Anne of Brittany

Anne of Brittany inherited the duchy in 1488 while still a child, during a military and diplomatic struggle over Brittany’s future. Her proxy marriage to Maximilian of Habsburg was displaced by the French invasion and her marriage to Charles VIII in 1491.

As duchess, Anne sought to preserve Breton institutions and dynastic rights while operating inside the increasingly powerful French monarchy. Her marriage contracts with Charles VIII and Louis XII were therefore politically important as well as personal. Her surviving daughter Claude inherited Brittany and married the future Francis I, further binding the duchy to the French crown.

Michael Livingston’s The Two Hundred Years War treats Charles VIII’s marriage to Anne of Brittany as part of the diplomatic settlement that closes one long phase of Anglo-French conflict. Rozsa Gaston’s Margaret of Austria shows the human cost of that marriage through the discarded Habsburg bride Charles had previously been expected to wed. Gaston’s Anne and Charles then places Anne herself at the centre of the struggle over Brittany and the marriage that binds the duchy to the French crown; Anne and Louis follows her second queenship after Charles’s death, and Anne and Louis: Forever Bound examines her later efforts to protect Brittany and control the marriages of her daughters.