
By this treaty King Edward formally gave up his claim to the French throne, which he had always intended to use merely as an asset for barter, and was to receive in return not only a sum of 3,000,000 gold crowns for King John's personal ransom, but an immense cession of territory which--in southern France at least--almost restored the old boundaries of the time of Henry II. The duchy of Aquitaine was reconstructed, so as to include not only the lands that Edward had inherited, and his recent conquests, but all Poitou, Limousin, Angoumois, Quercy, Rouergue and Saintonge--a full half of France south of the Loire. This vast duchy the English king bestowed not long after on his son Edward, the victor of Poitiers, who reigned there as a vassal-sovereign, owing homage to England but administering his possessions in his own right. In northern France, Calais and the county of Guînes, and also the isolated county of Ponthieu, the inheritance of the wife of Edward I., were ceded to the English crown. All these regions, it must be noted, were to be held for the future free of any homage or acknowledgment of allegiance to an overlord, "in perpetuity, and in the manner in which the kings of France had held them." There was to be an end to the power of the courts of Paris to harass the duke of Aquitaine, by using the rights of the suzerain to interfere with the vassal's subjects. It was hoped that for the future the insidious legal warfare which had been used with such effect by the French kings would be effectually prevented.