Treaty of Senlis
The Treaty of Senlis , also the Peace of Senlis , was an agreement concluded on May 23, 1493 in Senlis (Oise) between the Habsburg Maximilian I and the French King Charles VIII. It regulated the ownership of the House of Burgundy , which was disputed between both parties In 1477 after the death of Charles the Bold at the Battle of Nancy, he was without a male heir. The Burgundian War of Succession (1477-1493) , which flared up over the inheritance, was finally ended by the Peace of Senlis.
Charles viewed Burgundy as a fallen fiefdom and was anxious to secure Flanders in particular , which was one of the wealthiest regions in Europe and was under French fiefdom throughout the Middle Ages. Maximilian, on the other hand, asserted his own inheritance claim: in 1477, shortly after Charles the Bold fell in battle near Nancy, he married his daughter Maria . As a result, there were armed conflicts between France and Maximilian over the Burgundian inheritance , which the Habsburgs won in the Battle of Guinegate in 1479 . With this, Flanders was essentially secured for Maximilian, but the latter now had to deal with the self-confident Flemish cities that opposed the centralization of Habsburg rule. In addition, Mary of Burgundy died in 1482 and the French king then renewed his claims. In the face of French pressure, Maximilian had to grant France the possession of Artois and the Duchy of Burgundy and the Free County of Burgundy in the Peace of Arras at the end of 1482 , but kept Flanders. A Habsburg-French marriage alliance was also planned, under which Maximilian's daughter Margarethe Karl was to marry. But it did not come to that: Karl, French king since 1483, married Anne de Bretagne instead , which led to an annoyance with Maximilian, because Anne had previously been married to him, but the marriage had to be dissolved because it had to be dissolved without the consent of Anne's liege lords Karl was done.
Maximilian, successor to Friedrich III since 1493 . as a German king , was dissatisfied with the outcome of the peace of 1482 and subsequently tried to revise it in his favor. Indeed, his governor in Flanders, Albrecht of Saxony , succeeded in making the troubled Flemish cities lawful , while at the same time the Free County of Burgundy could be conquered. The County of Artois also fell into Maximilian's hands. Even the county of Charolais , an enclave on the Loire that had previously belonged to Burgundy, came into Habsburg possession, albeit as a French fief. In the Treaty of Senlis, Karl was now forced to recognize these new conditions. In a secret addition Maximilian renounced all titles and rights pertaining to Brittany.
The imperial border with France now ran south from Calais to about 20 km from Amiens and then, bordering on French Picardy , eastwards parallel to the Somme, with Arras and Cambrai falling to the Habsburgs. The small Burgundian county of Rethel remained French, in this section the border ran roughly along the Meuse. Burgundy proper was, as was the case in the times before Charles the Bold, again divided into the French Duchy of Burgundy and the Free County belonging to the empire.
The imperial border against France thus reached its furthest westward course in all of history, around 30–40 km west of the French language border . This appeared to Charles and the following French kings as an untenable situation in the long run. The question of rulership over Flanders and Burgundy became a constant bone of contention for the centuries that followed, and the Habsburg-French antagonism had a decisive influence on European politics.
literature
- Stephan Elbern: Peace - a lost art. From Kadesch to Camp David . Nünnerich-Asmus, Mainz 2014, ISBN 978-394-39043-9-0 , pp. 91-93: Beginning of a hereditary enmity: The Treaty of Senlis (1493) .
- Manfred Hollegger : Maximilian I. (1459-1519). Ruler and man of a turning point. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2005, p. 78f.