Charles VIII of France

Charles VIII (30 June 1470 – 7 April 1498), called the Affable (French: l'Affable), was King of France from 1483 to his death in 1498. He succeeded his father Louis XI at the age of 13. His elder sister Anne acted as regent jointly with her husband Peter II, Duke of Bourbon until 1491, when the young king turned 21 years of age. During Anne's regency, the great lords rebelled against royal centralisation efforts in a conflict known as the Mad War (1485–1488), which resulted in a victory for the royal government.

In a remarkable stroke of audacity, Charles married Anne of Brittany in 1491 after she had already been married by proxy to the Habsburg heir Maximilian I in a ceremony of questionable validity. Preoccupied by the problematic succession in the Kingdom of Hungary, Maximilian failed to press his claim. Upon his marriage, Charles became administrator of Brittany and established a personal union that enabled France to avoid total encirclement by Habsburg territories.

To secure his rights to the Neapolitan throne that René of Anjou had left to his father, Charles made a series of concessions to neighbouring monarchs and, due to his revolutionary artillery, conquered the Italian Peninsula without much opposition. A coalition formed against the French invasion of 1494–1498 attempted to stop Charles' army at Fornovo, but failed and Charles marched his army back to France.

Charles died in 1498 after supposedly striking his head accidentally on the lintel of a door at the Château d'Amboise, his place of birth, but that has been subject to re-analysis. Since he had no male heir, he was succeeded by his second cousin once removed and brother-in-law at the time, Louis XII, from the Orléans cadet branch of the House of Valois.