He was always
declaring war against this kingdom or that, and summoning his great
lords to aid him in upholding the glory of the empire. They persistently
declined; and he was helpless. At one time having pledged his alliance to
the English king, Henry VII, against France, he preserved his knightly
word by going alone and serving as a volunteer in Henry's army, whither
his people would not follow him. Instead they stayed at home and demanded
from him constitutions and courts of law and other internal reforms,
uninteresting matters about which the gallant soul of Maximilian cared
not a straw and which he gave his subjects under protest.

To the westward of him a far subtler monarch, by far subtler means, was
strengthening the power of France and making smooth her way toward that
supremacy over European affairs which she was later to assert. Louis XI
(1461-1483) is called the first modern king, though it is little flattery
to modern statecraft to compare its methods with his, and perhaps our
recent governments have truly outgrown them. Louis was no warrior,
although under compulsion he showed possibilities of becoming an able
general. He preferred to send others who should do his fighting for him,
to embroil his opponents one with another, and then reap the fruit of
their mutual exhaustion. He was passed master of all falsity and craft;
and by his shrewdness he brought to his country peace and prosperity.
Typically does he represent his age in which intellectual ability, though
sometimes wholly divorced from nobleness of soul, began to dominate brute
force.

Charles the Bold stands as the representative of this brute force. He was
the mightiest of the French nobles. His ancestors, a younger branch
of the royal family, had been made dukes of Burgundy, and by skilful
alliances and rapid changes of side through the long Hundred Years' War,
they had steadily added to their possessions and their powers. The father
of Charles found himself stronger than his king, possessor not only of
Burgundy, but of many other fiefs from Germany as well as France, and
lord of the Netherlands as well.[8]

Charles was thus the last of those great, overgrown vassals so
characteristic of feudal times. Like Hugh Capet in France, like William
the Conqueror in England, he hoped to establish himself as an independent
king. He opened negotiations for this purpose with the Emperor Frederick,
Maximilian's father. He made himself practically independen