Medieval France
. In an ordinance issued at Amboise on October 13, 1472, Louis XI proclaimed in France a concordat with Pope Sixtus IV that the pope had published two months earlier. Its language closely resembled that of papal proposals in the years since 1438, when the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had sharply reduced the authority of the papacy over the French church. The “Gallican liberties” embodied in the Pragmatic Sanction gave the French church, particularly the episcopate, considerable independence from both the pope and the king. It was strongly supported by the Parlement de Paris, but Louis XI, on becoming king in 1461, had alternately canceled it, restored it, and ignored it. He preferred to deal with the pope rather than to concede liberties to his own clergy.
The Concordat of 1472, which historians once thought was never enforced, prefigured the more famous Concordat of Bologna (1516), in that the pope and the king arranged for a joint hegemony over the French clergy, primarily with regard to episcopal appointments.
Although the relations between Louis XI and Sixtus IV often were bitter during the succeeding decade, the Concordat of Amboise remained the de facto arrangement for handling bishoprics, and it enabled the monarchy to strengthen its control over the French church.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: GALLICANISM; PRAGMATIC SANCTION OF BOURGES]
Ourliac, Paul. “The Concordat of 1472: An Essay on the Relations Between Louis XI and Sixtus IV.” In The Recovery of France in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Peter S.Lewis. New York: Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 102–84.
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