to French sovereignty in Aquitaine and fear of subjection to French taxation--the aides, taille, and gabelle--which provided the means whereby Charles VII was able to recover Normandy and Aquitaine. But the victory over the English in 1453 undoubtedly bolstered the international standing of the Valois monarchy and Louis XI, despite his early mistakes and overcomplex intrigues, was able to build on the foundations laid in his father's reign. Between 1453 and 1500 a number of great principalities reverted to or were annexed by the French crown--Burgundy, Provence, and Brittany were brought into a much closer relationship with the ruling house through marriage and conquest. The kingdom of France had largely achieved the form in which it was to endure under the ancien régime by the end of the fifteenth century. The war with England was to some extent the anvil upon which the identity of early modern France was forged.
War, as has been observed, was costly in material as well as human terms. The Anglo-French war of 1294-8 cost the English £360,000 sterling and the French at least 1,730,000 livres tournois (£432,500 sterling). Periods of inflation and monetary debasement often coincided with those of most intensive warfare, such as the inflationary spiral of 11801220 which afflicted the Angevin monarchy of England, or the acute monetary problems of 1290-1310 which afflicted both England and France. Military costs--of equipment, fortification, horses, armour, and supplies--increased markedly during these periods and it was more costly to put an army in the field or to conduct a siege in the fifteenth century than it had been a century earlier. Technical improvements in armour, castle-building, and the advent of firearms and artillery contributed greatly to this rise of military costs. In 1470 Louis XI of France spent 928,000 livres on the army and artillery from a total budget of 1,854,000 livres, while his father, it was estimated, had spent only about half that sum. In the German Empire the defence of the eastern frontier against the incursions of the Ottoman Turks (who had defeated a western crusading army at Nicopolis ( 1396) and successfully taken the city of Constantinople in 1453) absorbed Habsburg revenues,
-301-