The Burgundian Wars
The Franco-Aragon War
The Burgundian Wars were a long time incoming. The Duchy of Burgundy had been aggressively expanding since the beginning of the 14th century when she broke off from France. Since then she had been steadily gaining land in the Lowlands, in French Burgundy, and most recently in Italy. Through her swift success, she had formed a bloc of anti-status quo powers which included Brittany, Aragon, and several Italian states. Involving most of the major powers of Western Europe, the Wars were fought over Spain, France, and Italy and taking the lives of several ten thousand men, the Burgundian Wars were the largest conflict of their time. But what is generally forgotten about the Wars was that they were started over France's ambition to weaken Berber piracy and her want for security in the Papal State; but what started out as a simple security issue turned into an existential struggle which vanquished several Western duchies and kingdoms.
The first conflict in the Burgundian Wars can be traced directly to the Turkish pirate Barbarossa. Hayreddin Barbarossa, born into slavery in the Genoese colony of Lesbos, escaped at the age of 16 to the Ottoman Empire via a sailboat. After that, he became the greatest naval mind of his time, orchestrating raids against Aragon, Castille, France, the Italian states, and even going to far as to sack the port of Sagres, in Portugal, in 1480. But it was his attack on the Duchy of Provence which drove France to action.
An artist's rendering of the attack on Ile d'Hyeres, which historically guarded Marseille and Toulon from pirates
By 1482 the headquarters of France's Anti-Piracy Force had been moved to Provence. This headquarters, guarded by a massive fortress on the Island of Hyeres, coordinated similar fortresses as well as mobile anti-piracy fleets which spanned through the whole Kingdom. Although France did not have an admiralty or even a naval academy until the 19th century, the L'Ordonne D'Hyeres was the closest thing to it. An attack on the fortress on the 8th of May, 1484 took the French by surprise--not the fact that it happened but the size of it. A full flotilla of galleys, barques, and a carrack attacked the fortress, and nearly 500 men landed on the Island and did battle with the guards stationed there. The battle lasted for a week and at times it seemed that the fortress was going to fall. Eventually the French, Genoese, and Templar navies were called to action, and Barbarossa's fleet disengaged. But the cost was great--nearly all of the French anti-piracy officer staff had been killed in the fighting, and the attack led to a massive outpouring of capital from France, which would have led to a huge scaling back of the French economy if it weren't for colossal government spending.
The French military, now the most powerful force in French foreign policy, came up with several actions to ameliorate the problem of Berber piracy--they signed pacts of non-aggression with the Tripolantian and Tunisian pirates, bulked up the French navy, and created more cooperation efforts with the French vassals. But lastly, they began asking Aragon for military access to their ports. Aragon, at this point, controlled the Strait of Messina (between Sicily and Naples), the Sea of Sicily (between Sicily and Africa), and all of the access-points to the Mediterranean via their control of Sardinia.
In 1482, Aragon controlled all of the waterways by which one could move from the Eastern to the Western Mediterranean
But this request came too late. The King of Aragon was already deeply concerned about the French army stationed in Roma (which was in fact there to protect the Pope against the anti-semitic mobs left over from the revolts of the 1470s), and the request for naval access came at the worst possible time. The King of Aragon, like the Duke of Burgundy at the time, had no heir. He has asked the Pope for a missive allowing his stepson to inherit his realm, but the Pope refused the missive. This left war as his last option. This played directly into French hands--the Royal Army and the Armee d'Est marched into Italy with the aim of conquering all of the Kingdom of Naples.
Furthermore, the Aragon War killed two birds with one stone for France--The Duchy of Brittany (which, by this point, was called "The County of Nantes" by the French court because the province of Brittany was officially the 'Duchy of Brittany') was allied with the Kingdom of Aragon, and the Duchy's small police force was swiftly done away with by the numerically superior Armee du Nord. The Duchy of Brittany was annexed shortly after, and though the province remained a thorn in France's side for years to come, the country was no longer actively promoting dissent.
The last gasp of the Bretons
This was the last good news in a while. The French armies soon met resistance in Naples and the Pyrenees. The mountains which separated the French Kingdom from the Iberian ones were difficult to surpass for the French army, which relied so heavily on heavy infantry. The French army took heavy casualties in the mountains, losing ~6,000 men within the first month of the campaign into Aragon. This led to a reliance on the soldiers of Foix and Armagnac, which fielded large groups of highly trained light infantry. The success of the soldiers of Foix is what led to a 'federalization' of the French army, wherein the armies of the French vassals were allowed to follow their own doctrinal paths (it would be decades before focused light infantry/skirmisher elements would be introduced to the French army).
Although the French Armee du Sud performed horribly in the Aragonese Theatre, the Army of Foix under Count Gascard VI's ability to destroy armies far larger than they tipped the scale in French favor
French problems got far worse with the death of de Crevecoeur, the most senior and experienced of the French generals and the Commander in Chief of the Aragonese theater. With a King insistent on remaining uninvolved in military manners, and with Armand de Villenueve fully involved with the increasingly destabilizing Neapolitan theatre, the position of Commander in chief fell to the new general Simon de Maurepas. Simon de Maurepas was an interesting creature within the French military--he had started as a diplomat, and in fact was the newphew of d'Ursine. But the demotion of the French diplomatic corps and the promotion of the French army as
the foreign policy-making body in France had led him to move to the Army Academy of France, where he specialized in anti-partisan warfare. De Maurepas' belief that the high command of an army should include diplomats as well as the police of the local area was not relevant to his skill as commander in chief of the Aragonese front, but becomes relevant soon after.
De Maurepas was not as aggressive a commander as his predecessor, and this swiftly proved problematic. 15,000 French soldiers stayed in the province of Barcelona, fighting the local garrisons rather than engaging the weakened Army of Aragon. This prolonged the campaign, which brings me back to the Duchy of Burgundy.
The end of positive Franco-Burgundian relations.
French-Burgundy relations had been sliding downward ever since the War of the League of Vendee. Duke Philip worried about the massive lost opportunity within that war--the chance for a backstab given up, and a major French enemy destroyed while France became ever stronger. Philip decided, after 1470, that he would not allow another opportunity like the League of Vendee to sip past his grip. This problem was exacerbated by the same problem that King Miquel had--Philip had no heir, and the French controlled Papacy wasn't likely to give him a missive. So he acted for the next decade to weaken France--first putting pressure on Savoy to break her bonds of vassalage, which Savoy did in 1484 (
didn't screencap this, but there's an event by which a vassal in the HRE who doesn't like you can ask for freedom, and if you deny it the Holy Roman Emperor [Austria] gets pissed at you. I didn't want to lose my alliance with Austria because I'd like as long a time of calm before the Reformation starts, so I let Savoy go). At the beginning of the War with Aragon, Philip cancelled France's military access to the Milanese area. And, at the news of yet another French army leaving to fight in Italy, leaving only 25,000 soldiers still in France, Philip declared war on France.
The First Burgundian War