Charles IX, King of France

CHARLES IX, King of France. - Third male child of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, b. at St-Germain-en-Laye on 27 June 1550, d. at Vincennes on 30 May 1574. He first bore the title of duke of Orléans. Having ascended the throne in 1560, on the death of his elder brother Francis II, he reigned under the guardianship of his mother until 1563, the year in which he was declared of age, but his mother's guardianship in fact continued even afterwards. Around 1570, under the influence of Coligny, who held out to him the prospect, in an intervention in favor of the Netherlands, which had risen against Spain, of a future of glory and power, he followed for the first time a personal policy. Catherine, feeling the influence she exercised over her son slipping away, tried to regain it by making his rival disappear. But the attempt did not succeed and provoked a chain of disastrous consequences that began with the night of St. Bartholomew, and with the two terrible civil wars that were the consequences of that massacre. C., who had fully assumed responsibility for those events, died during the second war, after a rapid moral and physical decline.

Luigi Michelini Tocci