BY giving his eldest² daughter, Isabelle, the heiress of Lorraine, in marriage to René, the second son of Madame Yolande, Queen of Sicily and of Jerusalem, and Duchess of Anjou,[423] Duke Charles II of Lorraine, who was in alliance with the English, had recently done his cousin and friend, the Duke of Burgundy, a bad turn. René of Anjou, now in his twentieth year, was a man of culture as much in love with sound learning as with chivalry⁴, and withal kind, affable, and gracious. When not engaged in some military expedition and in wielding⁵ the lance he delighted to illuminate⁶ manuscripts. He had a taste for flower-decked gardens and stories in tapestry⁷; and like his fair cousin the Duke of Orléans he wrote poems in French.[424] Invested with the duchy of Bar by the Cardinal⁸ Duke[Pg i.92] of Bar, his great-uncle, he would inherit the duchy of Lorraine after the death of Duke Charles which could not be far off. This marriage was rightly regarded as a clever stroke on the part of Madame Yolande. But he who reigns⁹ must fight. The Duke of Burgundy, ill content to see a prince of the house of Anjou, the brother-in-law of Charles of Valois, established between Burgundy and Flanders, stirred up against René the Count of Vaudémont, who was a claimant of the inheritance of Lorraine. The Angevin policy rendered a reconciliation¹⁰ between the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France difficult. Thus was René of Anjou involved in the quarrels of his father-in-law of Lorraine. It befell that in this year, 1429, he was waging war against the citizens of Metz, the War of the Basketful of Apples.[425] It was so called because the cause of war was a basketful of apples which had been brought into the town of Metz without paying duty to the officers of the Duke of Lorraine.[426]

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