of an enormous concession which he had, two years previously, made to the King of Spain on consenting to affiance his daughter, Princess Claude of France, two years old, to Ferdinand’s grandson, Charles of Austria, who was then only one year old, and who became Charles the Fifth (emperor)!  Lastly, about the same time, Pope Alexander VI., who, willy hilly, had rendered Louis XII. so many services, died at Rome on the 12th of August, 1503.  Louis had hoped that his favorite minister, Cardinal George d’Amboise, would succeed him, and that hope had a great deal to do with the shocking favor he showed Caesar Borgia, that infamous son of a demoralized father.  But the candidature of Cardinal d’Amboise failed; a four weeks’ pope, Pius III., succeeded Alexander VI.; and, when the Holy See suddenly became once more vacant, Cardinal d’Amboise failed again; and the new choice was Cardinal Julian della Rovera, Pope Julius II., who soon became the most determined and most dangerous foe of Louis XII., already assailed by so many enemies.

The Venetian, Dominic of Treviso, was quite right; Louis XII. was “of unstable mind, saying yes and no.”  On such characters discouragement tells rapidly.  In order to put off the struggle which had succeeded so ill for him in the kingdom of Naples, Louis concluded, on the 31st of March, 1504, a truce for three years with the King of Spain; and on the 22d of September, in the same year, in order to satisfy his grudge on account of the Venetians’ demeanor towards him, he made an alliance against them with Emperor Maximilian I. and Pope Julius II., with the design, all three of them, of wresting certain provinces from them.  With those political miscalculations was connected a more personal and more disinterested feeling.  Louis repented of having in 1501 affianced his daughter Claude to Prince Charles of Austria, and of the enormous concessions he had made by two treaties, one of April 5, 1503, and the other of September 22, 1504, for the sake of this marriage.  He had assigned as dowry to his daughter, first the duchy of Milan, then the kingdom of Naples, then Brittany, and then the duchy of Burgundy and the countship of Blois.  The latter of these treaties contained even the following strange clause:  “If, by default of the Most Christian king or of the queen his wife, or of the Princess Claude, the aforesaid marriage should not take place, the Most Christian king doth will and consent, from now, that the said duchies of Burgundy and Milan and the countship of Asti, do remain settled upon the said Prince Charles, Duke of Luxembourg, with all the rights therein possessed, or possibly to be possessed, by the Most Christian king.” [Corps Diplomatique du Droit des Gens, by J. Dumont, t. iv. part i. p. 57.] It was dismembering France, and at the same time settling on all her frontiers, to east, west, and south-west, as well as to north and south, a power which the approaching union of two crowns, the imperial and the Spanish, on the head of Prince Charles of Austria, rendered so preponderating and so formidable.