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Historical person

Charles the Bold

1433–1477

Charles the Bold was duke of Burgundy from 1467 to 1477 and sought to turn his scattered territories into an independent kingdom between France and the Holy Roman Empire. His aggressive campaigns brought him into conflict with Louis XI, the Swiss Confederacy and the duke of Lorraine.

After defeats at Grandson and Morat, he was killed at Nancy, and the Burgundian state was divided through the marriage of his heir Mary. He is often presented as the last great chivalric duke, although his government also depended on sophisticated finance and administration.

Anne Easter Smith’s Daughter of York places Charles the Bold at the centre of Margaret of York’s dynastic marriage, following her adjustment to the Burgundian court and the collision between Charles’s ambitions and Louis XI’s hostility. In Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, Charles is Louis XI’s formidable rival, and the crisis at Péronne leaves the French king temporarily in the duke’s power. Dorothy Dunnett’s The Unicorn Hunt carries Nicholas de Fleury through the financial and diplomatic networks linking Scotland, Burgundy and the continental courts during Charles’s expansion. To Lie with Lions returns to the same Burgundian sphere in 1471, where Nicholas’s commercial schemes operate inside a balance of power increasingly shaped by Charles’s wars and political reach.

Periods

Periods linked to Charles the Bold

Burgundian State1363–1477 CE Holy Roman Empire962–1500 CE

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Charles the Bold (3 series)

House of Niccolo in Order

by Dorothy Dunnett 8 books 4.6(4,501)

The House of Niccolò follows Claes, later Nicholas de Fleury, from an underestimated Bruges apprentice into an international merchant, banker and political operator. Set across fifteenth-century Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa and the Black Sea, the series connects commerce, dynastic rivalry, war, family secrets and the ancestry of characters…

All books in this series

York Family Novels in Order

by Anne Easter Smith 6 books 4.1(16,252)

The York Family Novels are six overlapping biographical novels about the House of York during the Wars of the Roses and the opening of Tudor rule. Each book centres on a different historical or lightly documented figure—Kate Haute, Margaret of York, Grace Plantagenet, Cecily Neville, Jane Shore and…

All books in this series

Waverley Novels in Order

by Sir Walter Scott 8 books 3.8(119,678)

The Waverley Novels are Walter Scott’s long sequence of historical romances, named after the anonymously published Waverley of 1814. The series moves across Scottish, English and continental European history, placing fictional protagonists between older systems of loyalty and the political, commercial and legal institutions replacing them. Scott’s characters…

All books in this series