[1][2] When Louis XII became king in 1498, he had his marriage with Joan annulled by Pope Alexander VI and instead married Anne, Duchess of Brittany, the widow of Charles VIII.

Louis XII did not encroach on the power of local governments or the privileges of the nobility, in opposition with the long tradition of the French kings to attempt to impose absolute monarchy in France.

A popular king, Louis was proclaimed "Father of the People" (French: Le Père du Peuple) for his reduction of the tax known as taille, legal reforms, and civil peace within France.

[5] However, Louis XI might have been more influenced in this opinion by his opposition to the entire Orleanist faction of the royal family than by the actual facts of this paternity case.

[11] Allied with Francis II, Duke of Brittany, Louis confronted the royal army at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier on 28 July 1488 but was defeated and captured.

[12] Pardoned three years later, Louis joined his cousin King Charles VIII in campaigns in Italy,[13] leading the vanguards of the army.

[14] Although he came late[15] (and unexpectedly) to power, Louis acted with vigour, reforming the French legal system,[16] reducing taxes,[17] and improving the government[18] much like his contemporary Henry VII did in the Kingdom of England.

Louis was also skilled in managing his nobility, including the powerful Bourbon faction, greatly contributing to the stability of French government.

[26] Accordingly, even before he became King of France, Louis began to claim the Duchy of Milan as his own inheritance, which should have come to his by right of his paternal grandmother Valentina Visconti.

On this occasion he tried to conquer the Duchy of Milan, weakened by an economic crisis, and on 11 June 1495 he occupied with his troops the city of Novara, which was given to him by treason.

He was on the verge of subjugating "il Moro", who proved unable to cope with the situation, but clashed with the fierce opposition of Sforza's wife Beatrice d'Este, who forced him to a long and exhausting siege from which he finally came out defeated.

With the major powers preoccupied or pledged to peace with France, Louis XII could attend to two other neighbours on his border: the Swiss Confederation and the Duchy of Savoy.

[34] In the campaign of 1499, the French army surrounded the fortified town of Rocca di Arazzo in the western part of the Duchy of Milan.

[34] The legal rationale for the massacre at Rocca di Arazzo was that defenders of the town were traitors because they had risen up in arms against their rightful lord, Louis XII.

By the time Trémoille reached the forts west of Milan where Marshal Trivulzio and his force were holding out, the French army had swollen to 30,000 men by recruitment along the way.

[42] The Florentines requested aid from the French to recapture Pisa, as the city of Florence had long been an ally of France in Italian affairs.

It was at this point, in 1500, that Louis XII pursued the claim of his immediate predecessor to the Kingdom of Naples with Ferdinand II, the King of Aragon and with Queen Isabel of Castile, ruler of Spain.

On 11 November 1500, Ferdinand II and Louis XII signed the Treaty of Granada,[44] which brought Spain into Italian politics in a big way for the first time.

Genoa yielded, and the Florentines turned friendly, the Marquis of Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara, the Bentivogli (of Bologna), the countess of Forlì (Caterina Sforza), the lords of Faenza, Pesaro, Rimini, Camerino, Piombino, and the people of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena all sought him out with professions of friendship.

At this point the Venetians began to see the folly of what they had done, since in order to gain for themselves a couple of districts in Lombardy, they had now made the king master of a third of Italy.

Not satisfied with having made the Church powerful and deprived himself of his friends, he went after the kingdom of Naples and divided it with the king of Spain (Ferdinand II).

[46] As the army approached Rome, Spanish and French ambassadors notified Pope Alexander VI of the thus far secret Treaty of Grenada, signed 11 November 1500, which divided the Kingdom of Naples between France and Spain.

[46] Indeed, the public announcement of the treaty in the Vatican was the first news that King Frederick of Naples had received about his fate and his betrayal by his own cousin, Ferdinand.

Furthermore, while these royal images flooded the kingdom, popular writers – encouraged by Louis's lack of censorship – disseminated praise of their king.

[57] At the end of his reign, the budget deficit of the crown was no greater than it had been when he succeeded Charles VIII in 1498, despite several expensive military campaigns in Italy.

To sustain this union, Louis XII had his marriage to Joan annulled (December 1498) after he became king so that he could marry Charles VIII's widow, Anne of Brittany.

Accordingly, Louis (much to the dismay of his wife) claimed that Joan was physically malformed (providing a rich variety of detail precisely how) and that he had therefore been unable to consummate the marriage.

Joan, unsurprisingly, fought this uncertain charge fiercely, producing witnesses to Louis's boast of having "mounted my wife three or four times during the night".

After Anne's death, Louis married Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII of England, in Abbeville, France, on 9 October 1514.

Thus, Anne's eldest daughter, Claude of France, inherited the Duchy of Brittany directly in her own right (suo jure) before Louis's death.