1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Charles (Count of Valois)

CHARLES (1270–1325), count of Valois, of Maine, and of Anjou, third son of Philip III., king of France, surnamed the Bold, and of Isabella of Aragon, was born on the 12th of March 1270. By his father’s will he inherited the four lordships of Crépy, La Ferté-Milon, Pierrefonds and Béthisy, which together formed the countship of Valois. In 1284 Martin IV., having excommunicated Pedro III., king of Aragon, offered that kingdom to Charles. King Philip failed in an attempt to place his son on this throne, and died on the return of the expedition. In 1290 Charles married Margaret, daughter of Charles II., king of Naples, and renounced his pretensions to Aragon. In 1294, at the beginning of the hostilities against England, he invaded Guienne and took La Réole and Saint-Sever. During the war Flanders (1300), he took Douai, Béthune and Dam, received the submission of Guy of Dampierre, and aided King Philip IV., the Fair, to gain the battle of Mons-en-Pévèle, on the 18th of August 1304. Asked by Boniface VIII. for his aid against the Ghibellines, he crossed the Alps in June 1301, entered Florence, and helped Charles II., the Lame, king of Sicily, to reconquer Calabria and Apulia from the house of Aragon, but was defeated in Sicily. As after the death of his first wife Charles had married Catherine de Courtenay, a granddaughter of Baldwin II., the last Latin emperor of Constantinople, he tried to assert his rights to that throne. Philip the Fair also wished to get him elected emperor; but Clement V. quashed his candidature in favour of Henry of Luxemburg, afterwards the emperor Henry VII. Under Louis X. Charles headed the party of feudal reaction, and was among those who compassed the ruin of Enguerrand de Marigny. In the reign of Charles IV., the Fair, he fought yet again in Guienne (1324), and died at Perray (Seine-et-Oise) on the 16th of December 1325. His second wife had died in 1307, and in July 1308 he had married a third wife, Mahaut de Châtillon, countess of Saint-Pol. Philip, his eldest son, ascended the French throne in 1328, and from him sprang the royal house of Valois.

See Joseph Petit, Charles de Valois (Paris, 1900).