Such then was the new acquisition of Charles after four years of his administration.  Peter von Hagenbach, his deputy in charge of this unremunerative territory, is a character painted in the darkest colours by all historians.  It is more than probable that his unpopular efforts to make bricks without straw were largely responsible for his unenviable reputation.  Ground between the upper and lower millstones of Charles’s clamours for revenues and popular clamours that the people had nothing wherewith to pay, Hagenbach developed into a taskmaster of the hardest and most unpitying type, who made himself thoroughly hated by the people he was set to rule.

It must be remembered that there was no cleft in nationality or in language between governor and governed.  He was not a foreigner set over them.  He was one of them raised to a high position.  There was then no French element in Lower Alsace.  It was then German pure and simple.

[Illustration:  UPPER ALSACE AND ADJACENT TERRITORY BY PERMISSION OF HACHETTE, 1902]

[Footnote 1:  Gachard, Doc. ined., i., 204-209.  “Relation de l’assemblee solennelle tenue a Bruxelles le 15 Jan., 1469.”]

[Footnote 2:  See Toutey, Charles le Temeraire et la ligue de Constance, p. 7.]

[Footnote 3:  See the text given in Comines-Lenglet, iii., 116.  Charles is characterised as ducem strenuum in armis ac justitiae praecipium zelatorem.]

[Footnote 4:  See Toutey, p. 8; also Lavisse, iv^{ii}., 371.]

[Footnote 5:  Thus was named the assembly of ten Alsatian towns from Strasburg to Basel, organised into a half independent confederation by the Emperor Charles IV.]

[Footnote 6:  Toutey, p. 11.]

[Footnote 7:  See “Fontes Rerum Austriacarum” Chmel, J., Urkunden zur Geschichte von Osterreich, etc., II^2, 223 et passim.  One document, p. 229, has Marz as a misprint for Mai.]

[Footnote 8:  Charles was, to be sure, already within that circle for some of his Netherland provinces, but his feudal obligations there were very shadowy.]

[Footnote 9:  See Toutey, Lavisse, etc., and above all a valuable article by L. Stouff, entitled “Les Possessions Bourguignonnes dans la vallee du Rhin sous Charles le Temeraire,” Annales de l’Est, vol. 18.  This article, is the result of a careful examination of the reports made by Poinsot and Pellet, Charles’s commissioners.]

CHAPTER XIV

ENGLISH AFFAIRS

1470-1471