Anne of Brittany

Anne inherited Brittany in 1488 when her father died and she was only eleven, already a prize because her duchy sat wedged between France and the sea. The next year she married Maximilian I of Austria by proxy, but Charles VIII of France launched a military campaign that forced her to renounce it. She married Charles in 1491; none of their children survived early childhood. When he died in 1498, the throne passed to his cousin Louis XII, and Anne - bound by an earlier agreement to secure Brittany's fate - had to marry him too. Louis was devoted, and Anne used the room that gave her to defend her duchy's independence. They had two daughters, and though French law barred them from the throne, Anne declared the elder her heir in Brittany and arranged her engagement to Charles of Austria. After Anne's death in 1514, the girl instead married Francis I of France, and the union that followed folded Brittany into the kingdom for good.