Duke of Burgundy who won his epithet as the captured crusader of Nicopolis, ordered the murder of Louis of Orléans, plunged France into the Armagnac–Burgundian civil war, and was himself murdered on the bridge at Montereau in 1419.
John the Fearless ruled Burgundy for fifteen years and dominated — and poisoned — French politics for all of them. He earned his epithet young: as Count of Nevers he led the Franco-Burgundian chivalry on the Nicopolis crusade of 1396, charged the Ottoman army against all advice, and survived the massacre of the prisoners because his captors knew what his ransom was worth.
As duke from 1404 he fought his cousin Louis of Orléans for control of mad Charles VI's kingdom, and in 1407 settled the quarrel with hired killers in a Paris street. The murder split France into Armagnac and Burgundian camps whose civil war opened the door to Henry V of England. On 10 September 1419, meeting the dauphin Charles for a reconciliation on the bridge at Montereau, John was struck down in his turn — and his son Philip the Good took Burgundy into the English alliance that nearly unmade France.
John was born at Dijon on 28 May 1371, eldest son of Philip the Bold — youngest son of King John II of France and first Valois duke of Burgundy — and of Margaret of Flanders, whose inheritance brought the rich cities of the Low Countries into the Burgundian orbit. As Count of Nevers he was groomed for the crusade that would make his name: in 1396 he took command, at twenty-five, of the French and Burgundian contingent that joined Sigismund of Hungary's great expedition against Bayezid I. At the Battle of Nicopolis the western knights insisted on charging first and were destroyed; John fought well enough in the disaster for later tradition to coin the epithet "the Fearless", and was one of the few nobles spared in the mass execution of prisoners, ransomed home in 1397–98 for a sum that strained even Burgundian finances.
Burgundian writers celebrated the courage that Nicopolis advertised and their duke's common touch — John cultivated the guilds, butchers, and university of Paris, posed as the enemy of courtly corruption, and was genuinely popular in the capital in ways his glittering father never sought. He was also, by the agreement of every party, a ruler of secretive, suspicious intensity: small, unimpressive in person beside his rival Louis of Orléans, he worked through calculation, propaganda, and patience. His chosen emblems said it plainly — the carpenter's plane, adopted to answer Orléans's knotted club, promised to shave his enemies smooth.
The murder of 1407 defines him because he defined himself by it. Far from hiding, John admitted the deed within days and had the theologian Jean Petit argue publicly in 1408 that killing a "tyrant" was lawful — one of the most notorious justifications of political murder of the Middle Ages. Chroniclers of the Armagnac side painted him as treacherous beyond redemption; even Burgundian ones concede the ruthlessness. Modern historians, following Richard Vaughan, tend to see a formidably able politician whose one great crime locked France into the civil war he could exploit but never end — and which, on the bridge at Montereau, ended him.
Succeeding his father as duke in 1404, John inherited Burgundy, Flanders, and his father's claim to govern France during the recurring madness of King Charles VI. His rival was the king's brother Louis, Duke of Orléans, and their struggle over the regency, the royal treasury, and war policy toward England escalated past reconciliation: on 23 November 1407, assassins in John's pay ambushed Orléans in the rue Vieille-du-Temple in Paris and hacked him down. After a brief exile from favour, John returned to dominate the capital, backed by the Parisian populace and legitimised by Jean Petit's defence of tyrannicide.
The dead duke's cause passed to his son Charles of Orléans and his father-in-law Bernard of Armagnac, and France split into Burgundian and Armagnac factions in open civil war. John rode popular movements like the Cabochien revolt of 1413 until they turned to riot and cost him Paris; the Armagnacs held the government when Henry V of England invaded in 1415, and John kept Burgundy's knights home from the campaign that ended at the Battle of Agincourt — his brothers Anthony and Philip of Nevers died there. In 1418 his partisans retook Paris in a bloodbath of Armagnac prisoners, and John, holding the mad king and the capital, faced a new France divided between his enemies: the young dauphin Charles at Bourges, and the English king conquering Normandy town by town.
With Henry V advancing after the fall of Rouen, John and the sixteen-year-old dauphin Charles — the future Charles VII — agreed to meet and settle the civil war. On 10 September 1419, on the bridge at Montereau where the Yonne meets the Seine, the two parties met inside a wooden enclosure; words were exchanged, and the dauphin's companions, led by Tanguy du Châtel, cut the duke down with axe and sword. Whether it was planned vengeance for Orléans or a parley that exploded no source settles beyond doubt; the dauphin's party called it justice, everyone else called it murder. A century later a Carthusian prior at Dijon, showing François I the duke's broken skull, delivered the epitaph history kept: "this is the hole through which the English entered France."
Montereau accomplished what John's whole career had threatened: it married Burgundy to England. His son Philip the Good sealed the alliance with Henry V in the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, which disinherited the dauphin and made the English king heir of France; for fifteen years Lancastrian France stood on the foundation of the murdered duke's feud. John's tomb at the Charterhouse of Champmol in Dijon, with its alabaster mourners, remains one of the masterworks of Burgundian sculpture, and his reign marks the moment the Valois dukes of Burgundy stopped being French princes first — the state-building of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold grew directly from the ambitions and enmities John left behind.