Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 215 – The Bold in the Cold, the end of Charles of Burgundy.

The rise of the Habsburgs to world domination pivots on one crucial moment, the marriage of Maximilian of Habsburg to Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles the Bold, last of the Grand Dukes of the West.

The usual story is that young Maximilian one day walked down the aisle of some splendid cathedral and was handed the richest principality in Europe on an jewel-encrusted golden platter by the father of the bride. All he then had to do was lie down and think of the Habsburg-Burgundian empire.

That is not quite what happened. When Maximilian arrived in Ghent in August 1477, his father-in-law lay dead in a ditch in Lorraine and large sways of ducal authority and income had gone. Within less than 3 years, 1474 to 1477 Charles the Bold had frittered away the mythical wealth of the Burgundian dukes. And not just that.

These years between 1474 and 1477 helped turn the medieval empire into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. So please allow me to do this episode, even though very, very few of the protagonists or parties to the conflicts are Germans in the modern sense.

If however you prefer to listen to more Germanic content, I have something quite juicy for you. At midnight yesterday the History of Venice podcast has released a unique three way collaboration where they talk to Mike Corradi from A History of Italy and yours truly about Frederick Barbarossa’s grand plan to take over Northern Italy between 1152 and 1177. I had so much fun doing that and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

As long as you come back. In particular you have to come back for the Christmas Special. It is now time to reveal outcome of your vote. Drumroll…. You have voted with absolutely overwhelming, just over 75% majority to …..make me sing….no, no,no. I am so grateful you have saved me from this humiliation. No, the winner is…recommendations for 5 to 10 places I think you should see and that are not on the usual travel itinerary. Thanks so much to all of you who have participated. It was brilliant to see that there is now a real community of fans of the history of the Germans podcast out there. And I hope I can come up with something interesting…release date will be Thursday, 25th of December – it is the Christmas special after all.

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we ended with the lifting of the Siege of Neuss. Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, the richest prince in Europe and master of one of the first modern armies had failed to break a small town on the Rhine. For 10 month the finest artillery pieces the world had ever seen pounded the walls of Neuss. And with every week the city held out, the aura of the Burgundian war machine diminished.

And as news of the heroic defense spread rapidly across the empire, the mood changed. When I first published last week’s episode I said that there were no pamphlets telling the story of the siege of Neuss, but I found myself mistaken very quickly. Printers in Strasburg and Cologne published rhymed chronicles of the Burgundian wars in 1476 and 1477, which makes it almost certain, that printed narratives had been circulating whilst the fighting was still going on. And we find letters describing the events of 1474 and 1475 in the archives of dozens of cities, taken along by traders going up and down the Rhine and then copied across the extensive networks of the Hanseatic League, the Augsburg bankers, the Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft, discussed at the Frankfurt and Leipzig fairs and passed along by messengers in the pay of the territorial princes. From Luebeck to Graz, from Berne to Riga, people heard about the epic struggle in the West.

These wars of the second half of the 15th century were the first conflicts that were covered by an early version of mass media. And like mass media throughout the rest of history, news changed minds and attitudes even of people far away from the events.

For most of the period we have covered in this podcast, the empire had been a matter for the aristocratic elites. It was all about the emperors, the prince electors, sometimes about the imperial princes. If people outside that demographic had any influence, they had usually been churchmen whose theological ideas had seeped into the world of politics or who had risen to become bishops, cardinals, even popes. What we have not seen before were educated laymen having a role in politics beyond the confines of their cities or courts. We already mentioned Martin Mair, the prime minister of Bavaria-Landshut and major political opponent of the emperor Friedrich III. He did of course stand out, but men of his background and education permeated the political and economic structure of the territorial principalities leading to the emergence of something akin to public opinion.

This public opinion is what both motivated Friedrich III to take a lead in the resistance as well as made it possible for him to gather an army to face off against Charles the Bold. His role in the events around the siege of Neuss is often played down. It just does not fit with the idea that Friedrich III was the Imperial Arch Sleepy Hat who hid in his castle in Styria, never showing up when he was needed.

This time Friedrich III was everywhere, calling imperial diets, attending informal meetings with the local dukes and counts, stiffening the resolve of the townsfolk and the estates by spending Christmas 1473 and 1474 in Cologne, and leading the imperial army to Neuss in 1475.

In March 1475 he wrote the following letter quote: “Honourable and well-beloved faithful people, we have (after our great period of instability, now some time ago) betaken ourselves hither to the See of Cologne in person, together with our and the Empire’s electors, princes, counts, those of the cities and other faithful people; and, for the deliverance and preservation of the Holy Empire and German nation, with the assistance of Almighty God, we intend to offer mighty resistance against the duke of Burgundy in his improper, arbitrary undertaking that he has carried out in the See of Cologne, which is an electorate and a notable member of the Holy Empire, to the truncation, severance and injury of the Holy Empire and German nation, against the prohibition issued against him by our Holy Father the pope and by us. And to that end we have conquered – with great effort, expense and labour – certain towns and fortifications along the Rhine in which the same duke of Burgundy’s people have been, and we are now in daily military preparations to meet the same duke of Burgundy in the field and to defy and defeat him with armed force, through God’s help.” End quote.

Thanks again to professor Duncan Hardy for this translation, which is from his very recently published book Law, Society and Political Culture in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany.

That does not sound very sleepy to me. And notice the mention of the German Nation. This was not your usual plea to medieval vassals to fulfill their sworn obligations. This talks about the defense of the empire against the improper undertakings of the duke of Burgundy and the injury inflicted on the Nation. Friedrich III may appear gothic and medieval in his buildings and outward appearance, but in his acts after 1463, he is much more modern than he has been given credit for.

And he remains an astonishing negotiator. Because, whilst he is rallying the reluctant nation into a war against Charles of Burgundy, he is also still keen on the marriage between his son Maximilian and Charles’ only child, Marie. One would assume that given the outright war between the two men and the extremely volatile character of Charles the Bold, that this engagement would now wash down the Rhine River.

But it did not. Charles did not give up his hope to gain a crown and hence could not or did not want to bin the engagement. There is also the remote chance that having met Maximilian in Trier, he had grown fond of the young man. His state as powerful as it was, was also brittle. The great trading cities insisted on their independence and the territories had not yet fused into one coherent structure. Hence his daughter would need a competent husband by her side if she were to hold on to the Burgundian empire.

Or maybe he did not think at all about Friedrich and Maximilian and all that. He reconfirmed the engagement just to reduce the long list of headache inducing problems that had been piling up whilst he had been held up in Neuss.

Charles had calculated that the campaign into Cologne would last no more than a few weeks. That was the amount of time it had taken him to incorporate the duchy of Guelders and to get the duke Rene II of Lorraine to submit to him. If everything had gone to plan, he would have incorporated Cologne in the autumn of 1474, and then gone on to his next big project, putting the English king Edward IV on the throne of France. Charles real enemy wasn’t the emperor or anyone else on his eastern border, the man he really wanted to crush was Louis XI, the king of France. It was time for Anglo-Burgundian Alliance to once more ride into Paris.

But the heroic Hessians inside little Neuss prevented a new Agincourt. When Charles arrived in Calais months later than planned, he did not bring his army. He wished Edward the best of luck in his war with France, told him he was going through Lorraine and that they should sit down for a coffee in Paris some time. The dejected Edward and Louis of France made peace a few weeks later.

The reason that Charles could not team up with Edward was only partially the physical damage his army had suffered. The even bigger impact was the hit to his authority. Charles’ regime had been built on fear. He had burned Dinant and Liege not only out of spite, but as a signal that he would brutally crush every opponent, that he would not give mercy. And this fear is what kept the cities of Ghent, Bruges and all the others in line, it is what made the duke of Guelders and Lorraine drop to their knees when he showed up. And that fear was based on the superiority of his army. What Neuss had shown was that his army was not invincible, and without an invincible army there was no fear and without fear Charles was just a man with a ridiculous golden hat.

The clearest indication that his state was in trouble was the League of Constance. You may remember from last week that the cities of Strasburg, Colmar, Basel and Selestat had teamed up with the Swiss Confederacy to throw out Peter von Hagenbach, Charles brutal governor of Lower Alsace. They had brought in the ever cash strapped Sigismund of Tyrol, which added the Habsburg lands around Freiburg in Breisgau to the League.

And then, when the siege of Neuss was going badly, duke Rene II of Lorraine joined the League. We have met Rene II already. He was the patron of Martin Waldseemueller and Matthias Ringmann whose famous map gave the American continents their name (episode 201). But that happened in 1507 at the very end of Rene II’s life. We are in the year 1474 and Rene II was young and reckless. He had become a vassal of Charles out of fear, but now that Charles’ terrifying army was falling apart before Neuss and king Louis of France was easing his concerns with cash, he did not want to be no vassal no more.

Rene II threw down a blood splattered gauntlet at Charles the Bold, or more precisely sent an envoy to do exactly that on his behalf. Instead of getting enraged as the poor envoy expected, Charles smiled and said, “your words bring me great joy”. A reaction that got his courtiers wondering whether God had clouded the common sense of their great lord.

Because at the same time his campaign to avenge the death of Peter von Hagenbach in Alsace had gone badly wrong. The big cities of Alsace, and even the villages, had strengthened their walls and those who could, had hired mercenaries. And worse, the league of Constance mustered an army that chased the Burgundians away. And then they pursued them before the castle of Héricourt in the Franche Comte. In the ensuing battle Charles’ army lost 3,000 men and handed the castle over to Sigismund of Tyrol. Another nail in the coffin of Charles reputation as a great warrior.

If Charles wanted to keep his empire after Neuss and Héricourt, he needed a win, urgently. So he led his army into Lorraine, took one town after the next within just weeks rode into the capital, Nancy. Duke Rene II fled to France.

Charles was now lord of Lorraine which means he had established a connection between his possessions in the Low Countries and the duchy of Burgundy. You could now travel from the North Sea to the gates of Lyon without ever leaving the lands of the Duke of Burgundy. The grand dream of the dynasty, the resurrection of the empire of Lothair was within reach.

He was back on top. Burgundy was again the invincible, unstoppable power in the West. Neuss must have been an inexplicable aberration. In fact he now knew why it went wrong. The citizens of Bruges were responsible for the knock he had received. It was Bruges who had failed to provide the sappers and engineers he needed to break the walls. He demanded that they make up for this failure and support his upcoming campaigns with redoubled vigor, blood and treasure, or else.

Bruges chose “or else”. They did not send troops or cash or sappers or anyone. Charles may believe he was again invincible, but the cool calculating merchants of Europe’s most important trading hub could do the maths. Neuss was a tenth of the size of Bruges and held out for 10 months, so how long could Bruges hold out for?

The Grand Duke of the West may not have known or may not have cared what some petty bourgeois in Bruges thought. He was hungry for more conquests and more war to show the world that he was back in full.

And an opportunity to fight presented itself in the nearby duchy of Savoy. This duchy occupied what is today Piedmont, Nice and the Aosta Valley, but also the region around Geneva and Chambery, stretching as far north as Bourg-en-Bresse. Charles had an interest in Savoy as the next step down towards the Mediterranean and as a route for Italian mercenaries to come up and resupply his forces. Savoy, like Alsace, Franche Comte and the Swiss Confederacy was part of the Holy Roman empire. However, the dukes of Savoy had close links into France, the reigning duchess was the sister of Louis XI. Nevertheless the duchess had lined up with Charles the Bold, rather than her brother, because she feared incursions on her eastern border, by the cities of Berne and Fribourg.

To call them the Swiss at this point is not yet accurate. The Swiss confederacy was a permanent defensive alliance formed to push back the Habsburgs and as we now see, the Burgundians. But if a member wanted to expand, the others would not necessarily come along for the ride. So when Berne took over the county of Vaud, around lake Neuchatel, that was the business of the city of Berne. That happened in April 1475. The Bernois and their allies, the Fribourgeois took the Vaud and its main castle, Grandson, just when the siege of Neuss was winding down.

It took until early 1476 before Charles could react to this attack on his ally, the duchy of Savoy and to his supply route. He celebrated Christmas in Nancy and by January his grand army set out for the Vaud.

The first defensive structure they came across was the castle of Grandson at the bottom of Lake Neuchatel. Charles’ great army with its 400 cannon took a couple of days to force the garrison of 412 men to surrender. Charles had them slaughtered to the very last soldier. The executioners hung them on the branches of the nearby trees until there was no more space. They drowned the others in the lake. This was against all military standards of the time. It was understood that any army would have to at least make some sort of stand in the beginning, but if they gave up quickly, they would normally be allowed to go home unharmed. Not this time.

Charles did not regard the militia of the city of Bern as combatants. They were commoners, fighting with pikes and shields and halberds, not chivalric knights on horseback. They could not demand the courtesies that existed between members of the nobility. In the eyes of Charles the Bold, their mere existence was an insult to the social order. Hence they could be killed with impunity, like the citizens of Liege and Dinant, and if he had got there, the inhabitants of Neuss.

From Grandson he headed towards Berne, about 60 km north. His grand army, replenished to a total of 20,000 after the siege of Neuss, journeyed along the shore of Lake Neuchatel. They moved slowly, dragging along their cannon, their fine tents, inns, cabarets and camp followers.

The delay at Grandson had allowed Bern and Fribourg to call on their allies in the league of Constance to come to their aid. And they did show up. They had to travel fast, which meant they had to travel light. They had few cannon, many were wearing light or no armor and the cavalry from duke Sigismund of Tyrol had not yet arrived in its full force. What they had though were their pikes, their halberds and their shields, their familiarity with the mountainous landscape, their trust in their friends and neighbors standing next to them in the line of battle and the knowledge that Charles would cut them down to the very last if he defeated them.

Neither side knew where the other was. They were all groping around in the dark. On March 2nd, 1476, a Swiss advance guard spotted the Burgundian troops marching right below them. Without a second thought they attacked, ferociously. But this was not like Morgarten where the Habsburg forces were moving along a narrow path along the shore.

The Burgundians were able to form their battle lines as did the League. The core of the league forces were the Swiss pike squares which they called “Gewalthaufen” literally “horde of violence”. These squares comprised pikemen, holding out up to five meter long lances and protected by enormous shields. If the line of pikemen held, any oncoming cavalry charge would literally be skewered by the pikes. And once their momentum had stalled, the fighters behind the pikes would come out with swords and halberds cutting down the now immobilized riders.

It did work often, but not always. Cannonballs may mow down the shields and pikemen or the momentum of the cavalry charge could break the lines.

At Grandson Charles began with several cavalry charges, but the pikemen held firm. His artillery could not reach them, they were simply too far away. So Charles decided to lure them closer to his 400 cannon, operated by the greatest team of gunners money could buy.

To bring the Swiss pikemen closer, he needed to feign a retreat. That is never easy because the undisciplined armies of the Middle Ages might mistake the withdrawal of the front line as either a sign of cowardice and run them down or as a signal to turn around and run for their lives. But Charles had trained his forces for years, these were professional soldiers, led by experienced generals who understood tactics. So Charles took the gamble and gave the order to gradually fall back.

What he had not known was that the army they saw in front of them was only half of the League forces. The other half was still travelling on the ridge above, trying to catch up with their comrades. And it was exactly at the point the Burgundians were re-organizing their battle lines, that the reinforcements arrived on the scene. They saw a battle in progress and blew their horns. These horns, made from, as the name indicates, the horn of cattle, are amongst the oldest wind instruments in history and their sound had accompanied the attacks by Celtic, Germanic and Viking armies for centuries. They sound a bit like this:

Imagine you are a Burgundian soldier and your officer has told you that they were to tactically withdraw a few hundred meters. Sure, no problem, we have trained this a hundred times, so we are slowly moving backwards. But then you hear this sound <horns> above to your left and then a whole new army of pikemen comes out of the woodwork. Do you still believe this is a tactical retreat to lure the enemy before your cannon? No, of course not. What you now think is that the generals have concluded they are outnumbered and the battle is lost. And that they leave the schmucks in the front line to cover their flight. Well, not with me you say. And so say the Guiseppes, Jans, Johns and Johanns who made up the Burgundian army. Three florins a month is not enough to die for. So you turn round and run, so do your friends, the other squads, platoons, companies suddenly, the whole battalion is running. You run past the gun emplacements, past the tented camp, all the way until you can run no more.

Soon the great army of the duke of Burgundy is in full flight. Charles is trying to hold them back. He shouts, he hits at them with the flat side of his sword, but to no avail, he is dragged along by the masses running down the shore of Lac Neuchatel, past Grandson, back into Savoy.

Meanwhile the Swiss look at the whole shebang with utter disbelief that turned into amusement and then jubilation. The grandest, most feared army of the whole of Europe was running before them. And the two sides had barely exchanged more than a few blows.

They followed them down the valley and on to the lake, but hey had only a small cavalry force, so they could not catch up with the fleeing Burgundians on their horses. And even if they could have, they would not have gone any further. Because they had stumbled across the wagon train of Charles of Burgundy.

For reasons best known only to himself, Charles had taken everything he owned along on this campaign, and Charles did own literally everything. The splendor of the court of the Valois dukes of Burgundy was legendary for a reason. What these sons of peasants and burghers saw before them was simply beyond their comprehension. The silver and gold reliquaries encrusted with precious stones, the dinnerware likewise splendid and the gold coins were easily recognized as valuable. As was the grandest item of them all, Charles solid golden ducal hat that featured more rubies and diamonds, ancient roman intaglios than any crown, his personal seal, again made with a kilo of pure gold were easily identified. But then there were the tents, decked out with the grandest tapestries, the vestments embroidered by the finest craftsmen and women of the Burgundian empire, the illuminated manuscripts that still dazzle the onlooker. Many of the soldiers had never seen such items and struggle to understand what they were. One farmer’s boy found Charles famous diamond, one of the largest in Europe at the time. He dropped it and it was run over by a cart. He dug it up again and sold it for a few florins to a priest. Its value was 20,000 florins, enough to buy a small county.

The loot at the battle of Grandson entered the history books as the biggest booty ever caught in battle. Not much is left in Bern and elsewhere. Most of it has been broken up and sold in parts or simply destroyed in the frenzied aftermath, not surprising given the barrels of the finest Burgundy wine that was also quickly found, as were the ladies that had been following the army. The famous Golden Hat was sold and disappeared. Only a drawing of it remains.

From a purely military perspective, Grandson wasn’t anywhere near as catastrophic a defeat as it was often depicted. Charles army had lost maybe a 1,000 men compared to 500 casualties amongst the Swiss. But the psychological blow was hard to take. Charles the Bold, like everyone else in his class, safe for the Habsburg dukes, dismissed the fighters from the Alpine valleys and the mid-sized trading cities of Bern, Basel, Zurich and Lucerne as peasants, inferior opponents that could be run down by a squadron of knights, even if outnumbered four to one. But once more a grand aristocrat who had grown up in a world of chivalric pride had to face the fact that the days of the superiority of the armed rider were over. Even though Charles was much more modern in his military thinking then the French lords at Poitiers and Agincourt, he could not understand how these lowlifes could defeat his wonderful and wonderfully expensive army.

Charles took the defeat very hard. There is a portrait made of him around this time that shows him as a dejected man, with the beginnings of a double chin, a five o'clock shadow, his eyes staring vacantly into the middle distance. That is a far cry from the beautiful young man in his best known portrait from 1461. After Grandson he experienced something like a mental breakdown, began drinking heavily and periods of melancholic withdrawal are alternate with frenzied activity.

The loss of his personal possessions, the symbols of his wealth and position must have also been hard to bear. And even harder to bear in light of his deteriorating finances. Whilst even after Grandson, everyone in europe believed the grand Duke of the West to be the richest prince who ever lived, the reality was dire. His main source of income, the taxes from the great trading hubs of the Low Countries had dried up. Not that the cities did not have the money, but they were no longer afraid of him. They saw Neuss holding out for 10 months and now Berne beating the hell out of their duke. When Charles’ envoys came to Bruges and Ghent asking for more money, more guns and more men, they returned empty handed.

He still had credit with the banks and so he could replace the 400 cannon he lost at Grandson, but these were no longer the best and greatest guns in the western world. These were the pieces that had been held back, had been given to the lesser garrisons. Though he had not lost too many men, his army was marching for coin, not for glory. And coin was scarce, in the nights may wet home. In his impotent fury Charles called the useless, claimed that they had been in the pay of king Louis of France anyway and so good riddance. The forces he hired to replace them were rarely of the same quality, nor did he have enough time to train them.

Then he fell ill with stomach cramps, suffering badly and the treatments weakened him to the point that his entourage feared for his life. But he recovered. And he wanted to have another go at these pesky mountain people.

The city he needed to take if he wanted to get to Berne was Murten. What followed was the second battle of Murten, the first one we covered in episode 24. And whilst the first one was fought in the depth of winter and the emperor Konrad II had to give up when the horses and men were literally frozen hard on to the ground, this second battle was fought in the summer, in June 1476, but that did not mean the weather was on the side of the attacker.

Hostilities began with the siege of the city of Murten. The Burgundian army began as per usual with the bombardment of the city walls. What answered them were their own cannon, the ones they had lost at Grandson and that had been brought to Murten. The 2,000 defenders of Murten were clear they would never surrender, they did not want to hang off trees like their comrades at Grandson. Which meant Charles was stuck before the town of Murten.

That left enough time for the people of Bern to once again call on their allies. These were the members of the old confederation, Zurich, Zug, Lucerne and the cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Nidwalden, but also the members of the league of Constance, Strasburg, Colmar, Selestat and Rottweil sent soldiers, as did the Habsburg lands on the Rhine and duke Rene of Lorraine. These latter mattered since they brought in the cavalry that had been lacking at Grandson.

As the allies moved towards Murten, the weather began to turn. Charles had prepared every inch of the battlefield. He had sent scouts out who told him who was coming, when and where. His guns were in place, his cavalry had donned their armor, the crossbowmen and harquebusiers were in position, they were ready. But the enemy did not show. Instead what came was rain, endless, miserable rain. As darkness fell, Charles allowed his soldiers to return to their tents.

By the next morning it was still raining, if not worse than before. Charles believed it impossible the League would attack in this weather and to keep the morale up, he only ordered a few companies to man the battle positions. When a troop of 1,300 Swiss scouts appeared, they were spotted but not pursued.

At 12.00 the Swiss and their allies set up for battle. When Charles was told that was happening, he refused to believe it. It took no fewer than four reminders before he finally put on his armor and called for the muster. Meanwhile the sun had come out and the battle began. The 2,000 Burgundians who we remanning and defending the gun emplacements fought ferociously against an overwhelming force. When Charles’ main army had finally gotten out of their tents, the Swiss pikesquares, the Gewalthaufen, had overrun the gun emplacement and 15,000 men armed with halberds were storming into the Burgundian camp. At the same time the garrison of Murten came out and attacked what was now their rear. The Lothringian and Austrian cavalry meanwhile ran down the flank of the Burgundian army. Charles, who had barely been able to put on his armor when the camp had already fallen, could only gather his remaining men and flee.

This time the casualties in the Burgundian army ran into the thousands. The loot was much less than what had been found in Grandson. A few years later a charnel house was erected for the bones of the fallen Burgundian soldiers. An inscription was added that began with the words: Helvetians, stop, here lies the army that laid waste to Liege and shook the throne of France…

Meanwhile duke Rene II of Lorraine had thrown the Burgundians out of Nancy and many other cities of his duchy. Charles went to Dijon, in Burgundy where his family’s rise to power had begun. He gathered another army, the third one in less than three years, to take back Nancy, to rebuild his land bridge between North and South, to then complete his empire from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.

He pretty much had lost the plot. His enemy. Louis of France declared him mad, his courtiers worried when he was talking gibberish or laughing maniacally, saying his empire had enough resources to sustain many more blows like Grandson and Murten.

Where does the money come from? From our old friend Tommaso Portinari, the representative of the Medici bank in Bruges, he of the Portinari triptych. His knowledge of art clearly surpassed his risk management skills. This loan was the straw that broke the camel’s back, that compelled Lorenzo the magnificent to close the Medici bank, leaving the reign of the financial system to Jakob Fugger of Augsburg.

Fortified with Florentine money, Charles gathered 10,000 men and marched on Nancy. It was now October and the weather was turning. This time the city of Nancy was not prepared to yield. They knew what would happen to them if they did. Charles reputation for harsh retaliation and unconstrained terror had gone round europe and had stiffened the resolve of the cities he besieged. The weeks dragged on, winter was coming. Still Nancy held out.

Meanwhile duke Rene II was trying to put together a relief force. His allies, the Swiss turned him down, it was too late and too cold to go. But apparently an appropriate amount of gold and silver could warm their hands sufficiently, so that they were prepared to head out into the icy chill. Meanwhile Charles had been cut off from supplies by the bishop of Metz and one of his captains had switched sides.

The Swiss mercenaries, a force of almost 20,000 arrived on January 5, 1477, barely visible through the raging snow storm. The battle itself did not take long. Charles had again set up his cannon with utmost care, pointing to where the enemy had to come from. But it didn’t. The Swiss had gone around his camp in the cover of the woods and their sound muffled by the frozen flurry. When they attacked, the cannon pointed into the void, his soldiers, disoriented fled. Charles, once more, mounted his great horse El Moro looking for an escape. The last his men saw of him was the duke slashing randomly with his sword to fight his way out.

He was found the next day, his armor and weapons stripped off by scavengers, his head split open by a battle axe and frozen into a puddle of icy water. And with him ended the line of the great dukes of Burgundy.

Wow, that was a great story, but what does it have to do with the History of the Germans?

A whole lot.

Though today Lorraine, Alsace and Switzerland are not part of Germany, in 1477 they were without question part of the Holy Roman Empire, a Holy Roman empire that was gaining the add-on “of the German Nation”. And when Charles talked about what we now call the Swiss, he saw them as a type of Germans. The resolve to stand up against Charles that had first appeared at Neuss was the same sentiment that motivated the fighters at Grandson, Murten and Nancy.

But even more importantly, these successes confirmed to the rest of the empire that if they stood united, they could repel any foe, even one as rich and as powerful as the duke of Burgundy. And that if they don’t, some other rapacious king or grand duke will be successful where Charles had failed. It is this sentiment that gave the call for imperial reform the urgency that was needed to get it over the line.

And then, this is obviously a crucial moment in the history of Switzerland. Having defeated the greatest, most modern and most expensive army in Europe established them as the #1 mercenary service provider of the time. And it made them de facto unassailable, leaving them the choice whether they wanted to be part of this reformed Holy Roman Empire or not.

And last but by no means least, the death of Charles the Bold left behind an as yet unmarried heiress, an heiress that is engaged, but as we know, engagements can be broken. How Maximilian and Mary find each other, fend off the external and internal challenges her father had left her and with it fundamentally reset the political chess board in Europe is what will occupy us for the next few episodes. I hope you will join us again.

And, if you find yourself in possession of some loot picked up in the baggage train of an enemy and you are unsure what to do with it, you can always stiffen the morale of your fellow listeners by keeping the show advertising free buy sharing some of it. You know where to go and you know what to do…