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 independent of France.
He wielded a military power greater than that of any other prince of the
moment, and he knew it and charged like a mad bull at whoever seemed to
interpose in his designs.

Over such a man Louis XI's cunning had full play. He involved Charles in
fights with every neighbor. Finally he lured him into conflict with the
Swiss, and those hardy mountaineers won the repute of being the best