Introduction

Dealing with violence, whenever takes place the period you are focusing on, needs to make a constant distance from the matters you know nowadays. Indeed, violence is a common point shared by every human beings society. That's why dealing with violence in the French society of today is really different from studying violences in medieval societies. Firstly, you have to understand that the more peacefull is a society, the more violence is unbearable for this society. So, in a society of violence, the "limits" are constantly pushed away. For example, a man living during the XVth century, who had known warfares, diseases, starvations, plague... felt the violence differently from a man living during the XXIth century who struggles against violences on animals. That's why it is so important to focus on the context of the facts without any consideration for the era you are actually living in.

This blog is an attempt to study the violence of the sacks during the Burgundian wars, from 1465 to 1477. During this period, the Burgundian states are governed by one only man : Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy (1467-1477). I've chosen that period because of its amazing increase of violence almost paroxismal. Indeed, during the Hundred Years War violences of war kept growing after a relatively peacefull XIIIth century.  After 1453, and the British defeat of Castillon wich ends the Hundred Years War, you could have thought that war violences would have decreased. But Charles the Bold's reign shows the opposite. Some decades before the progress of Humanism, Charles the Bold's reign shows the last episodes of a kind of conflict that is on the verge of vanishing : feudal wars.

That's why this work is an attempt to answer the following question : how the violences of war can help a lord during the XVth century ?