VI.] THE ITALIAN WARS. 89 2. The Inheritance of Britanny, 1483. — Francis 11., Duke of Britanny, had no son, and Jiis daughter Anne was the mark for all suitors, while he and his favourite Landais, a tailor, strove to make capital of this rivalry. The Bretons, whose chief desire was that she should so marry as to secure their independence, made a great rising under John of Chalons, Prince of Orange, a nephew of the Duke, in which Landais was killed, and the feeble duke became a prisoner in their hands. He received, however, the Duke of Orleans and his cousin, Francis de Dttnois, Count of Longueville, the son of that Dunois who had fought against the English. They had been discovered to be plotting against the Lady of Beaujeu, and had been forced to fly into Britanny, where the Duke of Orleans, who longed to break his forced mar- riage with the king's sister, won the heart of the little heiress Anne, who was only twelve years old. He was favoured by her father, but the Prince of Orange had chosen for her Maximilian of Austria, the widower of Mary of Burgundy, who in i486 was chosen King of the Romans in the lifetime of his father. The states of Britanny preferred Alan of Albrct,^ Gascon noble of sixty, with twelve children, who was descended from the ducal family, and who, without being too powerful, was able to hold his own. All these rivals were united by the Lady of Beaujeu's evident intention of claiming Britanny for her brother as a male fief, and her sending an army into the duchy under Lewis de la Tremouille, who totally routed the Bretons at St. Aubin de Cormieres in 148S. Albret escaped, but the Prince of Orange was taken prisoner, and the Duke of Orleans dragged out from the slain and shut up in an iron cage at Bourges. Much of the noblest blood in Britanny was shed on the scaffold, and the country would have been laid waste if the young king had not insisted that fair terms should be offered to the poor old duke, whose death, in 1488, left his daughter Duchess of Britanny. She was no puppet, but had a strong will, set above all against old Alan of Albret, to whom half her subjects wanted to give her, while the other half were plotting to deliver her to the French. As the Duke of Orleans was a prisoner, she sent to entreat the King of the Romans to come to her rescue, and he set out vvith a troop of Germans. As he passed through Flanders, where his son Philip had succeeded his mother, he was seized by the people of
