How did Charles VIII die?

What the accounts say

The king was taking his wife, Anne of Brittany, to watch the tennis played in the dry moat. The route went through a gallery called the Hacquelebac, and the doorway was low. He struck his head hard enough for the blow to be remarked on, said he hoped never to think an evil thought again, and watched the game.

Some hours later, still standing in the gallery, he fell backwards and lost speech. He was laid on a pallet on the spot — contemporaries noted with some horror that the bed was a poor one and that the king of France died on straw in a corridor. He died around eleven at night, roughly nine hours after the blow.

What it probably was

A modern reading is an extradural or subdural haemorrhage: the classic pattern of a lucid interval followed by sudden collapse hours later. That pattern is why the story sounds implausible and is not. A minor-seeming knock to the head that kills nine hours later is a recognised presentation, and it kills people in exactly this way today.

Why it mattered

He and Anne of Brittany had lost every one of their children in infancy. With no heir, the crown went sideways to his cousin Louis of Orléans, who became Louis XII, married Anne to keep Brittany attached to France, and carried on the Italian wars. Charles’s own story — born in this château, died in it, the only French king of whom that is true — is on his page, and the odd business of his feet is on this one.

What there is to book

Not the entrance ticket — that is bought at the château’s own desk when you arrive. What is bookable is the guiding, and the day trips that include entry to Amboise along with the other Loire châteaux.

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