Louis XI, , eldest son of Charles VII and Marie of Anjou, b. at Bourges July 3, 1423; d. at Plessis-les-Tours, August 30, 1483. Having married Margaret of Scotland in June, 1436, he took part in two intrigues against his father, Charles VII, the first in 1440, when he organized the revolt of the Praguerie, the second in 1446, when he withdrew into Dauphiny and later to the Court of the Duke of Burgundy. Succeeding to the throne, July 21, 1461, he had to make large concessions, by the Treaties of Conflans and Saint-Maur (1465), to the feudal lords, who had organized against him the League of the Public Weal (Ligue du Bien public). But his revenge was swift; he imposed a humiliating peace on the Duke of Brittany (1468). Louis looked upon Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, as the head of the feudal organization; he had to treat with him or subdue him. The Conference of Peronne (1468) ended with an act of treachery on the part of Charles, who retained Louis a prisoner, forced him to sign a disadvantageous treaty, and took the king with him on an expedition against the revolted burghers of Liege. But on the return of Louis to France preparations were begun for a decisive struggle between the king, who, in 1474, had formed an alliance with the Swiss cantons, and the duke, who was an ally of the King of England. Charles the Bold having fallen at Nancy, January 5, 1477, Louis took possession of the Duchy of Burgundy, of Artois, and of Hainaut. Margaret, daughter of Charles the Bold, married Maximilian of Austria, in August, 1477; the result of this marriage would have been to place Burgundy and Artois in the hands of Philip the Handsome, grandson of Charles and it was to provide against such an undesirable eventuality that Louis affianced his son Charles (afterwards Charles VIII) to the daughter of Margaret and Maximilian. (The marriage of Charles VIII to Anne of Brittany, in 1491, after Louis's death, frustrated this precaution.) Louis passed his last years in his castle of Plessis-les-Tours, surrounded by persons of low estate, very suspicious, very irascible. His character was contemptible, though he was a clever politician; he was fond of pilgrimages and pious practices, but he had a narrow idea of God; his religion was based on morbid fear, his Christianity never displayed itself in kind deeds. His perfidy and cruelty were notorious; he kept Cardinal Balue (q.v.) a prisoner for eleven years in an iron cage.
The relations of Louis XI with the Holy See are worthy of special study, for they definitely shaped the religious policy of the French monarchy. From the beginning of his reign there were two questions that necessitated continued communication between Louis and the pope: the question of the Pragmatic Sanction and the Italian question. Pius II, at the Council of Mantua, in 1459, had protested once more against the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, and the Bull "Execrabilis" (June 18, 1460), by which Pius II condemned appeals to future councils, was directed against it. Again, Louis was always anxious to form an offensive and defensive alliance with the smaller Italian States, to reduce the revolted Genoese, and bring the north of the peninsula under his sway by means of the possessions of the house of Orleans in Lombardy, to bring under his control the house of Anjou in Naples, to marry the Duke of Calabria to a daughter of Francis Sforza, and gradually to obtain a kind of hegemony in Italy.