Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac

Seal of Bernard VII

Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac (1360 – 12 June 1418) was Count of Armagnac and Constable of France. He was the son of John II and Jeanne de Périgord. He succeeded in Armagnac at the death of his brother, John III, in 1391. After prolonged fighting, he also became Count of Comminges in 1412.

When his brother, who claimed the Kingdom of Majorca, invaded northern Catalonia late in 1389 in an attempt to seize the kingdom's continental possessions (the County of Roussillon), Bernard commanded part of his forces.

Bernard's wife was Bonne,^[1] the daughter of John, Duke of Berry, and widow of Count Amadeus VII, Count of Savoy. He first gained influence at the French court when Louis, Duke of Orléans married Valentina Visconti, the daughter of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. Bernard's sister Beatrice married Valentina's brother Carlo.

After Louis' assassination in 1407, Armagnac remained attached to the cause of Orléans. He married his daughter Bonne to the young Charles, Duke of Orléans in 1410.^[2] Bernard d'Armagnac became the nominal head of the faction which opposed John the Fearless in the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War, and the faction came to be called the "Armagnacs" as a consequence.

He became constable of France in 1415 and was the head of the government of the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, until the Burgundians invaded Paris in the night of 28-29 May 1418. On 12 June 1418, he was one of the first victims of the massacres in which over 550 of his real or suspected followers were killed in the course of weeks throughout the summer.^[3][4]

Children

• John IV, Count of Armagnac, married 1) Blanche of Brittany and 2) Isabella of Navarre
• Anne of Armagnac, married Charles II of Albret
• Bonne of Armagnac, married Charles, Duke of Orléans
• Bernard, Count of Pardiac, married Eleanor, heiress to La Marche

Notes

1. Schnerb, Bertrand, Un Seigneur auvergnat à la Cour de Bourgogne: Renaud II, Vicomte de Murat (1405-1420), Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire de France, 2005, p. 108 n16.
2. Harrington, David V., Charles d'Orléans, in The Middle Ages: Dictionary of World Biography, Vol.2, Routledge, 1998, p. 232.
3. Anonym, Le journal d'un bourgeois de Paris, 1405-1449, Champion, Paris, 1881, p. 92 , (15th century French)
4. Sizer, Michael (2007). "The Calamity of Violence: Reading the Paris Massacres of 1418". Proceedings of the Western Society for French History. Michigan Publishing. 35. ISSN 2162-0423.

External links

• Cawley, Charles, Ancestors of Bernard VII, Medieval Lands database, Foundation for Medieval Genealogy -Family tree from the Medieval Lands Project
• The Households of the Counts of Armagnac in the Late Middle Ages - abstract of a paper analyzing the household expenses of Count Bernard VII, from the Société Internationale des Médiévistes.