Louis I, duke d’Orléans

Louis I, duke d’Orléans (born March 13, 1372, Paris—died Nov. 23, 1407, Paris) was the younger brother of King Charles VI and first in the second dynasty of dukes of Orléans. He initiated the power struggle with the dukes of Burgundy that became the dominating factor in 15th-century France. Known for his ambition and his love of pleasure, he was said to have had a liaison with the Queen as well as with other ladies.

Louis was at first titled comte de Valois; in 1386 Charles granted him Touraine, which he exchanged in 1392 for the duchy of Orléans. In 1386 he married his cousin Valentina Visconti, daughter of the Duke of Milan, who brought as part of her dowry lands in northern Italy and awakened Orléans’s ambitions for founding a kingdom there. Her hereditary right to Milan furnished her descendants, the kings Louis XII and Francis I, with a pretext for the wars they undertook in Italy.

Orléans sat on his brother’s council. When Charles VI went mad, a power struggle developed between Orléans and his uncle Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. When Philip died in 1404, the rivalry continued with his son John the Fearless, culminating in Orléans’s assassination by John’s agents in 1407. A long feud ensued between the Armagnacs, partisans of Orléans’s heirs, and the Burgundians. Orléans was the father of the poet Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465), head of the Armagnacs after his father’s death and grandfather of Louis XII.