The same Parliament is noteworthy as having given a definitely legal status
to the judicial authority of the Council by the establishment of the Court
thereafter known as the Star Chamber, of which we shall hear later. Besides
this, however, it had the duty of voting supplies for embroilments
threatening on the Continent.

The complexities of foreign affairs form so important a feature in the
history of the next forty years that it is important to open the study of
the period with a clear idea of the position of the Continental powers.

[Sidenote: The state of Europe]

Lewis XI., the craftiest of kings, had died in 1482, leaving a tolerably
organised kingdom to his young son Charles VIII., under the regency of Anne
of Beaujeu. With the exception of the Dukedom of Brittany, which still
claimed a degree of independence, and of Flanders and Artois which, though
fiefs of France, were still ruled by the House of Burgundy, the whole
country was under the royal dominion; which had also absorbed the Duchy of
Burgundy proper. The daughter of Charles the Bold, wife of Maximilian of
Austria, inherited as a diminished domain the Low Countries and the County
of Burgundy or Franche Comte.

East of the Rhine, the kingdoms, principalities, and dukedoms of Germany
owned the somewhat vague authority of the Habsburg Emperor Frederick, but
the idea of German Unity had not yet come into being. On the south-east the
Turks who had captured Constantinople some thirty years before (1453) were
a militant and aggressive danger to the Empire and to Christendom; while
the stoutest opponent of their fleets was Venice. Switzerland was an
independent confederacy of republican States: Italy a collection of