Henry M. Baird · 3 of 379

CHAPTER I · Extent of France at the accession of Francis the First.

When, on the first day of the year 1515, the young Count of Angoulême succeeded to the throne left vacant by the death of his kinsman and father-in-law, Louis the Twelfth, the country of which he became monarch was already an extensive, flourishing, and well-consolidated kingdom. The territorial development of France was, it is true, far from complete. On the north, the whole province of Hainault belonged to the Spanish Netherlands, whose boundary line was less than one hundred miles distant from Paris. Alsace and Lorraine had not yet been wrested from the German Empire. The "Duchy" of Burgundy, seized by Louis the Eleventh immediately after the death of Charles the Bold, had, indeed, been incorporated into the French realm; but the "Free County" of Burgundy—la Franche Comté, as it was briefly designated—had been imprudently suffered to fall into other hands, and Besançon was the residence of a governor appointed by princes of the House of Hapsburg. Lyons was a frontier town; for the little districts of Bresse and Bugey, lying between the Saône and Rhône, belonged to the Dukes of Savoy. Further to the south, two fragments of foreign territory were completely enveloped by the domain of the French king. The first was the sovereign principality of Orange, which, after having been for over a century in the possession of the noble House of Châlons, was shortly to pass into that of Nassau, and to furnish the title of William the Silent, the future deliverer of Holland. The other and larger one was the Comtât Venaissin, a fief directly dependent upon the Pope. Of irregular shape, and touching the Rhone both above and below Orange, the Comtât Venaissin nearly enclosed the diminutive principality in its folds. Its capital, Avignon, having forfeited the distinction enjoyed in the fourteenth century as the residence of the Roman Pontiffs, still boasted the presence of a Legate of the Papal See, a poor compensation for the loss of its past splendor. On the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the Spanish dominions still extended north of the principal chain of the Pyrenees, and included the former County of Roussillon.