René I of Anjou — known to posterity as the Good King René — was born on January 16, 1409, in the castle of Angers, the second son of Duke Louis II of Anjou and Yolanda of Aragon. He entered the world as a prince of a cadet branch of the French royal house, the House of Valois-Anjou, and as the great-grandson of John II of France. His elder brother Louis III would eventually succeed to the crown of Sicily and the Duchy of Anjou; René himself, as the younger son, was positioned for an important but secondary role. History, however, arranged matters differently.
René's sister Marie married the future Charles VII of France, making René the brother-in-law of the reigning king for most of his adult life — a connection of considerable political importance in a France still divided by the catastrophic struggles of the Hundred Years War. When Duke Louis II died in 1417, his sons were raised under the guardianship of their formidable mother, Yolanda of Aragon, one of the most capable political figures of her era.
In 1419, when René was only ten years old, he was legally married to Isabella, the elder daughter of Charles II, Duke of Lorraine. The match was designed to secure dynastic interests rather than to satisfy the hearts of children, and René was sent to Lorraine to be raised under the guardianship of Charles II and Louis, Cardinal of Bar — both of whom were aligned with the Burgundian faction that opposed the French royal cause. René, despite this early formation, proved sympathetic to the French side. In 1429 he joined the French army at Reims and was present at the consecration of Charles VII in the cathedral — one of the most charged political and symbolic moments of the medieval era, made all the more dramatic by the presence of Joan of Arc.
When Louis of Bar died in 1430, René inherited the Duchy of Bar. The following year, on the death of his father-in-law, he succeeded to the Duchy of Lorraine. This inheritance was immediately contested by Antoine de Vaudemont, the heir-male to Lorraine, who with Burgundian support defeated René at the Battle of Bulgneville in July 1431. Duchess Isabella negotiated a truce, but René himself remained a prisoner of the Burgundians for nearly a year. He recovered his liberty on parole in April 1432, surrendering his two sons, John and Louis, as hostages. His title as Duke of Lorraine was confirmed by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund at Basel in 1434, a decision that infuriated Philip the Good of Burgundy, who required René to return to prison early the following year. He was finally released two years later on payment of a heavy ransom.
René's claims did not end in France. Joanna II of Naples had chosen his elder brother Louis III as her presumptive heir, and when Louis died in 1435, she offered the succession to René. He also inherited the Duchy of Anjou and the County of Maine upon his brother's death that same year. René set sail for Naples in 1438, entering a kingdom simultaneously claimed by Alfonso V of Aragon, who had previously been adopted and then repudiated by Joanna II herself. In 1441 Alfonso laid siege to Naples for six months. René was unable to hold the city, returned to France in 1442, and though he continued to use the title of King of Naples for the rest of his life, his effective rule over the kingdom was never recovered. Subsequent attempts to reassert his Italian rights proved equally fruitless.
His mother Yolanda, who had governed Anjou in his absence, died in 1442. René remained close to Charles VII, participating in negotiations with the English at Tours in 1444 that produced a truce and were consolidated by the marriage of his younger daughter, Margaret of Anjou, to Henry VI of England at Nancy — a match that would have enormous consequences for English history, as Margaret became one of the most determined figures in the Wars of the Roses. René made over the government of Lorraine to his son John, though John was only formally installed as Duke on the death of René's wife Isabella in 1453.
In his final decades René withdrew increasingly to his beloved Provence, residing at Aix-en-Provence and cultivating the arts, literature, and music with the enthusiasm of a man whose temperament suited culture far better than warfare. He was himself a painter, poet, and patron of considerable accomplishment, and the court he maintained in Provence became a center of late medieval culture in the south of France. He spent his last years there and died at Aix-en-Provence on July 10, 1480, at the age of seventy-one.
The sobriquet "Good King René" — le bon roi René — reflects not military achievement or political mastery, both of which largely eluded him, but the affection his subjects bore for a prince whose genuine love of art, learning, and his people outlasted the kingdoms he lost. He was a man more suited to the patronage of poets than the command of armies, and the melancholy thread of noble intentions meeting worldly failure runs through his life from beginning to end.
