Sources

Finding source material for the War of Burgundian Succession has been difficult, as there is not much written about it in English. Usually when it comes up it is not really referred to as a war, with just the Battle of Guinegate (1479) and the treaties of Arras (1482) and Senlis (1493) being mentioned.

My first stop was to buy a copy of the Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, mine being a 1972 translation by Michael Jones. Commynes is a great source, as he was was personally close to Louis XI and was there for many of the events he relates. He covers a lot of what happened following the death of Charles the Bold, and here I found my first accounts of interesting events such as the siege of Arras, the death of Adolph of Egmont, the rebellion of the Prince of Orange, and other things that suggested this was a topic well worth looking into further. 

I then was able to find a couple of excellent French articles online by Amable Sablon du Coreil, focusing on the details of the Burgundian armies of the 1477-1482 period. I put them through the Google translation tool and got very readable results, which was encouraging. Both the articles can be read here and here. It seems the author has also written a longer academic paper on the war which I would love to read, but I haven't found it accessible anywhere.

Next I was able to find a number of old French histories on Google Books, which can be downloaded as PDF files and subsequently translated. The first one I tried was painstakingly difficult - it's not as simple as copying and pasting into the translation tool, you need to carefully 'smarten up' the pasted text, and a lot depends on the quality of the scanned image you are copying from. This first one was Histoire generale et particuliere de Bourgogne by Urbain Plancher (1781). A laborious task finding the relevant chapters and translating them one paragraph at a time, but the results were fantastic! This book is full of fascinating details about military operations in both the Low Countries and Burgundy.

I subsequently found three more similar French histories - Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valois by M. de Barante (1826), Histoire de la Franche-Comté ancienne et moderne by Eugene Rougebief (1851) and Histoire de la réunion de la Franche-Comté à la France by L. de Piépape (1881). Luckily these three gave much easier, cleaner translations than the first. These have all been gold-mines of information.

By then I had come to realise that the main source I really needed to find was the chronicles of Jean Molinet, who seems to have given much more detailed accounts of the war than Commynes. Unfortunately I am not aware of any English translations of Molinet. I have been able to find PDFs of all the relevant volumes, but sadly could not get a good enough translation from them. I realise the problem is that unlike my 18th and 19th century French texts, they are written in Middle French! You can get a vague idea of what is being talked about when you put it through Google, but not enough to really call it understandable. So Molinet remains elusive.

That covers my main sources. I have also found all sorts of other useful books and articles, some available as PDFs, others I have bought physical copies of. Lots of them have been invaluable for filling in big gaps in the story.  Here is a list of all the sources I have used. If there are any you want help accessing, or are interested in my rough translations of the French texts, feel free to get in touch.

Philippe de Commynes – Memoirs

Urbain Plancher – Histoire generale et particuliere de Bourgogne (1781)
M. de Barante – Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valois (1826)
Eugene Rougebief – Histoire de la Franche-Comté ancienne et moderne (1851)
L. de Piépape - Histoire de la réunion de la Franche-Comté à la France (1881)
Louis Gollut - Histoire de la république des Séquanes et des princes de Franche-Comté de Bourgogne (1592)
Ed. A.W. Ward – The Cambridge Modern History, Volume 1: The Renaissance (1902)
Ed. G.R. Potter – The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume 1: The Renaissance 1493-1520 (1957)
R.W. Seton-Watson – Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (1902)
Christopher Hare – The Life of Louis XI (1907) 
C.M. Davies - History of Holland, from the beginning of the tenth to the end of the eighteenth century (1841)
Thomas Johnes (trans.) – The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Vol II (1809)

Richard Vaughan - Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy (1973)
H.G. Koenigsberger – Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (2001)

Robert Douglas Smith & Kelly Devries - The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy 1363-1477 (2005)
David Potter – War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy 1470-1560 (1993)
David Potter – Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society c.1480-1560 (2008)
Ernest Girard - Relation de la Battaille de Dournon, 17-18 Janvier 1493 (1879)
Charles Pinot Duclos – L’Histoire de Louis XI (1745)
Louis Moreri – Le Grand Dictionnaire Historique (1759)
Achmet d’Hericourt – Les Sieges d’Arras, histoire des expeditions militaires (1844)
Henri Louis Gustave Guillaume – Histoire des Bandes d’Ordonnance des Pays-Bas (1873)
Xavier de Bonnault d'Houët - Les Francs-archers de Compiègne 1448-1524 (1897)

Hans Cools - Mannen met macht. Edellieden en de Moderne Staat in de Bourgondisch-Habsburgse landen, ca. 1475 - ca. 1530
M. Sommé - L’artillerie et la guerre de frontière dans le Nord de la France de 1477 à 1482

Amable Sablon du Coreil - L'État princier à l'épreuve. Financer et conduire la guerre pendant la crise de l'Étatbourguignon 1477-1493
Amable Sablon du Coreil - Les étrangers au service de Marie de Bourgogne : de l'armée de Charles le Téméraire à l'armée de Maximilien 1477-1482
Amable Sablon du Coreil - L’armée, le Prince et ses sujets : le financement de la guerre aux Pays-Bas bourguignons après la mort de Charles Le Téméraire, 1477-1482