King of France from 1498 to 1515
He inherited a throne his cousin had tried to deny him through a forced marriage to a disabled woman, then bent the Pope to annul it. Louis XII played the feudal chessboard hard — rebel lord turned king, conqueror of Milan, briefly King of Naples — but made his name at home by cutting taxes and earning a title no amount of Italian gold could buy: "Father of
The son of Charles I, Duke of Orléans, Louis was compelled by Louis XI to marry the king's disabled and supposedly sterile daughter Joan — a dynastic trap meant to kill off the Orléans branch. When he took the throne in 1498 after Charles VIII died childless, Louis had Pope Alexander VI annul the marriage and wed Anne, Duchess of Brittany, binding Brittany to France. Once a rebel lord captured at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488, he pivoted to the Italian Wars: he took Milan in 1500, pushed into Naples and claimed its crown in 1501, then lost it to Ferdinand II of Aragon by 1504. A…
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