The influence exercised by Louis XI. on the development of the Italian affairs of his time makes it necessary to give a retrospect of the policy and situation of this monarch, under whom the French kingdom began to assume that form which was completed by Richelieu. Louis XI. had in 1461, on the death of his father, whom he succeeded at the age of thirty-eight, found the country freed indeed from foreign foes, after a hundred years’ struggle, but loosely held together. For half the provinces of his kingdom recognised the King indeed as their supreme lord, but were independent of him with regard to their administration. They pursued a policy of their own, concluded alliances of peace and war, while, as in the case of the most powerful of these great feudatories, Charles Duke of Burgundy, the union of French districts with foreign territories belonging nominally to the German empire, constituted a power which, if they won over their neighbours to their interests, might enter the lists with royal France. Louis, as Dauphin, long at variance with his father and the government, had relied upon Duke Philip the Good. Under him the dukedom, comprising the greater part of Belgium of the present day, the Netherlands, with Burgundy, Artois, Picardy, and Franche Comté, rose to the height of its prosperity and power. Scarcely had Louis ascended the throne, however, than he took measures against the great feudatories which kindled the war known under the name of the War of the Public Good (_Guerre du bien public_), in which Burgundy was also involved. This war was indeed terminated in 1465 by the treaties of Conflans and St. Maur, but only to break out afresh in another shape two years later, when Charles the Bold had succeeded his father on the ducal throne. Thus fully occupied at home and threatened in his own capital, Louis had closely connected his foreign affairs with his internal policy. At the commencement of his reign he had declared the pragmatic sanction of his father, which placed limits on the authority of the Holy See in his country, to be abrogated; nevertheless, when Pius II. refused to comply with his wishes in political matters, he permitted a contradiction on the part of his parliament which practically destroyed that authority. In 1462 he had allowed John of Anjou to be defeated in the war against King Ferrante, and thus made enemies of this family, to whom Provence belonged, while he likewise estranged Duke Charles of Orleans by allying himself closely with Francesco Sforza, whose states, as we have seen, were claimed by the former on the ground of his mother’s hereditary rights. The Duke of Milan had at least shown himself grateful by sending him, during his war with the allied princes, the auxiliary troop which Galeazzo Maria was commanding when his father’s death summoned him home.