death of Louis XI (August 30, 1483) had borne the title of Queen and had lived at Amboise with other children of the French royal house, under the care of the Regent, Anne de Beaujeu.  The marriage, however, of Charles VIII and Margaret was never to be consummated.  In August, 1488, the male line of the Dukes of Brittany became extinct; and the hand of the heiress, Anne of Brittany, a girl of twelve, attracted many suitors.  It was clearly a matter of supreme importance to the King of France that this important territory should not pass by marriage into the hands of an enemy.  The Bretons, on the other hand, clung to their independence and dreaded absorption in the unifying French state.  After many intrigues her council advised the young duchess to accept Maximilian as her husband, and she was married to him by proxy in March, 1490.  Charles VIII immediately entered Brittany at the head of a strong force and, despite a fierce and prolonged resistance, conquered the country, and gained possession of Anne’s person (August, 1491).  The temptation was too strong to be resisted.  Margaret, after residing in France as his affianced wife for eight years, was repudiated and finally, two years later, sent back to the Netherlands, while Anne was compelled to break off her marriage with Margaret’s father, and became Charles’ queen.  This double slight was never forgiven either by Maximilian or by Margaret, and was the direct cause of the negotiations for the double Spanish marriage, which, though delayed by the suspicious caution of the two chief negotiators, Ferdinand and Maximilian, was at length arranged.  In August, 1496, an imposing fleet conveyed the Infanta Juana to Antwerp and she was married to Philip at Lille.  In the following April Margaret and Don Juan were wedded in the cathedral of Burgos.  The union was followed by a series of catastrophes in the Spanish royal family.  While on his way with his wife to attend the marriage of his older sister Isabel with the King of Portugal, Juan caught a malignant fever and expired at Salamanca in October, 1497.

The newly-married Queen of Portugal now became the heiress to the crowns of Aragon and Castile, but she died a year later and shortly afterwards her infant son.  The succession therefore passed to the younger sister, Juana; and Philip the Fair, the heir of the House of Austria and already through his mother the ruler of the rich Burgundian domain, became through his wife the prospective sovereign of the Spanish kingdoms of Ferdinand and Isabel.  Fortune seemed to have reserved all her smiles for the young prince, when on February 24, 1500, a son was born to him at Ghent, who received the name Charles.  But dark days were soon to follow.  Philip was pleasure-loving and dissolute, and he showed little affection for his wife, who had already begun to exhibit symptoms of that weakness of mind which was before long to develop into insanity.  However in 1501, they journeyed together to Spain, in order to secure Juana’s rights to the Castilian succession and also to that of Aragon should King Ferdinand die without an heir-male.