Louis XI. began his reign with the same high-handed treatment of the nobles which had marked his rule in Dauphiné, going so far as to forbid them to hunt without his permission. He forced the clergy to pay long-neglected feudal dues, and intrigued against the great houses of Anjou and Orleans in Italy. The malcontent nobles soon began to plan revolt. Discharged officers of Charles VII. like Jean Dunois and John II. duke of Bourbon, stirred up hostility to the new men of the king, and Francis II. duke of Brittany was soon embroiled with Louis over an attempt to assert royal control over that practically independent duchy. The dissatisfied nobility found their greatest ally in Charles the Bold, afterwards duke of Burgundy, and in 1465 formed a "league of public welfare" and declared war on their king. The nominal head was the king's brother Charles, duke of Berry, then eighteen years old, a weak character, the tool of the rebels as he was later the dupe of the king. Every great noble in France was in the league, except Gaston de Foix--who kept the south of France for the king,--and the counts of Vendôme and Eu. The whole country seemed on the verge of anarchy. It was saved by the refusal of the lesser gentry to rise, and by the alliance of the king with the citizen class, which was not led astray by the pretences of regard for the public weal which cloaked the designs of the leaguers. After a successful campaign in the Bourbonnais, Louis fought an indecisive battle with the Burgundians who had marched on Paris at Montlhéry, on the 16th of July 1465, and then stood a short siege in Paris. On the 28th of September he made a truce with Charles the Bold, and in October the treaties of Conflans and Saint Maur-les-Fossés, ended the war. The king yielded at all points; gave up the "Somme towns" in Picardy, for which he had paid 200,000 gold crowns, to Philip the Good, thus bringing the Burgundians close to Paris and to Normandy. Charles, the king's brother, was given Normandy as an apanage, thus joining the territories of the rebellious duke of Brittany with those of Charles the Bold. The public weal was no longer talked about, while the kingdom was plundered both by royal tax gatherers and by unsubdued feudal lords to pay the cost of the war.