Duke of Berry
nobiliari title
Duke of Berry (French: Duc de Berry) or Duchess of Berry (French: Duchesse de Berry) was a title in the Peerage of France. The Duchy of Berry, centred on Bourges, was originally created as an appanage for junior members of the Capetian dynasty and was frequently granted to female royals. The style "Duke of Berry" was later granted by several Bourbon monarchs to their grandsons. The last official Duke of Berry was Charles Ferdinand of Artois, son of King Charles X. The title Duke of Berry is currently being claimed through its usage as a courtesy title by Alphonse de Bourbon, son of Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, the Legitimist claimant to the French Throne.
House of Valois (1360-1505)
On October 1360, King John II created the peerage-duchy of Berry as an appanage for his third-born son, John of Poitiers, perhaps on the occasion of his marriage with Joan of Armagnac. Upon his death in 1416, John of Poitiers was succeeded as Duke of Berry by his grandnephew John, Dauphin of France (having been predeceased in 1397 by his only son who survived into adulthood, Jean d'Valois, Count of Montpensier). After Dauphin John's death in 1417, the appanage passed to his younger brother, Dauphin Charles, who subsequently moved his court to Berry's capital of Bourges to escape the advancing English during the Hundred Years' War. When the Dauphin ascended to the throne as Charles VII, Berry returned to the royal domain.
In 1461, Louis XI granted Berry to his younger brother, Charles. Charles maintained a rivalry with his brother and joined the League of the Public Weal, an anti-royal alliance of French magnates led by the Charles the Bold, the Count of Charolais.
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This entry incorporates text from “Duke of Berry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.