By the time Anne was born, her father was the only male from the Breton House of Montfort-Brittany, and the Blois-Penthièvre heir was a female, Nicole of Blois, who in 1480 sold her rights over Brittany to King Louis XI of France for the amount of 50,000 écus.

To avoid this, Francis II had Anne officially recognised as his heiress by the Estates of Brittany on 10 February 1486;[8] however, the question of her marriage remained a diplomatic issue.

Francis II indeed promised his daughter to various French or foreign princes in order to obtain military and financial aid, and to strengthen his position against the King of France.

The prospect for these princes to add the duchy to their domain thus allowed the Duke of Brittany to initiate several marriage negotiations and to forge various secret alliances which accompanied these matrimonial projects.

Anne became the stake of these rival ambitions, and her father, reassured by the signing of these alliances, could afford to refuse various marriage projects and contracts.

[a] These political calculations thus led to Anne's engagement with different European princes:[11] In 1488, Francis II was defeated at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, ending the Mad War (la Guerre Folle) between Brittany and France.

In the Treaty of Sablé (19 August 1488), which concluded the peace settlement, the Duke was forced to accept clauses stipulating that his daughters were not to marry without the approval of the King of France.

With the death of Francis II soon afterwards (9 September 1488) as a result of a fall from his horse, Brittany was plunged into a fresh crisis, leading to the final Franco-Breton war.

The spring of 1491 brought new successes by the French general La Trémoille (the previous victor of the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier), and King Charles VIII of France came to lay siege to Rennes, where Anne stayed, to force her to desist from her Habsburg marriage.

[16] Aided by troops from England, the Holy Roman Empire, and Aragon and Castile,[17] Rennes lasted through two months of Charles's siege before falling.

[19] Charles VIII entered the city on 15 November, and both parties signed the Treaty of Rennes, ending the fourth military campaign of the French over Brittany.

The official marriage between Anne and King Charles VIII of France was celebrated in the Great Hall of the Château de Langeais on 6 December 1491 at dawn.

The ceremony was concluded discreetly and urgently because it was technically illegal until Pope Innocent VIII, in exchange for substantial concessions, validated the union on 15 February 1492, by granting the annulment[21] of the marriage by proxy[22] with Maximilian, and also giving a dispensation for the marriage with Charles VIII, needed because the King and Anne were related in the forbidden fourth degree of consanguinity.

If Anne was gambling that the annulment would be denied, she lost: Louis's first marriage was dissolved by Pope Alexander VI before the end of the year.

She built the tomb of her parents at Nantes Cathedral (where her heart would also return under the terms of her last will) with the symbols of the four virtues: Courage, Temperance, Justice and Prudence, that she always tried to wear.

Louis XII assented to this plan publicly, but in private worked to match Claude with the heir to the French throne, Francis of Angoulême.

[42] Anne, determined to maintain Breton independence, refused to sanction the marriage until her death, pushing instead for Claude to marry Charles, or for her other daughter, Renée, to inherit the Duchy.

When Louis XII definitively settled their daughters' dispositions counter to her wishes, Anne left his side to tour the Duchy, visiting many places she had never been able to see as a child.

Officially, it was a pilgrimage to the Breton shrines in thanks for one of Louis' recent recoveries, but in reality it was a political journey: an act of independence that sought to assert her sovereignty within the marriage.

[50] Separate mourning motets by other members of the two royal choirs also survive: Quis dabit oculis by Costanzo Festa and Fiere attropos by Pierre Moulu.

In accordance to her will, Anne's heart was placed in a raised enamel gold reliquary before it was transported to Nantes to be deposited in her parents' tomb in the chapel of the Carmelite friars.

It is inscribed on the obverse as follows: It was made by anonymous goldsmiths of the court of Blois, and has been attributed to Geoffroy Jacquet and Pierre Mangot working to the designs of Jean Perréal.

[53] It was recovered undamaged later that month[54] The double mausoleum Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, carved in Carrara marble, was unveiled at Saint Denis Basilica in 1531.

[55] The baldachin was in arcades, while the base of the sarcophagus depicted the victories of Louis XII (Battle of Agnadello, the triumphal entry into Milan), statues of the Twelve Apostles and the four Cardinal virtues, the work of the Juste brothers, Italian sculptors who received the order in 1515.

The transi (whose realism was so shocking that it included an open abdomen stitched after the extraction of the entrails[56]) and orans before a Prie-dieu crowning the platform are attributed to Guillaume Regnault.

[59] She made the safeguarding of Breton autonomy, and the preservation of the Duchy outside the French crown, her life's work, although that goal would prove to have failed shortly after her death.

The contents of these books produced specifically for children – Latin, Biblical scenes, models of proper female behavior – give insight into the priorities of the Princesses' childhood education.

Anne was trained from a young age to hide her limp, caused by a difference in the length of her legs,[63] linked to a congenital displacement of her hips.

Through her great-granddaughter Claude, Duchess of Lorraine (daughter of Henry II of France), Anne is also the ancestor of Karl von Habsburg, the current head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.

In the following centuries, historians and popular culture sometimes presented Anne of Brittany in differing fashions, ascribing to her physical and psychological characteristics that are not necessarily supported by historical evidence.