Antoine de Chabannes was involved from a young age in the intrigues and fights of the embattled king Charles VII, associating himself with commanders La Hire and Xaintrailles.

The contemporary chronique martinienne observes of him at that time that "he was inclined towards fighting and keen to acquire honour and properties" (tant il avait le coeur aux armes et envie d'acquérir honneurs et biens).

[4] On 12 November 1437, he was with Charles VII at the latter's ceremonial entry into Paris, a major symbolic moment following the 1435 Treaty of Arras that put an end to the most chaotic period of the Hundred Years' War.

[7] He spent most of the late 1430s leading his own band of soldiers, as one of the most prominent écorcheurs as they were labeled in contemporary chronicles, especially Burgundian ones: literally "flayers", referring to their practices of robbing and ransoming.

[8] The grey area in which Antoine de Chabannes operated during those years, a hybrid of unsupervised banditry and royal service, is illustrated by a chronicler's story that Charles VII once saluted him ironically as "capitaine des écorcheurs", to which his reply was "Sire, I only flayed your enemies, and methinks their skins will bring you more profit than to me; I never flayed anybody else" (Sire, je n'ai écorché que vos ennemis, et il me semble que leurs peaux vous feront plus de profit qu'à moi ; je n'en écorchai jamais d'autres).

[4] Charles VII made him conseiller du roi in 1444, then Grand Panetier of France in 1445 (and again in 1447),[8] after he had forced him and other warlords of the Hundred Years' War to dismiss their bands of soldiers as he strived to establish a standing army.

He then led a campaign in 1454 against John V, Count of Armagnac on the king's behalf, jointly with Jean Bureau, for which he was awarded a number of lands in Rouergue and Languedoc including the lordship of Sévérac.

[4] On succeeding Charles VII in 1461, Louis XI was initially hostile to Antoine de Chabannes, banished him from the kingdom, then upon his voluntary return from the Holy Roman Empire in August 1462 imprisoned him briefly in the Conciergerie and then in the Louvre.

Following a hearing on 20 August 1463, Chabannes received a death sentence from the Parlement of Paris, which was commuted by the king into perpetual banishment to Rhodes, then after a change of mind, imprisonment in the Bastille.

At the request of the League's princely members, the treaty included a specific clause by which Louis XI gave back to Antoine de Chabannes all his former domains.

[7] In February 1467, the king further made him the Grand Master of France, in replacement of his former nemesis Charles de Melun (who ended up decapitated the next year), and in August 1468 finally annulled his 1463 conviction.

[4] In 1468, Chabannes decisively refused to demobilize the royal troops assembled in Noyon despite a written order Louis had signed under duress in Péronne, which fully regained him the King's confidence.

[12] On 29 August 1475, he attended the meeting of Picquigny between Louis XI and Edward IV of England, which undermined the Anglo-Burgundian alliance and marked the formal end of the Hundred Years' War.

He was buried in the collegiate church of Our Lady (Collégiale Notre-Dame) in Dammartin-en-Goële, which he had built from 1480, following a wish he had made in 1463 while imprisoned in the Bastille, on the site of a chapel that had been destroyed during the War of the Public Weal.

[6] The still-extant monumental tomb displays an idealized youth portrait of him as a gisant with a phoenix bird at his feet, which may refer to eternal life but also to the ups and downs of his long career.

Until the 17th century, the corresponding location inside the church was adorned with a small monument and an epitaph that read "Antoine de Chabannes, / Mort suis sans trahison / Mais bien aimant raison / Conte et aussi grant mestre.

/ J'aimai loyauté / Qui m'a toujours porté, / Tant qu'au monde ait esté ; / D'ennemi non vaincu / D'ans IIIIxx [80] j'ai vescu, / On le sait, de trois roys non reprint.

The metal chest that contained the heart was later relocated to a chapel within the same church, in which Antoine de Chabannes's son had also erected an equestrian statue of him, probably destroyed in 1793.