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+Louis IX (25 April 1214 – 25 August 1270), commonly known as Saint Louis or Louis the Saint, is the only King of France to be canonized in the Catholic Church. Louis was crowned in Reims at the age of 12, following the death of his father Louis VIII; his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruled the kingdom as regent until he reached maturity. During Louis's childhood, Blanche dealt with the opposition of rebellious vassals and obtained a definitive victory in the Albigensian Crusade, which had started 20 years earlier.
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+As an adult, Louis IX faced recurring conflicts with some of his realm's most powerful nobles, such as Hugh X of Lusignan and Peter of Dreux. Simultaneously, Henry III of England invaded to restore his continental possessions, but Louis routed him at the Battle of Taillebourg. Louis annexed several provinces, notably parts of Aquitaine, Maine and Provence.
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+Louis IX is one of the most notable European monarchs of the Middle Ages. His reign is remembered as a medieval golden age in which the Kingdom of France reached an economic as well as political peak. His fellow European rulers esteemed him highly, not only for his military pre-eminence and the wealth of his kingdom, but for his reputation of fairness and moral integrity: he was often asked to arbitrate their disputes.[1]
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+He was a reformer and developed French royal justice, in which the king was the supreme judge to whom anyone could appeal to seek the amendment of a judgment. He banned trials by ordeal, tried to prevent the private wars that were plaguing the country, and introduced the presumption of innocence in criminal procedure. To enforce the application of this new legal system, Louis IX created provosts and bailiffs.
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+After his unexpected recovery from a serious illness, and to honor a vow he made while ill, Louis IX led the Seventh and Eighth crusades against the Ayyubids, Bahriyya Mamluks and Hafsid Kingdom. He was captured in the first and ransomed. He died from dysentery during the latter, and was succeeded by his son Philip III.
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+Louis' actions were inspired by Christian zeal and Catholic devotion. He was a just king: although he exacted what was due him, he had no wish to wrong anyone, from the lowest peasant to the richest vassal.[2] Renowned for his moderate lifestyle, reason, bravery and chivalrous politeness, he was a splendid knight whose kindness and engaging manner made him popular. He was therefore regarded as the ideal Christian ruler even if he was also occasionally rebuked by contemporaries as a "monk king".[3]  He decided to severely punish blasphemy (for which he set the punishment to mutilation of the tongue and lips).[4] He is the only canonized king of France, and there are consequently many places named after him.
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+Much of what is known of Louis's life comes from Jean de Joinville's famous Life of Saint Louis. Joinville was a close friend, confidant, and counselor to the king. He participated as a witness in the papal inquest into Louis's life that resulted in his canonisation in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII.
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+Two other important biographies were written by the king's confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and his chaplain, William of Chartres. While several individuals wrote biographies in the decades following the king's death, only Jean of Joinville, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and William of Chartres wrote from personal knowledge of the king, and all three are biased favorably to the king. The fourth important source of information is William of Saint-Parthus's 19th-century biography,[5] which he wrote using material from the papal inquest mentioned above.
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+Louis was born on 25 April 1214 at Poissy, near Paris, the son of Louis the Lion and Blanche of Castile, and was baptised there in La Collégiale Notre-Dame church. His grandfather on his father's side was Philip II, king of France; while his grandfather on his mother's side was Alfonso VIII, king of Castile. Tutors of Blanche's choosing taught him most of what a king must know—Latin, public speaking, writing, military arts, and government.[6] He was nine years old when his grandfather Philip II died and his father ascended as Louis VIII.[7]
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+Louis was 12 years old when his father died on 8 November 1226. He was crowned king within the month at Reims Cathedral. Because of Louis's youth, his mother ruled France as regent during his minority.[8] Louis's mother trained him to be a great leader and a good Christian. She used to say:[9]
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+I love you, my dear son, as much as a mother can love her child; but I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should ever commit a mortal sin.
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+His younger brother Charles I of Sicily (1227–85) was created count of Anjou, thus founding the Capetian Angevin dynasty.
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+No date is given for the beginning of Louis's personal rule. His contemporaries viewed his reign as co-rule between the king and his mother, though historians generally view the year 1234 as the year in which Louis began ruling personally, with his mother assuming a more advisory role.[1] She continued to have a strong influence on the king until her death in 1252.[8][10]
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+On 27 May 1234, Louis married Margaret of Provence (1221 – 21 December 1295); she was crowned in the cathedral of Sens the next day.[11] Louis's marriage had political connections, as his wife was sister to Eleanor, who later married Henry III of England.  The new queen's religious zeal made her a well-suited partner for the king. He enjoyed her company, and was pleased to show her the many public works he was making in Paris, both for its defence and for its health. They enjoyed riding together, reading, and listening to music. His attention to Margaret aroused a certain amount of jealousy in his mother, who tried to keep the couple apart as much as she could.[12]
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+In the 1230s, Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, translated the Talmud and pressed 35 charges against it to Pope Gregory IX by quoting a series of passages about Jesus, Mary or Christianity that he considered blasphemous. There is a Talmudic passage, for example, where someone called Yeshu is sent to Hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. Donin also selected an injunction of the Talmud that allegedly permits Jews to kill non-Jews.[citation needed]
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+This led to the Disputation of Paris, which took place in 1240 at the court of Louis IX. Rabbi Yechiel of Paris was called on to defend the Talmud against Donin's accusations. Louis IX's Catholic representatives condemned the Talmud and burned thousands of copies.[13]
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+When Louis was 15, his mother brought an end to the Albigensian Crusade in 1229. She signed an agreement with Count Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, which cleared the latter's father of wrongdoing.[14] Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse had been suspected of murdering a preacher on a mission to convert the Cathars.[15]
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+Louis went on two crusades: in his mid-30s in 1248 (Seventh Crusade), and then again in his mid-50s in 1270 (Eighth Crusade).
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+In 1248 Louis decided that his obligations as a son of the Church outweighed those of his throne, and he left his kingdom to participate in a Crusade, what for him was a disastrous six-year adventure. Since the base of Muslim power had shifted to Egypt, Louis did not march on the Holy Land. Any war against Islam was considered to fit the definition of a Crusade.[16]
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+Louis and his followers landed in Egypt on 5 June 1249 and began his campaign with the rapid capture of the port of Damietta.[16][17] This attack caused some disruption in the Muslim Ayyubid empire, especially as the current sultan, Al-Malik as-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, was on his deathbed. However, the march of Europeans from Damietta toward Cairo through the Nile River Delta went slowly. The seasonal rising of the Nile and the summer heat made it impossible for them to advance and follow up on their success.[18] During this time, the Ayyubid sultan died, and the sultan's wife Shajar al-Durr set in motion a sudden power shift that would make her Queen and eventually place the Egyptian army of the Mamluks in power.
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+On 8 February 1250 Louis lost his army at the Battle of Al Mansurah[19] and was captured by the Egyptians. His release was eventually negotiated in return for a ransom of 400,000 livres tournois (at the time France's annual revenue was only about 1,250,000 livres tournois) and the surrender of the city of Damietta.[20]
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+Following his release from Egyptian captivity, Louis spent four years in the Latin kingdoms of Acre, Caesarea, and Jaffa. He used his wealth to assist the Crusaders in rebuilding their defences[21] and conducted diplomacy with the Islamic powers of Syria and Egypt. In the spring of 1254 he and his surviving army returned to France.[16]
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+Louis exchanged multiple letters and emissaries with Mongol rulers of the period. During his first crusade in 1248, Louis was approached by envoys from Eljigidei, the Mongol military commander stationed in Armenia and Persia.[22] Eljigidei suggested that King Louis should land in Egypt, while Eljigidei attacked Baghdad, to prevent the Saracens of Egypt and those of Syria from joining forces. Louis sent André de Longjumeau, a Dominican priest, as an emissary to the Great Khan Güyük Khan (r. 1246–48) in Mongolia. Güyük died before the emissary arrived at his court, however, and no action was taken by the two parties. Instead Güyükq's queen and now regent, Oghul Qaimish, politely turned down the diplomatic offer.[23]
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+Louis dispatched another envoy to the Mongol court, the Franciscan William of Rubruck, who visited the Great Khan Möngke (1251–1259) in Mongolia. He spent several years at the Mongol court. In 1259, Berke, the ruler of the Golden Horde, westernmost part of the Mongolian Empire, demanded the submission of Louis.[24] By contrast, Mongolian emperors Möngke and Khubilai's brother, the Ilkhan Hulegu, sent a letter to the king of France seeking his military assistance, but the letter never reached France.[25]
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+In a parliament held at Paris, 24 March 1267, Louis and his three sons "took the cross." On hearing the reports of the missionaries, Louis resolved to land at Tunis, and he ordered his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, to join him there. The crusaders, among whom was the English prince Edward Longshanks, landed at Carthage 17 July 1270, but disease broke out in the camp. Many died of dysentery, and on 25 August, Louis himself died.[21][26]
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+Louis's patronage of the arts inspired much innovation in Gothic art and architecture. The style of his court was influential throughout Europe, both because of art objects purchased for export from Parisian masters, and by the marriage of the king's daughters and female relatives to foreign husbands. They became emissaries of Parisian models and styles elsewhere. Louis's personal chapel, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which was known for its intricate stained-glass windows, was copied more than once by his descendants elsewhere. Louis is believed to have ordered the production of the Morgan Bible, a masterpiece of medieval painting.
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+During the so-called "golden century of Saint Louis", the kingdom of France was at its height in Europe, both politically and economically. Saint Louis was regarded as "primus inter pares", first among equals, among the kings and rulers of the continent. He commanded the largest army and ruled the largest and wealthiest kingdom, the European centre of arts and intellectual thought at the time. The foundations for the notable college of theology, later known as the Sorbonne, were laid in Paris about the year 1257.[18]
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+The prestige and respect felt by Europeans for King Louis IX were due more to the appeal of his personality than to military domination. For his contemporaries, he was the quintessential example of the Christian prince and embodied the whole of Christendom in his person. His reputation for fairness and even saintliness was already well established while he was alive, and on many occasions he was chosen as an arbiter in quarrels among the rulers of Europe.[1]
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+Shortly before 1256, Enguerrand IV, Lord of Coucy, arrested and without trial hanged three young squires of Laon, whom he accused of poaching in his forest. In 1256 Louis had the lord arrested and brought to the Louvre by his sergeants. Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and trial by battle, which the king refused because he thought it obsolete. Enguerrand was tried, sentenced, and ordered to pay 12,000 livres. Part of the money was to pay for masses to be said in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged.
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+In 1258, Louis and James I of Aragon signed the Treaty of Corbeil to end areas of contention between them. By this treaty, Louis renounced his feudal overlordship over the County of Barcelona and Roussillon, which was held by the King of Aragon. James in turn renounced his feudal overlordship over several counties in southern France, including Provence and Languedoc. In 1259 Louis signed the Treaty of Paris, by which Henry III of England was confirmed in his possession of territories in southwestern France, and Louis received the provinces of Anjou, Normandy (Normandie), Poitou, Maine, and Touraine.[8]
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+The perception of Louis IX as the exemplary Christian prince was reinforced by his religious zeal. Louis was an extremely devout Catholic, and he built the Sainte-Chapelle ("Holy Chapel"),[1] located within the royal palace complex (now the Paris Hall of Justice), on the Île de la Cité in the centre of Paris. Sainte Chapelle, a prime example of the Rayonnant style of Gothic architecture, was erected as a shrine for what Louis believed to be the Crown of Thorns and a fragment of the True Cross, supposed precious relics of the Passion of Christ. He acquired these in 1239–41 from Emperor Baldwin II of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. Louis agreed to pay off the imperial debt which Baldwin owed to Niccolo Quirino, a wealthy Venetian merchant, a debt to which Baldwin had pledged the Crown of Thorns as collateral.[27] Louis IX paid the exorbitant sum of 135,000 livres to clear this debt (the construction of the chapel, for comparison, cost only 60,000 livres).
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+Louis IX took very seriously his mission as "lieutenant of God on Earth", with which he had been invested when he was crowned in Reims. To fulfill this duty, he conducted two crusades. They contributed to his prestige, even though both ended disastrously. Everything he did was for what he saw as the glory of God and the good of his people. He protected the poor and was never heard to speak ill of anyone. He excelled in penance, leaving a hair shirt and a scourge which he had used in private practice. He had a great love for the Church. He was merciful even to rebels. When he was urged to execute a prince who had followed his father in rebellion, he refused, saying: "A son cannot refuse to obey his father."[9]
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+In 1230 the King forbade all forms of usury, defined at the time as any taking of interest and therefore covering most banking activities. When the original borrowers from Jewish and Lombard lenders could not be found, Louis exacted from those lenders a contribution toward the crusade which Pope Gregory was trying to launch.[18] At the urging of Pope Gregory IX, following the Disputation of Paris in 1240, Louis ordered in 1243 the burning in Paris of some 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books. Eventually, the edict against the Talmud was overturned by Gregory IX's successor, Innocent IV.[28]
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+Louis also expanded the scope of the Inquisition in France. He set the punishment for blasphemy to mutilation of the tongue and lips.[4] The area most affected by this expansion was southern France, where the Cathar sect had been strongest. The rate of confiscation of property from the Cathars and others reached its highest levels in the years before his first crusade, and slowed upon his return to France in 1254.
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+In 1250, Louis headed a crusade to Egypt and was taken prisoner. During his captivity, he recited the Divine Office every day. After his release against ransom, he visited the Holy Land before returning to France.[9] In these deeds, Louis IX tried to fulfill what he believed was the duty of France as "the eldest daughter of the Church" (la fille aînée de l'Église), a tradition of protector of the Church going back to the Franks and Charlemagne, who had been crowned by Pope Leo III in Rome in 800. The kings of France were known in the church by the title "most Christian king" (Rex Christianissimus). The relationship between France and the papacy was at its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries. The popes called for most of the crusades from French soil.
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+Louis was renowned for his charity. Beggars were fed from his table: he ate their leavings; washed their feet; ministered to the wants of lepers, who were generally ostracized; and daily fed over one hundred poor. He founded many hospitals and houses: the House of the Filles-Dieu for reformed prostitutes; the Quinze-Vingt for 300 blind men (1254), and hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon, and Compiégne.[29]
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+St. Louis installed a house of the Trinitarian Order at  Fontainebleau, his chateau and estate near Paris. He chose Trinitarians as his chaplains, and was accompanied by them on his crusades. In his spiritual testament he wrote: "My dearest son, you should permit yourself to be tormented by every kind of martyrdom before you would allow yourself to commit a mortal sin."[9]
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+Louis and Margaret's two royal children who died in infancy were first buried at the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont. In 1820 they were transferred and reinterred to Saint-Denis Basilica.[33]
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+During his second crusade, Louis died at Tunis on 25 August 1270, in an epidemic of dysentery that swept through his army.[26][34][35] According to European custom, his body was subjected to the process known as mos Teutonicus prior to his remains being returned to France. (This was a postmortem funerary custom used in medieval Europe whereby the flesh was boiled from the body, so that the bones of the deceased could be transported hygienically from distant lands back home). This was not the common practice for Muslim burials. [36] Louis was succeeded by his son, Philip III.
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+Louis's younger brother, Charles I of Naples, preserved his heart and intestines, and conveyed them for burial in the cathedral of Monreale near Palermo.[37] Louis's bones were carried overland in a lengthy processional across Sicily, Italy, the Alps, and France, until they were interred in the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis in May 1271.[38] Charles and Philip II later dispersed a number of relics to promote his veneration.[39]
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+Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the canonisation of Louis in 1297;[40] he is the only French king to be declared a saint.[41] Louis IX is often considered the model of the ideal Christian monarch.[40] The influence of his canonization was so great that many of his successors were named Louis after him.
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+Named in his honour, the Sisters of Charity of St. Louis is a Roman Catholic religious order founded in Vannes, France, in 1803.[42] A similar order, the Sisters of St Louis, was founded in Juilly in 1842.[43][44]
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+He is honoured as co-patron of the Third Order of St. Francis, which claims him as a member of the Order. Even in childhood, his compassion for the poor and suffering people were known to those who were close to him. When he became king, over a hundred poor people were served meals in his house on ordinary days. Often the king served these guests himself. Such acts of charity, coupled with Louis's devout religious practices, gave rise to the legend that he joined the Third Order of St. Francis. Though it is unlikely that Louis did join the order, his life and actions proclaimed him as one of them in spirit.[6]
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+Many countries in which French speakers and Catholicism were prevalent named places after King Louis:
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+The French royal Order of Saint Louis (1693–1790 and 1814–1830),[citation needed] the Île Saint-Louis,[48] and  a hospital in the 10th arrondissement of Paris[citation needed] also bear his name.The Cathedral Saint-Louis in Versailles;[citation needed] the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France completed in 1834 and the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis completed in 1914, both in St. Louis, Missouri;[citation needed] and the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans were also named for the king.[citation needed]  The national church of France in Rome also carries his name: San Luigi dei Francesi in Italian, or Saint Louis of France in English.[citation needed] Also the Cathedral of St Louis in Plovdiv, Bulgaria[citation needed], the Church of St Louis in Moscow, Russia,[citation needed] and rue Saint Louis of Pondicherry, India.[citation needed]
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+A bas-relief of St. Louis is one of the carved portraits of historic lawmakers that adorns the chamber of the United States House of Representatives.
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+Saint Louis is also portrayed on a frieze depicting a timeline of important lawgivers throughout world history, on the North Wall of the Courtroom at the Supreme Court of the United States.[49]
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+A statue of St. Louis by the sculptor John Donoghue stands on the roofline of the New York State Appellate Division Court at 27 Madison Avenue in New York City.
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+The Apotheosis of St. Louis is an equestrian statue of the saint, by Charles Henry Niehaus, that stands in front of the Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park.
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+A heroic portrait by Baron Charles de Steuben hangs in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.  An 1821 gift of King Louis XVIII of France, it depicts St. Louis burying his plague-stricken troops before the siege of Tunis at the beginning of the Eighth Crusade in 1270.
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+Archimedes of Syracuse (/ˌɑːrkɪˈmiːdiːz/;[2] Ancient Greek: Ἀρχιμήδης, Arkhimḗdēs; Doric Greek: [ar.kʰi.mɛː.dɛ̂ːs]; c. 287 – c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer.[3] Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Considered to be the greatest mathematician of ancient history, and one of the greatest of all time,[4][5][6][7][8][9] Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying concepts of infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems, including: the area of a circle; the surface area and volume of a sphere; area of an ellipse; the area under a parabola; the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution; the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution; and the area of a spiral.[10][11]
+
+Other mathematical achievements include deriving an accurate approximation of pi; defining and investigating the spiral that now bears his name; and creating a system using exponentiation for expressing very large numbers. He was also one of the first to apply mathematics to physical phenomena, founding hydrostatics and statics, including an explanation of the principle of the lever. He is credited with designing innovative machines, such as his screw pump, compound pulleys, and defensive war machines to protect his native Syracuse from invasion.
+
+Archimedes died during the Siege of Syracuse, where he was killed by a Roman soldier despite orders that he should not be harmed. Cicero describes visiting the tomb of Archimedes, which was surmounted by a sphere and a cylinder, which Archimedes had requested be placed on his tomb to represent his mathematical discoveries.
+
+Unlike his inventions, the mathematical writings of Archimedes were little known in antiquity. Mathematicians from Alexandria read and quoted him, but the first comprehensive compilation was not made until c. 530 AD by Isidore of Miletus in Byzantine Constantinople, while commentaries on the works of Archimedes written by Eutocius in the 6th century AD opened them to wider readership for the first time. The relatively few copies of Archimedes' written work that survived through the Middle Ages were an influential source of ideas for scientists during the Renaissance, while the discovery in 1906 of previously unknown works by Archimedes in the Archimedes Palimpsest has provided new insights into how he obtained mathematical results.[12][13][14]
+
+Archimedes was born c. 287 BC in the seaport city of Syracuse, Sicily, at that time a self-governing colony in Magna Graecia. The date of birth is based on a statement by the Byzantine Greek historian John Tzetzes that Archimedes lived for 75 years.[11] In The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes gives his father's name as Phidias, an astronomer about whom nothing else is known. Plutarch wrote in his Parallel Lives that Archimedes was related to King Hiero II, the ruler of Syracuse.[15] A biography of Archimedes was written by his friend Heracleides, but this work has been lost, leaving the details of his life obscure.[16] It is unknown, for instance, whether he ever married or had children. During his youth, Archimedes may have studied in Alexandria, Egypt, where Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene were contemporaries. He referred to Conon of Samos as his friend, while two of his works (The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Cattle Problem) have introductions addressed to Eratosthenes.[a]
+
+Archimedes died c. 212 BC during the Second Punic War, when Roman forces under General Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured the city of Syracuse after a two-year-long siege. According to the popular account given by Plutarch, Archimedes was contemplating a mathematical diagram when the city was captured. A Roman soldier commanded him to come and meet General Marcellus but he declined, saying that he had to finish working on the problem. The soldier was enraged by this, and killed Archimedes with his sword. Plutarch also gives a lesser-known account of the death of Archimedes which suggests that he may have been killed while attempting to surrender to a Roman soldier. According to this story, Archimedes was carrying mathematical instruments, and was killed because the soldier thought that they were valuable items. General Marcellus was reportedly angered by the death of Archimedes, as he considered him a valuable scientific asset and had ordered that he must not be harmed.[18] Marcellus called Archimedes "a geometrical Briareus."[19]
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+The last words attributed to Archimedes are "Do not disturb my circles", a reference to the circles in the mathematical drawing that he was supposedly studying when disturbed by the Roman soldier. This quote is often given in Latin as "Noli turbare circulos meos," but there is no reliable evidence that Archimedes uttered these words and they do not appear in the account given by Plutarch. Valerius Maximus, writing in Memorable Doings and Sayings in the 1st century AD, gives the phrase as "…sed protecto manibus puluere 'noli' inquit, 'obsecro, istum disturbare'" ("…but protecting the dust with his hands, said 'I beg of you, do not disturb this'"). The phrase is also given in Katharevousa Greek as "μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε!" (Mē mou tous kuklous taratte!).[18]
+
+The tomb of Archimedes carried a sculpture illustrating his favorite mathematical proof, consisting of a sphere and a cylinder of the same height and diameter. Archimedes had proven that the volume and surface area of the sphere are two thirds that of the cylinder including its bases. In 75 BC, 137 years after his death, the Roman orator Cicero was serving as quaestor in Sicily. He had heard stories about the tomb of Archimedes, but none of the locals were able to give him the location. Eventually he found the tomb near the Agrigentine gate in Syracuse, in a neglected condition and overgrown with bushes. Cicero had the tomb cleaned up, and was able to see the carving and read some of the verses that had been added as an inscription.[20] A tomb discovered in the courtyard of the Hotel Panorama in Syracuse in the early 1960s was claimed to be that of Archimedes, but there was no compelling evidence for this and the location of his tomb today is unknown.[21]
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+The standard versions of the life of Archimedes were written long after his death by the historians of Ancient Rome. The account of the siege of Syracuse given by Polybius in his The Histories was written around seventy years after Archimedes' death, and was used subsequently as a source by Plutarch and Livy. It sheds little light on Archimedes as a person, and focuses on the war machines that he is said to have built in order to defend the city.[22]
+
+The most widely known anecdote about Archimedes tells of how he invented a method for determining the volume of an object with an irregular shape. According to Vitruvius, a votive crown for a temple had been made for King Hiero II of Syracuse, who had supplied the pure gold to be used, and Archimedes was asked to determine whether some silver had been substituted by the dishonest goldsmith.[23] Archimedes had to solve the problem without damaging the crown, so he could not melt it down into a regularly shaped body in order to calculate its density.
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+While taking a bath, he noticed that the level of the water in the tub rose as he got in, and realized that this effect could be used to determine the volume of the crown. For practical purposes water is incompressible,[24] so the submerged crown would displace an amount of water equal to its own volume. By dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of water displaced, the density of the crown could be obtained. This density would be lower than that of gold if cheaper and less dense metals had been added. Archimedes then took to the streets naked, so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to dress, crying "Eureka!" (Greek: "εὕρηκα, heúrēka!, lit. 'I have found [it]!').[23] The test was conducted successfully, proving that silver had indeed been mixed in.[25]
+
+The story of the golden crown does not appear in the known works of Archimedes. Moreover, the practicality of the method it describes has been called into question, due to the extreme accuracy with which one would have to measure the water displacement.[26] Archimedes may have instead sought a solution that applied the principle known in hydrostatics as Archimedes' principle, which he describes in his treatise On Floating Bodies. This principle states that a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.[27] Using this principle, it would have been possible to compare the density of the crown to that of pure gold by balancing the crown on a scale with a pure gold reference sample of the same weight, then immersing the apparatus in water. The difference in density between the two samples would cause the scale to tip accordingly. Galileo considered it "probable that this method is the same that Archimedes followed, since, besides being very accurate, it is based on demonstrations found by Archimedes himself."[28]
+
+In a 12th-century text titled Mappae clavicula there are instructions on how to perform the weighings in the water in order to calculate the percentage of silver used, and thus solve the problem.[29][30] The Latin poem Carmen de ponderibus et mensuris of the 4th or 5th century describes the use of a hydrostatic balance to solve the problem of the crown, and attributes the method to Archimedes.[29]
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+A large part of Archimedes' work in engineering arose from fulfilling the needs of his home city of Syracuse. The Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis described how King Hiero II commissioned Archimedes to design a huge ship, the Syracusia, which could be used for luxury travel, carrying supplies, and as a naval warship. The Syracusia is said to have been the largest ship built in classical antiquity.[31] According to Athenaeus, it was capable of carrying 600 people and included garden decorations, a gymnasium and a temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite among its facilities. Since a ship of this size would leak a considerable amount of water through the hull, the Archimedes' screw was purportedly developed in order to remove the bilge water. Archimedes' machine was a device with a revolving screw-shaped blade inside a cylinder. It was turned by hand, and could also be used to transfer water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation canals. The Archimedes' screw is still in use today for pumping liquids and granulated solids such as coal and grain. The Archimedes' screw described in Roman times by Vitruvius may have been an improvement on a screw pump that was used to irrigate the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.[32][33] The world's first seagoing steamship with a screw propeller was the SS Archimedes, which was launched in 1839 and named in honor of Archimedes and his work on the screw.[34]
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+The Claw of Archimedes is a weapon that he is said to have designed in order to defend the city of Syracuse. Also known as "the ship shaker," the claw consisted of a crane-like arm from which a large metal grappling hook was suspended. When the claw was dropped onto an attacking ship the arm would swing upwards, lifting the ship out of the water and possibly sinking it. There have been modern experiments to test the feasibility of the claw, and in 2005 a television documentary entitled Superweapons of the Ancient World built a version of the claw and concluded that it was a workable device.[35][36]
+
+Archimedes may have used mirrors acting collectively as a parabolic reflector to burn ships attacking Syracuse.
+The 2nd century AD author Lucian wrote that during the Siege of Syracuse (c. 214–212 BC), Archimedes destroyed enemy ships with fire. Centuries later, Anthemius of Tralles mentions burning-glasses as Archimedes' weapon.[37] The device, sometimes called the "Archimedes heat ray," was used to focus sunlight onto approaching ships, causing them to catch fire. In the modern era, similar devices have been constructed and may be referred to as a heliostat or solar furnace.[38]
+
+This purported weapon has been the subject of ongoing debate about its credibility since the Renaissance. René Descartes rejected it as false, while modern researchers have attempted to recreate the effect using only the means that would have been available to Archimedes.[39] It has been suggested that a large array of highly polished bronze or copper shields acting as mirrors could have been employed to focus sunlight onto a ship.
+
+A test of the Archimedes heat ray was carried out in 1973 by the Greek scientist Ioannis Sakkas. The experiment took place at the Skaramagas naval base outside Athens. On this occasion 70 mirrors were used, each with a copper coating and a size of around 5 by 3 feet (1.52 m × 0.91 m). The mirrors were pointed at a plywood mock-up of a Roman warship at a distance of around 160 feet (49 m). When the mirrors were focused accurately, the ship burst into flames within a few seconds. The plywood ship had a coating of tar paint, which may have aided combustion.[40] A coating of tar would have been commonplace on ships in the classical era.[b]
+
+In October 2005 a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology carried out an experiment with 127 one-foot (30 cm) square mirror tiles, focused on a mock-up wooden ship at a range of around 100 feet (30 m). Flames broke out on a patch of the ship, but only after the sky had been cloudless and the ship had remained stationary for around ten minutes. It was concluded that the device was a feasible weapon under these conditions. The MIT group repeated the experiment for the television show MythBusters, using a wooden fishing boat in San Francisco as the target. Again some charring occurred, along with a small amount of flame. In order to catch fire, wood needs to reach its autoignition temperature, which is around 300 °C (572 °F).[41][42]
+
+When MythBusters broadcast the result of the San Francisco experiment in January 2006, the claim was placed in the category of "busted" (i.e. failed) because of the length of time and the ideal weather conditions required for combustion to occur. It was also pointed out that since Syracuse faces the sea towards the east, the Roman fleet would have had to attack during the morning for optimal gathering of light by the mirrors. MythBusters also pointed out that conventional weaponry, such as flaming arrows or bolts from a catapult, would have been a far easier way of setting a ship on fire at short distances.[43]
+
+In December 2010, MythBusters again looked at the heat ray story in a special edition entitled "President's Challenge". Several experiments were carried out, including a large scale test with 500 schoolchildren aiming mirrors at a mock-up of a Roman sailing ship 400 feet (120 m) away. In all of the experiments, the sail failed to reach the 210 °C (410 °F) required to catch fire, and the verdict was again "busted". The show concluded that a more likely effect of the mirrors would have been blinding, dazzling, or distracting the crew of the ship.[44]
+
+While Archimedes did not invent the lever, he gave an explanation of the principle involved in his work On the Equilibrium of Planes. Earlier descriptions of the lever are found in the Peripatetic school of the followers of Aristotle, and are sometimes attributed to Archytas.[45][46] According to Pappus of Alexandria, Archimedes' work on levers caused him to remark: "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth" (Greek: δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω).[47] Plutarch describes how Archimedes designed block-and-tackle pulley systems, allowing sailors to use the principle of leverage to lift objects that would otherwise have been too heavy to move.[48] Archimedes has also been credited with improving the power and accuracy of the catapult, and with inventing the odometer during the First Punic War. The odometer was described as a cart with a gear mechanism that dropped a ball into a container after each mile traveled.[49]
+
+Cicero (106–43 BC) mentions Archimedes briefly in his dialogue, De re publica, which portrays a fictional conversation taking place in 129 BC. After the capture of Syracuse c. 212 BC, General Marcus Claudius Marcellus is said to have taken back to Rome two mechanisms, constructed by Archimedes and used as aids in astronomy, which showed the motion of the Sun, Moon and five planets. Cicero mentions similar mechanisms designed by Thales of Miletus and Eudoxus of Cnidus. The dialogue says that Marcellus kept one of the devices as his only personal loot from Syracuse, and donated the other to the Temple of Virtue in Rome. Marcellus' mechanism was demonstrated, according to Cicero, by Gaius Sulpicius Gallus to Lucius Furius Philus, who described it thus:[50][51]
+
+Hanc sphaeram Gallus cum moveret, fiebat ut soli luna totidem conversionibus in aere illo quot diebus in ipso caelo succederet, ex quo et in caelo sphaera solis fieret eadem illa defectio, et incideret luna tum in eam metam quae esset umbra terrae, cum sol e regione.
+
+When Gallus moved the globe, it happened that the Moon followed the Sun by as many turns on that bronze contrivance as in the sky itself, from which also in the sky the Sun's globe became to have that same eclipse, and the Moon came then to that position which was its shadow on the Earth, when the Sun was in line.
+
+This is a description of a planetarium or orrery. Pappus of Alexandria stated that Archimedes had written a manuscript (now lost) on the construction of these mechanisms entitled On Sphere-Making. Modern research in this area has been focused on the Antikythera mechanism, another device built c. 100 BC that was probably designed for the same purpose.[52] Constructing mechanisms of this kind would have required a sophisticated knowledge of differential gearing.[53] This was once thought to have been beyond the range of the technology available in ancient times, but the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism in 1902 has confirmed that devices of this kind were known to the ancient Greeks.[54][55]
+
+While he is often regarded as a designer of mechanical devices, Archimedes also made contributions to the field of mathematics. Plutarch wrote: "He placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life."[56]
+
+Archimedes was able to use infinitesimals in a way that is similar to modern integral calculus. Through proof by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum), he could give answers to problems to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, while specifying the limits within which the answer lay. This technique is known as the method of exhaustion, and he employed it to approximate the value of π.
+
+In Measurement of a Circle, he did this by drawing a larger regular hexagon outside a circle then a smaller regular hexagon inside the circle, and progressively doubling the number of sides of each regular polygon, calculating the length of a side of each polygon at each step. As the number of sides increases, it becomes a more accurate approximation of a circle. After four such steps, when the polygons had 96 sides each, he was able to determine that the value of π lay between 31/7 (approx. 3.1429) and 310/71 (approx. 3.1408), consistent with its actual value of approximately 3.1416.[57]
+
+He also proved that the area of a circle was equal to π multiplied by the square of the radius of the circle (
+
+
+
+π
+
+r
+
+2
+
+
+
+
+{\textstyle \pi r^{2}}
+
+). In On the Sphere and Cylinder, Archimedes postulates that any magnitude when added to itself enough times will exceed any given magnitude. This is the Archimedean property of real numbers.[58]
+
+In Measurement of a Circle, Archimedes gives the value of the square root of 3 as lying between 265/153 (approximately 1.7320261) and 1351/780 (approximately 1.7320512). The actual value is approximately 1.7320508, making this a very accurate estimate. He introduced this result without offering any explanation of how he had obtained it. This aspect of the work of Archimedes caused John Wallis to remark that he was: "as it were of set purpose to have covered up the traces of his investigation as if he had grudged posterity the secret of his method of inquiry while he wished to extort from them assent to his results."[59] It is possible that he used an iterative procedure to calculate these values.[60]
+
+In The Quadrature of the Parabola, Archimedes proved that the area enclosed by a parabola and a straight line is 4/3 times the area of a corresponding inscribed triangle as shown in the figure at right. He expressed the solution to the problem as an infinite geometric series with the common ratio 1/4:
+
+If the first term in this series is the area of the triangle, then the second is the sum of the areas of two triangles whose bases are the two smaller secant lines, and so on. This proof uses a variation of the series 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + 1/256 + · · · which sums to 1/3.
+
+In The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes set out to calculate the number of grains of sand that the universe could contain. In doing so, he challenged the notion that the number of grains of sand was too large to be counted. He wrote:
+
+There are some, King Gelo (Gelo II, son of Hiero II), who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude; and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited.
+
+To solve the problem, Archimedes devised a system of counting based on the myriad. The word itself derives from the Greek μυριάς, murias, for the number 10,000. He proposed a number system using powers of a myriad of myriads (100 million, i.e., 10,000 x 10,000) and concluded that the number of grains of sand required to fill the universe would be 8 vigintillion, or 8×1063.[61]
+
+The works of Archimedes were written in Doric Greek, the dialect of ancient Syracuse.[62] The written work of Archimedes has not survived as well as that of Euclid, and seven of his treatises are known to have existed only through references made to them by other authors. Pappus of Alexandria mentions On Sphere-Making and another work on polyhedra, while Theon of Alexandria quotes a remark about refraction from the now-lost Catoptrica.[c] During his lifetime, Archimedes made his work known through correspondence with the mathematicians in Alexandria. The writings of Archimedes were first collected by the Byzantine Greek architect Isidore of Miletus (c. 530 AD), while commentaries on the works of Archimedes written by Eutocius in the sixth century AD helped to bring his work a wider audience. Archimedes' work was translated into Arabic by Thābit ibn Qurra (836–901 AD), and Latin by Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114–1187 AD). During the Renaissance, the Editio Princeps (First Edition) was published in Basel in 1544 by Johann Herwagen with the works of Archimedes in Greek and Latin.[63] Around the year 1586 Galileo Galilei invented a hydrostatic balance for weighing metals in air and water after apparently being inspired by the work of Archimedes.[64]
+
+There are two volumes to On the Equilibrium of Planes: the being is in fifteen propositions with seven postulates, while the second book is in ten propositions. In this work Archimedes explains the Law of the Lever, stating, "Magnitudes are in equilibrium at distances reciprocally proportional to their weights."
+
+Archimedes uses the principles derived to calculate the areas and centers of gravity of various geometric figures including triangles, parallelograms and parabolas.[65]
+
+This is a short work consisting of three propositions. It is written in the form of a correspondence with Dositheus of Pelusium, who was a student of Conon of Samos. In Proposition II, Archimedes gives an approximation of the value of pi (π), showing that it is greater than 223/71 and less than 22/7.
+
+This work of 28 propositions is also addressed to Dositheus. The treatise defines what is now called the Archimedean spiral. It is the locus of points corresponding to the locations over time of a point moving away from a fixed point with a constant speed along a line which rotates with constant angular velocity. Equivalently, in polar coordinates (r, θ) it can be described by the equation 
+
+
+
+
+r
+=
+a
++
+b
+θ
+
+
+{\displaystyle \,r=a+b\theta }
+
+  with real numbers a and b.
+
+This is an early example of a mechanical curve (a curve traced by a moving point) considered by a Greek mathematician.
+
+In this two-volume treatise addressed to Dositheus, Archimedes obtains the result of which he was most proud, namely the relationship between a sphere and a circumscribed cylinder of the same height and diameter. The volume is 4/3πr3 for the sphere, and 2πr3 for the cylinder. The surface area is 4πr2 for the sphere, and 6πr2 for the cylinder (including its two bases), where r is the radius of the sphere and cylinder. The sphere has a volume two-thirds that of the circumscribed cylinder. Similarly, the sphere has an area  two-thirds that of the cylinder (including the bases). A sculpted sphere and cylinder were placed on the tomb of Archimedes at his request.
+
+This is a work in 32 propositions addressed to Dositheus. In this treatise Archimedes calculates the areas and volumes of sections of cones, spheres, and paraboloids.
+
+In the first part of this two-volume treatise, Archimedes spells out the law of equilibrium of fluids, and proves that water will adopt a spherical form around a center of gravity. This may have been an attempt at explaining the theory of contemporary Greek astronomers such as Eratosthenes that the Earth is round. The fluids described by Archimedes are not self-gravitating, since he assumes the existence of a point towards which all things fall in order to derive the spherical shape.
+
+In the second part, he calculates the equilibrium positions of sections of paraboloids. This was probably an idealization of the shapes of ships' hulls. Some of his sections float with the base under water and the summit above water, similar to the way that icebergs float. Archimedes' principle of buoyancy is given in the work, stated as follows:
+
+Any body wholly or partially immersed in a fluid experiences an upthrust equal to, but opposite in sense to, the weight of the fluid displaced.
+
+In this work of 24 propositions addressed to Dositheus, Archimedes proves by two methods that the area enclosed by a parabola and a straight line is 4/3 multiplied by the area of a triangle with equal base and height. He achieves this by calculating the value of a geometric series that sums to infinity with the ratio 1/4.
+
+Also known as Loculus of Archimedes or Archimedes' Box,[66] this is a dissection puzzle similar to a Tangram, and the treatise describing it was found in more complete form in the Archimedes Palimpsest. Archimedes calculates the areas of the 14 pieces which can be assembled to form a square. Research published by Dr. Reviel Netz of Stanford University in 2003 argued that Archimedes was attempting to determine how many ways the pieces could be assembled into the shape of a square. Dr. Netz calculates that the pieces can be made into a square 17,152 ways.[67] The number of arrangements is 536 when solutions that are equivalent by rotation and reflection have been excluded.[68] The puzzle represents an example of an early problem in combinatorics.
+
+The origin of the puzzle's name is unclear, and it has been suggested that it is taken from the Ancient Greek word for 'throat' or 'gullet', stomachos (στόμαχος).[69] Ausonius refers to the puzzle as Ostomachion, a Greek compound word formed from the roots of osteon (ὀστέον, 'bone') and machē (μάχη, 'fight').[66]
+
+This work was discovered by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in a Greek manuscript consisting of a poem of 44 lines, in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany in 1773. It is addressed to Eratosthenes and the mathematicians in Alexandria. Archimedes challenges them to count the numbers of cattle in the Herd of the Sun by solving a number of simultaneous Diophantine equations. There is a more difficult version of the problem in which some of the answers are required to be square numbers. This version of the problem was first solved by A. Amthor[70] in 1880, and the answer is a very large number, approximately 7.760271×10206544.[71]
+
+In this treatise, also known as Psammites, Archimedes counts the number of grains of sand that will fit inside the universe. This book mentions the heliocentric theory of the solar system proposed by Aristarchus of Samos, as well as contemporary ideas about the size of the Earth and the distance between various celestial bodies. By using a system of numbers based on powers of the myriad, Archimedes concludes that the number of grains of sand required to fill the universe is 8×1063 in modern notation. The introductory letter states that Archimedes' father was an astronomer named Phidias. The Sand Reckoner is the only surviving work in which Archimedes discusses his views on astronomy.[72]
+
+This treatise was thought lost until the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest in 1906. In this work Archimedes uses infinitesimals, and shows how breaking up a figure into an infinite number of infinitely small parts can be used to determine its area or volume. Archimedes may have considered this method lacking in formal rigor, so he also used the method of exhaustion to derive the results. As with The Cattle Problem, The Method of Mechanical Theorems was written in the form of a letter to Eratosthenes in Alexandria.
+
+Archimedes' Book of Lemmas or Liber Assumptorum is a treatise with fifteen propositions on the nature of circles. The earliest known copy of the text is in Arabic. The scholars T.L. Heath and Marshall Clagett argued that it cannot have been written by Archimedes in its current form, since it quotes Archimedes, suggesting modification by another author. The Lemmas may be based on an earlier work by Archimedes that is now lost.[73]
+
+It has also been claimed that Heron's formula for calculating the area of a triangle from the length of its sides was known to Archimedes.[d] However, the first reliable reference to the formula is given by Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD.[74]
+
+The foremost document containing the work of Archimedes is the Archimedes Palimpsest. In 1906, the Danish professor Johan Ludvig Heiberg visited Constantinople and examined a 174-page goatskin parchment of prayers written in the 13th century AD. He discovered that it was a palimpsest, a document with text that had been written over an erased older work. Palimpsests were created by scraping the ink from existing works and reusing them, which was a common practice in the Middle Ages as vellum was expensive. The older works in the palimpsest were identified by scholars as 10th century AD copies of previously unknown treatises by Archimedes.[75] The parchment spent hundreds of years in a monastery library in Constantinople before being sold to a private collector in the 1920s. On October 29, 1998 it was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for $2 million at Christie's in New York.[76]
+
+The palimpsest holds seven treatises, including the only surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in the original Greek. It is the only known source of The Method of Mechanical Theorems, referred to by Suidas and thought to have been lost forever. Stomachion was also discovered in the palimpsest, with a more complete analysis of the puzzle than had been found in previous texts. The palimpsest is now stored at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where it has been subjected to a range of modern tests including the use of ultraviolet and x-ray light to read the overwritten text.[77]
+
+The treatises in the Archimedes Palimpsest include:
+

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+Louis IX (25 April 1214 – 25 August 1270), commonly known as Saint Louis or Louis the Saint, is the only King of France to be canonized in the Catholic Church. Louis was crowned in Reims at the age of 12, following the death of his father Louis VIII; his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruled the kingdom as regent until he reached maturity. During Louis's childhood, Blanche dealt with the opposition of rebellious vassals and obtained a definitive victory in the Albigensian Crusade, which had started 20 years earlier.
+
+As an adult, Louis IX faced recurring conflicts with some of his realm's most powerful nobles, such as Hugh X of Lusignan and Peter of Dreux. Simultaneously, Henry III of England invaded to restore his continental possessions, but Louis routed him at the Battle of Taillebourg. Louis annexed several provinces, notably parts of Aquitaine, Maine and Provence.
+
+Louis IX is one of the most notable European monarchs of the Middle Ages. His reign is remembered as a medieval golden age in which the Kingdom of France reached an economic as well as political peak. His fellow European rulers esteemed him highly, not only for his military pre-eminence and the wealth of his kingdom, but for his reputation of fairness and moral integrity: he was often asked to arbitrate their disputes.[1]
+
+He was a reformer and developed French royal justice, in which the king was the supreme judge to whom anyone could appeal to seek the amendment of a judgment. He banned trials by ordeal, tried to prevent the private wars that were plaguing the country, and introduced the presumption of innocence in criminal procedure. To enforce the application of this new legal system, Louis IX created provosts and bailiffs.
+
+After his unexpected recovery from a serious illness, and to honor a vow he made while ill, Louis IX led the Seventh and Eighth crusades against the Ayyubids, Bahriyya Mamluks and Hafsid Kingdom. He was captured in the first and ransomed. He died from dysentery during the latter, and was succeeded by his son Philip III.
+
+Louis' actions were inspired by Christian zeal and Catholic devotion. He was a just king: although he exacted what was due him, he had no wish to wrong anyone, from the lowest peasant to the richest vassal.[2] Renowned for his moderate lifestyle, reason, bravery and chivalrous politeness, he was a splendid knight whose kindness and engaging manner made him popular. He was therefore regarded as the ideal Christian ruler even if he was also occasionally rebuked by contemporaries as a "monk king".[3]  He decided to severely punish blasphemy (for which he set the punishment to mutilation of the tongue and lips).[4] He is the only canonized king of France, and there are consequently many places named after him.
+
+Much of what is known of Louis's life comes from Jean de Joinville's famous Life of Saint Louis. Joinville was a close friend, confidant, and counselor to the king. He participated as a witness in the papal inquest into Louis's life that resulted in his canonisation in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII.
+
+Two other important biographies were written by the king's confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and his chaplain, William of Chartres. While several individuals wrote biographies in the decades following the king's death, only Jean of Joinville, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and William of Chartres wrote from personal knowledge of the king, and all three are biased favorably to the king. The fourth important source of information is William of Saint-Parthus's 19th-century biography,[5] which he wrote using material from the papal inquest mentioned above.
+
+Louis was born on 25 April 1214 at Poissy, near Paris, the son of Louis the Lion and Blanche of Castile, and was baptised there in La Collégiale Notre-Dame church. His grandfather on his father's side was Philip II, king of France; while his grandfather on his mother's side was Alfonso VIII, king of Castile. Tutors of Blanche's choosing taught him most of what a king must know—Latin, public speaking, writing, military arts, and government.[6] He was nine years old when his grandfather Philip II died and his father ascended as Louis VIII.[7]
+
+Louis was 12 years old when his father died on 8 November 1226. He was crowned king within the month at Reims Cathedral. Because of Louis's youth, his mother ruled France as regent during his minority.[8] Louis's mother trained him to be a great leader and a good Christian. She used to say:[9]
+
+I love you, my dear son, as much as a mother can love her child; but I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should ever commit a mortal sin.
+
+His younger brother Charles I of Sicily (1227–85) was created count of Anjou, thus founding the Capetian Angevin dynasty.
+
+No date is given for the beginning of Louis's personal rule. His contemporaries viewed his reign as co-rule between the king and his mother, though historians generally view the year 1234 as the year in which Louis began ruling personally, with his mother assuming a more advisory role.[1] She continued to have a strong influence on the king until her death in 1252.[8][10]
+
+On 27 May 1234, Louis married Margaret of Provence (1221 – 21 December 1295); she was crowned in the cathedral of Sens the next day.[11] Louis's marriage had political connections, as his wife was sister to Eleanor, who later married Henry III of England.  The new queen's religious zeal made her a well-suited partner for the king. He enjoyed her company, and was pleased to show her the many public works he was making in Paris, both for its defence and for its health. They enjoyed riding together, reading, and listening to music. His attention to Margaret aroused a certain amount of jealousy in his mother, who tried to keep the couple apart as much as she could.[12]
+
+In the 1230s, Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, translated the Talmud and pressed 35 charges against it to Pope Gregory IX by quoting a series of passages about Jesus, Mary or Christianity that he considered blasphemous. There is a Talmudic passage, for example, where someone called Yeshu is sent to Hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. Donin also selected an injunction of the Talmud that allegedly permits Jews to kill non-Jews.[citation needed]
+
+This led to the Disputation of Paris, which took place in 1240 at the court of Louis IX. Rabbi Yechiel of Paris was called on to defend the Talmud against Donin's accusations. Louis IX's Catholic representatives condemned the Talmud and burned thousands of copies.[13]
+
+When Louis was 15, his mother brought an end to the Albigensian Crusade in 1229. She signed an agreement with Count Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, which cleared the latter's father of wrongdoing.[14] Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse had been suspected of murdering a preacher on a mission to convert the Cathars.[15]
+
+Louis went on two crusades: in his mid-30s in 1248 (Seventh Crusade), and then again in his mid-50s in 1270 (Eighth Crusade).
+
+In 1248 Louis decided that his obligations as a son of the Church outweighed those of his throne, and he left his kingdom to participate in a Crusade, what for him was a disastrous six-year adventure. Since the base of Muslim power had shifted to Egypt, Louis did not march on the Holy Land. Any war against Islam was considered to fit the definition of a Crusade.[16]
+
+Louis and his followers landed in Egypt on 5 June 1249 and began his campaign with the rapid capture of the port of Damietta.[16][17] This attack caused some disruption in the Muslim Ayyubid empire, especially as the current sultan, Al-Malik as-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, was on his deathbed. However, the march of Europeans from Damietta toward Cairo through the Nile River Delta went slowly. The seasonal rising of the Nile and the summer heat made it impossible for them to advance and follow up on their success.[18] During this time, the Ayyubid sultan died, and the sultan's wife Shajar al-Durr set in motion a sudden power shift that would make her Queen and eventually place the Egyptian army of the Mamluks in power.
+
+On 8 February 1250 Louis lost his army at the Battle of Al Mansurah[19] and was captured by the Egyptians. His release was eventually negotiated in return for a ransom of 400,000 livres tournois (at the time France's annual revenue was only about 1,250,000 livres tournois) and the surrender of the city of Damietta.[20]
+
+Following his release from Egyptian captivity, Louis spent four years in the Latin kingdoms of Acre, Caesarea, and Jaffa. He used his wealth to assist the Crusaders in rebuilding their defences[21] and conducted diplomacy with the Islamic powers of Syria and Egypt. In the spring of 1254 he and his surviving army returned to France.[16]
+
+Louis exchanged multiple letters and emissaries with Mongol rulers of the period. During his first crusade in 1248, Louis was approached by envoys from Eljigidei, the Mongol military commander stationed in Armenia and Persia.[22] Eljigidei suggested that King Louis should land in Egypt, while Eljigidei attacked Baghdad, to prevent the Saracens of Egypt and those of Syria from joining forces. Louis sent André de Longjumeau, a Dominican priest, as an emissary to the Great Khan Güyük Khan (r. 1246–48) in Mongolia. Güyük died before the emissary arrived at his court, however, and no action was taken by the two parties. Instead Güyükq's queen and now regent, Oghul Qaimish, politely turned down the diplomatic offer.[23]
+
+Louis dispatched another envoy to the Mongol court, the Franciscan William of Rubruck, who visited the Great Khan Möngke (1251–1259) in Mongolia. He spent several years at the Mongol court. In 1259, Berke, the ruler of the Golden Horde, westernmost part of the Mongolian Empire, demanded the submission of Louis.[24] By contrast, Mongolian emperors Möngke and Khubilai's brother, the Ilkhan Hulegu, sent a letter to the king of France seeking his military assistance, but the letter never reached France.[25]
+
+In a parliament held at Paris, 24 March 1267, Louis and his three sons "took the cross." On hearing the reports of the missionaries, Louis resolved to land at Tunis, and he ordered his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, to join him there. The crusaders, among whom was the English prince Edward Longshanks, landed at Carthage 17 July 1270, but disease broke out in the camp. Many died of dysentery, and on 25 August, Louis himself died.[21][26]
+
+Louis's patronage of the arts inspired much innovation in Gothic art and architecture. The style of his court was influential throughout Europe, both because of art objects purchased for export from Parisian masters, and by the marriage of the king's daughters and female relatives to foreign husbands. They became emissaries of Parisian models and styles elsewhere. Louis's personal chapel, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which was known for its intricate stained-glass windows, was copied more than once by his descendants elsewhere. Louis is believed to have ordered the production of the Morgan Bible, a masterpiece of medieval painting.
+
+During the so-called "golden century of Saint Louis", the kingdom of France was at its height in Europe, both politically and economically. Saint Louis was regarded as "primus inter pares", first among equals, among the kings and rulers of the continent. He commanded the largest army and ruled the largest and wealthiest kingdom, the European centre of arts and intellectual thought at the time. The foundations for the notable college of theology, later known as the Sorbonne, were laid in Paris about the year 1257.[18]
+
+The prestige and respect felt by Europeans for King Louis IX were due more to the appeal of his personality than to military domination. For his contemporaries, he was the quintessential example of the Christian prince and embodied the whole of Christendom in his person. His reputation for fairness and even saintliness was already well established while he was alive, and on many occasions he was chosen as an arbiter in quarrels among the rulers of Europe.[1]
+
+Shortly before 1256, Enguerrand IV, Lord of Coucy, arrested and without trial hanged three young squires of Laon, whom he accused of poaching in his forest. In 1256 Louis had the lord arrested and brought to the Louvre by his sergeants. Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and trial by battle, which the king refused because he thought it obsolete. Enguerrand was tried, sentenced, and ordered to pay 12,000 livres. Part of the money was to pay for masses to be said in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged.
+
+In 1258, Louis and James I of Aragon signed the Treaty of Corbeil to end areas of contention between them. By this treaty, Louis renounced his feudal overlordship over the County of Barcelona and Roussillon, which was held by the King of Aragon. James in turn renounced his feudal overlordship over several counties in southern France, including Provence and Languedoc. In 1259 Louis signed the Treaty of Paris, by which Henry III of England was confirmed in his possession of territories in southwestern France, and Louis received the provinces of Anjou, Normandy (Normandie), Poitou, Maine, and Touraine.[8]
+
+The perception of Louis IX as the exemplary Christian prince was reinforced by his religious zeal. Louis was an extremely devout Catholic, and he built the Sainte-Chapelle ("Holy Chapel"),[1] located within the royal palace complex (now the Paris Hall of Justice), on the Île de la Cité in the centre of Paris. Sainte Chapelle, a prime example of the Rayonnant style of Gothic architecture, was erected as a shrine for what Louis believed to be the Crown of Thorns and a fragment of the True Cross, supposed precious relics of the Passion of Christ. He acquired these in 1239–41 from Emperor Baldwin II of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. Louis agreed to pay off the imperial debt which Baldwin owed to Niccolo Quirino, a wealthy Venetian merchant, a debt to which Baldwin had pledged the Crown of Thorns as collateral.[27] Louis IX paid the exorbitant sum of 135,000 livres to clear this debt (the construction of the chapel, for comparison, cost only 60,000 livres).
+
+Louis IX took very seriously his mission as "lieutenant of God on Earth", with which he had been invested when he was crowned in Reims. To fulfill this duty, he conducted two crusades. They contributed to his prestige, even though both ended disastrously. Everything he did was for what he saw as the glory of God and the good of his people. He protected the poor and was never heard to speak ill of anyone. He excelled in penance, leaving a hair shirt and a scourge which he had used in private practice. He had a great love for the Church. He was merciful even to rebels. When he was urged to execute a prince who had followed his father in rebellion, he refused, saying: "A son cannot refuse to obey his father."[9]
+
+In 1230 the King forbade all forms of usury, defined at the time as any taking of interest and therefore covering most banking activities. When the original borrowers from Jewish and Lombard lenders could not be found, Louis exacted from those lenders a contribution toward the crusade which Pope Gregory was trying to launch.[18] At the urging of Pope Gregory IX, following the Disputation of Paris in 1240, Louis ordered in 1243 the burning in Paris of some 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books. Eventually, the edict against the Talmud was overturned by Gregory IX's successor, Innocent IV.[28]
+
+Louis also expanded the scope of the Inquisition in France. He set the punishment for blasphemy to mutilation of the tongue and lips.[4] The area most affected by this expansion was southern France, where the Cathar sect had been strongest. The rate of confiscation of property from the Cathars and others reached its highest levels in the years before his first crusade, and slowed upon his return to France in 1254.
+
+In 1250, Louis headed a crusade to Egypt and was taken prisoner. During his captivity, he recited the Divine Office every day. After his release against ransom, he visited the Holy Land before returning to France.[9] In these deeds, Louis IX tried to fulfill what he believed was the duty of France as "the eldest daughter of the Church" (la fille aînée de l'Église), a tradition of protector of the Church going back to the Franks and Charlemagne, who had been crowned by Pope Leo III in Rome in 800. The kings of France were known in the church by the title "most Christian king" (Rex Christianissimus). The relationship between France and the papacy was at its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries. The popes called for most of the crusades from French soil.
+
+Louis was renowned for his charity. Beggars were fed from his table: he ate their leavings; washed their feet; ministered to the wants of lepers, who were generally ostracized; and daily fed over one hundred poor. He founded many hospitals and houses: the House of the Filles-Dieu for reformed prostitutes; the Quinze-Vingt for 300 blind men (1254), and hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon, and Compiégne.[29]
+
+St. Louis installed a house of the Trinitarian Order at  Fontainebleau, his chateau and estate near Paris. He chose Trinitarians as his chaplains, and was accompanied by them on his crusades. In his spiritual testament he wrote: "My dearest son, you should permit yourself to be tormented by every kind of martyrdom before you would allow yourself to commit a mortal sin."[9]
+
+Louis and Margaret's two royal children who died in infancy were first buried at the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont. In 1820 they were transferred and reinterred to Saint-Denis Basilica.[33]
+
+During his second crusade, Louis died at Tunis on 25 August 1270, in an epidemic of dysentery that swept through his army.[26][34][35] According to European custom, his body was subjected to the process known as mos Teutonicus prior to his remains being returned to France. (This was a postmortem funerary custom used in medieval Europe whereby the flesh was boiled from the body, so that the bones of the deceased could be transported hygienically from distant lands back home). This was not the common practice for Muslim burials. [36] Louis was succeeded by his son, Philip III.
+
+Louis's younger brother, Charles I of Naples, preserved his heart and intestines, and conveyed them for burial in the cathedral of Monreale near Palermo.[37] Louis's bones were carried overland in a lengthy processional across Sicily, Italy, the Alps, and France, until they were interred in the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis in May 1271.[38] Charles and Philip II later dispersed a number of relics to promote his veneration.[39]
+
+Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the canonisation of Louis in 1297;[40] he is the only French king to be declared a saint.[41] Louis IX is often considered the model of the ideal Christian monarch.[40] The influence of his canonization was so great that many of his successors were named Louis after him.
+
+Named in his honour, the Sisters of Charity of St. Louis is a Roman Catholic religious order founded in Vannes, France, in 1803.[42] A similar order, the Sisters of St Louis, was founded in Juilly in 1842.[43][44]
+
+He is honoured as co-patron of the Third Order of St. Francis, which claims him as a member of the Order. Even in childhood, his compassion for the poor and suffering people were known to those who were close to him. When he became king, over a hundred poor people were served meals in his house on ordinary days. Often the king served these guests himself. Such acts of charity, coupled with Louis's devout religious practices, gave rise to the legend that he joined the Third Order of St. Francis. Though it is unlikely that Louis did join the order, his life and actions proclaimed him as one of them in spirit.[6]
+
+Many countries in which French speakers and Catholicism were prevalent named places after King Louis:
+
+The French royal Order of Saint Louis (1693–1790 and 1814–1830),[citation needed] the Île Saint-Louis,[48] and  a hospital in the 10th arrondissement of Paris[citation needed] also bear his name.The Cathedral Saint-Louis in Versailles;[citation needed] the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France completed in 1834 and the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis completed in 1914, both in St. Louis, Missouri;[citation needed] and the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans were also named for the king.[citation needed]  The national church of France in Rome also carries his name: San Luigi dei Francesi in Italian, or Saint Louis of France in English.[citation needed] Also the Cathedral of St Louis in Plovdiv, Bulgaria[citation needed], the Church of St Louis in Moscow, Russia,[citation needed] and rue Saint Louis of Pondicherry, India.[citation needed]
+
+A bas-relief of St. Louis is one of the carved portraits of historic lawmakers that adorns the chamber of the United States House of Representatives.
+
+Saint Louis is also portrayed on a frieze depicting a timeline of important lawgivers throughout world history, on the North Wall of the Courtroom at the Supreme Court of the United States.[49]
+
+A statue of St. Louis by the sculptor John Donoghue stands on the roofline of the New York State Appellate Division Court at 27 Madison Avenue in New York City.
+
+The Apotheosis of St. Louis is an equestrian statue of the saint, by Charles Henry Niehaus, that stands in front of the Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park.
+
+A heroic portrait by Baron Charles de Steuben hangs in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.  An 1821 gift of King Louis XVIII of France, it depicts St. Louis burying his plague-stricken troops before the siege of Tunis at the beginning of the Eighth Crusade in 1270.
+

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+Louis IX (25 April 1214 – 25 August 1270), commonly known as Saint Louis or Louis the Saint, is the only King of France to be canonized in the Catholic Church. Louis was crowned in Reims at the age of 12, following the death of his father Louis VIII; his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruled the kingdom as regent until he reached maturity. During Louis's childhood, Blanche dealt with the opposition of rebellious vassals and obtained a definitive victory in the Albigensian Crusade, which had started 20 years earlier.
+
+As an adult, Louis IX faced recurring conflicts with some of his realm's most powerful nobles, such as Hugh X of Lusignan and Peter of Dreux. Simultaneously, Henry III of England invaded to restore his continental possessions, but Louis routed him at the Battle of Taillebourg. Louis annexed several provinces, notably parts of Aquitaine, Maine and Provence.
+
+Louis IX is one of the most notable European monarchs of the Middle Ages. His reign is remembered as a medieval golden age in which the Kingdom of France reached an economic as well as political peak. His fellow European rulers esteemed him highly, not only for his military pre-eminence and the wealth of his kingdom, but for his reputation of fairness and moral integrity: he was often asked to arbitrate their disputes.[1]
+
+He was a reformer and developed French royal justice, in which the king was the supreme judge to whom anyone could appeal to seek the amendment of a judgment. He banned trials by ordeal, tried to prevent the private wars that were plaguing the country, and introduced the presumption of innocence in criminal procedure. To enforce the application of this new legal system, Louis IX created provosts and bailiffs.
+
+After his unexpected recovery from a serious illness, and to honor a vow he made while ill, Louis IX led the Seventh and Eighth crusades against the Ayyubids, Bahriyya Mamluks and Hafsid Kingdom. He was captured in the first and ransomed. He died from dysentery during the latter, and was succeeded by his son Philip III.
+
+Louis' actions were inspired by Christian zeal and Catholic devotion. He was a just king: although he exacted what was due him, he had no wish to wrong anyone, from the lowest peasant to the richest vassal.[2] Renowned for his moderate lifestyle, reason, bravery and chivalrous politeness, he was a splendid knight whose kindness and engaging manner made him popular. He was therefore regarded as the ideal Christian ruler even if he was also occasionally rebuked by contemporaries as a "monk king".[3]  He decided to severely punish blasphemy (for which he set the punishment to mutilation of the tongue and lips).[4] He is the only canonized king of France, and there are consequently many places named after him.
+
+Much of what is known of Louis's life comes from Jean de Joinville's famous Life of Saint Louis. Joinville was a close friend, confidant, and counselor to the king. He participated as a witness in the papal inquest into Louis's life that resulted in his canonisation in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII.
+
+Two other important biographies were written by the king's confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and his chaplain, William of Chartres. While several individuals wrote biographies in the decades following the king's death, only Jean of Joinville, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and William of Chartres wrote from personal knowledge of the king, and all three are biased favorably to the king. The fourth important source of information is William of Saint-Parthus's 19th-century biography,[5] which he wrote using material from the papal inquest mentioned above.
+
+Louis was born on 25 April 1214 at Poissy, near Paris, the son of Louis the Lion and Blanche of Castile, and was baptised there in La Collégiale Notre-Dame church. His grandfather on his father's side was Philip II, king of France; while his grandfather on his mother's side was Alfonso VIII, king of Castile. Tutors of Blanche's choosing taught him most of what a king must know—Latin, public speaking, writing, military arts, and government.[6] He was nine years old when his grandfather Philip II died and his father ascended as Louis VIII.[7]
+
+Louis was 12 years old when his father died on 8 November 1226. He was crowned king within the month at Reims Cathedral. Because of Louis's youth, his mother ruled France as regent during his minority.[8] Louis's mother trained him to be a great leader and a good Christian. She used to say:[9]
+
+I love you, my dear son, as much as a mother can love her child; but I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should ever commit a mortal sin.
+
+His younger brother Charles I of Sicily (1227–85) was created count of Anjou, thus founding the Capetian Angevin dynasty.
+
+No date is given for the beginning of Louis's personal rule. His contemporaries viewed his reign as co-rule between the king and his mother, though historians generally view the year 1234 as the year in which Louis began ruling personally, with his mother assuming a more advisory role.[1] She continued to have a strong influence on the king until her death in 1252.[8][10]
+
+On 27 May 1234, Louis married Margaret of Provence (1221 – 21 December 1295); she was crowned in the cathedral of Sens the next day.[11] Louis's marriage had political connections, as his wife was sister to Eleanor, who later married Henry III of England.  The new queen's religious zeal made her a well-suited partner for the king. He enjoyed her company, and was pleased to show her the many public works he was making in Paris, both for its defence and for its health. They enjoyed riding together, reading, and listening to music. His attention to Margaret aroused a certain amount of jealousy in his mother, who tried to keep the couple apart as much as she could.[12]
+
+In the 1230s, Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, translated the Talmud and pressed 35 charges against it to Pope Gregory IX by quoting a series of passages about Jesus, Mary or Christianity that he considered blasphemous. There is a Talmudic passage, for example, where someone called Yeshu is sent to Hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. Donin also selected an injunction of the Talmud that allegedly permits Jews to kill non-Jews.[citation needed]
+
+This led to the Disputation of Paris, which took place in 1240 at the court of Louis IX. Rabbi Yechiel of Paris was called on to defend the Talmud against Donin's accusations. Louis IX's Catholic representatives condemned the Talmud and burned thousands of copies.[13]
+
+When Louis was 15, his mother brought an end to the Albigensian Crusade in 1229. She signed an agreement with Count Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, which cleared the latter's father of wrongdoing.[14] Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse had been suspected of murdering a preacher on a mission to convert the Cathars.[15]
+
+Louis went on two crusades: in his mid-30s in 1248 (Seventh Crusade), and then again in his mid-50s in 1270 (Eighth Crusade).
+
+In 1248 Louis decided that his obligations as a son of the Church outweighed those of his throne, and he left his kingdom to participate in a Crusade, what for him was a disastrous six-year adventure. Since the base of Muslim power had shifted to Egypt, Louis did not march on the Holy Land. Any war against Islam was considered to fit the definition of a Crusade.[16]
+
+Louis and his followers landed in Egypt on 5 June 1249 and began his campaign with the rapid capture of the port of Damietta.[16][17] This attack caused some disruption in the Muslim Ayyubid empire, especially as the current sultan, Al-Malik as-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, was on his deathbed. However, the march of Europeans from Damietta toward Cairo through the Nile River Delta went slowly. The seasonal rising of the Nile and the summer heat made it impossible for them to advance and follow up on their success.[18] During this time, the Ayyubid sultan died, and the sultan's wife Shajar al-Durr set in motion a sudden power shift that would make her Queen and eventually place the Egyptian army of the Mamluks in power.
+
+On 8 February 1250 Louis lost his army at the Battle of Al Mansurah[19] and was captured by the Egyptians. His release was eventually negotiated in return for a ransom of 400,000 livres tournois (at the time France's annual revenue was only about 1,250,000 livres tournois) and the surrender of the city of Damietta.[20]
+
+Following his release from Egyptian captivity, Louis spent four years in the Latin kingdoms of Acre, Caesarea, and Jaffa. He used his wealth to assist the Crusaders in rebuilding their defences[21] and conducted diplomacy with the Islamic powers of Syria and Egypt. In the spring of 1254 he and his surviving army returned to France.[16]
+
+Louis exchanged multiple letters and emissaries with Mongol rulers of the period. During his first crusade in 1248, Louis was approached by envoys from Eljigidei, the Mongol military commander stationed in Armenia and Persia.[22] Eljigidei suggested that King Louis should land in Egypt, while Eljigidei attacked Baghdad, to prevent the Saracens of Egypt and those of Syria from joining forces. Louis sent André de Longjumeau, a Dominican priest, as an emissary to the Great Khan Güyük Khan (r. 1246–48) in Mongolia. Güyük died before the emissary arrived at his court, however, and no action was taken by the two parties. Instead Güyükq's queen and now regent, Oghul Qaimish, politely turned down the diplomatic offer.[23]
+
+Louis dispatched another envoy to the Mongol court, the Franciscan William of Rubruck, who visited the Great Khan Möngke (1251–1259) in Mongolia. He spent several years at the Mongol court. In 1259, Berke, the ruler of the Golden Horde, westernmost part of the Mongolian Empire, demanded the submission of Louis.[24] By contrast, Mongolian emperors Möngke and Khubilai's brother, the Ilkhan Hulegu, sent a letter to the king of France seeking his military assistance, but the letter never reached France.[25]
+
+In a parliament held at Paris, 24 March 1267, Louis and his three sons "took the cross." On hearing the reports of the missionaries, Louis resolved to land at Tunis, and he ordered his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, to join him there. The crusaders, among whom was the English prince Edward Longshanks, landed at Carthage 17 July 1270, but disease broke out in the camp. Many died of dysentery, and on 25 August, Louis himself died.[21][26]
+
+Louis's patronage of the arts inspired much innovation in Gothic art and architecture. The style of his court was influential throughout Europe, both because of art objects purchased for export from Parisian masters, and by the marriage of the king's daughters and female relatives to foreign husbands. They became emissaries of Parisian models and styles elsewhere. Louis's personal chapel, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which was known for its intricate stained-glass windows, was copied more than once by his descendants elsewhere. Louis is believed to have ordered the production of the Morgan Bible, a masterpiece of medieval painting.
+
+During the so-called "golden century of Saint Louis", the kingdom of France was at its height in Europe, both politically and economically. Saint Louis was regarded as "primus inter pares", first among equals, among the kings and rulers of the continent. He commanded the largest army and ruled the largest and wealthiest kingdom, the European centre of arts and intellectual thought at the time. The foundations for the notable college of theology, later known as the Sorbonne, were laid in Paris about the year 1257.[18]
+
+The prestige and respect felt by Europeans for King Louis IX were due more to the appeal of his personality than to military domination. For his contemporaries, he was the quintessential example of the Christian prince and embodied the whole of Christendom in his person. His reputation for fairness and even saintliness was already well established while he was alive, and on many occasions he was chosen as an arbiter in quarrels among the rulers of Europe.[1]
+
+Shortly before 1256, Enguerrand IV, Lord of Coucy, arrested and without trial hanged three young squires of Laon, whom he accused of poaching in his forest. In 1256 Louis had the lord arrested and brought to the Louvre by his sergeants. Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and trial by battle, which the king refused because he thought it obsolete. Enguerrand was tried, sentenced, and ordered to pay 12,000 livres. Part of the money was to pay for masses to be said in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged.
+
+In 1258, Louis and James I of Aragon signed the Treaty of Corbeil to end areas of contention between them. By this treaty, Louis renounced his feudal overlordship over the County of Barcelona and Roussillon, which was held by the King of Aragon. James in turn renounced his feudal overlordship over several counties in southern France, including Provence and Languedoc. In 1259 Louis signed the Treaty of Paris, by which Henry III of England was confirmed in his possession of territories in southwestern France, and Louis received the provinces of Anjou, Normandy (Normandie), Poitou, Maine, and Touraine.[8]
+
+The perception of Louis IX as the exemplary Christian prince was reinforced by his religious zeal. Louis was an extremely devout Catholic, and he built the Sainte-Chapelle ("Holy Chapel"),[1] located within the royal palace complex (now the Paris Hall of Justice), on the Île de la Cité in the centre of Paris. Sainte Chapelle, a prime example of the Rayonnant style of Gothic architecture, was erected as a shrine for what Louis believed to be the Crown of Thorns and a fragment of the True Cross, supposed precious relics of the Passion of Christ. He acquired these in 1239–41 from Emperor Baldwin II of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. Louis agreed to pay off the imperial debt which Baldwin owed to Niccolo Quirino, a wealthy Venetian merchant, a debt to which Baldwin had pledged the Crown of Thorns as collateral.[27] Louis IX paid the exorbitant sum of 135,000 livres to clear this debt (the construction of the chapel, for comparison, cost only 60,000 livres).
+
+Louis IX took very seriously his mission as "lieutenant of God on Earth", with which he had been invested when he was crowned in Reims. To fulfill this duty, he conducted two crusades. They contributed to his prestige, even though both ended disastrously. Everything he did was for what he saw as the glory of God and the good of his people. He protected the poor and was never heard to speak ill of anyone. He excelled in penance, leaving a hair shirt and a scourge which he had used in private practice. He had a great love for the Church. He was merciful even to rebels. When he was urged to execute a prince who had followed his father in rebellion, he refused, saying: "A son cannot refuse to obey his father."[9]
+
+In 1230 the King forbade all forms of usury, defined at the time as any taking of interest and therefore covering most banking activities. When the original borrowers from Jewish and Lombard lenders could not be found, Louis exacted from those lenders a contribution toward the crusade which Pope Gregory was trying to launch.[18] At the urging of Pope Gregory IX, following the Disputation of Paris in 1240, Louis ordered in 1243 the burning in Paris of some 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books. Eventually, the edict against the Talmud was overturned by Gregory IX's successor, Innocent IV.[28]
+
+Louis also expanded the scope of the Inquisition in France. He set the punishment for blasphemy to mutilation of the tongue and lips.[4] The area most affected by this expansion was southern France, where the Cathar sect had been strongest. The rate of confiscation of property from the Cathars and others reached its highest levels in the years before his first crusade, and slowed upon his return to France in 1254.
+
+In 1250, Louis headed a crusade to Egypt and was taken prisoner. During his captivity, he recited the Divine Office every day. After his release against ransom, he visited the Holy Land before returning to France.[9] In these deeds, Louis IX tried to fulfill what he believed was the duty of France as "the eldest daughter of the Church" (la fille aînée de l'Église), a tradition of protector of the Church going back to the Franks and Charlemagne, who had been crowned by Pope Leo III in Rome in 800. The kings of France were known in the church by the title "most Christian king" (Rex Christianissimus). The relationship between France and the papacy was at its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries. The popes called for most of the crusades from French soil.
+
+Louis was renowned for his charity. Beggars were fed from his table: he ate their leavings; washed their feet; ministered to the wants of lepers, who were generally ostracized; and daily fed over one hundred poor. He founded many hospitals and houses: the House of the Filles-Dieu for reformed prostitutes; the Quinze-Vingt for 300 blind men (1254), and hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon, and Compiégne.[29]
+
+St. Louis installed a house of the Trinitarian Order at  Fontainebleau, his chateau and estate near Paris. He chose Trinitarians as his chaplains, and was accompanied by them on his crusades. In his spiritual testament he wrote: "My dearest son, you should permit yourself to be tormented by every kind of martyrdom before you would allow yourself to commit a mortal sin."[9]
+
+Louis and Margaret's two royal children who died in infancy were first buried at the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont. In 1820 they were transferred and reinterred to Saint-Denis Basilica.[33]
+
+During his second crusade, Louis died at Tunis on 25 August 1270, in an epidemic of dysentery that swept through his army.[26][34][35] According to European custom, his body was subjected to the process known as mos Teutonicus prior to his remains being returned to France. (This was a postmortem funerary custom used in medieval Europe whereby the flesh was boiled from the body, so that the bones of the deceased could be transported hygienically from distant lands back home). This was not the common practice for Muslim burials. [36] Louis was succeeded by his son, Philip III.
+
+Louis's younger brother, Charles I of Naples, preserved his heart and intestines, and conveyed them for burial in the cathedral of Monreale near Palermo.[37] Louis's bones were carried overland in a lengthy processional across Sicily, Italy, the Alps, and France, until they were interred in the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis in May 1271.[38] Charles and Philip II later dispersed a number of relics to promote his veneration.[39]
+
+Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the canonisation of Louis in 1297;[40] he is the only French king to be declared a saint.[41] Louis IX is often considered the model of the ideal Christian monarch.[40] The influence of his canonization was so great that many of his successors were named Louis after him.
+
+Named in his honour, the Sisters of Charity of St. Louis is a Roman Catholic religious order founded in Vannes, France, in 1803.[42] A similar order, the Sisters of St Louis, was founded in Juilly in 1842.[43][44]
+
+He is honoured as co-patron of the Third Order of St. Francis, which claims him as a member of the Order. Even in childhood, his compassion for the poor and suffering people were known to those who were close to him. When he became king, over a hundred poor people were served meals in his house on ordinary days. Often the king served these guests himself. Such acts of charity, coupled with Louis's devout religious practices, gave rise to the legend that he joined the Third Order of St. Francis. Though it is unlikely that Louis did join the order, his life and actions proclaimed him as one of them in spirit.[6]
+
+Many countries in which French speakers and Catholicism were prevalent named places after King Louis:
+
+The French royal Order of Saint Louis (1693–1790 and 1814–1830),[citation needed] the Île Saint-Louis,[48] and  a hospital in the 10th arrondissement of Paris[citation needed] also bear his name.The Cathedral Saint-Louis in Versailles;[citation needed] the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France completed in 1834 and the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis completed in 1914, both in St. Louis, Missouri;[citation needed] and the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans were also named for the king.[citation needed]  The national church of France in Rome also carries his name: San Luigi dei Francesi in Italian, or Saint Louis of France in English.[citation needed] Also the Cathedral of St Louis in Plovdiv, Bulgaria[citation needed], the Church of St Louis in Moscow, Russia,[citation needed] and rue Saint Louis of Pondicherry, India.[citation needed]
+
+A bas-relief of St. Louis is one of the carved portraits of historic lawmakers that adorns the chamber of the United States House of Representatives.
+
+Saint Louis is also portrayed on a frieze depicting a timeline of important lawgivers throughout world history, on the North Wall of the Courtroom at the Supreme Court of the United States.[49]
+
+A statue of St. Louis by the sculptor John Donoghue stands on the roofline of the New York State Appellate Division Court at 27 Madison Avenue in New York City.
+
+The Apotheosis of St. Louis is an equestrian statue of the saint, by Charles Henry Niehaus, that stands in front of the Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park.
+
+A heroic portrait by Baron Charles de Steuben hangs in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.  An 1821 gift of King Louis XVIII of France, it depicts St. Louis burying his plague-stricken troops before the siege of Tunis at the beginning of the Eighth Crusade in 1270.
+

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+Louis Napoleon may refer to:

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+Louis Napoleon may refer to:

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+Louis Napoleon may refer to:

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+
+
+
+
+Louis Pasteur (/ˈluːi pæˈstɜːr/, French: [lwi pastœʁ]; December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French biologist, microbiologist and chemist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and prevention of diseases, and his discoveries have saved many lives ever since. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax.
+
+His medical discoveries provided direct support for the germ theory of disease and its application in clinical medicine. He is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, and is popularly known as the "father of microbiology".[4][5][6]
+
+Pasteur was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation. He performed experiments that showed that, without contamination, microorganisms could not develop. Under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, he demonstrated that in sterilized and sealed flasks, nothing ever developed; and, conversely, in sterilized but open flasks, microorganisms could grow.[7] Although Pasteur was not the first to propose the germ theory, his experiments indicated its correctness and convinced most of Europe that it was true.
+
+Today, he is often regarded as one of the fathers of germ theory.[8] Pasteur made significant discoveries in chemistry, most notably on the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals and racemization. Early in his career, his investigation of tartaric acid resulted in the first resolution of what is now called optical isomers. His work led the way to the current understanding of a fundamental principle in the structure of organic compounds.
+
+He was the director of the Pasteur Institute, established in 1887, until his death, and his body was interred in a vault beneath the institute. Although Pasteur made groundbreaking experiments, his reputation became associated with various controversies. Historical reassessment of his notebook revealed that he practiced deception to overcome his rivals.[9][10]
+
+Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole, Jura, France, to a Catholic family of a poor tanner.[4] He was the third child of Jean-Joseph Pasteur and Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui. The family moved to Marnoz in 1826 and then to Arbois in 1827.[11][12] Pasteur entered primary school in 1831.[13]
+
+He was an average student in his early years, and not particularly academic, as his interests were fishing and sketching.[4] He drew many pastels and portraits of his parents, friends and neighbors.[14] Pasteur attended secondary school at the Collège d'Arbois.[15] In October 1838, he left for Paris to join the Pension Barbet, but became homesick and returned in November.[16]
+
+In 1839, he entered the Collège Royal at Besançon to study philosophy and earned his Bachelor of Letters degree in 1840.[17] He was appointed a tutor at the Besançon college while continuing a degree science course with special mathematics.[18] He failed his first examination in 1841. He managed to pass the baccalauréat scientifique (general science) degree in 1842 from Dijon but with a mediocre grade in chemistry.[19]
+
+Later in 1842, Pasteur took the entrance test for the École Normale Supérieure.[20] He passed the first set of tests, but because his ranking was low, Pasteur decided not to continue and try again next year.[21] He went back to the Pension Barbet to prepare for the test. He also attended classes at the Lycée Saint-Louis and lectures of Jean-Baptiste Dumas at the Sorbonne.[22] In 1843, he passed the test with a high ranking and entered the École Normale Supérieure.[23] In 1845 he received the licencié ès sciences (Master of Science) degree.[24] In 1846, he was appointed professor of physics at the Collège de Tournon (now called Lycée Gabriel-Faure [fr]) in Ardèche, but the chemist Antoine Jérôme Balard wanted him back at the École Normale Supérieure as a graduate laboratory assistant (agrégé préparateur).[25] He joined Balard and simultaneously started his research in crystallography and in 1847, he submitted his two theses, one in chemistry and the other in physics.[24][26]
+
+After serving briefly as professor of physics at the Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg,[27] where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849,[28] and together had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood;[29] the other three died of typhoid.
+
+Pasteur was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg in 1848, and became the chair of chemistry in 1852.[30] In 1854, he was named dean of the new faculty of sciences at University of Lille, where he began his studies on fermentation.[31] It was on this occasion that Pasteur uttered his oft-quoted remark: "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind").[32]
+
+In 1857, he moved to Paris as the director of scientific studies at the École Normale Supérieure where he took control from 1858 to 1867 and introduced a series of reforms to improve the standard of scientific work. The examinations became more rigid, which led to better results, greater competition, and increased prestige. Many of his decrees, however, were rigid and authoritarian, leading to two serious student revolts. During "the bean revolt" he decreed that a mutton stew, which students had refused to eat, would be served and eaten every Monday. On another occasion he threatened to expel any student caught smoking, and 73 of the 80 students in the school resigned.[33]
+
+In 1863, he was appointed professor of geology, physics, and chemistry at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, a position he held until his resignation in 1867. In 1867, he became the chair of organic chemistry at the Sorbonne,[34] but he later gave up the position because of poor health.[35] In 1867, the École Normale's laboratory of physiological chemistry was created at Pasteur's request,[34] and he was the laboratory's director from 1867 to 1888.[36] In Paris, he established the Pasteur Institute in 1887, in which he was its director for the rest of his life.[5][6]
+
+In Pasteur's early work as a chemist, beginning at the École Normale Supérieure, and continuing at Strasbourg and Lille, he examined the chemical, optical and crystallographic properties of a group of compounds known as tartrates.[37]
+
+He resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid in 1848.[38][39][40][41] A solution of this compound derived from living things rotated the plane of polarization of light passing through it.[37] The problem was that tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis had no such effect, even though its chemical reactions were identical and its elemental composition was the same.[42]
+
+Pasteur noticed that crystals of tartrates had small faces. Then he observed that, in racemic mixtures of tartrates, half of the crystals were right-handed and half were left-handed. In solution, the right-handed compound was dextrorotatory, and the left-handed one was levorotatory.[37] Pasteur determined that optical activity related to the shape of the crystals, and that an asymmetric internal arrangement of the molecules of the compound was responsible for twisting the light.[31] The (2R,3R)- and (2S,3S)- tartrates were isometric, non-superposable mirror images of each other. This was the first time anyone had demonstrated molecular chirality, and also the first explanation of isomerism.[37]
+
+Some historians consider Pasteur's work in this area to be his "most profound and most original contributions to science", and his "greatest scientific discovery."[37]
+
+Pasteur was motivated to investigate fermentation while working at Lille. In 1856 a local wine manufacturer, M. Bigot, whose son was one of Pasteur's students, sought for his advice on the problems of making beetroot alcohol and souring.[43][44]
+
+According to his son-in-law, René Vallery-Radot, in August 1857 Pasteur sent a paper about lactic acid fermentation to the Société des Sciences de Lille, but the paper was read three months later.[45] A memoire was subsequently published on November 30, 1857.[46] In the memoir, he developed his ideas stating that: "I intend to establish that, just as there is an alcoholic ferment, the yeast of beer, which is found everywhere that sugar is decomposed into alcohol and carbonic acid, so also there is a particular ferment, a lactic yeast, always present when sugar becomes lactic acid."[47]
+
+Pasteur also wrote about alcoholic fermentation.[48] It was published in full form in 1858.[49][50] Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Justus von Liebig had proposed the theory that fermentation was caused by decomposition. Pasteur demonstrated that this theory was incorrect, and that yeast was responsible for fermentation to produce alcohol from sugar.[51] He also demonstrated that, when a different microorganism contaminated the wine, lactic acid was produced, making the wine sour.[44] In 1861, Pasteur observed that less sugar fermented per part of yeast when the yeast was exposed to air.[51] The lower rate of fermentation aerobically became known as the Pasteur effect.[52]
+
+Pasteur's research also showed that the growth of micro-organisms was responsible for spoiling beverages, such as beer, wine and milk. With this established, he invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to a temperature between 60 and 100 °C.[53] This killed most bacteria and moulds already present within them. Pasteur and Claude Bernard completed tests on blood and urine on April 20, 1862.[54] Pasteur patented the process, to fight the "diseases" of wine, in 1865.[53] The method became known as pasteurization, and was soon applied to beer and milk.[55]
+
+Beverage contamination led Pasteur to the idea that micro-organisms infecting animals and humans cause disease. He proposed preventing the entry of micro-organisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.[56]
+
+In 1866, Pasteur published Etudes sur le Vin, about the diseases of wine, and he published Etudes sur la Bière in 1876, concerning the diseases of beer.[51]
+
+In the early 19th century, Agostino Bassi had shown that muscardine was caused by a fungus that infected silkworms.[57] Since 1853, two diseases called pébrine and flacherie had been infecting great numbers of silkworms in southern France, and by 1865 they were causing huge losses to farmers. In 1865, Pasteur went to Alès and worked for five years until 1870.[58][59]
+
+Silkworms with pébrine were covered in corpuscles. In the first three years, Pasteur thought that the corpuscles were a symptom of the disease. In 1870, he concluded that the corpuscles were the cause of pébrine (it is now known that the cause is a microsporidian).[57] Pasteur also showed that the disease was hereditary.[60] Pasteur developed a system to prevent pébrine: after the female moths laid their eggs, the moths were turned into a pulp. The pulp was examined with a microscope, and if corpuscles were observed, the eggs were destroyed.[61][60] Pasteur concluded that bacteria caused flacherie. The primary cause is currently thought to be viruses.[57] The spread of flacherie could be accidental or hereditary. Hygiene could be used to prevent accidental flacherie. Moths whose digestive cavities did not contain the microorganisms causing flacherie were used to lay eggs, preventing hereditary flacherie.[62]
+
+Following his fermentation experiments, Pasteur demonstrated that the skin of grapes was the natural source of yeasts, and that sterilized grapes and grape juice never fermented. He drew grape juice from under the skin with sterilized needles, and also covered grapes with sterilized cloth. Both experiments could not produce wine in sterilized containers.[44]
+
+His findings and ideas were against the prevailing notion of spontaneous generation. He received a particularly stern criticism from Félix Archimède Pouchet, who was director of the Rouen Museum of Natural History. To settle the debate between the eminent scientists, the French Academy of Sciences offered the Alhumbert Prize carrying 2,500 francs to whoever could experimentally demonstrate for or against the doctrine.[63][64][65]
+
+Pouchet stated that air everywhere could cause spontaneous generation of living organisms in liquids.[66] In the late 1850s, he performed experiments and claimed that they were evidence of spontaneous generation.[67][63] Francesco Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani had provided some evidence against spontaneous generation in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively. Spallanzani's experiments in 1765 suggested that air contaminated broths with bacteria. In the 1860s, Pasteur repeated Spallanzani's experiments, but Pouchet reported a different result using a different broth.[58]
+
+Pasteur performed several experiments to disprove spontaneous generation. He placed boiled liquid in a flask and let hot air enter the flask. Then he closed the flask, and no organisms grew in it.[67] In another experiment, when he opened flasks containing boiled liquid, dust entered the flasks, causing organisms to grow in some of them. The number of flasks in which organisms grew was lower at higher altitudes, showing that air at high altitudes contained less dust and fewer organisms.[44][68] Pasteur also used swan neck flasks containing a fermentable liquid. Air was allowed to enter the flask via a long curving tube that made dust particles stick to it. Nothing grew in the broths unless the flasks were tilted, making the liquid touch the contaminated walls of the neck. This showed that the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, on dust, rather than spontaneously generating within the liquid or from the action of pure air.[44][69]
+
+These were some of the most important experiments disproving the theory of spontaneous generation, for which Pasteur won the Alhumbert Prize in 1862.[67] He concluded that:[44][59]
+
+Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment. There is no known circumstance in which it can be confirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves.
+
+Pasteur's later work on diseases included work on chicken cholera. He received cultures from Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint, and cultivated them in chicken broth.[70] During this work, a culture of the responsible bacteria had spoiled and failed to induce the disease in some chickens he was infecting with the disease. Upon reusing these healthy chickens, Pasteur discovered he could not infect them, even with fresh bacteria; the weakened bacteria had caused the chickens to become immune to the disease, though they had caused only mild symptoms.[4][8]
+
+In 1879, his assistant, Charles Chamberland (of French origin), had been instructed to inoculate the chickens after Pasteur went on holiday. Chamberland failed to do this and went on holiday himself. On his return, the month-old cultures made the chickens unwell, but instead of the infections being fatal, as they usually were, the chickens recovered completely. Chamberland assumed an error had been made, and wanted to discard the apparently faulty culture, but Pasteur stopped him.[71][72] He inoculated the chickens with virulent bacteria that killed other chickens, and they survived. Pasteur concluded that the animals were now immune to the disease.[73]
+
+In December 1879, Pasteur used a weakened culture of the bacteria to inoculate chickens. The chickens survived, and when he inoculated them with a virulent strain, they were immune to it. In 1880, Pasteur presented his results to the French Academy of Sciences, saying that the bacteria were weakened by contact with oxygen.[70]
+
+In the 1870s, he applied this immunization method to anthrax, which affected cattle, and aroused interest in combating other diseases. Pasteur cultivated bacteria from the blood of animals infected with anthrax. When he inoculated animals with the bacteria, anthrax occurred, proving that the bacteria was the cause of the disease.[74] Many cattle were dying of anthrax in "cursed fields".[59] Pasteur was told that sheep that died from anthrax were buried in the field. Pasteur thought that earthworms might have brought the bacteria to the surface. He found anthrax bacteria in earthworms' excrement, showing that he was correct.[59] He told the farmers not to bury dead animals in the fields.[75]
+
+In 1880, Pasteur's rival Jean-Joseph-Henri Toussaint, a veterinary surgeon, used carbolic acid to kill anthrax bacilli and tested the vaccine on sheep. Pasteur thought that this type of killed vaccine should not work because he believed that attenuated bacteria used up nutrients that the bacteria needed to grow. He thought oxidizing bacteria made them less virulent.[76] In early 1881, Pasteur discovered that growing anthrax bacilli at about 42 °C made them unable to produce spores,[77] and he described this method in a speech to the French Academy of Sciences on February 28.[78] Later in 1881, veterinarian Hippolyte Rossignol proposed that the Société d'agriculture de Melun organize an experiment to test Pasteur's vaccine. Pasteur agreed, and the experiment, conducted at Pouilly-le-Fort on sheep, goats and cows, was successful. Pasteur did not directly disclose how he prepared the vaccines used at Pouilly-le-Fort.[79][77] His laboratory notebooks, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, show that he actually used heat and potassium dichromate, similar to Toussaint's method.[80][42][81]
+
+The notion of a weak form of a disease causing immunity to the virulent version was not new; this had been known for a long time for smallpox. Inoculation with smallpox (variolation) was known to result in a much less severe disease, and greatly reduced mortality, in comparison with the naturally acquired disease.[82] Edward Jenner had also studied vaccination using cowpox (vaccinia) to give cross-immunity to smallpox in the late 1790s, and by the early 1800s vaccination had spread to most of Europe.[83]
+
+The difference between smallpox vaccination and anthrax or chicken cholera vaccination was that the latter two disease organisms had been artificially weakened, so a naturally weak form of the disease organism did not need to be found.[80] This discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases, and Pasteur gave these artificially weakened diseases the generic name of "vaccines", in honour of Jenner's discovery.[84]
+
+In 1876, Robert Koch had shown that Bacillus anthracis caused anthrax.[85] In his papers published between 1878 and 1880, Pasteur only mentioned Koch's work in a footnote. Koch met Pasteur at the Seventh International Medical Congress in 1881. A few months later, Koch wrote that Pasteur had used impure cultures and made errors. In 1882, Pasteur replied to Koch in a speech, to which Koch responded aggressively.[8] Koch stated that Pasteur tested his vaccine on unsuitable animals and that Pasteur's research was not properly scientific.[44] In 1882, Koch wrote "On the Anthrax Inoculation", in which he refuted several of Pasteur's conclusions about anthrax and criticized Pasteur for keeping his methods secret, jumping to conclusions, and being imprecise. In 1883, Pasteur wrote that he used cultures prepared in a similar way to his successful fermentation experiments and that Koch misinterpreted statistics and ignored Pasteur's work on silkworms.[85]
+
+In 1882, Pasteur sent his assistant Louis Thuillier to southern France because of an epizootic of swine erysipelas.[86] Thuillier identified the bacillus that caused the disease in March 1883.[58] Pasteur and Thuillier increased the bacillus's virulence after passing it through pigeons. Then they passed the bacillus through rabbits, weakening it and obtaining a vaccine. Pasteur and Thuillier incorrectly described the bacterium as a figure-eight shape. Roux described the bacterium as stick-shaped in 1884.[87]
+
+Pasteur produced the first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits, and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue.[59][88] The rabies vaccine was initially created by Emile Roux, a French doctor and a colleague of Pasteur, who had produced a killed vaccine using this method.[44] The vaccine had been tested in 50 dogs before its first human trial.[89][90] This vaccine was used on 9-year-old Joseph Meister, on July 6, 1885, after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog.[42][88] This was done at some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy.[6] After consulting with physicians, he decided to go ahead with the treatment.[91] Over 11 days, Meister received 13 inoculations, each inoculation using viruses that had been weakened for a shorter period of time.[92] Three months later he examined Meister and found that he was in good health.[91][93] Pasteur was hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued.[6] Analysis of his laboratory notebooks shows that Pasteur had treated two people before his vaccination of Meister. One survived but may not actually have had rabies, and the other died of rabies.[92][94] Pasteur began treatment of Jean-Baptiste Jupille on October 20, 1885, and the treatment was successful.[92] Later in 1885, people, including four children from the United States, went to Pasteur's laboratory to be inoculated.[91] In 1886, he treated 350 people, of which only one developed rabies.[92] The treatment's success laid the foundations for the manufacture of many other vaccines. The first of the Pasteur Institutes was also built on the basis of this achievement.[42]
+
+In The Story of San Michele, Axel Munthe writes of some risks Pasteur undertook in the rabies vaccine research:[95]
+
+Pasteur himself was absolutely fearless. Anxious to secure a sample of saliva straight from the jaws of a rabid dog, I once saw him with the glass tube held between his lips draw a few drops of the deadly saliva from the mouth of a rabid bull-dog, held on the table by two assistants, their hands protected by leather gloves.
+
+Because of his study in germs, Pasteur encouraged doctors to sanitize their hands and equipment before surgery. Prior to this, few doctors or their assistants practiced these procedures.
+
+A French national hero at age 55, in 1878 Pasteur discreetly told his family never to reveal his laboratory notebooks to anyone. His family obeyed, and all his documents were held and inherited in secrecy. Finally, in 1964 Pasteur's grandson and last surviving male descendant, Pasteur Vallery-Radot, donated the papers to the French national library (Bibliothèque nationale de France). Yet the papers were restricted for historical studies until the death of Vallery-Radot in 1971. The documents were given a catalogue number only in 1985.[96]
+
+In 1995, the centennial of the death of Louis Pasteur, a historian of science Gerald L. Geison published an analysis of Pasteur's private notebooks in his The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, and declared that Pasteur had given several misleading accounts and played deceptions in his most important discoveries.[9][97] Max Perutz published a defense of Pasteur in The New York Review of Books.[98] Based on further examinations of Pasteur's documents, French immunologist Patrice Debré concluded in his book Louis Pasteur (1998) that, in spite of his genius, Pasteur had some faults. A book review states that Debré "sometimes finds him unfair, combative, arrogant, unattractive in attitude, inflexible and even dogmatic".[99][100]
+
+Scientists before Pasteur had studied fermentation. In the 1830s, Charles Cagniard-Latour, Friedrich Traugott Kützing and Theodor Schwann used microscopes to study yeasts and concluded that yeasts were living organisms. In 1839, Justus von Liebig, Friedrich Wöhler and Jöns Jacob Berzelius stated that yeast was not an organism and was produced when air acted on plant juice.[51]
+
+In 1855, Antoine Béchamp, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Montpellier, conducted experiments with sucrose solutions and concluded that water was the factor for fermentation.[101] He changed his conclusion in 1858, stating that fermentation was directly related to the growth of moulds, which required air for growth. He regarded himself as the first to show the role of microorganisms in fermentation.[102][47]
+
+Pasteur started his experiments in 1857 and published his findings in 1858 (April issue of Comptes Rendus Chimie, Béchamp's paper appeared in January issue). Béchamp noted that Pasteur did not bring any novel idea or experiments. On the other hand, Béchamp was probably aware of Pasteur's 1857 preliminary works. With both scientists claiming priority on the discovery, a dispute, extending to several areas, lasted throughout their lives.[103][104]
+
+However, Béchamp was on the losing side, as the BMJ obituary remarked: His name was "associated with bygone controversies as to priority which it would be unprofitable to recall".[105] Béchamp proposed the incorrect theory of microzymes. According to K. L. Manchester, anti-vivisectionists and proponents of alternative medicine promoted Béchamp and microzymes, unjustifiably claiming that Pasteur plagiarized Béchamp.[47]
+
+Pasteur thought that succinic acid inverted sucrose. In 1860, Marcellin Berthelot isolated invertase and showed that succinic acid did not invert sucrose.[51] Pasteur believed that fermentation was only due to living cells. Hans Buchner discovered that zymase catalyzed fermentation, showing that fermentation was catalyzed by enzymes within cells.[106] Eduard Buchner also discovered that fermentation could take place outside living cells.[107]
+
+Pasteur publicly claimed his success in developing the anthrax vaccine in 1881.[93] However, his admirer-turned-rival Toussaint was the one who developed the first vaccine. Toussaint isolated the bacteria that caused chicken cholera (later named Pasteurella in honour of Pasteur) in 1879 and gave samples to Pasteur who used them for his own works.[108] On July 12, 1880, Toussaint presented his successful result to the French Academy of Sciences, using an attenuated vaccine against anthrax in dogs and sheep.[109] Pasteur on grounds of jealousy contested the discovery by publicly displaying his vaccination method at Pouilly-le-Fort on May 5, 1881.[110] Pasteur gave a misleading account of the preparation of the anthrax vaccine used in the experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort. He used potassium dichromate to prepare the vaccine.[9] The promotional experiment was a success and helped Pasteur sell his products, getting the benefits and glory.[110][111][112]
+
+Pasteur experiments are often cited as against medical ethics, especially on his vaccination of Meister. He did not have any experience in medical practice, and more importantly, lacked a medical license. This is often cited as a serious threat to his professional and personal reputation.[113][114] His closest partner Émile Roux, who had medical qualifications, refused to participate in the clinical trial, likely because he considered it unjust.[92] However, Pasteur executed vaccination of the boy under the close watch of practising physicians Jacques-Joseph Grancher, head of the Paris Children's Hospital's paediatric clinic, and Alfred Vulpian, a member of the Commission on Rabies. He was not allowed to hold the syringe, although the inoculations were entirely under his supervision.[91] It was Grancher who was responsible for the injections, and he defended Pasteur before the French National Academy of Medicine in the issue.[115]
+
+Pasteur has also been criticized for keeping secrecy of his procedure and not giving proper pre-clinical trials on animals.[44] Pasteur stated that he kept his procedure secret in order to control its quality. He later disclosed his procedures to a small group of scientists. Pasteur wrote that he had successfully vaccinated 50 rabid dogs before using it on Meister.[116][117][118] According to Geison, Pasteur's laboratory notebooks show that he had vaccinated only 11 dogs.[44]
+
+Meister never showed any symptoms of rabies,[92] but the vaccination has not been proved to be the reason. One source estimates the probability of Meister contracting rabies at 10%.[80]
+
+Pasteur was awarded 1,500 francs in 1853 by the Pharmaceutical Society for the synthesis of racemic acid.[119] In 1856 the Royal Society of London presented him the Rumford Medal for his discovery of the nature of racemic acid and its relations to polarized light,[120] and the Copley Medal in 1874 for his work on fermentation.[121] He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1869.[1]
+
+The French Academy of Sciences awarded Pasteur the 1859 Montyon Prize for experimental physiology in 1860,[34] and the Jecker Prize in 1861 and the Alhumbert Prize in 1862 for his experimental refutation of spontaneous generation.[67][122] Though he lost elections in 1857 and 1861 for membership to the French Academy of Sciences, he won the 1862 election for membership to the mineralogy section.[123] He was elected to permanent secretary of the physical science section of the academy in 1887 and held the position until 1889.[124]
+
+In 1873 Pasteur was elected to the Académie Nationale de Médecine[125] and was made the commander in the Brazilian Order of the Rose.[126] In 1881 he was elected to a seat at the Académie française left vacant by Émile Littré.[127] Pasteur received the Albert Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in 1882.[128] In 1883 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[129] On June 8, 1886, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II awarded Pasteur with the Order of the Medjidie (I Class) and 10000 Ottoman liras.[130] He was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1889.[131] Pasteur won the Leeuwenhoek Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to microbiology in 1895.[132]
+
+Pasteur was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1853, promoted to Officer in 1863, to Commander in 1868, to Grand Officer in 1878 and made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1881.[133][128]
+
+In many localities worldwide, streets are named in his honor. For example, in the US: Palo Alto and Irvine, California, Boston and Polk, Florida, adjacent to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; Jonquière, Québec; San Salvador de Jujuy and Buenos Aires (Argentina), Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, in the United Kingdom, Jericho and Wulguru in Queensland, (Australia); Phnom Penh in Cambodia; Ho Chi Minh City; Batna in Algeria; Bandung in Indonesia, Tehran in Iran, near the central campus of the Warsaw University in Warsaw, Poland; adjacent to the Odessa State Medical University in Odessa, Ukraine; Milan in Italy and Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Timișoara in Romania. The Avenue Pasteur in Saigon, Vietnam, is one of the few streets in that city to retain its French name. Avenue Louis Pasteur in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area in Boston, Massachusetts was named in his honor in the French manner with "Avenue" preceding the name of the dedicatee.[134]
+
+Both the Institut Pasteur and Université Louis Pasteur were named after Pasteur. The schools Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and Lycée Louis Pasteur in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, are named after him. In South Africa, the Louis Pasteur Private Hospital in Pretoria, and Life Louis Pasteur Private Hospital, Bloemfontein, are named after him. Louis Pasteur University Hospital in Košice, Slovakia is also named after Pasteur.
+
+A statue of Pasteur is erected at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, California. A bronze bust of him resides on the French Campus of Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco Medical Center in San Francisco. The sculpture was designed by Harriet G. Moore and cast in 1984 by Artworks Foundry.[135]
+
+The UNESCO/Institut Pasteur Medal was created on the centenary of Pasteur's death, and is given every two years in his name, "in recognition of outstanding research contributing to a beneficial impact on human health".[136]
+
+After developing the rabies vaccine, Pasteur proposed an institute for the vaccine.[137] In 1887, fundraising for the Pasteur Institute began, with donations from many countries. The official statute was registered in 1887, stating that the institute's purposes were "the treatment of rabies according to the method developed by M. Pasteur" and "the study of virulent and contagious diseases".[91] The institute was inaugurated on November 14, 1888.[91] He brought together scientists with various specialties. The first five departments were directed by two graduates of the École Normale Supérieure: Émile Duclaux (general microbiology research) and Charles Chamberland (microbe research applied to hygiene), as well as a biologist, Élie Metchnikoff (morphological microbe research) and two physicians, Jacques-Joseph Grancher (rabies) and Émile Roux (technical microbe research). One year after the inauguration of the institute, Roux set up the first course of microbiology ever taught in the world, then entitled Cours de Microbie Technique (Course of microbe research techniques). Since 1891 the Pasteur Institute had been extended to different countries, and currently there are 32 institutes in 29 countries in various parts of the world.[138]
+
+His grandson, Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot, wrote that Pasteur had kept from his Catholic background only a spiritualism without religious practice.[139] However, Catholic observers often said that Pasteur remained an ardent Christian throughout his whole life, and his son-in-law wrote, in a biography of him:
+
+Absolute faith in God and in Eternity, and a conviction that the power for good given to us in this world will be continued beyond it, were feelings which pervaded his whole life; the virtues of the gospel had ever been present to him. Full of respect for the form of religion which had been that of his forefathers, he came simply to it and naturally for spiritual help in these last weeks of his life.[140]
+
+The Literary Digest of 18 October 1902 gives this statement from Pasteur that he prayed while he worked:
+
+Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.
+
+Maurice Vallery-Radot, grandson of the brother of the son-in-law of Pasteur and outspoken Catholic, also holds that Pasteur fundamentally remained Catholic.[141] According to both Pasteur Vallery-Radot and Maurice Vallery-Radot, the following well-known quotation attributed to Pasteur is apocryphal:[142] "The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant's wife".[4] According to Maurice Vallery-Radot,[143] the false quotation appeared for the first time shortly after the death of Pasteur.[144] However, despite his belief in God, it has been said that his views were that of a freethinker rather than a Catholic, a spiritual more than a religious man.[145][146] He was also against mixing science with religion.[147][148]
+
+In 1868, Pasteur suffered a severe brain stroke that paralysed the left side of his body, but he recovered.[149] A stroke or uremia in 1894 severely impaired his health.[150][151][152] Failing to fully recover, he died on September 28, 1895, near Paris.[42] He was given a state funeral and was buried in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but his remains were reinterred in the Pasteur Institute in Paris,[153] in a vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.[154]
+
+Pasteur's principal published works are:[4]

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+Louis Pasteur (/ˈluːi pæˈstɜːr/, French: [lwi pastœʁ]; December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French biologist, microbiologist and chemist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and prevention of diseases, and his discoveries have saved many lives ever since. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax.
+
+His medical discoveries provided direct support for the germ theory of disease and its application in clinical medicine. He is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, and is popularly known as the "father of microbiology".[4][5][6]
+
+Pasteur was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation. He performed experiments that showed that, without contamination, microorganisms could not develop. Under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, he demonstrated that in sterilized and sealed flasks, nothing ever developed; and, conversely, in sterilized but open flasks, microorganisms could grow.[7] Although Pasteur was not the first to propose the germ theory, his experiments indicated its correctness and convinced most of Europe that it was true.
+
+Today, he is often regarded as one of the fathers of germ theory.[8] Pasteur made significant discoveries in chemistry, most notably on the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals and racemization. Early in his career, his investigation of tartaric acid resulted in the first resolution of what is now called optical isomers. His work led the way to the current understanding of a fundamental principle in the structure of organic compounds.
+
+He was the director of the Pasteur Institute, established in 1887, until his death, and his body was interred in a vault beneath the institute. Although Pasteur made groundbreaking experiments, his reputation became associated with various controversies. Historical reassessment of his notebook revealed that he practiced deception to overcome his rivals.[9][10]
+
+Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole, Jura, France, to a Catholic family of a poor tanner.[4] He was the third child of Jean-Joseph Pasteur and Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui. The family moved to Marnoz in 1826 and then to Arbois in 1827.[11][12] Pasteur entered primary school in 1831.[13]
+
+He was an average student in his early years, and not particularly academic, as his interests were fishing and sketching.[4] He drew many pastels and portraits of his parents, friends and neighbors.[14] Pasteur attended secondary school at the Collège d'Arbois.[15] In October 1838, he left for Paris to join the Pension Barbet, but became homesick and returned in November.[16]
+
+In 1839, he entered the Collège Royal at Besançon to study philosophy and earned his Bachelor of Letters degree in 1840.[17] He was appointed a tutor at the Besançon college while continuing a degree science course with special mathematics.[18] He failed his first examination in 1841. He managed to pass the baccalauréat scientifique (general science) degree in 1842 from Dijon but with a mediocre grade in chemistry.[19]
+
+Later in 1842, Pasteur took the entrance test for the École Normale Supérieure.[20] He passed the first set of tests, but because his ranking was low, Pasteur decided not to continue and try again next year.[21] He went back to the Pension Barbet to prepare for the test. He also attended classes at the Lycée Saint-Louis and lectures of Jean-Baptiste Dumas at the Sorbonne.[22] In 1843, he passed the test with a high ranking and entered the École Normale Supérieure.[23] In 1845 he received the licencié ès sciences (Master of Science) degree.[24] In 1846, he was appointed professor of physics at the Collège de Tournon (now called Lycée Gabriel-Faure [fr]) in Ardèche, but the chemist Antoine Jérôme Balard wanted him back at the École Normale Supérieure as a graduate laboratory assistant (agrégé préparateur).[25] He joined Balard and simultaneously started his research in crystallography and in 1847, he submitted his two theses, one in chemistry and the other in physics.[24][26]
+
+After serving briefly as professor of physics at the Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg,[27] where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849,[28] and together had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood;[29] the other three died of typhoid.
+
+Pasteur was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg in 1848, and became the chair of chemistry in 1852.[30] In 1854, he was named dean of the new faculty of sciences at University of Lille, where he began his studies on fermentation.[31] It was on this occasion that Pasteur uttered his oft-quoted remark: "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind").[32]
+
+In 1857, he moved to Paris as the director of scientific studies at the École Normale Supérieure where he took control from 1858 to 1867 and introduced a series of reforms to improve the standard of scientific work. The examinations became more rigid, which led to better results, greater competition, and increased prestige. Many of his decrees, however, were rigid and authoritarian, leading to two serious student revolts. During "the bean revolt" he decreed that a mutton stew, which students had refused to eat, would be served and eaten every Monday. On another occasion he threatened to expel any student caught smoking, and 73 of the 80 students in the school resigned.[33]
+
+In 1863, he was appointed professor of geology, physics, and chemistry at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, a position he held until his resignation in 1867. In 1867, he became the chair of organic chemistry at the Sorbonne,[34] but he later gave up the position because of poor health.[35] In 1867, the École Normale's laboratory of physiological chemistry was created at Pasteur's request,[34] and he was the laboratory's director from 1867 to 1888.[36] In Paris, he established the Pasteur Institute in 1887, in which he was its director for the rest of his life.[5][6]
+
+In Pasteur's early work as a chemist, beginning at the École Normale Supérieure, and continuing at Strasbourg and Lille, he examined the chemical, optical and crystallographic properties of a group of compounds known as tartrates.[37]
+
+He resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid in 1848.[38][39][40][41] A solution of this compound derived from living things rotated the plane of polarization of light passing through it.[37] The problem was that tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis had no such effect, even though its chemical reactions were identical and its elemental composition was the same.[42]
+
+Pasteur noticed that crystals of tartrates had small faces. Then he observed that, in racemic mixtures of tartrates, half of the crystals were right-handed and half were left-handed. In solution, the right-handed compound was dextrorotatory, and the left-handed one was levorotatory.[37] Pasteur determined that optical activity related to the shape of the crystals, and that an asymmetric internal arrangement of the molecules of the compound was responsible for twisting the light.[31] The (2R,3R)- and (2S,3S)- tartrates were isometric, non-superposable mirror images of each other. This was the first time anyone had demonstrated molecular chirality, and also the first explanation of isomerism.[37]
+
+Some historians consider Pasteur's work in this area to be his "most profound and most original contributions to science", and his "greatest scientific discovery."[37]
+
+Pasteur was motivated to investigate fermentation while working at Lille. In 1856 a local wine manufacturer, M. Bigot, whose son was one of Pasteur's students, sought for his advice on the problems of making beetroot alcohol and souring.[43][44]
+
+According to his son-in-law, René Vallery-Radot, in August 1857 Pasteur sent a paper about lactic acid fermentation to the Société des Sciences de Lille, but the paper was read three months later.[45] A memoire was subsequently published on November 30, 1857.[46] In the memoir, he developed his ideas stating that: "I intend to establish that, just as there is an alcoholic ferment, the yeast of beer, which is found everywhere that sugar is decomposed into alcohol and carbonic acid, so also there is a particular ferment, a lactic yeast, always present when sugar becomes lactic acid."[47]
+
+Pasteur also wrote about alcoholic fermentation.[48] It was published in full form in 1858.[49][50] Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Justus von Liebig had proposed the theory that fermentation was caused by decomposition. Pasteur demonstrated that this theory was incorrect, and that yeast was responsible for fermentation to produce alcohol from sugar.[51] He also demonstrated that, when a different microorganism contaminated the wine, lactic acid was produced, making the wine sour.[44] In 1861, Pasteur observed that less sugar fermented per part of yeast when the yeast was exposed to air.[51] The lower rate of fermentation aerobically became known as the Pasteur effect.[52]
+
+Pasteur's research also showed that the growth of micro-organisms was responsible for spoiling beverages, such as beer, wine and milk. With this established, he invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to a temperature between 60 and 100 °C.[53] This killed most bacteria and moulds already present within them. Pasteur and Claude Bernard completed tests on blood and urine on April 20, 1862.[54] Pasteur patented the process, to fight the "diseases" of wine, in 1865.[53] The method became known as pasteurization, and was soon applied to beer and milk.[55]
+
+Beverage contamination led Pasteur to the idea that micro-organisms infecting animals and humans cause disease. He proposed preventing the entry of micro-organisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.[56]
+
+In 1866, Pasteur published Etudes sur le Vin, about the diseases of wine, and he published Etudes sur la Bière in 1876, concerning the diseases of beer.[51]
+
+In the early 19th century, Agostino Bassi had shown that muscardine was caused by a fungus that infected silkworms.[57] Since 1853, two diseases called pébrine and flacherie had been infecting great numbers of silkworms in southern France, and by 1865 they were causing huge losses to farmers. In 1865, Pasteur went to Alès and worked for five years until 1870.[58][59]
+
+Silkworms with pébrine were covered in corpuscles. In the first three years, Pasteur thought that the corpuscles were a symptom of the disease. In 1870, he concluded that the corpuscles were the cause of pébrine (it is now known that the cause is a microsporidian).[57] Pasteur also showed that the disease was hereditary.[60] Pasteur developed a system to prevent pébrine: after the female moths laid their eggs, the moths were turned into a pulp. The pulp was examined with a microscope, and if corpuscles were observed, the eggs were destroyed.[61][60] Pasteur concluded that bacteria caused flacherie. The primary cause is currently thought to be viruses.[57] The spread of flacherie could be accidental or hereditary. Hygiene could be used to prevent accidental flacherie. Moths whose digestive cavities did not contain the microorganisms causing flacherie were used to lay eggs, preventing hereditary flacherie.[62]
+
+Following his fermentation experiments, Pasteur demonstrated that the skin of grapes was the natural source of yeasts, and that sterilized grapes and grape juice never fermented. He drew grape juice from under the skin with sterilized needles, and also covered grapes with sterilized cloth. Both experiments could not produce wine in sterilized containers.[44]
+
+His findings and ideas were against the prevailing notion of spontaneous generation. He received a particularly stern criticism from Félix Archimède Pouchet, who was director of the Rouen Museum of Natural History. To settle the debate between the eminent scientists, the French Academy of Sciences offered the Alhumbert Prize carrying 2,500 francs to whoever could experimentally demonstrate for or against the doctrine.[63][64][65]
+
+Pouchet stated that air everywhere could cause spontaneous generation of living organisms in liquids.[66] In the late 1850s, he performed experiments and claimed that they were evidence of spontaneous generation.[67][63] Francesco Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani had provided some evidence against spontaneous generation in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively. Spallanzani's experiments in 1765 suggested that air contaminated broths with bacteria. In the 1860s, Pasteur repeated Spallanzani's experiments, but Pouchet reported a different result using a different broth.[58]
+
+Pasteur performed several experiments to disprove spontaneous generation. He placed boiled liquid in a flask and let hot air enter the flask. Then he closed the flask, and no organisms grew in it.[67] In another experiment, when he opened flasks containing boiled liquid, dust entered the flasks, causing organisms to grow in some of them. The number of flasks in which organisms grew was lower at higher altitudes, showing that air at high altitudes contained less dust and fewer organisms.[44][68] Pasteur also used swan neck flasks containing a fermentable liquid. Air was allowed to enter the flask via a long curving tube that made dust particles stick to it. Nothing grew in the broths unless the flasks were tilted, making the liquid touch the contaminated walls of the neck. This showed that the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, on dust, rather than spontaneously generating within the liquid or from the action of pure air.[44][69]
+
+These were some of the most important experiments disproving the theory of spontaneous generation, for which Pasteur won the Alhumbert Prize in 1862.[67] He concluded that:[44][59]
+
+Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment. There is no known circumstance in which it can be confirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves.
+
+Pasteur's later work on diseases included work on chicken cholera. He received cultures from Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint, and cultivated them in chicken broth.[70] During this work, a culture of the responsible bacteria had spoiled and failed to induce the disease in some chickens he was infecting with the disease. Upon reusing these healthy chickens, Pasteur discovered he could not infect them, even with fresh bacteria; the weakened bacteria had caused the chickens to become immune to the disease, though they had caused only mild symptoms.[4][8]
+
+In 1879, his assistant, Charles Chamberland (of French origin), had been instructed to inoculate the chickens after Pasteur went on holiday. Chamberland failed to do this and went on holiday himself. On his return, the month-old cultures made the chickens unwell, but instead of the infections being fatal, as they usually were, the chickens recovered completely. Chamberland assumed an error had been made, and wanted to discard the apparently faulty culture, but Pasteur stopped him.[71][72] He inoculated the chickens with virulent bacteria that killed other chickens, and they survived. Pasteur concluded that the animals were now immune to the disease.[73]
+
+In December 1879, Pasteur used a weakened culture of the bacteria to inoculate chickens. The chickens survived, and when he inoculated them with a virulent strain, they were immune to it. In 1880, Pasteur presented his results to the French Academy of Sciences, saying that the bacteria were weakened by contact with oxygen.[70]
+
+In the 1870s, he applied this immunization method to anthrax, which affected cattle, and aroused interest in combating other diseases. Pasteur cultivated bacteria from the blood of animals infected with anthrax. When he inoculated animals with the bacteria, anthrax occurred, proving that the bacteria was the cause of the disease.[74] Many cattle were dying of anthrax in "cursed fields".[59] Pasteur was told that sheep that died from anthrax were buried in the field. Pasteur thought that earthworms might have brought the bacteria to the surface. He found anthrax bacteria in earthworms' excrement, showing that he was correct.[59] He told the farmers not to bury dead animals in the fields.[75]
+
+In 1880, Pasteur's rival Jean-Joseph-Henri Toussaint, a veterinary surgeon, used carbolic acid to kill anthrax bacilli and tested the vaccine on sheep. Pasteur thought that this type of killed vaccine should not work because he believed that attenuated bacteria used up nutrients that the bacteria needed to grow. He thought oxidizing bacteria made them less virulent.[76] In early 1881, Pasteur discovered that growing anthrax bacilli at about 42 °C made them unable to produce spores,[77] and he described this method in a speech to the French Academy of Sciences on February 28.[78] Later in 1881, veterinarian Hippolyte Rossignol proposed that the Société d'agriculture de Melun organize an experiment to test Pasteur's vaccine. Pasteur agreed, and the experiment, conducted at Pouilly-le-Fort on sheep, goats and cows, was successful. Pasteur did not directly disclose how he prepared the vaccines used at Pouilly-le-Fort.[79][77] His laboratory notebooks, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, show that he actually used heat and potassium dichromate, similar to Toussaint's method.[80][42][81]
+
+The notion of a weak form of a disease causing immunity to the virulent version was not new; this had been known for a long time for smallpox. Inoculation with smallpox (variolation) was known to result in a much less severe disease, and greatly reduced mortality, in comparison with the naturally acquired disease.[82] Edward Jenner had also studied vaccination using cowpox (vaccinia) to give cross-immunity to smallpox in the late 1790s, and by the early 1800s vaccination had spread to most of Europe.[83]
+
+The difference between smallpox vaccination and anthrax or chicken cholera vaccination was that the latter two disease organisms had been artificially weakened, so a naturally weak form of the disease organism did not need to be found.[80] This discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases, and Pasteur gave these artificially weakened diseases the generic name of "vaccines", in honour of Jenner's discovery.[84]
+
+In 1876, Robert Koch had shown that Bacillus anthracis caused anthrax.[85] In his papers published between 1878 and 1880, Pasteur only mentioned Koch's work in a footnote. Koch met Pasteur at the Seventh International Medical Congress in 1881. A few months later, Koch wrote that Pasteur had used impure cultures and made errors. In 1882, Pasteur replied to Koch in a speech, to which Koch responded aggressively.[8] Koch stated that Pasteur tested his vaccine on unsuitable animals and that Pasteur's research was not properly scientific.[44] In 1882, Koch wrote "On the Anthrax Inoculation", in which he refuted several of Pasteur's conclusions about anthrax and criticized Pasteur for keeping his methods secret, jumping to conclusions, and being imprecise. In 1883, Pasteur wrote that he used cultures prepared in a similar way to his successful fermentation experiments and that Koch misinterpreted statistics and ignored Pasteur's work on silkworms.[85]
+
+In 1882, Pasteur sent his assistant Louis Thuillier to southern France because of an epizootic of swine erysipelas.[86] Thuillier identified the bacillus that caused the disease in March 1883.[58] Pasteur and Thuillier increased the bacillus's virulence after passing it through pigeons. Then they passed the bacillus through rabbits, weakening it and obtaining a vaccine. Pasteur and Thuillier incorrectly described the bacterium as a figure-eight shape. Roux described the bacterium as stick-shaped in 1884.[87]
+
+Pasteur produced the first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits, and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue.[59][88] The rabies vaccine was initially created by Emile Roux, a French doctor and a colleague of Pasteur, who had produced a killed vaccine using this method.[44] The vaccine had been tested in 50 dogs before its first human trial.[89][90] This vaccine was used on 9-year-old Joseph Meister, on July 6, 1885, after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog.[42][88] This was done at some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy.[6] After consulting with physicians, he decided to go ahead with the treatment.[91] Over 11 days, Meister received 13 inoculations, each inoculation using viruses that had been weakened for a shorter period of time.[92] Three months later he examined Meister and found that he was in good health.[91][93] Pasteur was hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued.[6] Analysis of his laboratory notebooks shows that Pasteur had treated two people before his vaccination of Meister. One survived but may not actually have had rabies, and the other died of rabies.[92][94] Pasteur began treatment of Jean-Baptiste Jupille on October 20, 1885, and the treatment was successful.[92] Later in 1885, people, including four children from the United States, went to Pasteur's laboratory to be inoculated.[91] In 1886, he treated 350 people, of which only one developed rabies.[92] The treatment's success laid the foundations for the manufacture of many other vaccines. The first of the Pasteur Institutes was also built on the basis of this achievement.[42]
+
+In The Story of San Michele, Axel Munthe writes of some risks Pasteur undertook in the rabies vaccine research:[95]
+
+Pasteur himself was absolutely fearless. Anxious to secure a sample of saliva straight from the jaws of a rabid dog, I once saw him with the glass tube held between his lips draw a few drops of the deadly saliva from the mouth of a rabid bull-dog, held on the table by two assistants, their hands protected by leather gloves.
+
+Because of his study in germs, Pasteur encouraged doctors to sanitize their hands and equipment before surgery. Prior to this, few doctors or their assistants practiced these procedures.
+
+A French national hero at age 55, in 1878 Pasteur discreetly told his family never to reveal his laboratory notebooks to anyone. His family obeyed, and all his documents were held and inherited in secrecy. Finally, in 1964 Pasteur's grandson and last surviving male descendant, Pasteur Vallery-Radot, donated the papers to the French national library (Bibliothèque nationale de France). Yet the papers were restricted for historical studies until the death of Vallery-Radot in 1971. The documents were given a catalogue number only in 1985.[96]
+
+In 1995, the centennial of the death of Louis Pasteur, a historian of science Gerald L. Geison published an analysis of Pasteur's private notebooks in his The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, and declared that Pasteur had given several misleading accounts and played deceptions in his most important discoveries.[9][97] Max Perutz published a defense of Pasteur in The New York Review of Books.[98] Based on further examinations of Pasteur's documents, French immunologist Patrice Debré concluded in his book Louis Pasteur (1998) that, in spite of his genius, Pasteur had some faults. A book review states that Debré "sometimes finds him unfair, combative, arrogant, unattractive in attitude, inflexible and even dogmatic".[99][100]
+
+Scientists before Pasteur had studied fermentation. In the 1830s, Charles Cagniard-Latour, Friedrich Traugott Kützing and Theodor Schwann used microscopes to study yeasts and concluded that yeasts were living organisms. In 1839, Justus von Liebig, Friedrich Wöhler and Jöns Jacob Berzelius stated that yeast was not an organism and was produced when air acted on plant juice.[51]
+
+In 1855, Antoine Béchamp, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Montpellier, conducted experiments with sucrose solutions and concluded that water was the factor for fermentation.[101] He changed his conclusion in 1858, stating that fermentation was directly related to the growth of moulds, which required air for growth. He regarded himself as the first to show the role of microorganisms in fermentation.[102][47]
+
+Pasteur started his experiments in 1857 and published his findings in 1858 (April issue of Comptes Rendus Chimie, Béchamp's paper appeared in January issue). Béchamp noted that Pasteur did not bring any novel idea or experiments. On the other hand, Béchamp was probably aware of Pasteur's 1857 preliminary works. With both scientists claiming priority on the discovery, a dispute, extending to several areas, lasted throughout their lives.[103][104]
+
+However, Béchamp was on the losing side, as the BMJ obituary remarked: His name was "associated with bygone controversies as to priority which it would be unprofitable to recall".[105] Béchamp proposed the incorrect theory of microzymes. According to K. L. Manchester, anti-vivisectionists and proponents of alternative medicine promoted Béchamp and microzymes, unjustifiably claiming that Pasteur plagiarized Béchamp.[47]
+
+Pasteur thought that succinic acid inverted sucrose. In 1860, Marcellin Berthelot isolated invertase and showed that succinic acid did not invert sucrose.[51] Pasteur believed that fermentation was only due to living cells. Hans Buchner discovered that zymase catalyzed fermentation, showing that fermentation was catalyzed by enzymes within cells.[106] Eduard Buchner also discovered that fermentation could take place outside living cells.[107]
+
+Pasteur publicly claimed his success in developing the anthrax vaccine in 1881.[93] However, his admirer-turned-rival Toussaint was the one who developed the first vaccine. Toussaint isolated the bacteria that caused chicken cholera (later named Pasteurella in honour of Pasteur) in 1879 and gave samples to Pasteur who used them for his own works.[108] On July 12, 1880, Toussaint presented his successful result to the French Academy of Sciences, using an attenuated vaccine against anthrax in dogs and sheep.[109] Pasteur on grounds of jealousy contested the discovery by publicly displaying his vaccination method at Pouilly-le-Fort on May 5, 1881.[110] Pasteur gave a misleading account of the preparation of the anthrax vaccine used in the experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort. He used potassium dichromate to prepare the vaccine.[9] The promotional experiment was a success and helped Pasteur sell his products, getting the benefits and glory.[110][111][112]
+
+Pasteur experiments are often cited as against medical ethics, especially on his vaccination of Meister. He did not have any experience in medical practice, and more importantly, lacked a medical license. This is often cited as a serious threat to his professional and personal reputation.[113][114] His closest partner Émile Roux, who had medical qualifications, refused to participate in the clinical trial, likely because he considered it unjust.[92] However, Pasteur executed vaccination of the boy under the close watch of practising physicians Jacques-Joseph Grancher, head of the Paris Children's Hospital's paediatric clinic, and Alfred Vulpian, a member of the Commission on Rabies. He was not allowed to hold the syringe, although the inoculations were entirely under his supervision.[91] It was Grancher who was responsible for the injections, and he defended Pasteur before the French National Academy of Medicine in the issue.[115]
+
+Pasteur has also been criticized for keeping secrecy of his procedure and not giving proper pre-clinical trials on animals.[44] Pasteur stated that he kept his procedure secret in order to control its quality. He later disclosed his procedures to a small group of scientists. Pasteur wrote that he had successfully vaccinated 50 rabid dogs before using it on Meister.[116][117][118] According to Geison, Pasteur's laboratory notebooks show that he had vaccinated only 11 dogs.[44]
+
+Meister never showed any symptoms of rabies,[92] but the vaccination has not been proved to be the reason. One source estimates the probability of Meister contracting rabies at 10%.[80]
+
+Pasteur was awarded 1,500 francs in 1853 by the Pharmaceutical Society for the synthesis of racemic acid.[119] In 1856 the Royal Society of London presented him the Rumford Medal for his discovery of the nature of racemic acid and its relations to polarized light,[120] and the Copley Medal in 1874 for his work on fermentation.[121] He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1869.[1]
+
+The French Academy of Sciences awarded Pasteur the 1859 Montyon Prize for experimental physiology in 1860,[34] and the Jecker Prize in 1861 and the Alhumbert Prize in 1862 for his experimental refutation of spontaneous generation.[67][122] Though he lost elections in 1857 and 1861 for membership to the French Academy of Sciences, he won the 1862 election for membership to the mineralogy section.[123] He was elected to permanent secretary of the physical science section of the academy in 1887 and held the position until 1889.[124]
+
+In 1873 Pasteur was elected to the Académie Nationale de Médecine[125] and was made the commander in the Brazilian Order of the Rose.[126] In 1881 he was elected to a seat at the Académie française left vacant by Émile Littré.[127] Pasteur received the Albert Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in 1882.[128] In 1883 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[129] On June 8, 1886, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II awarded Pasteur with the Order of the Medjidie (I Class) and 10000 Ottoman liras.[130] He was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1889.[131] Pasteur won the Leeuwenhoek Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to microbiology in 1895.[132]
+
+Pasteur was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1853, promoted to Officer in 1863, to Commander in 1868, to Grand Officer in 1878 and made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1881.[133][128]
+
+In many localities worldwide, streets are named in his honor. For example, in the US: Palo Alto and Irvine, California, Boston and Polk, Florida, adjacent to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; Jonquière, Québec; San Salvador de Jujuy and Buenos Aires (Argentina), Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, in the United Kingdom, Jericho and Wulguru in Queensland, (Australia); Phnom Penh in Cambodia; Ho Chi Minh City; Batna in Algeria; Bandung in Indonesia, Tehran in Iran, near the central campus of the Warsaw University in Warsaw, Poland; adjacent to the Odessa State Medical University in Odessa, Ukraine; Milan in Italy and Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Timișoara in Romania. The Avenue Pasteur in Saigon, Vietnam, is one of the few streets in that city to retain its French name. Avenue Louis Pasteur in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area in Boston, Massachusetts was named in his honor in the French manner with "Avenue" preceding the name of the dedicatee.[134]
+
+Both the Institut Pasteur and Université Louis Pasteur were named after Pasteur. The schools Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and Lycée Louis Pasteur in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, are named after him. In South Africa, the Louis Pasteur Private Hospital in Pretoria, and Life Louis Pasteur Private Hospital, Bloemfontein, are named after him. Louis Pasteur University Hospital in Košice, Slovakia is also named after Pasteur.
+
+A statue of Pasteur is erected at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, California. A bronze bust of him resides on the French Campus of Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco Medical Center in San Francisco. The sculpture was designed by Harriet G. Moore and cast in 1984 by Artworks Foundry.[135]
+
+The UNESCO/Institut Pasteur Medal was created on the centenary of Pasteur's death, and is given every two years in his name, "in recognition of outstanding research contributing to a beneficial impact on human health".[136]
+
+After developing the rabies vaccine, Pasteur proposed an institute for the vaccine.[137] In 1887, fundraising for the Pasteur Institute began, with donations from many countries. The official statute was registered in 1887, stating that the institute's purposes were "the treatment of rabies according to the method developed by M. Pasteur" and "the study of virulent and contagious diseases".[91] The institute was inaugurated on November 14, 1888.[91] He brought together scientists with various specialties. The first five departments were directed by two graduates of the École Normale Supérieure: Émile Duclaux (general microbiology research) and Charles Chamberland (microbe research applied to hygiene), as well as a biologist, Élie Metchnikoff (morphological microbe research) and two physicians, Jacques-Joseph Grancher (rabies) and Émile Roux (technical microbe research). One year after the inauguration of the institute, Roux set up the first course of microbiology ever taught in the world, then entitled Cours de Microbie Technique (Course of microbe research techniques). Since 1891 the Pasteur Institute had been extended to different countries, and currently there are 32 institutes in 29 countries in various parts of the world.[138]
+
+His grandson, Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot, wrote that Pasteur had kept from his Catholic background only a spiritualism without religious practice.[139] However, Catholic observers often said that Pasteur remained an ardent Christian throughout his whole life, and his son-in-law wrote, in a biography of him:
+
+Absolute faith in God and in Eternity, and a conviction that the power for good given to us in this world will be continued beyond it, were feelings which pervaded his whole life; the virtues of the gospel had ever been present to him. Full of respect for the form of religion which had been that of his forefathers, he came simply to it and naturally for spiritual help in these last weeks of his life.[140]
+
+The Literary Digest of 18 October 1902 gives this statement from Pasteur that he prayed while he worked:
+
+Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.
+
+Maurice Vallery-Radot, grandson of the brother of the son-in-law of Pasteur and outspoken Catholic, also holds that Pasteur fundamentally remained Catholic.[141] According to both Pasteur Vallery-Radot and Maurice Vallery-Radot, the following well-known quotation attributed to Pasteur is apocryphal:[142] "The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant's wife".[4] According to Maurice Vallery-Radot,[143] the false quotation appeared for the first time shortly after the death of Pasteur.[144] However, despite his belief in God, it has been said that his views were that of a freethinker rather than a Catholic, a spiritual more than a religious man.[145][146] He was also against mixing science with religion.[147][148]
+
+In 1868, Pasteur suffered a severe brain stroke that paralysed the left side of his body, but he recovered.[149] A stroke or uremia in 1894 severely impaired his health.[150][151][152] Failing to fully recover, he died on September 28, 1895, near Paris.[42] He was given a state funeral and was buried in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but his remains were reinterred in the Pasteur Institute in Paris,[153] in a vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.[154]
+
+Pasteur's principal published works are:[4]

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+Louis Pasteur (/ˈluːi pæˈstɜːr/, French: [lwi pastœʁ]; December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French biologist, microbiologist and chemist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and prevention of diseases, and his discoveries have saved many lives ever since. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax.
+
+His medical discoveries provided direct support for the germ theory of disease and its application in clinical medicine. He is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, and is popularly known as the "father of microbiology".[4][5][6]
+
+Pasteur was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation. He performed experiments that showed that, without contamination, microorganisms could not develop. Under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, he demonstrated that in sterilized and sealed flasks, nothing ever developed; and, conversely, in sterilized but open flasks, microorganisms could grow.[7] Although Pasteur was not the first to propose the germ theory, his experiments indicated its correctness and convinced most of Europe that it was true.
+
+Today, he is often regarded as one of the fathers of germ theory.[8] Pasteur made significant discoveries in chemistry, most notably on the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals and racemization. Early in his career, his investigation of tartaric acid resulted in the first resolution of what is now called optical isomers. His work led the way to the current understanding of a fundamental principle in the structure of organic compounds.
+
+He was the director of the Pasteur Institute, established in 1887, until his death, and his body was interred in a vault beneath the institute. Although Pasteur made groundbreaking experiments, his reputation became associated with various controversies. Historical reassessment of his notebook revealed that he practiced deception to overcome his rivals.[9][10]
+
+Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole, Jura, France, to a Catholic family of a poor tanner.[4] He was the third child of Jean-Joseph Pasteur and Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui. The family moved to Marnoz in 1826 and then to Arbois in 1827.[11][12] Pasteur entered primary school in 1831.[13]
+
+He was an average student in his early years, and not particularly academic, as his interests were fishing and sketching.[4] He drew many pastels and portraits of his parents, friends and neighbors.[14] Pasteur attended secondary school at the Collège d'Arbois.[15] In October 1838, he left for Paris to join the Pension Barbet, but became homesick and returned in November.[16]
+
+In 1839, he entered the Collège Royal at Besançon to study philosophy and earned his Bachelor of Letters degree in 1840.[17] He was appointed a tutor at the Besançon college while continuing a degree science course with special mathematics.[18] He failed his first examination in 1841. He managed to pass the baccalauréat scientifique (general science) degree in 1842 from Dijon but with a mediocre grade in chemistry.[19]
+
+Later in 1842, Pasteur took the entrance test for the École Normale Supérieure.[20] He passed the first set of tests, but because his ranking was low, Pasteur decided not to continue and try again next year.[21] He went back to the Pension Barbet to prepare for the test. He also attended classes at the Lycée Saint-Louis and lectures of Jean-Baptiste Dumas at the Sorbonne.[22] In 1843, he passed the test with a high ranking and entered the École Normale Supérieure.[23] In 1845 he received the licencié ès sciences (Master of Science) degree.[24] In 1846, he was appointed professor of physics at the Collège de Tournon (now called Lycée Gabriel-Faure [fr]) in Ardèche, but the chemist Antoine Jérôme Balard wanted him back at the École Normale Supérieure as a graduate laboratory assistant (agrégé préparateur).[25] He joined Balard and simultaneously started his research in crystallography and in 1847, he submitted his two theses, one in chemistry and the other in physics.[24][26]
+
+After serving briefly as professor of physics at the Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg,[27] where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849,[28] and together had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood;[29] the other three died of typhoid.
+
+Pasteur was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg in 1848, and became the chair of chemistry in 1852.[30] In 1854, he was named dean of the new faculty of sciences at University of Lille, where he began his studies on fermentation.[31] It was on this occasion that Pasteur uttered his oft-quoted remark: "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind").[32]
+
+In 1857, he moved to Paris as the director of scientific studies at the École Normale Supérieure where he took control from 1858 to 1867 and introduced a series of reforms to improve the standard of scientific work. The examinations became more rigid, which led to better results, greater competition, and increased prestige. Many of his decrees, however, were rigid and authoritarian, leading to two serious student revolts. During "the bean revolt" he decreed that a mutton stew, which students had refused to eat, would be served and eaten every Monday. On another occasion he threatened to expel any student caught smoking, and 73 of the 80 students in the school resigned.[33]
+
+In 1863, he was appointed professor of geology, physics, and chemistry at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, a position he held until his resignation in 1867. In 1867, he became the chair of organic chemistry at the Sorbonne,[34] but he later gave up the position because of poor health.[35] In 1867, the École Normale's laboratory of physiological chemistry was created at Pasteur's request,[34] and he was the laboratory's director from 1867 to 1888.[36] In Paris, he established the Pasteur Institute in 1887, in which he was its director for the rest of his life.[5][6]
+
+In Pasteur's early work as a chemist, beginning at the École Normale Supérieure, and continuing at Strasbourg and Lille, he examined the chemical, optical and crystallographic properties of a group of compounds known as tartrates.[37]
+
+He resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid in 1848.[38][39][40][41] A solution of this compound derived from living things rotated the plane of polarization of light passing through it.[37] The problem was that tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis had no such effect, even though its chemical reactions were identical and its elemental composition was the same.[42]
+
+Pasteur noticed that crystals of tartrates had small faces. Then he observed that, in racemic mixtures of tartrates, half of the crystals were right-handed and half were left-handed. In solution, the right-handed compound was dextrorotatory, and the left-handed one was levorotatory.[37] Pasteur determined that optical activity related to the shape of the crystals, and that an asymmetric internal arrangement of the molecules of the compound was responsible for twisting the light.[31] The (2R,3R)- and (2S,3S)- tartrates were isometric, non-superposable mirror images of each other. This was the first time anyone had demonstrated molecular chirality, and also the first explanation of isomerism.[37]
+
+Some historians consider Pasteur's work in this area to be his "most profound and most original contributions to science", and his "greatest scientific discovery."[37]
+
+Pasteur was motivated to investigate fermentation while working at Lille. In 1856 a local wine manufacturer, M. Bigot, whose son was one of Pasteur's students, sought for his advice on the problems of making beetroot alcohol and souring.[43][44]
+
+According to his son-in-law, René Vallery-Radot, in August 1857 Pasteur sent a paper about lactic acid fermentation to the Société des Sciences de Lille, but the paper was read three months later.[45] A memoire was subsequently published on November 30, 1857.[46] In the memoir, he developed his ideas stating that: "I intend to establish that, just as there is an alcoholic ferment, the yeast of beer, which is found everywhere that sugar is decomposed into alcohol and carbonic acid, so also there is a particular ferment, a lactic yeast, always present when sugar becomes lactic acid."[47]
+
+Pasteur also wrote about alcoholic fermentation.[48] It was published in full form in 1858.[49][50] Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Justus von Liebig had proposed the theory that fermentation was caused by decomposition. Pasteur demonstrated that this theory was incorrect, and that yeast was responsible for fermentation to produce alcohol from sugar.[51] He also demonstrated that, when a different microorganism contaminated the wine, lactic acid was produced, making the wine sour.[44] In 1861, Pasteur observed that less sugar fermented per part of yeast when the yeast was exposed to air.[51] The lower rate of fermentation aerobically became known as the Pasteur effect.[52]
+
+Pasteur's research also showed that the growth of micro-organisms was responsible for spoiling beverages, such as beer, wine and milk. With this established, he invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to a temperature between 60 and 100 °C.[53] This killed most bacteria and moulds already present within them. Pasteur and Claude Bernard completed tests on blood and urine on April 20, 1862.[54] Pasteur patented the process, to fight the "diseases" of wine, in 1865.[53] The method became known as pasteurization, and was soon applied to beer and milk.[55]
+
+Beverage contamination led Pasteur to the idea that micro-organisms infecting animals and humans cause disease. He proposed preventing the entry of micro-organisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.[56]
+
+In 1866, Pasteur published Etudes sur le Vin, about the diseases of wine, and he published Etudes sur la Bière in 1876, concerning the diseases of beer.[51]
+
+In the early 19th century, Agostino Bassi had shown that muscardine was caused by a fungus that infected silkworms.[57] Since 1853, two diseases called pébrine and flacherie had been infecting great numbers of silkworms in southern France, and by 1865 they were causing huge losses to farmers. In 1865, Pasteur went to Alès and worked for five years until 1870.[58][59]
+
+Silkworms with pébrine were covered in corpuscles. In the first three years, Pasteur thought that the corpuscles were a symptom of the disease. In 1870, he concluded that the corpuscles were the cause of pébrine (it is now known that the cause is a microsporidian).[57] Pasteur also showed that the disease was hereditary.[60] Pasteur developed a system to prevent pébrine: after the female moths laid their eggs, the moths were turned into a pulp. The pulp was examined with a microscope, and if corpuscles were observed, the eggs were destroyed.[61][60] Pasteur concluded that bacteria caused flacherie. The primary cause is currently thought to be viruses.[57] The spread of flacherie could be accidental or hereditary. Hygiene could be used to prevent accidental flacherie. Moths whose digestive cavities did not contain the microorganisms causing flacherie were used to lay eggs, preventing hereditary flacherie.[62]
+
+Following his fermentation experiments, Pasteur demonstrated that the skin of grapes was the natural source of yeasts, and that sterilized grapes and grape juice never fermented. He drew grape juice from under the skin with sterilized needles, and also covered grapes with sterilized cloth. Both experiments could not produce wine in sterilized containers.[44]
+
+His findings and ideas were against the prevailing notion of spontaneous generation. He received a particularly stern criticism from Félix Archimède Pouchet, who was director of the Rouen Museum of Natural History. To settle the debate between the eminent scientists, the French Academy of Sciences offered the Alhumbert Prize carrying 2,500 francs to whoever could experimentally demonstrate for or against the doctrine.[63][64][65]
+
+Pouchet stated that air everywhere could cause spontaneous generation of living organisms in liquids.[66] In the late 1850s, he performed experiments and claimed that they were evidence of spontaneous generation.[67][63] Francesco Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani had provided some evidence against spontaneous generation in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively. Spallanzani's experiments in 1765 suggested that air contaminated broths with bacteria. In the 1860s, Pasteur repeated Spallanzani's experiments, but Pouchet reported a different result using a different broth.[58]
+
+Pasteur performed several experiments to disprove spontaneous generation. He placed boiled liquid in a flask and let hot air enter the flask. Then he closed the flask, and no organisms grew in it.[67] In another experiment, when he opened flasks containing boiled liquid, dust entered the flasks, causing organisms to grow in some of them. The number of flasks in which organisms grew was lower at higher altitudes, showing that air at high altitudes contained less dust and fewer organisms.[44][68] Pasteur also used swan neck flasks containing a fermentable liquid. Air was allowed to enter the flask via a long curving tube that made dust particles stick to it. Nothing grew in the broths unless the flasks were tilted, making the liquid touch the contaminated walls of the neck. This showed that the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, on dust, rather than spontaneously generating within the liquid or from the action of pure air.[44][69]
+
+These were some of the most important experiments disproving the theory of spontaneous generation, for which Pasteur won the Alhumbert Prize in 1862.[67] He concluded that:[44][59]
+
+Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment. There is no known circumstance in which it can be confirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves.
+
+Pasteur's later work on diseases included work on chicken cholera. He received cultures from Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint, and cultivated them in chicken broth.[70] During this work, a culture of the responsible bacteria had spoiled and failed to induce the disease in some chickens he was infecting with the disease. Upon reusing these healthy chickens, Pasteur discovered he could not infect them, even with fresh bacteria; the weakened bacteria had caused the chickens to become immune to the disease, though they had caused only mild symptoms.[4][8]
+
+In 1879, his assistant, Charles Chamberland (of French origin), had been instructed to inoculate the chickens after Pasteur went on holiday. Chamberland failed to do this and went on holiday himself. On his return, the month-old cultures made the chickens unwell, but instead of the infections being fatal, as they usually were, the chickens recovered completely. Chamberland assumed an error had been made, and wanted to discard the apparently faulty culture, but Pasteur stopped him.[71][72] He inoculated the chickens with virulent bacteria that killed other chickens, and they survived. Pasteur concluded that the animals were now immune to the disease.[73]
+
+In December 1879, Pasteur used a weakened culture of the bacteria to inoculate chickens. The chickens survived, and when he inoculated them with a virulent strain, they were immune to it. In 1880, Pasteur presented his results to the French Academy of Sciences, saying that the bacteria were weakened by contact with oxygen.[70]
+
+In the 1870s, he applied this immunization method to anthrax, which affected cattle, and aroused interest in combating other diseases. Pasteur cultivated bacteria from the blood of animals infected with anthrax. When he inoculated animals with the bacteria, anthrax occurred, proving that the bacteria was the cause of the disease.[74] Many cattle were dying of anthrax in "cursed fields".[59] Pasteur was told that sheep that died from anthrax were buried in the field. Pasteur thought that earthworms might have brought the bacteria to the surface. He found anthrax bacteria in earthworms' excrement, showing that he was correct.[59] He told the farmers not to bury dead animals in the fields.[75]
+
+In 1880, Pasteur's rival Jean-Joseph-Henri Toussaint, a veterinary surgeon, used carbolic acid to kill anthrax bacilli and tested the vaccine on sheep. Pasteur thought that this type of killed vaccine should not work because he believed that attenuated bacteria used up nutrients that the bacteria needed to grow. He thought oxidizing bacteria made them less virulent.[76] In early 1881, Pasteur discovered that growing anthrax bacilli at about 42 °C made them unable to produce spores,[77] and he described this method in a speech to the French Academy of Sciences on February 28.[78] Later in 1881, veterinarian Hippolyte Rossignol proposed that the Société d'agriculture de Melun organize an experiment to test Pasteur's vaccine. Pasteur agreed, and the experiment, conducted at Pouilly-le-Fort on sheep, goats and cows, was successful. Pasteur did not directly disclose how he prepared the vaccines used at Pouilly-le-Fort.[79][77] His laboratory notebooks, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, show that he actually used heat and potassium dichromate, similar to Toussaint's method.[80][42][81]
+
+The notion of a weak form of a disease causing immunity to the virulent version was not new; this had been known for a long time for smallpox. Inoculation with smallpox (variolation) was known to result in a much less severe disease, and greatly reduced mortality, in comparison with the naturally acquired disease.[82] Edward Jenner had also studied vaccination using cowpox (vaccinia) to give cross-immunity to smallpox in the late 1790s, and by the early 1800s vaccination had spread to most of Europe.[83]
+
+The difference between smallpox vaccination and anthrax or chicken cholera vaccination was that the latter two disease organisms had been artificially weakened, so a naturally weak form of the disease organism did not need to be found.[80] This discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases, and Pasteur gave these artificially weakened diseases the generic name of "vaccines", in honour of Jenner's discovery.[84]
+
+In 1876, Robert Koch had shown that Bacillus anthracis caused anthrax.[85] In his papers published between 1878 and 1880, Pasteur only mentioned Koch's work in a footnote. Koch met Pasteur at the Seventh International Medical Congress in 1881. A few months later, Koch wrote that Pasteur had used impure cultures and made errors. In 1882, Pasteur replied to Koch in a speech, to which Koch responded aggressively.[8] Koch stated that Pasteur tested his vaccine on unsuitable animals and that Pasteur's research was not properly scientific.[44] In 1882, Koch wrote "On the Anthrax Inoculation", in which he refuted several of Pasteur's conclusions about anthrax and criticized Pasteur for keeping his methods secret, jumping to conclusions, and being imprecise. In 1883, Pasteur wrote that he used cultures prepared in a similar way to his successful fermentation experiments and that Koch misinterpreted statistics and ignored Pasteur's work on silkworms.[85]
+
+In 1882, Pasteur sent his assistant Louis Thuillier to southern France because of an epizootic of swine erysipelas.[86] Thuillier identified the bacillus that caused the disease in March 1883.[58] Pasteur and Thuillier increased the bacillus's virulence after passing it through pigeons. Then they passed the bacillus through rabbits, weakening it and obtaining a vaccine. Pasteur and Thuillier incorrectly described the bacterium as a figure-eight shape. Roux described the bacterium as stick-shaped in 1884.[87]
+
+Pasteur produced the first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits, and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue.[59][88] The rabies vaccine was initially created by Emile Roux, a French doctor and a colleague of Pasteur, who had produced a killed vaccine using this method.[44] The vaccine had been tested in 50 dogs before its first human trial.[89][90] This vaccine was used on 9-year-old Joseph Meister, on July 6, 1885, after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog.[42][88] This was done at some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy.[6] After consulting with physicians, he decided to go ahead with the treatment.[91] Over 11 days, Meister received 13 inoculations, each inoculation using viruses that had been weakened for a shorter period of time.[92] Three months later he examined Meister and found that he was in good health.[91][93] Pasteur was hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued.[6] Analysis of his laboratory notebooks shows that Pasteur had treated two people before his vaccination of Meister. One survived but may not actually have had rabies, and the other died of rabies.[92][94] Pasteur began treatment of Jean-Baptiste Jupille on October 20, 1885, and the treatment was successful.[92] Later in 1885, people, including four children from the United States, went to Pasteur's laboratory to be inoculated.[91] In 1886, he treated 350 people, of which only one developed rabies.[92] The treatment's success laid the foundations for the manufacture of many other vaccines. The first of the Pasteur Institutes was also built on the basis of this achievement.[42]
+
+In The Story of San Michele, Axel Munthe writes of some risks Pasteur undertook in the rabies vaccine research:[95]
+
+Pasteur himself was absolutely fearless. Anxious to secure a sample of saliva straight from the jaws of a rabid dog, I once saw him with the glass tube held between his lips draw a few drops of the deadly saliva from the mouth of a rabid bull-dog, held on the table by two assistants, their hands protected by leather gloves.
+
+Because of his study in germs, Pasteur encouraged doctors to sanitize their hands and equipment before surgery. Prior to this, few doctors or their assistants practiced these procedures.
+
+A French national hero at age 55, in 1878 Pasteur discreetly told his family never to reveal his laboratory notebooks to anyone. His family obeyed, and all his documents were held and inherited in secrecy. Finally, in 1964 Pasteur's grandson and last surviving male descendant, Pasteur Vallery-Radot, donated the papers to the French national library (Bibliothèque nationale de France). Yet the papers were restricted for historical studies until the death of Vallery-Radot in 1971. The documents were given a catalogue number only in 1985.[96]
+
+In 1995, the centennial of the death of Louis Pasteur, a historian of science Gerald L. Geison published an analysis of Pasteur's private notebooks in his The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, and declared that Pasteur had given several misleading accounts and played deceptions in his most important discoveries.[9][97] Max Perutz published a defense of Pasteur in The New York Review of Books.[98] Based on further examinations of Pasteur's documents, French immunologist Patrice Debré concluded in his book Louis Pasteur (1998) that, in spite of his genius, Pasteur had some faults. A book review states that Debré "sometimes finds him unfair, combative, arrogant, unattractive in attitude, inflexible and even dogmatic".[99][100]
+
+Scientists before Pasteur had studied fermentation. In the 1830s, Charles Cagniard-Latour, Friedrich Traugott Kützing and Theodor Schwann used microscopes to study yeasts and concluded that yeasts were living organisms. In 1839, Justus von Liebig, Friedrich Wöhler and Jöns Jacob Berzelius stated that yeast was not an organism and was produced when air acted on plant juice.[51]
+
+In 1855, Antoine Béchamp, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Montpellier, conducted experiments with sucrose solutions and concluded that water was the factor for fermentation.[101] He changed his conclusion in 1858, stating that fermentation was directly related to the growth of moulds, which required air for growth. He regarded himself as the first to show the role of microorganisms in fermentation.[102][47]
+
+Pasteur started his experiments in 1857 and published his findings in 1858 (April issue of Comptes Rendus Chimie, Béchamp's paper appeared in January issue). Béchamp noted that Pasteur did not bring any novel idea or experiments. On the other hand, Béchamp was probably aware of Pasteur's 1857 preliminary works. With both scientists claiming priority on the discovery, a dispute, extending to several areas, lasted throughout their lives.[103][104]
+
+However, Béchamp was on the losing side, as the BMJ obituary remarked: His name was "associated with bygone controversies as to priority which it would be unprofitable to recall".[105] Béchamp proposed the incorrect theory of microzymes. According to K. L. Manchester, anti-vivisectionists and proponents of alternative medicine promoted Béchamp and microzymes, unjustifiably claiming that Pasteur plagiarized Béchamp.[47]
+
+Pasteur thought that succinic acid inverted sucrose. In 1860, Marcellin Berthelot isolated invertase and showed that succinic acid did not invert sucrose.[51] Pasteur believed that fermentation was only due to living cells. Hans Buchner discovered that zymase catalyzed fermentation, showing that fermentation was catalyzed by enzymes within cells.[106] Eduard Buchner also discovered that fermentation could take place outside living cells.[107]
+
+Pasteur publicly claimed his success in developing the anthrax vaccine in 1881.[93] However, his admirer-turned-rival Toussaint was the one who developed the first vaccine. Toussaint isolated the bacteria that caused chicken cholera (later named Pasteurella in honour of Pasteur) in 1879 and gave samples to Pasteur who used them for his own works.[108] On July 12, 1880, Toussaint presented his successful result to the French Academy of Sciences, using an attenuated vaccine against anthrax in dogs and sheep.[109] Pasteur on grounds of jealousy contested the discovery by publicly displaying his vaccination method at Pouilly-le-Fort on May 5, 1881.[110] Pasteur gave a misleading account of the preparation of the anthrax vaccine used in the experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort. He used potassium dichromate to prepare the vaccine.[9] The promotional experiment was a success and helped Pasteur sell his products, getting the benefits and glory.[110][111][112]
+
+Pasteur experiments are often cited as against medical ethics, especially on his vaccination of Meister. He did not have any experience in medical practice, and more importantly, lacked a medical license. This is often cited as a serious threat to his professional and personal reputation.[113][114] His closest partner Émile Roux, who had medical qualifications, refused to participate in the clinical trial, likely because he considered it unjust.[92] However, Pasteur executed vaccination of the boy under the close watch of practising physicians Jacques-Joseph Grancher, head of the Paris Children's Hospital's paediatric clinic, and Alfred Vulpian, a member of the Commission on Rabies. He was not allowed to hold the syringe, although the inoculations were entirely under his supervision.[91] It was Grancher who was responsible for the injections, and he defended Pasteur before the French National Academy of Medicine in the issue.[115]
+
+Pasteur has also been criticized for keeping secrecy of his procedure and not giving proper pre-clinical trials on animals.[44] Pasteur stated that he kept his procedure secret in order to control its quality. He later disclosed his procedures to a small group of scientists. Pasteur wrote that he had successfully vaccinated 50 rabid dogs before using it on Meister.[116][117][118] According to Geison, Pasteur's laboratory notebooks show that he had vaccinated only 11 dogs.[44]
+
+Meister never showed any symptoms of rabies,[92] but the vaccination has not been proved to be the reason. One source estimates the probability of Meister contracting rabies at 10%.[80]
+
+Pasteur was awarded 1,500 francs in 1853 by the Pharmaceutical Society for the synthesis of racemic acid.[119] In 1856 the Royal Society of London presented him the Rumford Medal for his discovery of the nature of racemic acid and its relations to polarized light,[120] and the Copley Medal in 1874 for his work on fermentation.[121] He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1869.[1]
+
+The French Academy of Sciences awarded Pasteur the 1859 Montyon Prize for experimental physiology in 1860,[34] and the Jecker Prize in 1861 and the Alhumbert Prize in 1862 for his experimental refutation of spontaneous generation.[67][122] Though he lost elections in 1857 and 1861 for membership to the French Academy of Sciences, he won the 1862 election for membership to the mineralogy section.[123] He was elected to permanent secretary of the physical science section of the academy in 1887 and held the position until 1889.[124]
+
+In 1873 Pasteur was elected to the Académie Nationale de Médecine[125] and was made the commander in the Brazilian Order of the Rose.[126] In 1881 he was elected to a seat at the Académie française left vacant by Émile Littré.[127] Pasteur received the Albert Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in 1882.[128] In 1883 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.[129] On June 8, 1886, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II awarded Pasteur with the Order of the Medjidie (I Class) and 10000 Ottoman liras.[130] He was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1889.[131] Pasteur won the Leeuwenhoek Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to microbiology in 1895.[132]
+
+Pasteur was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1853, promoted to Officer in 1863, to Commander in 1868, to Grand Officer in 1878 and made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1881.[133][128]
+
+In many localities worldwide, streets are named in his honor. For example, in the US: Palo Alto and Irvine, California, Boston and Polk, Florida, adjacent to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; Jonquière, Québec; San Salvador de Jujuy and Buenos Aires (Argentina), Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, in the United Kingdom, Jericho and Wulguru in Queensland, (Australia); Phnom Penh in Cambodia; Ho Chi Minh City; Batna in Algeria; Bandung in Indonesia, Tehran in Iran, near the central campus of the Warsaw University in Warsaw, Poland; adjacent to the Odessa State Medical University in Odessa, Ukraine; Milan in Italy and Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Timișoara in Romania. The Avenue Pasteur in Saigon, Vietnam, is one of the few streets in that city to retain its French name. Avenue Louis Pasteur in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area in Boston, Massachusetts was named in his honor in the French manner with "Avenue" preceding the name of the dedicatee.[134]
+
+Both the Institut Pasteur and Université Louis Pasteur were named after Pasteur. The schools Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and Lycée Louis Pasteur in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, are named after him. In South Africa, the Louis Pasteur Private Hospital in Pretoria, and Life Louis Pasteur Private Hospital, Bloemfontein, are named after him. Louis Pasteur University Hospital in Košice, Slovakia is also named after Pasteur.
+
+A statue of Pasteur is erected at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, California. A bronze bust of him resides on the French Campus of Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco Medical Center in San Francisco. The sculpture was designed by Harriet G. Moore and cast in 1984 by Artworks Foundry.[135]
+
+The UNESCO/Institut Pasteur Medal was created on the centenary of Pasteur's death, and is given every two years in his name, "in recognition of outstanding research contributing to a beneficial impact on human health".[136]
+
+After developing the rabies vaccine, Pasteur proposed an institute for the vaccine.[137] In 1887, fundraising for the Pasteur Institute began, with donations from many countries. The official statute was registered in 1887, stating that the institute's purposes were "the treatment of rabies according to the method developed by M. Pasteur" and "the study of virulent and contagious diseases".[91] The institute was inaugurated on November 14, 1888.[91] He brought together scientists with various specialties. The first five departments were directed by two graduates of the École Normale Supérieure: Émile Duclaux (general microbiology research) and Charles Chamberland (microbe research applied to hygiene), as well as a biologist, Élie Metchnikoff (morphological microbe research) and two physicians, Jacques-Joseph Grancher (rabies) and Émile Roux (technical microbe research). One year after the inauguration of the institute, Roux set up the first course of microbiology ever taught in the world, then entitled Cours de Microbie Technique (Course of microbe research techniques). Since 1891 the Pasteur Institute had been extended to different countries, and currently there are 32 institutes in 29 countries in various parts of the world.[138]
+
+His grandson, Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot, wrote that Pasteur had kept from his Catholic background only a spiritualism without religious practice.[139] However, Catholic observers often said that Pasteur remained an ardent Christian throughout his whole life, and his son-in-law wrote, in a biography of him:
+
+Absolute faith in God and in Eternity, and a conviction that the power for good given to us in this world will be continued beyond it, were feelings which pervaded his whole life; the virtues of the gospel had ever been present to him. Full of respect for the form of religion which had been that of his forefathers, he came simply to it and naturally for spiritual help in these last weeks of his life.[140]
+
+The Literary Digest of 18 October 1902 gives this statement from Pasteur that he prayed while he worked:
+
+Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.
+
+Maurice Vallery-Radot, grandson of the brother of the son-in-law of Pasteur and outspoken Catholic, also holds that Pasteur fundamentally remained Catholic.[141] According to both Pasteur Vallery-Radot and Maurice Vallery-Radot, the following well-known quotation attributed to Pasteur is apocryphal:[142] "The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant's wife".[4] According to Maurice Vallery-Radot,[143] the false quotation appeared for the first time shortly after the death of Pasteur.[144] However, despite his belief in God, it has been said that his views were that of a freethinker rather than a Catholic, a spiritual more than a religious man.[145][146] He was also against mixing science with religion.[147][148]
+
+In 1868, Pasteur suffered a severe brain stroke that paralysed the left side of his body, but he recovered.[149] A stroke or uremia in 1894 severely impaired his health.[150][151][152] Failing to fully recover, he died on September 28, 1895, near Paris.[42] He was given a state funeral and was buried in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but his remains were reinterred in the Pasteur Institute in Paris,[153] in a vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.[154]
+
+Pasteur's principal published works are:[4]

en/3528.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@
+Louis VI (late 1081 – 1 August 1137), called the Fat (French: le Gros) or the Fighter (French: le Batailleur), was King of France from 1108 to 1137.[1]
+
+Chronicles called him "King of Saint-Denis". Louis was the first member of the house of Capet to make a lasting contribution to centralizing the institutions of royal power.[2] He spent almost all of his twenty-nine-year reign fighting either the "robber barons" who plagued Paris[3] or the Norman kings of England for their continental possession of Normandy. Nonetheless, Louis VI managed to reinforce his power considerably and became one of the first strong kings of France since the death of Charlemagne in 814.
+
+Louis was a warrior-king, but by his forties his weight had become so great that it was increasingly difficult for him to lead in the field. A biography – The Deeds of Louis the Fat, prepared by his loyal advisor Abbot Suger of Saint Denis – offers a fully developed portrait of his character, in contrast to what little historians know about most of his predecessors.
+
+Louis was born around 1081 in Paris, the son of Philip I and Bertha of Holland.[4]
+
+Suger tells us: "In his youth, growing courage matured his spirit with youthful vigour, making him bored with hunting and the boyish games with which others of his age used to enjoy themselves and forget the pursuit of arms." And..."How valiant he was in youth, and with what energy he repelled the king of the English, William Rufus, when he attacked Louis' inherited kingdom."[5]
+
+Louis married Lucienne de Rochefort, the daughter of his father's seneschal, in 1104, but repudiated her three years later. They had no children.
+
+On 3 August 1115 Louis married Adelaide of Maurienne, daughter of Humbert II of Savoy and of Gisela of Burgundy, and niece of Pope Callixtus II. They had eight children. Adelaide was one of the most politically active of all France's medieval queens. Her name appears on 45 royal charters from the reign of Louis VI. During her time as queen (1115–1137), royal charters were dated with both her regnal year and that of the king.
+
+Suger became Louis's adviser even before he succeeded his father as king at the age of 26 on 29 July 1108. Louis's half-brother prevented him from reaching Rheims, and so Daimbert, Archbishop of Sens, crowned him in the cathedral of Orléans on 3 August.[6] Ralph the Green, Archbishop of Rheims, sent envoys to challenge the validity of the coronation and anointing, but to no avail.[6]
+
+When Louis ascended the throne, the Kingdom of France was a collection of feudal principalities. Beyond the Isle de France the French kings had little authority over the great dukes and counts of the realm but slowly Louis began to change this and assert Capetian rights. This process would take two centuries to complete but began in the reign of Louis VI.
+
+The second great challenge facing Louis was to counter the rising power of the Anglo-Normans under their capable new king, Henry I of England.
+
+From early in his reign (and during his father's reign) Louis faced the problem of the robber barons who resisted the King's authority and engaged in brigandry, making the area around Paris unsafe.
+
+From their castles, such as Le Puiset, Chateaufort, and Montlhery, these barons would charge tolls, waylay merchants and pilgrims, terrorize the peasantry and loot churches and abbeys, the latter deeds drawing the ire of the writers of the day, who were mostly clerics.
+
+In 1108, soon after he ascended the throne, Louis engaged in war with Hugh of Crecy, who was plaguing the countryside and had captured Eudes, Count of Corbeil, and imprisoned him at La Ferte-Alais. Louis besieged that fortress to free Eudes.[7]
+
+In early 1109, Louis besieged his half-brother, Philip, the son of Bertrade de Montfort, who was involved in brigandry and conspiracies against the King, at Mantes-la-Jolie.[7] Philip's plots included the lords of Montfort-l'Amaury. Amaury III de Montfort held many castles which, when linked together, formed a continuous barrier between Louis and vast swathes of his domains, threatening all communication south of Paris.[7]
+
+In 1108–1109 a seigneur named Aymon Vaire-Vache seized the lordship of Bourbon from his nephew, Archambaud, a minor. Louis demanded the boy be restored to his rights but Aymon refused the summons. Louis raised his army and besieged Aymon at his castle at Germigny-sur-l'Aubois, forcing its surrender and enforcing the rights of Archambaud.[8]
+
+In 1121, Louis established the marchands de l'eau, to regulate trade along the Seine.[9]
+
+In 1122, Aimeri, Bishop of Clermont, appealed to Louis after William VI, Count of Auvergne, had driven him from his episcopal town. When William refused Louis' summons, Louis raised an army at Bourges, and marched into Auvergne, supported by some of his leading vassals, such as the Counts of Anjou, Brittany, and Nevers. Louis seized the fortress of Pont-du-Chateau on the Allier, then attacked Clermont, which William was forced to abandon. Aimeri was restored. Four years later William rebelled again and Louis, though his increasing weight made campaigning difficult, marched again. He burned Montferrand and seized Clermont a second time, captured William, and brought him before the court at Orléans to answer for his crimes.[8]
+
+Some of the outlaws became notorious for their cruelty, the most notable being Thomas, Lord of Coucy, who was reputed to indulge in torture of his victims, including hanging men by their testicles, cutting out eyes, and chopping off feet. Guibert of Nogent noted of him, "No one can imagine the number of those who perished in his dungeons, from starvation, from torture, from filth."[10]
+
+Another notable brigand was Hugh, Lord of Le Puiset, who was ravaging the lands around Chartres. In March 1111,[10] Louis heard charges against Hugh at his court at Melun from Theobald II, Count of Champagne, the Archbishop of Sens, and also from bishops and abbots. Louis commanded Hugh to appear before him to answer these charges, but Hugh evaded the summons. Louis stripped him of his lands and titles and laid siege to Le Puiset. After a fierce struggle, Louis took the castle and burned it to the ground, taking Hugh prisoner.
+
+Rashly, Louis released Hugh, and while Louis was engaged in war with Henry I of England and Theobald, Hugh raised another band of brigands and began ravaging the country again. When Louis returned his attention to Hugh, he found Le Puiset rebuilt and Hugh receiving aid from Theobald. Hugh held out against the King until Theobald abandoned him. Once again Louis razed Le Puiset and Hugh, who had sworn never to return to his brigandage, rebuilt the castle and resumed terrorizing his neighbours. At the third attempt, Louis finally defeated Hugh and stripped him of his possessions for the last time. Hugh later died on an expiatory pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[11]
+
+These were just some of the recalcitrant nobles Louis was forced to contend with. There were many more, and Louis was in constant motion against them, leading his army from castle to castle, bringing law and order to his domains. The result was increased recognition of the King's authority and the Crown's ability to impose its will, so that all sectors of French society began to see the King as their protector.
+
+After seizing the English Crown, Henry I of England deprived his brother, Robert Curthose, of the Duchy of Normandy and quickly took possession of the castle at Gisors, a fortress of strategic importance on the 
+right bank of the Epte, commanding the road between Rouen and Paris. This violated an earlier agreement between 
+Henry and the French King that Gisors should remain in the hands of a neutral castellan, or else be demolished.
+
+This move threatened the Capetian domain and Louis was outraged, demanding Henry, as his vassal, appear 
+before him to account for his actions. The two kings met, in force, in March 1109[12] at the borders of their respective 
+territories at the bridge of Neauphle on the Epte.[12] Henry refused to relinquish Gisors. Louis challenged the English 
+King to single combat to settle the issue. When Henry refused, war was inevitable, a war which would last, on and off, for twenty years.
+
+The first years of the war went well for Louis until the influential Theobald II, Count of Champagne, switched to Henry's side. By early 1112[12] Theobald had succeeded in bringing together a coalition of barons 
+with grievances against Louis: Lancelin of Bulles,[12] Ralph of Beaugency,[12] Milo of Bray-sur-Seine,[12] Hugh of Crecy,[12] Guy of Rochfort,[12] Hugh of Le Puiset[12] and Hugh, Count of Troyes.[12]
+
+Louis defeated Theobald's coalition but the additional effort meant he could not defeat the English monarch as well 
+or force him to abandon Gisors, and in March 1113[12] Louis was forced to sign a treaty recognizing Henry I as suzerain 
+of Brittany and Maine. Peace of sorts lasted three years until April 1116[12] when hostilities renewed in the French and 
+Norman Vexins, with each king making gains from his rival.
+
+By 1119, buoyed by several successes and the capture (through treachery) of Les Andelys, Louis felt ready for a final 
+encounter to end the war. In the fierce Battle of Bremule, in August 1119,[12] Louis's troops 
+broke and were routed, abandoning the royal banner and sweeping the King along with them in retreat to Les Andelys. A 
+counterattack through Évreux to seize Breteuil failed, and Louis, his health failing, looked for peace.
+
+He appealed to Pope Calixtus II, who agreed to help and met with Henry at Gisors in November 1120.[12] The terms of the 
+peace included Henry's heir, William Adelin, doing homage to Louis for Normandy, a return of all territories captured 
+by both kings with the painful exception of Gisors itself, which Louis was forced to concede to Henry.
+
+On 2 March 1127, the count of Flanders, Charles the Good, was assassinated in St. Donatian's Cathedral at Bruges. It was a scandal in itself but made worse because it precipitated a succession crisis. Soon a number of relatives raised claims, including William of Ypres, popularly thought to be complicit in the murder; Thierry of Alsace; and Arnold of Denmark, nephew of Charles who seized Saint-Omer; Baldwin, Count of Hainault, who seized Oudenarde, and Godfrey I, Count of Louvain and Duke of Brabant.[13]
+
+Louis had his own candidate in mind and marched into Flanders with an army and urged the barons to elect William Clito, son of Robert Curthose, who had been disinherited of Normandy by his uncle Henry I of England, as their new Count. He had no better claim to Flanders than being the King's candidate but on 23 March 1127 he was elected Count by the Flemings.[13]
+
+Louis then moved decisively to secure Flanders, apprehending the murderers of Charles the Good and ousting the rival claimants. On 2 April he took Ghent, on 5 April Bruges, on 26 April he took Ypres, capturing William of Ypres and imprisoning him at Lille. He then quickly took Aire, Cassel and all the towns still loyal to William of Ypres.[13]
+
+Louis's final act before leaving for France was to witness the execution of Charles the Good's murderers. They were hurled from the roof of the church of Saint Donatian where they had committed their crime.[13]
+
+It was a triumph for Louis and demonstrated how far the Crown had come under his leadership, but it was a brief triumph. The new young Count William Clito fared badly, relying on heavy handed feudal ways not suited to the more socially advanced and mercantile Flemings. William's knights ran amok and the Flemings rebelled against Louis's candidate. Ghent and Bruge appealed to Thierry of Alsace and Saint-Omer to Arnold of Denmark.[13]
+
+Louis attempted to intervene again but the moment was gone. The people of Bruge rejected him and recognized Thierry of Alsace as their Count, and he quickly moved to enforce his claim. Louis called a great assembly at Arras and had Thierry excommunicated but it was a gesture. Louis abandoned William of Clito, who died during a siege at Alost on 27 July 1128, and after the whole country finally submitted to Thierry, Louis was obliged to confirm his claim.[13]
+
+On 25 November 1120, Louis' fortunes against Henry I of England were raised when Henry's heir, William Ætheling, drunkenly perished aboard the White Ship en route from Normandy to England, putting the future of Henry's dynasty and his position in doubt.
+
+By 1123 Louis was involved with a coalition of Norman and French seigneurs opposed to Henry. The plan was to drive the English King from Normandy and replace him with William Clito. Henry, however, easily defeated this coalition then instigated his son-in-law, Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, to invade France.[14]
+
+Henry V had married the Empress Matilda, the English King's daughter and the future mother of Henry II of England, 9 years earlier, in hopes of creating an Anglo-German empire, though the couple remained childless. Like Louis, Henry V had designs on the Low Countries and an invasion of Northern France would enable him to strengthen his ambitions in Flanders, as well as support his father-in-law.
+
+Thus in 1124, Henry V assembled an army to march on Rheims.[14] It never arrived. In testament to how far Louis had risen as national protector, all of France rose to his appeal against the threat. Henry V was unwilling to see the French barons united behind their King, who now identified himself as the vassal of St Denis, the patron saint of Paris, whose banner he now carried,[15][incomplete short citation] and the proposed invasion was abandoned.
+
+Henry V died a year after the aborted campaign.
+
+In 1128 Henry I married his sole surviving legitimate child, the dowager Empress Matilda, to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. This was a very dangerous alliance for Louis and would prove so during the reign of his successor, Louis VII of France.
+
+As Louis VI approached his end, there seemed to be reasons for optimism. Henry I of England had died on 1 December 1135 and Stephen of Blois had seized the English crown, reneging on the oath he had sworn to Henry I to support Matilda. Stephen was thus in no position to bring the combined Anglo-Norman might against the French crown.
+
+Louis had also made great strides in exercising his royal authority over his barons, and even Theobald II had finally rallied to the Capetian cause.[14]
+
+Finally, on 9 April 1137, a dying William X, Duke of Aquitaine appointed Louis VI guardian of his fifteen-year-old daughter and heiress, Eleanor of Aquitaine.[16] Eleanor was suddenly the most eligible heiress in Europe, and Louis wasted no time in marrying her to his own heir, the future Louis VII, at the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux on 25 July 1137.[16] At a stroke Louis had added one of the most powerful duchies in France to the Capetian domains.
+
+Louis died of dysentery 7 days later, on 1 August 1137. Despite his achievements, it would be the growing power of the soon to be Angevin Empire that would come to overshadow his successor, its seeds sown in the marriage between the Empress Matilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet and realised through their son, Henry II of England.
+
+Louis VI was interred in the Basilica of St Denis in Paris.
+
+He married in 1104: 1) Lucienne de Rochefort — the marriage was annulled on 23 May 1107 at the Council of Troyes by Pope Paschal II.[17]
+
+He married in 1115: 2) Adélaide de Maurienne (1092–1154)[17]
+
+With Marie de Breuillet, daughter of Renaud de Breuillet de Dourdan,[23] Louis VI was the father of a daughter:
+
+
+

en/3529.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@
+Louis VI (late 1081 – 1 August 1137), called the Fat (French: le Gros) or the Fighter (French: le Batailleur), was King of France from 1108 to 1137.[1]
+
+Chronicles called him "King of Saint-Denis". Louis was the first member of the house of Capet to make a lasting contribution to centralizing the institutions of royal power.[2] He spent almost all of his twenty-nine-year reign fighting either the "robber barons" who plagued Paris[3] or the Norman kings of England for their continental possession of Normandy. Nonetheless, Louis VI managed to reinforce his power considerably and became one of the first strong kings of France since the death of Charlemagne in 814.
+
+Louis was a warrior-king, but by his forties his weight had become so great that it was increasingly difficult for him to lead in the field. A biography – The Deeds of Louis the Fat, prepared by his loyal advisor Abbot Suger of Saint Denis – offers a fully developed portrait of his character, in contrast to what little historians know about most of his predecessors.
+
+Louis was born around 1081 in Paris, the son of Philip I and Bertha of Holland.[4]
+
+Suger tells us: "In his youth, growing courage matured his spirit with youthful vigour, making him bored with hunting and the boyish games with which others of his age used to enjoy themselves and forget the pursuit of arms." And..."How valiant he was in youth, and with what energy he repelled the king of the English, William Rufus, when he attacked Louis' inherited kingdom."[5]
+
+Louis married Lucienne de Rochefort, the daughter of his father's seneschal, in 1104, but repudiated her three years later. They had no children.
+
+On 3 August 1115 Louis married Adelaide of Maurienne, daughter of Humbert II of Savoy and of Gisela of Burgundy, and niece of Pope Callixtus II. They had eight children. Adelaide was one of the most politically active of all France's medieval queens. Her name appears on 45 royal charters from the reign of Louis VI. During her time as queen (1115–1137), royal charters were dated with both her regnal year and that of the king.
+
+Suger became Louis's adviser even before he succeeded his father as king at the age of 26 on 29 July 1108. Louis's half-brother prevented him from reaching Rheims, and so Daimbert, Archbishop of Sens, crowned him in the cathedral of Orléans on 3 August.[6] Ralph the Green, Archbishop of Rheims, sent envoys to challenge the validity of the coronation and anointing, but to no avail.[6]
+
+When Louis ascended the throne, the Kingdom of France was a collection of feudal principalities. Beyond the Isle de France the French kings had little authority over the great dukes and counts of the realm but slowly Louis began to change this and assert Capetian rights. This process would take two centuries to complete but began in the reign of Louis VI.
+
+The second great challenge facing Louis was to counter the rising power of the Anglo-Normans under their capable new king, Henry I of England.
+
+From early in his reign (and during his father's reign) Louis faced the problem of the robber barons who resisted the King's authority and engaged in brigandry, making the area around Paris unsafe.
+
+From their castles, such as Le Puiset, Chateaufort, and Montlhery, these barons would charge tolls, waylay merchants and pilgrims, terrorize the peasantry and loot churches and abbeys, the latter deeds drawing the ire of the writers of the day, who were mostly clerics.
+
+In 1108, soon after he ascended the throne, Louis engaged in war with Hugh of Crecy, who was plaguing the countryside and had captured Eudes, Count of Corbeil, and imprisoned him at La Ferte-Alais. Louis besieged that fortress to free Eudes.[7]
+
+In early 1109, Louis besieged his half-brother, Philip, the son of Bertrade de Montfort, who was involved in brigandry and conspiracies against the King, at Mantes-la-Jolie.[7] Philip's plots included the lords of Montfort-l'Amaury. Amaury III de Montfort held many castles which, when linked together, formed a continuous barrier between Louis and vast swathes of his domains, threatening all communication south of Paris.[7]
+
+In 1108–1109 a seigneur named Aymon Vaire-Vache seized the lordship of Bourbon from his nephew, Archambaud, a minor. Louis demanded the boy be restored to his rights but Aymon refused the summons. Louis raised his army and besieged Aymon at his castle at Germigny-sur-l'Aubois, forcing its surrender and enforcing the rights of Archambaud.[8]
+
+In 1121, Louis established the marchands de l'eau, to regulate trade along the Seine.[9]
+
+In 1122, Aimeri, Bishop of Clermont, appealed to Louis after William VI, Count of Auvergne, had driven him from his episcopal town. When William refused Louis' summons, Louis raised an army at Bourges, and marched into Auvergne, supported by some of his leading vassals, such as the Counts of Anjou, Brittany, and Nevers. Louis seized the fortress of Pont-du-Chateau on the Allier, then attacked Clermont, which William was forced to abandon. Aimeri was restored. Four years later William rebelled again and Louis, though his increasing weight made campaigning difficult, marched again. He burned Montferrand and seized Clermont a second time, captured William, and brought him before the court at Orléans to answer for his crimes.[8]
+
+Some of the outlaws became notorious for their cruelty, the most notable being Thomas, Lord of Coucy, who was reputed to indulge in torture of his victims, including hanging men by their testicles, cutting out eyes, and chopping off feet. Guibert of Nogent noted of him, "No one can imagine the number of those who perished in his dungeons, from starvation, from torture, from filth."[10]
+
+Another notable brigand was Hugh, Lord of Le Puiset, who was ravaging the lands around Chartres. In March 1111,[10] Louis heard charges against Hugh at his court at Melun from Theobald II, Count of Champagne, the Archbishop of Sens, and also from bishops and abbots. Louis commanded Hugh to appear before him to answer these charges, but Hugh evaded the summons. Louis stripped him of his lands and titles and laid siege to Le Puiset. After a fierce struggle, Louis took the castle and burned it to the ground, taking Hugh prisoner.
+
+Rashly, Louis released Hugh, and while Louis was engaged in war with Henry I of England and Theobald, Hugh raised another band of brigands and began ravaging the country again. When Louis returned his attention to Hugh, he found Le Puiset rebuilt and Hugh receiving aid from Theobald. Hugh held out against the King until Theobald abandoned him. Once again Louis razed Le Puiset and Hugh, who had sworn never to return to his brigandage, rebuilt the castle and resumed terrorizing his neighbours. At the third attempt, Louis finally defeated Hugh and stripped him of his possessions for the last time. Hugh later died on an expiatory pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[11]
+
+These were just some of the recalcitrant nobles Louis was forced to contend with. There were many more, and Louis was in constant motion against them, leading his army from castle to castle, bringing law and order to his domains. The result was increased recognition of the King's authority and the Crown's ability to impose its will, so that all sectors of French society began to see the King as their protector.
+
+After seizing the English Crown, Henry I of England deprived his brother, Robert Curthose, of the Duchy of Normandy and quickly took possession of the castle at Gisors, a fortress of strategic importance on the 
+right bank of the Epte, commanding the road between Rouen and Paris. This violated an earlier agreement between 
+Henry and the French King that Gisors should remain in the hands of a neutral castellan, or else be demolished.
+
+This move threatened the Capetian domain and Louis was outraged, demanding Henry, as his vassal, appear 
+before him to account for his actions. The two kings met, in force, in March 1109[12] at the borders of their respective 
+territories at the bridge of Neauphle on the Epte.[12] Henry refused to relinquish Gisors. Louis challenged the English 
+King to single combat to settle the issue. When Henry refused, war was inevitable, a war which would last, on and off, for twenty years.
+
+The first years of the war went well for Louis until the influential Theobald II, Count of Champagne, switched to Henry's side. By early 1112[12] Theobald had succeeded in bringing together a coalition of barons 
+with grievances against Louis: Lancelin of Bulles,[12] Ralph of Beaugency,[12] Milo of Bray-sur-Seine,[12] Hugh of Crecy,[12] Guy of Rochfort,[12] Hugh of Le Puiset[12] and Hugh, Count of Troyes.[12]
+
+Louis defeated Theobald's coalition but the additional effort meant he could not defeat the English monarch as well 
+or force him to abandon Gisors, and in March 1113[12] Louis was forced to sign a treaty recognizing Henry I as suzerain 
+of Brittany and Maine. Peace of sorts lasted three years until April 1116[12] when hostilities renewed in the French and 
+Norman Vexins, with each king making gains from his rival.
+
+By 1119, buoyed by several successes and the capture (through treachery) of Les Andelys, Louis felt ready for a final 
+encounter to end the war. In the fierce Battle of Bremule, in August 1119,[12] Louis's troops 
+broke and were routed, abandoning the royal banner and sweeping the King along with them in retreat to Les Andelys. A 
+counterattack through Évreux to seize Breteuil failed, and Louis, his health failing, looked for peace.
+
+He appealed to Pope Calixtus II, who agreed to help and met with Henry at Gisors in November 1120.[12] The terms of the 
+peace included Henry's heir, William Adelin, doing homage to Louis for Normandy, a return of all territories captured 
+by both kings with the painful exception of Gisors itself, which Louis was forced to concede to Henry.
+
+On 2 March 1127, the count of Flanders, Charles the Good, was assassinated in St. Donatian's Cathedral at Bruges. It was a scandal in itself but made worse because it precipitated a succession crisis. Soon a number of relatives raised claims, including William of Ypres, popularly thought to be complicit in the murder; Thierry of Alsace; and Arnold of Denmark, nephew of Charles who seized Saint-Omer; Baldwin, Count of Hainault, who seized Oudenarde, and Godfrey I, Count of Louvain and Duke of Brabant.[13]
+
+Louis had his own candidate in mind and marched into Flanders with an army and urged the barons to elect William Clito, son of Robert Curthose, who had been disinherited of Normandy by his uncle Henry I of England, as their new Count. He had no better claim to Flanders than being the King's candidate but on 23 March 1127 he was elected Count by the Flemings.[13]
+
+Louis then moved decisively to secure Flanders, apprehending the murderers of Charles the Good and ousting the rival claimants. On 2 April he took Ghent, on 5 April Bruges, on 26 April he took Ypres, capturing William of Ypres and imprisoning him at Lille. He then quickly took Aire, Cassel and all the towns still loyal to William of Ypres.[13]
+
+Louis's final act before leaving for France was to witness the execution of Charles the Good's murderers. They were hurled from the roof of the church of Saint Donatian where they had committed their crime.[13]
+
+It was a triumph for Louis and demonstrated how far the Crown had come under his leadership, but it was a brief triumph. The new young Count William Clito fared badly, relying on heavy handed feudal ways not suited to the more socially advanced and mercantile Flemings. William's knights ran amok and the Flemings rebelled against Louis's candidate. Ghent and Bruge appealed to Thierry of Alsace and Saint-Omer to Arnold of Denmark.[13]
+
+Louis attempted to intervene again but the moment was gone. The people of Bruge rejected him and recognized Thierry of Alsace as their Count, and he quickly moved to enforce his claim. Louis called a great assembly at Arras and had Thierry excommunicated but it was a gesture. Louis abandoned William of Clito, who died during a siege at Alost on 27 July 1128, and after the whole country finally submitted to Thierry, Louis was obliged to confirm his claim.[13]
+
+On 25 November 1120, Louis' fortunes against Henry I of England were raised when Henry's heir, William Ætheling, drunkenly perished aboard the White Ship en route from Normandy to England, putting the future of Henry's dynasty and his position in doubt.
+
+By 1123 Louis was involved with a coalition of Norman and French seigneurs opposed to Henry. The plan was to drive the English King from Normandy and replace him with William Clito. Henry, however, easily defeated this coalition then instigated his son-in-law, Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, to invade France.[14]
+
+Henry V had married the Empress Matilda, the English King's daughter and the future mother of Henry II of England, 9 years earlier, in hopes of creating an Anglo-German empire, though the couple remained childless. Like Louis, Henry V had designs on the Low Countries and an invasion of Northern France would enable him to strengthen his ambitions in Flanders, as well as support his father-in-law.
+
+Thus in 1124, Henry V assembled an army to march on Rheims.[14] It never arrived. In testament to how far Louis had risen as national protector, all of France rose to his appeal against the threat. Henry V was unwilling to see the French barons united behind their King, who now identified himself as the vassal of St Denis, the patron saint of Paris, whose banner he now carried,[15][incomplete short citation] and the proposed invasion was abandoned.
+
+Henry V died a year after the aborted campaign.
+
+In 1128 Henry I married his sole surviving legitimate child, the dowager Empress Matilda, to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. This was a very dangerous alliance for Louis and would prove so during the reign of his successor, Louis VII of France.
+
+As Louis VI approached his end, there seemed to be reasons for optimism. Henry I of England had died on 1 December 1135 and Stephen of Blois had seized the English crown, reneging on the oath he had sworn to Henry I to support Matilda. Stephen was thus in no position to bring the combined Anglo-Norman might against the French crown.
+
+Louis had also made great strides in exercising his royal authority over his barons, and even Theobald II had finally rallied to the Capetian cause.[14]
+
+Finally, on 9 April 1137, a dying William X, Duke of Aquitaine appointed Louis VI guardian of his fifteen-year-old daughter and heiress, Eleanor of Aquitaine.[16] Eleanor was suddenly the most eligible heiress in Europe, and Louis wasted no time in marrying her to his own heir, the future Louis VII, at the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux on 25 July 1137.[16] At a stroke Louis had added one of the most powerful duchies in France to the Capetian domains.
+
+Louis died of dysentery 7 days later, on 1 August 1137. Despite his achievements, it would be the growing power of the soon to be Angevin Empire that would come to overshadow his successor, its seeds sown in the marriage between the Empress Matilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet and realised through their son, Henry II of England.
+
+Louis VI was interred in the Basilica of St Denis in Paris.
+
+He married in 1104: 1) Lucienne de Rochefort — the marriage was annulled on 23 May 1107 at the Council of Troyes by Pope Paschal II.[17]
+
+He married in 1115: 2) Adélaide de Maurienne (1092–1154)[17]
+
+With Marie de Breuillet, daughter of Renaud de Breuillet de Dourdan,[23] Louis VI was the father of a daughter:
+
+
+

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@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+
+
+An archipelago (/ˌɑːrkɪˈpɛləɡoʊ/ (listen) ARK-ih-PEL-ə-goh), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster or collection of islands, or sometimes a sea containing a small number of scattered islands.
+
+Indonesia, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Galápagos Islands, Japan, the Philippines, Maldives, the Balearic Isles, the Bahamas, the Aegean Islands, Hawaii, the Canary Islands, Malta, the Azores, Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Archipelago Sea (Finland) and the Shetland Islands are all examples of well-known archipelagos. They are sometimes defined by political boundaries. The Gulf archipelago off the pacific coast forms part of a larger archipelago that geographically includes Washington state's San Juan islands. While the Gulf archipelago and San Juan islands are geographically related, they are not technically included in the same archipelago due to manmade geopolitical borders. [1]
+
+The word archipelago is derived from the Ancient Greek ἄρχι-(arkhi-, "chief") and πέλαγος (pélagos, "sea") through the Italian arcipelago. In Italian, possibly following a tradition of antiquity, "Archipelago" (from medieval Greek *ἀρχιπέλαγος and Latin archipelagus) was the proper name for the Aegean Sea. Later, usage shifted to refer to the Aegean Islands (since the sea is remarkable for its large number of islands).
+
+Archipelagos may be found isolated in large amounts of water or neighbouring a large land mass. For example, Scotland has more than 700 islands surrounding its mainland which form an archipelago
+
+Archipelagos are often volcanic, forming along island arcs generated by subduction zones or hotspots, but may also be the result of erosion, deposition, and land elevation. Depending on their geological origin, islands forming archipelagos can be referred to as oceanic islands, continental fragments, and continental islands.[2]
+
+Oceanic islands are mainly of volcanic origin, and widely separated from any adjacent continent. The Hawaiian Islands and Easter Island in the Pacific, and Île Amsterdam in the south Indian Ocean are examples.
+
+Continental fragments correspond to land masses that have separated from a continental mass due to tectonic displacement. The Farallon Islands off the coast of California are an example.
+
+Sets of islands formed close to the coast of a continent are considered continental archipelagos when they form part of the same continental shelf, when those islands are above-water extensions of the shelf. The islands of the Inside Passage off the coast of British Columbia and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago are examples.
+
+Artificial archipelagos have been created in various countries for different purposes. Palm Islands and the World Islands off Dubai were or are being created for leisure and tourism purposes.[3][4] Marker Wadden in the Netherlands is being built as a conservation area for birds and other wildlife.[5]
+
+The largest archipelagic state in the world by area, and by population, is Indonesia.[6]

en/3530.html.txt

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+Louis VII (1120 – 18 September 1180), called the Younger or the Young (French: le Jeune), was King of the Franks from 1137 to 1180. He was the son and successor of King Louis VI, hence his nickname, and married Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in western Europe. The marriage temporarily extended the Capetian lands to the Pyrenees, but was annulled in 1152 after no male heir was produced.
+
+Immediately after the annulment of her marriage, Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, to whom she conveyed Aquitaine and produced five male heirs. When Henry became King of England in 1154, as Henry II, he ruled as king, duke or count over a large empire of kingdoms, duchies and counties that spanned from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Henry's efforts to preserve and expand on this patrimony for the Crown of England would mark the beginning of the long rivalry between France and England.
+
+Louis VII's reign saw the founding of the University of Paris and the disastrous Second Crusade. Louis and his famous counselor, Abbot Suger, pushed for a greater centralization of the state and favoured the development of French Gothic architecture, notably the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris.
+
+He died in 1180 and was succeeded by his son Philip II.
+
+Louis was born in 1120 in Paris,[citation needed] the second son of Louis VI of France and Adelaide of Maurienne. The early education of Prince Louis anticipated an ecclesiastical career. As a result, he became well-learned and exceptionally devout, but his life course changed decisively after the accidental death of his older brother Philip in 1131, when he unexpectedly became the heir to the throne of France. In October 1131, his father had him anointed and crowned by Pope Innocent II in Reims Cathedral.[1][2] He spent much of his youth in Saint-Denis, where he built a friendship with the Abbot Suger, an advisor to his father who also served Louis well during his early years as king.
+
+Following the death of Duke William X of Aquitaine, Louis VI moved quickly to have his son married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had inherited William's territory, on 25 July 1137.[3]  In this way, Louis VI sought to add the large, sprawling territory of the duchy of Aquitaine to his family's holdings in France.  On 1 August 1137, shortly after the marriage, Louis VI died, and Louis VII became king. The pairing of the monkish Louis and the high-spirited Eleanor was doomed to failure; she reportedly once declared that she had thought to marry a king, only to find she had married a monk. There was a marked difference between the frosty, reserved culture of the northern court in the Íle de France, where Louis had been raised, and the rich, free-wheeling court life of the Aquitaine with which Eleanor was familiar.[3]  Louis and Eleanor had two daughters, Marie and Alix.[3]
+
+In the first part of his reign, Louis VII was vigorous and zealous in his prerogatives. His accession was marked by no disturbances other than uprisings by the burgesses of Orléans and  Poitiers, who wished to organise communes. He soon came into violent conflict with Pope Innocent II, however, when the archbishopric of Bourges became vacant. The king supported the chancellor Cadurc as a candidate to fill the vacancy against the pope's nominee Pierre de la Chatre, swearing upon relics that so long as he lived, Pierre should never enter Bourges. The pope thus imposed an interdict upon the king.
+
+Louis VII then became involved in a war with Theobald II of Champagne by permitting Raoul I of Vermandois, the seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife, Theobald II's sister, and to marry Petronilla of Aquitaine, sister of the queen of France. As a result, Champagne decided to side with the pope in the dispute over Bourges. The war lasted two years (1142–1144) and ended with the occupation of Champagne by the royal army. Louis VII was personally involved in the assault and burning of the town of Vitry-le-François.[4] At least 1500 people who had sought refuge in the church died in the flames.[4] Condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, Louis removed his armies from Champagne and returned them to Theobald. He accepted Pierre de la Chatre as archbishop of Bourges  and shunned Raoul and Petronilla. Desiring to atone for his sins, he declared his intention of mounting a crusade on Christmas Day 1145 at Bourges. Bernard of Clairvaux assured its popularity by his preaching at Vezelay on Easter 1146.
+
+In the meantime, Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, completed his conquest of Normandy in 1144. In exchange for being recognised as Duke of Normandy by Louis, Geoffrey surrendered half of the county of Vexin — a region vital to Norman security — to Louis. Considered a clever move by Louis at the time, it would later prove yet another step towards Angevin rule.
+
+In June 1147, in fulfillment of his vow to mount the Second Crusade, Louis VII and his queen set out from the Basilica of St Denis, first stopping in Metz on the overland route to Syria. Soon they arrived in the Kingdom of Hungary, where they were welcomed by the king Géza II of Hungary, who was already waiting with King Conrad III of Germany. Due to his good relationships with Louis VII, Géza II asked the French king to be his son Stephen's baptism godfather. Relations between the kingdoms of France and Hungary remained cordial long after this time: decades later, Louis's daughter Margaret was taken as wife by Géza's son Béla III of Hungary.[5] After receiving provisions from Géza, the armies continued the march to the East. Just beyond Laodicea at Honaz, the French army was ambushed by Turks.[6] In the resulting battle of Mount Cadmus, the Turks first bombarded the French with arrows and heavy stones, then swarmed down from the mountains and massacred them. The historian Odo of Deuil gives this account:
+
+During the fighting the King Louis lost his small and famous royal guard, but he remained in good heart and nimbly and courageously scaled the side of the mountain by gripping the tree roots [...] The enemy climbed after him, hoping to capture him, and the enemy in the distance continued to fire arrows at him. But God willed that his cuirass should protect him from the arrows, and to prevent himself from being captured he defended the crag with his bloody sword, cutting off many heads and hands.
+
+Louis VII and his army finally reached the Holy Land in 1148. His queen Eleanor supported her uncle, Raymond of Antioch, and prevailed upon Louis to help Antioch against Aleppo. But Louis VII's interest lay in Jerusalem, and so he slipped out of Antioch in secret. He united with King Conrad III of Germany and King Baldwin III of Jerusalem to lay siege to Damascus; this ended in disaster and the project was abandoned. Louis VII decided to leave the Holy Land, despite the protests of Eleanor, who still wanted to help her doomed uncle Raymond. Louis VII and the French army returned home in 1149.
+
+The expedition to the Holy Land came at a great cost to the royal treasury and military. It also precipitated a conflict with Eleanor that led to the annulment of their marriage.[7] Perhaps the marriage to Eleanor might have continued if the royal couple had produced a male heir, but this had not occurred.[3] The Council of Beaugency found an exit clause, declaring that Louis VII and Eleanor were too closely related for their marriage to be legal,[3] thus the marriage was annulled on 21 March 1152.  The pretext of kinship was the basis for annulment, but in fact, it owed more to the state of hostility between Louis and Eleanor, with a decreasing likelihood that their marriage would produce a male heir to the throne of France.  On 18 May 1152, Eleanor married the Count of Anjou, the future King Henry II of England. She gave him the duchy of Aquitaine and bore him three daughters and five sons. Louis VII led an ineffective war against Henry for having married without the authorization of his suzerain. The result was a humiliation for the enemies of Henry and Eleanor, who saw their troops routed, their lands ravaged, and their property stolen.[3] Louis reacted by coming down with a fever and returned to the Ile-de France.
+
+In 1154, Louis VII married Constance of Castile, daughter of King Alfonso VII of Castile. She also failed to supply him with a son and heir, bearing only two daughters, Margaret and Alys. By 1157, Henry II of England began to believe that Louis might never produce a male heir, and that the succession of France would consequently be left in question. Determined to secure a claim for his family, he sent his chancellor, Thomas Becket, to press for a marriage between Margaret and Henry's heir, Henry the Young King. Louis agreed to this proposal, and by the Treaty of Gisors (1158) betrothed the young pair, giving as a dowry the Norman city of Gisors and the surrounding county of Vexin.
+
+Louis VII was devastated when Constance died in childbirth on 4 October 1160. As he was desperate for a son, he married Adela of Champagne just 5 weeks later. To counterbalance the advantage this would give the king of France, Henry II had the marriage of their children (Henry "the Young King" and Margaret) celebrated at once. Louis understood the danger of the growing Angevin power; however, through indecision and a lack of fiscal and military resources in comparison to Henry II, he failed to oppose Angevin hegemony effectively. One of his few successes was a trip to Toulouse in 1159 to aid Raymond V, Count of Toulouse, who had been attacked by Henry II: after he entered into the city with a small escort, claiming to be visiting his sister, the Countess, Henry declared that he could not attack the city while his liege lord was inside, and went home.
+
+At the same time, Emperor Frederick I was making good the imperial claims on Arles. When a papal schism broke out in 1159, Louis VII took the part of Pope Alexander III, the enemy of Frederick I, and after two comical failures of Frederick I to meet Louis VII at Saint Jean de Losne (on 29 August and 22 September 1162), Louis VII definitely gave himself up to the cause of Alexander III, who lived at Sens from 1163 to 1165. In return for his loyal support, Alexander III gave Louis the golden rose.
+
+More important for English history would be Louis' support for Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom he tried to reconcile with Henry II. Louis sided with Becket as much to damage Henry as out of piety – yet even he grew irritated with the stubbornness of the archbishop, asking when Becket refused Henry's conciliations, "Do you wish to be more than a Saint?"
+
+Louis also tried to weaken Henry by supporting his rebellious sons, and encouraged Plantagenet disunity by making Henry's sons, rather than Henry himself, the feudal overlords of the Angevin territories in France. But the rivalry among Henry's sons and Louis's own indecisiveness broke up the coalition (1173–1174) between them. Finally, in 1177, the pope intervened to bring the two kings to terms at Vitry-le-François.
+
+In 1165, Louis' third wife bore him a son and heir, Philip. Louis had him crowned at Reims in 1179,[8] in the Capetian tradition (Philip would in fact be the last king so crowned). Already stricken with paralysis, Louis himself could not be present at the ceremony.[8] He died on 18 September 1180 in Paris and was buried the next day at Barbeau Abbey,[8] which he had founded. His remains were moved to the Basilica of Saint-Denis in 1817.
+
+Louis' children by his three marriages:
+
+with Eleanor of Aquitaine:[9]
+
+with Constance of Castile:[11]
+
+with Adele of Champagne:[13]
+
+From the point of view of the preservation and expansion of the French royal domains, the reign of Louis VII was a difficult and unfortunate one. Yet royal authority was more strongly felt in the parts of France distant from these domains: more direct and more frequent connections were made with distant vassals, a result largely due to an alliance between the clergy with the crown. Louis VII thus reaped the reward for services rendered the church during the least successful portions of his reign. His greater accomplishments lie in the development of agriculture, population, commerce, the building of stone fortresses, as well as an intellectual renaissance. Considering the significant disparity of political leverage and financial resources between Louis VII and his Angevin rival Henry II, not to mention Henry's superior military skills, Louis VII should be credited with helping to preserve the Capetian dynasty.
+
+Louis is a character in Jean Anouilh's 1959 play Becket. In the 1964 film adaptation he was portrayed by John Gielgud, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was also portrayed by Charles Kay in the 1978 BBC TV drama series The Devil's Crown. He has a role in Sharon Kay Penman's novels When Christ and His Saints Slept and Devil's Brood. The early part of Norah Lofts' biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine deals considerably with Louis VII, seen through Eleanor's eyes and giving her side in their problematic relationship. Louis is one of the main characters in Elizabeth Chadwick's novel The Summer Queen.
+

en/3531.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+Louis VII (1120 – 18 September 1180), called the Younger or the Young (French: le Jeune), was King of the Franks from 1137 to 1180. He was the son and successor of King Louis VI, hence his nickname, and married Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in western Europe. The marriage temporarily extended the Capetian lands to the Pyrenees, but was annulled in 1152 after no male heir was produced.
+
+Immediately after the annulment of her marriage, Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, to whom she conveyed Aquitaine and produced five male heirs. When Henry became King of England in 1154, as Henry II, he ruled as king, duke or count over a large empire of kingdoms, duchies and counties that spanned from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Henry's efforts to preserve and expand on this patrimony for the Crown of England would mark the beginning of the long rivalry between France and England.
+
+Louis VII's reign saw the founding of the University of Paris and the disastrous Second Crusade. Louis and his famous counselor, Abbot Suger, pushed for a greater centralization of the state and favoured the development of French Gothic architecture, notably the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris.
+
+He died in 1180 and was succeeded by his son Philip II.
+
+Louis was born in 1120 in Paris,[citation needed] the second son of Louis VI of France and Adelaide of Maurienne. The early education of Prince Louis anticipated an ecclesiastical career. As a result, he became well-learned and exceptionally devout, but his life course changed decisively after the accidental death of his older brother Philip in 1131, when he unexpectedly became the heir to the throne of France. In October 1131, his father had him anointed and crowned by Pope Innocent II in Reims Cathedral.[1][2] He spent much of his youth in Saint-Denis, where he built a friendship with the Abbot Suger, an advisor to his father who also served Louis well during his early years as king.
+
+Following the death of Duke William X of Aquitaine, Louis VI moved quickly to have his son married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had inherited William's territory, on 25 July 1137.[3]  In this way, Louis VI sought to add the large, sprawling territory of the duchy of Aquitaine to his family's holdings in France.  On 1 August 1137, shortly after the marriage, Louis VI died, and Louis VII became king. The pairing of the monkish Louis and the high-spirited Eleanor was doomed to failure; she reportedly once declared that she had thought to marry a king, only to find she had married a monk. There was a marked difference between the frosty, reserved culture of the northern court in the Íle de France, where Louis had been raised, and the rich, free-wheeling court life of the Aquitaine with which Eleanor was familiar.[3]  Louis and Eleanor had two daughters, Marie and Alix.[3]
+
+In the first part of his reign, Louis VII was vigorous and zealous in his prerogatives. His accession was marked by no disturbances other than uprisings by the burgesses of Orléans and  Poitiers, who wished to organise communes. He soon came into violent conflict with Pope Innocent II, however, when the archbishopric of Bourges became vacant. The king supported the chancellor Cadurc as a candidate to fill the vacancy against the pope's nominee Pierre de la Chatre, swearing upon relics that so long as he lived, Pierre should never enter Bourges. The pope thus imposed an interdict upon the king.
+
+Louis VII then became involved in a war with Theobald II of Champagne by permitting Raoul I of Vermandois, the seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife, Theobald II's sister, and to marry Petronilla of Aquitaine, sister of the queen of France. As a result, Champagne decided to side with the pope in the dispute over Bourges. The war lasted two years (1142–1144) and ended with the occupation of Champagne by the royal army. Louis VII was personally involved in the assault and burning of the town of Vitry-le-François.[4] At least 1500 people who had sought refuge in the church died in the flames.[4] Condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, Louis removed his armies from Champagne and returned them to Theobald. He accepted Pierre de la Chatre as archbishop of Bourges  and shunned Raoul and Petronilla. Desiring to atone for his sins, he declared his intention of mounting a crusade on Christmas Day 1145 at Bourges. Bernard of Clairvaux assured its popularity by his preaching at Vezelay on Easter 1146.
+
+In the meantime, Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, completed his conquest of Normandy in 1144. In exchange for being recognised as Duke of Normandy by Louis, Geoffrey surrendered half of the county of Vexin — a region vital to Norman security — to Louis. Considered a clever move by Louis at the time, it would later prove yet another step towards Angevin rule.
+
+In June 1147, in fulfillment of his vow to mount the Second Crusade, Louis VII and his queen set out from the Basilica of St Denis, first stopping in Metz on the overland route to Syria. Soon they arrived in the Kingdom of Hungary, where they were welcomed by the king Géza II of Hungary, who was already waiting with King Conrad III of Germany. Due to his good relationships with Louis VII, Géza II asked the French king to be his son Stephen's baptism godfather. Relations between the kingdoms of France and Hungary remained cordial long after this time: decades later, Louis's daughter Margaret was taken as wife by Géza's son Béla III of Hungary.[5] After receiving provisions from Géza, the armies continued the march to the East. Just beyond Laodicea at Honaz, the French army was ambushed by Turks.[6] In the resulting battle of Mount Cadmus, the Turks first bombarded the French with arrows and heavy stones, then swarmed down from the mountains and massacred them. The historian Odo of Deuil gives this account:
+
+During the fighting the King Louis lost his small and famous royal guard, but he remained in good heart and nimbly and courageously scaled the side of the mountain by gripping the tree roots [...] The enemy climbed after him, hoping to capture him, and the enemy in the distance continued to fire arrows at him. But God willed that his cuirass should protect him from the arrows, and to prevent himself from being captured he defended the crag with his bloody sword, cutting off many heads and hands.
+
+Louis VII and his army finally reached the Holy Land in 1148. His queen Eleanor supported her uncle, Raymond of Antioch, and prevailed upon Louis to help Antioch against Aleppo. But Louis VII's interest lay in Jerusalem, and so he slipped out of Antioch in secret. He united with King Conrad III of Germany and King Baldwin III of Jerusalem to lay siege to Damascus; this ended in disaster and the project was abandoned. Louis VII decided to leave the Holy Land, despite the protests of Eleanor, who still wanted to help her doomed uncle Raymond. Louis VII and the French army returned home in 1149.
+
+The expedition to the Holy Land came at a great cost to the royal treasury and military. It also precipitated a conflict with Eleanor that led to the annulment of their marriage.[7] Perhaps the marriage to Eleanor might have continued if the royal couple had produced a male heir, but this had not occurred.[3] The Council of Beaugency found an exit clause, declaring that Louis VII and Eleanor were too closely related for their marriage to be legal,[3] thus the marriage was annulled on 21 March 1152.  The pretext of kinship was the basis for annulment, but in fact, it owed more to the state of hostility between Louis and Eleanor, with a decreasing likelihood that their marriage would produce a male heir to the throne of France.  On 18 May 1152, Eleanor married the Count of Anjou, the future King Henry II of England. She gave him the duchy of Aquitaine and bore him three daughters and five sons. Louis VII led an ineffective war against Henry for having married without the authorization of his suzerain. The result was a humiliation for the enemies of Henry and Eleanor, who saw their troops routed, their lands ravaged, and their property stolen.[3] Louis reacted by coming down with a fever and returned to the Ile-de France.
+
+In 1154, Louis VII married Constance of Castile, daughter of King Alfonso VII of Castile. She also failed to supply him with a son and heir, bearing only two daughters, Margaret and Alys. By 1157, Henry II of England began to believe that Louis might never produce a male heir, and that the succession of France would consequently be left in question. Determined to secure a claim for his family, he sent his chancellor, Thomas Becket, to press for a marriage between Margaret and Henry's heir, Henry the Young King. Louis agreed to this proposal, and by the Treaty of Gisors (1158) betrothed the young pair, giving as a dowry the Norman city of Gisors and the surrounding county of Vexin.
+
+Louis VII was devastated when Constance died in childbirth on 4 October 1160. As he was desperate for a son, he married Adela of Champagne just 5 weeks later. To counterbalance the advantage this would give the king of France, Henry II had the marriage of their children (Henry "the Young King" and Margaret) celebrated at once. Louis understood the danger of the growing Angevin power; however, through indecision and a lack of fiscal and military resources in comparison to Henry II, he failed to oppose Angevin hegemony effectively. One of his few successes was a trip to Toulouse in 1159 to aid Raymond V, Count of Toulouse, who had been attacked by Henry II: after he entered into the city with a small escort, claiming to be visiting his sister, the Countess, Henry declared that he could not attack the city while his liege lord was inside, and went home.
+
+At the same time, Emperor Frederick I was making good the imperial claims on Arles. When a papal schism broke out in 1159, Louis VII took the part of Pope Alexander III, the enemy of Frederick I, and after two comical failures of Frederick I to meet Louis VII at Saint Jean de Losne (on 29 August and 22 September 1162), Louis VII definitely gave himself up to the cause of Alexander III, who lived at Sens from 1163 to 1165. In return for his loyal support, Alexander III gave Louis the golden rose.
+
+More important for English history would be Louis' support for Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom he tried to reconcile with Henry II. Louis sided with Becket as much to damage Henry as out of piety – yet even he grew irritated with the stubbornness of the archbishop, asking when Becket refused Henry's conciliations, "Do you wish to be more than a Saint?"
+
+Louis also tried to weaken Henry by supporting his rebellious sons, and encouraged Plantagenet disunity by making Henry's sons, rather than Henry himself, the feudal overlords of the Angevin territories in France. But the rivalry among Henry's sons and Louis's own indecisiveness broke up the coalition (1173–1174) between them. Finally, in 1177, the pope intervened to bring the two kings to terms at Vitry-le-François.
+
+In 1165, Louis' third wife bore him a son and heir, Philip. Louis had him crowned at Reims in 1179,[8] in the Capetian tradition (Philip would in fact be the last king so crowned). Already stricken with paralysis, Louis himself could not be present at the ceremony.[8] He died on 18 September 1180 in Paris and was buried the next day at Barbeau Abbey,[8] which he had founded. His remains were moved to the Basilica of Saint-Denis in 1817.
+
+Louis' children by his three marriages:
+
+with Eleanor of Aquitaine:[9]
+
+with Constance of Castile:[11]
+
+with Adele of Champagne:[13]
+
+From the point of view of the preservation and expansion of the French royal domains, the reign of Louis VII was a difficult and unfortunate one. Yet royal authority was more strongly felt in the parts of France distant from these domains: more direct and more frequent connections were made with distant vassals, a result largely due to an alliance between the clergy with the crown. Louis VII thus reaped the reward for services rendered the church during the least successful portions of his reign. His greater accomplishments lie in the development of agriculture, population, commerce, the building of stone fortresses, as well as an intellectual renaissance. Considering the significant disparity of political leverage and financial resources between Louis VII and his Angevin rival Henry II, not to mention Henry's superior military skills, Louis VII should be credited with helping to preserve the Capetian dynasty.
+
+Louis is a character in Jean Anouilh's 1959 play Becket. In the 1964 film adaptation he was portrayed by John Gielgud, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was also portrayed by Charles Kay in the 1978 BBC TV drama series The Devil's Crown. He has a role in Sharon Kay Penman's novels When Christ and His Saints Slept and Devil's Brood. The early part of Norah Lofts' biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine deals considerably with Louis VII, seen through Eleanor's eyes and giving her side in their problematic relationship. Louis is one of the main characters in Elizabeth Chadwick's novel The Summer Queen.
+

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+Louis VII (1120 – 18 September 1180), called the Younger or the Young (French: le Jeune), was King of the Franks from 1137 to 1180. He was the son and successor of King Louis VI, hence his nickname, and married Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in western Europe. The marriage temporarily extended the Capetian lands to the Pyrenees, but was annulled in 1152 after no male heir was produced.
+
+Immediately after the annulment of her marriage, Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, to whom she conveyed Aquitaine and produced five male heirs. When Henry became King of England in 1154, as Henry II, he ruled as king, duke or count over a large empire of kingdoms, duchies and counties that spanned from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Henry's efforts to preserve and expand on this patrimony for the Crown of England would mark the beginning of the long rivalry between France and England.
+
+Louis VII's reign saw the founding of the University of Paris and the disastrous Second Crusade. Louis and his famous counselor, Abbot Suger, pushed for a greater centralization of the state and favoured the development of French Gothic architecture, notably the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris.
+
+He died in 1180 and was succeeded by his son Philip II.
+
+Louis was born in 1120 in Paris,[citation needed] the second son of Louis VI of France and Adelaide of Maurienne. The early education of Prince Louis anticipated an ecclesiastical career. As a result, he became well-learned and exceptionally devout, but his life course changed decisively after the accidental death of his older brother Philip in 1131, when he unexpectedly became the heir to the throne of France. In October 1131, his father had him anointed and crowned by Pope Innocent II in Reims Cathedral.[1][2] He spent much of his youth in Saint-Denis, where he built a friendship with the Abbot Suger, an advisor to his father who also served Louis well during his early years as king.
+
+Following the death of Duke William X of Aquitaine, Louis VI moved quickly to have his son married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had inherited William's territory, on 25 July 1137.[3]  In this way, Louis VI sought to add the large, sprawling territory of the duchy of Aquitaine to his family's holdings in France.  On 1 August 1137, shortly after the marriage, Louis VI died, and Louis VII became king. The pairing of the monkish Louis and the high-spirited Eleanor was doomed to failure; she reportedly once declared that she had thought to marry a king, only to find she had married a monk. There was a marked difference between the frosty, reserved culture of the northern court in the Íle de France, where Louis had been raised, and the rich, free-wheeling court life of the Aquitaine with which Eleanor was familiar.[3]  Louis and Eleanor had two daughters, Marie and Alix.[3]
+
+In the first part of his reign, Louis VII was vigorous and zealous in his prerogatives. His accession was marked by no disturbances other than uprisings by the burgesses of Orléans and  Poitiers, who wished to organise communes. He soon came into violent conflict with Pope Innocent II, however, when the archbishopric of Bourges became vacant. The king supported the chancellor Cadurc as a candidate to fill the vacancy against the pope's nominee Pierre de la Chatre, swearing upon relics that so long as he lived, Pierre should never enter Bourges. The pope thus imposed an interdict upon the king.
+
+Louis VII then became involved in a war with Theobald II of Champagne by permitting Raoul I of Vermandois, the seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife, Theobald II's sister, and to marry Petronilla of Aquitaine, sister of the queen of France. As a result, Champagne decided to side with the pope in the dispute over Bourges. The war lasted two years (1142–1144) and ended with the occupation of Champagne by the royal army. Louis VII was personally involved in the assault and burning of the town of Vitry-le-François.[4] At least 1500 people who had sought refuge in the church died in the flames.[4] Condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, Louis removed his armies from Champagne and returned them to Theobald. He accepted Pierre de la Chatre as archbishop of Bourges  and shunned Raoul and Petronilla. Desiring to atone for his sins, he declared his intention of mounting a crusade on Christmas Day 1145 at Bourges. Bernard of Clairvaux assured its popularity by his preaching at Vezelay on Easter 1146.
+
+In the meantime, Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, completed his conquest of Normandy in 1144. In exchange for being recognised as Duke of Normandy by Louis, Geoffrey surrendered half of the county of Vexin — a region vital to Norman security — to Louis. Considered a clever move by Louis at the time, it would later prove yet another step towards Angevin rule.
+
+In June 1147, in fulfillment of his vow to mount the Second Crusade, Louis VII and his queen set out from the Basilica of St Denis, first stopping in Metz on the overland route to Syria. Soon they arrived in the Kingdom of Hungary, where they were welcomed by the king Géza II of Hungary, who was already waiting with King Conrad III of Germany. Due to his good relationships with Louis VII, Géza II asked the French king to be his son Stephen's baptism godfather. Relations between the kingdoms of France and Hungary remained cordial long after this time: decades later, Louis's daughter Margaret was taken as wife by Géza's son Béla III of Hungary.[5] After receiving provisions from Géza, the armies continued the march to the East. Just beyond Laodicea at Honaz, the French army was ambushed by Turks.[6] In the resulting battle of Mount Cadmus, the Turks first bombarded the French with arrows and heavy stones, then swarmed down from the mountains and massacred them. The historian Odo of Deuil gives this account:
+
+During the fighting the King Louis lost his small and famous royal guard, but he remained in good heart and nimbly and courageously scaled the side of the mountain by gripping the tree roots [...] The enemy climbed after him, hoping to capture him, and the enemy in the distance continued to fire arrows at him. But God willed that his cuirass should protect him from the arrows, and to prevent himself from being captured he defended the crag with his bloody sword, cutting off many heads and hands.
+
+Louis VII and his army finally reached the Holy Land in 1148. His queen Eleanor supported her uncle, Raymond of Antioch, and prevailed upon Louis to help Antioch against Aleppo. But Louis VII's interest lay in Jerusalem, and so he slipped out of Antioch in secret. He united with King Conrad III of Germany and King Baldwin III of Jerusalem to lay siege to Damascus; this ended in disaster and the project was abandoned. Louis VII decided to leave the Holy Land, despite the protests of Eleanor, who still wanted to help her doomed uncle Raymond. Louis VII and the French army returned home in 1149.
+
+The expedition to the Holy Land came at a great cost to the royal treasury and military. It also precipitated a conflict with Eleanor that led to the annulment of their marriage.[7] Perhaps the marriage to Eleanor might have continued if the royal couple had produced a male heir, but this had not occurred.[3] The Council of Beaugency found an exit clause, declaring that Louis VII and Eleanor were too closely related for their marriage to be legal,[3] thus the marriage was annulled on 21 March 1152.  The pretext of kinship was the basis for annulment, but in fact, it owed more to the state of hostility between Louis and Eleanor, with a decreasing likelihood that their marriage would produce a male heir to the throne of France.  On 18 May 1152, Eleanor married the Count of Anjou, the future King Henry II of England. She gave him the duchy of Aquitaine and bore him three daughters and five sons. Louis VII led an ineffective war against Henry for having married without the authorization of his suzerain. The result was a humiliation for the enemies of Henry and Eleanor, who saw their troops routed, their lands ravaged, and their property stolen.[3] Louis reacted by coming down with a fever and returned to the Ile-de France.
+
+In 1154, Louis VII married Constance of Castile, daughter of King Alfonso VII of Castile. She also failed to supply him with a son and heir, bearing only two daughters, Margaret and Alys. By 1157, Henry II of England began to believe that Louis might never produce a male heir, and that the succession of France would consequently be left in question. Determined to secure a claim for his family, he sent his chancellor, Thomas Becket, to press for a marriage between Margaret and Henry's heir, Henry the Young King. Louis agreed to this proposal, and by the Treaty of Gisors (1158) betrothed the young pair, giving as a dowry the Norman city of Gisors and the surrounding county of Vexin.
+
+Louis VII was devastated when Constance died in childbirth on 4 October 1160. As he was desperate for a son, he married Adela of Champagne just 5 weeks later. To counterbalance the advantage this would give the king of France, Henry II had the marriage of their children (Henry "the Young King" and Margaret) celebrated at once. Louis understood the danger of the growing Angevin power; however, through indecision and a lack of fiscal and military resources in comparison to Henry II, he failed to oppose Angevin hegemony effectively. One of his few successes was a trip to Toulouse in 1159 to aid Raymond V, Count of Toulouse, who had been attacked by Henry II: after he entered into the city with a small escort, claiming to be visiting his sister, the Countess, Henry declared that he could not attack the city while his liege lord was inside, and went home.
+
+At the same time, Emperor Frederick I was making good the imperial claims on Arles. When a papal schism broke out in 1159, Louis VII took the part of Pope Alexander III, the enemy of Frederick I, and after two comical failures of Frederick I to meet Louis VII at Saint Jean de Losne (on 29 August and 22 September 1162), Louis VII definitely gave himself up to the cause of Alexander III, who lived at Sens from 1163 to 1165. In return for his loyal support, Alexander III gave Louis the golden rose.
+
+More important for English history would be Louis' support for Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom he tried to reconcile with Henry II. Louis sided with Becket as much to damage Henry as out of piety – yet even he grew irritated with the stubbornness of the archbishop, asking when Becket refused Henry's conciliations, "Do you wish to be more than a Saint?"
+
+Louis also tried to weaken Henry by supporting his rebellious sons, and encouraged Plantagenet disunity by making Henry's sons, rather than Henry himself, the feudal overlords of the Angevin territories in France. But the rivalry among Henry's sons and Louis's own indecisiveness broke up the coalition (1173–1174) between them. Finally, in 1177, the pope intervened to bring the two kings to terms at Vitry-le-François.
+
+In 1165, Louis' third wife bore him a son and heir, Philip. Louis had him crowned at Reims in 1179,[8] in the Capetian tradition (Philip would in fact be the last king so crowned). Already stricken with paralysis, Louis himself could not be present at the ceremony.[8] He died on 18 September 1180 in Paris and was buried the next day at Barbeau Abbey,[8] which he had founded. His remains were moved to the Basilica of Saint-Denis in 1817.
+
+Louis' children by his three marriages:
+
+with Eleanor of Aquitaine:[9]
+
+with Constance of Castile:[11]
+
+with Adele of Champagne:[13]
+
+From the point of view of the preservation and expansion of the French royal domains, the reign of Louis VII was a difficult and unfortunate one. Yet royal authority was more strongly felt in the parts of France distant from these domains: more direct and more frequent connections were made with distant vassals, a result largely due to an alliance between the clergy with the crown. Louis VII thus reaped the reward for services rendered the church during the least successful portions of his reign. His greater accomplishments lie in the development of agriculture, population, commerce, the building of stone fortresses, as well as an intellectual renaissance. Considering the significant disparity of political leverage and financial resources between Louis VII and his Angevin rival Henry II, not to mention Henry's superior military skills, Louis VII should be credited with helping to preserve the Capetian dynasty.
+
+Louis is a character in Jean Anouilh's 1959 play Becket. In the 1964 film adaptation he was portrayed by John Gielgud, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was also portrayed by Charles Kay in the 1978 BBC TV drama series The Devil's Crown. He has a role in Sharon Kay Penman's novels When Christ and His Saints Slept and Devil's Brood. The early part of Norah Lofts' biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine deals considerably with Louis VII, seen through Eleanor's eyes and giving her side in their problematic relationship. Louis is one of the main characters in Elizabeth Chadwick's novel The Summer Queen.
+

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+Louis VI (late 1081 – 1 August 1137), called the Fat (French: le Gros) or the Fighter (French: le Batailleur), was King of France from 1108 to 1137.[1]
+
+Chronicles called him "King of Saint-Denis". Louis was the first member of the house of Capet to make a lasting contribution to centralizing the institutions of royal power.[2] He spent almost all of his twenty-nine-year reign fighting either the "robber barons" who plagued Paris[3] or the Norman kings of England for their continental possession of Normandy. Nonetheless, Louis VI managed to reinforce his power considerably and became one of the first strong kings of France since the death of Charlemagne in 814.
+
+Louis was a warrior-king, but by his forties his weight had become so great that it was increasingly difficult for him to lead in the field. A biography – The Deeds of Louis the Fat, prepared by his loyal advisor Abbot Suger of Saint Denis – offers a fully developed portrait of his character, in contrast to what little historians know about most of his predecessors.
+
+Louis was born around 1081 in Paris, the son of Philip I and Bertha of Holland.[4]
+
+Suger tells us: "In his youth, growing courage matured his spirit with youthful vigour, making him bored with hunting and the boyish games with which others of his age used to enjoy themselves and forget the pursuit of arms." And..."How valiant he was in youth, and with what energy he repelled the king of the English, William Rufus, when he attacked Louis' inherited kingdom."[5]
+
+Louis married Lucienne de Rochefort, the daughter of his father's seneschal, in 1104, but repudiated her three years later. They had no children.
+
+On 3 August 1115 Louis married Adelaide of Maurienne, daughter of Humbert II of Savoy and of Gisela of Burgundy, and niece of Pope Callixtus II. They had eight children. Adelaide was one of the most politically active of all France's medieval queens. Her name appears on 45 royal charters from the reign of Louis VI. During her time as queen (1115–1137), royal charters were dated with both her regnal year and that of the king.
+
+Suger became Louis's adviser even before he succeeded his father as king at the age of 26 on 29 July 1108. Louis's half-brother prevented him from reaching Rheims, and so Daimbert, Archbishop of Sens, crowned him in the cathedral of Orléans on 3 August.[6] Ralph the Green, Archbishop of Rheims, sent envoys to challenge the validity of the coronation and anointing, but to no avail.[6]
+
+When Louis ascended the throne, the Kingdom of France was a collection of feudal principalities. Beyond the Isle de France the French kings had little authority over the great dukes and counts of the realm but slowly Louis began to change this and assert Capetian rights. This process would take two centuries to complete but began in the reign of Louis VI.
+
+The second great challenge facing Louis was to counter the rising power of the Anglo-Normans under their capable new king, Henry I of England.
+
+From early in his reign (and during his father's reign) Louis faced the problem of the robber barons who resisted the King's authority and engaged in brigandry, making the area around Paris unsafe.
+
+From their castles, such as Le Puiset, Chateaufort, and Montlhery, these barons would charge tolls, waylay merchants and pilgrims, terrorize the peasantry and loot churches and abbeys, the latter deeds drawing the ire of the writers of the day, who were mostly clerics.
+
+In 1108, soon after he ascended the throne, Louis engaged in war with Hugh of Crecy, who was plaguing the countryside and had captured Eudes, Count of Corbeil, and imprisoned him at La Ferte-Alais. Louis besieged that fortress to free Eudes.[7]
+
+In early 1109, Louis besieged his half-brother, Philip, the son of Bertrade de Montfort, who was involved in brigandry and conspiracies against the King, at Mantes-la-Jolie.[7] Philip's plots included the lords of Montfort-l'Amaury. Amaury III de Montfort held many castles which, when linked together, formed a continuous barrier between Louis and vast swathes of his domains, threatening all communication south of Paris.[7]
+
+In 1108–1109 a seigneur named Aymon Vaire-Vache seized the lordship of Bourbon from his nephew, Archambaud, a minor. Louis demanded the boy be restored to his rights but Aymon refused the summons. Louis raised his army and besieged Aymon at his castle at Germigny-sur-l'Aubois, forcing its surrender and enforcing the rights of Archambaud.[8]
+
+In 1121, Louis established the marchands de l'eau, to regulate trade along the Seine.[9]
+
+In 1122, Aimeri, Bishop of Clermont, appealed to Louis after William VI, Count of Auvergne, had driven him from his episcopal town. When William refused Louis' summons, Louis raised an army at Bourges, and marched into Auvergne, supported by some of his leading vassals, such as the Counts of Anjou, Brittany, and Nevers. Louis seized the fortress of Pont-du-Chateau on the Allier, then attacked Clermont, which William was forced to abandon. Aimeri was restored. Four years later William rebelled again and Louis, though his increasing weight made campaigning difficult, marched again. He burned Montferrand and seized Clermont a second time, captured William, and brought him before the court at Orléans to answer for his crimes.[8]
+
+Some of the outlaws became notorious for their cruelty, the most notable being Thomas, Lord of Coucy, who was reputed to indulge in torture of his victims, including hanging men by their testicles, cutting out eyes, and chopping off feet. Guibert of Nogent noted of him, "No one can imagine the number of those who perished in his dungeons, from starvation, from torture, from filth."[10]
+
+Another notable brigand was Hugh, Lord of Le Puiset, who was ravaging the lands around Chartres. In March 1111,[10] Louis heard charges against Hugh at his court at Melun from Theobald II, Count of Champagne, the Archbishop of Sens, and also from bishops and abbots. Louis commanded Hugh to appear before him to answer these charges, but Hugh evaded the summons. Louis stripped him of his lands and titles and laid siege to Le Puiset. After a fierce struggle, Louis took the castle and burned it to the ground, taking Hugh prisoner.
+
+Rashly, Louis released Hugh, and while Louis was engaged in war with Henry I of England and Theobald, Hugh raised another band of brigands and began ravaging the country again. When Louis returned his attention to Hugh, he found Le Puiset rebuilt and Hugh receiving aid from Theobald. Hugh held out against the King until Theobald abandoned him. Once again Louis razed Le Puiset and Hugh, who had sworn never to return to his brigandage, rebuilt the castle and resumed terrorizing his neighbours. At the third attempt, Louis finally defeated Hugh and stripped him of his possessions for the last time. Hugh later died on an expiatory pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[11]
+
+These were just some of the recalcitrant nobles Louis was forced to contend with. There were many more, and Louis was in constant motion against them, leading his army from castle to castle, bringing law and order to his domains. The result was increased recognition of the King's authority and the Crown's ability to impose its will, so that all sectors of French society began to see the King as their protector.
+
+After seizing the English Crown, Henry I of England deprived his brother, Robert Curthose, of the Duchy of Normandy and quickly took possession of the castle at Gisors, a fortress of strategic importance on the 
+right bank of the Epte, commanding the road between Rouen and Paris. This violated an earlier agreement between 
+Henry and the French King that Gisors should remain in the hands of a neutral castellan, or else be demolished.
+
+This move threatened the Capetian domain and Louis was outraged, demanding Henry, as his vassal, appear 
+before him to account for his actions. The two kings met, in force, in March 1109[12] at the borders of their respective 
+territories at the bridge of Neauphle on the Epte.[12] Henry refused to relinquish Gisors. Louis challenged the English 
+King to single combat to settle the issue. When Henry refused, war was inevitable, a war which would last, on and off, for twenty years.
+
+The first years of the war went well for Louis until the influential Theobald II, Count of Champagne, switched to Henry's side. By early 1112[12] Theobald had succeeded in bringing together a coalition of barons 
+with grievances against Louis: Lancelin of Bulles,[12] Ralph of Beaugency,[12] Milo of Bray-sur-Seine,[12] Hugh of Crecy,[12] Guy of Rochfort,[12] Hugh of Le Puiset[12] and Hugh, Count of Troyes.[12]
+
+Louis defeated Theobald's coalition but the additional effort meant he could not defeat the English monarch as well 
+or force him to abandon Gisors, and in March 1113[12] Louis was forced to sign a treaty recognizing Henry I as suzerain 
+of Brittany and Maine. Peace of sorts lasted three years until April 1116[12] when hostilities renewed in the French and 
+Norman Vexins, with each king making gains from his rival.
+
+By 1119, buoyed by several successes and the capture (through treachery) of Les Andelys, Louis felt ready for a final 
+encounter to end the war. In the fierce Battle of Bremule, in August 1119,[12] Louis's troops 
+broke and were routed, abandoning the royal banner and sweeping the King along with them in retreat to Les Andelys. A 
+counterattack through Évreux to seize Breteuil failed, and Louis, his health failing, looked for peace.
+
+He appealed to Pope Calixtus II, who agreed to help and met with Henry at Gisors in November 1120.[12] The terms of the 
+peace included Henry's heir, William Adelin, doing homage to Louis for Normandy, a return of all territories captured 
+by both kings with the painful exception of Gisors itself, which Louis was forced to concede to Henry.
+
+On 2 March 1127, the count of Flanders, Charles the Good, was assassinated in St. Donatian's Cathedral at Bruges. It was a scandal in itself but made worse because it precipitated a succession crisis. Soon a number of relatives raised claims, including William of Ypres, popularly thought to be complicit in the murder; Thierry of Alsace; and Arnold of Denmark, nephew of Charles who seized Saint-Omer; Baldwin, Count of Hainault, who seized Oudenarde, and Godfrey I, Count of Louvain and Duke of Brabant.[13]
+
+Louis had his own candidate in mind and marched into Flanders with an army and urged the barons to elect William Clito, son of Robert Curthose, who had been disinherited of Normandy by his uncle Henry I of England, as their new Count. He had no better claim to Flanders than being the King's candidate but on 23 March 1127 he was elected Count by the Flemings.[13]
+
+Louis then moved decisively to secure Flanders, apprehending the murderers of Charles the Good and ousting the rival claimants. On 2 April he took Ghent, on 5 April Bruges, on 26 April he took Ypres, capturing William of Ypres and imprisoning him at Lille. He then quickly took Aire, Cassel and all the towns still loyal to William of Ypres.[13]
+
+Louis's final act before leaving for France was to witness the execution of Charles the Good's murderers. They were hurled from the roof of the church of Saint Donatian where they had committed their crime.[13]
+
+It was a triumph for Louis and demonstrated how far the Crown had come under his leadership, but it was a brief triumph. The new young Count William Clito fared badly, relying on heavy handed feudal ways not suited to the more socially advanced and mercantile Flemings. William's knights ran amok and the Flemings rebelled against Louis's candidate. Ghent and Bruge appealed to Thierry of Alsace and Saint-Omer to Arnold of Denmark.[13]
+
+Louis attempted to intervene again but the moment was gone. The people of Bruge rejected him and recognized Thierry of Alsace as their Count, and he quickly moved to enforce his claim. Louis called a great assembly at Arras and had Thierry excommunicated but it was a gesture. Louis abandoned William of Clito, who died during a siege at Alost on 27 July 1128, and after the whole country finally submitted to Thierry, Louis was obliged to confirm his claim.[13]
+
+On 25 November 1120, Louis' fortunes against Henry I of England were raised when Henry's heir, William Ætheling, drunkenly perished aboard the White Ship en route from Normandy to England, putting the future of Henry's dynasty and his position in doubt.
+
+By 1123 Louis was involved with a coalition of Norman and French seigneurs opposed to Henry. The plan was to drive the English King from Normandy and replace him with William Clito. Henry, however, easily defeated this coalition then instigated his son-in-law, Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, to invade France.[14]
+
+Henry V had married the Empress Matilda, the English King's daughter and the future mother of Henry II of England, 9 years earlier, in hopes of creating an Anglo-German empire, though the couple remained childless. Like Louis, Henry V had designs on the Low Countries and an invasion of Northern France would enable him to strengthen his ambitions in Flanders, as well as support his father-in-law.
+
+Thus in 1124, Henry V assembled an army to march on Rheims.[14] It never arrived. In testament to how far Louis had risen as national protector, all of France rose to his appeal against the threat. Henry V was unwilling to see the French barons united behind their King, who now identified himself as the vassal of St Denis, the patron saint of Paris, whose banner he now carried,[15][incomplete short citation] and the proposed invasion was abandoned.
+
+Henry V died a year after the aborted campaign.
+
+In 1128 Henry I married his sole surviving legitimate child, the dowager Empress Matilda, to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. This was a very dangerous alliance for Louis and would prove so during the reign of his successor, Louis VII of France.
+
+As Louis VI approached his end, there seemed to be reasons for optimism. Henry I of England had died on 1 December 1135 and Stephen of Blois had seized the English crown, reneging on the oath he had sworn to Henry I to support Matilda. Stephen was thus in no position to bring the combined Anglo-Norman might against the French crown.
+
+Louis had also made great strides in exercising his royal authority over his barons, and even Theobald II had finally rallied to the Capetian cause.[14]
+
+Finally, on 9 April 1137, a dying William X, Duke of Aquitaine appointed Louis VI guardian of his fifteen-year-old daughter and heiress, Eleanor of Aquitaine.[16] Eleanor was suddenly the most eligible heiress in Europe, and Louis wasted no time in marrying her to his own heir, the future Louis VII, at the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux on 25 July 1137.[16] At a stroke Louis had added one of the most powerful duchies in France to the Capetian domains.
+
+Louis died of dysentery 7 days later, on 1 August 1137. Despite his achievements, it would be the growing power of the soon to be Angevin Empire that would come to overshadow his successor, its seeds sown in the marriage between the Empress Matilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet and realised through their son, Henry II of England.
+
+Louis VI was interred in the Basilica of St Denis in Paris.
+
+He married in 1104: 1) Lucienne de Rochefort — the marriage was annulled on 23 May 1107 at the Council of Troyes by Pope Paschal II.[17]
+
+He married in 1115: 2) Adélaide de Maurienne (1092–1154)[17]
+
+With Marie de Breuillet, daughter of Renaud de Breuillet de Dourdan,[23] Louis VI was the father of a daughter:
+
+
+

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+
+
+Louis XII (27 June 1462 – 1 January 1515) was King of France from 1498 to 1515 and King of Naples from 1501 to 1504. The son of Charles, Duke of Orléans, and Maria of Cleves, he succeeded his cousin Charles VIII, who died without direct heirs in 1498.
+
+Before his accession to the throne of France, he was known as Louis of Orléans and was compelled to be married to his disabled and supposedly sterile cousin Joan by his second cousin, King Louis XI. By doing so, Louis XI hoped to extinguish the Orléans cadet branch of the House of Valois.[1][2]
+
+Louis of Orléans was one of the great feudal lords who opposed the French monarchy in the conflict known as the Mad War. At the royal victory in the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488, Louis was captured, but Charles VIII pardoned him and released him. He subsequently took part in the Italian War of 1494–1498 as one of the French commanders.
+
+When Louis XII became king in 1498, he had his marriage with Joan annulled by Pope Alexander VI and instead married Anne of Brittany, the widow of his cousin Charles VIII. This marriage allowed Louis to reinforce the personal Union of Brittany and France.
+
+Louis persevered in the Italian Wars, initiating a second Italian campaign for the control of the Kingdom of Naples. Louis conquered the Duchy of Milan in 1500 and pushed forward to the Kingdom of Naples, which fell to him in 1501. Proclaimed King of Naples, Louis faced a new coalition gathered by Ferdinand II of Aragon and was forced to cede Naples to Spain in 1504.
+
+Louis XII did not encroach on the power of local governments or the privileges of the nobility, in opposition with the long tradition of the French kings to attempt to impose absolute monarchy in France. A popular king, Louis was proclaimed "Father of the People" (French: Le Père du Peuple) in 1506 by the Estates-General of Tours for his reduction of the tax known as taille, legal reforms, and civil peace within France.
+
+Louis, who remained Duke of Milan after the second Italian War, was interested in further expansion in the Italian Peninsula and launched a third Italian War (1508–1516), which was marked by the military prowess of the Chevalier de Bayard.
+
+Louis XII died in 1515 without a male heir. He was succeeded by his cousin and son-in-law Francis from the Angoulême cadet branch of the House of Valois.
+
+Louis d'Orléans was born on 27 June 1462 in the Château de Blois, Touraine (in the modern French department of Loir-et-Cher).[3] The son of Charles, Duke of Orléans, and Marie of Cleves, he succeeded his father as Duke of Orléans in the year 1465.[4]
+
+Louis XI, who had become king of France in 1461, became highly distrustful of the close relationship between the Orleanists and the Burgundians and began to oppose the idea of an Orleanist ever coming to the throne of France.[5] However, Louis XI may have been more influenced in this opinion by his opposition to the entire Orleanist faction of the royal family than by the actual facts of this paternity case.[clarification needed]  Despite any alleged doubts that King Louis XI may have had, the King, nevertheless, became "godfather" of the newborn.[5]
+
+King Louis XI died on 30 August 1483.[6] He was succeeded to the throne of France by his thirteen (13) year-old son, Charles VIII.[7] Nobody knew the direction which the new king (or more accurately his regent and oldest sister, Anne of France) would take in leading the kingdom. Accordingly, on 24 October 1483, a call went out for a convocation of the Estates General of the French kingdom.[8] In January 1484, deputies of the Estates General began to arrive in Tours, France. The deputies represented three different "estates" in society. The First Estate was the Church; in France this meant the Roman Catholic Church. The Second Estate was composed of the nobility and the royalty of France. The Third Estate was generally composed of commoners and the class of traders and merchants in France. Louis, the current Duke of Orleans and future Louis XII, attended as part of the Second Estate. Each estate brought their chief complaints to the Estates General in hopes to have some impact on the policies that the new King would pursue.
+
+The First Estate (the Church) wanted a return to the "Pragmatic Sanction".[9] The Pragmatic Sanction had been first instituted by King Charles VII, the current King Charles VIII's grandfather. The Pragmatic Sanction eliminated the papacy from the process of appointing bishops and abbots in France. Instead, these positions would be filled by appointment made by the cathedrals and monastery chapters themselves.[9] All church prelates within France would be appointed by the King of France without reference to the pope.
+
+The deputies representing the Second Estate (the nobility) at the Estates General of 1484 wanted all foreigners to be prohibited from command positions in the military.[9] The deputies of the Third Estate (the merchants and traders) wanted taxes to be drastically reduced and that the revenue needs of the crown be met by reducing royal pensions and the number offices.[9] All three of the estates were in agreement on the demand for an end to the sale of government offices.[9] By 7 March 1484, the King announced that he was leaving Tours because of poor health. Five days later the deputies were told that there was no more money to pay their salaries, and the Estates General meekly concluded its business and went home.  The Estates General of 1484 is called, by historians, the most important Estates General until the Estates General of 1789.[10] Important as they were, many of the reforms suggested at the meeting of the Estates General were not immediately adopted. Rather the reforms would only be acted on when Louis XII came to the throne.
+
+Since Charles VIII was only thirteen years of age when he became king, his older sister Anne was to serve as regent until Charles VIII became 20 years old.  From 1485 through 1488, there was another war against the royal authority of France conducted by a collections of nobles.  This war was the Mad War (1485-1488), Louis's war against Anne.[11] Allied with Francis II, Duke of Brittany, Louis confronted the royal army at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier on 28 July 1488 but was defeated and captured.[12] Pardoned three years later, Louis joined his cousin King Charles VIII in campaigns in Italy.[13]
+
+All four children of Charles VIII died in infancy. The French interpretation of the Salic Law permitted claims to the French throne only by male agnatic descendants of French kings. This made Louis, the great-grandson of King Charles V, the most senior claimant as heir of Charles VIII. Thus, Louis, Duke of Orleans, succeeded to the throne on 7 April 1498 as Louis XII upon the death of King Charles VIII.[14]
+
+Although he came late[15] (and unexpectedly) to power, Louis acted with vigour, reforming the French legal system,[16] reducing taxes,[17] and improving the government[18] much like his contemporary Henry VII did in England. To meet his budget after having reduced taxes, Louis XII reduced the pensions for the nobility and for foreign princes.[19] In religious policy, Louis XII re-instituted the Pragmatic Sanction, which established the Roman Catholic Church in France as a "Gallic Church" with most of the power of appointment in the hands of the king or other French officials. As noted above, these reforms had been proposed at the meeting of the Estates General in 1484.
+
+Louis was also skilled in managing his nobility, including the powerful Bourbon faction, greatly contributing to the stability of French government. In the Ordinance of Blois of 1499[20] and the Ordinance of Lyon issued in June 1510[21] he extended the powers of royal judges and made efforts to curb corruption in the law. Highly complex French customary law was codified and ratified by the royal proclamation of the Ordinance of Blois of 1499.[22] The Ordinance of Lyon tightened up the tax collection system requiring, for instance, that tax collectors forward all money to the government within eight days after they collected it from the people.[23] Fines and loss of office were prescribed for violations of this ordinance.
+
+The French Kingdom under Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494 to protect the Duchy of Milan from the threats of the Republic of Venice. At the time, the Duchy of Milan was one of the most prosperous regions of Europe.[24] Louis, the current Duke of Orleans and future King Louis XII, joined Charles VIII on this campaign. The French Kingdom was responding to an appeal for assistance from Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. The invasion set off a series of wars that would last from 1494 until 1559 and would become known as the "Italian Wars".
+
+In 1495, Ludovico Sforza betrayed the French by changing sides in the war and joining the anti-French League of Venice (sometimes called the "Holy League").[25] This left Louis, the Duke of Orleans, in an awkward and inferior military position at the Battle of Fornovo on 6 July 1495. As a result, Louis had come to hate Ludovico Sforza.[26] Accordingly, even before he became King of France, Louis began to claim the Duchy of Milan as his own inheritance, which should have come to his by right of his paternal grandmother Valentina Visconti.
+
+After becoming king in 1499, Louis XII pursued his ambition to claim Milan in what is known as the "Great Italian War" (1499–1504) or "King Louis XII's War". However, before initiating any war Louis XII needed to deal with the international threats that he faced. In August 1498, he signed a peace treaty with the Emperor Maximillian I of the Holy Roman Empire.[27]
+
+With Maximillian I neutralized, Louis wanted to turn his attention to King Henry VII of England. However, Henry was then pursuing a marriage between his eldest son, Arthur, and Catherine of Aragon, the Infanta of Spain.[27] Thus he needed to detach Spain from its close relations with England before he could deal with Henry VII. Furthermore, Spain was then a member of the anti-French League of Venice. Ferdinand of Aragon, king of the newly unified Spain, directed all relations between Spain and the French on behalf of himself and his queen, Isabella I of Castile.[27] Ferdinand was so hostile to France that he had founded the anti-French League of Venice in 1495.[28] In August 1498, Louis XII succeeded in signing a treaty with Spain that ignored all the territorial disputes between France and Spain and merely pledged mutual friendship and non-aggression.[29]
+
+This allowed enough freedom for Louis XII to start negotiating with Scotland for an alliance. Actually, Louis was merely seeking to reinstitute the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland that had been in existence since King Philippe IV of France first recognised Robert the Bruce (1306–1329) as King of Scotland in 1309. In early 1499, the old alliance between Scotland and France was renewed[27] and the attentions of England were drawn northward toward Scotland rather than southward toward continental Europe.
+
+With the major powers preoccupied or pledged to peace with France, Louis XII could attend to two other neighbors on his border: the Swiss Confederation and the Duchy of Savoy. In March 1499, Louis signed an agreement with the Swiss Confederation that promised 20,000 francs as an annual subsidy for simply allowing the French to recruit an unspecified number of troops in the Confederation.[29] In exchange, Louis promised to protect the Confederation from any aggression from Maximillian and the Holy Roman Empire. Louis opened negotiations with the Duchy of Savoy and by May 1499 had hammered out an agreement that allowed French troops to cross Savoy to reach the Duchy of Milan. The agreement with Savoy also allowed France to purchase supplies and to recruit troops in Savoy.[30] Finally, Louis was ready to march into Italy.
+
+The French army had been a potent force in 1494 when Charles VIII had first invaded Italy.  However, during the remainder of Charles VIII's reign, the army had been allowed to deteriorate through neglect. Ever since becoming king, Louis XII had been rebuilding the French army.[31] Now he could put it to use.
+
+On 10 August 1499, after marching across Savoy and through the town of Asti, the French army crossed the border into the Duchy of Milan. Contrary to the wishes of the Second Estate (the nobles and royalty of France), expressed at the Estates General in 1484, this French army was being led by a non-Frenchman, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio.[32] Marshall Trivulzio had been in the service of the French throne since the reign of Louis XI, but he had been born and raised in Milan.[32] The French army that Marshal Trivulzio now commanded consisted of 27,000 men of which 10,000 were mounted. The French army was also supplied with 5,000 Swiss mercenaries.[32] In the campaign of 1499, the French army surrounded the fortified town of Rocca di Arazzo in the western part of the Duchy of Milan. After five hours of bombardment by the French artillery batteries, the walls of Rocca di Arazzo were breached and the town was taken by the French. Louis XII had ordered his army to massacre the garrison and many civilians as a message to the other towns in the Duchy against resistance to the French army.[32] The legal rationale for the massacre at Rocca di Arazzo was that defenders of the town were traitors because they had risen up in arms against their rightful lord, Louis XII. The French repeated the episode at Annone, the next fortified town on the road to the city of Milan. This time the massacre had the desired effect, as three more fortified towns surrendered without a fight.[33] Marshall Trivulzio then brought the French Army up to the gates of town of Alessandro, and his batteries began battering the walls of the town on 25 August 1499. At first, a vigorous defense was mounted by the garrison, but on 29 August 1499, the city gave up and the garrison and the governor of the city slipped out of town before dawn.[33]
+
+Marshal Trivulzio now became aware that the Venetian army, allies of the Duchy of Milan, were crossing into the Duchy from the east in an attempt to aid the Milanese army before it was too late. Accordingly, Marshal Trivulzio marched his army to Pavia, the last fortified town in the Duchy of Milan.[33] With French troops already near Pavia, a short distance west of the city of Milan, Lodovico Sforza determined that it was useless to continue resisting the French. Accordingly, on the night of 2 September 1499, Sforza and a band of cavalry fled Milan, heading northward to the Holy Roman Empire.[33] Louis XII, staying in Lyon, heard about the surrender of Milan on 17 September 1499. He immediately left Lyon and on 6 October 1499, Louis XII made his triumphant entry into Milan. Marshal Trevulzio presented the key to the city to Louis, who in turn appointed Marshal Trivulzio as the temporary French governor of Milan. Later, Louis appointed Georges d' Amboise as the permanent governor of Milan.[34] In an attempt to win popularity with the public in Milan, Louis lowered the old Sforza taxes by as much as one-third.[35]
+
+Meanwhile, Ludovico Sforza had been gathering an army, mainly among the Swiss, to take Milan back. In mid-January 1500, his army crossed the border into the Duchy of Milan and marched toward the city of Milan.[36] Upon hearing the news of Sforza's return, some of his partisans in the city rose up. On 1 February 1500, Marshal Trivulzio decided that he could not hold the city, and the French retreated to the fortresses west of the city. Sforza was welcomed back into the city by a joyous crowd of his supporters on 5 February 1500.[37] Louis XII raised another army under Louis de La Trémoille and sent him to recapture Milan. By the time Trémoille reached the forts west of Milan where Marshal Trivulzio and his force were holding out, the French army had swollen to 30,000 men by recruitment along the way.[37] Many of these new recruits in the French army were Swiss mercenaries. The government of the Swiss Confederation heard about the coming battle and forbade any Swiss soldier from fighting against a fellow Swiss, which effectively subtracted all the Swiss from both sides for this particular battle. These troops then started to march back home to Switzerland. This had a much more damaging effect on Sforza's army, because his army was composed of a larger proportion of Swiss than the French army under La Trémoille.
+
+Faced with the return of the French and his own greatly reduced force, Sforza decided to slip out of Milan as he had done previously. This time, however, Sforza was captured[38] and spent the rest of his life in a French prison. Despite Milan's openly warm welcome of Sforza (which Louis XII regarded as "treasonous"), Louis XII was very generous to the city in victory. While Sforza had been in charge of Milan, the export of grain had been forbidden. Now the French reopened the trade in grain, setting off a decade of prosperity in Milan.[39] Milan was to remain a French stronghold in Italy for twelve years.
+
+Using Milan as his firmly established base, Louis XII began to turn his attention to other parts of Italy. The city of Genoa agreed to the appointment of Philip of Cleves, a cousin of Louis XII, as its new governor.[33] Additionally, the French king now began to espouse his claim to the Kingdom of Naples, though the legal rationale for this claim was weaker than for his claim to Milan, stemming only from his position as the successor to Charles VIII.[40] Nonetheless, Louis XII pursued the claim with vigor.
+
+The presence of several French garrisons in southern Italy, the remnants of Charles VIII's first invasion of Italy, provided Louis XII with a toehold in southern Italy from which he hoped to enforce his claim to the Kingdom of Naples.[40] However, Louis first had to deal with a recurring problem in northern Italy. In 1406, the city of Pisa was conquered by Florence but had been in constant revolt almost ever since. In 1494, the Pisans successfully overthrew the Florentine governors of the city.[40] The Florentines requested aid from the French to recapture Pisa, as the city of Florence had long been an ally of France in Italian affairs. However, Louis and his advisers were miffed at Florence because in the recent fight against Sforza, Florence had chosen to abandon France and remain strictly neutral.[40] The French knew that they would need Florence in the coming campaign in the Kingdom of Naples – French troops would need to cross Florentine territory on their way to Naples and they would need Florentine agreement to do so. Accordingly, a French army including 600 knights and 6,000 Swiss infantrymen under the command of Sire de Beaumont was sent to Pisa. On 29 June 1500, a combined French and Florentine force laid siege to Pisa and set up batteries around the town.[41] Within a day of opening fire, the French batteries had knocked down 100 feet of the old medieval walls surrounding the city. Even with the breach in their walls, the Pisans put up such a determined resistance that Beaumont despaired of ever taking Pisa. On 11 July 1500, the French broke camp and retreated north.[41] The diversion to Pisa and the failure there emboldened opponents of the French in Italy. Pursuing the claim to the Kingdom of Naples had become politically impossible until some of the opponents were neutralized. One opponent in particular was Spain. It was at this point, in 1500, that Louis XII pursued the claim of his immediate predecessor to the Kingdom of Naples with Ferdinand II, the King of Aragon and with Queen Isabel of Castile, ruler of Spain.
+
+On 11 November 1500, Ferdinand II and Louis XII signed the Treaty of Granada,[42] which brought Spain into Italian politics in a big way for the first time. Louis XII was severely criticized by contemporary historians including Niccolò Machiavelli;[42] Machiavelli's criticism of Louis XII is contained in his work The Prince.
+
+Louis's failure to hold on to Naples prompted a commentary by Niccolò Machiavelli in his famous opus The Prince:
+
+Consider how easy it would have been for the king to maintain his position in Italy if he had observed the rules [of not worrying about weaker powers, decreasing the strength of a major power, not introducing a very powerful foreigner in the midst of his new subjects and taking up residence among his new subjects and/or setting up colonies], and become the protector and defender of his new friends. They were many, they were weak, some of them were afraid of the Venetians, others of the Church, hence they were bound to stick by him; and with their help, he could easily have protected himself against the remaining great powers. But no sooner was he established in Milan than he took exactly the wrong tack, helping Pope Alexander to occupy the Romagna. And he never realized that by this decision he was weakening himself, driving away his friends and those who had flocked to him, while strengthening the Church by adding vast temporal power to the spiritual power which gives it so much authority. Having made this first mistake, he was forced into others. To limit the ambition of Alexander and keep him from becoming master of Tuscany, he was forced to come to Italy himself [in 1502]. Not satisfied with having made the Church powerful and deprived himself of his friends, he went after the kingdom of Naples and divided it with the king of Spain (Ferdinand II). And where before he alone had been the arbiter of Italy, he brought in a rival to whom everyone in the kingdom who was ambitious on his own account or dissatisfied with Louis could have recourse. He could have left in Naples a caretaker king of his own, but he threw him out, and substituted a man capable of driving out Louis himself.
+
+Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince,[43] Chapter III
+
+To assert his claim to his half of the Kingdom of Naples, Louis XII sent an army under the command of Bernard Stuart of Aubigny composed of 1,000 lances, 10,000 infantrymen including 5,000 Swiss troops to Naples in early June 1501.[44] In May 1501, Louis had obtained free passage for his troops to march through Bologne on the way to Naples.[44] As the army approached Rome, Spanish and French ambassadors notified Pope Alexander VI of the thus far secret Treaty of Grenada, signed 11 November 1500, which divided the Kingdom of Naples between France and Spain. The Pope was pleased and enthusiastically issued a bull naming the two kings – Louis XII of France and Ferdinand II of Spain – as the Pope's vassals in Naples.[44] Indeed, the public announcement of the treaty in the Vatican was the first news that King Frederick of Naples had received about his fate and his betrayal by his own cousin, Ferdinand.
+
+Being a stern disciplinarian, Lord Stuart held the troops of his army to strict decorum during most of the march to Naples. However, discipline fell apart when the army passed through Capua. The French army plundered and raped Capua mercilessly.[44]  However, when news of the rape of Capua spread throughout southern Italy, resistance to the French vanished. Frederick fled and the French Army entered Naples unopposed. Louis XII claimed the throne of Naples and pursuant to the sharing agreement with Ferdinand II shared half the income of Naples with Spain. However, as Machiavelli had predicted, the agreement could not last and in early 1502 relations between France and Spain had gone sour.[45] Negotiations were started between France and Spain over their disagreements about Naples. However, in April 1502, without waiting for the conclusion of these negotiations, Louis sent an army under the command of Louis d' Armagnac, Duke of Nemours against the Spanish in Apulia.[46]
+
+Louis's greatest success came in the War of the League of Cambrai (1508-1516), his final war, fought against the Venetians, who had again become his enemy. The French army won the Battle of Agnadello on 14 May 1508. However, things became much more difficult in 1510, when the army of Pope Julius II intervened.[47] Julius II founded the Holy League of the League of Cambrai specifically to thwart the ambitions of France. The French were eventually driven from Milan in 1513 by the Swiss.
+
+At the end of his reign the crown deficit was no greater than it had been when he succeeded Charles VIII in 1498, despite several expensive military campaigns in Italy. His fiscal reforms of 1504 and 1508 tightened and improved procedures for the collection of taxes.
+
+In spite of his military and diplomatic failures, Louis proved to be a popular king. He duly earned the title of Father of the People ("Le Père du Peuple") conferred upon him by the Estates in 1506.
+
+Queen Joan of France
+
+Queen Anne of Brittany
+
+Mary Tudor during her brief period as Queen of France
+
+In 1476, Louis XI forced Louis (his second cousin) to marry his daughter Joan of France. The son of Louis XI, Charles VIII, succeeded to the throne of France in 1483, but died childless in 1498, whereupon the throne passed to Louis XII. Charles had been married to Anne, Duchess of Brittany, in order to unite the quasi-sovereign Duchy of Brittany with the Kingdom of France. To sustain this union, Louis XII had his marriage to Joan annulled (December 1498) after he became king so that he could marry Charles VIII's widow, Anne of Brittany.
+
+The annulment, described as "one of the seamiest lawsuits of the age", was not simple. Louis did not, as one might have expected, argue the marriage to be void due to consanguinity (the general allowance for the dissolution of a marriage at that time). Though he could produce witnesses to claim that the two were closely related due to various linking marriages, there was no documentary proof, merely the opinions of courtiers. Likewise, Louis could not argue that he had been below the legal age of consent (fourteen) to marry: no one was certain when he had been born, with Louis claiming to have been twelve at the time, and others ranging in their estimates between eleven and thirteen. As there was no real proof, he had perforce to bring forward other arguments.
+
+Accordingly, Louis (much to the dismay of his wife) claimed that Joan was physically malformed (providing a rich variety of detail precisely how) and that he had therefore been unable to consummate the marriage. Joan, unsurprisingly, fought this uncertain charge fiercely, producing witnesses to Louis's boast of having "mounted my wife three or four times during the night". Louis also claimed that his sexual performance had been inhibited by witchcraft. Joan responded by asking how he was able to know what it was like to try to make love to her. Had the Papacy been a neutral party, Joan would likely have won, for Louis's case was exceedingly weak. Pope Alexander VI, however, had political reasons to grant the annulment, and ruled against Joan accordingly. He granted the annulment on the grounds that Louis did not freely marry, but was forced to marry by Joan's father Louis XI. Outraged, Joan reluctantly submitted, saying that she would pray for her former husband. She became a nun; she was canonized in 1950.
+
+Louis married the reluctant queen dowager, Anne, in 1499. Anne, who had borne as many as seven stillborn or shortlived children during her previous marriage to King Charles, now bore a further four stillborn sons to the new king, but also two surviving daughters. The elder daughter, Claude (1499–1524), was betrothed by her mother's arrangement to the future Emperor Charles V in 1501. But after Anne failed to produce a living son, Louis dissolved the betrothal and betrothed Claude to his heir presumptive, Francis of Angoulême, thereby insuring that Brittany would remain united with France. Anne opposed this marriage, which took place only after her death in 1514. Claude succeeded her mother in Brittany and became queen consort to Francis. The younger daughter, Renée (1510–1575), married Duke Ercole II of Ferrara.
+
+After Anne's death, Louis married Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII of England, in Abbeville, France, on 9 October 1514. This represented a final attempt to produce an heir to his throne, for despite two previous marriages the king had no living sons. Louis died on 1 January 1515, less than three months after he married Mary, reputedly worn out by his exertions in the bedchamber, but more likely from the effects of gout. Their union produced no children, and the throne passed to Francis I of France, who was Louis’s first cousin once removed, and also his son-in-law.
+
+Louis XII had an illegitimate son, Michel Bucy, Archbishop of Bourges, from 1505, who died in 1511 and was buried in Bourges.[49][50]
+
+On 24 December 1514, Louis was reportedly suffering from a severe case of gout.[51] In the early hours of 1 January 1515, he received the final sacraments and died later that evening.[51] Louis was interred in Saint Denis Basilica.[52] He is commemorated by the Tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany.
+
+The succession to the throne of France followed Salic Law, which did not allow women to inherit the throne. As a result, Louis XII was succeeded by Francis I.  Born to Louise of Savoy, on 12 September 1494, Francis I was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême. Francis would also marry Louis XII's eldest daughter Claude of France.
+
+The succession to the ducal crown of Brittany followed semi-Salic tradition, allowing women to inherit the crown in their own right (suo jure).  Anne of Brittany predeceased Louis XII.  Thus, Anne's eldest daughter, Claude of France, inherited the Duchy of Brittany directly in her own right (suo jure) before Louis's death. When Claude married Francis I, Francis also became the administrator of Brittany in right of his wife. This assured that Brittany would remain part of the Kingdom of France and the unity of the Kingdom would be upheld.

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+Louis XII (27 June 1462 – 1 January 1515) was King of France from 1498 to 1515 and King of Naples from 1501 to 1504. The son of Charles, Duke of Orléans, and Maria of Cleves, he succeeded his cousin Charles VIII, who died without direct heirs in 1498.
+
+Before his accession to the throne of France, he was known as Louis of Orléans and was compelled to be married to his disabled and supposedly sterile cousin Joan by his second cousin, King Louis XI. By doing so, Louis XI hoped to extinguish the Orléans cadet branch of the House of Valois.[1][2]
+
+Louis of Orléans was one of the great feudal lords who opposed the French monarchy in the conflict known as the Mad War. At the royal victory in the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488, Louis was captured, but Charles VIII pardoned him and released him. He subsequently took part in the Italian War of 1494–1498 as one of the French commanders.
+
+When Louis XII became king in 1498, he had his marriage with Joan annulled by Pope Alexander VI and instead married Anne of Brittany, the widow of his cousin Charles VIII. This marriage allowed Louis to reinforce the personal Union of Brittany and France.
+
+Louis persevered in the Italian Wars, initiating a second Italian campaign for the control of the Kingdom of Naples. Louis conquered the Duchy of Milan in 1500 and pushed forward to the Kingdom of Naples, which fell to him in 1501. Proclaimed King of Naples, Louis faced a new coalition gathered by Ferdinand II of Aragon and was forced to cede Naples to Spain in 1504.
+
+Louis XII did not encroach on the power of local governments or the privileges of the nobility, in opposition with the long tradition of the French kings to attempt to impose absolute monarchy in France. A popular king, Louis was proclaimed "Father of the People" (French: Le Père du Peuple) in 1506 by the Estates-General of Tours for his reduction of the tax known as taille, legal reforms, and civil peace within France.
+
+Louis, who remained Duke of Milan after the second Italian War, was interested in further expansion in the Italian Peninsula and launched a third Italian War (1508–1516), which was marked by the military prowess of the Chevalier de Bayard.
+
+Louis XII died in 1515 without a male heir. He was succeeded by his cousin and son-in-law Francis from the Angoulême cadet branch of the House of Valois.
+
+Louis d'Orléans was born on 27 June 1462 in the Château de Blois, Touraine (in the modern French department of Loir-et-Cher).[3] The son of Charles, Duke of Orléans, and Marie of Cleves, he succeeded his father as Duke of Orléans in the year 1465.[4]
+
+Louis XI, who had become king of France in 1461, became highly distrustful of the close relationship between the Orleanists and the Burgundians and began to oppose the idea of an Orleanist ever coming to the throne of France.[5] However, Louis XI may have been more influenced in this opinion by his opposition to the entire Orleanist faction of the royal family than by the actual facts of this paternity case.[clarification needed]  Despite any alleged doubts that King Louis XI may have had, the King, nevertheless, became "godfather" of the newborn.[5]
+
+King Louis XI died on 30 August 1483.[6] He was succeeded to the throne of France by his thirteen (13) year-old son, Charles VIII.[7] Nobody knew the direction which the new king (or more accurately his regent and oldest sister, Anne of France) would take in leading the kingdom. Accordingly, on 24 October 1483, a call went out for a convocation of the Estates General of the French kingdom.[8] In January 1484, deputies of the Estates General began to arrive in Tours, France. The deputies represented three different "estates" in society. The First Estate was the Church; in France this meant the Roman Catholic Church. The Second Estate was composed of the nobility and the royalty of France. The Third Estate was generally composed of commoners and the class of traders and merchants in France. Louis, the current Duke of Orleans and future Louis XII, attended as part of the Second Estate. Each estate brought their chief complaints to the Estates General in hopes to have some impact on the policies that the new King would pursue.
+
+The First Estate (the Church) wanted a return to the "Pragmatic Sanction".[9] The Pragmatic Sanction had been first instituted by King Charles VII, the current King Charles VIII's grandfather. The Pragmatic Sanction eliminated the papacy from the process of appointing bishops and abbots in France. Instead, these positions would be filled by appointment made by the cathedrals and monastery chapters themselves.[9] All church prelates within France would be appointed by the King of France without reference to the pope.
+
+The deputies representing the Second Estate (the nobility) at the Estates General of 1484 wanted all foreigners to be prohibited from command positions in the military.[9] The deputies of the Third Estate (the merchants and traders) wanted taxes to be drastically reduced and that the revenue needs of the crown be met by reducing royal pensions and the number offices.[9] All three of the estates were in agreement on the demand for an end to the sale of government offices.[9] By 7 March 1484, the King announced that he was leaving Tours because of poor health. Five days later the deputies were told that there was no more money to pay their salaries, and the Estates General meekly concluded its business and went home.  The Estates General of 1484 is called, by historians, the most important Estates General until the Estates General of 1789.[10] Important as they were, many of the reforms suggested at the meeting of the Estates General were not immediately adopted. Rather the reforms would only be acted on when Louis XII came to the throne.
+
+Since Charles VIII was only thirteen years of age when he became king, his older sister Anne was to serve as regent until Charles VIII became 20 years old.  From 1485 through 1488, there was another war against the royal authority of France conducted by a collections of nobles.  This war was the Mad War (1485-1488), Louis's war against Anne.[11] Allied with Francis II, Duke of Brittany, Louis confronted the royal army at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier on 28 July 1488 but was defeated and captured.[12] Pardoned three years later, Louis joined his cousin King Charles VIII in campaigns in Italy.[13]
+
+All four children of Charles VIII died in infancy. The French interpretation of the Salic Law permitted claims to the French throne only by male agnatic descendants of French kings. This made Louis, the great-grandson of King Charles V, the most senior claimant as heir of Charles VIII. Thus, Louis, Duke of Orleans, succeeded to the throne on 7 April 1498 as Louis XII upon the death of King Charles VIII.[14]
+
+Although he came late[15] (and unexpectedly) to power, Louis acted with vigour, reforming the French legal system,[16] reducing taxes,[17] and improving the government[18] much like his contemporary Henry VII did in England. To meet his budget after having reduced taxes, Louis XII reduced the pensions for the nobility and for foreign princes.[19] In religious policy, Louis XII re-instituted the Pragmatic Sanction, which established the Roman Catholic Church in France as a "Gallic Church" with most of the power of appointment in the hands of the king or other French officials. As noted above, these reforms had been proposed at the meeting of the Estates General in 1484.
+
+Louis was also skilled in managing his nobility, including the powerful Bourbon faction, greatly contributing to the stability of French government. In the Ordinance of Blois of 1499[20] and the Ordinance of Lyon issued in June 1510[21] he extended the powers of royal judges and made efforts to curb corruption in the law. Highly complex French customary law was codified and ratified by the royal proclamation of the Ordinance of Blois of 1499.[22] The Ordinance of Lyon tightened up the tax collection system requiring, for instance, that tax collectors forward all money to the government within eight days after they collected it from the people.[23] Fines and loss of office were prescribed for violations of this ordinance.
+
+The French Kingdom under Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494 to protect the Duchy of Milan from the threats of the Republic of Venice. At the time, the Duchy of Milan was one of the most prosperous regions of Europe.[24] Louis, the current Duke of Orleans and future King Louis XII, joined Charles VIII on this campaign. The French Kingdom was responding to an appeal for assistance from Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. The invasion set off a series of wars that would last from 1494 until 1559 and would become known as the "Italian Wars".
+
+In 1495, Ludovico Sforza betrayed the French by changing sides in the war and joining the anti-French League of Venice (sometimes called the "Holy League").[25] This left Louis, the Duke of Orleans, in an awkward and inferior military position at the Battle of Fornovo on 6 July 1495. As a result, Louis had come to hate Ludovico Sforza.[26] Accordingly, even before he became King of France, Louis began to claim the Duchy of Milan as his own inheritance, which should have come to his by right of his paternal grandmother Valentina Visconti.
+
+After becoming king in 1499, Louis XII pursued his ambition to claim Milan in what is known as the "Great Italian War" (1499–1504) or "King Louis XII's War". However, before initiating any war Louis XII needed to deal with the international threats that he faced. In August 1498, he signed a peace treaty with the Emperor Maximillian I of the Holy Roman Empire.[27]
+
+With Maximillian I neutralized, Louis wanted to turn his attention to King Henry VII of England. However, Henry was then pursuing a marriage between his eldest son, Arthur, and Catherine of Aragon, the Infanta of Spain.[27] Thus he needed to detach Spain from its close relations with England before he could deal with Henry VII. Furthermore, Spain was then a member of the anti-French League of Venice. Ferdinand of Aragon, king of the newly unified Spain, directed all relations between Spain and the French on behalf of himself and his queen, Isabella I of Castile.[27] Ferdinand was so hostile to France that he had founded the anti-French League of Venice in 1495.[28] In August 1498, Louis XII succeeded in signing a treaty with Spain that ignored all the territorial disputes between France and Spain and merely pledged mutual friendship and non-aggression.[29]
+
+This allowed enough freedom for Louis XII to start negotiating with Scotland for an alliance. Actually, Louis was merely seeking to reinstitute the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland that had been in existence since King Philippe IV of France first recognised Robert the Bruce (1306–1329) as King of Scotland in 1309. In early 1499, the old alliance between Scotland and France was renewed[27] and the attentions of England were drawn northward toward Scotland rather than southward toward continental Europe.
+
+With the major powers preoccupied or pledged to peace with France, Louis XII could attend to two other neighbors on his border: the Swiss Confederation and the Duchy of Savoy. In March 1499, Louis signed an agreement with the Swiss Confederation that promised 20,000 francs as an annual subsidy for simply allowing the French to recruit an unspecified number of troops in the Confederation.[29] In exchange, Louis promised to protect the Confederation from any aggression from Maximillian and the Holy Roman Empire. Louis opened negotiations with the Duchy of Savoy and by May 1499 had hammered out an agreement that allowed French troops to cross Savoy to reach the Duchy of Milan. The agreement with Savoy also allowed France to purchase supplies and to recruit troops in Savoy.[30] Finally, Louis was ready to march into Italy.
+
+The French army had been a potent force in 1494 when Charles VIII had first invaded Italy.  However, during the remainder of Charles VIII's reign, the army had been allowed to deteriorate through neglect. Ever since becoming king, Louis XII had been rebuilding the French army.[31] Now he could put it to use.
+
+On 10 August 1499, after marching across Savoy and through the town of Asti, the French army crossed the border into the Duchy of Milan. Contrary to the wishes of the Second Estate (the nobles and royalty of France), expressed at the Estates General in 1484, this French army was being led by a non-Frenchman, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio.[32] Marshall Trivulzio had been in the service of the French throne since the reign of Louis XI, but he had been born and raised in Milan.[32] The French army that Marshal Trivulzio now commanded consisted of 27,000 men of which 10,000 were mounted. The French army was also supplied with 5,000 Swiss mercenaries.[32] In the campaign of 1499, the French army surrounded the fortified town of Rocca di Arazzo in the western part of the Duchy of Milan. After five hours of bombardment by the French artillery batteries, the walls of Rocca di Arazzo were breached and the town was taken by the French. Louis XII had ordered his army to massacre the garrison and many civilians as a message to the other towns in the Duchy against resistance to the French army.[32] The legal rationale for the massacre at Rocca di Arazzo was that defenders of the town were traitors because they had risen up in arms against their rightful lord, Louis XII. The French repeated the episode at Annone, the next fortified town on the road to the city of Milan. This time the massacre had the desired effect, as three more fortified towns surrendered without a fight.[33] Marshall Trivulzio then brought the French Army up to the gates of town of Alessandro, and his batteries began battering the walls of the town on 25 August 1499. At first, a vigorous defense was mounted by the garrison, but on 29 August 1499, the city gave up and the garrison and the governor of the city slipped out of town before dawn.[33]
+
+Marshal Trivulzio now became aware that the Venetian army, allies of the Duchy of Milan, were crossing into the Duchy from the east in an attempt to aid the Milanese army before it was too late. Accordingly, Marshal Trivulzio marched his army to Pavia, the last fortified town in the Duchy of Milan.[33] With French troops already near Pavia, a short distance west of the city of Milan, Lodovico Sforza determined that it was useless to continue resisting the French. Accordingly, on the night of 2 September 1499, Sforza and a band of cavalry fled Milan, heading northward to the Holy Roman Empire.[33] Louis XII, staying in Lyon, heard about the surrender of Milan on 17 September 1499. He immediately left Lyon and on 6 October 1499, Louis XII made his triumphant entry into Milan. Marshal Trevulzio presented the key to the city to Louis, who in turn appointed Marshal Trivulzio as the temporary French governor of Milan. Later, Louis appointed Georges d' Amboise as the permanent governor of Milan.[34] In an attempt to win popularity with the public in Milan, Louis lowered the old Sforza taxes by as much as one-third.[35]
+
+Meanwhile, Ludovico Sforza had been gathering an army, mainly among the Swiss, to take Milan back. In mid-January 1500, his army crossed the border into the Duchy of Milan and marched toward the city of Milan.[36] Upon hearing the news of Sforza's return, some of his partisans in the city rose up. On 1 February 1500, Marshal Trivulzio decided that he could not hold the city, and the French retreated to the fortresses west of the city. Sforza was welcomed back into the city by a joyous crowd of his supporters on 5 February 1500.[37] Louis XII raised another army under Louis de La Trémoille and sent him to recapture Milan. By the time Trémoille reached the forts west of Milan where Marshal Trivulzio and his force were holding out, the French army had swollen to 30,000 men by recruitment along the way.[37] Many of these new recruits in the French army were Swiss mercenaries. The government of the Swiss Confederation heard about the coming battle and forbade any Swiss soldier from fighting against a fellow Swiss, which effectively subtracted all the Swiss from both sides for this particular battle. These troops then started to march back home to Switzerland. This had a much more damaging effect on Sforza's army, because his army was composed of a larger proportion of Swiss than the French army under La Trémoille.
+
+Faced with the return of the French and his own greatly reduced force, Sforza decided to slip out of Milan as he had done previously. This time, however, Sforza was captured[38] and spent the rest of his life in a French prison. Despite Milan's openly warm welcome of Sforza (which Louis XII regarded as "treasonous"), Louis XII was very generous to the city in victory. While Sforza had been in charge of Milan, the export of grain had been forbidden. Now the French reopened the trade in grain, setting off a decade of prosperity in Milan.[39] Milan was to remain a French stronghold in Italy for twelve years.
+
+Using Milan as his firmly established base, Louis XII began to turn his attention to other parts of Italy. The city of Genoa agreed to the appointment of Philip of Cleves, a cousin of Louis XII, as its new governor.[33] Additionally, the French king now began to espouse his claim to the Kingdom of Naples, though the legal rationale for this claim was weaker than for his claim to Milan, stemming only from his position as the successor to Charles VIII.[40] Nonetheless, Louis XII pursued the claim with vigor.
+
+The presence of several French garrisons in southern Italy, the remnants of Charles VIII's first invasion of Italy, provided Louis XII with a toehold in southern Italy from which he hoped to enforce his claim to the Kingdom of Naples.[40] However, Louis first had to deal with a recurring problem in northern Italy. In 1406, the city of Pisa was conquered by Florence but had been in constant revolt almost ever since. In 1494, the Pisans successfully overthrew the Florentine governors of the city.[40] The Florentines requested aid from the French to recapture Pisa, as the city of Florence had long been an ally of France in Italian affairs. However, Louis and his advisers were miffed at Florence because in the recent fight against Sforza, Florence had chosen to abandon France and remain strictly neutral.[40] The French knew that they would need Florence in the coming campaign in the Kingdom of Naples – French troops would need to cross Florentine territory on their way to Naples and they would need Florentine agreement to do so. Accordingly, a French army including 600 knights and 6,000 Swiss infantrymen under the command of Sire de Beaumont was sent to Pisa. On 29 June 1500, a combined French and Florentine force laid siege to Pisa and set up batteries around the town.[41] Within a day of opening fire, the French batteries had knocked down 100 feet of the old medieval walls surrounding the city. Even with the breach in their walls, the Pisans put up such a determined resistance that Beaumont despaired of ever taking Pisa. On 11 July 1500, the French broke camp and retreated north.[41] The diversion to Pisa and the failure there emboldened opponents of the French in Italy. Pursuing the claim to the Kingdom of Naples had become politically impossible until some of the opponents were neutralized. One opponent in particular was Spain. It was at this point, in 1500, that Louis XII pursued the claim of his immediate predecessor to the Kingdom of Naples with Ferdinand II, the King of Aragon and with Queen Isabel of Castile, ruler of Spain.
+
+On 11 November 1500, Ferdinand II and Louis XII signed the Treaty of Granada,[42] which brought Spain into Italian politics in a big way for the first time. Louis XII was severely criticized by contemporary historians including Niccolò Machiavelli;[42] Machiavelli's criticism of Louis XII is contained in his work The Prince.
+
+Louis's failure to hold on to Naples prompted a commentary by Niccolò Machiavelli in his famous opus The Prince:
+
+Consider how easy it would have been for the king to maintain his position in Italy if he had observed the rules [of not worrying about weaker powers, decreasing the strength of a major power, not introducing a very powerful foreigner in the midst of his new subjects and taking up residence among his new subjects and/or setting up colonies], and become the protector and defender of his new friends. They were many, they were weak, some of them were afraid of the Venetians, others of the Church, hence they were bound to stick by him; and with their help, he could easily have protected himself against the remaining great powers. But no sooner was he established in Milan than he took exactly the wrong tack, helping Pope Alexander to occupy the Romagna. And he never realized that by this decision he was weakening himself, driving away his friends and those who had flocked to him, while strengthening the Church by adding vast temporal power to the spiritual power which gives it so much authority. Having made this first mistake, he was forced into others. To limit the ambition of Alexander and keep him from becoming master of Tuscany, he was forced to come to Italy himself [in 1502]. Not satisfied with having made the Church powerful and deprived himself of his friends, he went after the kingdom of Naples and divided it with the king of Spain (Ferdinand II). And where before he alone had been the arbiter of Italy, he brought in a rival to whom everyone in the kingdom who was ambitious on his own account or dissatisfied with Louis could have recourse. He could have left in Naples a caretaker king of his own, but he threw him out, and substituted a man capable of driving out Louis himself.
+
+Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince,[43] Chapter III
+
+To assert his claim to his half of the Kingdom of Naples, Louis XII sent an army under the command of Bernard Stuart of Aubigny composed of 1,000 lances, 10,000 infantrymen including 5,000 Swiss troops to Naples in early June 1501.[44] In May 1501, Louis had obtained free passage for his troops to march through Bologne on the way to Naples.[44] As the army approached Rome, Spanish and French ambassadors notified Pope Alexander VI of the thus far secret Treaty of Grenada, signed 11 November 1500, which divided the Kingdom of Naples between France and Spain. The Pope was pleased and enthusiastically issued a bull naming the two kings – Louis XII of France and Ferdinand II of Spain – as the Pope's vassals in Naples.[44] Indeed, the public announcement of the treaty in the Vatican was the first news that King Frederick of Naples had received about his fate and his betrayal by his own cousin, Ferdinand.
+
+Being a stern disciplinarian, Lord Stuart held the troops of his army to strict decorum during most of the march to Naples. However, discipline fell apart when the army passed through Capua. The French army plundered and raped Capua mercilessly.[44]  However, when news of the rape of Capua spread throughout southern Italy, resistance to the French vanished. Frederick fled and the French Army entered Naples unopposed. Louis XII claimed the throne of Naples and pursuant to the sharing agreement with Ferdinand II shared half the income of Naples with Spain. However, as Machiavelli had predicted, the agreement could not last and in early 1502 relations between France and Spain had gone sour.[45] Negotiations were started between France and Spain over their disagreements about Naples. However, in April 1502, without waiting for the conclusion of these negotiations, Louis sent an army under the command of Louis d' Armagnac, Duke of Nemours against the Spanish in Apulia.[46]
+
+Louis's greatest success came in the War of the League of Cambrai (1508-1516), his final war, fought against the Venetians, who had again become his enemy. The French army won the Battle of Agnadello on 14 May 1508. However, things became much more difficult in 1510, when the army of Pope Julius II intervened.[47] Julius II founded the Holy League of the League of Cambrai specifically to thwart the ambitions of France. The French were eventually driven from Milan in 1513 by the Swiss.
+
+At the end of his reign the crown deficit was no greater than it had been when he succeeded Charles VIII in 1498, despite several expensive military campaigns in Italy. His fiscal reforms of 1504 and 1508 tightened and improved procedures for the collection of taxes.
+
+In spite of his military and diplomatic failures, Louis proved to be a popular king. He duly earned the title of Father of the People ("Le Père du Peuple") conferred upon him by the Estates in 1506.
+
+Queen Joan of France
+
+Queen Anne of Brittany
+
+Mary Tudor during her brief period as Queen of France
+
+In 1476, Louis XI forced Louis (his second cousin) to marry his daughter Joan of France. The son of Louis XI, Charles VIII, succeeded to the throne of France in 1483, but died childless in 1498, whereupon the throne passed to Louis XII. Charles had been married to Anne, Duchess of Brittany, in order to unite the quasi-sovereign Duchy of Brittany with the Kingdom of France. To sustain this union, Louis XII had his marriage to Joan annulled (December 1498) after he became king so that he could marry Charles VIII's widow, Anne of Brittany.
+
+The annulment, described as "one of the seamiest lawsuits of the age", was not simple. Louis did not, as one might have expected, argue the marriage to be void due to consanguinity (the general allowance for the dissolution of a marriage at that time). Though he could produce witnesses to claim that the two were closely related due to various linking marriages, there was no documentary proof, merely the opinions of courtiers. Likewise, Louis could not argue that he had been below the legal age of consent (fourteen) to marry: no one was certain when he had been born, with Louis claiming to have been twelve at the time, and others ranging in their estimates between eleven and thirteen. As there was no real proof, he had perforce to bring forward other arguments.
+
+Accordingly, Louis (much to the dismay of his wife) claimed that Joan was physically malformed (providing a rich variety of detail precisely how) and that he had therefore been unable to consummate the marriage. Joan, unsurprisingly, fought this uncertain charge fiercely, producing witnesses to Louis's boast of having "mounted my wife three or four times during the night". Louis also claimed that his sexual performance had been inhibited by witchcraft. Joan responded by asking how he was able to know what it was like to try to make love to her. Had the Papacy been a neutral party, Joan would likely have won, for Louis's case was exceedingly weak. Pope Alexander VI, however, had political reasons to grant the annulment, and ruled against Joan accordingly. He granted the annulment on the grounds that Louis did not freely marry, but was forced to marry by Joan's father Louis XI. Outraged, Joan reluctantly submitted, saying that she would pray for her former husband. She became a nun; she was canonized in 1950.
+
+Louis married the reluctant queen dowager, Anne, in 1499. Anne, who had borne as many as seven stillborn or shortlived children during her previous marriage to King Charles, now bore a further four stillborn sons to the new king, but also two surviving daughters. The elder daughter, Claude (1499–1524), was betrothed by her mother's arrangement to the future Emperor Charles V in 1501. But after Anne failed to produce a living son, Louis dissolved the betrothal and betrothed Claude to his heir presumptive, Francis of Angoulême, thereby insuring that Brittany would remain united with France. Anne opposed this marriage, which took place only after her death in 1514. Claude succeeded her mother in Brittany and became queen consort to Francis. The younger daughter, Renée (1510–1575), married Duke Ercole II of Ferrara.
+
+After Anne's death, Louis married Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII of England, in Abbeville, France, on 9 October 1514. This represented a final attempt to produce an heir to his throne, for despite two previous marriages the king had no living sons. Louis died on 1 January 1515, less than three months after he married Mary, reputedly worn out by his exertions in the bedchamber, but more likely from the effects of gout. Their union produced no children, and the throne passed to Francis I of France, who was Louis’s first cousin once removed, and also his son-in-law.
+
+Louis XII had an illegitimate son, Michel Bucy, Archbishop of Bourges, from 1505, who died in 1511 and was buried in Bourges.[49][50]
+
+On 24 December 1514, Louis was reportedly suffering from a severe case of gout.[51] In the early hours of 1 January 1515, he received the final sacraments and died later that evening.[51] Louis was interred in Saint Denis Basilica.[52] He is commemorated by the Tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany.
+
+The succession to the throne of France followed Salic Law, which did not allow women to inherit the throne. As a result, Louis XII was succeeded by Francis I.  Born to Louise of Savoy, on 12 September 1494, Francis I was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême. Francis would also marry Louis XII's eldest daughter Claude of France.
+
+The succession to the ducal crown of Brittany followed semi-Salic tradition, allowing women to inherit the crown in their own right (suo jure).  Anne of Brittany predeceased Louis XII.  Thus, Anne's eldest daughter, Claude of France, inherited the Duchy of Brittany directly in her own right (suo jure) before Louis's death. When Claude married Francis I, Francis also became the administrator of Brittany in right of his wife. This assured that Brittany would remain part of the Kingdom of France and the unity of the Kingdom would be upheld.

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+Louis XIII (French pronunciation: ​[lwi tʁɛz]; sometimes called the Just; 27 September 1601 – 14 May 1643) was King of France from 1610 to 1643 and King of Navarre (as Louis II) from 1610 to 1620, when the crown of Navarre was merged with the French crown.
+
+Shortly before his ninth birthday, Louis became king of France and Navarre after his father Henry IV was assassinated. His mother, Marie de' Medici, acted as regent during his minority. Mismanagement of the kingdom and ceaseless political intrigues by Marie and her Italian favourites led the young king to take power in 1617 by exiling his mother and executing her followers, including Concino Concini, the most influential Italian at the French court.
+
+Louis XIII, taciturn and suspicious, relied heavily on his chief ministers, first Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes and then Cardinal Richelieu, to govern the Kingdom of France. King and cardinal are remembered for establishing the Académie française, and ending the revolt of the French nobility. They systematically destroyed the castles of defiant lords, and denounced the use of private violence (dueling, carrying weapons, and maintaining private armies). By the end of the 1620s, Richelieu had established "the royal monopoly of force" as the ruling doctrine.[1] His reign was also marked by the struggles against the Huguenots and Habsburg Spain.[2]
+
+Born at the Palace of Fontainebleau, Louis XIII was the eldest child of King Henry IV of France and his second wife Marie de' Medici. As son of the king, he was a Fils de France ("son of France"), and as the eldest son, Dauphin of France. His father Henry IV was the first French king of the House of Bourbon, having succeeded his second cousin, Henry III (1574–1589), in application of Salic law. Louis XIII's paternal grandparents were Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre. His maternal grandparents were Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Joanna of Austria, Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Eleonora de' Medici, his maternal aunt, was his godmother.[3] As a child, he was raised under the supervision of the royal governess Françoise de Montglat.
+
+The ambassador of King James I of England to the court of France, Sir Edward Herbert, who presented his credentials to Louis XIII in 1619, remarked on Louis’s extreme congenital speech impediment and his double teeth:
+
+...I presented to the King [Louis] a letter of credence from the King [James] my master: the King [Louis] assured me of a reciprocal affection to the King [James] my master, and of my particular welcome to his Court: his words were never many, as being so extream  [sic] a stutterer that he would sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he could speak so much as one word; he had besides a double row of teeth, and was observed seldom or never to spit or blow his nose, or to sweat much, 'tho he were very laborious, and almost indefatigable in his exercises of hunting and hawking, to which he was much addicted...[4]
+
+Louis XIII ascended the throne in 1610 upon the assassination of his father, and his mother Marie de' Medici acted as his Regent. Although Louis XIII became of age at thirteen (1614), his mother did not give up her position as Regent until 1617, when he was 16. Marie maintained most of her husband's ministers, with the exception of Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, who was unpopular in the country. She mainly relied on Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy, Noël Brûlart de Sillery, and Pierre Jeannin for political advice. Marie pursued a moderate policy, confirming the Edict of Nantes. She was not, however, able to prevent rebellion by nobles such as Henri, Prince of Condé (1588–1646), second in line to the throne after Marie's second surviving son Gaston, Duke of Orléans. Condé squabbled with Marie in 1614, and briefly raised an army, but he found little support in the country, and Marie was able to raise her own army. Nevertheless, Marie agreed to call an Estates General assembly to address Condé's grievances.
+
+The assembly of this Estates General was delayed until Louis XIII formally came of age on his thirteenth birthday. Although his coming-of-age formally ended Marie's Regency, she remained the de facto ruler of France. The Estates General accomplished little, spending its time discussing the relationship of France to the Papacy and the venality of offices, but reaching no resolutions.
+
+Beginning in 1615, Marie came to rely increasingly on Concino Concini, an Italian who assumed the role of her favourite, and was widely unpopular because he was a foreigner. This further antagonised Condé, who launched another rebellion in the early months of 1616. Huguenot leaders supported Condé's rebellion, which led the young Louis XIII to conclude that they would never be loyal subjects. Eventually, Condé and Queen Marie made peace with the ratification on 3 May of the Treaty of Loudun, which allowed Condé great power in government but did not remove Concini. However, on 1 September, after growing dissatisfaction from nobles due to Concini's position, Queen Marie, with Louis's help, imprisoned Condé to protect Concini, leading to renewed revolts against the Queen and Concini.[5]
+
+In the meantime, Louis XIII decided, with the encouragement of Charles d'Albert (the Grand Falconer of France) and other advisers, to break with his mother and to arrest Concini.[6] On 24 April 1617, during the attempted arrest, Concini was killed.[7] His widow Leonora Dori Galigaï was tried for witchcraft, condemned, beheaded, and burned on 8 July 1617,[8] and Marie was sent into exile in Blois.[9] Later, Louis conferred the title of Duke of Luynes on Charles d'Albert.[10]
+
+Luynes soon became as unpopular as Concini had been. Other nobles resented his monopolisation of the King. Luynes was seen as less competent than Henry IV's ministers, many now elderly or deceased, who had surrounded Marie de' Medici.
+
+The Thirty Years' War broke out in 1618. The French court was initially unsure of which side to support. On the one hand, France's traditional rivalry with the House of Habsburg argued in favour of intervening on behalf of the Protestant powers (and Louis's father Henry IV of France had once been a Huguenot leader). On the other hand, Louis XIII had a strict Catholic upbringing, and his natural inclination was to support the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Ferdinand II.
+
+The French nobles were further antagonised against Luynes by the 1618 revocation of the paulette tax and by the sale of offices in 1620. From her exile in Blois, Marie de' Medici became the obvious rallying point for this discontent, and the Bishop of Luçon (who became Cardinal Richelieu in 1622) was allowed to act as her chief adviser, serving as a go-between Marie and the King.
+
+French nobles launched a rebellion in 1620, but their forces were easily routed by royal forces at Les Ponts-de-Cé in August 1620. Louis then launched an expedition against the Huguenots of Béarn who had defied a number of royal decisions. This expedition managed to re-establish Catholicism as the official religion of Béarn. However, the Béarn expedition drove Huguenots in other provinces into a rebellion led by Henri, Duke of Rohan.
+
+In 1621 Louis XIII was formally reconciled with his mother. Luynes was appointed Constable of France, after which he and Louis set out to quell the Huguenot rebellion. The siege at the Huguenot stronghold of Montauban had to be abandoned after three months owing to the large number of royal troops who had succumbed to camp fever. One of the victims of camp fever was Luynes, who died in December 1621.
+
+Following the death of Luynes, Louis determined that he would rule by council. His mother returned from exile and, in 1622, entered this council, where Condé recommended violent suppression of the Huguenots. The 1622 campaign, however, followed the pattern of the previous year: royal forces won some early victories, but were unable to complete a siege, this time at the fortress of Montpellier.
+
+The rebellion was ended by the Treaty of Montpellier, signed by Louis XIII and the Duke of Rohan in October 1622. The treaty confirmed the tenets of the Edict of Nantes: several Huguenot fortresses were to be razed, but the Huguenots retained control of Montauban and La Rochelle.
+
+Louis ultimately dismissed Noël Brûlart de Sillery and Pierre Brûlart in 1624 because of his displeasure with how they handled the diplomatic situation over the Valtellina with Spain. Valtellina was an area with Catholic inhabitants under the suzerainty of the Protestant Three Leagues. It served as an important route to Italy for France and it provided an easy connection between the Spanish and the Holy Roman empires, especially in helping each other with armies if necessary. Spain was constantly interfering in the Valtellina, which angered Louis, as he wanted to hold possession of this strategically important passageway. (In these years the French kingdom was literally surrounded by the Habsburg realms, for the Habsburgs were Kings of Spain as well as Holy Roman Emperors. In addition, the Spanish and Holy Roman empires included the territories of today's Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and northern Italy.) He therefore found a better servitor in his Superintendent of Finances Charles de La Vieuville, who held similar views of Spain as the king, and who advised Louis to side with the Dutch via the Treaty of Compiègne.[11]
+However, La Vieuville was dismissed by the middle of 1624, partly due to his bad behaviour (during his tenure as superintendent he was arrogant and incompetent) and because of a well-organized pamphlet campaign by Cardinal Richelieu against his council rival.[12] Louis needed a new chief advisor; Cardinal Richelieu would be that counsellor.
+
+Cardinal Richelieu played a major role in Louis XIII's reign from 1624, determining France's direction over the course of the next eighteen years. As a result of Richelieu's work, Louis XIII became one of the first examples of an absolute monarch. Under Louis and Richelieu, the crown successfully intervened in the Thirty Years' War against the Habsburgs, managed to keep the French nobility in line, and retracted the political and military privileges granted to the Huguenots by Henry IV (while maintaining their religious freedoms). Louis XIII successfully led the important Siege of La Rochelle. In addition, Louis had the port of Le Havre modernised, and he built a powerful navy.
+
+Louis also worked to reverse the trend of promising French artists leaving for Italy to work and study. He commissioned the painters Nicolas Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne to decorate the Louvre Palace. In foreign matters, Louis organised the development and administration of New France, expanding its settlements westward along the Saint Lawrence River from Quebec City to Montreal.
+
+In order to continue the exploration efforts of his predecessor Henry IV, Louis XIII considered a colonial venture in Morocco, and sent a fleet under Isaac de Razilly in 1619.[13] Razilly was able to explore the coast as far as Mogador. In 1624 he was given charge of an embassy to the pirate harbour of Salé in Morocco, in order to solve the affair of the library of Mulay Zidan.[14]
+
+In 1630, Razilly was able to negotiate the purchase of French slaves from the Moroccans. He visited Morocco again in 1631, and helped negotiate the Franco-Moroccan Treaty (1631).[15] The Treaty gave France preferential treatment, known as Capitulations: preferential tariffs, the establishment of a Consulate, and freedom of religion for French subjects.[16]
+
+Unlike other colonial powers, France, under the guidance of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, encouraged a peaceful coexistence in New France between the Natives and the Colonists. Indians, converted to Catholicism, were considered as "natural Frenchmen" by the Ordonnance of 1627:
+
+"The descendants of the French who are accustomed to this country [New France], together with all the Indians who will be brought to the knowledge of the faith and will profess it, shall be deemed and renowned natural Frenchmen, and as such may come to live in France when they want, and acquire, donate, and succeed and accept donations and legacies, just as true French subjects, without being required to take letters of declaration of naturalization."[17]
+
+Acadia was also developed under Louis XIII. In 1632, Isaac de Razilly became involved, at the request of Cardinal Richelieu, in the colonization of Acadia, by taking possession of the Habitation at Port-Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia) and developing it into a French colony. The King gave Razilly the official title of lieutenant-general for New France. He took on military tasks such as taking control of Fort Pentagouet at Majabigwaduce on the Penobscot Bay, which had been given to France in an earlier Treaty, and to inform the English they were to vacate all lands North of Pemaquid. This resulted in all the French interests in Acadia being restored.
+
+In Brazil, the colony of Equinoctial France was established in 1612, but only lasted 4 years until it was eliminated by the Portuguese.
+
+France-Japan relations started under Louis XIII in 1615 when Hasekura Tsunenaga, a Japanese samurai and ambassador, sent to Rome by Date Masamune, landed at Saint-Tropez for a few days. In 1636, Guillaume Courtet, a French Dominican priest, reciprocated when he set foot in Japan.[18]
+
+Also in 1615, Marie de' Medici incorporated the merchants of Dieppe and other harbours to found the Company of the Moluccas. In 1619, an armed expedition composed of three ships (275 crew, 106 cannon) and called the "Fleet of Montmorency" under General Augustin de Beaulieu was sent from Honfleur, to fight the Dutch in the Far East. In 1624, with the Treaty of Compiègne, Cardinal Richelieu obtained an agreement to halt the Dutch–French warfare in the Far East.[19]
+
+Twice the king's younger brother, Gaston, Duke of Orléans, had to leave France for conspiring against his government and for attempting to undermine the influence of his mother and Cardinal Richelieu. After waging an unsuccessful war in Languedoc, he took refuge in Flanders. In 1643, on the death of Louis XIII, Gaston became Lieutenant-General of the kingdom and fought against Spain on the northern frontiers of France.
+
+On 24 November 1615, Louis XIII married Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain. The couple were second cousins, by mutual descent from Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor. This marriage followed a tradition of cementing military and political alliances between the Catholic powers of France and Spain with royal marriages. The tradition went back to the marriage of Louis VII of France and Constance of Castile. The marriage was only briefly happy, and the King's duties often kept them apart. After twenty-three years of marriage and four stillbirths, Anne finally gave birth to a son on 5 September 1638, the future Louis XIV.
+
+Many people regarded this birth as a miracle and, in show of gratitude to God for the long-awaited birth of an heir, his parents named him Louis-Dieudonné ("God-given"). As another sign of gratitude, according to several interpretations, seven months before his birth, France was dedicated by Louis XIII to the Virgin Mary, who, many believed, had interceded for the perceived miracle.[20][21][22] However, the text of the dedication does not mention the royal pregnancy and birth as one of its reasons. Also, Louis XIII himself is said to have expressed his scepticism with regard to the miracle after his son's birth.[23] In gratitude for having successfully given birth, the queen founded the Benedictine abbey of the Val-de-Grâce, for which Louis XIV himself laid the cornerstone of its church, an early masterpiece of French Baroque architecture.
+
+The couple had the following offspring:
+
+Voltaire claimed in the second edition of Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1771) that Louis XIII had an illegitimate son, before Louis XIV; adding he was jailed and his face hidden beneath an iron mask (see the Man in the Iron Mask).
+
+There is no evidence that Louis kept mistresses (a distinction that earned him the title "Louis the Chaste"), but several reports suggest that he may have been homosexual. The prolonged temporal gap between the queen's pregnancies may have been a result of Louis XIII's aversion to heterosexuality, a matter of great political consequence, since it took the couple more than 20 years of marriage before Louis XIV's birth.[24] His interests as a teenager were focused on male courtiers and he developed an intense emotional attachment to his favourite, Charles d'Albert, although some say there is no clear evidence of a physical sexual relationship.[25] Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, drawing from rumours told to him by a critic of the King (the Marquise de Rambouillet), explicitly speculated in his Historiettes about what happened in the king's bed.
+
+A further liaison with an equerry, François de Baradas, ended when the latter lost favour fighting a duel after duelling had been forbidden by royal decree.[26]
+
+Louis was also captivated by Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who was later executed for conspiring with the Spanish enemy in time of war. Tallemant described how on a royal journey, the King "sent M. le Grand [de Cinq-Mars] to undress, who returned, adorned like a bride. 'To bed, to bed' he said to him impatiently... and the mignon was not in before the king was already kissing his hands."[27]
+
+Louis XIII died in Paris on 14 May 1643, the 33rd anniversary of his father's death. According to his biographer A. Lloyd Moote,
+
+"his intestines were inflamed and ulcerated, making digestion virtually impossible; tuberculosis had spread to his lungs, accompanied by habitual cough. Either of these major ailments, or the accumulation of minor problems, may have killed him, not to mention physiological weaknesses that made him prone to disease or his doctors' remedies of enemas and bleedings, which continued right to his death."[28]
+
+Louis XIII shared his mother's love of the lute, developed in her childhood in Florence. One of his first toys was a lute and his personal doctor, Jean Héroard, reports him playing it for his mother in 1604, at the age of three.[29] In 1635, Louis XIII composed the music, wrote the libretto and designed the costumes for the "Ballet de la Merlaison." The king himself danced in two performances of the ballet the same year at Chantilly and Royaumont.[30]
+
+In the sphere of the men's fashion, Louis helped introduce the wearing of wigs among men in 1624[31] that became fashionable for the first time since antiquity. This would be a dominant style among men in European and European-influenced countries for nearly 200 years until the fashion changes brought about by the French Revolution.[32]

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+
+
+
+
+Louis XIII (French pronunciation: ​[lwi tʁɛz]; sometimes called the Just; 27 September 1601 – 14 May 1643) was King of France from 1610 to 1643 and King of Navarre (as Louis II) from 1610 to 1620, when the crown of Navarre was merged with the French crown.
+
+Shortly before his ninth birthday, Louis became king of France and Navarre after his father Henry IV was assassinated. His mother, Marie de' Medici, acted as regent during his minority. Mismanagement of the kingdom and ceaseless political intrigues by Marie and her Italian favourites led the young king to take power in 1617 by exiling his mother and executing her followers, including Concino Concini, the most influential Italian at the French court.
+
+Louis XIII, taciturn and suspicious, relied heavily on his chief ministers, first Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes and then Cardinal Richelieu, to govern the Kingdom of France. King and cardinal are remembered for establishing the Académie française, and ending the revolt of the French nobility. They systematically destroyed the castles of defiant lords, and denounced the use of private violence (dueling, carrying weapons, and maintaining private armies). By the end of the 1620s, Richelieu had established "the royal monopoly of force" as the ruling doctrine.[1] His reign was also marked by the struggles against the Huguenots and Habsburg Spain.[2]
+
+Born at the Palace of Fontainebleau, Louis XIII was the eldest child of King Henry IV of France and his second wife Marie de' Medici. As son of the king, he was a Fils de France ("son of France"), and as the eldest son, Dauphin of France. His father Henry IV was the first French king of the House of Bourbon, having succeeded his second cousin, Henry III (1574–1589), in application of Salic law. Louis XIII's paternal grandparents were Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre. His maternal grandparents were Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Joanna of Austria, Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Eleonora de' Medici, his maternal aunt, was his godmother.[3] As a child, he was raised under the supervision of the royal governess Françoise de Montglat.
+
+The ambassador of King James I of England to the court of France, Sir Edward Herbert, who presented his credentials to Louis XIII in 1619, remarked on Louis’s extreme congenital speech impediment and his double teeth:
+
+...I presented to the King [Louis] a letter of credence from the King [James] my master: the King [Louis] assured me of a reciprocal affection to the King [James] my master, and of my particular welcome to his Court: his words were never many, as being so extream  [sic] a stutterer that he would sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he could speak so much as one word; he had besides a double row of teeth, and was observed seldom or never to spit or blow his nose, or to sweat much, 'tho he were very laborious, and almost indefatigable in his exercises of hunting and hawking, to which he was much addicted...[4]
+
+Louis XIII ascended the throne in 1610 upon the assassination of his father, and his mother Marie de' Medici acted as his Regent. Although Louis XIII became of age at thirteen (1614), his mother did not give up her position as Regent until 1617, when he was 16. Marie maintained most of her husband's ministers, with the exception of Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, who was unpopular in the country. She mainly relied on Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy, Noël Brûlart de Sillery, and Pierre Jeannin for political advice. Marie pursued a moderate policy, confirming the Edict of Nantes. She was not, however, able to prevent rebellion by nobles such as Henri, Prince of Condé (1588–1646), second in line to the throne after Marie's second surviving son Gaston, Duke of Orléans. Condé squabbled with Marie in 1614, and briefly raised an army, but he found little support in the country, and Marie was able to raise her own army. Nevertheless, Marie agreed to call an Estates General assembly to address Condé's grievances.
+
+The assembly of this Estates General was delayed until Louis XIII formally came of age on his thirteenth birthday. Although his coming-of-age formally ended Marie's Regency, she remained the de facto ruler of France. The Estates General accomplished little, spending its time discussing the relationship of France to the Papacy and the venality of offices, but reaching no resolutions.
+
+Beginning in 1615, Marie came to rely increasingly on Concino Concini, an Italian who assumed the role of her favourite, and was widely unpopular because he was a foreigner. This further antagonised Condé, who launched another rebellion in the early months of 1616. Huguenot leaders supported Condé's rebellion, which led the young Louis XIII to conclude that they would never be loyal subjects. Eventually, Condé and Queen Marie made peace with the ratification on 3 May of the Treaty of Loudun, which allowed Condé great power in government but did not remove Concini. However, on 1 September, after growing dissatisfaction from nobles due to Concini's position, Queen Marie, with Louis's help, imprisoned Condé to protect Concini, leading to renewed revolts against the Queen and Concini.[5]
+
+In the meantime, Louis XIII decided, with the encouragement of Charles d'Albert (the Grand Falconer of France) and other advisers, to break with his mother and to arrest Concini.[6] On 24 April 1617, during the attempted arrest, Concini was killed.[7] His widow Leonora Dori Galigaï was tried for witchcraft, condemned, beheaded, and burned on 8 July 1617,[8] and Marie was sent into exile in Blois.[9] Later, Louis conferred the title of Duke of Luynes on Charles d'Albert.[10]
+
+Luynes soon became as unpopular as Concini had been. Other nobles resented his monopolisation of the King. Luynes was seen as less competent than Henry IV's ministers, many now elderly or deceased, who had surrounded Marie de' Medici.
+
+The Thirty Years' War broke out in 1618. The French court was initially unsure of which side to support. On the one hand, France's traditional rivalry with the House of Habsburg argued in favour of intervening on behalf of the Protestant powers (and Louis's father Henry IV of France had once been a Huguenot leader). On the other hand, Louis XIII had a strict Catholic upbringing, and his natural inclination was to support the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Ferdinand II.
+
+The French nobles were further antagonised against Luynes by the 1618 revocation of the paulette tax and by the sale of offices in 1620. From her exile in Blois, Marie de' Medici became the obvious rallying point for this discontent, and the Bishop of Luçon (who became Cardinal Richelieu in 1622) was allowed to act as her chief adviser, serving as a go-between Marie and the King.
+
+French nobles launched a rebellion in 1620, but their forces were easily routed by royal forces at Les Ponts-de-Cé in August 1620. Louis then launched an expedition against the Huguenots of Béarn who had defied a number of royal decisions. This expedition managed to re-establish Catholicism as the official religion of Béarn. However, the Béarn expedition drove Huguenots in other provinces into a rebellion led by Henri, Duke of Rohan.
+
+In 1621 Louis XIII was formally reconciled with his mother. Luynes was appointed Constable of France, after which he and Louis set out to quell the Huguenot rebellion. The siege at the Huguenot stronghold of Montauban had to be abandoned after three months owing to the large number of royal troops who had succumbed to camp fever. One of the victims of camp fever was Luynes, who died in December 1621.
+
+Following the death of Luynes, Louis determined that he would rule by council. His mother returned from exile and, in 1622, entered this council, where Condé recommended violent suppression of the Huguenots. The 1622 campaign, however, followed the pattern of the previous year: royal forces won some early victories, but were unable to complete a siege, this time at the fortress of Montpellier.
+
+The rebellion was ended by the Treaty of Montpellier, signed by Louis XIII and the Duke of Rohan in October 1622. The treaty confirmed the tenets of the Edict of Nantes: several Huguenot fortresses were to be razed, but the Huguenots retained control of Montauban and La Rochelle.
+
+Louis ultimately dismissed Noël Brûlart de Sillery and Pierre Brûlart in 1624 because of his displeasure with how they handled the diplomatic situation over the Valtellina with Spain. Valtellina was an area with Catholic inhabitants under the suzerainty of the Protestant Three Leagues. It served as an important route to Italy for France and it provided an easy connection between the Spanish and the Holy Roman empires, especially in helping each other with armies if necessary. Spain was constantly interfering in the Valtellina, which angered Louis, as he wanted to hold possession of this strategically important passageway. (In these years the French kingdom was literally surrounded by the Habsburg realms, for the Habsburgs were Kings of Spain as well as Holy Roman Emperors. In addition, the Spanish and Holy Roman empires included the territories of today's Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and northern Italy.) He therefore found a better servitor in his Superintendent of Finances Charles de La Vieuville, who held similar views of Spain as the king, and who advised Louis to side with the Dutch via the Treaty of Compiègne.[11]
+However, La Vieuville was dismissed by the middle of 1624, partly due to his bad behaviour (during his tenure as superintendent he was arrogant and incompetent) and because of a well-organized pamphlet campaign by Cardinal Richelieu against his council rival.[12] Louis needed a new chief advisor; Cardinal Richelieu would be that counsellor.
+
+Cardinal Richelieu played a major role in Louis XIII's reign from 1624, determining France's direction over the course of the next eighteen years. As a result of Richelieu's work, Louis XIII became one of the first examples of an absolute monarch. Under Louis and Richelieu, the crown successfully intervened in the Thirty Years' War against the Habsburgs, managed to keep the French nobility in line, and retracted the political and military privileges granted to the Huguenots by Henry IV (while maintaining their religious freedoms). Louis XIII successfully led the important Siege of La Rochelle. In addition, Louis had the port of Le Havre modernised, and he built a powerful navy.
+
+Louis also worked to reverse the trend of promising French artists leaving for Italy to work and study. He commissioned the painters Nicolas Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne to decorate the Louvre Palace. In foreign matters, Louis organised the development and administration of New France, expanding its settlements westward along the Saint Lawrence River from Quebec City to Montreal.
+
+In order to continue the exploration efforts of his predecessor Henry IV, Louis XIII considered a colonial venture in Morocco, and sent a fleet under Isaac de Razilly in 1619.[13] Razilly was able to explore the coast as far as Mogador. In 1624 he was given charge of an embassy to the pirate harbour of Salé in Morocco, in order to solve the affair of the library of Mulay Zidan.[14]
+
+In 1630, Razilly was able to negotiate the purchase of French slaves from the Moroccans. He visited Morocco again in 1631, and helped negotiate the Franco-Moroccan Treaty (1631).[15] The Treaty gave France preferential treatment, known as Capitulations: preferential tariffs, the establishment of a Consulate, and freedom of religion for French subjects.[16]
+
+Unlike other colonial powers, France, under the guidance of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, encouraged a peaceful coexistence in New France between the Natives and the Colonists. Indians, converted to Catholicism, were considered as "natural Frenchmen" by the Ordonnance of 1627:
+
+"The descendants of the French who are accustomed to this country [New France], together with all the Indians who will be brought to the knowledge of the faith and will profess it, shall be deemed and renowned natural Frenchmen, and as such may come to live in France when they want, and acquire, donate, and succeed and accept donations and legacies, just as true French subjects, without being required to take letters of declaration of naturalization."[17]
+
+Acadia was also developed under Louis XIII. In 1632, Isaac de Razilly became involved, at the request of Cardinal Richelieu, in the colonization of Acadia, by taking possession of the Habitation at Port-Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia) and developing it into a French colony. The King gave Razilly the official title of lieutenant-general for New France. He took on military tasks such as taking control of Fort Pentagouet at Majabigwaduce on the Penobscot Bay, which had been given to France in an earlier Treaty, and to inform the English they were to vacate all lands North of Pemaquid. This resulted in all the French interests in Acadia being restored.
+
+In Brazil, the colony of Equinoctial France was established in 1612, but only lasted 4 years until it was eliminated by the Portuguese.
+
+France-Japan relations started under Louis XIII in 1615 when Hasekura Tsunenaga, a Japanese samurai and ambassador, sent to Rome by Date Masamune, landed at Saint-Tropez for a few days. In 1636, Guillaume Courtet, a French Dominican priest, reciprocated when he set foot in Japan.[18]
+
+Also in 1615, Marie de' Medici incorporated the merchants of Dieppe and other harbours to found the Company of the Moluccas. In 1619, an armed expedition composed of three ships (275 crew, 106 cannon) and called the "Fleet of Montmorency" under General Augustin de Beaulieu was sent from Honfleur, to fight the Dutch in the Far East. In 1624, with the Treaty of Compiègne, Cardinal Richelieu obtained an agreement to halt the Dutch–French warfare in the Far East.[19]
+
+Twice the king's younger brother, Gaston, Duke of Orléans, had to leave France for conspiring against his government and for attempting to undermine the influence of his mother and Cardinal Richelieu. After waging an unsuccessful war in Languedoc, he took refuge in Flanders. In 1643, on the death of Louis XIII, Gaston became Lieutenant-General of the kingdom and fought against Spain on the northern frontiers of France.
+
+On 24 November 1615, Louis XIII married Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain. The couple were second cousins, by mutual descent from Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor. This marriage followed a tradition of cementing military and political alliances between the Catholic powers of France and Spain with royal marriages. The tradition went back to the marriage of Louis VII of France and Constance of Castile. The marriage was only briefly happy, and the King's duties often kept them apart. After twenty-three years of marriage and four stillbirths, Anne finally gave birth to a son on 5 September 1638, the future Louis XIV.
+
+Many people regarded this birth as a miracle and, in show of gratitude to God for the long-awaited birth of an heir, his parents named him Louis-Dieudonné ("God-given"). As another sign of gratitude, according to several interpretations, seven months before his birth, France was dedicated by Louis XIII to the Virgin Mary, who, many believed, had interceded for the perceived miracle.[20][21][22] However, the text of the dedication does not mention the royal pregnancy and birth as one of its reasons. Also, Louis XIII himself is said to have expressed his scepticism with regard to the miracle after his son's birth.[23] In gratitude for having successfully given birth, the queen founded the Benedictine abbey of the Val-de-Grâce, for which Louis XIV himself laid the cornerstone of its church, an early masterpiece of French Baroque architecture.
+
+The couple had the following offspring:
+
+Voltaire claimed in the second edition of Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1771) that Louis XIII had an illegitimate son, before Louis XIV; adding he was jailed and his face hidden beneath an iron mask (see the Man in the Iron Mask).
+
+There is no evidence that Louis kept mistresses (a distinction that earned him the title "Louis the Chaste"), but several reports suggest that he may have been homosexual. The prolonged temporal gap between the queen's pregnancies may have been a result of Louis XIII's aversion to heterosexuality, a matter of great political consequence, since it took the couple more than 20 years of marriage before Louis XIV's birth.[24] His interests as a teenager were focused on male courtiers and he developed an intense emotional attachment to his favourite, Charles d'Albert, although some say there is no clear evidence of a physical sexual relationship.[25] Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, drawing from rumours told to him by a critic of the King (the Marquise de Rambouillet), explicitly speculated in his Historiettes about what happened in the king's bed.
+
+A further liaison with an equerry, François de Baradas, ended when the latter lost favour fighting a duel after duelling had been forbidden by royal decree.[26]
+
+Louis was also captivated by Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who was later executed for conspiring with the Spanish enemy in time of war. Tallemant described how on a royal journey, the King "sent M. le Grand [de Cinq-Mars] to undress, who returned, adorned like a bride. 'To bed, to bed' he said to him impatiently... and the mignon was not in before the king was already kissing his hands."[27]
+
+Louis XIII died in Paris on 14 May 1643, the 33rd anniversary of his father's death. According to his biographer A. Lloyd Moote,
+
+"his intestines were inflamed and ulcerated, making digestion virtually impossible; tuberculosis had spread to his lungs, accompanied by habitual cough. Either of these major ailments, or the accumulation of minor problems, may have killed him, not to mention physiological weaknesses that made him prone to disease or his doctors' remedies of enemas and bleedings, which continued right to his death."[28]
+
+Louis XIII shared his mother's love of the lute, developed in her childhood in Florence. One of his first toys was a lute and his personal doctor, Jean Héroard, reports him playing it for his mother in 1604, at the age of three.[29] In 1635, Louis XIII composed the music, wrote the libretto and designed the costumes for the "Ballet de la Merlaison." The king himself danced in two performances of the ballet the same year at Chantilly and Royaumont.[30]
+
+In the sphere of the men's fashion, Louis helped introduce the wearing of wigs among men in 1624[31] that became fashionable for the first time since antiquity. This would be a dominant style among men in European and European-influenced countries for nearly 200 years until the fashion changes brought about by the French Revolution.[32]

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+
+
+Illegitimate:
+
+Louis XIV (Louis Dieudonné; 5 September 1638 – 1 September 1715), known as  Louis the Great (Louis le Grand) or the Sun King (le Roi Soleil), was King of France from 14 May 1643 until his death in 1715. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest recorded of any monarch of a sovereign country in European history.[1][a] Louis XIV's France was emblematic of the age of absolutism in Europe.[2]
+
+Louis began his personal rule of France in 1661, after the death of his chief minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin.[3] An adherent of the concept of the divine right of kings, Louis continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralised state governed from the capital. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France and, by compelling many members of the nobility to inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the Fronde rebellion during Louis' minority. By these means he became one of the most powerful French monarchs and consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that endured until the French Revolution. He also enforced uniformity of religion under the Gallican Catholic Church. His revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished the rights of the Huguenot Protestant minority and subjected them to a wave of dragonnades, effectively forcing Huguenots to emigrate or convert, and virtually destroying the French Protestant community.
+
+The Sun King surrounded himself with a variety of significant political, military, and cultural figures such as Mazarin, Colbert, Louvois, the Grand Condé, Turenne, Vauban, Boulle, Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Lully, Charpentier, Marais, Le Brun, Rigaud, Bossuet, Le Vau, Mansart, Charles, Claude Perrault, and Le Nôtre.
+
+During Louis' long reign, France emerged as the leading European power, and regularly asserted its military strength. A conflict with Spain marked his entire childhood, while during his personal rule, the kingdom took part in three major continental conflicts, each against powerful foreign alliances: the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession. In addition, France also contested shorter wars such as the War of Devolution and the War of the Reunions. Warfare defined the foreign policy of Louis XIV and his personality shaped his approach. Impelled by "a mix of commerce, revenge, and pique", Louis sensed that warfare was the ideal way to enhance his glory. In peacetime he concentrated on preparing for the next war. He taught his diplomats that their job was to create tactical and strategic advantages for the French military.[4]
+
+Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. He was named Louis Dieudonné (Louis the God-given)[5] and bore the traditional title of French heirs apparent: Dauphin.[6] At the time of his birth, his parents had been married for 23 years. His mother had experienced four stillbirths between 1619 and 1631. Leading contemporaries thus regarded him as a divine gift and his birth a miracle of God.
+
+Sensing imminent death, Louis XIII decided to put his affairs in order in the spring of 1643, when Louis XIV was four years old. In defiance of custom, which would have made Queen Anne the sole Regent of France, the king decreed that a regency council would rule on his son's behalf. His lack of faith in Queen Anne's political abilities was his primary rationale. He did, however, make the concession of appointing her head of the council.
+
+Louis' relationship with his mother was uncommonly affectionate for the time. Contemporaries and eyewitnesses claimed that the Queen would spend all her time with Louis. Both were greatly interested in food and theatre, and it is highly likely that Louis developed these interests through his close relationship with his mother. This long-lasting and loving relationship can be evidenced by excerpts in Louis' journal entries, such as:
+
+"Nature was responsible for the first knots which tied me to my mother. But attachments formed later by shared qualities of the spirit are far more difficult to break than those formed merely by blood."[7]
+
+It was his mother who gave Louis his belief in the absolute and divine power of his monarchical rule.[8]
+
+During his childhood, he was taken care of by the governesses Françoise de Lansac and Marie-Catherine de Senecey. In 1646, Nicolas V de Villeroy became the young king's tutor. Louis XIV became friends with Villeroy's young children, particularly François de Villeroy, and divided his time between the Palais-Royal and the nearby Hotel de Villeroy.
+
+On 14 May 1643, with Louis XIII dead, Queen Anne had her husband's will annulled by the Parlement de Paris (a judicial body comprising mostly nobles and high clergymen).[9] This action abolished the regency council and made Anne sole Regent of France. Anne exiled some of her husband's ministers (Chavigny, Bouthilier), and she nominated Brienne as her minister of foreign affairs.[10] Anne also nominated Saint Vincent de Paul as her spiritual adviser, which helped her deal with religious policy and the Jansenism question.[11]
+
+Anne kept the direction of religious policy strongly in her hand until 1661; her most important political decisions were to nominate Cardinal Mazarin as her chief minister and the continuation of her late husband's and Cardinal Richelieu's policy, despite their persecution of her, for the sake of her son. Anne wanted to give her son absolute authority and a victorious kingdom. Her rationales for choosing Mazarin were mainly his ability and his total dependence on her, at least until 1653 when she was no longer regent. Anne protected Mazarin by arresting and exiling her followers who conspired against him in 1643: the Duke of Beaufort and Marie de Rohan.[12] She left the direction of the daily administration of policy to Cardinal Mazarin.
+
+The best example of Anne's statesmanship and the partial change in her heart towards her native Spain is seen in her keeping of one of Richelieu's men, the Chancellor of France Pierre Séguier, in his post. Séguier was the person who had interrogated Anne in 1637, treating her like a "common criminal" as she described her treatment following the discovery that she was giving military secrets and information to Spain. Anne was virtually under house arrest for a number of years during her husband's rule. By keeping him in his post, Anne was giving a sign that the interests of France and her son Louis were the guiding spirit of all her political and legal actions. Though not necessarily opposed to Spain, she sought to end the war with a French victory, in order to establish a lasting peace between the Catholic nations.
+
+The Queen also gave a partial Catholic orientation to French foreign policy. This was felt by the Netherlands, France's Protestant ally, which negotiated a separate peace with Spain in 1648.[13]
+
+In 1648, Anne and Mazarin successfully negotiated the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War. Its terms ensured Dutch independence from Spain, awarded some autonomy to the various German princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and granted Sweden seats on the Imperial Diet and territories to control the mouths of the Oder, Elbe, and Weser rivers. France, however, profited most from the settlement. Austria, ruled by the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand III, ceded all Habsburg lands and claims in Alsace to France and acknowledged her de facto sovereignty over the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Verdun, and Toul. Moreover, eager to emancipate themselves from Habsburg domination, petty German states sought French protection. This anticipated the formation of the 1658 League of the Rhine, leading to the further diminution of Imperial power.
+
+As the Thirty Years' War came to an end, a civil war known as the Fronde (after the slings used to smash windows) erupted in France. It effectively checked France's ability to exploit the Peace of Westphalia. Anne and Mazarin had largely pursued the policies of Cardinal Richelieu, augmenting the Crown's power at the expense of the nobility and the Parlements. Anne interfered much more in internal policy than foreign affairs; she was a very proud queen who insisted on the divine rights of the King of France.[citation needed]
+
+All this led her to advocate a forceful policy in all matters relating to the King's authority, in a manner that was much more radical than the one proposed by Mazarin. The Cardinal depended totally on Anne's support and had to use all his influence on the Queen to avoid nullifying, but to restrain some of her radical actions. Anne imprisoned any aristocrat or member of parliament who challenged her will; her main aim was to transfer to her son an absolute authority in the matters of finance and justice. One of the leaders of the Parlement of Paris, whom she had jailed, died in prison.[14]
+
+The Frondeurs, political heirs of the disaffected feudal aristocracy, sought to protect their traditional feudal privileges from the increasingly centralized royal government. Furthermore, they believed their traditional influence and authority was being usurped by the recently ennobled bureaucrats (the Noblesse de Robe, or "nobility of the robe"), who administered the kingdom and on whom the monarchy increasingly began to rely. This belief intensified the nobles' resentment.[citation needed]
+
+In 1648, Anne and Mazarin attempted to tax members of the Parlement de Paris. The members refused to comply and ordered all of the king's earlier financial edicts burned. Buoyed by the victory of Louis, duc d’Enghien (later known as le Grand Condé) at the Battle of Lens, Mazarin, on Queen Anne's insistence, arrested certain members in a show of force.[15] The most important arrest, from Anne's point of view, concerned Pierre Broussel, one of the most important leaders in the Parlement de Paris.
+
+People in France were complaining about the expansion of royal authority, the high rate of taxation, and the reduction of the authority of the Parlement de Paris and other regional representative entities. Paris erupted in rioting as a result, and Anne was forced, under intense pressure, to free Broussel. Moreover, a mob of angry Parisians broke into the royal palace and demanded to see their king. Led into the royal bedchamber, they gazed upon Louis, who was feigning sleep, were appeased, and then quietly departed. The threat to the royal family prompted Anne to flee Paris with the king and his courtiers.
+
+Shortly thereafter, the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia allowed Condé's army to return to aid Louis and his court. Condé's family was close to Anne at that time, and he agreed to help her attempt to restore the king's authority.[16] The queen's army, headed by Condé, attacked the rebels in Paris; the rebels were under the political control of Anne's old friend Marie de Rohan. Beaufort, who had escaped from the prison where Anne had incarcerated him five years before, was the military leader in Paris, under the nominal control of Conti. After a few battles, a political compromise was reached; the Peace of Rueil was signed, and the court returned to Paris.
+
+Unfortunately for Anne, her partial victory depended on Condé, who wanted to control the queen and destroy Mazarin's influence. It was Condé's sister who pushed him to turn against the queen. After striking a deal with her old friend Marie de Rohan, who was able to impose the nomination of Charles de l'Aubespine, marquis de Châteauneuf as minister of justice, Anne arrested Condé, his brother Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and the husband of their sister Anne Genevieve de Bourbon, duchess of Longueville. This situation did not last long, and Mazarin's unpopularity led to the creation of a coalition headed mainly by Marie de Rohan and the duchess of Longueville. This aristocratic coalition was strong enough to liberate the princes, exile Mazarin, and impose a condition of virtual house arrest on Queen Anne.
+
+All these events were witnessed by Louis and largely explained his later distrust of Paris and the higher aristocracy.[17] "In one sense, Louis' childhood came to an end with the outbreak of the Fronde. It was not only that life became insecure and unpleasant – a fate meted out to many children in all ages – but that Louis had to be taken into the confidence of his mother and Mazarin and political and military matters of which he could have no deep understanding".[18] "The family home became at times a near-prison when Paris had to be abandoned, not in carefree outings to other chateaux but in humiliating flights".[18] The royal family was driven out of Paris twice in this manner, and at one point Louis XIV and Anne were held under virtual arrest in the royal palace in Paris. The Fronde years planted in Louis a hatred of Paris and a consequent determination to move out of the ancient capital as soon as possible, never to return.[19]
+
+Just as the first Fronde (the Fronde parlementaire of 1648–1649) ended, a second one (the Fronde des princes of 1650–1653) began. Unlike that which preceded it, tales of sordid intrigue and half-hearted warfare characterized this second phase of upper-class insurrection. To the aristocracy, this rebellion represented a protest against and a reversal of their political demotion from vassals to courtiers. It was headed by the highest-ranking French nobles, among them Louis' uncle Gaston, Duke of Orléans and first cousin Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, known as la Grande Mademoiselle; Princes of the Blood such as Condé, his brother Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and their sister the Duchess of Longueville; dukes of legitimised royal descent, such as Henri, Duke of Longueville, and François, Duke of Beaufort; so-called "foreign princes" such as Frédéric Maurice, Duke of Bouillon, his brother Marshal Turenne, and Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse; and scions of France's oldest families, such as François de La Rochefoucauld.
+
+Queen Anne played the most important role in defeating the Fronde because she wanted to transfer absolute authority to her son. In addition, most of the princes refused to deal with Mazarin, who went into exile for a number of years. The Frondeurs claimed to act on Louis' behalf, and in his real interest against his mother and Mazarin.
+
+Queen Anne had a very close relationship with the Cardinal, and many observers believed that Mazarin became Louis XIV's stepfather by a secret marriage to Queen Anne.[20] However, Louis' coming-of-age and subsequent coronation deprived them of the Frondeurs' pretext for revolt. The Fronde thus gradually lost steam and ended in 1653, when Mazarin returned triumphantly from exile. From that time until his death, Mazarin was in charge of foreign and financial policy without the daily supervision of Anne, who was no longer regent.[21]
+
+During this period, Louis fell in love with Mazarin's niece Marie Mancini, but Anne and Mazarin ended the king's infatuation by sending Mancini away from court to be married in Italy. While Mazarin might have been tempted for a short period of time to marry his niece to the King of France, Queen Anne was absolutely against this; she wanted to marry her son to the daughter of her brother, Philip IV of Spain, for both dynastic and political reasons. Mazarin soon supported the Queen's position because he knew that her support for his power and his foreign policy depended on making peace with Spain from a strong position and on the Spanish marriage. Additionally, Mazarin's relations with Marie Mancini were not good, and he did not trust her to support his position. All of Louis' tears and his supplications to his mother did not make her change her mind; the Spanish marriage was very important both for its role in ending the war between France and Spain, and because many of the claims and objectives of Louis' foreign policy in the next 50 years would be based on this marriage.[22]
+
+Louis XIV was declared to have reached the age of majority on 7 September 1651. On the death of Mazarin, in March 1661, Louis assumed personal control of the reins of government and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister: "Up to this moment I have been pleased to entrust the government of my affairs to the late Cardinal. It is now time that I govern them myself. You [he was talking to the secretaries and ministers of state] will assist me with your counsels when I ask for them. I request and order you to seal no orders except by my command . . . I order you not to sign anything, not even a passport . . . without my command; to render account to me personally each day and to favor no one".[23] Louis was able to capitalize on the widespread public yearning for law and order, that resulted from prolonged foreign wars and domestic civil strife, to further consolidate central political authority and reform at the expense of the feudal aristocracy. Praising his ability to choose and encourage men of talent, the historian Chateaubriand noted: "it is the voice of genius of all kinds which sounds from the tomb of Louis".[24]
+
+Louis began his personal reign with administrative and fiscal reforms. In 1661, the treasury verged on bankruptcy. To rectify the situation, Louis chose Jean-Baptiste Colbert as Controller-General of Finances in 1665. However, Louis first had to neutralize Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances, in order to give Colbert a free hand. Although Fouquet's financial indiscretions were not very different from Mazarin's before him or Colbert's after him, his ambition was worrying to Louis. He had, for example, built an opulent château at Vaux-le-Vicomte where he entertained Louis and his court ostentatiously, as if he were wealthier than the king himself. The court was left with the impression that the vast sums of money needed to support his lifestyle could only have been obtained through embezzlement of government funds.
+
+Fouquet appeared eager to succeed Mazarin and Richelieu in assuming power, and he indiscreetly purchased and privately fortified the remote island of Belle Île. These acts sealed his doom. Fouquet was charged with embezzlement. The Parlement found him guilty and sentenced him to exile. However, Louis altered the sentence to life-imprisonment and abolished Fouquet's post.
+
+With Fouquet dismissed, Colbert reduced the national debt through more efficient taxation. The principal taxes included the aides and douanes (both customs duties), the gabelle (a tax on salt), and the taille (a tax on land). The taille was reduced at first; financial officials were forced to keep regular accounts, auctioning certain taxes instead of selling them privately to a favored few, revising inventories and removing unauthorized exemptions (for example, in 1661 only 10 per cent from the royal domain reached the King). Reform proved difficult because the taille was levied by officers of the Crown who had purchased their post at a high price: punishment of abuses necessarily lowered the value of the post. Nevertheless, excellent results were achieved: the deficit of 1661 turned into a surplus in 1666. The interest on the debt was reduced from 52 million to 24 million livres. The taille was reduced to 42 million in 1661 and 35 million in 1665; finally the revenue from indirect taxation progressed from 26 million to 55 million. The revenues of the royal domain were raised from 80,000 livres in 1661 to 5.5 million livres in 1671. In 1661, the receipts were equivalent to 26 million British pounds, of which 10 million reached the treasury. The expenditure was around 18 million pounds, leaving a deficit of 8 million. In 1667, the net receipts had risen to 20 million pounds sterling, while expenditure had fallen to 11 million, leaving a surplus of 9 million pounds.
+
+To support the reorganized and enlarged army, the panoply of Versailles, and the growing civil administration, the king needed a good deal of money. Finance had always been the weak spot in the French monarchy: methods of collecting taxes were costly and inefficient; direct taxes passed through the hands of many intermediate officials; and indirect taxes were collected by private concessionaries, called tax farmers, who made a substantial profit. Consequently, the state always received far less than what the taxpayers actually paid.
+
+The main weakness arose from an old bargain between the French crown and nobility: the king might raise taxes without consent if only he refrained from taxing the nobles. Only the "unprivileged" classes paid direct taxes, and this term came to mean the peasants only, since many bourgeois, in one way or another, obtained exemptions.
+
+The system was outrageously unjust in throwing a heavy tax burden on the poor and helpless. Later, after 1700, the French ministers who were supported by Louis' secret wife Madame De Maintenon, were able to convince the king to change his fiscal policy. Louis was willing enough to tax the nobles but was unwilling to fall under their control, and only towards the close of his reign, under extreme stress of war, was he able, for the first time in French history, to impose direct taxes on the aristocratic elements of the population. This was a step toward equality before the law and toward sound public finance, but so many concessions and exemptions were won by nobles and bourgeois that the reform lost much of its value.[25]
+
+Louis and Colbert also had wide-ranging plans to bolster French commerce and trade. Colbert's mercantilist administration established new industries and encouraged manufacturers and inventors, such as the Lyon silk manufacturers and the Gobelins manufactory, a producer of tapestries. He invited manufacturers and artisans from all over Europe to France, such as Murano glassmakers, Swedish ironworkers, and Dutch shipbuilders. In this way, he aimed to decrease foreign imports while increasing French exports, hence reducing the net outflow of precious metals from France.
+
+Louis instituted reforms in military administration through Michel le Tellier and the latter's son François-Michel le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois. They helped to curb the independent spirit of the nobility, imposing order on them at court and in the army. Gone were the days when generals protracted war at the frontiers while bickering over precedence and ignoring orders from the capital and the larger politico-diplomatic picture. The old military aristocracy (the Noblesse d'épée, or "nobility of the sword") ceased to have a monopoly over senior military positions and rank. Louvois, in particular, pledged to modernize the army and re-organize it into a professional, disciplined, well-trained force. He was devoted to the soldiers' material well-being and morale, and even tried to direct campaigns.
+
+Legal matters did not escape Louis' attention, as is reflected in the numerous "Great Ordinances" he enacted. Pre-revolutionary France was a patchwork of legal systems, with as many legal customs as there were provinces, and two co-existing legal traditions—customary law in the north and Roman civil law in the south.[26] The Grande Ordonnance de Procédure Civile of 1667, also known as the Code Louis, was a comprehensive legal code attempting a uniform regulation of civil procedure throughout legally irregular France. Among other things, it prescribed baptismal, marriage and death records in the state's registers, not the church's, and it strictly regulated the right of the Parlements to remonstrate.[27] The Code Louis played an important part in French legal history as the basis for the Napoleonic code, from which many modern legal codes are, in turn, derived.
+
+One of Louis' more infamous decrees was the Grande Ordonnance sur les Colonies of 1685, also known as the Code Noir ("black code"). Although it sanctioned slavery, it attempted to humanise the practice by prohibiting the separation of families. Additionally, in the colonies, only Roman Catholics could own slaves, and these had to be baptised.
+
+Louis ruled through a number of councils:
+
+The death of his maternal uncle King Philip IV of Spain, in 1665, precipitated the War of Devolution. In 1660, Louis had married Philip IV's eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, as one of the provisions of the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees.[29] The marriage treaty specified that Maria Theresa was to renounce all claims to Spanish territory for herself and all her descendants.[29] Mazarin and Lionne, however, made the renunciation conditional on the full payment of a Spanish dowry of 500,000 écus.[30] The dowry was never paid and would later play a part persuading his maternal first cousin Charles II of Spain to leave his empire to Philip, Duke of Anjou (later Philip V of Spain), the grandson of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa.
+
+The War of Devolution did not focus on the payment of the dowry; rather, the lack of payment was what Louis XIV used as a pretext for nullifying Maria Theresa's renunciation of her claims, allowing the land to "devolve" to him. In Brabant (the location of the land in dispute), children of first marriages traditionally were not disadvantaged by their parents' remarriages and still inherited property. Louis' wife was Philip IV's daughter by his first marriage, while the new king of Spain, Charles II, was his son by a subsequent marriage. Thus, Brabant allegedly "devolved" to Maria Theresa, giving France a justification to attack the Spanish Netherlands.
+
+During the Eighty Years' War with Spain, France supported the Dutch Republic as part of a general policy of opposing Habsburg power. Johan de Witt, Dutch Grand Pensionary from 1653 to 1672, viewed them as crucial for Dutch security and against his domestic Orangist opponents. Louis provided support in the 1665-1667 Second Anglo-Dutch War but used the opportunity to launch the War of Devolution in 1667. This captured Franche-Comté and much of the Spanish Netherlands; French expansion in this area was a direct threat to Dutch economic interests.[31]
+
+The Dutch opened talks with Charles II of England on a common diplomatic front against France, leading to the Triple Alliance, between England, the Dutch and Sweden. The threat of an escalation and a secret treaty to divide Spanish possessions with Emperor Leopold, the other major claimant to the throne of Spain, led Louis to relinquish many of his gains in the 1668 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.[32]
+
+Louis placed little reliance on his agreement with Leopold and as it was now clear French and Dutch aims were in direct conflict, he decided to first defeat the Republic, then seize the Spanish Netherlands. This required breaking up the Triple Alliance; he paid Sweden to remain neutral and signed the 1670 Secret Treaty of Dover with Charles, an Anglo-French alliance against the Dutch Republic. In May 1672, France invaded the Republic, supported by Münster and the Electorate of Cologne.[33]
+
+Rapid French advance led to a coup that toppled De Witt and brought William III to power. Leopold viewed French expansion into the Rhineland as an increasing threat, especially after their seizure of the strategic Duchy of Lorraine in 1670. The prospect of Dutch defeat led Leopold to an alliance with Brandenburg-Prussia on 23 June, followed by another with the Republic on 25th.[34] Although Brandenburg was forced out of the war by the June 1673 Treaty of Vossem, in August an anti-French alliance was formed by the Dutch, Spain, Emperor Leopold and the Duke of Lorraine.[35]
+
+The French alliance was deeply unpopular in England, who made peace with the Dutch in the February 1674 Treaty of Westminster. However, French armies held significant advantages over their opponents; an undivided command, talented generals like Turenne, Condé and Luxembourg and vastly superior logistics. Reforms introduced by Louvois, the Secretary of War, helped maintain large field armies that could be mobilised much quicker, allowing them to mount offensives in early spring before their opponents were ready.[36]
+
+The French were forced to retreat from the Dutch Republic but these advantages allowed them to hold their ground in Alsace and the Spanish Netherlands, while retaking Franche-Comté. By 1678, mutual exhaustion led to the Treaty of Nijmegen, which was generally settled in France's favour and allowed Louis to intervene in the Scanian War. Despite military defeat, his ally Sweden regained much of their losses under the 1679 treaties of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau and Lund imposed on Denmark-Norway and Brandenburg.[37]
+
+Louis was at the height of his power, but at the cost of uniting his opponents; this increased as he continued his expansion. In 1679, he dismissed his foreign minister Simon Arnauld, marquis de Pomponne, because he was seen as having compromised too much with the allies. Louis maintained the strength of his army, but in his next series of territorial claims avoided using military force alone. Rather, he combined it with legal pretexts in his efforts to augment the boundaries of his kingdom. Contemporary treaties were intentionally phrased ambiguously. Louis established the Chambers of Reunion to determine the full extent of his rights and obligations under those treaties.
+
+Cities and territories, such as Luxembourg and Casale, were prized for their strategic positions on the frontier and access to important waterways. Louis also sought Strasbourg, an important strategic crossing on the left bank of the Rhine and theretofore a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire, annexing it and other territories in 1681. Although a part of Alsace, Strasbourg was not part of Habsburg-ruled Alsace and was thus not ceded to France in the Peace of Westphalia.
+
+Following these annexations, Spain declared war, precipitating the War of the Reunions. However, the Spanish were rapidly defeated because the Emperor (distracted by the Great Turkish War) abandoned them, and the Dutch only supported them minimally. By the Truce of Ratisbon, in 1684, Spain was forced to acquiesce in the French occupation of most of the conquered territories, for 20 years.[38]
+
+Louis' policy of the Réunions may have raised France to its greatest size and power during his reign, but it alienated much of Europe. This poor public opinion was compounded by French actions off the Barbary Coast and at Genoa. First, Louis had Algiers and Tripoli, two Barbary pirate strongholds, bombarded to obtain a favourable treaty and the liberation of Christian slaves. Next, in 1684, a punitive mission was launched against Genoa in retaliation for its support for Spain in previous wars. Although the Genoese submitted, and the Doge led an official mission of apology to Versailles, France gained a reputation for brutality and arrogance. European apprehension at growing French might and the realisation of the extent of the dragonnades' effect (discussed below) led many states to abandon their alliance with France.[39] Accordingly, by the late 1680s, France became increasingly isolated in Europe.
+
+French colonies multiplied in Africa, the Americas, and Asia during Louis' reign, and French explorers made important discoveries in North America.  In 1673, Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette discovered the Mississippi River. In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, followed the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the vast Mississippi basin in Louis' name, calling it Louisiane. French trading posts were also established in India, at Chandernagore and Pondicherry, and in the Indian Ocean at Île Bourbon. Throughout these regions Louis and Colbert embarked on an extensive program of architecture and urbanism meant to reflect the styles of Versailles and Paris and the 'gloire' of the realm.[40]
+
+Meanwhile, diplomatic relations were initiated with distant countries. In 1669, Suleiman Aga led an Ottoman embassy to revive the old Franco-Ottoman alliance.[41] Then, in 1682, after the reception of the Moroccan embassy of Mohammed Tenim in France, Moulay Ismail, Sultan of Morocco, allowed French consular and commercial establishments in his country.[42] In 1699, Louis once again received a Moroccan ambassador, Abdallah bin Aisha, and in 1715, he received a Persian embassy led by Mohammad Reza Beg.
+
+From farther afield, Siam dispatched an embassy in 1684, reciprocated by the French magnificently the next year under Alexandre, Chevalier de Chaumont. This, in turn, was succeeded by another Siamese embassy under Kosa Pan, superbly received at Versailles in 1686. Louis then sent another embassy in 1687, under Simon de la Loubère, and French influence grew at the Siamese court, which granted Mergui as a naval base to France. However, the death of Narai, King of Ayutthaya, the execution of his pro-French minister Constantine Phaulkon, and the Siege of Bangkok in 1688 ended this era of French influence.[43]
+
+France also attempted to participate actively in Jesuit missions to China. To break the Portuguese dominance there, Louis sent Jesuit missionaries to the court of the Kangxi Emperor in 1685: Jean de Fontaney, Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Gerbillon, Louis Le Comte, and Claude de Visdelou.[44] Louis also received a Chinese Jesuit, Michael Shen Fu-Tsung, at Versailles in 1684.[45] Furthermore, Louis' librarian and translator Arcadio Huang was Chinese.[46][47]
+
+By the early 1680s, Louis had greatly augmented French influence in the world. Domestically, he successfully increased the influence of the crown and its authority over the church and aristocracy, thus consolidating absolute monarchy in France.
+
+Louis initially supported traditional Gallicanism, which limited papal authority in France, and convened an Assembly of the French clergy in November 1681. Before its dissolution eight months later, the Assembly had accepted the Declaration of the Clergy of France, which increased royal authority at the expense of papal power. Without royal approval, bishops could not leave France, and appeals could not be made to the Pope. Additionally, government officials could not be excommunicated for acts committed in pursuance of their duties. Although the king could not make ecclesiastical law, all papal regulations without royal assent were invalid in France. Unsurprisingly, the pope repudiated the Declaration.[3]
+
+By attaching nobles to his court at Versailles, Louis achieved increased control over the French aristocracy. Apartments were built to house those willing to pay court to the king.[48] However, the pensions and privileges necessary to live in a style appropriate to their rank were only possible by waiting constantly on Louis.[49] For this purpose, an elaborate court ritual was created wherein the king became the centre of attention and was observed throughout the day by the public. With his excellent memory, Louis could then see who attended him at court and who was absent, facilitating the subsequent distribution of favours and positions. Another tool Louis used to control his nobility was censorship, which often involved the opening of letters to discern their author's opinion of the government and king.[48] Moreover, by entertaining, impressing, and domesticating them with extravagant luxury and other distractions, Louis not only cultivated public opinion of him, he also ensured the aristocracy remained under his scrutiny.
+
+Louis' extravagance at Versailles extended far beyond the scope of elaborate court rituals. Louis took delivery of an African elephant as a gift from the king of Portugal.[50]}} The king encouraged the leading nobles to live at Versailles. This, along with the prohibition of private armies, prevented them from passing time on their own estates and in their regional power bases, from which they historically waged local wars and plotted resistance to royal authority.  Louis thus compelled and seduced the old military aristocracy (the "nobility of the sword") into becoming his ceremonial courtiers, further weakening their power. In their place, Louis raised commoners or the more recently ennobled bureaucratic aristocracy (the "nobility of the robe"). He judged that royal authority thrived more surely by filling high executive and administrative positions with these men because they could be more easily dismissed than nobles of ancient lineage, with entrenched influence. It is believed that Louis' policies were rooted in his experiences during the Fronde, when men of high birth readily took up the rebel cause against their king, who was actually the kinsman of some. This victory of Louis' over the nobility may have then in fact ensured the end of major civil wars in France until the French Revolution about a century later.
+
+In 1648 France was the leading European power, and most of the wars pivoted around its aggressiveness.  Only poverty-stricken Russia exceeded it in population, and no one could match its wealth, central location, and very strong professional army. It had largely avoided the devastation of the Thirty Years' War.  Its weaknesses included an inefficient financial system that was hard-pressed to pay for all the military adventures, and the tendency of most other powers to gang up against it.
+
+During the very long reign of King Louis XIV (1643 – 1715), France fought three major wars: the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession. There were also two lesser conflicts: the War of Devolution and the War of the Reunions.[51] The wars were very expensive but they defined Louis XIV's foreign policies, and his personality shaped his approach. Impelled "by a mix of commerce, revenge, and pique," Louis sensed that warfare was the ideal way to enhance his glory. In peacetime he concentrated on preparing for the next war. He taught his diplomats that their job was to create tactical and strategic advantages for the French military.[4] By 1695, France retained much of its dominance, but had lost control of the seas to the combination of England and Holland.  What's more, most countries, both Protestant and Catholic, were in alliance against it. Vauban, France's leading military strategist, warned the king in 1689 that a hostile "Alliance" was too powerful at sea. He recommended the best way for France to fight back was to license French merchants ships to privateer and seize enemy merchant ships, while avoiding its navies:
+
+Vauban was pessimistic about France's so-called friends and allies:
+
+Louis decided to persecute Protestants and revoke the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which awarded Huguenots political and religious freedom. He saw the persistence of Protestantism as a disgraceful reminder of royal powerlessness. After all, the Edict was the pragmatic concession of his grandfather Henry IV to end the longstanding French Wars of Religion. An additional factor in Louis' thinking was the prevailing contemporary European principle to assure socio-political stability, cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion"), the idea that the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the realm (as originally confirmed in central Europe in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555).[54]
+
+Responding to petitions, Louis initially excluded Protestants from office, constrained the meeting of synods, closed churches outside of Edict-stipulated areas, banned Protestant outdoor preachers, and prohibited domestic Protestant migration. He also disallowed Protestant-Catholic intermarriages to which third parties objected, encouraged missions to the Protestants, and rewarded converts to Catholicism.[55] This discrimination did not encounter much Protestant resistance, and a steady conversion of Protestants occurred, especially among the noble elites.
+
+In 1681, Louis dramatically increased his persecution of Protestants. The principle of cuius regio, eius religio generally had also meant that subjects who refused to convert could emigrate, but Louis banned emigration and effectively insisted that all Protestants must be converted. Secondly, following the proposal of René de Marillac and the Marquis of Louvois, he began quartering dragoons in Protestant homes. Although this was within his legal rights, the dragonnades inflicted severe financial strain on Protestants and atrocious abuse. Between 300,000 and 400,000 Huguenots converted, as this entailed financial rewards and exemption from the dragonnades.[56]
+
+On 15 October 1685, Louis issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, which cited the redundancy of privileges for Protestants given their scarcity after the extensive conversions. The Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes and repealed all the privileges that arose therefrom.[3] By his edict, Louis no longer tolerated the existence of Protestant groups, pastors, or churches in France. No further churches were to be constructed, and those already existing were to be demolished. Pastors could choose either exile or a secular life. Those Protestants who had resisted conversion were now to be baptised forcibly into the established church.[57]
+
+Historians have debated Louis' reasons for issuing the Edict of Fontainebleau. He may have been seeking to placate Pope Innocent XI, with whom relations were tense and whose aid was necessary to determine the outcome of a succession crisis in the Electorate of Cologne. He may also have acted to upstage Emperor Leopold I and regain international prestige after the latter defeated the Turks without Louis' help. Otherwise, he may simply have desired to end the remaining divisions in French society dating to the Wars of Religion by fulfilling his coronation oath to eradicate heresy.[58][59]
+
+Many historians have condemned the Edict of Fontainebleau as gravely harmful to France.[60] In support, they cite the emigration of about 200,000 highly skilled Huguenots (roughly one-fourth of the Protestant population, or 1% of the French population) who defied royal decrees and fled France for various Protestant states, weakening the French economy and enriching that of Protestant states.
+
+On the other hand, there are historians who view this as an exaggeration. They argue that most of France's preeminent Protestant businessmen and industrialists converted to Catholicism and remained.[61]
+
+What is certain is that reaction to the Edict was mixed. Even while French Catholic leaders exulted, Pope Innocent XI still argued with Louis over Gallicanism and criticised the use of violence. Protestants across Europe were horrified at the treatment of their co-religionists, but most Catholics in France applauded the move. Nonetheless, it is indisputable that Louis' public image in most of Europe, especially in Protestant regions, was dealt a severe blow.
+
+In the end, however, despite renewed tensions with the Camisards of south-central France at the end of his reign, Louis may have helped ensure that his successor would experience fewer instances of the religion-based disturbances that had plagued his forebears. French society would sufficiently change by the time of his descendant, Louis XVI, to welcome tolerance in the form of the 1787 Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance. This restored to non-Catholics their civil rights and the freedom to worship openly.[62] With the advent of the French Revolution in 1789, Protestants were granted equal rights with their Roman Catholic counterparts.
+
+The War of the League of Augsburg, which lasted from 1688 to 1697, initiated a period of decline in Louis' political and diplomatic fortunes. The conflict arose from two events in the Rhineland. First, in 1685, the Elector Palatine Charles II died. All that remained of his immediate family was Louis' sister-in-law, Elizabeth Charlotte. German law ostensibly barred her from succeeding to her brother's lands and electoral dignity, but it was unclear enough for arguments in favour of Elizabeth Charlotte to have a chance of success. Conversely, the princess was clearly entitled to a division of the family's personal property. Louis pressed her claims to land and chattels, hoping the latter, at least, would be given to her.[63] Then, in 1688, Maximilian Henry of Bavaria, Archbishop of Cologne, an ally of France, died. The archbishopric had traditionally been held by the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria. However, the Bavarian claimant to replace Maximilian Henry, Prince Joseph Clemens of Bavaria, was at that time not more than 17 years old and not even ordained. Louis sought instead to install his own candidate, William Egon of Fürstenberg, to ensure the key Rhenish state remained an ally.[64]
+
+In light of his foreign and domestic policies during the early 1680s, which were perceived as aggressive, Louis' actions, fostered by the succession crises of the late 1680s, created concern and alarm in much of Europe. This led to the formation of the 1686 League of Augsburg by the Holy Roman Emperor, Spain, Sweden, Saxony, and Bavaria. Their stated intention was to return France to at least the borders agreed to in the Treaty of Nijmegen.[65] Emperor Leopold I's persistent refusal to convert the Truce of Ratisbon into a permanent treaty fed Louis' fears that the Emperor would turn on France and attack the Reunions after settling his affairs in the Balkans.[66]
+
+Another event that Louis found threatening was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in England. Although King James II was Catholic, his two Anglican daughters, Mary and Anne, ensured the English people a Protestant succession. However, when James II's son James was born, he took precedence in the succession over his elder sisters. This seemed to herald an era of Catholic monarchs in England. Protestant lords called on the Dutch Prince William III of Orange, grandson of Charles I of England, to come to their aid. He sailed for England with troops despite Louis' warning that France would regard it as a provocation. Witnessing numerous desertions and defections, even among those closest to him, James II fled England. Parliament declared the throne vacant, and offered it to James's daughter Mary II and his son-in-law and nephew William. Vehemently anti-French, William (now William III of England) pushed his new kingdoms into war, thus transforming the League of Augsburg into the Grand Alliance. Before this happened, Louis expected William's expedition to England to absorb his energies and those of his allies, so he dispatched troops to the Rhineland after the expiry of his ultimatum to the German princes requiring confirmation of the Truce of Ratisbon and acceptance of his demands about the succession crises. This military manoeuvre was also intended to protect his eastern provinces from Imperial invasion by depriving the enemy army of sustenance, thus explaining the pre-emptive scorched earth policy pursued in much of southwestern Germany (the "Devastation of the Palatinate").[67]
+
+French armies were generally victorious throughout the war because of Imperial commitments in the Balkans, French logistical superiority, and the quality of French generals such as Condé's famous pupil, François Henri de Montmorency-Bouteville, duc de Luxembourg. His triumphs at the Battles of Fleurus in 1690, Steenkerque in 1692, and Landen in 1693 preserved northern France from invasion.[68]
+
+Although an attempt to restore James II failed at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, France accumulated a string of victories from Flanders in the north, Germany in the east, and Italy and Spain in the south, to the high seas and the colonies. Louis personally supervised the captures of Mons in 1691 and Namur in 1692. Luxembourg gave France the defensive line of the Sambre by capturing Charleroi in 1693. France also overran most of the Duchy of Savoy after the battles of Marsaglia and Staffarde in 1693. While naval stalemate ensued after the French victory at the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690 and the Allied victory at Barfleur-La Hougue in 1692, the Battle of Torroella in 1694 exposed Catalonia to French invasion, culminating in the capture of Barcelona. Although the Dutch captured Pondichéry in 1693, a French raid on the Spanish treasure port of Cartagena, Spain in 1697 yielded a fortune of 10,000,000 livres.
+
+In July 1695, the city of Namur, occupied for three years by the French, was besieged by an allied army led by William III. Louis XIV ordered the surprise destruction of a Flemish city to divert the attention of these troops. This led to the bombardment of Brussels, in which 4-5000 buildings were destroyed, including the entire city-center. The strategy failed, as Namur fell three weeks later, but harmed Louis XIV's reputation: a century later, Napoleon deemed the bombardment "as barbarous as it was useless."[69]
+
+Peace was broached by Sweden in 1690. By 1692, both sides evidently wanted peace, and secret bilateral talks began, but to no avail.[70] Louis tried to break up the alliance against him by dealing with individual opponents, but this did not achieve its aim until 1696, when the Savoyards agreed to the Treaty of Turin and switched sides. Thereafter, members of the League of Augsburg rushed to the peace table, and negotiations for a general peace began in earnest, culminating in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697.[71]
+
+The Treaty of Ryswick ended the War of the League of Augsburg and disbanded the Grand Alliance. By manipulating their rivalries and suspicions, Louis divided his enemies and broke their power.
+
+The treaty yielded many benefits for France. Louis secured permanent French sovereignty over all of Alsace, including Strasbourg, and established the Rhine as the Franco-German border (which persists to this day). Pondichéry and Acadia were returned to France, and Louis' de facto possession of Saint-Domingue was recognised as lawful. However, he returned Catalonia and most of the Reunions.
+
+French military superiority might have allowed him to press for more advantageous terms. Thus, his generosity to Spain with regard to Catalonia has been read as a concession to foster pro-French sentiment and may ultimately have induced King Charles II to name Louis' grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, as heir to the throne of Spain.[72] In exchange for financial compensation, France renounced its interests in the Electorate of Cologne and the Palatinate. Lorraine, which had been occupied by the French since 1670, was returned to its rightful Duke Leopold, albeit with a right of way to the French military. William and Mary were recognised as joint sovereigns of the British Isles, and Louis withdrew support for James II. The Dutch were given the right to garrison forts in the Spanish Netherlands that acted as a protective barrier against possible French aggression. Though in some respects, the Treaty of Ryswick may appear a diplomatic defeat for Louis since he failed to place client rulers in control of the Palatinate or the Electorate of Cologne, he did in fact fulfill many of the aims laid down in his 1688 ultimatum.[73] In any case, peace in 1697 was desirable to Louis, since France was exhausted from the costs of the war.
+
+By the time of the Treaty of Ryswick, the Spanish succession had been a source of concern to European leaders for well over forty years. King Charles II ruled a vast empire comprising Spain, Naples, Sicily, Milan, the Spanish Netherlands, and numerous Spanish colonies. He produced no children, however, and consequently had no direct heirs.
+
+The principal claimants to the throne of Spain belonged to the ruling families of France and Austria. The French claim derived from Louis XIV's mother Anne of Austria (the older sister of Philip IV of Spain) and his wife Maria Theresa (Philip IV's eldest daughter). Based on the laws of primogeniture, France had the better claim as it originated from the eldest daughters in two generations. However, their renunciation of succession rights complicated matters. In the case of Maria Theresa, nonetheless, the renunciation was considered null and void owing to Spain's breach of her marriage contract with Louis. In contrast, no renunciations tainted the claims of the Emperor Leopold I's son Charles, Archduke of Austria, who was a grandson of Philip III's youngest daughter Maria Anna. The English and Dutch feared that a French or Austrian-born Spanish king would threaten the balance of power and thus preferred the Bavarian Prince Joseph Ferdinand, a grandson of Leopold I through his first wife Margaret Theresa of Spain (the younger daughter of Philip IV).
+
+In an attempt to avoid war, Louis signed the Treaty of the Hague with William III of England in 1698. This agreement divided Spain's Italian territories between Louis's son le Grand Dauphin and the Archduke Charles, with the rest of the empire awarded to Joseph Ferdinand. William III consented to permitting the Dauphin's new territories to become part of France when the latter succeeded to his father's throne.[74] The signatories, however, omitted to consult the ruler of these lands, and Charles II was passionately opposed to the dismemberment of his empire. In 1699, he re-confirmed his 1693 will that named Joseph Ferdinand as his sole successor.[75]
+
+Six months later, Joseph Ferdinand died. Therefore, in 1700, Louis and William III concluded a fresh partitioning agreement, the Treaty of London. This allocated Spain, the Low Countries, and the Spanish colonies to the Archduke. The Dauphin would receive all of Spain's Italian territories.[76] Charles II acknowledged that his empire could only remain undivided by bequeathing it entirely to a Frenchman or an Austrian. Under pressure from his German wife, Maria Anna of Neuburg, Charles II named the Archduke Charles as his sole heir.
+
+On his deathbed in 1700, Charles II unexpectedly changed his will. The clear demonstration of French military superiority for many decades before this time, the pro-French faction at the court of Spain, and even Pope Innocent XII convinced him that France was more likely to preserve his empire intact. He thus offered the entire empire to the Dauphin's second son Philip, Duke of Anjou, provided it remained undivided. Anjou was not in the direct line of French succession, thus his accession would not cause a Franco-Spanish union.[76] If Anjou refused, the throne would be offered to his younger brother Charles, Duke of Berry. If the Duke of Berry declined it, it would go to the Archduke Charles, then to the distantly related House of Savoy if Charles declined it.[77]
+
+Louis was confronted with a difficult choice. He might agree to a partition of the Spanish possessions and avoid a general war, or accept Charles II's will and alienate much of Europe. Initially, Louis may have been inclined to abide by the partition treaties. However, the Dauphin's insistence persuaded Louis otherwise.[78] Moreover, Louis's foreign minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Torcy, pointed out that war with the Emperor would almost certainly ensue whether Louis accepted the partition treaties or Charles II's will. He emphasised that, should it come to war, William III was unlikely to stand by France since he "made a treaty to avoid war and did not intend to go to war to implement the treaty".[75] Indeed, in the event of a war, it might be preferable to be already in control of the disputed lands. Eventually, therefore, Louis decided to accept Charles II's will. Philip, Duke of Anjou, thus became Philip V, King of Spain.
+
+Most European rulers accepted Philip as king, though some only reluctantly. Depending on one's views of the war as inevitable or not, Louis acted reasonably or arrogantly.[79] He confirmed that Philip V retained his French rights despite his new Spanish position. Admittedly, he may only have been hypothesising a theoretical eventuality and not attempting a Franco-Spanish union. But his actions were certainly not read as being disinterested. Moreover, Louis sent troops to the Spanish Netherlands to evict Dutch garrisons and secure Dutch recognition of Philip V. In 1701, Philip transferred the asiento (the right to supply slaves to Spanish colonies) to France, alienating English traders. As tensions mounted, Louis decided to acknowledge James Stuart, the son of James II, as king of England on the latter's death, infuriating William III. These actions enraged Britain and the Dutch Republic.[80] With the Holy Roman Emperor and the petty German states, they formed another Grand Alliance and declared war on France in 1702. French diplomacy, however, secured Bavaria, Portugal, and Savoy as Franco-Spanish allies.[81]
+
+Even before war was officially declared, hostilities began with Imperial aggression in Italy. When finally declared, the War of the Spanish Succession would last almost until Louis's death, at great cost to him and the kingdom of France.
+
+The war began with French successes, however the joint talents of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Eugene of Savoy checked these victories and broke the myth of French invincibility. The duo allowed the Palatinate and Austria to occupy Bavaria after their victory at the Battle of Blenheim. Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, had to flee to the Spanish Netherlands. The impact of this victory won the support of Portugal and Savoy. Later, the Battle of Ramillies delivered the Low Countries up to the Allies, and the Battle of Turin forced Louis to evacuate Italy, leaving it open to Allied forces. Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy met again at the Battle of Oudenarde, which enabled them to mount an invasion of France.
+
+France established contact with Francis II Rákóczi and promised support if he took up the cause of Hungarian independence.
+
+Defeats, famine, and mounting debt greatly weakened France. Between 1693 and 1710, over two million people died in two famines, made worse as foraging armies seized food supplies from the villages.[82][83] In his desperation, Louis XIV even ordered a disastrous invasion of the English island of Guernsey in the autumn of 1704 with the aim of raiding their successful harvest. By the winter of 1708–1709, Louis was willing to accept peace at nearly any cost. He agreed that the entire Spanish empire should be surrendered to the Archduke Charles, and he also consented to return to the frontiers of the Peace of Westphalia, giving up all the territories he had acquired over sixty years of his reign. He could not speak for his grandson, however, and could not promise that Philip V would accept these terms. Thus, the Allies demanded that Louis single-handedly attack his own grandson to force these terms on him. If he could not achieve this within the year, the war would resume. Louis could not accept these terms.[84]
+
+The final phases of the War of the Spanish Succession demonstrated that the Allies could not maintain the Archduke Charles in Spain just as surely as France could not retain the entire Spanish inheritance for King Philip V. The Allies were definitively expelled from central Spain by the Franco-Spanish victories at the Battles of Villaviciosa and Brihuega in 1710. French forces elsewhere remained obdurate despite their defeats. The Allies suffered a Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Malplaquet with 21,000 casualties, twice that of the French.[85] Eventually, France recovered its military pride with the decisive victory at Denain in 1712.
+
+French military successes near the end of the war took place against the background of a changed political situation in Austria. In 1705, the Emperor Leopold I died. His elder son and successor, Joseph I, followed him in 1711. His heir was none other than the Archduke Charles, who secured control of all of his brother's Austrian land holdings. If the Spanish empire then fell to him, it would have resurrected a domain as vast as that of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century. To the maritime powers of Great Britain and the Dutch Republic, this would have been as undesirable as a Franco-Spanish union.[86]
+
+As a result of the fresh British perspective on the European balance of power, Anglo-French talks began that culminated in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht between Louis, Philip V of Spain, Anne, Queen of Great Britain, and the Dutch Republic. In 1714, after losing Landau and Freiburg, the Holy Roman Emperor also made peace with France in the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden.
+
+In the general settlement, Philip V retained Spain and its colonies, whereas Austria received the Spanish Netherlands and divided Spanish Italy with Savoy. Britain kept Gibraltar and Menorca. Louis agreed to withdraw his support for James Stuart, son of James II and pretender to the throne of Great Britain, and ceded Newfoundland, Rupert's Land, and Acadia in the Americas to Anne. Britain gained most from the Treaty of Utrecht, but the final terms were much more favourable to France than those which were being discussed in peace negotiations in 1709 and 1710.[citation needed] France retained Île-Saint-Jean and Île Royale, and Louis did acquire a few minor European territories, such as the Principality of Orange and the Ubaye Valley, which covered transalpine passes into Italy. Thanks to Louis, his allies the Electors of Bavaria and Cologne were restored to their pre-war status and returned their lands.[87]
+
+Louis and his wife Maria Theresa of Spain had six children from the marriage contracted for them in 1660. However, only one child, the eldest, survived to adulthood: Louis, le Grand Dauphin, known as Monseigneur. Maria Theresa died in 1683, whereupon Louis remarked that she had never caused him unease on any other occasion.
+
+Despite evidence of affection early on in their marriage, Louis was never faithful to Maria Theresa. He took a series of mistresses, both official and unofficial. Among the better documented are Louise de La Vallière (with whom he had 5 children; 1661–67), Bonne de Pons d'Heudicourt (1665), Catherine Charlotte de Gramont (1665), Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan (with whom he had 7 children; 1667–80), Anne de Rohan-Chabot (1669–75), Claude de Vin des Œillets (1 child born in 1676), Isabelle de Ludres (1675–78), and Marie Angélique de Scorailles (1679–81), who died at age 19 in childbirth. Through these liaisons, he produced numerous illegitimate children, most of whom he married to members of cadet branches of the royal family.
+
+Louis proved relatively more faithful to his second wife, Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon.  He first met her through her work caring for his children by Madame de Montespan, noting the care she gave to his favorite, Louis Auguste, Duke of Maine.[88]  The king was, at first, put off by her strict religious practice, but he warmed to her through her care for his children.[88]
+
+When he legitimized his children by Madame de Montespan on 20 December 1673, Françoise d'Aubigné became the royal governess at Saint-Germain.[88]  As governess, she was one of very few people permitted to speak to him as an equal, without limits.[88]  It is believed that they were married secretly at Versailles on or around 10 October 1683[89] or January 1684.[90] This marriage, though never announced or publicly discussed, was an open secret and lasted until his death.[91]
+
+Louis was a pious and devout king who saw himself as the head and protector of the Gallican Church. Louis made his devotions daily regardless of where he was, following the liturgical calendar regularly.[92] Under the influence of his very religious second wife, he became much stronger in the practice of his Catholic faith.[93]  This included the banning of opera and comedy performances during Lent.[93]
+
+Towards the middle and the end of his reign, the centre for the King's religious observances was usually the Chapelle Royale at Versailles. Ostentation was a distinguishing feature of daily Mass, annual celebrations, such as those of Holy Week, and special ceremonies.[94] Louis established the Paris Foreign Missions Society, but his informal alliance with the Ottoman Empire was criticised for undermining Christendom.[95]
+
+Louis generously supported the royal court of France and those who worked under him. He brought the Académie Française under his patronage and became its "Protector". He allowed Classical French literature to flourish by protecting such writers as Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine, whose works remain greatly influential to this day. Louis also patronised the visual arts by funding and commissioning various artists, such as Charles Le Brun, Pierre Mignard, Antoine Coysevox, and Hyacinthe Rigaud, whose works became famous throughout Europe. In music, composers and musicians such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, and François Couperin thrived. In 1661, Louis founded the Académie Royale de Danse, and in 1669, the Académie d'Opéra, important driving events in the evolution of ballet. The King also attracted, supported and patronized such artists as André Charles Boulle who revolutionised marquetry with his art of inlay, today known as "Boulle Work".
+
+Over the course of four building campaigns, Louis converted a hunting lodge built by Louis XIII into the spectacular Palace of Versailles. With the exception of the current Royal Chapel (built near the end of Louis' reign), the palace achieved much of its current appearance after the third building campaign, which was followed by an official move of the royal court to Versailles on 6 May 1682. Versailles became a dazzling, awe-inspiring setting for state affairs and the reception of foreign dignitaries. At Versailles, the king alone commanded attention.
+
+Several reasons have been suggested for the creation of the extravagant and stately palace, as well as the relocation of the monarchy's seat. For example, the memoirist Saint-Simon speculated that Louis viewed Versailles as an isolated power center where treasonous cabals could be more readily discovered and foiled.[49] Alternatively, there has been speculation that the revolt of the Fronde caused Louis to hate Paris, which he abandoned for a country retreat. However, his sponsorship of many public works in Paris, such as the establishment of a police force and of street-lighting,[96] lend little credence to this theory. As a further example of his continued care for the capital, Louis constructed the Hôtel des Invalides, a military complex and home to this day for officers and soldiers rendered infirm either by injury or old age. While pharmacology was still quite rudimentary in his day, the Invalides pioneered new treatments and set new standards for hospice treatment. The conclusion of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1668, also induced Louis to demolish the northern walls of Paris in 1670 and replace them with wide tree-lined boulevards.[97]
+
+Louis also renovated and improved the Louvre and other royal residences. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was originally to plan additions to the Louvre; however, his plans would have meant the destruction of much of the existing structure, replacing it with an Italian summer villa in the centre of Paris. Bernini's plans were eventually shelved in favour of the elegant Louvre Colonnade designed by three Frenchmen: Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault. With the relocation of the court to Versailles, the Louvre was given over to the arts and the public.[98]
+During his visit from Rome, Bernini also executed a renowned portrait bust of the king.
+
+Few rulers in world history have commemorated themselves in as grand a manner as Louis.[99] Louis used court ritual and the arts to validate and augment his control over France. With his support, Colbert established from the beginning of Louis' personal reign a centralised and institutionalised system for creating and perpetuating the royal image. The King was thus portrayed largely in majesty or at war, notably against Spain. This portrayal of the monarch was to be found in numerous media of artistic expression, such as painting, sculpture, theatre, dance, music, and the almanacs that diffused royal propaganda to the population at large.
+
+Over his lifetime, Louis commissioned numerous works of art to portray himself, among them over 300 formal portraits. The earliest portrayals of Louis already followed the pictorial conventions of the day in depicting the child king as the majestically royal incarnation of France. This idealisation of the monarch continued in later works, which avoided depictions of the effect of the smallpox that Louis contracted in 1647. In the 1660s, Louis began to be shown as a Roman emperor, the god Apollo, or Alexander the Great, as can be seen in many works of Charles Le Brun, such as sculpture, paintings, and the decor of major monuments.
+
+The depiction of the king in this manner focused on allegorical or mythological attributes, instead of attempting to produce a true likeness. As Louis aged, so too did the manner in which he was depicted. Nonetheless, there was still a disparity between realistic representation and the demands of royal propaganda. There is no better illustration of this than in Hyacinthe Rigaud's frequently-reproduced Portrait of Louis XIV of 1701, in which a 63-year-old Louis appears to stand on a set of unnaturally young legs.[100]
+
+Rigaud's portrait exemplified the height of royal portraiture during Louis' reign. Although Rigaud crafted a credible likeness of Louis, the portrait was neither meant as an exercise in realism nor to explore Louis' personal character. Certainly, Rigaud was concerned with detail and depicted the king's costume with great precision, down to his shoe buckle.[101]
+
+However, Rigaud's intention was to glorify the monarchy. Rigaud's original, now housed in the Louvre, was originally meant as a gift to Louis' grandson, Philip V of Spain. However, Louis was so pleased with the work that he kept the original and commissioned a copy to be sent to his grandson. That became the first of many copies, both in full and half-length formats, to be made by Rigaud, often with the help of his assistants. The portrait also became a model for French royal and imperial portraiture down to the time of Charles X over a century later. In his work, Rigaud proclaims Louis' exalted royal status through his elegant stance and haughty expression, the royal regalia and throne, rich ceremonial fleur-de-lys robes, as well as the upright column in the background, which, together with the draperies, serves to frame this image of majesty.
+
+In addition to portraits, Louis commissioned at least 20 statues of himself in the 1680s, to stand in Paris and provincial towns as physical manifestations of his rule. He also commissioned "war artists" to follow him on campaigns to document his military triumphs. To remind the people of these triumphs, Louis erected permanent triumphal arches in Paris and the provinces for the first time since the decline of the Roman Empire.
+
+Louis' reign marked the birth and infancy of the art of medallions. Sixteenth-century rulers had often issued medals in small numbers to commemorate the major events of their reigns. Louis, however, struck more than 300 to celebrate the story of the king in bronze, that were enshrined in thousands of households throughout France.
+
+He also used tapestries as a medium of exalting the monarchy. Tapestries could be allegorical, depicting the elements or seasons, or realist, portraying royal residences or historical events. They were among the most significant means to spread royal propaganda prior to the construction of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.[102]
+
+Louis loved ballet and frequently danced in court ballets during the early half of his reign. In general, Louis was an eager dancer who performed 80 roles in 40 major ballets. This approaches the career of a professional ballet dancer.[103]
+
+His choices were strategic and varied. He danced four parts in three of Molière's comédies-ballets, which are plays accompanied by music and dance. Louis played an Egyptian in Le Mariage forcé in 1664, a Moorish gentleman in Le Sicilien in 1667, and both Neptune and Apollo in Les Amants magnifiques in 1670.
+
+He sometimes danced leading roles which were suitably royal or godlike (such as Neptune, Apollo, or the Sun).[103] At other times, he would adopt mundane roles before appearing at the end in the lead role. It is considered that, at all times, he provided his roles with sufficient majesty and drew the limelight with his flair for dancing.[103] For Louis, ballet may not have merely been a tool for manipulation in his propaganda machinery. The sheer number of performances he gave as well as the diversity of roles he played may serve to indicate a deeper understanding and interest in the art form.[104][105]
+
+Ballet dancing was actually used by Louis as a political tool to hold power over his state. [106] He integrated ballet deeply in court social functions and fixated his nobles' attention on upholding standards in ballet dancing, effectively distracting them from political activities. [107] In 1661, Royal of the Academy was founded by Louis to further his ambition. Pierre Beauchamp, his private dance instructor, was ordered by Louis to come up with a notation system to record ballet performances, which he did with great success. His work was adopted and published by Feuillet in 1700. This major development in ballet played an important role in promoting French culture and ballet throughout Europe during Louis' time. [108]
+
+Louis greatly emphasized etiquettes in ballet dancing, evidently seen in "La belle danse" (the French noble style). More challenging skills were required to perform this dance with movements very much resembling court behaviors, as a way to remind the nobles of the king's absolute power and their own status. All the details and rules were compressed in five positions of the bodies codified by Beauchamp. [109]
+
+Besides the official depiction and image of Louis, his subjects also followed a non-official discourse consisting mainly of clandestine publications, popular songs, and rumors that provided an alternative interpretation of Louis and his government. They often focused on the miseries arising from poor government, but also carried the hope for a better future when Louis escaped the malignant influence of his ministers and mistresses, and took the government into his own hands. On the other hand, petitions addressed either directly to Louis or to his ministers exploited the traditional imagery and language of monarchy. These varying interpretations of Louis abounded in self-contradictions that reflected the people's amalgamation of their everyday experiences with the idea of monarchy.[110]
+
+Despite the image of a healthy and virile king that Louis sought to project, evidence exists to suggest that his health was not very good. He had many ailments: for example, symptoms of diabetes, as confirmed in reports of suppurating periostitis in 1678, dental abscesses in 1696, along with recurring boils, fainting spells, gout, dizziness, hot flushes, and headaches.
+
+From 1647 to 1711, the three chief physicians to the king (Antoine Vallot, Antoine d'Aquin, and Guy-Crescent Fagon) recorded all of his health problems in the Journal de Santé du Roi (Journal of the King's Health), a daily report of his health. On 18 November 1686, Louis underwent a painful operation for an anal fistula that was performed by the surgeon Charles Felix de Tassy, who prepared a specially shaped curved scalpel for the occasion. The wound took more than two months to heal.[111]
+
+Louis died of gangrene at Versailles on 1 September 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, after 72 years on the throne. Enduring much pain in his last days, he finally "yielded up his soul without any effort, like a candle going out", while reciting the psalm Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina (O Lord, make haste to help me).[112] His body was laid to rest in Saint-Denis Basilica outside Paris. It remained there undisturbed for about 80 years, until revolutionaries exhumed and destroyed all of the remains found in the Basilica.[113]
+
+Louis outlived most of his immediate legitimate family. His last surviving in-wedlock son, the Dauphin, died in 1711. Barely a year later, the Duke of Burgundy, the eldest of the Dauphin's three sons and then heir to Louis, followed his father. Burgundy's elder son, Louis, Duke of Brittany, joined them a few weeks later. Thus, on his deathbed, Louis' heir was his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis, Duke of Anjou, Burgundy's younger son.
+
+Louis foresaw an underaged heir and sought to restrict the power of his nephew Philip II, Duke of Orléans, who, as his closest surviving legitimate relative in France, would likely become regent to the prospective Louis XV. Accordingly, the king created a regency council as Louis XIII had in anticipation of Louis XIV's own minority, with some power vested in his illegitimate son Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Duke of Maine.[114] Orléans, however, had Louis' will annulled by the Parlement of Paris after his death and made himself sole regent. He stripped Maine and his brother, Louis-Alexandre, Count of Toulouse, of the rank of Prince of the Blood, which Louis had granted them, and significantly reduced Maine's power and privileges.[115]
+
+Line of succession to the French throne upon the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Louis XIV's only surviving legitimate grandson, Philip V, was not included in the line of succession due to having renounced the French throne after the war of the Spanish succession, which lasted for 13 years after the death of Charles II of Spain in 1700.[116]
+
+According to Philippe de Dangeau's Journal, Louis on his deathbed advised his heir with these words:
+
+Do not follow the bad example which I have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviation of the burdens of your subjects.[117]
+
+Some historians point out that it was a customary demonstration of piety in those days to exaggerate one's sins. Thus they do not place much emphasis on Louis' deathbed declarations in assessing his accomplishments. Rather, they focus on military and diplomatic successes, such as how he placed a French prince on the Spanish throne. This, they contend, ended the threat of an aggressive Spain that historically interfered in domestic French politics. These historians also emphasise the effect of Louis' wars in expanding France's boundaries and creating more defensible frontiers that preserved France from invasion until the Revolution.[117]
+
+Arguably, Louis also applied himself indirectly to "the alleviation of the burdens of [his] subjects." For example, he patronised the arts, encouraged industry, fostered trade and commerce, and sponsored the founding of an overseas empire. Moreover, the significant reduction in civil wars and aristocratic rebellions during his reign are seen by these historians as the result of Louis' consolidation of royal authority over feudal elites.[118] In their analysis, his early reforms centralised France and marked the birth of the modern French state. They regard the political and military victories as well as numerous cultural achievements as the means by which Louis helped raise France to a preeminent position in Europe.[119] Europe came to admire France for its military and cultural successes, power, and sophistication. Europeans generally began to emulate French manners, values, goods, and deportment. French became the universal language of the European elite.
+
+Louis' detractors have argued that his considerable foreign, military, and domestic expenditure impoverished and bankrupted France. His supporters, however, distinguish the state, which was impoverished, from France, which was not. As supporting evidence, they cite the literature of the time, such as the social commentary in Montesquieu's Persian Letters.[120]
+
+Alternatively, Louis' critics attribute the social upheaval culminating in the French Revolution to his failure to reform French institutions while the monarchy was still secure. Other scholars counter that there was little reason to reform institutions that largely worked well under Louis. They also maintain that events occurring almost 80 years after his death were not reasonably foreseeable to Louis, and that in any case, his successors had sufficient time to initiate reforms of their own.[121]
+
+Louis has often been criticised for his vanity. The memoirist Saint-Simon, who claimed that Louis slighted him, criticised him thus:
+
+There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.
+
+For his part, Voltaire saw Louis' vanity as the cause for his bellicosity:
+
+It is certain that he passionately wanted glory, rather than the conquests themselves. In the acquisition of Alsace and half of Flanders, and of all of Franche-Comté, what he really liked was the name he made for himself.[122]
+
+Nonetheless, Louis has also received praise. The anti-Bourbon Napoleon described him not only as "a great king", but also as "the only King of France worthy of the name".[123] Leibniz, the German Protestant philosopher, commended him as "one of the greatest kings that ever was".[124] And Lord Acton admired him as "by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne".[125] The historian and philosopher Voltaire wrote: "His name can never be pronounced without respect and without summoning the image of an eternally memorable age".[126] Voltaire's history, The Age of Louis XIV, named Louis' reign as not only one of the four great ages in which reason and culture flourished, but the greatest ever.[127][128]
+
+In 1848, at Nuneham House, a piece of Louis' mummified heart, taken from his tomb and kept in a silver locket by Lord Harcourt, Archbishop of York, was shown to the Dean of Westminster, William Buckland, who ate it.[129]
+
+Numerous quotes have been attributed to Louis XIV by legend.
+
+The well-known "I am the state" ("L'état, c'est moi.") was reported from at least the late 18th century.[130]
+It was widely repeated but also denounced as apocryphal by the early 19th century.[131][b][132]
+
+He did say, "Every time I appoint someone to a vacant position, I make a hundred unhappy and one ungrateful."[133][134] Louis is recorded by numerous eyewitnesses as having said on his deathbed: "Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours." ("I depart, but the State shall always remain.")[135]
+
+Louis's formal style was "Louis XIV, par la grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre", or "Louis XIV, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre".
+
+On 5 April 1693, Louis also founded the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis (French: Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint-Louis), a military order of chivalry.[137][138] He named it after Louis IX and intended it as a reward for outstanding officers. It is notable as the first decoration that could be granted to non-nobles and is roughly the forerunner of the Légion d'honneur, with which it shares the red ribbon (though the Légion d'honneur is awarded to military personnel and civilians alike).
+
+Louis' patriline is the line from which he is descended father to son.
+
+Patrilineal descent is the principle behind membership in royal houses, as it can be traced back through the generations - which means that if King Louis were to choose an historically accurate house name it would be Robertian, as all his male-line ancestors have been of that house.
+
+Louis is a member of the House of Bourbon, a branch of the Capetian dynasty and of the Robertians.
+
+Louis' patriline is the line from which he is descended father to son. It follows the Bourbon, Kings of France, and the Counts of Paris and Worms. This line can be traced back more than 1,200 years from Robert of Hesbaye to the present day, through Kings of France & Navarre, Spain and Two-Sicilies, Dukes of Parma and Grand-Dukes of Luxembourg, Princes of Orléans and Emperors of Brazil. It is one of the oldest in Europe.
+
+This is an incomplete list of Louis XIV's illegitimate children. He reputedly had more, but the difficulty in fully documenting all such births restricts the list only to the better-known and/or legitimised.

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+Illegitimate:
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+Louis XIV (Louis Dieudonné; 5 September 1638 – 1 September 1715), known as  Louis the Great (Louis le Grand) or the Sun King (le Roi Soleil), was King of France from 14 May 1643 until his death in 1715. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest recorded of any monarch of a sovereign country in European history.[1][a] Louis XIV's France was emblematic of the age of absolutism in Europe.[2]
+
+Louis began his personal rule of France in 1661, after the death of his chief minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin.[3] An adherent of the concept of the divine right of kings, Louis continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralised state governed from the capital. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France and, by compelling many members of the nobility to inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the Fronde rebellion during Louis' minority. By these means he became one of the most powerful French monarchs and consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that endured until the French Revolution. He also enforced uniformity of religion under the Gallican Catholic Church. His revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished the rights of the Huguenot Protestant minority and subjected them to a wave of dragonnades, effectively forcing Huguenots to emigrate or convert, and virtually destroying the French Protestant community.
+
+The Sun King surrounded himself with a variety of significant political, military, and cultural figures such as Mazarin, Colbert, Louvois, the Grand Condé, Turenne, Vauban, Boulle, Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Lully, Charpentier, Marais, Le Brun, Rigaud, Bossuet, Le Vau, Mansart, Charles, Claude Perrault, and Le Nôtre.
+
+During Louis' long reign, France emerged as the leading European power, and regularly asserted its military strength. A conflict with Spain marked his entire childhood, while during his personal rule, the kingdom took part in three major continental conflicts, each against powerful foreign alliances: the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession. In addition, France also contested shorter wars such as the War of Devolution and the War of the Reunions. Warfare defined the foreign policy of Louis XIV and his personality shaped his approach. Impelled by "a mix of commerce, revenge, and pique", Louis sensed that warfare was the ideal way to enhance his glory. In peacetime he concentrated on preparing for the next war. He taught his diplomats that their job was to create tactical and strategic advantages for the French military.[4]
+
+Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. He was named Louis Dieudonné (Louis the God-given)[5] and bore the traditional title of French heirs apparent: Dauphin.[6] At the time of his birth, his parents had been married for 23 years. His mother had experienced four stillbirths between 1619 and 1631. Leading contemporaries thus regarded him as a divine gift and his birth a miracle of God.
+
+Sensing imminent death, Louis XIII decided to put his affairs in order in the spring of 1643, when Louis XIV was four years old. In defiance of custom, which would have made Queen Anne the sole Regent of France, the king decreed that a regency council would rule on his son's behalf. His lack of faith in Queen Anne's political abilities was his primary rationale. He did, however, make the concession of appointing her head of the council.
+
+Louis' relationship with his mother was uncommonly affectionate for the time. Contemporaries and eyewitnesses claimed that the Queen would spend all her time with Louis. Both were greatly interested in food and theatre, and it is highly likely that Louis developed these interests through his close relationship with his mother. This long-lasting and loving relationship can be evidenced by excerpts in Louis' journal entries, such as:
+
+"Nature was responsible for the first knots which tied me to my mother. But attachments formed later by shared qualities of the spirit are far more difficult to break than those formed merely by blood."[7]
+
+It was his mother who gave Louis his belief in the absolute and divine power of his monarchical rule.[8]
+
+During his childhood, he was taken care of by the governesses Françoise de Lansac and Marie-Catherine de Senecey. In 1646, Nicolas V de Villeroy became the young king's tutor. Louis XIV became friends with Villeroy's young children, particularly François de Villeroy, and divided his time between the Palais-Royal and the nearby Hotel de Villeroy.
+
+On 14 May 1643, with Louis XIII dead, Queen Anne had her husband's will annulled by the Parlement de Paris (a judicial body comprising mostly nobles and high clergymen).[9] This action abolished the regency council and made Anne sole Regent of France. Anne exiled some of her husband's ministers (Chavigny, Bouthilier), and she nominated Brienne as her minister of foreign affairs.[10] Anne also nominated Saint Vincent de Paul as her spiritual adviser, which helped her deal with religious policy and the Jansenism question.[11]
+
+Anne kept the direction of religious policy strongly in her hand until 1661; her most important political decisions were to nominate Cardinal Mazarin as her chief minister and the continuation of her late husband's and Cardinal Richelieu's policy, despite their persecution of her, for the sake of her son. Anne wanted to give her son absolute authority and a victorious kingdom. Her rationales for choosing Mazarin were mainly his ability and his total dependence on her, at least until 1653 when she was no longer regent. Anne protected Mazarin by arresting and exiling her followers who conspired against him in 1643: the Duke of Beaufort and Marie de Rohan.[12] She left the direction of the daily administration of policy to Cardinal Mazarin.
+
+The best example of Anne's statesmanship and the partial change in her heart towards her native Spain is seen in her keeping of one of Richelieu's men, the Chancellor of France Pierre Séguier, in his post. Séguier was the person who had interrogated Anne in 1637, treating her like a "common criminal" as she described her treatment following the discovery that she was giving military secrets and information to Spain. Anne was virtually under house arrest for a number of years during her husband's rule. By keeping him in his post, Anne was giving a sign that the interests of France and her son Louis were the guiding spirit of all her political and legal actions. Though not necessarily opposed to Spain, she sought to end the war with a French victory, in order to establish a lasting peace between the Catholic nations.
+
+The Queen also gave a partial Catholic orientation to French foreign policy. This was felt by the Netherlands, France's Protestant ally, which negotiated a separate peace with Spain in 1648.[13]
+
+In 1648, Anne and Mazarin successfully negotiated the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War. Its terms ensured Dutch independence from Spain, awarded some autonomy to the various German princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and granted Sweden seats on the Imperial Diet and territories to control the mouths of the Oder, Elbe, and Weser rivers. France, however, profited most from the settlement. Austria, ruled by the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand III, ceded all Habsburg lands and claims in Alsace to France and acknowledged her de facto sovereignty over the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Verdun, and Toul. Moreover, eager to emancipate themselves from Habsburg domination, petty German states sought French protection. This anticipated the formation of the 1658 League of the Rhine, leading to the further diminution of Imperial power.
+
+As the Thirty Years' War came to an end, a civil war known as the Fronde (after the slings used to smash windows) erupted in France. It effectively checked France's ability to exploit the Peace of Westphalia. Anne and Mazarin had largely pursued the policies of Cardinal Richelieu, augmenting the Crown's power at the expense of the nobility and the Parlements. Anne interfered much more in internal policy than foreign affairs; she was a very proud queen who insisted on the divine rights of the King of France.[citation needed]
+
+All this led her to advocate a forceful policy in all matters relating to the King's authority, in a manner that was much more radical than the one proposed by Mazarin. The Cardinal depended totally on Anne's support and had to use all his influence on the Queen to avoid nullifying, but to restrain some of her radical actions. Anne imprisoned any aristocrat or member of parliament who challenged her will; her main aim was to transfer to her son an absolute authority in the matters of finance and justice. One of the leaders of the Parlement of Paris, whom she had jailed, died in prison.[14]
+
+The Frondeurs, political heirs of the disaffected feudal aristocracy, sought to protect their traditional feudal privileges from the increasingly centralized royal government. Furthermore, they believed their traditional influence and authority was being usurped by the recently ennobled bureaucrats (the Noblesse de Robe, or "nobility of the robe"), who administered the kingdom and on whom the monarchy increasingly began to rely. This belief intensified the nobles' resentment.[citation needed]
+
+In 1648, Anne and Mazarin attempted to tax members of the Parlement de Paris. The members refused to comply and ordered all of the king's earlier financial edicts burned. Buoyed by the victory of Louis, duc d’Enghien (later known as le Grand Condé) at the Battle of Lens, Mazarin, on Queen Anne's insistence, arrested certain members in a show of force.[15] The most important arrest, from Anne's point of view, concerned Pierre Broussel, one of the most important leaders in the Parlement de Paris.
+
+People in France were complaining about the expansion of royal authority, the high rate of taxation, and the reduction of the authority of the Parlement de Paris and other regional representative entities. Paris erupted in rioting as a result, and Anne was forced, under intense pressure, to free Broussel. Moreover, a mob of angry Parisians broke into the royal palace and demanded to see their king. Led into the royal bedchamber, they gazed upon Louis, who was feigning sleep, were appeased, and then quietly departed. The threat to the royal family prompted Anne to flee Paris with the king and his courtiers.
+
+Shortly thereafter, the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia allowed Condé's army to return to aid Louis and his court. Condé's family was close to Anne at that time, and he agreed to help her attempt to restore the king's authority.[16] The queen's army, headed by Condé, attacked the rebels in Paris; the rebels were under the political control of Anne's old friend Marie de Rohan. Beaufort, who had escaped from the prison where Anne had incarcerated him five years before, was the military leader in Paris, under the nominal control of Conti. After a few battles, a political compromise was reached; the Peace of Rueil was signed, and the court returned to Paris.
+
+Unfortunately for Anne, her partial victory depended on Condé, who wanted to control the queen and destroy Mazarin's influence. It was Condé's sister who pushed him to turn against the queen. After striking a deal with her old friend Marie de Rohan, who was able to impose the nomination of Charles de l'Aubespine, marquis de Châteauneuf as minister of justice, Anne arrested Condé, his brother Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and the husband of their sister Anne Genevieve de Bourbon, duchess of Longueville. This situation did not last long, and Mazarin's unpopularity led to the creation of a coalition headed mainly by Marie de Rohan and the duchess of Longueville. This aristocratic coalition was strong enough to liberate the princes, exile Mazarin, and impose a condition of virtual house arrest on Queen Anne.
+
+All these events were witnessed by Louis and largely explained his later distrust of Paris and the higher aristocracy.[17] "In one sense, Louis' childhood came to an end with the outbreak of the Fronde. It was not only that life became insecure and unpleasant – a fate meted out to many children in all ages – but that Louis had to be taken into the confidence of his mother and Mazarin and political and military matters of which he could have no deep understanding".[18] "The family home became at times a near-prison when Paris had to be abandoned, not in carefree outings to other chateaux but in humiliating flights".[18] The royal family was driven out of Paris twice in this manner, and at one point Louis XIV and Anne were held under virtual arrest in the royal palace in Paris. The Fronde years planted in Louis a hatred of Paris and a consequent determination to move out of the ancient capital as soon as possible, never to return.[19]
+
+Just as the first Fronde (the Fronde parlementaire of 1648–1649) ended, a second one (the Fronde des princes of 1650–1653) began. Unlike that which preceded it, tales of sordid intrigue and half-hearted warfare characterized this second phase of upper-class insurrection. To the aristocracy, this rebellion represented a protest against and a reversal of their political demotion from vassals to courtiers. It was headed by the highest-ranking French nobles, among them Louis' uncle Gaston, Duke of Orléans and first cousin Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, known as la Grande Mademoiselle; Princes of the Blood such as Condé, his brother Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and their sister the Duchess of Longueville; dukes of legitimised royal descent, such as Henri, Duke of Longueville, and François, Duke of Beaufort; so-called "foreign princes" such as Frédéric Maurice, Duke of Bouillon, his brother Marshal Turenne, and Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse; and scions of France's oldest families, such as François de La Rochefoucauld.
+
+Queen Anne played the most important role in defeating the Fronde because she wanted to transfer absolute authority to her son. In addition, most of the princes refused to deal with Mazarin, who went into exile for a number of years. The Frondeurs claimed to act on Louis' behalf, and in his real interest against his mother and Mazarin.
+
+Queen Anne had a very close relationship with the Cardinal, and many observers believed that Mazarin became Louis XIV's stepfather by a secret marriage to Queen Anne.[20] However, Louis' coming-of-age and subsequent coronation deprived them of the Frondeurs' pretext for revolt. The Fronde thus gradually lost steam and ended in 1653, when Mazarin returned triumphantly from exile. From that time until his death, Mazarin was in charge of foreign and financial policy without the daily supervision of Anne, who was no longer regent.[21]
+
+During this period, Louis fell in love with Mazarin's niece Marie Mancini, but Anne and Mazarin ended the king's infatuation by sending Mancini away from court to be married in Italy. While Mazarin might have been tempted for a short period of time to marry his niece to the King of France, Queen Anne was absolutely against this; she wanted to marry her son to the daughter of her brother, Philip IV of Spain, for both dynastic and political reasons. Mazarin soon supported the Queen's position because he knew that her support for his power and his foreign policy depended on making peace with Spain from a strong position and on the Spanish marriage. Additionally, Mazarin's relations with Marie Mancini were not good, and he did not trust her to support his position. All of Louis' tears and his supplications to his mother did not make her change her mind; the Spanish marriage was very important both for its role in ending the war between France and Spain, and because many of the claims and objectives of Louis' foreign policy in the next 50 years would be based on this marriage.[22]
+
+Louis XIV was declared to have reached the age of majority on 7 September 1651. On the death of Mazarin, in March 1661, Louis assumed personal control of the reins of government and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister: "Up to this moment I have been pleased to entrust the government of my affairs to the late Cardinal. It is now time that I govern them myself. You [he was talking to the secretaries and ministers of state] will assist me with your counsels when I ask for them. I request and order you to seal no orders except by my command . . . I order you not to sign anything, not even a passport . . . without my command; to render account to me personally each day and to favor no one".[23] Louis was able to capitalize on the widespread public yearning for law and order, that resulted from prolonged foreign wars and domestic civil strife, to further consolidate central political authority and reform at the expense of the feudal aristocracy. Praising his ability to choose and encourage men of talent, the historian Chateaubriand noted: "it is the voice of genius of all kinds which sounds from the tomb of Louis".[24]
+
+Louis began his personal reign with administrative and fiscal reforms. In 1661, the treasury verged on bankruptcy. To rectify the situation, Louis chose Jean-Baptiste Colbert as Controller-General of Finances in 1665. However, Louis first had to neutralize Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances, in order to give Colbert a free hand. Although Fouquet's financial indiscretions were not very different from Mazarin's before him or Colbert's after him, his ambition was worrying to Louis. He had, for example, built an opulent château at Vaux-le-Vicomte where he entertained Louis and his court ostentatiously, as if he were wealthier than the king himself. The court was left with the impression that the vast sums of money needed to support his lifestyle could only have been obtained through embezzlement of government funds.
+
+Fouquet appeared eager to succeed Mazarin and Richelieu in assuming power, and he indiscreetly purchased and privately fortified the remote island of Belle Île. These acts sealed his doom. Fouquet was charged with embezzlement. The Parlement found him guilty and sentenced him to exile. However, Louis altered the sentence to life-imprisonment and abolished Fouquet's post.
+
+With Fouquet dismissed, Colbert reduced the national debt through more efficient taxation. The principal taxes included the aides and douanes (both customs duties), the gabelle (a tax on salt), and the taille (a tax on land). The taille was reduced at first; financial officials were forced to keep regular accounts, auctioning certain taxes instead of selling them privately to a favored few, revising inventories and removing unauthorized exemptions (for example, in 1661 only 10 per cent from the royal domain reached the King). Reform proved difficult because the taille was levied by officers of the Crown who had purchased their post at a high price: punishment of abuses necessarily lowered the value of the post. Nevertheless, excellent results were achieved: the deficit of 1661 turned into a surplus in 1666. The interest on the debt was reduced from 52 million to 24 million livres. The taille was reduced to 42 million in 1661 and 35 million in 1665; finally the revenue from indirect taxation progressed from 26 million to 55 million. The revenues of the royal domain were raised from 80,000 livres in 1661 to 5.5 million livres in 1671. In 1661, the receipts were equivalent to 26 million British pounds, of which 10 million reached the treasury. The expenditure was around 18 million pounds, leaving a deficit of 8 million. In 1667, the net receipts had risen to 20 million pounds sterling, while expenditure had fallen to 11 million, leaving a surplus of 9 million pounds.
+
+To support the reorganized and enlarged army, the panoply of Versailles, and the growing civil administration, the king needed a good deal of money. Finance had always been the weak spot in the French monarchy: methods of collecting taxes were costly and inefficient; direct taxes passed through the hands of many intermediate officials; and indirect taxes were collected by private concessionaries, called tax farmers, who made a substantial profit. Consequently, the state always received far less than what the taxpayers actually paid.
+
+The main weakness arose from an old bargain between the French crown and nobility: the king might raise taxes without consent if only he refrained from taxing the nobles. Only the "unprivileged" classes paid direct taxes, and this term came to mean the peasants only, since many bourgeois, in one way or another, obtained exemptions.
+
+The system was outrageously unjust in throwing a heavy tax burden on the poor and helpless. Later, after 1700, the French ministers who were supported by Louis' secret wife Madame De Maintenon, were able to convince the king to change his fiscal policy. Louis was willing enough to tax the nobles but was unwilling to fall under their control, and only towards the close of his reign, under extreme stress of war, was he able, for the first time in French history, to impose direct taxes on the aristocratic elements of the population. This was a step toward equality before the law and toward sound public finance, but so many concessions and exemptions were won by nobles and bourgeois that the reform lost much of its value.[25]
+
+Louis and Colbert also had wide-ranging plans to bolster French commerce and trade. Colbert's mercantilist administration established new industries and encouraged manufacturers and inventors, such as the Lyon silk manufacturers and the Gobelins manufactory, a producer of tapestries. He invited manufacturers and artisans from all over Europe to France, such as Murano glassmakers, Swedish ironworkers, and Dutch shipbuilders. In this way, he aimed to decrease foreign imports while increasing French exports, hence reducing the net outflow of precious metals from France.
+
+Louis instituted reforms in military administration through Michel le Tellier and the latter's son François-Michel le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois. They helped to curb the independent spirit of the nobility, imposing order on them at court and in the army. Gone were the days when generals protracted war at the frontiers while bickering over precedence and ignoring orders from the capital and the larger politico-diplomatic picture. The old military aristocracy (the Noblesse d'épée, or "nobility of the sword") ceased to have a monopoly over senior military positions and rank. Louvois, in particular, pledged to modernize the army and re-organize it into a professional, disciplined, well-trained force. He was devoted to the soldiers' material well-being and morale, and even tried to direct campaigns.
+
+Legal matters did not escape Louis' attention, as is reflected in the numerous "Great Ordinances" he enacted. Pre-revolutionary France was a patchwork of legal systems, with as many legal customs as there were provinces, and two co-existing legal traditions—customary law in the north and Roman civil law in the south.[26] The Grande Ordonnance de Procédure Civile of 1667, also known as the Code Louis, was a comprehensive legal code attempting a uniform regulation of civil procedure throughout legally irregular France. Among other things, it prescribed baptismal, marriage and death records in the state's registers, not the church's, and it strictly regulated the right of the Parlements to remonstrate.[27] The Code Louis played an important part in French legal history as the basis for the Napoleonic code, from which many modern legal codes are, in turn, derived.
+
+One of Louis' more infamous decrees was the Grande Ordonnance sur les Colonies of 1685, also known as the Code Noir ("black code"). Although it sanctioned slavery, it attempted to humanise the practice by prohibiting the separation of families. Additionally, in the colonies, only Roman Catholics could own slaves, and these had to be baptised.
+
+Louis ruled through a number of councils:
+
+The death of his maternal uncle King Philip IV of Spain, in 1665, precipitated the War of Devolution. In 1660, Louis had married Philip IV's eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, as one of the provisions of the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees.[29] The marriage treaty specified that Maria Theresa was to renounce all claims to Spanish territory for herself and all her descendants.[29] Mazarin and Lionne, however, made the renunciation conditional on the full payment of a Spanish dowry of 500,000 écus.[30] The dowry was never paid and would later play a part persuading his maternal first cousin Charles II of Spain to leave his empire to Philip, Duke of Anjou (later Philip V of Spain), the grandson of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa.
+
+The War of Devolution did not focus on the payment of the dowry; rather, the lack of payment was what Louis XIV used as a pretext for nullifying Maria Theresa's renunciation of her claims, allowing the land to "devolve" to him. In Brabant (the location of the land in dispute), children of first marriages traditionally were not disadvantaged by their parents' remarriages and still inherited property. Louis' wife was Philip IV's daughter by his first marriage, while the new king of Spain, Charles II, was his son by a subsequent marriage. Thus, Brabant allegedly "devolved" to Maria Theresa, giving France a justification to attack the Spanish Netherlands.
+
+During the Eighty Years' War with Spain, France supported the Dutch Republic as part of a general policy of opposing Habsburg power. Johan de Witt, Dutch Grand Pensionary from 1653 to 1672, viewed them as crucial for Dutch security and against his domestic Orangist opponents. Louis provided support in the 1665-1667 Second Anglo-Dutch War but used the opportunity to launch the War of Devolution in 1667. This captured Franche-Comté and much of the Spanish Netherlands; French expansion in this area was a direct threat to Dutch economic interests.[31]
+
+The Dutch opened talks with Charles II of England on a common diplomatic front against France, leading to the Triple Alliance, between England, the Dutch and Sweden. The threat of an escalation and a secret treaty to divide Spanish possessions with Emperor Leopold, the other major claimant to the throne of Spain, led Louis to relinquish many of his gains in the 1668 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.[32]
+
+Louis placed little reliance on his agreement with Leopold and as it was now clear French and Dutch aims were in direct conflict, he decided to first defeat the Republic, then seize the Spanish Netherlands. This required breaking up the Triple Alliance; he paid Sweden to remain neutral and signed the 1670 Secret Treaty of Dover with Charles, an Anglo-French alliance against the Dutch Republic. In May 1672, France invaded the Republic, supported by Münster and the Electorate of Cologne.[33]
+
+Rapid French advance led to a coup that toppled De Witt and brought William III to power. Leopold viewed French expansion into the Rhineland as an increasing threat, especially after their seizure of the strategic Duchy of Lorraine in 1670. The prospect of Dutch defeat led Leopold to an alliance with Brandenburg-Prussia on 23 June, followed by another with the Republic on 25th.[34] Although Brandenburg was forced out of the war by the June 1673 Treaty of Vossem, in August an anti-French alliance was formed by the Dutch, Spain, Emperor Leopold and the Duke of Lorraine.[35]
+
+The French alliance was deeply unpopular in England, who made peace with the Dutch in the February 1674 Treaty of Westminster. However, French armies held significant advantages over their opponents; an undivided command, talented generals like Turenne, Condé and Luxembourg and vastly superior logistics. Reforms introduced by Louvois, the Secretary of War, helped maintain large field armies that could be mobilised much quicker, allowing them to mount offensives in early spring before their opponents were ready.[36]
+
+The French were forced to retreat from the Dutch Republic but these advantages allowed them to hold their ground in Alsace and the Spanish Netherlands, while retaking Franche-Comté. By 1678, mutual exhaustion led to the Treaty of Nijmegen, which was generally settled in France's favour and allowed Louis to intervene in the Scanian War. Despite military defeat, his ally Sweden regained much of their losses under the 1679 treaties of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau and Lund imposed on Denmark-Norway and Brandenburg.[37]
+
+Louis was at the height of his power, but at the cost of uniting his opponents; this increased as he continued his expansion. In 1679, he dismissed his foreign minister Simon Arnauld, marquis de Pomponne, because he was seen as having compromised too much with the allies. Louis maintained the strength of his army, but in his next series of territorial claims avoided using military force alone. Rather, he combined it with legal pretexts in his efforts to augment the boundaries of his kingdom. Contemporary treaties were intentionally phrased ambiguously. Louis established the Chambers of Reunion to determine the full extent of his rights and obligations under those treaties.
+
+Cities and territories, such as Luxembourg and Casale, were prized for their strategic positions on the frontier and access to important waterways. Louis also sought Strasbourg, an important strategic crossing on the left bank of the Rhine and theretofore a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire, annexing it and other territories in 1681. Although a part of Alsace, Strasbourg was not part of Habsburg-ruled Alsace and was thus not ceded to France in the Peace of Westphalia.
+
+Following these annexations, Spain declared war, precipitating the War of the Reunions. However, the Spanish were rapidly defeated because the Emperor (distracted by the Great Turkish War) abandoned them, and the Dutch only supported them minimally. By the Truce of Ratisbon, in 1684, Spain was forced to acquiesce in the French occupation of most of the conquered territories, for 20 years.[38]
+
+Louis' policy of the Réunions may have raised France to its greatest size and power during his reign, but it alienated much of Europe. This poor public opinion was compounded by French actions off the Barbary Coast and at Genoa. First, Louis had Algiers and Tripoli, two Barbary pirate strongholds, bombarded to obtain a favourable treaty and the liberation of Christian slaves. Next, in 1684, a punitive mission was launched against Genoa in retaliation for its support for Spain in previous wars. Although the Genoese submitted, and the Doge led an official mission of apology to Versailles, France gained a reputation for brutality and arrogance. European apprehension at growing French might and the realisation of the extent of the dragonnades' effect (discussed below) led many states to abandon their alliance with France.[39] Accordingly, by the late 1680s, France became increasingly isolated in Europe.
+
+French colonies multiplied in Africa, the Americas, and Asia during Louis' reign, and French explorers made important discoveries in North America.  In 1673, Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette discovered the Mississippi River. In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, followed the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the vast Mississippi basin in Louis' name, calling it Louisiane. French trading posts were also established in India, at Chandernagore and Pondicherry, and in the Indian Ocean at Île Bourbon. Throughout these regions Louis and Colbert embarked on an extensive program of architecture and urbanism meant to reflect the styles of Versailles and Paris and the 'gloire' of the realm.[40]
+
+Meanwhile, diplomatic relations were initiated with distant countries. In 1669, Suleiman Aga led an Ottoman embassy to revive the old Franco-Ottoman alliance.[41] Then, in 1682, after the reception of the Moroccan embassy of Mohammed Tenim in France, Moulay Ismail, Sultan of Morocco, allowed French consular and commercial establishments in his country.[42] In 1699, Louis once again received a Moroccan ambassador, Abdallah bin Aisha, and in 1715, he received a Persian embassy led by Mohammad Reza Beg.
+
+From farther afield, Siam dispatched an embassy in 1684, reciprocated by the French magnificently the next year under Alexandre, Chevalier de Chaumont. This, in turn, was succeeded by another Siamese embassy under Kosa Pan, superbly received at Versailles in 1686. Louis then sent another embassy in 1687, under Simon de la Loubère, and French influence grew at the Siamese court, which granted Mergui as a naval base to France. However, the death of Narai, King of Ayutthaya, the execution of his pro-French minister Constantine Phaulkon, and the Siege of Bangkok in 1688 ended this era of French influence.[43]
+
+France also attempted to participate actively in Jesuit missions to China. To break the Portuguese dominance there, Louis sent Jesuit missionaries to the court of the Kangxi Emperor in 1685: Jean de Fontaney, Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Gerbillon, Louis Le Comte, and Claude de Visdelou.[44] Louis also received a Chinese Jesuit, Michael Shen Fu-Tsung, at Versailles in 1684.[45] Furthermore, Louis' librarian and translator Arcadio Huang was Chinese.[46][47]
+
+By the early 1680s, Louis had greatly augmented French influence in the world. Domestically, he successfully increased the influence of the crown and its authority over the church and aristocracy, thus consolidating absolute monarchy in France.
+
+Louis initially supported traditional Gallicanism, which limited papal authority in France, and convened an Assembly of the French clergy in November 1681. Before its dissolution eight months later, the Assembly had accepted the Declaration of the Clergy of France, which increased royal authority at the expense of papal power. Without royal approval, bishops could not leave France, and appeals could not be made to the Pope. Additionally, government officials could not be excommunicated for acts committed in pursuance of their duties. Although the king could not make ecclesiastical law, all papal regulations without royal assent were invalid in France. Unsurprisingly, the pope repudiated the Declaration.[3]
+
+By attaching nobles to his court at Versailles, Louis achieved increased control over the French aristocracy. Apartments were built to house those willing to pay court to the king.[48] However, the pensions and privileges necessary to live in a style appropriate to their rank were only possible by waiting constantly on Louis.[49] For this purpose, an elaborate court ritual was created wherein the king became the centre of attention and was observed throughout the day by the public. With his excellent memory, Louis could then see who attended him at court and who was absent, facilitating the subsequent distribution of favours and positions. Another tool Louis used to control his nobility was censorship, which often involved the opening of letters to discern their author's opinion of the government and king.[48] Moreover, by entertaining, impressing, and domesticating them with extravagant luxury and other distractions, Louis not only cultivated public opinion of him, he also ensured the aristocracy remained under his scrutiny.
+
+Louis' extravagance at Versailles extended far beyond the scope of elaborate court rituals. Louis took delivery of an African elephant as a gift from the king of Portugal.[50]}} The king encouraged the leading nobles to live at Versailles. This, along with the prohibition of private armies, prevented them from passing time on their own estates and in their regional power bases, from which they historically waged local wars and plotted resistance to royal authority.  Louis thus compelled and seduced the old military aristocracy (the "nobility of the sword") into becoming his ceremonial courtiers, further weakening their power. In their place, Louis raised commoners or the more recently ennobled bureaucratic aristocracy (the "nobility of the robe"). He judged that royal authority thrived more surely by filling high executive and administrative positions with these men because they could be more easily dismissed than nobles of ancient lineage, with entrenched influence. It is believed that Louis' policies were rooted in his experiences during the Fronde, when men of high birth readily took up the rebel cause against their king, who was actually the kinsman of some. This victory of Louis' over the nobility may have then in fact ensured the end of major civil wars in France until the French Revolution about a century later.
+
+In 1648 France was the leading European power, and most of the wars pivoted around its aggressiveness.  Only poverty-stricken Russia exceeded it in population, and no one could match its wealth, central location, and very strong professional army. It had largely avoided the devastation of the Thirty Years' War.  Its weaknesses included an inefficient financial system that was hard-pressed to pay for all the military adventures, and the tendency of most other powers to gang up against it.
+
+During the very long reign of King Louis XIV (1643 – 1715), France fought three major wars: the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession. There were also two lesser conflicts: the War of Devolution and the War of the Reunions.[51] The wars were very expensive but they defined Louis XIV's foreign policies, and his personality shaped his approach. Impelled "by a mix of commerce, revenge, and pique," Louis sensed that warfare was the ideal way to enhance his glory. In peacetime he concentrated on preparing for the next war. He taught his diplomats that their job was to create tactical and strategic advantages for the French military.[4] By 1695, France retained much of its dominance, but had lost control of the seas to the combination of England and Holland.  What's more, most countries, both Protestant and Catholic, were in alliance against it. Vauban, France's leading military strategist, warned the king in 1689 that a hostile "Alliance" was too powerful at sea. He recommended the best way for France to fight back was to license French merchants ships to privateer and seize enemy merchant ships, while avoiding its navies:
+
+Vauban was pessimistic about France's so-called friends and allies:
+
+Louis decided to persecute Protestants and revoke the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which awarded Huguenots political and religious freedom. He saw the persistence of Protestantism as a disgraceful reminder of royal powerlessness. After all, the Edict was the pragmatic concession of his grandfather Henry IV to end the longstanding French Wars of Religion. An additional factor in Louis' thinking was the prevailing contemporary European principle to assure socio-political stability, cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion"), the idea that the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the realm (as originally confirmed in central Europe in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555).[54]
+
+Responding to petitions, Louis initially excluded Protestants from office, constrained the meeting of synods, closed churches outside of Edict-stipulated areas, banned Protestant outdoor preachers, and prohibited domestic Protestant migration. He also disallowed Protestant-Catholic intermarriages to which third parties objected, encouraged missions to the Protestants, and rewarded converts to Catholicism.[55] This discrimination did not encounter much Protestant resistance, and a steady conversion of Protestants occurred, especially among the noble elites.
+
+In 1681, Louis dramatically increased his persecution of Protestants. The principle of cuius regio, eius religio generally had also meant that subjects who refused to convert could emigrate, but Louis banned emigration and effectively insisted that all Protestants must be converted. Secondly, following the proposal of René de Marillac and the Marquis of Louvois, he began quartering dragoons in Protestant homes. Although this was within his legal rights, the dragonnades inflicted severe financial strain on Protestants and atrocious abuse. Between 300,000 and 400,000 Huguenots converted, as this entailed financial rewards and exemption from the dragonnades.[56]
+
+On 15 October 1685, Louis issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, which cited the redundancy of privileges for Protestants given their scarcity after the extensive conversions. The Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes and repealed all the privileges that arose therefrom.[3] By his edict, Louis no longer tolerated the existence of Protestant groups, pastors, or churches in France. No further churches were to be constructed, and those already existing were to be demolished. Pastors could choose either exile or a secular life. Those Protestants who had resisted conversion were now to be baptised forcibly into the established church.[57]
+
+Historians have debated Louis' reasons for issuing the Edict of Fontainebleau. He may have been seeking to placate Pope Innocent XI, with whom relations were tense and whose aid was necessary to determine the outcome of a succession crisis in the Electorate of Cologne. He may also have acted to upstage Emperor Leopold I and regain international prestige after the latter defeated the Turks without Louis' help. Otherwise, he may simply have desired to end the remaining divisions in French society dating to the Wars of Religion by fulfilling his coronation oath to eradicate heresy.[58][59]
+
+Many historians have condemned the Edict of Fontainebleau as gravely harmful to France.[60] In support, they cite the emigration of about 200,000 highly skilled Huguenots (roughly one-fourth of the Protestant population, or 1% of the French population) who defied royal decrees and fled France for various Protestant states, weakening the French economy and enriching that of Protestant states.
+
+On the other hand, there are historians who view this as an exaggeration. They argue that most of France's preeminent Protestant businessmen and industrialists converted to Catholicism and remained.[61]
+
+What is certain is that reaction to the Edict was mixed. Even while French Catholic leaders exulted, Pope Innocent XI still argued with Louis over Gallicanism and criticised the use of violence. Protestants across Europe were horrified at the treatment of their co-religionists, but most Catholics in France applauded the move. Nonetheless, it is indisputable that Louis' public image in most of Europe, especially in Protestant regions, was dealt a severe blow.
+
+In the end, however, despite renewed tensions with the Camisards of south-central France at the end of his reign, Louis may have helped ensure that his successor would experience fewer instances of the religion-based disturbances that had plagued his forebears. French society would sufficiently change by the time of his descendant, Louis XVI, to welcome tolerance in the form of the 1787 Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance. This restored to non-Catholics their civil rights and the freedom to worship openly.[62] With the advent of the French Revolution in 1789, Protestants were granted equal rights with their Roman Catholic counterparts.
+
+The War of the League of Augsburg, which lasted from 1688 to 1697, initiated a period of decline in Louis' political and diplomatic fortunes. The conflict arose from two events in the Rhineland. First, in 1685, the Elector Palatine Charles II died. All that remained of his immediate family was Louis' sister-in-law, Elizabeth Charlotte. German law ostensibly barred her from succeeding to her brother's lands and electoral dignity, but it was unclear enough for arguments in favour of Elizabeth Charlotte to have a chance of success. Conversely, the princess was clearly entitled to a division of the family's personal property. Louis pressed her claims to land and chattels, hoping the latter, at least, would be given to her.[63] Then, in 1688, Maximilian Henry of Bavaria, Archbishop of Cologne, an ally of France, died. The archbishopric had traditionally been held by the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria. However, the Bavarian claimant to replace Maximilian Henry, Prince Joseph Clemens of Bavaria, was at that time not more than 17 years old and not even ordained. Louis sought instead to install his own candidate, William Egon of Fürstenberg, to ensure the key Rhenish state remained an ally.[64]
+
+In light of his foreign and domestic policies during the early 1680s, which were perceived as aggressive, Louis' actions, fostered by the succession crises of the late 1680s, created concern and alarm in much of Europe. This led to the formation of the 1686 League of Augsburg by the Holy Roman Emperor, Spain, Sweden, Saxony, and Bavaria. Their stated intention was to return France to at least the borders agreed to in the Treaty of Nijmegen.[65] Emperor Leopold I's persistent refusal to convert the Truce of Ratisbon into a permanent treaty fed Louis' fears that the Emperor would turn on France and attack the Reunions after settling his affairs in the Balkans.[66]
+
+Another event that Louis found threatening was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in England. Although King James II was Catholic, his two Anglican daughters, Mary and Anne, ensured the English people a Protestant succession. However, when James II's son James was born, he took precedence in the succession over his elder sisters. This seemed to herald an era of Catholic monarchs in England. Protestant lords called on the Dutch Prince William III of Orange, grandson of Charles I of England, to come to their aid. He sailed for England with troops despite Louis' warning that France would regard it as a provocation. Witnessing numerous desertions and defections, even among those closest to him, James II fled England. Parliament declared the throne vacant, and offered it to James's daughter Mary II and his son-in-law and nephew William. Vehemently anti-French, William (now William III of England) pushed his new kingdoms into war, thus transforming the League of Augsburg into the Grand Alliance. Before this happened, Louis expected William's expedition to England to absorb his energies and those of his allies, so he dispatched troops to the Rhineland after the expiry of his ultimatum to the German princes requiring confirmation of the Truce of Ratisbon and acceptance of his demands about the succession crises. This military manoeuvre was also intended to protect his eastern provinces from Imperial invasion by depriving the enemy army of sustenance, thus explaining the pre-emptive scorched earth policy pursued in much of southwestern Germany (the "Devastation of the Palatinate").[67]
+
+French armies were generally victorious throughout the war because of Imperial commitments in the Balkans, French logistical superiority, and the quality of French generals such as Condé's famous pupil, François Henri de Montmorency-Bouteville, duc de Luxembourg. His triumphs at the Battles of Fleurus in 1690, Steenkerque in 1692, and Landen in 1693 preserved northern France from invasion.[68]
+
+Although an attempt to restore James II failed at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, France accumulated a string of victories from Flanders in the north, Germany in the east, and Italy and Spain in the south, to the high seas and the colonies. Louis personally supervised the captures of Mons in 1691 and Namur in 1692. Luxembourg gave France the defensive line of the Sambre by capturing Charleroi in 1693. France also overran most of the Duchy of Savoy after the battles of Marsaglia and Staffarde in 1693. While naval stalemate ensued after the French victory at the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690 and the Allied victory at Barfleur-La Hougue in 1692, the Battle of Torroella in 1694 exposed Catalonia to French invasion, culminating in the capture of Barcelona. Although the Dutch captured Pondichéry in 1693, a French raid on the Spanish treasure port of Cartagena, Spain in 1697 yielded a fortune of 10,000,000 livres.
+
+In July 1695, the city of Namur, occupied for three years by the French, was besieged by an allied army led by William III. Louis XIV ordered the surprise destruction of a Flemish city to divert the attention of these troops. This led to the bombardment of Brussels, in which 4-5000 buildings were destroyed, including the entire city-center. The strategy failed, as Namur fell three weeks later, but harmed Louis XIV's reputation: a century later, Napoleon deemed the bombardment "as barbarous as it was useless."[69]
+
+Peace was broached by Sweden in 1690. By 1692, both sides evidently wanted peace, and secret bilateral talks began, but to no avail.[70] Louis tried to break up the alliance against him by dealing with individual opponents, but this did not achieve its aim until 1696, when the Savoyards agreed to the Treaty of Turin and switched sides. Thereafter, members of the League of Augsburg rushed to the peace table, and negotiations for a general peace began in earnest, culminating in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697.[71]
+
+The Treaty of Ryswick ended the War of the League of Augsburg and disbanded the Grand Alliance. By manipulating their rivalries and suspicions, Louis divided his enemies and broke their power.
+
+The treaty yielded many benefits for France. Louis secured permanent French sovereignty over all of Alsace, including Strasbourg, and established the Rhine as the Franco-German border (which persists to this day). Pondichéry and Acadia were returned to France, and Louis' de facto possession of Saint-Domingue was recognised as lawful. However, he returned Catalonia and most of the Reunions.
+
+French military superiority might have allowed him to press for more advantageous terms. Thus, his generosity to Spain with regard to Catalonia has been read as a concession to foster pro-French sentiment and may ultimately have induced King Charles II to name Louis' grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, as heir to the throne of Spain.[72] In exchange for financial compensation, France renounced its interests in the Electorate of Cologne and the Palatinate. Lorraine, which had been occupied by the French since 1670, was returned to its rightful Duke Leopold, albeit with a right of way to the French military. William and Mary were recognised as joint sovereigns of the British Isles, and Louis withdrew support for James II. The Dutch were given the right to garrison forts in the Spanish Netherlands that acted as a protective barrier against possible French aggression. Though in some respects, the Treaty of Ryswick may appear a diplomatic defeat for Louis since he failed to place client rulers in control of the Palatinate or the Electorate of Cologne, he did in fact fulfill many of the aims laid down in his 1688 ultimatum.[73] In any case, peace in 1697 was desirable to Louis, since France was exhausted from the costs of the war.
+
+By the time of the Treaty of Ryswick, the Spanish succession had been a source of concern to European leaders for well over forty years. King Charles II ruled a vast empire comprising Spain, Naples, Sicily, Milan, the Spanish Netherlands, and numerous Spanish colonies. He produced no children, however, and consequently had no direct heirs.
+
+The principal claimants to the throne of Spain belonged to the ruling families of France and Austria. The French claim derived from Louis XIV's mother Anne of Austria (the older sister of Philip IV of Spain) and his wife Maria Theresa (Philip IV's eldest daughter). Based on the laws of primogeniture, France had the better claim as it originated from the eldest daughters in two generations. However, their renunciation of succession rights complicated matters. In the case of Maria Theresa, nonetheless, the renunciation was considered null and void owing to Spain's breach of her marriage contract with Louis. In contrast, no renunciations tainted the claims of the Emperor Leopold I's son Charles, Archduke of Austria, who was a grandson of Philip III's youngest daughter Maria Anna. The English and Dutch feared that a French or Austrian-born Spanish king would threaten the balance of power and thus preferred the Bavarian Prince Joseph Ferdinand, a grandson of Leopold I through his first wife Margaret Theresa of Spain (the younger daughter of Philip IV).
+
+In an attempt to avoid war, Louis signed the Treaty of the Hague with William III of England in 1698. This agreement divided Spain's Italian territories between Louis's son le Grand Dauphin and the Archduke Charles, with the rest of the empire awarded to Joseph Ferdinand. William III consented to permitting the Dauphin's new territories to become part of France when the latter succeeded to his father's throne.[74] The signatories, however, omitted to consult the ruler of these lands, and Charles II was passionately opposed to the dismemberment of his empire. In 1699, he re-confirmed his 1693 will that named Joseph Ferdinand as his sole successor.[75]
+
+Six months later, Joseph Ferdinand died. Therefore, in 1700, Louis and William III concluded a fresh partitioning agreement, the Treaty of London. This allocated Spain, the Low Countries, and the Spanish colonies to the Archduke. The Dauphin would receive all of Spain's Italian territories.[76] Charles II acknowledged that his empire could only remain undivided by bequeathing it entirely to a Frenchman or an Austrian. Under pressure from his German wife, Maria Anna of Neuburg, Charles II named the Archduke Charles as his sole heir.
+
+On his deathbed in 1700, Charles II unexpectedly changed his will. The clear demonstration of French military superiority for many decades before this time, the pro-French faction at the court of Spain, and even Pope Innocent XII convinced him that France was more likely to preserve his empire intact. He thus offered the entire empire to the Dauphin's second son Philip, Duke of Anjou, provided it remained undivided. Anjou was not in the direct line of French succession, thus his accession would not cause a Franco-Spanish union.[76] If Anjou refused, the throne would be offered to his younger brother Charles, Duke of Berry. If the Duke of Berry declined it, it would go to the Archduke Charles, then to the distantly related House of Savoy if Charles declined it.[77]
+
+Louis was confronted with a difficult choice. He might agree to a partition of the Spanish possessions and avoid a general war, or accept Charles II's will and alienate much of Europe. Initially, Louis may have been inclined to abide by the partition treaties. However, the Dauphin's insistence persuaded Louis otherwise.[78] Moreover, Louis's foreign minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Torcy, pointed out that war with the Emperor would almost certainly ensue whether Louis accepted the partition treaties or Charles II's will. He emphasised that, should it come to war, William III was unlikely to stand by France since he "made a treaty to avoid war and did not intend to go to war to implement the treaty".[75] Indeed, in the event of a war, it might be preferable to be already in control of the disputed lands. Eventually, therefore, Louis decided to accept Charles II's will. Philip, Duke of Anjou, thus became Philip V, King of Spain.
+
+Most European rulers accepted Philip as king, though some only reluctantly. Depending on one's views of the war as inevitable or not, Louis acted reasonably or arrogantly.[79] He confirmed that Philip V retained his French rights despite his new Spanish position. Admittedly, he may only have been hypothesising a theoretical eventuality and not attempting a Franco-Spanish union. But his actions were certainly not read as being disinterested. Moreover, Louis sent troops to the Spanish Netherlands to evict Dutch garrisons and secure Dutch recognition of Philip V. In 1701, Philip transferred the asiento (the right to supply slaves to Spanish colonies) to France, alienating English traders. As tensions mounted, Louis decided to acknowledge James Stuart, the son of James II, as king of England on the latter's death, infuriating William III. These actions enraged Britain and the Dutch Republic.[80] With the Holy Roman Emperor and the petty German states, they formed another Grand Alliance and declared war on France in 1702. French diplomacy, however, secured Bavaria, Portugal, and Savoy as Franco-Spanish allies.[81]
+
+Even before war was officially declared, hostilities began with Imperial aggression in Italy. When finally declared, the War of the Spanish Succession would last almost until Louis's death, at great cost to him and the kingdom of France.
+
+The war began with French successes, however the joint talents of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Eugene of Savoy checked these victories and broke the myth of French invincibility. The duo allowed the Palatinate and Austria to occupy Bavaria after their victory at the Battle of Blenheim. Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, had to flee to the Spanish Netherlands. The impact of this victory won the support of Portugal and Savoy. Later, the Battle of Ramillies delivered the Low Countries up to the Allies, and the Battle of Turin forced Louis to evacuate Italy, leaving it open to Allied forces. Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy met again at the Battle of Oudenarde, which enabled them to mount an invasion of France.
+
+France established contact with Francis II Rákóczi and promised support if he took up the cause of Hungarian independence.
+
+Defeats, famine, and mounting debt greatly weakened France. Between 1693 and 1710, over two million people died in two famines, made worse as foraging armies seized food supplies from the villages.[82][83] In his desperation, Louis XIV even ordered a disastrous invasion of the English island of Guernsey in the autumn of 1704 with the aim of raiding their successful harvest. By the winter of 1708–1709, Louis was willing to accept peace at nearly any cost. He agreed that the entire Spanish empire should be surrendered to the Archduke Charles, and he also consented to return to the frontiers of the Peace of Westphalia, giving up all the territories he had acquired over sixty years of his reign. He could not speak for his grandson, however, and could not promise that Philip V would accept these terms. Thus, the Allies demanded that Louis single-handedly attack his own grandson to force these terms on him. If he could not achieve this within the year, the war would resume. Louis could not accept these terms.[84]
+
+The final phases of the War of the Spanish Succession demonstrated that the Allies could not maintain the Archduke Charles in Spain just as surely as France could not retain the entire Spanish inheritance for King Philip V. The Allies were definitively expelled from central Spain by the Franco-Spanish victories at the Battles of Villaviciosa and Brihuega in 1710. French forces elsewhere remained obdurate despite their defeats. The Allies suffered a Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Malplaquet with 21,000 casualties, twice that of the French.[85] Eventually, France recovered its military pride with the decisive victory at Denain in 1712.
+
+French military successes near the end of the war took place against the background of a changed political situation in Austria. In 1705, the Emperor Leopold I died. His elder son and successor, Joseph I, followed him in 1711. His heir was none other than the Archduke Charles, who secured control of all of his brother's Austrian land holdings. If the Spanish empire then fell to him, it would have resurrected a domain as vast as that of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century. To the maritime powers of Great Britain and the Dutch Republic, this would have been as undesirable as a Franco-Spanish union.[86]
+
+As a result of the fresh British perspective on the European balance of power, Anglo-French talks began that culminated in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht between Louis, Philip V of Spain, Anne, Queen of Great Britain, and the Dutch Republic. In 1714, after losing Landau and Freiburg, the Holy Roman Emperor also made peace with France in the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden.
+
+In the general settlement, Philip V retained Spain and its colonies, whereas Austria received the Spanish Netherlands and divided Spanish Italy with Savoy. Britain kept Gibraltar and Menorca. Louis agreed to withdraw his support for James Stuart, son of James II and pretender to the throne of Great Britain, and ceded Newfoundland, Rupert's Land, and Acadia in the Americas to Anne. Britain gained most from the Treaty of Utrecht, but the final terms were much more favourable to France than those which were being discussed in peace negotiations in 1709 and 1710.[citation needed] France retained Île-Saint-Jean and Île Royale, and Louis did acquire a few minor European territories, such as the Principality of Orange and the Ubaye Valley, which covered transalpine passes into Italy. Thanks to Louis, his allies the Electors of Bavaria and Cologne were restored to their pre-war status and returned their lands.[87]
+
+Louis and his wife Maria Theresa of Spain had six children from the marriage contracted for them in 1660. However, only one child, the eldest, survived to adulthood: Louis, le Grand Dauphin, known as Monseigneur. Maria Theresa died in 1683, whereupon Louis remarked that she had never caused him unease on any other occasion.
+
+Despite evidence of affection early on in their marriage, Louis was never faithful to Maria Theresa. He took a series of mistresses, both official and unofficial. Among the better documented are Louise de La Vallière (with whom he had 5 children; 1661–67), Bonne de Pons d'Heudicourt (1665), Catherine Charlotte de Gramont (1665), Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan (with whom he had 7 children; 1667–80), Anne de Rohan-Chabot (1669–75), Claude de Vin des Œillets (1 child born in 1676), Isabelle de Ludres (1675–78), and Marie Angélique de Scorailles (1679–81), who died at age 19 in childbirth. Through these liaisons, he produced numerous illegitimate children, most of whom he married to members of cadet branches of the royal family.
+
+Louis proved relatively more faithful to his second wife, Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon.  He first met her through her work caring for his children by Madame de Montespan, noting the care she gave to his favorite, Louis Auguste, Duke of Maine.[88]  The king was, at first, put off by her strict religious practice, but he warmed to her through her care for his children.[88]
+
+When he legitimized his children by Madame de Montespan on 20 December 1673, Françoise d'Aubigné became the royal governess at Saint-Germain.[88]  As governess, she was one of very few people permitted to speak to him as an equal, without limits.[88]  It is believed that they were married secretly at Versailles on or around 10 October 1683[89] or January 1684.[90] This marriage, though never announced or publicly discussed, was an open secret and lasted until his death.[91]
+
+Louis was a pious and devout king who saw himself as the head and protector of the Gallican Church. Louis made his devotions daily regardless of where he was, following the liturgical calendar regularly.[92] Under the influence of his very religious second wife, he became much stronger in the practice of his Catholic faith.[93]  This included the banning of opera and comedy performances during Lent.[93]
+
+Towards the middle and the end of his reign, the centre for the King's religious observances was usually the Chapelle Royale at Versailles. Ostentation was a distinguishing feature of daily Mass, annual celebrations, such as those of Holy Week, and special ceremonies.[94] Louis established the Paris Foreign Missions Society, but his informal alliance with the Ottoman Empire was criticised for undermining Christendom.[95]
+
+Louis generously supported the royal court of France and those who worked under him. He brought the Académie Française under his patronage and became its "Protector". He allowed Classical French literature to flourish by protecting such writers as Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine, whose works remain greatly influential to this day. Louis also patronised the visual arts by funding and commissioning various artists, such as Charles Le Brun, Pierre Mignard, Antoine Coysevox, and Hyacinthe Rigaud, whose works became famous throughout Europe. In music, composers and musicians such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, and François Couperin thrived. In 1661, Louis founded the Académie Royale de Danse, and in 1669, the Académie d'Opéra, important driving events in the evolution of ballet. The King also attracted, supported and patronized such artists as André Charles Boulle who revolutionised marquetry with his art of inlay, today known as "Boulle Work".
+
+Over the course of four building campaigns, Louis converted a hunting lodge built by Louis XIII into the spectacular Palace of Versailles. With the exception of the current Royal Chapel (built near the end of Louis' reign), the palace achieved much of its current appearance after the third building campaign, which was followed by an official move of the royal court to Versailles on 6 May 1682. Versailles became a dazzling, awe-inspiring setting for state affairs and the reception of foreign dignitaries. At Versailles, the king alone commanded attention.
+
+Several reasons have been suggested for the creation of the extravagant and stately palace, as well as the relocation of the monarchy's seat. For example, the memoirist Saint-Simon speculated that Louis viewed Versailles as an isolated power center where treasonous cabals could be more readily discovered and foiled.[49] Alternatively, there has been speculation that the revolt of the Fronde caused Louis to hate Paris, which he abandoned for a country retreat. However, his sponsorship of many public works in Paris, such as the establishment of a police force and of street-lighting,[96] lend little credence to this theory. As a further example of his continued care for the capital, Louis constructed the Hôtel des Invalides, a military complex and home to this day for officers and soldiers rendered infirm either by injury or old age. While pharmacology was still quite rudimentary in his day, the Invalides pioneered new treatments and set new standards for hospice treatment. The conclusion of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1668, also induced Louis to demolish the northern walls of Paris in 1670 and replace them with wide tree-lined boulevards.[97]
+
+Louis also renovated and improved the Louvre and other royal residences. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was originally to plan additions to the Louvre; however, his plans would have meant the destruction of much of the existing structure, replacing it with an Italian summer villa in the centre of Paris. Bernini's plans were eventually shelved in favour of the elegant Louvre Colonnade designed by three Frenchmen: Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault. With the relocation of the court to Versailles, the Louvre was given over to the arts and the public.[98]
+During his visit from Rome, Bernini also executed a renowned portrait bust of the king.
+
+Few rulers in world history have commemorated themselves in as grand a manner as Louis.[99] Louis used court ritual and the arts to validate and augment his control over France. With his support, Colbert established from the beginning of Louis' personal reign a centralised and institutionalised system for creating and perpetuating the royal image. The King was thus portrayed largely in majesty or at war, notably against Spain. This portrayal of the monarch was to be found in numerous media of artistic expression, such as painting, sculpture, theatre, dance, music, and the almanacs that diffused royal propaganda to the population at large.
+
+Over his lifetime, Louis commissioned numerous works of art to portray himself, among them over 300 formal portraits. The earliest portrayals of Louis already followed the pictorial conventions of the day in depicting the child king as the majestically royal incarnation of France. This idealisation of the monarch continued in later works, which avoided depictions of the effect of the smallpox that Louis contracted in 1647. In the 1660s, Louis began to be shown as a Roman emperor, the god Apollo, or Alexander the Great, as can be seen in many works of Charles Le Brun, such as sculpture, paintings, and the decor of major monuments.
+
+The depiction of the king in this manner focused on allegorical or mythological attributes, instead of attempting to produce a true likeness. As Louis aged, so too did the manner in which he was depicted. Nonetheless, there was still a disparity between realistic representation and the demands of royal propaganda. There is no better illustration of this than in Hyacinthe Rigaud's frequently-reproduced Portrait of Louis XIV of 1701, in which a 63-year-old Louis appears to stand on a set of unnaturally young legs.[100]
+
+Rigaud's portrait exemplified the height of royal portraiture during Louis' reign. Although Rigaud crafted a credible likeness of Louis, the portrait was neither meant as an exercise in realism nor to explore Louis' personal character. Certainly, Rigaud was concerned with detail and depicted the king's costume with great precision, down to his shoe buckle.[101]
+
+However, Rigaud's intention was to glorify the monarchy. Rigaud's original, now housed in the Louvre, was originally meant as a gift to Louis' grandson, Philip V of Spain. However, Louis was so pleased with the work that he kept the original and commissioned a copy to be sent to his grandson. That became the first of many copies, both in full and half-length formats, to be made by Rigaud, often with the help of his assistants. The portrait also became a model for French royal and imperial portraiture down to the time of Charles X over a century later. In his work, Rigaud proclaims Louis' exalted royal status through his elegant stance and haughty expression, the royal regalia and throne, rich ceremonial fleur-de-lys robes, as well as the upright column in the background, which, together with the draperies, serves to frame this image of majesty.
+
+In addition to portraits, Louis commissioned at least 20 statues of himself in the 1680s, to stand in Paris and provincial towns as physical manifestations of his rule. He also commissioned "war artists" to follow him on campaigns to document his military triumphs. To remind the people of these triumphs, Louis erected permanent triumphal arches in Paris and the provinces for the first time since the decline of the Roman Empire.
+
+Louis' reign marked the birth and infancy of the art of medallions. Sixteenth-century rulers had often issued medals in small numbers to commemorate the major events of their reigns. Louis, however, struck more than 300 to celebrate the story of the king in bronze, that were enshrined in thousands of households throughout France.
+
+He also used tapestries as a medium of exalting the monarchy. Tapestries could be allegorical, depicting the elements or seasons, or realist, portraying royal residences or historical events. They were among the most significant means to spread royal propaganda prior to the construction of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.[102]
+
+Louis loved ballet and frequently danced in court ballets during the early half of his reign. In general, Louis was an eager dancer who performed 80 roles in 40 major ballets. This approaches the career of a professional ballet dancer.[103]
+
+His choices were strategic and varied. He danced four parts in three of Molière's comédies-ballets, which are plays accompanied by music and dance. Louis played an Egyptian in Le Mariage forcé in 1664, a Moorish gentleman in Le Sicilien in 1667, and both Neptune and Apollo in Les Amants magnifiques in 1670.
+
+He sometimes danced leading roles which were suitably royal or godlike (such as Neptune, Apollo, or the Sun).[103] At other times, he would adopt mundane roles before appearing at the end in the lead role. It is considered that, at all times, he provided his roles with sufficient majesty and drew the limelight with his flair for dancing.[103] For Louis, ballet may not have merely been a tool for manipulation in his propaganda machinery. The sheer number of performances he gave as well as the diversity of roles he played may serve to indicate a deeper understanding and interest in the art form.[104][105]
+
+Ballet dancing was actually used by Louis as a political tool to hold power over his state. [106] He integrated ballet deeply in court social functions and fixated his nobles' attention on upholding standards in ballet dancing, effectively distracting them from political activities. [107] In 1661, Royal of the Academy was founded by Louis to further his ambition. Pierre Beauchamp, his private dance instructor, was ordered by Louis to come up with a notation system to record ballet performances, which he did with great success. His work was adopted and published by Feuillet in 1700. This major development in ballet played an important role in promoting French culture and ballet throughout Europe during Louis' time. [108]
+
+Louis greatly emphasized etiquettes in ballet dancing, evidently seen in "La belle danse" (the French noble style). More challenging skills were required to perform this dance with movements very much resembling court behaviors, as a way to remind the nobles of the king's absolute power and their own status. All the details and rules were compressed in five positions of the bodies codified by Beauchamp. [109]
+
+Besides the official depiction and image of Louis, his subjects also followed a non-official discourse consisting mainly of clandestine publications, popular songs, and rumors that provided an alternative interpretation of Louis and his government. They often focused on the miseries arising from poor government, but also carried the hope for a better future when Louis escaped the malignant influence of his ministers and mistresses, and took the government into his own hands. On the other hand, petitions addressed either directly to Louis or to his ministers exploited the traditional imagery and language of monarchy. These varying interpretations of Louis abounded in self-contradictions that reflected the people's amalgamation of their everyday experiences with the idea of monarchy.[110]
+
+Despite the image of a healthy and virile king that Louis sought to project, evidence exists to suggest that his health was not very good. He had many ailments: for example, symptoms of diabetes, as confirmed in reports of suppurating periostitis in 1678, dental abscesses in 1696, along with recurring boils, fainting spells, gout, dizziness, hot flushes, and headaches.
+
+From 1647 to 1711, the three chief physicians to the king (Antoine Vallot, Antoine d'Aquin, and Guy-Crescent Fagon) recorded all of his health problems in the Journal de Santé du Roi (Journal of the King's Health), a daily report of his health. On 18 November 1686, Louis underwent a painful operation for an anal fistula that was performed by the surgeon Charles Felix de Tassy, who prepared a specially shaped curved scalpel for the occasion. The wound took more than two months to heal.[111]
+
+Louis died of gangrene at Versailles on 1 September 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, after 72 years on the throne. Enduring much pain in his last days, he finally "yielded up his soul without any effort, like a candle going out", while reciting the psalm Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina (O Lord, make haste to help me).[112] His body was laid to rest in Saint-Denis Basilica outside Paris. It remained there undisturbed for about 80 years, until revolutionaries exhumed and destroyed all of the remains found in the Basilica.[113]
+
+Louis outlived most of his immediate legitimate family. His last surviving in-wedlock son, the Dauphin, died in 1711. Barely a year later, the Duke of Burgundy, the eldest of the Dauphin's three sons and then heir to Louis, followed his father. Burgundy's elder son, Louis, Duke of Brittany, joined them a few weeks later. Thus, on his deathbed, Louis' heir was his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis, Duke of Anjou, Burgundy's younger son.
+
+Louis foresaw an underaged heir and sought to restrict the power of his nephew Philip II, Duke of Orléans, who, as his closest surviving legitimate relative in France, would likely become regent to the prospective Louis XV. Accordingly, the king created a regency council as Louis XIII had in anticipation of Louis XIV's own minority, with some power vested in his illegitimate son Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Duke of Maine.[114] Orléans, however, had Louis' will annulled by the Parlement of Paris after his death and made himself sole regent. He stripped Maine and his brother, Louis-Alexandre, Count of Toulouse, of the rank of Prince of the Blood, which Louis had granted them, and significantly reduced Maine's power and privileges.[115]
+
+Line of succession to the French throne upon the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Louis XIV's only surviving legitimate grandson, Philip V, was not included in the line of succession due to having renounced the French throne after the war of the Spanish succession, which lasted for 13 years after the death of Charles II of Spain in 1700.[116]
+
+According to Philippe de Dangeau's Journal, Louis on his deathbed advised his heir with these words:
+
+Do not follow the bad example which I have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviation of the burdens of your subjects.[117]
+
+Some historians point out that it was a customary demonstration of piety in those days to exaggerate one's sins. Thus they do not place much emphasis on Louis' deathbed declarations in assessing his accomplishments. Rather, they focus on military and diplomatic successes, such as how he placed a French prince on the Spanish throne. This, they contend, ended the threat of an aggressive Spain that historically interfered in domestic French politics. These historians also emphasise the effect of Louis' wars in expanding France's boundaries and creating more defensible frontiers that preserved France from invasion until the Revolution.[117]
+
+Arguably, Louis also applied himself indirectly to "the alleviation of the burdens of [his] subjects." For example, he patronised the arts, encouraged industry, fostered trade and commerce, and sponsored the founding of an overseas empire. Moreover, the significant reduction in civil wars and aristocratic rebellions during his reign are seen by these historians as the result of Louis' consolidation of royal authority over feudal elites.[118] In their analysis, his early reforms centralised France and marked the birth of the modern French state. They regard the political and military victories as well as numerous cultural achievements as the means by which Louis helped raise France to a preeminent position in Europe.[119] Europe came to admire France for its military and cultural successes, power, and sophistication. Europeans generally began to emulate French manners, values, goods, and deportment. French became the universal language of the European elite.
+
+Louis' detractors have argued that his considerable foreign, military, and domestic expenditure impoverished and bankrupted France. His supporters, however, distinguish the state, which was impoverished, from France, which was not. As supporting evidence, they cite the literature of the time, such as the social commentary in Montesquieu's Persian Letters.[120]
+
+Alternatively, Louis' critics attribute the social upheaval culminating in the French Revolution to his failure to reform French institutions while the monarchy was still secure. Other scholars counter that there was little reason to reform institutions that largely worked well under Louis. They also maintain that events occurring almost 80 years after his death were not reasonably foreseeable to Louis, and that in any case, his successors had sufficient time to initiate reforms of their own.[121]
+
+Louis has often been criticised for his vanity. The memoirist Saint-Simon, who claimed that Louis slighted him, criticised him thus:
+
+There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.
+
+For his part, Voltaire saw Louis' vanity as the cause for his bellicosity:
+
+It is certain that he passionately wanted glory, rather than the conquests themselves. In the acquisition of Alsace and half of Flanders, and of all of Franche-Comté, what he really liked was the name he made for himself.[122]
+
+Nonetheless, Louis has also received praise. The anti-Bourbon Napoleon described him not only as "a great king", but also as "the only King of France worthy of the name".[123] Leibniz, the German Protestant philosopher, commended him as "one of the greatest kings that ever was".[124] And Lord Acton admired him as "by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne".[125] The historian and philosopher Voltaire wrote: "His name can never be pronounced without respect and without summoning the image of an eternally memorable age".[126] Voltaire's history, The Age of Louis XIV, named Louis' reign as not only one of the four great ages in which reason and culture flourished, but the greatest ever.[127][128]
+
+In 1848, at Nuneham House, a piece of Louis' mummified heart, taken from his tomb and kept in a silver locket by Lord Harcourt, Archbishop of York, was shown to the Dean of Westminster, William Buckland, who ate it.[129]
+
+Numerous quotes have been attributed to Louis XIV by legend.
+
+The well-known "I am the state" ("L'état, c'est moi.") was reported from at least the late 18th century.[130]
+It was widely repeated but also denounced as apocryphal by the early 19th century.[131][b][132]
+
+He did say, "Every time I appoint someone to a vacant position, I make a hundred unhappy and one ungrateful."[133][134] Louis is recorded by numerous eyewitnesses as having said on his deathbed: "Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours." ("I depart, but the State shall always remain.")[135]
+
+Louis's formal style was "Louis XIV, par la grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre", or "Louis XIV, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre".
+
+On 5 April 1693, Louis also founded the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis (French: Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint-Louis), a military order of chivalry.[137][138] He named it after Louis IX and intended it as a reward for outstanding officers. It is notable as the first decoration that could be granted to non-nobles and is roughly the forerunner of the Légion d'honneur, with which it shares the red ribbon (though the Légion d'honneur is awarded to military personnel and civilians alike).
+
+Louis' patriline is the line from which he is descended father to son.
+
+Patrilineal descent is the principle behind membership in royal houses, as it can be traced back through the generations - which means that if King Louis were to choose an historically accurate house name it would be Robertian, as all his male-line ancestors have been of that house.
+
+Louis is a member of the House of Bourbon, a branch of the Capetian dynasty and of the Robertians.
+
+Louis' patriline is the line from which he is descended father to son. It follows the Bourbon, Kings of France, and the Counts of Paris and Worms. This line can be traced back more than 1,200 years from Robert of Hesbaye to the present day, through Kings of France & Navarre, Spain and Two-Sicilies, Dukes of Parma and Grand-Dukes of Luxembourg, Princes of Orléans and Emperors of Brazil. It is one of the oldest in Europe.
+
+This is an incomplete list of Louis XIV's illegitimate children. He reputedly had more, but the difficulty in fully documenting all such births restricts the list only to the better-known and/or legitimised.

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+An archipelago (/ˌɑːrkɪˈpɛləɡoʊ/ (listen) ARK-ih-PEL-ə-goh), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster or collection of islands, or sometimes a sea containing a small number of scattered islands.
+
+Indonesia, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Galápagos Islands, Japan, the Philippines, Maldives, the Balearic Isles, the Bahamas, the Aegean Islands, Hawaii, the Canary Islands, Malta, the Azores, Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Archipelago Sea (Finland) and the Shetland Islands are all examples of well-known archipelagos. They are sometimes defined by political boundaries. The Gulf archipelago off the pacific coast forms part of a larger archipelago that geographically includes Washington state's San Juan islands. While the Gulf archipelago and San Juan islands are geographically related, they are not technically included in the same archipelago due to manmade geopolitical borders. [1]
+
+The word archipelago is derived from the Ancient Greek ἄρχι-(arkhi-, "chief") and πέλαγος (pélagos, "sea") through the Italian arcipelago. In Italian, possibly following a tradition of antiquity, "Archipelago" (from medieval Greek *ἀρχιπέλαγος and Latin archipelagus) was the proper name for the Aegean Sea. Later, usage shifted to refer to the Aegean Islands (since the sea is remarkable for its large number of islands).
+
+Archipelagos may be found isolated in large amounts of water or neighbouring a large land mass. For example, Scotland has more than 700 islands surrounding its mainland which form an archipelago
+
+Archipelagos are often volcanic, forming along island arcs generated by subduction zones or hotspots, but may also be the result of erosion, deposition, and land elevation. Depending on their geological origin, islands forming archipelagos can be referred to as oceanic islands, continental fragments, and continental islands.[2]
+
+Oceanic islands are mainly of volcanic origin, and widely separated from any adjacent continent. The Hawaiian Islands and Easter Island in the Pacific, and Île Amsterdam in the south Indian Ocean are examples.
+
+Continental fragments correspond to land masses that have separated from a continental mass due to tectonic displacement. The Farallon Islands off the coast of California are an example.
+
+Sets of islands formed close to the coast of a continent are considered continental archipelagos when they form part of the same continental shelf, when those islands are above-water extensions of the shelf. The islands of the Inside Passage off the coast of British Columbia and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago are examples.
+
+Artificial archipelagos have been created in various countries for different purposes. Palm Islands and the World Islands off Dubai were or are being created for leisure and tourism purposes.[3][4] Marker Wadden in the Netherlands is being built as a conservation area for birds and other wildlife.[5]
+
+The largest archipelagic state in the world by area, and by population, is Indonesia.[6]

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+Louis XV (15 February 1710 – 10 May 1774), known as Louis the Beloved (French: le Bien-Aimé),[1] was King of France from 1 September 1715 until his death in 1774. He succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV at the age of five. Until he reached maturity (then defined as his 13th birthday) on 15 February 1723, the kingdom was ruled by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, as Regent of France.
+Cardinal Fleury was his chief minister from 1726 until the Cardinal's death in 1743, at which time the king took sole control of the kingdom.
+
+His reign of almost 59 years (from 1715 to 1774) was the second longest in the history of France, exceeded only by his predecessor and great-grandfather, Louis XIV, who had ruled for 72 years (from 1643 to 1715).[2]  In 1748, Louis returned the Austrian Netherlands, won at the Battle of Fontenoy of 1745. He ceded New France in North America to Spain and Great Britain at the conclusion of the disastrous Seven Years' War in 1763. He incorporated the territories of the Duchy of Lorraine and the Corsican Republic into the Kingdom of France. He was succeeded in 1774 by his grandson Louis XVI, who was executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.  Two of his other grandsons, Louis XVIII and Charles X, occupied the throne of France after the fall of Napoleon I.  Historians generally give his reign very low marks, especially as reports of his corruption embarrassed the monarchy and as wars drained the treasury and set the stage for the French Revolution of 1789.
+
+Louis XV was the great-grandson of Louis XIV and the third son of the Duke of Burgundy (1682–1712), and his wife Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, the eldest daughter of Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy.  He was born in the Palace of Versailles on 15 February 1710. When he was born, he was named the Duke of Anjou. The possibility of his becoming King seemed very remote; the King's oldest son and heir, Louis Le Grand Dauphin, Louis's father and his elder surviving brother were ahead of him in the succession.  However, the Grand Dauphin died of smallpox on 14 April 1711.[3]  On 12 February 1712 the mother of Louis, Marie Adélaïde, was stricken with measles and died, followed on 18 February by Louis's father, the former Duke of Burgundy, who was next in line for the throne. On 7 March, it was found that both Louis and his older brother, the former Duke of Brittany, had the measles.  The two brothers were treated in the traditional way, with bleeding.  On the night of 8–9 March, the new Dauphin died from the combination of the disease and the treatment.  The governess of Louis, Madame de Ventadour, would not allow the doctors to bleed Louis further; he was very ill but survived.[4]  When Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, Louis, at the age of five, inherited the throne.[5]
+
+The Ordinance of Vincennes from 1374 required that the kingdom be governed by a regent until Louis reached the age of thirteen. The title of Regent was given to his nearest relative, his cousin Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. Louis XIV, however, distrusted Philippe, who was a renowned soldier, but was regarded by the King as an atheist and libertine. The King referred privately to Philippe as a Fanfaron des crimes ("braggart of crimes").[6]  Louis XIV wanted France to be ruled by his favorite but illegitimate son,  Duke of Maine (illegitimate son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan), who was in the council. In August 1714, shortly before his own death, the King rewrote his will to restrict the powers of the regent; it stipulated that the nation was to be governed by a Regency Council made up of fourteen members until the new king reached the age of thirteen. Philippe, nephew of Louis XIV, was named president of the council, but other members included the Duke of Maine and his allies.  Decisions were to be made by majority vote, meaning that the Regent could be outvoted by Maine's party.  Orléans saw the trap, and immediately after the death of the King, he went to the Parlement of Paris, an assembly of nobles where he had many allies, and had the Parlement annul the King's will.[7]  In exchange for their support, he restored to the Parlement its droit de remontrance (right of remonstrance) – the right to challenge the King's decisions, which had been removed by Louis XIV. The droit de remontrance would impair the monarchy's functioning and marked the beginning of a conflict between the Parlement and King which eventually led to the French Revolution in 1789.[8]
+
+On 9 September 1715, the Regent had the young King transported away from the court in Versailles to Paris, where the Regent had his own residence in the Palais Royal.  On 12 September, he performed his first official act, opening the first lit de justice of his reign at the Palais Royal.  From September 1715 until January 1716 he lived in the Château de Vincennes, before moving to the Tuileries Palace.  In February 1717, when he reached the age of seven, he was taken from his governess Madame Ventadour and placed in the care of François de Villeroy, the 73-year-old Duke and Maréchal de France, named as his governor in Louis XIV's will of August 1714. Villeroy instructed the young King in court etiquette, taught him how to review a regiment, and how to receive royal visitors.[9] His guests included the Russian Tsar Peter the Great in 1717; contrary to ordinary protocol, the two-meter-tall Tsar picked up Louis and kissed him. Louis also learned the skills of horseback riding and hunting, which became the great passion of the young King.[10]  In 1720, following the example of Louis XIV, Villeroy had the young Louis dance in public in two ballets at the Tuileries Palace on 24 February 1720, and again in The Ballet des Elements on 31 December 1721.[11]  The shy Louis evidently did not enjoy the experience; he never danced in another ballet.[12]
+
+The King's tutor was the Abbé André-Hercule de Fleury, the bishop of Fréjus (and later to become Cardinal de Fleury), who saw that he was instructed in Latin, Italian, history and geography, astronomy, mathematics and drawing, and cartography. The King charmed the visiting Russian Tsar by identifying the major rivers, cities and geographic features of Russia.  In his later life the King retained his passion for science and geography; he created departments in physics (1769) and mechanics (1773) at the Collège de France.,[13] and he sponsored the first complete and accurate map of France, the Cartes de Cassini.[14]  Besides his academic studies, He received a practical education in government. Beginning in 1720 he attended the regular meetings of the Regency Council.
+
+One economic crisis disrupted the Regency; the Scottish economist and banker John Law was named controller-general of finances. In May 1716, he opened the Banque Générale Privée ("General Private Bank"), which soon became the Banque Royal. It was mostly funded by the government, and was one of the earliest banks to issue paper money, which he promised could be exchanged for gold.[15]  He also persuaded wealthy Parisians to invest in the Mississippi Company, a scheme for the colonization of French territory of Louisiana.  The stock of the company first soared and then collapsed in 1720, taking the bank with it.  Law fled France, and wealthy Parisians became reluctant to make further investments or trust any currency but gold.[16]
+
+In 1719, France, in alliance with Britain and the Dutch Republic, declared war on Spain. Spain was defeated on both land and sea, and quickly sought peace. A French-Spanish treaty was signed on 27 March 1721. The two governments proposed to unite their royal families by marrying Louis to Mariana Victoria of Spain, the seven-year-old daughter of Philip V of Spain, who was himself grandson of Louis XIV. The marriage contract was signed on 25 November, and the future bride came to France and took up residence in the Louvre. However, the Regent decided she was too young to have children soon enough, and she was sent back to Spain.[17] During the rest of Regency France was at peace, and in 1720, the Regent decreed an official silence on religious conflicts.[18] Montesquieu and Voltaire published their first works, and the Age of Enlightenment in France quietly began.[19]
+
+On 15 June 1722, as Louis approached his thirteenth birthday, the year of his majority, he left Paris and moved back to Versailles, where he had happy memories of his childhood, but where he was far from the reach of public opinion.  On 25 October, Louis was crowned King at the Cathedral of Reims.[20] 
+On 15 February 1723, the king's majority was declared by the Parlement of Paris, officially ending the regency. In the beginning of Louis's reign, the Duke of Orleans continued to manage the government, and took the title of Prime Minister in August 1723, but while visiting his mistress, far from the court and medical care, Orleans died in December of the same year. Following the advice of his preceptor Fleury, Louis XV appointed his cousin Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon, to replace the late Duke of Orléans as prime minister.
+
+One of the first priorities of the Duke of Bourbon was to find a bride for the King, to assure the continuity of the monarchy, and especially to prevent the succession to the throne of the Orleans branch of the family, the rivals of his branch.[21]  A list of 99 princesses was prepared, among them being Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange, Barbara of Portugal, Princess Charlotte Amalie of Denmark, Elisabeth Therese of Lorraine, Enrichetta d'Este and the Duke's own sisters Henriette Louise de Bourbon and Élisabeth Alexandrine de Bourbon.[22]
+In the end, the 21-year-old Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of Stanislaus I, the deposed king of Poland, was finally chosen.
+
+The marriage was celebrated in September 1725 when the king was 15. Between 1727 and 1737, she gave the king ten children, eight girls and two boys, of whom one survived: the Dauphin Louis (1729–1765).  The birth of a long-awaited heir, which ensured the survival of the dynasty for the first time since 1712, was welcomed with celebration in all spheres of French society.  In 1747, the Dauphin married Maria Josephina of Saxony, who gave birth to the next three Kings of France: Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X.[23]
+
+The queen was pious and timid, and spent most of her time secluded with her own courtiers. She was a musician, read extensively, and played social games with her courtiers. After 1737, she did not share her bed with the King. She was deeply upset by the death of her son the Dauphin in 1765, and died on 24 June 1768.[24]
+
+One of the first serious conflicts that disturbed the early reign of Louis XV was a battle within the Catholic Church over a Papal Bull called Unigenitus. The Bull was requested by Louis XIV of Pope Clement XI and granted on 8 September 1713.  It was a fierce condemnation of Jansenism, a Catholic doctrine based largely on the teachings of Saint Augustine.  Jansenism had attracted many important followers in France, including the philosopher Blaise Pascal, the poet Racine, aristocrats including Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Lafayette.  The faculty of the Sorbonne, then primarily a theological college and a center of Jansenism, demanded clarification from the government.  The Jansenists were allied with the Gallicans, theologians who wanted the Catholic Church in France to be distinctly French.  The opposition to Unigenitus was particularly strong among the members of the Parlement de Paris, the assembly of the nobles. Despite the protests, on 24 March 1730 Cardinal Fleury persuaded the King to issue a decree that Unigenitus was the law of France as well as that of the Church.
+
+The government and church imposed repressive measures. On 27 April 1732, the Archbishop of Paris threatened to excommunicate any member of the Church who read the Jansenist journal, Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques. The Parlement was strictly forbidden to discuss religious questions, preventing them from opposing the Unigenitus bull. Priests who did not accept Unigenitus were denied the authority to administer last rites to the dying.[25] A new tax, the cinquantième, was levied against religious figures who had previously been exempted from taxation. Jansenists and Protestants were threatened with prison and banishment.[26] As a result of these repressive acts, religious dissent remained an issue throughout the King's reign.
+
+Tension grew between the Duke of Bourbon and Cardinal de Fleury over the King's favor. The Duke's rigid and cold personality did not appeal to the young King, who turned to his old tutor for advice on how to run the affairs of state. When the King insisted that de Fleury was to be included in all meetings between himself and the Duke of Bourbon, the Duke was infuriated and began to undermine de Fleury's position at court. When the King became aware of the Duke's intrigue, he abruptly dismissed him and replaced him with de Fleury.[27]
+
+From 1726 until his death in 1743, Fleury effectively ruled France with the king's assent.  Fleury dictated the choices to be made, and encouraged the king's indecision and flattered his pride. He forbade the king to discuss politics with the Queen. In order to save on court expenses, he sent the youngest four daughters of the king to be educated at the Abbey of Fontevrault. On the surface it was the most peaceful and prosperous period of the reign of Louis XV, but it was built upon a growing volcano of opposition, particularly from the noble members of the Parlements, who saw their privileges and power reduced. Fleury made the Papal doctrine Unigenitus part of French law and forbade any debate in Parlement, which caused the silent opposition to grow. He also downplayed the importance of the French Navy, which would prove be a fatal mistake in future conflicts.[28]
+
+Fleury showed the King the virtues of a stable government; he kept the same Minister of War, Bauyn d'Angervilliers, and controller of the currency, Philibert Orry, for twelve years, and his minister of foreign affairs, Germain Louis Chauvelin, for ten years. His minister of the Navy and household of the King, the Conte de Maurepas, was in office the entire period.  In all he had just thirteen ministers over the course of nineteen years, while the King, in his last thirty-one years, employed forty-three.[29]
+
+Louis's Controller-General of Finances Michel Robert Le Peletier des Forts (1726–1730), stabilized the French currency, though he was expelled for enriching himself in 1730. His successor, Philibert Orry, substantially reduced the debt caused by the War of the Spanish Succession, and simplified and made more fair the tax system, though he still had to depend upon the unpopular dixieme, or tax of the tenth of the revenue of every citizen.  Orry managed, in the last two years of Fleury's government, to balance the royal budget, an accomplishment never again repeated during the rest of the reign.[30]
+
+Fleury's government expanded commerce, both within France and with the rest of the world. Transportation and shipping were improved with the completion of the Saint-Quentin canal (linking the Oise and Somme rivers) in 1738, which was later extended to the Escaut River and the Low Countries, and the systematic building of a national road network. By the middle of the 18th century, France had the most modern and extensive road network in the world. The Council of Commerce stimulated trade, and French foreign maritime trade increased from 80 to 308 million livres between 1716 and 1748.[31]
+
+The Government continued its policy of religious repression, aimed at the Jansenists and the so-called "Gallicans" in Parlements of nobles. After the dismissal of 139 members of provincial parlements for opposing the official government and papal doctrine of Unigenitus, the Parlement of Paris had to register the Unigenitus papal bull and was forbidden to hear religious cases in the future.[32]
+
+In the first years of his governance, Fleury and his foreign minister Germain Louis Chauvelin sought to maintain the peace by maintaining the French alliance with England, despite their long history of antagonism and their colonial rivalry in North America and the West Indies. They also rebuilt the alliance with Spain, which had been shaken by the anger of the Spanish King when Louis refused to marry the Spanish infanta. The birth of the king's male heir in 1729 dispelled the risks of a succession crisis in France. However, new powers were emerging on the European stage, particularly Russia under Peter the Great and his successor, Catherine I of Russia. Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire of Charles VI were assembling a scattered but impressive empire far as Serbia in Eastern Europe with territories taken from Ottoman Turkey, and by marriage acquired the Catholic Netherlands (including Belgium), Milan and the Kingdom of Naples.[33]
+
+A new coalition against France began to assemble in eastern Europe, sealed by a defensive treaty signed on 6 August 1726 between Prussia, Russia and Austria. In 1732 the coalition came into direct conflict with France over the succession to the Polish throne. The King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, Augustus II, was dying, and his official heir was Stanislaus I Leszczyński, the father of the Queen of France. In the same year Russia, Prussia and Austria signed a secret agreement to exclude Stanislaus from the throne, and put forward another candidate, Augustus III, son of the dead Polish king. The death of Augustus on 1 February 1733, with two heirs claiming the throne, launched the War of the Polish Succession. Stanislaus traveled to Warsaw, where he was crowned King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania on 12 September. The Tsarina of Russia immediately marched her regiments into Poland to support her candidate. Stanislaus was forced to flee to the fortified port of Danzig (now Gdańsk), while on 5 October Augustus III was crowned in Warsaw.[34]
+
+Cardinal Fleury responded with a carefully orchestrated campaign of diplomacy. He first won assurances from Britain and Holland that they would not interfere in the war, while lining up alliances with Spain and the King of Sardinia in exchange for pieces of the Habsburg Empire. On 10 October 1733, Louis formally declared war against Austria. A French army occupied the Duchy of Lorraine and then Alsace, while another crossed the Alps and captured Milan on 3 November, handing it over to the King of Sardinia.[35] Fleury was less energetic in his actions to restore the Polish throne to Stanlslaw, who was blockaded by the Russian navy and army in Danzig. Instead of sending the largest part of the French fleet from its station off Copenhagen to Danzig, he ordered it to return to Brest and sent only a small squadron with two thousand soldiers, which after a fierce action was sunk by the Russians. On 3 July Stanislaus was forced to flee again, in disguise, to Prussia, where he became the guest of King Frederick William I of Prussia in the castle of Koenigsburg.
+
+To bring the war to an end, Fleury and Charles VI negotiated an ingenious diplomatic solution. Francis III, Duke of Lorraine, left Lorraine for Vienna, where he married Maria Theresa, the heir presumptive to the Habsburg thrones. The vacant throne of Lorraine was to be occupied by Stanislaus, who abandoned his claim to the Polish throne. Upon the death of Stanislaus, the Duchy of Lorraine and Bar would become part of France. Francis, as the future emperor, would be compensated for the loss of Lorraine by the granting of the Duchy of Tuscany.  The King of Sardinia would be compensated with certain territories in Lombardy; while the Sardinians would return Naples, in exchange for Parma and Plaisance. The marriage of Francis of Lorraine and Maria Theresa took place in 1736, and the other exchanges took place in turn.  With the death of Stanislaus in 1766, Lorraine and the neighboring Duchy of Bar became part of France.[36][37]
+
+In September 1739, Fleury scored another diplomatic success. France's mediation in the war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire led to the Treaty of Belgrade (September 1739), which favoured the Ottoman Empire, beneficiary of a Franco-Ottoman alliance against the Habsburgs since the early 16th century. As a result, the Ottoman Empire in 1740 renewed the French capitulations, which marked the supremacy of French trade in the Middle East. With these successes, Louis XV's prestige reached its highest point. In 1740 Frederick William I, the King of Prussia declared "Since the Treaty of Vienna France is the arbiter of Europe."[38]
+
+On 29 October 1740, a courier brought the news to the King, who was hunting in Fontainebleau, that the Emperor Charles VI was dead, and his daughter Maria Theresa was set to succeed him.  After two days of reflection, Louis declared, "In these circumstances, I don't want to get involved at all. I will remain with my hands in my pockets, unless of course they want to elect a protestant emperor."[39] This attitude did not please France's allies, who saw an opportunity to take parts of the Habsburg empire, or Louis's generals, who for a century had won glory fighting Austria. The King of Prussia had died on 31 May and was succeeded by his son Frederick the Great, a military genius with ambitions to expand Prussia's borders. The elector of Bavaria, supported by Frederick, challenged the succession of Maria Theresa, and on 17 December 1740 Frederick invaded the Austrian province of Silesia.  The elderly Cardinal Fleury had too little energy left to oppose this war.
+
+Fleury sent his highest ranking general, Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet, duc de Belle-Isle, the Maréchal de Belle-Isle, the grandson of Fouquet, the famous disgraced controller of finances of Louis XIV, as his ambassador to the Diet of Frankfurt, with instructions to avoid a war by supporting the candidacy of the Elector of Bavaria to the Austrian throne.  Instead, the Maréchal, who detested the Austrians, made an agreement to join with the Prussians against Austria, and the war began.[40]  French and Bavarian armies quickly captured Linz and laid siege to Prague. On 10 April 1741 Frederick won a major victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Molwitz.  On 18 May, Fleury assembled a new alliance combining France, Prussia, Spain and Bavaria, later joined by Poland and Sardinia.  However, in 1742, the balance of the war shifted against France. The German-born British King, George II, who was also the Elector of Hanover, joined the war on the side of Austria and personally took charge of his soldiers fighting the French in Germany.  Maria Theresa's Hungarian army recaptured Linz and marched into Bavaria as far as Munich. In June, Frederick of Prussia withdrew from the alliance with France, after gaining the crown of Silesia from the Austrians. Belleville had to abandon Prague, with a loss of eight thousand men. For seven years, France was engaged in a costly war with constantly shifting alliances. Orry, the superintendent of French finance, was forced to reinstate the highly unpopular dixieme tax to fund the war. Cardinal de Fleury did not live to see the end of the conflict; he died on 29 January 1743, and thereafter Louis ruled alone.[41]
+
+The war in Germany was not going well; the French and Bavarian forces were faced with the combined armies of Austria, Saxony, Holland, Sardinia and Hanover. The army of the Duke of Noailles was defeated by a force of British, Hessian and Hanover soldiers led by George II at the battle of Dettingen, and in September French forces were compelled to abandon Germany.[42]
+
+In 1744, the Netherlands became the primary battlefield of the war, and the French position began to improve. Frederick the Great decided to rejoin the war on the French side. Louis XV left Versailles to lead his armies in the Netherlands in person, and French field command was given to the German-born Maréchal Maurice de Saxe, a highly competent general. At the Battle of Fontenoy on 11 May 1745, Louis, accompanied by his young son the Dauphin, came under fire for the first time and witnessed a French victory over combined British, Dutch and Austrian forces. When the Dauphin became excited at the sight of so many dead enemy soldiers, the King told him, "You see what a victory costs. The blood of our enemies is still the blood of men. The true glory is to spare it."[43] Saxe went on to win further victories at Rocoux (1746) and Lauffeld (1747). In 1746 French forces besieged and occupied Brussels, which Louis entered in triumph. The King gave de Saxe the Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley as a reward for his victories.
+
+After Fleury's death in January 1743, his war minister, the Duke of Noailles, showed the King a letter that Louis XIV had written to his grandson, Philip V of Spain; it counseled: "Don't allow yourself to be governed; be the master. Never have a favorite or a prime minister. Listen, consult your Council, but decide yourself. God, who made you King, will give you all the guidance you need, as long as you have good intentions."[44] Louis followed this advice and decided to govern without a prime minister. Two of his ministers took the most prominent positions in his government; the finance minister, Jean Baptiste de Machault D'Arnouville, and the minister of the armies, Comte d'Argenson.
+
+With the end of the war, Louis decided to take the opportunity to reduce the debt and modernize the system of taxation of the Kingdom. The package of reforms was put together by his finance minister D'Arnouville and was approved by the King and presented in two decrees issued in May 1749. The first measure was an issue of bonds, paying five percent interest, to pay off the 36 million livres of debt caused by the cost of the war. This new measure was an immediate success. The second measure was the abolition of the dixième, a tax of ten percent of revenue, which had been created to finance the war, and its replacement by the vingtième, a tax of five percent on net revenue, which, unlike the dixième, taxed the income of all French citizens, including for the first time the income from the property of the clergy and the nobility.[45]
+
+While the new tax was supported by many, including Voltaire, it met immediate and fierce resistance from both the nobility and the church. When on 5 May 1749 it was presented for formal registration to the Parlement of Paris, the assembly composed of high nobles and wealthy Parisians who had purchased seats, it was rejected by a vote of one hundred six to forty nine; the majority asked for more time to consider the project. The King responded by demanding immediate registration, which the Parlement reluctantly granted on 19 May.[46] Resistance to the new measures grew with the church and in the provinces, which had their own parlements. While the Parlements of Burgundy, Provence and Artois bowed to the King's demands, Brittany and Languedoc refused. The royal government closed down the Parlement of Brittany, ordered the members of the Parlement of Languedoc to return to their estates and parishes, and took direct control of the Provence.[47]
+
+Within Paris, the battle between the King and Parlement was fought over the status of the Hôpital Général, a semi-religious organization which operated six different hospitals and shelters in Paris, with a staff of some five thousand persons. Many of the hospital staff and officials were Jansenists, while the board of directors of the hospital included many prominent members of the Parlement of Paris. In 1749, the King decided to purge the hospital of Jansenists and corruption, appointed a new "Supérieure" against the will of the administrators, who resigned, then appointed four temporary administrators, and asked the First President of the Parlement of Paris, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, to implement his decree for the reorganization of the hospital. De Maupeou refused to carry out the decree without the authorization of the Parlement, and the Parlement, without taking any action, went on vacation. On 20 November, when the Parlement returned, the King again summoned de Maupeou for an audience and again demanded action without delay. This time the Parlement members met but refused to discuss the Hospital. On 28 January 1752, the King instructed the Grand Council to change the administration of the Hospital without the approval of the Parlement. Voltaire, describing the affair, wrote, "Never before has such a small affair caused such a great emotion of the spirit." It was the first overt disobedience of the legislature against the King, and one of the first signs that the Parlement believed it, not the King, was the legitimate source of laws in the nation.[48]
+
+The King's original plans to tax the church also ran into difficulty. A royal decree ordered all the clergy to submit a declaration of their revenue by 17 February 1751, but that day passed without any declarations given. Instead it became known that the King had quietly issued a new decree in December 1750, canceling the tax and relying again, entirely, on the "don gratuit", the voluntary donation by the church of 1,500,000 livres. Under the new decree, instead of a tax, the church would each year collect a comparable sum and donate it freely to the government. His support for the church came both from the teachings of his tutor, Cardinal Fleury, and his gratitude to Archbishop de Beaumont, who defended him against the attacks of the Jansenists and the criticisms of the Parlement, and the Archbishop's tolerance of the King's own personal life and mistresses.[49]
+
+Despite the French victories, the war dragged on both in the Netherlands and in Italy, where Maréchal Belle-Isle was besieging the Austrians in Genoa. By the summer of 1747 France occupied the entire Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium).[50] In March 1748, Louis proposed a conference in Aix-en-Chapelle to bring the war to an end. The process was advanced by the capture of Maastricht by the Maréchal de Saxe on 10 April 1748. Britain, pressed by the threat of a French invasion of rest of the Netherlands, urged a quick settlement, despite objections from Austria and Sardinina. The Treaty was quickly negotiated and signed by all the parties in September and October 1748. Louis was also eager for a quick settlement, because the naval war with Britain was extremely costly to French maritime trade. The proposition of Louis was surprisingly generous; in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louis offered to return all of the territories he had conquered in the Netherlands to the Austrians, Maastricht to the Dutch, Nice and Savoy to the Sardinians, and Madras in India to the English. The Austrians would give the Duchy of Parma and some other territory to the infant Spanish King, Philippe, while Britain would give France Louisburg and the island of Cape Breton, both in Nova Scotia. France also agreed to expel the Stuart pretender to the English throne from its territory.[51]
+
+The end of the war had caused celebration in Paris, but the publication of the details of the treaty on 14 January 1749 caused dismay and anger. The Stuart pretender to the British throne refused to leave Paris and was acclaimed by the Parisians. He was finally arrested on 10 December 1748, and transported by force to Switzerland. The French military commanders, including De Saxe, were furious about giving up the Spanish Netherlands. The King's defense of his action was practical: he did not want the Netherlands to be a permanent source of contention between France and other powers; he also felt that France had already reached its proper borders, and it was better to cultivate its prosperity rather than make it larger. His basis was also religious; he had been taught by Fleury that the Seventh Commandment forbade taking the property of others by fraud or violence. Louis often cited a Latin maxim declaring, "if anyone who asks by what means he can best defend a kingdom, the answer is, by never wishing to augment it." He also received support from Voltaire, who wrote, "It seems better, and even more useful for the court of France to think about the happiness of its allies, rather than to be given two or three Flemish towns which would have been the eternal object of jealousy."[52] The King did not have the communication skills to explain his decision to the French public, and did not see any need to do so. The news that the king had restored the Southern Netherlands to Austria was met with disbelief and bitterness. The French obtained so little of what they had fought for that they adopted the expressions Bête comme la paix ("Stupid as the peace") and Travailler pour le roi de Prusse ("To work for the king of Prussia", i.e. working for nothing).[53]
+
+Between 1727 and 1737, the Queen gave birth to two sons and eight daughters. The first son, born 4 September 1729, became the dauphin and heir to the throne, though he did not live to rule. The second son, the Duke of Anjou, born in 1730, died in 1733. Only the two oldest daughters were raised at Versailles; the others were sent away to be raised at the Abbey of Fontevrault. The first-born daughter, called Madame Premiere, was married to the infant Philip of Spain, the second son of Philip of Spain and Elisabeth Farnese.
+
+Louis had been very much in love with the Queen, and they were inseparable in the early years of his reign, but as his family grew and the Queen was constantly pregnant or exhausted by her maternities, he began to look elsewhere. He first became attached to one of the ladies of the Queen's court, Louise Julie de Mailly, who was the same age as he and from an ancient noble family. Without courtship or ceremony he made her his mistress and raised her to the rank of Duchess. The Duke of Luynes commented on the King's behavior: "The King loves women, and yet there is absolutely no gallantry in his spirit."[54] In 1738, after the Queen lost an unborn child, her doctors forbade her to have relations with the King for a time. The King was offended by her refusal and thereafter never shared her bed. Acknowledging that he was committing adultery, Louis refused thereafter to go to confession and to take the sacrament. The Cardinal de Fleury tried to persuade him to confess and to give up his mistress, but without success.
+
+In 1740, the King turned his attentions to the sister of Louise-Joulie, Pauline-Félicité, the Marquise de Vintimille, who was married. Pauline-Félicité became pregnant by the King at the end of the year. Both the child and mother died in childbirth. The King went into mourning and for a time turned to religion for consolation.[55] When the King had finally recovered his spirits, the Countess of Mailly unwisely introduced the King to her youngest sister, Marie Anne de Mailly, the recent widow of the Marquis de Tournelle. The King was immediately attracted to Marie-Anne; however, she insisted that he expel her older sister from the Court before she would become his mistress. The King gave in, and on 4 October 1742, Marie-Anne was named a Lady of the Court of the Queen, and a month later the King ordered her older sister to leave the Court and to live in Paris. The King made his new mistress the Duchess of Châteauroux. The King's relationships with the three sisters became a subject of gossip in the court and in Paris, where a popular comic poem was recited, ending: "Choosing an entire family – is that being unfaithful, or constant?"[56]
+
+In June 1744, the king left Versailles for the front in order to take personal command of his armies fighting in the War of the Austrian Succession. This otherwise popular move was marred by the king's indiscreet decision to bring along Marie-Anne de Mailly. In August, the king fell gravely ill in Metz. Death appeared imminent, and public prayers were held all across France to ask God to save the king from death. The king's chaplain refused to give him absolution unless the king renounced his mistress, which he did; Marie-Anne left the court but was reunited with the King a few months later. The king's confession was distributed publicly, which embarrassed him and tarnished the prestige of the monarchy. Although Louis' recovery earned him the epithet "well-beloved" from a public relieved by his survival, the events at Metz diminished his standing. The military successes of the War of the Austrian Succession inclined the French public to overlook Louis' adulteries, but after 1748, in the wake of the anger over the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, pamphlets against the king's mistresses were widely distributed and read.
+
+Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour, was the most famous and influential of the mistresses of Louis XV. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Paris fermier-general, and was married to a banker, Charles Guillaume Lenormant d'Étoiles. She was noticed by the King following one of his hunts, and formally met him at a costume ball celebrating carnival in 1745. By July, she was the King's mistress and was formally given the title of the Marquise de Pompadour. For the next twenty years she was the King's confidante and advisor, helping him choose or demote ministers. Her opinions led to the downfall of some very competent ministers, including  Machault d'Aurnouville and the Marquis d'Argenson, and to the promotion of a number of incompetent military commanders. Her most successful choice was the promotion of The Duke de Choiseul, who became one of the King's most effective ministers. She ceased to be the King's mistress in 1750 but remained his closest advisor. She was promoted to Duchess in 1752, and Dame of the Queen's Palace in 1756, and was an important patron of music and the arts, as well as religious establishments. She remained close to the King until her death in 1764. He was devastated and remained in seclusion for several weeks after she died.[57]
+
+The peace achieved by Louis with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle lasted only seven years. At the end of August 1755, Marie Therese, the Empress of Austria, discreetly wrote a letter to Louis XV, which was passed by the Austrian ambassador in Paris to Madame de Pomapadour for delivery to the King. She proposed a secret alliance between Austria and France, to meet the threats of the growing power of Prussia, which was still formally an ally of France, and Britain.[58]
+
+In the New World, conflict had already begun between Britain and France. The French colonies were at an enormous demographic disadvantage; there were less than 70,000 French colonists spread over a territory from the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes extending down the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys down to Louisiana (named for Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV); compared with 300,000 in the British colonies. To defend its territories.  France had constructed Fort Duquesne to defend their frontier against the Americans;  Britain sent the young George Washington with a small force to construct his own fortification, Fort Necessity,  nearby. In 1752, after the killing of French envoy, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, the French sent reinforcements and compelled Washington and his men to withdraw.[59]
+
+The undeclared French and Indian War followed, with Britain treating the French colonies as an enemy. In 1755, the British seized 300 French merchant ships. In January 1756, Louis sent an ultimatum to London, which was rejected by the British government. A few months later, on 16 January 1756, Frederick the Great of Prussia signed the Treaty of Westminster, allying himself with Britain. Louis responded immediately on 1 May 1756 by sealing a formal defensive treaty with Austria, the first Treaty of Versailles, offering to defend Austria in case of a Prussian attack. This was a complete reversal of France's historic conflict with Austria, which had been underway for nearly two hundred years, and it was shocking to many in the French Court.[60]
+
+Louis declared war on England on 9 June 1756, and success seemed certain. A French fleet in the Mediterranean defeated the British at the Battle of Minorca of 1756, and captured that island.  The French army greatly outnumbered the British and Prussians on the continent.  The French army won the surrender of the British forces of the Duke of Comberland at Closterseven. Another French army invaded Saxony and Hanover, the ancestral home of King George II.  However, the best French commander, Maurice de Saxe, had died two years after the War of the Austrian Succession, and the new French commanders, Charles, Prince of Soubise, the Duke D'Estrees and the Duke de Broglie detested each other, and were rarely willing to cooperate.[61]
+
+In August Frederick of Prussia made a lightning strike into Saxony and on 5 November 1757, though outnumbered by the French nearly two to one,  decisively defeated the army of the Prince de Soubise  at the Battle of Rossbach.  The new British Prime Minister, William Pitt, named a new commander, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and the French armies were gradually pushed back to the Rhine, and defeated again at the Battle of Crefield on 23 June. Thereafter, Britain and Prussia held the upper hand, tying down the French army in the German states along the Rhine.[62]
+
+British naval supremacy prevented France from reinforcing its colonies overseas, and British naval squadrons raided the French coast at Cancale and Le Havre and landed on the Ile d'Aix and Le Havre. In 1759 the British seized Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies, and captured Port Louis and Quebec.   A series of naval defeats forced Louis to abandon plans for invasion of Britain. In India, the French colony at Pondicherry was surrounded by the British, and surrendered the following year. On 8 September 1760, Montreal surrendered, bringing to an end French rule in Canada. Martinique fell to the British in 1762.[63]
+
+On 5 January 1757, as the King was getting into his carriage in the courtyard of the Grand Trianon  Versailles, a demented man, Robert-François Damiens, pushed through the King's guards and attacked the King, stabbing him in the side with a small knife.  The King's guards seized Damien, and the King ordered them to hold him but not harm him. The King walked up the steps to his rooms at the Trianon, where he found he was bleeding seriously. He summoned his doctor and a priest, and then fainted.[64]  Louis was saved from greater harm by the thickness of the winter clothing he was wearing. When the news reached Paris, anxious crowds gathered in the streets.  The Pope, the Empress of Austria, and King George II, with whom France was at war, sent messages hoping for his swift recovery. Damien was tortured to see if he had accomplices, and was tried before the  Parlement of Paris, which had been the most vocal critic of the King.  The Parlement demonstrated its loyalty to the King by sentencing Damiens to the most severe possible penalty; On 28–29 March 1757 Damien was executed on the Place de Grève in Paris by drawing and quartering, following which his body was burned on a bonfire.  The house where he was born was burned down, his father, wife and daughter were banished from France, and his brothers and sisters were required to change their name.[65][66]
+The King recovered physically very quickly, but the attack had a depressive effect on his spirits. One of his chief courtiers, Duford de Chervrny, wrote afterwards: "it was easy to see that when members of the court congratulated him on his recovery, he replied, 'yes, the body is going well',  but touched his head and said, 'but this goes badly, and this is impossible to heal.'  After the assassination attempt, the King invited his heir, the Dauphin, to attend all of the Royal Council meetings, and quietly closed down the chateau at Versailles where he had met with his short-term mistresses."[67]
+
+The Parlements were assemblies of nobles in Paris and older regions of France, whose members served as magistrates and judged civil cases.  Their members included both hereditary nobles and wealthy citizens who had purchased their seats.  Several of the Parlements, such as those of Rouen and Provence,  had been in existence for centuries, and saw themselves as the legitimate governments in their provinces. As Louis reorganized the government and appointed his own intendants in the provinces, the authority and prestige of the Parlements decreased, and price of the seats dropped. In Franche-Comté, Bordelaise and Rouen, the Parlements refused to follow the decrees of the royal intendants. When the intendants attempted to assert their authority and collect taxes from all classes, the Parlements went on strike, refusing to proceed with the judgment of civil cases. The civil justice system came to a halt. In 1761, the provincial Parlement of Normandy in Rouen wrote a protest to the King, explaining that the King had the exclusive power to tax, but the Parlement had the exclusive right to collect the money. The King rejected the explanation and overruled the Parlement, banished some of his most provocative Parliament members to their estates. For the rest of his reign, the Parlements swore allegiance to the King, but took every opportunity to resist his new taxes and the King's authority. This was one of the seeds of resistance to the King's authority that was to turn into a Revolution less than thirty years later.[68]
+
+The Comte d'Argenson served as the Minister of War from 1743 until 1747.  He was an advocate of the continuation of the absolute monarchy in the style of Louis XIV.  He was responsible for creating the first school for engineers in France at Mézières (1749–50); thanks to the trained engineers, France had the finest system of roads and bridges in Europe. He also established the military academy, the École Militaire, and, following the model of the Prussians, established military training camps and exercises, and helped rebuild French military power.[69]
+
+Machaud D'Arnouville was brought into the government with the sponsorship of d'Argenson, but the two men gradually became rivals and enemies.  D'Arnouville was the Controller of Finances from 1745 to 1754, then Minister of Navy from 1754 to 1757.  He was the creator of the unpopular "Vingtieme" tax (1749), which taxed all citizens, including the nobility, at the same rate, and also freed the prices of grain (1754), which initially greatly increased agricultural production.  The fluctuation of grain prices would eventually become a factor in the French Revolution.[70]
+
+On 1 February 1757, the King abruptly dismissed both d'Arnouville and d'Argenson, and exiled them to their estates. The King held them responsible for not preventing the assassination attempt, and their government displeased Madame de Pompadour.
+
+Louis named the Duke de Choiseul as his minister of foreign affairs on 3 December 1758, following the recommendation of Madame de Pompadour.  In 1763, he became Minister of War, giving the role of minister of foreign affairs to his cousin, the Duc de Praslin. A few months later, he also became the Minister of the Navy, and became the most influential and powerful member of the government.  In the council and circles of government, he was the leader of the philosophe faction, which included Madame de Pompadour, which sought to appease the Parlements and the Jansenists.   On the diplomatic front, he negotiated a "Family Pact" with the Bourbon monarch of Spain (1761); negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1761, and completed the integration of Lorraine into France (1766) upon the death of the King's father-in-law Stanislaus I Leszczyński, Duke of Lorraine. He incorporated Corsica into France (1768), and negotiated the marriage of his grandson, the future Louis XVI with Marie Antoinette (1770).
+
+His most notable accomplishment was the reform modernization of the French military, based on the lessons learned during the Seven Years' War.  Under Choiseul, the government, rather than the officers, took the responsibility of training, giving uniforms, and training soldiers.  The artillery was standardized, and new tactics, based on the Prussian model, were adopted and taught.  The Navy in 1763 had been reduced to just 47 vessels and twenty frigates, three times smaller than the British Royal Navy fleet.  He launched a major shipbuilding program to construct eighty vessels and forty-five new frigates, which would allow the French fleet, combined with the allied Spanish fleet, to outnumber the Royal Navy.[71]
+
+In 1764, at the urging of the Parlement, Madame Pompadour and his foreign minister, the Duc de Chosieul,  Louis decided upon the Suppression of Jesuit Order in France.  The Jesuits in France numbered 3,500;  they had 150 establishments in France, including 85 colleges, which were considered the best in France; their graduates included Voltaire and Diderot.  The Confessor of the King, by a tradition dating back to Henry IV, was a Jesuit.  Agitation against the Jesuits began in 1760 in the provincial Parlements, where the Gallicans, supporters of a specifically French version of Catholicism, were strong. The complaint against the Jesuits was that they were independent of the authority of the King and the hierarchy of the church in France. The Jesuits had already been expelled from Portugal and its colony of Brazil in 1759, because of conflicts with the government and church hierarchy there.[72]
+
+In France, the Parlements had taken the lead in attacking the Jesuits.  On 12 February 1762, the Parlement of Rouen declared the Jesuits outside the law, forbid them to hold public positions or to teach, and demanded that they take an oath repudiating their beliefs.  Between April and September 1762, the Parlements of Rennes, Bordeaux, Paris and Metz joined in the condemnation, followed in 1763 by Aix, Toulouse, Pau, Dijon and Grenoble. By the end of the year only the Parlements of Besançon, Douai, and the governments of Colmar, Flanders, Alsace and Franche-Compté, plus the Duchy of Lorraine, run by the Queen's father, the former King Stanislaus, permitted the Jesuits to function.[73]
+
+The campaign against the Jesuits divided the royal household; his son the Dauphin, his daughters and the Queen supported the Jesuits, while Madame de Pompadaour, whose influence in the court was criticized by the Jesuits, wanted them gone.  The indecisive King declared two years later that he had made the decision against his own feelings.  The Jesuits departed, and were welcomed in Prussia and in Russia. The departure of the Jesuits weakened the church in France, and especially weakened the authority of the King, who, like a constitutional monarch, acted on behalf of the Parliament against his own beliefs.[74]
+
+Under the government of Choiseul, the Parlements of several French provinces continued to swear obedience to the King, while refusing to obey his intendents or to accept his new taxes. The Parlement of Franche-Comté in Besançon refused to collect the vingtieme tax imposed by the King to finance the war, claiming that only the Parlement could impose taxes.  The King's government immediately dismissed the leaders of the Parlement and confined them to their residences. The Parlement of Normandy  immediately supported that of Besançon; it wrote a remonstrance to the King on 5 July 1760, declaring that the Parlements represented all classes: "One King, one law, one Parlement; the law of the kingdom is a sacred pact of your alliance with the French nation; it is a kind of contract which destines the King to reign and the people to obey. In truth, no one except God can compel you to obey this sacred pact... but we can ask you, with respect, with submission... to keep your promises."  This was too much for the King.  He responded on 31 January 1761 that the Parlement's complaint "contained principles so false and so contrary to my authority and with expressions so indecent, particularly in connection with my Chancellor who only explained to you my wishes... that I send your letter back to you."[75]  The Parlement members of Besançon remained in exile.
+
+The Parlement of Bordeaux went even further in its resistance to the royal government;  in 1757 it brought accusations of corruption against the members of the government of the city of Bergerac, named by the Royal Council of the King.  When the Royal Council blocked the pursuits of the Parlement, the Parlement wrote a protest to the King, declaring, "Sire, your Parlement cannot recognize any intermediate power it and your person; no, your Council has over the Parlement no authority, superiority, or jurisdiction."[76]
+
+The prolonged war drained the treasury of the Kingdom;  France paid not only for its own army, but subsidized the armies of its allies;  in 1759 France paid 19 million livres to its allies, an amount which Choiseul reduced by one-third in 1761.[77] His new finance minister, Étienne de Silhouette imposed new taxes aimed at the wealthy;  taxes on horses, carriages, silk, paintings, coffee and furs, and other luxury goods.  The new taxes were extremely unpopular with the aristocracy and wealthy;  Silhouette was dismissed after eight months, and his name became the common expression for paper cutout made from a shadow, which, like his ministry, lasted only a moment.[78]  The King announced that he was giving his silver service to the mint, to be melted down and made into money.[79]
+
+The new Controller of Finances, Henri Bertin, a protege of Madame Pompadour named on 23 November 1759, reduced the luxury taxes of his predecessor, and instead proposed a broadening of the tax base to include those classes which had long been excluded, and a new survey of the wealth of the nobility. Once again the Parliaments rebelled.  When the Lieutenant General of Normandy appeared before the Parliament to register the decree, it refused to register or collect the new taxes. The same scene was reproduced in the other Parlements.  Once again the King yielded to Madame de Pomapdour and her allies;  the new decrees were withdrawn, Bertin was moved to a different position, the tax rolls were not enlarged, and no new taxes were collected; the debt remained.[80]
+
+The war with England continued, despite the death of King George II on 25 October 1760; the British Prime Minister William Pitt rejected French proposals for suggestions for negotiations. On 15 August 1761, France, Spain, Naples and Parma, all ruled by monarchs of the Bourbon family, signed the first "Family Pact" with a system of reciprocal guarantees of support if one or the other were attacked.  At the same time, they signed a secret treaty with Charles III of Spain engaging Spain to declare war on England if the war was not over by May 1762.  Learning of this pact, William Pitt wanted to declare an immediate war on Spain, but the new British King, George III, rejected the idea.   The military forces of Frederick the Great in Prussia had been nearly exhausted in the long war against the combined forces of Austria and Russia;  but Frederick was saved by the sudden death of the Tsarina Elizabeth in 1762, and her replacement by Peter III of Russia, a fervent admirer of the Prussian King.
+
+Choiseul had taken over direction of the French navy as well as the army in October 1761, and he pressed for an offensive to bring the war to a successful end. He persuaded the Parlements and the chambers of commerce of the major French cities to sponsor the construction of warships, and rebuilt the French Navy.  The French army launched a new offensive against the Prussians and Spain, as promised by its agreement with France, launched an invasion in Portugal, an ally of Britain.  However, once again the French initiatives were not enough. The French offensive in Hesse-Kassel was defeated by the Prussians, the Spanish army in Portugal made little progress, and the British took the opportunity to land on Martinique and to invade Spain's colony Cuba.  Choiseul decided it was time to end the war.  The preliminary negotiations opened at Palace of Fontainebleau on 3 November 1762, and ended hostilities between England, France and Spain. The final treaty was signed in Paris on 10 February 1763.  As a result of the War, France gave up its minor possessions in the West Indies; Marie Galante, Tobago and La Desiderade, but received back Guadaloupe, Martinique, and Santa Lucia, which, because of their sugar plantations, were considered of more value than all of its territories in Canada; France kept only the Iles of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.  The valley of the Ohio, and the territories along the west bank of the Mississippi River were ceded to Spain. Louis formally ratified the treaty on 23 February, on the same day that his statue was unveiled on the Place Louis XV (today the Place de la Concorde)[81]
+
+The winter of 1763–64 was particularly harsh; Madame de Pompadour contracted pneumonia, and died on 15 April. The King was deeply affected, but, strictly observing court protocol, he did not attend her funeral, because she was too far below his rank, and, though mourning, carried on court business as usual.   Maneuvering immediately began within the court to replace Madame de Pompadour; a leading candidate was Duchess of Gramont, the sister of Choiseul, but the King showed no interest in a new mistress, and in February 1765 he closed down the Parc-aux-Cerfs, where he had previously met his petites maitresses.[82]
+
+The resistance of the Parlements to the King's authority continued. The Parlements of the provinces began to quarrel with the Parlement of Paris over which more truly represented the nation.  In March 1764, the Parlement of Navarre in Pau, the smallest province, refused to accept the taxation authority of the Grand Council of the King. This time the King took action, arresting and replacing the President and leading officers of the Parlement, and replacing them with officers loyal to the King. The Parlements of Toulouse, Besançon and Rouen protested, but the King persisted.  In 1765 the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes denied the authority of the King's officers to impose taxes without its permission, and went on strike. The King summoned the Parlement to Versailles, where he had his lecture read to them.  This had little effect; when the King had his decree to the Parlement posted on the walls of Rennes, the Parlement ordered that the posters with the King's proclamation be taken down.  The King issued letters of cachet that forbade the Parlement members to leave Rennes, but the judicial system remained on strike.[83]
+
+The end of 1765 brought another personal tragedy; his son and heir Louis contracted tuberculosis.  He travelled with the King to the Palace of Fontainebleau.  The King distracted himself by secluding himself with the astronomer César-François Cassini de Thury and making astronomic calculations, while the doctors tried, without success, to treat his son.  The Dauphin died on 20 December 1765.  The succession was assured, since the Dauphin had a son, the future Louis XVI, who was of age to rule, but the death put him into a deep depression. He drafted his own will, writing: "If I made errors, it was not from a lack of will, but from a lack of talents, and for not having been supported as I wished to have been, particularly in matters of religion."[84]
+
+The Queen was deeply affected by the death of the Dauphin in 1765, then the death of her father in 1766, and then her daughter-in-law. She died on 24 June 1768.[85]
+
+In January 1766, while the King was still mourning the death of the Dauphin, the Parlement of Brittany issued another rejection of the King's authority to collect taxes. When he ignored it, both the Parlement of Rennes and the Parlement of Rouen wrote him again, complaining that he was ignoring "the oath that you took to the nation when accepting the crown."  When this part of the letter was read to the King, he interrupted the reading and declared that this accusation was false;  he had taken an oath to God alone, not to the nation.  On 3 March 1766, with only a few hours notice, he traveled in person from Versailles to the meeting of the Parlement of Paris at the Palais de la Cité and appeared before the members.  In his message, read to them by one of his ministers, he declared, "It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides...To me alone belongs the legislative power, without dependence and without sharing...The public order emanates entirely from me...Confusion and anarchy are taking the place of legitimate order, and the scandalous spectacle of a contradictory  rivaling my sovereign power reduces me to the sad necessity to use all the power that I received from God to preserve my peoples from the sad consequences of these enterprises."[86] The speech, immediately termed "the flagellation", was published in official press, and circulated to all levels of government. It became his political testament. The conflict between the Parlements and King was muted for a time, but not resolved.[87]
+
+After the death of the Madame de Pompadour, several women in the court sought to replace her, including the Duchess of Gramont, the sister of the Duke of Choiseul, the King's chief minister.  However, the King's favor turned to Jeanne Bécu, the comtesse du Barry. She was thirty-three years younger than the King. She was the illegitimate daughter of Anne Bécu, a seamstress.[88] She was raised by the Dames de Sacre-Coeur, and had various jobs as a shop assistant and designer of dresses before she became the mistress of a self-proclaimed count, Jean du Barry.  She began to hold a salon, which attracted writers and aristocrats. Since Jean du Barry was already married, to give her legitimacy he arranged for her to become engaged to his brother, Guillaume, a retired soldier.  They were married on 1 September 1768, and then, without spending the night with her, Guillaume retired to his home in Languedoc.[89]  Through her acquaintances with the nobility, she was invited to Versailles, where the King saw her and was immediately attracted to her.  He invited her to Fontainebleau, and then asked her to live in the Palace of Versailles.  Her appearance at the Court scandalized the Duke de Choiseul, but pleased the enemies of the Duke within the Court.
+
+For du Barry to be presented at Court, she had to be formally presented by a member of the nobility. The elderly Contesse de Béarn was persuaded to make the presentation for a large fee, and she was presented on 22 April 1769. None of the ladies of the Court attended, and de Choiseul himself, to show his displeasure, hosted a large reception the following day, which all the Court, except du Barry, attended.[90]
+
+The King soon installed her in the Palace of Versailles, and in 1771 gave her the new Pavillon de Louveciennes.  Choiseul sowed a strong dislike for DuBarry, as did Marie Antoinette, who arrived in Versailles and married the Dauphin on 16 May 1770. She described the Comtesse as "The most stupid and impertinent creature imaginable". However, the King kept du Barry close to him until the final days before his death, when he sent her away before he made confession.  The presence of du Barry at the court scandalized the high members of the Aristocracy.  Outside the Court, the opponents of the King in the Parlements used her presence to ridicule and attack the King.  She was the target of dozens of scandalous pamphlets accusing her of every possible immoral act.[91]  Decades later, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, the Comtesse was targeted by the Jacobins as a symbol of the hated old regime; she was guillotined on 8 December 1793.[92]
+
+The borders of France were enlarged for the last time before the Revolution by two additions; The Duchy of Lorraine, ruled by The King's father-in-law, Stanislaus, reverted to France after his death, and officially was joined to the kingdom 27–28 March 1766.  The acquisition of Corsica was more complicated.  The island formally belonged to the Republic of Genoa, but an independent Republic of Corsica had been proclaimed in 1755 by Pasquale Paoli, and the rebels controlled most of the island. The Republic of Genoa did not have the military forces to conquer the island, and permitted Louis to send French troops to occupy the ports and major cities, to keep the island from falling into British hands.  When the war ended, the island was formally granted to France by Treaty of Versailles on 19 May 1768.  Louis sent the army to subdue the Corsican rebels; the army on the island eventually numbered twenty-seven thousand soldiers.  In May 1769 the Corsican rebels were defeated at the Battle of Ponte Novu, and Paoli took refuge in England. In 1770 the island formally became a Province of France.[93]
+
+Two men had an enormous influence on the economic policies of the King. François Quesnay was the best-known economist in France.  He was the King's doctor, and treated Madame de Pompadour, but was also a celebrated economic theorist, whose collected writings, "Tableau Économique" (1758), were avidly read by the King and his Court: Louis referred to him as "my thinker."  His students included The Marquis de Mirabeau and Adam Smith. He was a critic of government regulation, and coined the term "bureaucracy" (literally "A government of desks").  The other was his disciple, the Minister of the Commerce of the King, Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay.  The two men advocated removing as many restrictions as possible from the economy, to encourage greater production and trade.  De Gournay's famous expression, laissez faire, laissez passer ("it be done, let it pass") was later adopted as the slogan of a whole school of free market economics.[94]
+
+De Gournay and Quesnay proposed in particular the liberalization of agricultural markets, which were strictly controlled, to encourage greater production, competition and lower prices.   Following the doctrines of Quesnay and de Gournay, Louis's controller of finances, Henri Bertin, created a new Society of Agriculture and an Agricultural Committee within the government, comparable to those existing to support commerce.  In May 1763, Bertin issued a decree permitting the tax-free circulation of grain without taxes. In August 1764, Bertin permitted the export of grain from twenty-seven French ports, later expanded to thirty-six.  At the same time he established a large zone around Paris, where grain was reserved exclusively for feeding the Parisians, and established a cap on the grain price, which, if it was passed, would cause the exports to cease.[95]
+
+The policy of freeing grain prices was effective in good years, and resulted in increased trade and lower prices, but during years with poor harvests;  1766, 1767 and 1768, prices went up.  Most of the Parlements, in regions which produced grain, supported the policy, but others, including Paris and Rouen, were highly critical.  In those cities rumors began to circulate of a mythical "Starvation Pact", a supposed plot by the government to deliberately starve and eliminate the poor. These rumors eventually became one of the factors that provoked the French Revolution.[96]
+
+The Duc de Choiseul devoted all of his considerable energy and talents to preparing a new war against Britain. In 1764, in a former Jesuit school he had closed, he created a new military preparatory school, to prepare students for the  recently founded Military Academy. In 1769 he raised the Naval school to the level of a royal academy, to train officers for his new fleet. In the same year he established a military engineering school. He provided the army with hundreds of new cannon, which would be used with great success decades later during the French Revolution and by Napoleon. Using the Prussian army as a model, he reformed French military doctrine, making the state and not the officers responsible for training and equipping soldiers. A large part of the French Navy had been sunk or captured by the British in the Seven Years' War. In addition to the existing naval arsenals in Toulon, Brest and Rochefort, he opened two more in Marseille (1762) and Lorient (1764). The arsenals began building new ships; by 1772 the Navy had sixty-six ships of the line, thirty-five frigates, and twenty-one new corvettes.[97] He and his allies in the government began planning for an invasion of England, and his government looked for new ways to challenge England. When the Duc de Broglie learned that the British were planning to tax the citizens of the British colonies in America, he wrote to the King: "It will be very curious to know what the result will be, and if their execution doesn't result in a Revolution in those states."[98]
+
+Choiseul combined his  military preparations for war with a diplomatic alliance, the Pacte de Famille or Pact of the Family, which united with other countries ruled by Kings of the Bourbon dynasty; Spain, ruled by Louis's cousin Charles III of Spain, the Naples and Tuscany. Choiseul was so entirely focused on England as his future enemy that he almost entirely neglected the rest of Europe. He had no accredited Ambassadors in Poland, Prussia or Russia during most of the period, and stood by while Russia imposed its own candidate for King of Poland, and when Turkey and Russia went to war in 1768–70.[99]
+
+A new conflict between England and Spain over the remote Falkland Islands in 1770 brought about Choiseul's downfall. The British had established a settlement in the islands, which were also claimed by Spain. In early 1770 the Spanish governor of Buenos Aires sent five warships full of troops to the islands, ordering the British to leave. The British prepared to depart. When the news reached London, the British government demanded that the Spanish leave. Both sides began to prepare for war.
+
+The possibility of a new war came just as France was undergoing a new confrontation between the King's government and the Parlement of Brittany, which once again refused to recognize the power of the King's government to impose taxes. The King wrote immediately to his cousin, the King of Spain, who wrote back that Spain did not want a war. Louis replied, "Gentleness and patience have guided me to the present, but my parlements, pushing to limit, have forgotten themselves to the point of disputing the sovereign authority that we possess only from the will of God. I am resolved to make myself obeyed by all available means..." On 24 December, the King sent a short note to Choiseul dismissing him from his post and ordering him to return to his home in Chateloup and to remain there. A similar note went to his cousin. Choiseul asked for two days to manage his affairs, but the King refused. Explaining the decision later to the Duke de Broglie, the King wrote, "The principles of the Choiseuls are too contrary to religion, and therefore to royal authority."[100]
+
+The King passed the leadership of the government to a triumvirate of three conservative ministers, led by his Chancellor, René de Maupeou, who had been President of the Parlement from 1763 to 1768.  Maupeou and two other conservative ministers, Abbot Terray for finance and the Duc d'Aiguillon for foreign affairs and war, took charge of the government. They became known as "The Triumvirate".
+
+The first priority of Maupeou was to bring the unruly Parlements under control, and to continue with his program for the modernization of the state.  Most of the members of the Parlement of Paris were on a virtual strike, refusing to render justice or approve the King's decrees.  On 21 January 1771, royal agents and musketeers arrived at the homes of each of the Parlement members, informing them that their positions were confiscated and ordering them to leave Paris and return to their home provinces, and not to leave them.[101] This was followed in February by an even more radical measure: the regional Parlements were replaced as the high courts of civil justice by six new regional high councils, to judge serious criminal and civil cases. Another decree announced the abolition of the high fees demanded by the Parlements for resolving civil cases, which were the source of their members' income; civil justice was to be rendered without charge.  The powers of the Parlement of Paris alone were largely unchanged.  Without the provincial parliaments, the government was able enact new laws and taxes without opposition. However, after the King's death, the nobility demanded and received the restoration of the regional parliaments.[102]
+
+Abbot Terray was nominally a priest, though his government career was entirely secular, and his personal life was considered scandalous.  He was an efficient and relentless tax collector; he opened a school to train tax inspectors, and worked to see that taxes were imposed and collected with the same precision and vigor in all regions, without interference from the local nobility. When he first took his position, the state had a budget deficit of 60 million livres, and a long-term debt of 100 million livres.  By 1774, revenues had been increased by 60 million livres and the debt reduced to 20 million livres.  He also reimposed the regulation of the price of grain, which had been freed in 1763 and 1764; these controls were an issue which would disturb the government and provoke agitation until the French Revolution.[103]
+
+The foreign affairs post had been left vacant by Choiseul, who acted as his own foreign minister. Following the dismissal of Choiseul, the King encouraged his cousin and ally Charles III of Spain to settle the crisis over the Falkland Islands with the aim of avoiding a war. Due to Choiseul's sole focus on a war with Britain, he had completely ignored the rest of Europe. France did not even have an ambassador in Vienna, and Russia and Prussia divided up an old French ally, Poland, without protest from France.  Another ally of France, Sweden, also risked being divided between Russia and Prussia upon the death of its King in 1771.  The Prince Royal, Gustav III of Sweden, was staying in Paris at the time. He had a long meeting with Louis XV, who promised to support him.  With French funding, and assistance from Louis's personal secret intelligence service, the Secret de Roi, Gustave III returned to Stockholm.  On 19 August 1772, at his command, the Swedish royal guard imprisoned the Swedish Senate, and two days later he was proclaimed King by the Diet.  Russia and Prussia, occupied with the division of Poland, protested but did not intervene.[104]
+
+In the last years of his reign, the court of Versailles was a theater of manners. Marie-Antoinette, a resident since her marriage, had difficulty disguising her dislike for the King's mistress, Madame du Barry. The King constructed a set of luxurious rooms for Madame du Barry on the floor above his offices; Madame du Barry also reigned in the Petit Trianon, which the King had built for Madame de Pompadour, and in the Pavillon de Louveciennes, also built for Madame de Pompadour. The Court was divided between those who welcomed Madame du Barry, and those of the older aristocracy, such as the Duc de Choiseul plus Marie-Antoinette, who scorned her.[105]  The King continued his grand construction projects, including the opera theater of the Palace of Versailles, completed for the celebration of the wedding of the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, and the new Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde) in Paris, whose centerpiece was an equestrian statue of the King, modeled after that of Louis XIV on the Place Vendôme.
+
+On 26 April 1774, the King left for the Petit Trianon with Madame du Barry and several nobles from his entourage, and reported that he felt ill. He participated in the hunt the next day, but rode in his carriage instead of on horseback. That evening he was still feeling ill, and sent for the Court physician, Le Mariniére. At the surgeon's insistence, the King was brought back to the Palace of Versailles for treatment, along with Madame du Barry and the others. The King was attended by six physicians, six surgeons, each of whom took his pulse and gave his diagnosis. He was bled three times by the surgeons, without effect. When some red eruptions appeared on his skin, the doctors first diagnosed petite variole, or smallpox, which caused optimism, since the patient and doctors both believed he had already had the illness. The members of the family, particularly the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, were asked to leave, since they had not already had the illness, and had no immunity. Madame du Barry remained with him.  As the hours passed, the red eruptions of the disease grew worse, and the doctors began to fear for his life. On the morning of 1 May, the Archbishop of Paris arrived, but was kept out of the King's room to avoid alarming him. The King remained conscious and cheerful. However, on 3 May, he studied the eruptions on his hands, summoned the Archbishop, and announced, "I have the petite variole."[106] The Archbishop instructed him to prepare for the final rites. That night, he summoned Madame du Barry, informed her of the diagnosis, and said, "We cannot recommence the scandal of Metz. If I had known what I know now, you would not have been admitted. I owe it to God and to my people. Therefore, you have to leave tomorrow."[107] On 7 May, he summoned his confessor and was given the final rites. The illness continued its course; one visitor on 9 May, the Duc de Croy, said the King's face resembled, with the darkening of the eruptions of the smallpox, "a mask of bronze". Louis died at 3:15 in the morning on 10 May 1774.[108]
+
+Several of his contemporaries who worked closely with him tried to describe the personality of Louis XV.  The Duke de Croy wrote: "He had a memory, presence, and justness of spirit that was unique. He was gentle, an excellent father, and the most honest individual in the world. He was well informed in the sciences...but with a modesty which, with him, was almost a vice. He always saw more correctly than others, but he always believed he was wrong.... He had the greatest bravery, but a bravery that was too modest. He never dared to decide for himself, but always, out of modesty, turned for advice to others, even when he saw more accurately than they did...Louis XIV had been too proud, but Louis XV was not proud enough. Other than his excessive modesty, his great and sole vice was women; He believed that only his mistresses loved him enough to tell him the truth.  For that reason he allowed them to lead him, which contributed to his failure with finance, which was the worse aspect of his reign."[109]
+
+Others, like d'Argenson, his Minister of War commented on his extreme shyness and timidity; his inability to make conversation with others. The Duke of Luynes remarked that he often seemed to want to speak, but "his timidity stopped him and the expressions did not come; one felt that he wanted to say something obliging, but he often ended by simply asking a frivolous question."[110]
+
+Another characteristic remarked by contemporaries was his penchant for secrecy. "No one was a greater expert at dissimulation than the King", wrote d'Argenson. "He worked from morning to night to dissimulate; he did not say a word, make a gesture or demarche except to hide what he really wanted."[111]
+
+"He was the most excellent of men", wrote another contemporary, Duffort de Cheverny, "but, in defiance of himself, he spoke about the affairs of state as if someone else was governing."[112]
+
+The most famous remark attributed to Louis XV (or sometimes to Madame de Pompadour) is Après nous, le déluge ("After us, the deluge").  It is commonly explained as his indifference to financial excesses, and a prediction of the French Revolution to come.  The remark is usually taken out of its original context. It was made in 1757, a year which saw the crushing defeat of the French army by the Prussians at the Battle of Rossbach and the assassination attempt on the King.  The "Deluge" the King referred to was not a revolution, but the arrival of Halley's Comet, which was predicted to pass by the earth in 1757, and which was commonly blamed for having caused the flood described in the Bible, with predictions of a new deluge when it returned.  The King was a proficient amateur astronomer, who collaborated with the best French astronomers.  Biographer Michel Antoine wrote that the King's remark "was a manner of evoking, with his scientific culture and a good dose of black humor, this sinister year beginning with the assassination attempt by Damiens and ending with the Prussian victory". Halley's Comet finally passed the earth in April 1759, and caused enormous public attention and anxiety, but no floods.[113]
+
+Another popular legend concerned the Maison-aux-Cerfs, the house in Versailles where, when he was no longer having sexual relations with Madame de Pompadour, he sometimes slept with his petites maitresses, young women recruited for that purpose. Popular legends at the time described it as a kind of harem, organized by Madame de Pompadour, where a group of women were kidnapped and kept for the King's pleasure.  The legend circulated widely in pamphlets with lurid illustrations, and made its way into some later biographies of the King.   In reality it had only one occupant at a time, for brief periods.  Madame Pompadour herself accepted it as a preferable alternative to a rival at court, as she stated: "It is his heart I want! All these little girls with no education will not take it from me. I would not be so calm if I saw some pretty woman of the court or the capital trying to conquer it."[114]
+In  February 1765, after the death of Madame de Pompadour, it was closed.[115]
+
+Louis was a major patron of architecture; he spent more money on buildings over the course of his reign than Louis XIV. His major architectural projects were the work of his favorite court architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel. They included the Ecole Militaire (1751–1770); the Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde (1763–83); the Petit Trianon at Versailles (1762–64), and the opera theater of the Palace of Versailles. Louis began construction of the Church of Saint-Geneviève, now the Pantheon (1758–90)  He also constructed monumental squares and surrounding buildings in the centers of Nancy, Bordeaux, and Rennes.  His workshops produced fine furniture, porcelain, tapestries and other goods in the Louis XV Style which were exported to all the capital cities of Europe.[116]
+
+The King, the Queen and her daughters were major patrons of music. The queen and her children played the clavecin, under the instruction of François Couperin. The young Mozart came to Paris and wrote two sonatas for clavecin and violin which he dedicated to Madame Victoire, the King's daughter.[117]  The King himself, like his grandfather Louis XIV, was taught to dance ballet but danced only once in public, in 1725. The most important musical figure of the reign was Jean Philippe Rameau, who was the court composer through the 1740s and 1750s, and wrote more than thirty operas for Louis and his court.[118]
+
+Louis XV, guided largely by Madame de Pompadour, was the most important art patron of the period.  He commissioned François Boucher to paint pastoral scenes for his apartments in Versailles, and gave him the title of First Painter of the King in 1765.  Other artists patronized by the King included Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Jean Marc Nattier, and the sculptor Edme Bouchardon. Bouchardon created the monumental statue of Louis XV on horseback which was the centerpiece of Place Louis XV until it was pulled down during the Revolution.[119]
+
+The French philosophical movement later called the Enlightenment began and gathered force during the reign of Louis XV; In 1746 Diderot published his Pensées philosophiques, followed in 1749 by his Lettres sur les Aveugles and the first volume of the Encyclopédie, in 1751.  Montesquieu published De l'esprit des Lois in 1748.  Voltaire published le Siecle de Louis XIV and l'Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations in 1756. Rousseau became known in 1750 by the publication of Discours sur les sciences et les arts, followed in 1755 by Discours sur les origins et les fondaments de l'inégalité.  These were accompanied by new works on economics, finance, and commerce by the elder Mirabeau, François Quesnay and other scientific thinkers which undermined all of the standard assumptions of royal government, economics and fiscal policy.[120]
+
+The censors of Louis XV at first permitted these publications; the first volume of the Encylopedie received official permission because the government censors believed it was purely a collection of scientific articles.  The project soon included a multitude of authors, including Rousseau, and had four thousand subscribers. Only later did the government and King himself take notice, after the church attacked the Encylopédie for questioning official church doctrines.  The King personally removed Diderot from the list of those nominated for the Académie française, and in 1759 the Encyclopédie was formally banned.
+
+Rousseau had a resounding success in 1756 with his opera Devin du Village, and was invited to Versailles to meet the King, but he refused.  Instead, he wrote the Contrat Social calling for a new system based upon political and economic equality, published in 1762. Increasingly solitary and unstable, he wandered from province to province, before returning to Paris, where he died in solitude in 1778. His ideas, composed during the reign of Louis XV, were adopted by the revolutionaries who overthrew Louis XVI in 1789.[121]
+
+In the 1740s Voltaire was welcomed to the court as a playwright and poet, but his low rank as the son of a notary and the fact his father was also a Jansenist soon displeased the King and the Queen, and he was finally forced to depart Versailles.  He went to Berlin, where he became a counselor to Frederick the Great, before living in Geneva and Savoy, far from Paris. On one issue in particular Voltaire took the side of Louis XV; when the King suppressed the parlements of nobles, demanded that all classes be taxed equally,  and removed the charges which plaintiffs had to pay  in order to have their cases heard. He wrote:  "Parlements of the King!  You are charged with rendering justice to the people!  Render justice upon yourselves!...There is in the entire world no judicial court which has ever tried to share the power of the sovereign."  However, the King's lack of further reforms in his last years disappointed Voltaire.  When the King died, Voltaire wrote of his reign, "Fifty-six years, consumed with fatigues and wanderings."[122]
+
+For much of his lifetime Louis XV was celebrated as a national hero. Edmé Bouchardon's equestrian statue of Louis was originally conceived to commemorate the monarch's victorious role in the War of the Austrian Succession. He portrayed the king as peacemaker. It was not unveiled until 1763, following France's defeat in the Seven Years' War. Designed as a symbol of loyalty to the king, Bouchardon's work was used by the Crown for a public relations event staged to restore public confidence in a monarchy in decline. It used art as propaganda on a grand scale.[123] This statue was located on the Place Louis XV and was torn down during the Revolution.
+
+French culture and influence were at their height in the first half of the eighteenth century, but most scholars agree that Louis XV's decisions damaged the power of France, weakened the treasury, discredited the absolute monarchy, and made it more vulnerable to distrust and destruction. Scholars point to the French Revolution, which broke out 15 years after his death.[124] Norman Davies characterized Louis XV's reign as "one of debilitating stagnation", characterized by lost wars, endless clashes between the Court and the Parlements, and religious feuds.[125] Jerome Blum described him as "a perpetual adolescent called to do a man's job."[126]
+
+The view of many historians is that Louis was unequal to the high expectations of his subjects. Robert Harris wrote in 1987 that, "Historians have depicted this ruler as one of the weakest of the Bourbons, a do-nothing king who left affairs of state to ministers while indulging in his hobbies of hunting and womanizing."[127] Harris added that ministers rose and fell according to his mistresses' opinions, seriously undermining the prestige of the monarchy.
+
+Trends in 20th century French historiography, especially the Annales School, have deprecated biography and ignored the King. English historian William Doyle wrote:
+
+The political story....of the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, by contrast, had too often been scorned, and therefore neglected, as a meaningless succession of petty intrigues in boudoirs and bedrooms, unworthy of serious attention when there were economic cycles, demographic fluctuations, rising and falling classes, and deep-seated shifts in cultural values to analyse.[128]
+
+Some scholars have ignored the king's own actions and turned instead to his image in the mind of the public. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the leader of the Annales School, noted that the king was handsome, athletic, intelligent and an excellent hunter, but that he disappointed the people. He did not keep up the practice of Mass and performing his religious obligations to the people. Le Roy Ladurie wrote that the people felt he had reduced the sacred nature of the monarchy, and thereby diminished himself.[129]
+
+According to Kenneth N. Jassie and Jeffrey Merrick, contemporary songs, poems, and public declarations typically portrayed a king as "master", unblemished "Christian", and benevolent provider ("baker"). Young Louis' failings were attributed to inexperience and manipulation by his handlers. Jassie and Merrick argued in 1994  that the king's troubles mounted steadily, and the people blamed and ridiculed his debauchery. The king ignored the famines and crises of the nation. The people reviled the king in popular protest, and finally celebrated his death. The monarchy survived—for a while—but Louis XV left his successor with a damaging legacy of popular discontent.[130]
+
+Some sermons on his death in 1774 praised the monarch and went out of their way to excuse his faults. Jeffrey Merrick wrote in 1986, "But those ecclesiastics who not only raised their eyebrows over the sins of the Beloved but also expressed doubts about his policies reflected the corporate attitude of the First Estate more accurately." They prayed the new king would restore morality at court and better serve the will of God.[131]
+
+The financial strain imposed by the wars and excesses of the royal court, and the consequent dissatisfaction with the monarchy, contributed to the national unrest that culminated in the French Revolution of 1789.[132] The historian Colin Jones argued in 2011 that Louis XV left France with serious financial difficulties: "The military disasters of the Seven Years' War led to acute state financial crisis.".[133]  Ultimately, he wrote, Louis XV failed to overcome these fiscal problems, mainly because he was incapable of pulling together conflicting parties and interests in his entourage. Although aware of the forces of anti-monarchism threatening his family's rule, he did not do anything to stop them.[134]
+
+A few scholars have defended Louis, arguing that his highly negative reputation was based on propaganda meant to justify the French Revolution. Olivier Bernier in his 1984 biography argued that Louis was both popular and a leader in reforming France. During his 59-year reign, France was never threatened by conquest as no foreign army crossed its borders (though some of its overseas colonies were lost). He was known popularly as Le Bien-aimé (the well-beloved). Many of his subjects prayed for his recovery during his serious illness in Metz in 1744. His dismissal of the Parlement of Paris and his chief minister, Choiseul, in 1771, were attempts to wrest control of government from those Louis considered corrupt. He changed the tax code to try to balance the national budget. Bernier argued that these acts would have avoided the French Revolution, but his successor, Louis XVI, reversed his policies.[135] Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret wrote that Louis XV's tarnished reputation was created fifteen years after his death, to justify the French Revolution, and that the nobility during his reign were competent.[136]
+
+E. H. Gombrich wrote in 2005, "Louis XV and Louis XVI, the Sun King's [Louis XIV] successors, were incompetent, and content merely to imitate their great predecessor's outward show of power. The pomp and magnificence remained....Finance ministers soon became expert swindlers, cheating and extorting on a grand scale.  The peasants worked till they dropped and citizens were forced to pay huge taxes."[137]
+
+Jeffrey Merrick wrote in 1986 that Louis XV's weak and ineffective rule accelerated the general decline that culminated in the French Revolution in 1789. The king was a notorious womaniser; the monarch's virility was supposed to be another way in which his power was manifested. Nevertheless, Merrick wrote, popular faith in the monarchy was shaken by the scandals of Louis’ private life and by the end of his life he had become despised.[138]
+
+Many historians agreed that in terms of culture and art, France reached a high point under Louis XV. However, he was blamed for the many diplomatic, military and economic reverses. His reign was marked by ministerial instability, while his "prestige was ruined by military failure and colonial losses", concluded Jean-Denis Lepage.[139]
+
+Louis's formal style was "Très haut, très puissant et très excellent Prince Louis XV, par la grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre", or "Most high, most potent and most excellent Prince Louis XV, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre".
+
+Louis XV had several illegitimate children, although the exact number is unknown. Historiography suggest the following as possible issue of the King:
+
+Note: Both children are officially recognized by their mother's husband, although it is alleged that the King himself was the real father. The coevals attribute the paternity of both children to Louis XV for, according to documents from the Military Archive, Françoise de Châlus' husband had been wounded in the War of the Austrian Succession (1747) becoming from that moment unable to have any offspring.  The baptism of Louis, Comte de Narbonne-Lara is another indication of that paternity.[144] His wife had become the King's mistress. Not only was it noted that he was named Louis but also his contemporaries remarked on the similarities between the young Louis and the King.
+
+Note: Both children were registered as daughters of Louis Auguste, Old Official, and citizen Lucie, both non-existent persons. In August 1774 Agnès and Aphrodite received from Louis XVI their letters of recognition of nobility (demoiselles issue de la plus ancienne noblesse de France) and following the stipulations leave by Louis XV, each of them obtained a capital of 223,000 livres and a reported annual revenue of 24,300 livres.
+
+The French line of succession upon the death of Louis XV in 1774.

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+Louis XV (15 February 1710 – 10 May 1774), known as Louis the Beloved (French: le Bien-Aimé),[1] was King of France from 1 September 1715 until his death in 1774. He succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV at the age of five. Until he reached maturity (then defined as his 13th birthday) on 15 February 1723, the kingdom was ruled by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, as Regent of France.
+Cardinal Fleury was his chief minister from 1726 until the Cardinal's death in 1743, at which time the king took sole control of the kingdom.
+
+His reign of almost 59 years (from 1715 to 1774) was the second longest in the history of France, exceeded only by his predecessor and great-grandfather, Louis XIV, who had ruled for 72 years (from 1643 to 1715).[2]  In 1748, Louis returned the Austrian Netherlands, won at the Battle of Fontenoy of 1745. He ceded New France in North America to Spain and Great Britain at the conclusion of the disastrous Seven Years' War in 1763. He incorporated the territories of the Duchy of Lorraine and the Corsican Republic into the Kingdom of France. He was succeeded in 1774 by his grandson Louis XVI, who was executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.  Two of his other grandsons, Louis XVIII and Charles X, occupied the throne of France after the fall of Napoleon I.  Historians generally give his reign very low marks, especially as reports of his corruption embarrassed the monarchy and as wars drained the treasury and set the stage for the French Revolution of 1789.
+
+Louis XV was the great-grandson of Louis XIV and the third son of the Duke of Burgundy (1682–1712), and his wife Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, the eldest daughter of Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy.  He was born in the Palace of Versailles on 15 February 1710. When he was born, he was named the Duke of Anjou. The possibility of his becoming King seemed very remote; the King's oldest son and heir, Louis Le Grand Dauphin, Louis's father and his elder surviving brother were ahead of him in the succession.  However, the Grand Dauphin died of smallpox on 14 April 1711.[3]  On 12 February 1712 the mother of Louis, Marie Adélaïde, was stricken with measles and died, followed on 18 February by Louis's father, the former Duke of Burgundy, who was next in line for the throne. On 7 March, it was found that both Louis and his older brother, the former Duke of Brittany, had the measles.  The two brothers were treated in the traditional way, with bleeding.  On the night of 8–9 March, the new Dauphin died from the combination of the disease and the treatment.  The governess of Louis, Madame de Ventadour, would not allow the doctors to bleed Louis further; he was very ill but survived.[4]  When Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, Louis, at the age of five, inherited the throne.[5]
+
+The Ordinance of Vincennes from 1374 required that the kingdom be governed by a regent until Louis reached the age of thirteen. The title of Regent was given to his nearest relative, his cousin Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. Louis XIV, however, distrusted Philippe, who was a renowned soldier, but was regarded by the King as an atheist and libertine. The King referred privately to Philippe as a Fanfaron des crimes ("braggart of crimes").[6]  Louis XIV wanted France to be ruled by his favorite but illegitimate son,  Duke of Maine (illegitimate son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan), who was in the council. In August 1714, shortly before his own death, the King rewrote his will to restrict the powers of the regent; it stipulated that the nation was to be governed by a Regency Council made up of fourteen members until the new king reached the age of thirteen. Philippe, nephew of Louis XIV, was named president of the council, but other members included the Duke of Maine and his allies.  Decisions were to be made by majority vote, meaning that the Regent could be outvoted by Maine's party.  Orléans saw the trap, and immediately after the death of the King, he went to the Parlement of Paris, an assembly of nobles where he had many allies, and had the Parlement annul the King's will.[7]  In exchange for their support, he restored to the Parlement its droit de remontrance (right of remonstrance) – the right to challenge the King's decisions, which had been removed by Louis XIV. The droit de remontrance would impair the monarchy's functioning and marked the beginning of a conflict between the Parlement and King which eventually led to the French Revolution in 1789.[8]
+
+On 9 September 1715, the Regent had the young King transported away from the court in Versailles to Paris, where the Regent had his own residence in the Palais Royal.  On 12 September, he performed his first official act, opening the first lit de justice of his reign at the Palais Royal.  From September 1715 until January 1716 he lived in the Château de Vincennes, before moving to the Tuileries Palace.  In February 1717, when he reached the age of seven, he was taken from his governess Madame Ventadour and placed in the care of François de Villeroy, the 73-year-old Duke and Maréchal de France, named as his governor in Louis XIV's will of August 1714. Villeroy instructed the young King in court etiquette, taught him how to review a regiment, and how to receive royal visitors.[9] His guests included the Russian Tsar Peter the Great in 1717; contrary to ordinary protocol, the two-meter-tall Tsar picked up Louis and kissed him. Louis also learned the skills of horseback riding and hunting, which became the great passion of the young King.[10]  In 1720, following the example of Louis XIV, Villeroy had the young Louis dance in public in two ballets at the Tuileries Palace on 24 February 1720, and again in The Ballet des Elements on 31 December 1721.[11]  The shy Louis evidently did not enjoy the experience; he never danced in another ballet.[12]
+
+The King's tutor was the Abbé André-Hercule de Fleury, the bishop of Fréjus (and later to become Cardinal de Fleury), who saw that he was instructed in Latin, Italian, history and geography, astronomy, mathematics and drawing, and cartography. The King charmed the visiting Russian Tsar by identifying the major rivers, cities and geographic features of Russia.  In his later life the King retained his passion for science and geography; he created departments in physics (1769) and mechanics (1773) at the Collège de France.,[13] and he sponsored the first complete and accurate map of France, the Cartes de Cassini.[14]  Besides his academic studies, He received a practical education in government. Beginning in 1720 he attended the regular meetings of the Regency Council.
+
+One economic crisis disrupted the Regency; the Scottish economist and banker John Law was named controller-general of finances. In May 1716, he opened the Banque Générale Privée ("General Private Bank"), which soon became the Banque Royal. It was mostly funded by the government, and was one of the earliest banks to issue paper money, which he promised could be exchanged for gold.[15]  He also persuaded wealthy Parisians to invest in the Mississippi Company, a scheme for the colonization of French territory of Louisiana.  The stock of the company first soared and then collapsed in 1720, taking the bank with it.  Law fled France, and wealthy Parisians became reluctant to make further investments or trust any currency but gold.[16]
+
+In 1719, France, in alliance with Britain and the Dutch Republic, declared war on Spain. Spain was defeated on both land and sea, and quickly sought peace. A French-Spanish treaty was signed on 27 March 1721. The two governments proposed to unite their royal families by marrying Louis to Mariana Victoria of Spain, the seven-year-old daughter of Philip V of Spain, who was himself grandson of Louis XIV. The marriage contract was signed on 25 November, and the future bride came to France and took up residence in the Louvre. However, the Regent decided she was too young to have children soon enough, and she was sent back to Spain.[17] During the rest of Regency France was at peace, and in 1720, the Regent decreed an official silence on religious conflicts.[18] Montesquieu and Voltaire published their first works, and the Age of Enlightenment in France quietly began.[19]
+
+On 15 June 1722, as Louis approached his thirteenth birthday, the year of his majority, he left Paris and moved back to Versailles, where he had happy memories of his childhood, but where he was far from the reach of public opinion.  On 25 October, Louis was crowned King at the Cathedral of Reims.[20] 
+On 15 February 1723, the king's majority was declared by the Parlement of Paris, officially ending the regency. In the beginning of Louis's reign, the Duke of Orleans continued to manage the government, and took the title of Prime Minister in August 1723, but while visiting his mistress, far from the court and medical care, Orleans died in December of the same year. Following the advice of his preceptor Fleury, Louis XV appointed his cousin Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon, to replace the late Duke of Orléans as prime minister.
+
+One of the first priorities of the Duke of Bourbon was to find a bride for the King, to assure the continuity of the monarchy, and especially to prevent the succession to the throne of the Orleans branch of the family, the rivals of his branch.[21]  A list of 99 princesses was prepared, among them being Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange, Barbara of Portugal, Princess Charlotte Amalie of Denmark, Elisabeth Therese of Lorraine, Enrichetta d'Este and the Duke's own sisters Henriette Louise de Bourbon and Élisabeth Alexandrine de Bourbon.[22]
+In the end, the 21-year-old Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of Stanislaus I, the deposed king of Poland, was finally chosen.
+
+The marriage was celebrated in September 1725 when the king was 15. Between 1727 and 1737, she gave the king ten children, eight girls and two boys, of whom one survived: the Dauphin Louis (1729–1765).  The birth of a long-awaited heir, which ensured the survival of the dynasty for the first time since 1712, was welcomed with celebration in all spheres of French society.  In 1747, the Dauphin married Maria Josephina of Saxony, who gave birth to the next three Kings of France: Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X.[23]
+
+The queen was pious and timid, and spent most of her time secluded with her own courtiers. She was a musician, read extensively, and played social games with her courtiers. After 1737, she did not share her bed with the King. She was deeply upset by the death of her son the Dauphin in 1765, and died on 24 June 1768.[24]
+
+One of the first serious conflicts that disturbed the early reign of Louis XV was a battle within the Catholic Church over a Papal Bull called Unigenitus. The Bull was requested by Louis XIV of Pope Clement XI and granted on 8 September 1713.  It was a fierce condemnation of Jansenism, a Catholic doctrine based largely on the teachings of Saint Augustine.  Jansenism had attracted many important followers in France, including the philosopher Blaise Pascal, the poet Racine, aristocrats including Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Lafayette.  The faculty of the Sorbonne, then primarily a theological college and a center of Jansenism, demanded clarification from the government.  The Jansenists were allied with the Gallicans, theologians who wanted the Catholic Church in France to be distinctly French.  The opposition to Unigenitus was particularly strong among the members of the Parlement de Paris, the assembly of the nobles. Despite the protests, on 24 March 1730 Cardinal Fleury persuaded the King to issue a decree that Unigenitus was the law of France as well as that of the Church.
+
+The government and church imposed repressive measures. On 27 April 1732, the Archbishop of Paris threatened to excommunicate any member of the Church who read the Jansenist journal, Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques. The Parlement was strictly forbidden to discuss religious questions, preventing them from opposing the Unigenitus bull. Priests who did not accept Unigenitus were denied the authority to administer last rites to the dying.[25] A new tax, the cinquantième, was levied against religious figures who had previously been exempted from taxation. Jansenists and Protestants were threatened with prison and banishment.[26] As a result of these repressive acts, religious dissent remained an issue throughout the King's reign.
+
+Tension grew between the Duke of Bourbon and Cardinal de Fleury over the King's favor. The Duke's rigid and cold personality did not appeal to the young King, who turned to his old tutor for advice on how to run the affairs of state. When the King insisted that de Fleury was to be included in all meetings between himself and the Duke of Bourbon, the Duke was infuriated and began to undermine de Fleury's position at court. When the King became aware of the Duke's intrigue, he abruptly dismissed him and replaced him with de Fleury.[27]
+
+From 1726 until his death in 1743, Fleury effectively ruled France with the king's assent.  Fleury dictated the choices to be made, and encouraged the king's indecision and flattered his pride. He forbade the king to discuss politics with the Queen. In order to save on court expenses, he sent the youngest four daughters of the king to be educated at the Abbey of Fontevrault. On the surface it was the most peaceful and prosperous period of the reign of Louis XV, but it was built upon a growing volcano of opposition, particularly from the noble members of the Parlements, who saw their privileges and power reduced. Fleury made the Papal doctrine Unigenitus part of French law and forbade any debate in Parlement, which caused the silent opposition to grow. He also downplayed the importance of the French Navy, which would prove be a fatal mistake in future conflicts.[28]
+
+Fleury showed the King the virtues of a stable government; he kept the same Minister of War, Bauyn d'Angervilliers, and controller of the currency, Philibert Orry, for twelve years, and his minister of foreign affairs, Germain Louis Chauvelin, for ten years. His minister of the Navy and household of the King, the Conte de Maurepas, was in office the entire period.  In all he had just thirteen ministers over the course of nineteen years, while the King, in his last thirty-one years, employed forty-three.[29]
+
+Louis's Controller-General of Finances Michel Robert Le Peletier des Forts (1726–1730), stabilized the French currency, though he was expelled for enriching himself in 1730. His successor, Philibert Orry, substantially reduced the debt caused by the War of the Spanish Succession, and simplified and made more fair the tax system, though he still had to depend upon the unpopular dixieme, or tax of the tenth of the revenue of every citizen.  Orry managed, in the last two years of Fleury's government, to balance the royal budget, an accomplishment never again repeated during the rest of the reign.[30]
+
+Fleury's government expanded commerce, both within France and with the rest of the world. Transportation and shipping were improved with the completion of the Saint-Quentin canal (linking the Oise and Somme rivers) in 1738, which was later extended to the Escaut River and the Low Countries, and the systematic building of a national road network. By the middle of the 18th century, France had the most modern and extensive road network in the world. The Council of Commerce stimulated trade, and French foreign maritime trade increased from 80 to 308 million livres between 1716 and 1748.[31]
+
+The Government continued its policy of religious repression, aimed at the Jansenists and the so-called "Gallicans" in Parlements of nobles. After the dismissal of 139 members of provincial parlements for opposing the official government and papal doctrine of Unigenitus, the Parlement of Paris had to register the Unigenitus papal bull and was forbidden to hear religious cases in the future.[32]
+
+In the first years of his governance, Fleury and his foreign minister Germain Louis Chauvelin sought to maintain the peace by maintaining the French alliance with England, despite their long history of antagonism and their colonial rivalry in North America and the West Indies. They also rebuilt the alliance with Spain, which had been shaken by the anger of the Spanish King when Louis refused to marry the Spanish infanta. The birth of the king's male heir in 1729 dispelled the risks of a succession crisis in France. However, new powers were emerging on the European stage, particularly Russia under Peter the Great and his successor, Catherine I of Russia. Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire of Charles VI were assembling a scattered but impressive empire far as Serbia in Eastern Europe with territories taken from Ottoman Turkey, and by marriage acquired the Catholic Netherlands (including Belgium), Milan and the Kingdom of Naples.[33]
+
+A new coalition against France began to assemble in eastern Europe, sealed by a defensive treaty signed on 6 August 1726 between Prussia, Russia and Austria. In 1732 the coalition came into direct conflict with France over the succession to the Polish throne. The King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, Augustus II, was dying, and his official heir was Stanislaus I Leszczyński, the father of the Queen of France. In the same year Russia, Prussia and Austria signed a secret agreement to exclude Stanislaus from the throne, and put forward another candidate, Augustus III, son of the dead Polish king. The death of Augustus on 1 February 1733, with two heirs claiming the throne, launched the War of the Polish Succession. Stanislaus traveled to Warsaw, where he was crowned King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania on 12 September. The Tsarina of Russia immediately marched her regiments into Poland to support her candidate. Stanislaus was forced to flee to the fortified port of Danzig (now Gdańsk), while on 5 October Augustus III was crowned in Warsaw.[34]
+
+Cardinal Fleury responded with a carefully orchestrated campaign of diplomacy. He first won assurances from Britain and Holland that they would not interfere in the war, while lining up alliances with Spain and the King of Sardinia in exchange for pieces of the Habsburg Empire. On 10 October 1733, Louis formally declared war against Austria. A French army occupied the Duchy of Lorraine and then Alsace, while another crossed the Alps and captured Milan on 3 November, handing it over to the King of Sardinia.[35] Fleury was less energetic in his actions to restore the Polish throne to Stanlslaw, who was blockaded by the Russian navy and army in Danzig. Instead of sending the largest part of the French fleet from its station off Copenhagen to Danzig, he ordered it to return to Brest and sent only a small squadron with two thousand soldiers, which after a fierce action was sunk by the Russians. On 3 July Stanislaus was forced to flee again, in disguise, to Prussia, where he became the guest of King Frederick William I of Prussia in the castle of Koenigsburg.
+
+To bring the war to an end, Fleury and Charles VI negotiated an ingenious diplomatic solution. Francis III, Duke of Lorraine, left Lorraine for Vienna, where he married Maria Theresa, the heir presumptive to the Habsburg thrones. The vacant throne of Lorraine was to be occupied by Stanislaus, who abandoned his claim to the Polish throne. Upon the death of Stanislaus, the Duchy of Lorraine and Bar would become part of France. Francis, as the future emperor, would be compensated for the loss of Lorraine by the granting of the Duchy of Tuscany.  The King of Sardinia would be compensated with certain territories in Lombardy; while the Sardinians would return Naples, in exchange for Parma and Plaisance. The marriage of Francis of Lorraine and Maria Theresa took place in 1736, and the other exchanges took place in turn.  With the death of Stanislaus in 1766, Lorraine and the neighboring Duchy of Bar became part of France.[36][37]
+
+In September 1739, Fleury scored another diplomatic success. France's mediation in the war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire led to the Treaty of Belgrade (September 1739), which favoured the Ottoman Empire, beneficiary of a Franco-Ottoman alliance against the Habsburgs since the early 16th century. As a result, the Ottoman Empire in 1740 renewed the French capitulations, which marked the supremacy of French trade in the Middle East. With these successes, Louis XV's prestige reached its highest point. In 1740 Frederick William I, the King of Prussia declared "Since the Treaty of Vienna France is the arbiter of Europe."[38]
+
+On 29 October 1740, a courier brought the news to the King, who was hunting in Fontainebleau, that the Emperor Charles VI was dead, and his daughter Maria Theresa was set to succeed him.  After two days of reflection, Louis declared, "In these circumstances, I don't want to get involved at all. I will remain with my hands in my pockets, unless of course they want to elect a protestant emperor."[39] This attitude did not please France's allies, who saw an opportunity to take parts of the Habsburg empire, or Louis's generals, who for a century had won glory fighting Austria. The King of Prussia had died on 31 May and was succeeded by his son Frederick the Great, a military genius with ambitions to expand Prussia's borders. The elector of Bavaria, supported by Frederick, challenged the succession of Maria Theresa, and on 17 December 1740 Frederick invaded the Austrian province of Silesia.  The elderly Cardinal Fleury had too little energy left to oppose this war.
+
+Fleury sent his highest ranking general, Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet, duc de Belle-Isle, the Maréchal de Belle-Isle, the grandson of Fouquet, the famous disgraced controller of finances of Louis XIV, as his ambassador to the Diet of Frankfurt, with instructions to avoid a war by supporting the candidacy of the Elector of Bavaria to the Austrian throne.  Instead, the Maréchal, who detested the Austrians, made an agreement to join with the Prussians against Austria, and the war began.[40]  French and Bavarian armies quickly captured Linz and laid siege to Prague. On 10 April 1741 Frederick won a major victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Molwitz.  On 18 May, Fleury assembled a new alliance combining France, Prussia, Spain and Bavaria, later joined by Poland and Sardinia.  However, in 1742, the balance of the war shifted against France. The German-born British King, George II, who was also the Elector of Hanover, joined the war on the side of Austria and personally took charge of his soldiers fighting the French in Germany.  Maria Theresa's Hungarian army recaptured Linz and marched into Bavaria as far as Munich. In June, Frederick of Prussia withdrew from the alliance with France, after gaining the crown of Silesia from the Austrians. Belleville had to abandon Prague, with a loss of eight thousand men. For seven years, France was engaged in a costly war with constantly shifting alliances. Orry, the superintendent of French finance, was forced to reinstate the highly unpopular dixieme tax to fund the war. Cardinal de Fleury did not live to see the end of the conflict; he died on 29 January 1743, and thereafter Louis ruled alone.[41]
+
+The war in Germany was not going well; the French and Bavarian forces were faced with the combined armies of Austria, Saxony, Holland, Sardinia and Hanover. The army of the Duke of Noailles was defeated by a force of British, Hessian and Hanover soldiers led by George II at the battle of Dettingen, and in September French forces were compelled to abandon Germany.[42]
+
+In 1744, the Netherlands became the primary battlefield of the war, and the French position began to improve. Frederick the Great decided to rejoin the war on the French side. Louis XV left Versailles to lead his armies in the Netherlands in person, and French field command was given to the German-born Maréchal Maurice de Saxe, a highly competent general. At the Battle of Fontenoy on 11 May 1745, Louis, accompanied by his young son the Dauphin, came under fire for the first time and witnessed a French victory over combined British, Dutch and Austrian forces. When the Dauphin became excited at the sight of so many dead enemy soldiers, the King told him, "You see what a victory costs. The blood of our enemies is still the blood of men. The true glory is to spare it."[43] Saxe went on to win further victories at Rocoux (1746) and Lauffeld (1747). In 1746 French forces besieged and occupied Brussels, which Louis entered in triumph. The King gave de Saxe the Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley as a reward for his victories.
+
+After Fleury's death in January 1743, his war minister, the Duke of Noailles, showed the King a letter that Louis XIV had written to his grandson, Philip V of Spain; it counseled: "Don't allow yourself to be governed; be the master. Never have a favorite or a prime minister. Listen, consult your Council, but decide yourself. God, who made you King, will give you all the guidance you need, as long as you have good intentions."[44] Louis followed this advice and decided to govern without a prime minister. Two of his ministers took the most prominent positions in his government; the finance minister, Jean Baptiste de Machault D'Arnouville, and the minister of the armies, Comte d'Argenson.
+
+With the end of the war, Louis decided to take the opportunity to reduce the debt and modernize the system of taxation of the Kingdom. The package of reforms was put together by his finance minister D'Arnouville and was approved by the King and presented in two decrees issued in May 1749. The first measure was an issue of bonds, paying five percent interest, to pay off the 36 million livres of debt caused by the cost of the war. This new measure was an immediate success. The second measure was the abolition of the dixième, a tax of ten percent of revenue, which had been created to finance the war, and its replacement by the vingtième, a tax of five percent on net revenue, which, unlike the dixième, taxed the income of all French citizens, including for the first time the income from the property of the clergy and the nobility.[45]
+
+While the new tax was supported by many, including Voltaire, it met immediate and fierce resistance from both the nobility and the church. When on 5 May 1749 it was presented for formal registration to the Parlement of Paris, the assembly composed of high nobles and wealthy Parisians who had purchased seats, it was rejected by a vote of one hundred six to forty nine; the majority asked for more time to consider the project. The King responded by demanding immediate registration, which the Parlement reluctantly granted on 19 May.[46] Resistance to the new measures grew with the church and in the provinces, which had their own parlements. While the Parlements of Burgundy, Provence and Artois bowed to the King's demands, Brittany and Languedoc refused. The royal government closed down the Parlement of Brittany, ordered the members of the Parlement of Languedoc to return to their estates and parishes, and took direct control of the Provence.[47]
+
+Within Paris, the battle between the King and Parlement was fought over the status of the Hôpital Général, a semi-religious organization which operated six different hospitals and shelters in Paris, with a staff of some five thousand persons. Many of the hospital staff and officials were Jansenists, while the board of directors of the hospital included many prominent members of the Parlement of Paris. In 1749, the King decided to purge the hospital of Jansenists and corruption, appointed a new "Supérieure" against the will of the administrators, who resigned, then appointed four temporary administrators, and asked the First President of the Parlement of Paris, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, to implement his decree for the reorganization of the hospital. De Maupeou refused to carry out the decree without the authorization of the Parlement, and the Parlement, without taking any action, went on vacation. On 20 November, when the Parlement returned, the King again summoned de Maupeou for an audience and again demanded action without delay. This time the Parlement members met but refused to discuss the Hospital. On 28 January 1752, the King instructed the Grand Council to change the administration of the Hospital without the approval of the Parlement. Voltaire, describing the affair, wrote, "Never before has such a small affair caused such a great emotion of the spirit." It was the first overt disobedience of the legislature against the King, and one of the first signs that the Parlement believed it, not the King, was the legitimate source of laws in the nation.[48]
+
+The King's original plans to tax the church also ran into difficulty. A royal decree ordered all the clergy to submit a declaration of their revenue by 17 February 1751, but that day passed without any declarations given. Instead it became known that the King had quietly issued a new decree in December 1750, canceling the tax and relying again, entirely, on the "don gratuit", the voluntary donation by the church of 1,500,000 livres. Under the new decree, instead of a tax, the church would each year collect a comparable sum and donate it freely to the government. His support for the church came both from the teachings of his tutor, Cardinal Fleury, and his gratitude to Archbishop de Beaumont, who defended him against the attacks of the Jansenists and the criticisms of the Parlement, and the Archbishop's tolerance of the King's own personal life and mistresses.[49]
+
+Despite the French victories, the war dragged on both in the Netherlands and in Italy, where Maréchal Belle-Isle was besieging the Austrians in Genoa. By the summer of 1747 France occupied the entire Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium).[50] In March 1748, Louis proposed a conference in Aix-en-Chapelle to bring the war to an end. The process was advanced by the capture of Maastricht by the Maréchal de Saxe on 10 April 1748. Britain, pressed by the threat of a French invasion of rest of the Netherlands, urged a quick settlement, despite objections from Austria and Sardinina. The Treaty was quickly negotiated and signed by all the parties in September and October 1748. Louis was also eager for a quick settlement, because the naval war with Britain was extremely costly to French maritime trade. The proposition of Louis was surprisingly generous; in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louis offered to return all of the territories he had conquered in the Netherlands to the Austrians, Maastricht to the Dutch, Nice and Savoy to the Sardinians, and Madras in India to the English. The Austrians would give the Duchy of Parma and some other territory to the infant Spanish King, Philippe, while Britain would give France Louisburg and the island of Cape Breton, both in Nova Scotia. France also agreed to expel the Stuart pretender to the English throne from its territory.[51]
+
+The end of the war had caused celebration in Paris, but the publication of the details of the treaty on 14 January 1749 caused dismay and anger. The Stuart pretender to the British throne refused to leave Paris and was acclaimed by the Parisians. He was finally arrested on 10 December 1748, and transported by force to Switzerland. The French military commanders, including De Saxe, were furious about giving up the Spanish Netherlands. The King's defense of his action was practical: he did not want the Netherlands to be a permanent source of contention between France and other powers; he also felt that France had already reached its proper borders, and it was better to cultivate its prosperity rather than make it larger. His basis was also religious; he had been taught by Fleury that the Seventh Commandment forbade taking the property of others by fraud or violence. Louis often cited a Latin maxim declaring, "if anyone who asks by what means he can best defend a kingdom, the answer is, by never wishing to augment it." He also received support from Voltaire, who wrote, "It seems better, and even more useful for the court of France to think about the happiness of its allies, rather than to be given two or three Flemish towns which would have been the eternal object of jealousy."[52] The King did not have the communication skills to explain his decision to the French public, and did not see any need to do so. The news that the king had restored the Southern Netherlands to Austria was met with disbelief and bitterness. The French obtained so little of what they had fought for that they adopted the expressions Bête comme la paix ("Stupid as the peace") and Travailler pour le roi de Prusse ("To work for the king of Prussia", i.e. working for nothing).[53]
+
+Between 1727 and 1737, the Queen gave birth to two sons and eight daughters. The first son, born 4 September 1729, became the dauphin and heir to the throne, though he did not live to rule. The second son, the Duke of Anjou, born in 1730, died in 1733. Only the two oldest daughters were raised at Versailles; the others were sent away to be raised at the Abbey of Fontevrault. The first-born daughter, called Madame Premiere, was married to the infant Philip of Spain, the second son of Philip of Spain and Elisabeth Farnese.
+
+Louis had been very much in love with the Queen, and they were inseparable in the early years of his reign, but as his family grew and the Queen was constantly pregnant or exhausted by her maternities, he began to look elsewhere. He first became attached to one of the ladies of the Queen's court, Louise Julie de Mailly, who was the same age as he and from an ancient noble family. Without courtship or ceremony he made her his mistress and raised her to the rank of Duchess. The Duke of Luynes commented on the King's behavior: "The King loves women, and yet there is absolutely no gallantry in his spirit."[54] In 1738, after the Queen lost an unborn child, her doctors forbade her to have relations with the King for a time. The King was offended by her refusal and thereafter never shared her bed. Acknowledging that he was committing adultery, Louis refused thereafter to go to confession and to take the sacrament. The Cardinal de Fleury tried to persuade him to confess and to give up his mistress, but without success.
+
+In 1740, the King turned his attentions to the sister of Louise-Joulie, Pauline-Félicité, the Marquise de Vintimille, who was married. Pauline-Félicité became pregnant by the King at the end of the year. Both the child and mother died in childbirth. The King went into mourning and for a time turned to religion for consolation.[55] When the King had finally recovered his spirits, the Countess of Mailly unwisely introduced the King to her youngest sister, Marie Anne de Mailly, the recent widow of the Marquis de Tournelle. The King was immediately attracted to Marie-Anne; however, she insisted that he expel her older sister from the Court before she would become his mistress. The King gave in, and on 4 October 1742, Marie-Anne was named a Lady of the Court of the Queen, and a month later the King ordered her older sister to leave the Court and to live in Paris. The King made his new mistress the Duchess of Châteauroux. The King's relationships with the three sisters became a subject of gossip in the court and in Paris, where a popular comic poem was recited, ending: "Choosing an entire family – is that being unfaithful, or constant?"[56]
+
+In June 1744, the king left Versailles for the front in order to take personal command of his armies fighting in the War of the Austrian Succession. This otherwise popular move was marred by the king's indiscreet decision to bring along Marie-Anne de Mailly. In August, the king fell gravely ill in Metz. Death appeared imminent, and public prayers were held all across France to ask God to save the king from death. The king's chaplain refused to give him absolution unless the king renounced his mistress, which he did; Marie-Anne left the court but was reunited with the King a few months later. The king's confession was distributed publicly, which embarrassed him and tarnished the prestige of the monarchy. Although Louis' recovery earned him the epithet "well-beloved" from a public relieved by his survival, the events at Metz diminished his standing. The military successes of the War of the Austrian Succession inclined the French public to overlook Louis' adulteries, but after 1748, in the wake of the anger over the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, pamphlets against the king's mistresses were widely distributed and read.
+
+Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour, was the most famous and influential of the mistresses of Louis XV. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Paris fermier-general, and was married to a banker, Charles Guillaume Lenormant d'Étoiles. She was noticed by the King following one of his hunts, and formally met him at a costume ball celebrating carnival in 1745. By July, she was the King's mistress and was formally given the title of the Marquise de Pompadour. For the next twenty years she was the King's confidante and advisor, helping him choose or demote ministers. Her opinions led to the downfall of some very competent ministers, including  Machault d'Aurnouville and the Marquis d'Argenson, and to the promotion of a number of incompetent military commanders. Her most successful choice was the promotion of The Duke de Choiseul, who became one of the King's most effective ministers. She ceased to be the King's mistress in 1750 but remained his closest advisor. She was promoted to Duchess in 1752, and Dame of the Queen's Palace in 1756, and was an important patron of music and the arts, as well as religious establishments. She remained close to the King until her death in 1764. He was devastated and remained in seclusion for several weeks after she died.[57]
+
+The peace achieved by Louis with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle lasted only seven years. At the end of August 1755, Marie Therese, the Empress of Austria, discreetly wrote a letter to Louis XV, which was passed by the Austrian ambassador in Paris to Madame de Pomapadour for delivery to the King. She proposed a secret alliance between Austria and France, to meet the threats of the growing power of Prussia, which was still formally an ally of France, and Britain.[58]
+
+In the New World, conflict had already begun between Britain and France. The French colonies were at an enormous demographic disadvantage; there were less than 70,000 French colonists spread over a territory from the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes extending down the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys down to Louisiana (named for Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV); compared with 300,000 in the British colonies. To defend its territories.  France had constructed Fort Duquesne to defend their frontier against the Americans;  Britain sent the young George Washington with a small force to construct his own fortification, Fort Necessity,  nearby. In 1752, after the killing of French envoy, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, the French sent reinforcements and compelled Washington and his men to withdraw.[59]
+
+The undeclared French and Indian War followed, with Britain treating the French colonies as an enemy. In 1755, the British seized 300 French merchant ships. In January 1756, Louis sent an ultimatum to London, which was rejected by the British government. A few months later, on 16 January 1756, Frederick the Great of Prussia signed the Treaty of Westminster, allying himself with Britain. Louis responded immediately on 1 May 1756 by sealing a formal defensive treaty with Austria, the first Treaty of Versailles, offering to defend Austria in case of a Prussian attack. This was a complete reversal of France's historic conflict with Austria, which had been underway for nearly two hundred years, and it was shocking to many in the French Court.[60]
+
+Louis declared war on England on 9 June 1756, and success seemed certain. A French fleet in the Mediterranean defeated the British at the Battle of Minorca of 1756, and captured that island.  The French army greatly outnumbered the British and Prussians on the continent.  The French army won the surrender of the British forces of the Duke of Comberland at Closterseven. Another French army invaded Saxony and Hanover, the ancestral home of King George II.  However, the best French commander, Maurice de Saxe, had died two years after the War of the Austrian Succession, and the new French commanders, Charles, Prince of Soubise, the Duke D'Estrees and the Duke de Broglie detested each other, and were rarely willing to cooperate.[61]
+
+In August Frederick of Prussia made a lightning strike into Saxony and on 5 November 1757, though outnumbered by the French nearly two to one,  decisively defeated the army of the Prince de Soubise  at the Battle of Rossbach.  The new British Prime Minister, William Pitt, named a new commander, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and the French armies were gradually pushed back to the Rhine, and defeated again at the Battle of Crefield on 23 June. Thereafter, Britain and Prussia held the upper hand, tying down the French army in the German states along the Rhine.[62]
+
+British naval supremacy prevented France from reinforcing its colonies overseas, and British naval squadrons raided the French coast at Cancale and Le Havre and landed on the Ile d'Aix and Le Havre. In 1759 the British seized Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies, and captured Port Louis and Quebec.   A series of naval defeats forced Louis to abandon plans for invasion of Britain. In India, the French colony at Pondicherry was surrounded by the British, and surrendered the following year. On 8 September 1760, Montreal surrendered, bringing to an end French rule in Canada. Martinique fell to the British in 1762.[63]
+
+On 5 January 1757, as the King was getting into his carriage in the courtyard of the Grand Trianon  Versailles, a demented man, Robert-François Damiens, pushed through the King's guards and attacked the King, stabbing him in the side with a small knife.  The King's guards seized Damien, and the King ordered them to hold him but not harm him. The King walked up the steps to his rooms at the Trianon, where he found he was bleeding seriously. He summoned his doctor and a priest, and then fainted.[64]  Louis was saved from greater harm by the thickness of the winter clothing he was wearing. When the news reached Paris, anxious crowds gathered in the streets.  The Pope, the Empress of Austria, and King George II, with whom France was at war, sent messages hoping for his swift recovery. Damien was tortured to see if he had accomplices, and was tried before the  Parlement of Paris, which had been the most vocal critic of the King.  The Parlement demonstrated its loyalty to the King by sentencing Damiens to the most severe possible penalty; On 28–29 March 1757 Damien was executed on the Place de Grève in Paris by drawing and quartering, following which his body was burned on a bonfire.  The house where he was born was burned down, his father, wife and daughter were banished from France, and his brothers and sisters were required to change their name.[65][66]
+The King recovered physically very quickly, but the attack had a depressive effect on his spirits. One of his chief courtiers, Duford de Chervrny, wrote afterwards: "it was easy to see that when members of the court congratulated him on his recovery, he replied, 'yes, the body is going well',  but touched his head and said, 'but this goes badly, and this is impossible to heal.'  After the assassination attempt, the King invited his heir, the Dauphin, to attend all of the Royal Council meetings, and quietly closed down the chateau at Versailles where he had met with his short-term mistresses."[67]
+
+The Parlements were assemblies of nobles in Paris and older regions of France, whose members served as magistrates and judged civil cases.  Their members included both hereditary nobles and wealthy citizens who had purchased their seats.  Several of the Parlements, such as those of Rouen and Provence,  had been in existence for centuries, and saw themselves as the legitimate governments in their provinces. As Louis reorganized the government and appointed his own intendants in the provinces, the authority and prestige of the Parlements decreased, and price of the seats dropped. In Franche-Comté, Bordelaise and Rouen, the Parlements refused to follow the decrees of the royal intendants. When the intendants attempted to assert their authority and collect taxes from all classes, the Parlements went on strike, refusing to proceed with the judgment of civil cases. The civil justice system came to a halt. In 1761, the provincial Parlement of Normandy in Rouen wrote a protest to the King, explaining that the King had the exclusive power to tax, but the Parlement had the exclusive right to collect the money. The King rejected the explanation and overruled the Parlement, banished some of his most provocative Parliament members to their estates. For the rest of his reign, the Parlements swore allegiance to the King, but took every opportunity to resist his new taxes and the King's authority. This was one of the seeds of resistance to the King's authority that was to turn into a Revolution less than thirty years later.[68]
+
+The Comte d'Argenson served as the Minister of War from 1743 until 1747.  He was an advocate of the continuation of the absolute monarchy in the style of Louis XIV.  He was responsible for creating the first school for engineers in France at Mézières (1749–50); thanks to the trained engineers, France had the finest system of roads and bridges in Europe. He also established the military academy, the École Militaire, and, following the model of the Prussians, established military training camps and exercises, and helped rebuild French military power.[69]
+
+Machaud D'Arnouville was brought into the government with the sponsorship of d'Argenson, but the two men gradually became rivals and enemies.  D'Arnouville was the Controller of Finances from 1745 to 1754, then Minister of Navy from 1754 to 1757.  He was the creator of the unpopular "Vingtieme" tax (1749), which taxed all citizens, including the nobility, at the same rate, and also freed the prices of grain (1754), which initially greatly increased agricultural production.  The fluctuation of grain prices would eventually become a factor in the French Revolution.[70]
+
+On 1 February 1757, the King abruptly dismissed both d'Arnouville and d'Argenson, and exiled them to their estates. The King held them responsible for not preventing the assassination attempt, and their government displeased Madame de Pompadour.
+
+Louis named the Duke de Choiseul as his minister of foreign affairs on 3 December 1758, following the recommendation of Madame de Pompadour.  In 1763, he became Minister of War, giving the role of minister of foreign affairs to his cousin, the Duc de Praslin. A few months later, he also became the Minister of the Navy, and became the most influential and powerful member of the government.  In the council and circles of government, he was the leader of the philosophe faction, which included Madame de Pompadour, which sought to appease the Parlements and the Jansenists.   On the diplomatic front, he negotiated a "Family Pact" with the Bourbon monarch of Spain (1761); negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1761, and completed the integration of Lorraine into France (1766) upon the death of the King's father-in-law Stanislaus I Leszczyński, Duke of Lorraine. He incorporated Corsica into France (1768), and negotiated the marriage of his grandson, the future Louis XVI with Marie Antoinette (1770).
+
+His most notable accomplishment was the reform modernization of the French military, based on the lessons learned during the Seven Years' War.  Under Choiseul, the government, rather than the officers, took the responsibility of training, giving uniforms, and training soldiers.  The artillery was standardized, and new tactics, based on the Prussian model, were adopted and taught.  The Navy in 1763 had been reduced to just 47 vessels and twenty frigates, three times smaller than the British Royal Navy fleet.  He launched a major shipbuilding program to construct eighty vessels and forty-five new frigates, which would allow the French fleet, combined with the allied Spanish fleet, to outnumber the Royal Navy.[71]
+
+In 1764, at the urging of the Parlement, Madame Pompadour and his foreign minister, the Duc de Chosieul,  Louis decided upon the Suppression of Jesuit Order in France.  The Jesuits in France numbered 3,500;  they had 150 establishments in France, including 85 colleges, which were considered the best in France; their graduates included Voltaire and Diderot.  The Confessor of the King, by a tradition dating back to Henry IV, was a Jesuit.  Agitation against the Jesuits began in 1760 in the provincial Parlements, where the Gallicans, supporters of a specifically French version of Catholicism, were strong. The complaint against the Jesuits was that they were independent of the authority of the King and the hierarchy of the church in France. The Jesuits had already been expelled from Portugal and its colony of Brazil in 1759, because of conflicts with the government and church hierarchy there.[72]
+
+In France, the Parlements had taken the lead in attacking the Jesuits.  On 12 February 1762, the Parlement of Rouen declared the Jesuits outside the law, forbid them to hold public positions or to teach, and demanded that they take an oath repudiating their beliefs.  Between April and September 1762, the Parlements of Rennes, Bordeaux, Paris and Metz joined in the condemnation, followed in 1763 by Aix, Toulouse, Pau, Dijon and Grenoble. By the end of the year only the Parlements of Besançon, Douai, and the governments of Colmar, Flanders, Alsace and Franche-Compté, plus the Duchy of Lorraine, run by the Queen's father, the former King Stanislaus, permitted the Jesuits to function.[73]
+
+The campaign against the Jesuits divided the royal household; his son the Dauphin, his daughters and the Queen supported the Jesuits, while Madame de Pompadaour, whose influence in the court was criticized by the Jesuits, wanted them gone.  The indecisive King declared two years later that he had made the decision against his own feelings.  The Jesuits departed, and were welcomed in Prussia and in Russia. The departure of the Jesuits weakened the church in France, and especially weakened the authority of the King, who, like a constitutional monarch, acted on behalf of the Parliament against his own beliefs.[74]
+
+Under the government of Choiseul, the Parlements of several French provinces continued to swear obedience to the King, while refusing to obey his intendents or to accept his new taxes. The Parlement of Franche-Comté in Besançon refused to collect the vingtieme tax imposed by the King to finance the war, claiming that only the Parlement could impose taxes.  The King's government immediately dismissed the leaders of the Parlement and confined them to their residences. The Parlement of Normandy  immediately supported that of Besançon; it wrote a remonstrance to the King on 5 July 1760, declaring that the Parlements represented all classes: "One King, one law, one Parlement; the law of the kingdom is a sacred pact of your alliance with the French nation; it is a kind of contract which destines the King to reign and the people to obey. In truth, no one except God can compel you to obey this sacred pact... but we can ask you, with respect, with submission... to keep your promises."  This was too much for the King.  He responded on 31 January 1761 that the Parlement's complaint "contained principles so false and so contrary to my authority and with expressions so indecent, particularly in connection with my Chancellor who only explained to you my wishes... that I send your letter back to you."[75]  The Parlement members of Besançon remained in exile.
+
+The Parlement of Bordeaux went even further in its resistance to the royal government;  in 1757 it brought accusations of corruption against the members of the government of the city of Bergerac, named by the Royal Council of the King.  When the Royal Council blocked the pursuits of the Parlement, the Parlement wrote a protest to the King, declaring, "Sire, your Parlement cannot recognize any intermediate power it and your person; no, your Council has over the Parlement no authority, superiority, or jurisdiction."[76]
+
+The prolonged war drained the treasury of the Kingdom;  France paid not only for its own army, but subsidized the armies of its allies;  in 1759 France paid 19 million livres to its allies, an amount which Choiseul reduced by one-third in 1761.[77] His new finance minister, Étienne de Silhouette imposed new taxes aimed at the wealthy;  taxes on horses, carriages, silk, paintings, coffee and furs, and other luxury goods.  The new taxes were extremely unpopular with the aristocracy and wealthy;  Silhouette was dismissed after eight months, and his name became the common expression for paper cutout made from a shadow, which, like his ministry, lasted only a moment.[78]  The King announced that he was giving his silver service to the mint, to be melted down and made into money.[79]
+
+The new Controller of Finances, Henri Bertin, a protege of Madame Pompadour named on 23 November 1759, reduced the luxury taxes of his predecessor, and instead proposed a broadening of the tax base to include those classes which had long been excluded, and a new survey of the wealth of the nobility. Once again the Parliaments rebelled.  When the Lieutenant General of Normandy appeared before the Parliament to register the decree, it refused to register or collect the new taxes. The same scene was reproduced in the other Parlements.  Once again the King yielded to Madame de Pomapdour and her allies;  the new decrees were withdrawn, Bertin was moved to a different position, the tax rolls were not enlarged, and no new taxes were collected; the debt remained.[80]
+
+The war with England continued, despite the death of King George II on 25 October 1760; the British Prime Minister William Pitt rejected French proposals for suggestions for negotiations. On 15 August 1761, France, Spain, Naples and Parma, all ruled by monarchs of the Bourbon family, signed the first "Family Pact" with a system of reciprocal guarantees of support if one or the other were attacked.  At the same time, they signed a secret treaty with Charles III of Spain engaging Spain to declare war on England if the war was not over by May 1762.  Learning of this pact, William Pitt wanted to declare an immediate war on Spain, but the new British King, George III, rejected the idea.   The military forces of Frederick the Great in Prussia had been nearly exhausted in the long war against the combined forces of Austria and Russia;  but Frederick was saved by the sudden death of the Tsarina Elizabeth in 1762, and her replacement by Peter III of Russia, a fervent admirer of the Prussian King.
+
+Choiseul had taken over direction of the French navy as well as the army in October 1761, and he pressed for an offensive to bring the war to a successful end. He persuaded the Parlements and the chambers of commerce of the major French cities to sponsor the construction of warships, and rebuilt the French Navy.  The French army launched a new offensive against the Prussians and Spain, as promised by its agreement with France, launched an invasion in Portugal, an ally of Britain.  However, once again the French initiatives were not enough. The French offensive in Hesse-Kassel was defeated by the Prussians, the Spanish army in Portugal made little progress, and the British took the opportunity to land on Martinique and to invade Spain's colony Cuba.  Choiseul decided it was time to end the war.  The preliminary negotiations opened at Palace of Fontainebleau on 3 November 1762, and ended hostilities between England, France and Spain. The final treaty was signed in Paris on 10 February 1763.  As a result of the War, France gave up its minor possessions in the West Indies; Marie Galante, Tobago and La Desiderade, but received back Guadaloupe, Martinique, and Santa Lucia, which, because of their sugar plantations, were considered of more value than all of its territories in Canada; France kept only the Iles of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.  The valley of the Ohio, and the territories along the west bank of the Mississippi River were ceded to Spain. Louis formally ratified the treaty on 23 February, on the same day that his statue was unveiled on the Place Louis XV (today the Place de la Concorde)[81]
+
+The winter of 1763–64 was particularly harsh; Madame de Pompadour contracted pneumonia, and died on 15 April. The King was deeply affected, but, strictly observing court protocol, he did not attend her funeral, because she was too far below his rank, and, though mourning, carried on court business as usual.   Maneuvering immediately began within the court to replace Madame de Pompadour; a leading candidate was Duchess of Gramont, the sister of Choiseul, but the King showed no interest in a new mistress, and in February 1765 he closed down the Parc-aux-Cerfs, where he had previously met his petites maitresses.[82]
+
+The resistance of the Parlements to the King's authority continued. The Parlements of the provinces began to quarrel with the Parlement of Paris over which more truly represented the nation.  In March 1764, the Parlement of Navarre in Pau, the smallest province, refused to accept the taxation authority of the Grand Council of the King. This time the King took action, arresting and replacing the President and leading officers of the Parlement, and replacing them with officers loyal to the King. The Parlements of Toulouse, Besançon and Rouen protested, but the King persisted.  In 1765 the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes denied the authority of the King's officers to impose taxes without its permission, and went on strike. The King summoned the Parlement to Versailles, where he had his lecture read to them.  This had little effect; when the King had his decree to the Parlement posted on the walls of Rennes, the Parlement ordered that the posters with the King's proclamation be taken down.  The King issued letters of cachet that forbade the Parlement members to leave Rennes, but the judicial system remained on strike.[83]
+
+The end of 1765 brought another personal tragedy; his son and heir Louis contracted tuberculosis.  He travelled with the King to the Palace of Fontainebleau.  The King distracted himself by secluding himself with the astronomer César-François Cassini de Thury and making astronomic calculations, while the doctors tried, without success, to treat his son.  The Dauphin died on 20 December 1765.  The succession was assured, since the Dauphin had a son, the future Louis XVI, who was of age to rule, but the death put him into a deep depression. He drafted his own will, writing: "If I made errors, it was not from a lack of will, but from a lack of talents, and for not having been supported as I wished to have been, particularly in matters of religion."[84]
+
+The Queen was deeply affected by the death of the Dauphin in 1765, then the death of her father in 1766, and then her daughter-in-law. She died on 24 June 1768.[85]
+
+In January 1766, while the King was still mourning the death of the Dauphin, the Parlement of Brittany issued another rejection of the King's authority to collect taxes. When he ignored it, both the Parlement of Rennes and the Parlement of Rouen wrote him again, complaining that he was ignoring "the oath that you took to the nation when accepting the crown."  When this part of the letter was read to the King, he interrupted the reading and declared that this accusation was false;  he had taken an oath to God alone, not to the nation.  On 3 March 1766, with only a few hours notice, he traveled in person from Versailles to the meeting of the Parlement of Paris at the Palais de la Cité and appeared before the members.  In his message, read to them by one of his ministers, he declared, "It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides...To me alone belongs the legislative power, without dependence and without sharing...The public order emanates entirely from me...Confusion and anarchy are taking the place of legitimate order, and the scandalous spectacle of a contradictory  rivaling my sovereign power reduces me to the sad necessity to use all the power that I received from God to preserve my peoples from the sad consequences of these enterprises."[86] The speech, immediately termed "the flagellation", was published in official press, and circulated to all levels of government. It became his political testament. The conflict between the Parlements and King was muted for a time, but not resolved.[87]
+
+After the death of the Madame de Pompadour, several women in the court sought to replace her, including the Duchess of Gramont, the sister of the Duke of Choiseul, the King's chief minister.  However, the King's favor turned to Jeanne Bécu, the comtesse du Barry. She was thirty-three years younger than the King. She was the illegitimate daughter of Anne Bécu, a seamstress.[88] She was raised by the Dames de Sacre-Coeur, and had various jobs as a shop assistant and designer of dresses before she became the mistress of a self-proclaimed count, Jean du Barry.  She began to hold a salon, which attracted writers and aristocrats. Since Jean du Barry was already married, to give her legitimacy he arranged for her to become engaged to his brother, Guillaume, a retired soldier.  They were married on 1 September 1768, and then, without spending the night with her, Guillaume retired to his home in Languedoc.[89]  Through her acquaintances with the nobility, she was invited to Versailles, where the King saw her and was immediately attracted to her.  He invited her to Fontainebleau, and then asked her to live in the Palace of Versailles.  Her appearance at the Court scandalized the Duke de Choiseul, but pleased the enemies of the Duke within the Court.
+
+For du Barry to be presented at Court, she had to be formally presented by a member of the nobility. The elderly Contesse de Béarn was persuaded to make the presentation for a large fee, and she was presented on 22 April 1769. None of the ladies of the Court attended, and de Choiseul himself, to show his displeasure, hosted a large reception the following day, which all the Court, except du Barry, attended.[90]
+
+The King soon installed her in the Palace of Versailles, and in 1771 gave her the new Pavillon de Louveciennes.  Choiseul sowed a strong dislike for DuBarry, as did Marie Antoinette, who arrived in Versailles and married the Dauphin on 16 May 1770. She described the Comtesse as "The most stupid and impertinent creature imaginable". However, the King kept du Barry close to him until the final days before his death, when he sent her away before he made confession.  The presence of du Barry at the court scandalized the high members of the Aristocracy.  Outside the Court, the opponents of the King in the Parlements used her presence to ridicule and attack the King.  She was the target of dozens of scandalous pamphlets accusing her of every possible immoral act.[91]  Decades later, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, the Comtesse was targeted by the Jacobins as a symbol of the hated old regime; she was guillotined on 8 December 1793.[92]
+
+The borders of France were enlarged for the last time before the Revolution by two additions; The Duchy of Lorraine, ruled by The King's father-in-law, Stanislaus, reverted to France after his death, and officially was joined to the kingdom 27–28 March 1766.  The acquisition of Corsica was more complicated.  The island formally belonged to the Republic of Genoa, but an independent Republic of Corsica had been proclaimed in 1755 by Pasquale Paoli, and the rebels controlled most of the island. The Republic of Genoa did not have the military forces to conquer the island, and permitted Louis to send French troops to occupy the ports and major cities, to keep the island from falling into British hands.  When the war ended, the island was formally granted to France by Treaty of Versailles on 19 May 1768.  Louis sent the army to subdue the Corsican rebels; the army on the island eventually numbered twenty-seven thousand soldiers.  In May 1769 the Corsican rebels were defeated at the Battle of Ponte Novu, and Paoli took refuge in England. In 1770 the island formally became a Province of France.[93]
+
+Two men had an enormous influence on the economic policies of the King. François Quesnay was the best-known economist in France.  He was the King's doctor, and treated Madame de Pompadour, but was also a celebrated economic theorist, whose collected writings, "Tableau Économique" (1758), were avidly read by the King and his Court: Louis referred to him as "my thinker."  His students included The Marquis de Mirabeau and Adam Smith. He was a critic of government regulation, and coined the term "bureaucracy" (literally "A government of desks").  The other was his disciple, the Minister of the Commerce of the King, Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay.  The two men advocated removing as many restrictions as possible from the economy, to encourage greater production and trade.  De Gournay's famous expression, laissez faire, laissez passer ("it be done, let it pass") was later adopted as the slogan of a whole school of free market economics.[94]
+
+De Gournay and Quesnay proposed in particular the liberalization of agricultural markets, which were strictly controlled, to encourage greater production, competition and lower prices.   Following the doctrines of Quesnay and de Gournay, Louis's controller of finances, Henri Bertin, created a new Society of Agriculture and an Agricultural Committee within the government, comparable to those existing to support commerce.  In May 1763, Bertin issued a decree permitting the tax-free circulation of grain without taxes. In August 1764, Bertin permitted the export of grain from twenty-seven French ports, later expanded to thirty-six.  At the same time he established a large zone around Paris, where grain was reserved exclusively for feeding the Parisians, and established a cap on the grain price, which, if it was passed, would cause the exports to cease.[95]
+
+The policy of freeing grain prices was effective in good years, and resulted in increased trade and lower prices, but during years with poor harvests;  1766, 1767 and 1768, prices went up.  Most of the Parlements, in regions which produced grain, supported the policy, but others, including Paris and Rouen, were highly critical.  In those cities rumors began to circulate of a mythical "Starvation Pact", a supposed plot by the government to deliberately starve and eliminate the poor. These rumors eventually became one of the factors that provoked the French Revolution.[96]
+
+The Duc de Choiseul devoted all of his considerable energy and talents to preparing a new war against Britain. In 1764, in a former Jesuit school he had closed, he created a new military preparatory school, to prepare students for the  recently founded Military Academy. In 1769 he raised the Naval school to the level of a royal academy, to train officers for his new fleet. In the same year he established a military engineering school. He provided the army with hundreds of new cannon, which would be used with great success decades later during the French Revolution and by Napoleon. Using the Prussian army as a model, he reformed French military doctrine, making the state and not the officers responsible for training and equipping soldiers. A large part of the French Navy had been sunk or captured by the British in the Seven Years' War. In addition to the existing naval arsenals in Toulon, Brest and Rochefort, he opened two more in Marseille (1762) and Lorient (1764). The arsenals began building new ships; by 1772 the Navy had sixty-six ships of the line, thirty-five frigates, and twenty-one new corvettes.[97] He and his allies in the government began planning for an invasion of England, and his government looked for new ways to challenge England. When the Duc de Broglie learned that the British were planning to tax the citizens of the British colonies in America, he wrote to the King: "It will be very curious to know what the result will be, and if their execution doesn't result in a Revolution in those states."[98]
+
+Choiseul combined his  military preparations for war with a diplomatic alliance, the Pacte de Famille or Pact of the Family, which united with other countries ruled by Kings of the Bourbon dynasty; Spain, ruled by Louis's cousin Charles III of Spain, the Naples and Tuscany. Choiseul was so entirely focused on England as his future enemy that he almost entirely neglected the rest of Europe. He had no accredited Ambassadors in Poland, Prussia or Russia during most of the period, and stood by while Russia imposed its own candidate for King of Poland, and when Turkey and Russia went to war in 1768–70.[99]
+
+A new conflict between England and Spain over the remote Falkland Islands in 1770 brought about Choiseul's downfall. The British had established a settlement in the islands, which were also claimed by Spain. In early 1770 the Spanish governor of Buenos Aires sent five warships full of troops to the islands, ordering the British to leave. The British prepared to depart. When the news reached London, the British government demanded that the Spanish leave. Both sides began to prepare for war.
+
+The possibility of a new war came just as France was undergoing a new confrontation between the King's government and the Parlement of Brittany, which once again refused to recognize the power of the King's government to impose taxes. The King wrote immediately to his cousin, the King of Spain, who wrote back that Spain did not want a war. Louis replied, "Gentleness and patience have guided me to the present, but my parlements, pushing to limit, have forgotten themselves to the point of disputing the sovereign authority that we possess only from the will of God. I am resolved to make myself obeyed by all available means..." On 24 December, the King sent a short note to Choiseul dismissing him from his post and ordering him to return to his home in Chateloup and to remain there. A similar note went to his cousin. Choiseul asked for two days to manage his affairs, but the King refused. Explaining the decision later to the Duke de Broglie, the King wrote, "The principles of the Choiseuls are too contrary to religion, and therefore to royal authority."[100]
+
+The King passed the leadership of the government to a triumvirate of three conservative ministers, led by his Chancellor, René de Maupeou, who had been President of the Parlement from 1763 to 1768.  Maupeou and two other conservative ministers, Abbot Terray for finance and the Duc d'Aiguillon for foreign affairs and war, took charge of the government. They became known as "The Triumvirate".
+
+The first priority of Maupeou was to bring the unruly Parlements under control, and to continue with his program for the modernization of the state.  Most of the members of the Parlement of Paris were on a virtual strike, refusing to render justice or approve the King's decrees.  On 21 January 1771, royal agents and musketeers arrived at the homes of each of the Parlement members, informing them that their positions were confiscated and ordering them to leave Paris and return to their home provinces, and not to leave them.[101] This was followed in February by an even more radical measure: the regional Parlements were replaced as the high courts of civil justice by six new regional high councils, to judge serious criminal and civil cases. Another decree announced the abolition of the high fees demanded by the Parlements for resolving civil cases, which were the source of their members' income; civil justice was to be rendered without charge.  The powers of the Parlement of Paris alone were largely unchanged.  Without the provincial parliaments, the government was able enact new laws and taxes without opposition. However, after the King's death, the nobility demanded and received the restoration of the regional parliaments.[102]
+
+Abbot Terray was nominally a priest, though his government career was entirely secular, and his personal life was considered scandalous.  He was an efficient and relentless tax collector; he opened a school to train tax inspectors, and worked to see that taxes were imposed and collected with the same precision and vigor in all regions, without interference from the local nobility. When he first took his position, the state had a budget deficit of 60 million livres, and a long-term debt of 100 million livres.  By 1774, revenues had been increased by 60 million livres and the debt reduced to 20 million livres.  He also reimposed the regulation of the price of grain, which had been freed in 1763 and 1764; these controls were an issue which would disturb the government and provoke agitation until the French Revolution.[103]
+
+The foreign affairs post had been left vacant by Choiseul, who acted as his own foreign minister. Following the dismissal of Choiseul, the King encouraged his cousin and ally Charles III of Spain to settle the crisis over the Falkland Islands with the aim of avoiding a war. Due to Choiseul's sole focus on a war with Britain, he had completely ignored the rest of Europe. France did not even have an ambassador in Vienna, and Russia and Prussia divided up an old French ally, Poland, without protest from France.  Another ally of France, Sweden, also risked being divided between Russia and Prussia upon the death of its King in 1771.  The Prince Royal, Gustav III of Sweden, was staying in Paris at the time. He had a long meeting with Louis XV, who promised to support him.  With French funding, and assistance from Louis's personal secret intelligence service, the Secret de Roi, Gustave III returned to Stockholm.  On 19 August 1772, at his command, the Swedish royal guard imprisoned the Swedish Senate, and two days later he was proclaimed King by the Diet.  Russia and Prussia, occupied with the division of Poland, protested but did not intervene.[104]
+
+In the last years of his reign, the court of Versailles was a theater of manners. Marie-Antoinette, a resident since her marriage, had difficulty disguising her dislike for the King's mistress, Madame du Barry. The King constructed a set of luxurious rooms for Madame du Barry on the floor above his offices; Madame du Barry also reigned in the Petit Trianon, which the King had built for Madame de Pompadour, and in the Pavillon de Louveciennes, also built for Madame de Pompadour. The Court was divided between those who welcomed Madame du Barry, and those of the older aristocracy, such as the Duc de Choiseul plus Marie-Antoinette, who scorned her.[105]  The King continued his grand construction projects, including the opera theater of the Palace of Versailles, completed for the celebration of the wedding of the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, and the new Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde) in Paris, whose centerpiece was an equestrian statue of the King, modeled after that of Louis XIV on the Place Vendôme.
+
+On 26 April 1774, the King left for the Petit Trianon with Madame du Barry and several nobles from his entourage, and reported that he felt ill. He participated in the hunt the next day, but rode in his carriage instead of on horseback. That evening he was still feeling ill, and sent for the Court physician, Le Mariniére. At the surgeon's insistence, the King was brought back to the Palace of Versailles for treatment, along with Madame du Barry and the others. The King was attended by six physicians, six surgeons, each of whom took his pulse and gave his diagnosis. He was bled three times by the surgeons, without effect. When some red eruptions appeared on his skin, the doctors first diagnosed petite variole, or smallpox, which caused optimism, since the patient and doctors both believed he had already had the illness. The members of the family, particularly the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, were asked to leave, since they had not already had the illness, and had no immunity. Madame du Barry remained with him.  As the hours passed, the red eruptions of the disease grew worse, and the doctors began to fear for his life. On the morning of 1 May, the Archbishop of Paris arrived, but was kept out of the King's room to avoid alarming him. The King remained conscious and cheerful. However, on 3 May, he studied the eruptions on his hands, summoned the Archbishop, and announced, "I have the petite variole."[106] The Archbishop instructed him to prepare for the final rites. That night, he summoned Madame du Barry, informed her of the diagnosis, and said, "We cannot recommence the scandal of Metz. If I had known what I know now, you would not have been admitted. I owe it to God and to my people. Therefore, you have to leave tomorrow."[107] On 7 May, he summoned his confessor and was given the final rites. The illness continued its course; one visitor on 9 May, the Duc de Croy, said the King's face resembled, with the darkening of the eruptions of the smallpox, "a mask of bronze". Louis died at 3:15 in the morning on 10 May 1774.[108]
+
+Several of his contemporaries who worked closely with him tried to describe the personality of Louis XV.  The Duke de Croy wrote: "He had a memory, presence, and justness of spirit that was unique. He was gentle, an excellent father, and the most honest individual in the world. He was well informed in the sciences...but with a modesty which, with him, was almost a vice. He always saw more correctly than others, but he always believed he was wrong.... He had the greatest bravery, but a bravery that was too modest. He never dared to decide for himself, but always, out of modesty, turned for advice to others, even when he saw more accurately than they did...Louis XIV had been too proud, but Louis XV was not proud enough. Other than his excessive modesty, his great and sole vice was women; He believed that only his mistresses loved him enough to tell him the truth.  For that reason he allowed them to lead him, which contributed to his failure with finance, which was the worse aspect of his reign."[109]
+
+Others, like d'Argenson, his Minister of War commented on his extreme shyness and timidity; his inability to make conversation with others. The Duke of Luynes remarked that he often seemed to want to speak, but "his timidity stopped him and the expressions did not come; one felt that he wanted to say something obliging, but he often ended by simply asking a frivolous question."[110]
+
+Another characteristic remarked by contemporaries was his penchant for secrecy. "No one was a greater expert at dissimulation than the King", wrote d'Argenson. "He worked from morning to night to dissimulate; he did not say a word, make a gesture or demarche except to hide what he really wanted."[111]
+
+"He was the most excellent of men", wrote another contemporary, Duffort de Cheverny, "but, in defiance of himself, he spoke about the affairs of state as if someone else was governing."[112]
+
+The most famous remark attributed to Louis XV (or sometimes to Madame de Pompadour) is Après nous, le déluge ("After us, the deluge").  It is commonly explained as his indifference to financial excesses, and a prediction of the French Revolution to come.  The remark is usually taken out of its original context. It was made in 1757, a year which saw the crushing defeat of the French army by the Prussians at the Battle of Rossbach and the assassination attempt on the King.  The "Deluge" the King referred to was not a revolution, but the arrival of Halley's Comet, which was predicted to pass by the earth in 1757, and which was commonly blamed for having caused the flood described in the Bible, with predictions of a new deluge when it returned.  The King was a proficient amateur astronomer, who collaborated with the best French astronomers.  Biographer Michel Antoine wrote that the King's remark "was a manner of evoking, with his scientific culture and a good dose of black humor, this sinister year beginning with the assassination attempt by Damiens and ending with the Prussian victory". Halley's Comet finally passed the earth in April 1759, and caused enormous public attention and anxiety, but no floods.[113]
+
+Another popular legend concerned the Maison-aux-Cerfs, the house in Versailles where, when he was no longer having sexual relations with Madame de Pompadour, he sometimes slept with his petites maitresses, young women recruited for that purpose. Popular legends at the time described it as a kind of harem, organized by Madame de Pompadour, where a group of women were kidnapped and kept for the King's pleasure.  The legend circulated widely in pamphlets with lurid illustrations, and made its way into some later biographies of the King.   In reality it had only one occupant at a time, for brief periods.  Madame Pompadour herself accepted it as a preferable alternative to a rival at court, as she stated: "It is his heart I want! All these little girls with no education will not take it from me. I would not be so calm if I saw some pretty woman of the court or the capital trying to conquer it."[114]
+In  February 1765, after the death of Madame de Pompadour, it was closed.[115]
+
+Louis was a major patron of architecture; he spent more money on buildings over the course of his reign than Louis XIV. His major architectural projects were the work of his favorite court architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel. They included the Ecole Militaire (1751–1770); the Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde (1763–83); the Petit Trianon at Versailles (1762–64), and the opera theater of the Palace of Versailles. Louis began construction of the Church of Saint-Geneviève, now the Pantheon (1758–90)  He also constructed monumental squares and surrounding buildings in the centers of Nancy, Bordeaux, and Rennes.  His workshops produced fine furniture, porcelain, tapestries and other goods in the Louis XV Style which were exported to all the capital cities of Europe.[116]
+
+The King, the Queen and her daughters were major patrons of music. The queen and her children played the clavecin, under the instruction of François Couperin. The young Mozart came to Paris and wrote two sonatas for clavecin and violin which he dedicated to Madame Victoire, the King's daughter.[117]  The King himself, like his grandfather Louis XIV, was taught to dance ballet but danced only once in public, in 1725. The most important musical figure of the reign was Jean Philippe Rameau, who was the court composer through the 1740s and 1750s, and wrote more than thirty operas for Louis and his court.[118]
+
+Louis XV, guided largely by Madame de Pompadour, was the most important art patron of the period.  He commissioned François Boucher to paint pastoral scenes for his apartments in Versailles, and gave him the title of First Painter of the King in 1765.  Other artists patronized by the King included Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Jean Marc Nattier, and the sculptor Edme Bouchardon. Bouchardon created the monumental statue of Louis XV on horseback which was the centerpiece of Place Louis XV until it was pulled down during the Revolution.[119]
+
+The French philosophical movement later called the Enlightenment began and gathered force during the reign of Louis XV; In 1746 Diderot published his Pensées philosophiques, followed in 1749 by his Lettres sur les Aveugles and the first volume of the Encyclopédie, in 1751.  Montesquieu published De l'esprit des Lois in 1748.  Voltaire published le Siecle de Louis XIV and l'Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations in 1756. Rousseau became known in 1750 by the publication of Discours sur les sciences et les arts, followed in 1755 by Discours sur les origins et les fondaments de l'inégalité.  These were accompanied by new works on economics, finance, and commerce by the elder Mirabeau, François Quesnay and other scientific thinkers which undermined all of the standard assumptions of royal government, economics and fiscal policy.[120]
+
+The censors of Louis XV at first permitted these publications; the first volume of the Encylopedie received official permission because the government censors believed it was purely a collection of scientific articles.  The project soon included a multitude of authors, including Rousseau, and had four thousand subscribers. Only later did the government and King himself take notice, after the church attacked the Encylopédie for questioning official church doctrines.  The King personally removed Diderot from the list of those nominated for the Académie française, and in 1759 the Encyclopédie was formally banned.
+
+Rousseau had a resounding success in 1756 with his opera Devin du Village, and was invited to Versailles to meet the King, but he refused.  Instead, he wrote the Contrat Social calling for a new system based upon political and economic equality, published in 1762. Increasingly solitary and unstable, he wandered from province to province, before returning to Paris, where he died in solitude in 1778. His ideas, composed during the reign of Louis XV, were adopted by the revolutionaries who overthrew Louis XVI in 1789.[121]
+
+In the 1740s Voltaire was welcomed to the court as a playwright and poet, but his low rank as the son of a notary and the fact his father was also a Jansenist soon displeased the King and the Queen, and he was finally forced to depart Versailles.  He went to Berlin, where he became a counselor to Frederick the Great, before living in Geneva and Savoy, far from Paris. On one issue in particular Voltaire took the side of Louis XV; when the King suppressed the parlements of nobles, demanded that all classes be taxed equally,  and removed the charges which plaintiffs had to pay  in order to have their cases heard. He wrote:  "Parlements of the King!  You are charged with rendering justice to the people!  Render justice upon yourselves!...There is in the entire world no judicial court which has ever tried to share the power of the sovereign."  However, the King's lack of further reforms in his last years disappointed Voltaire.  When the King died, Voltaire wrote of his reign, "Fifty-six years, consumed with fatigues and wanderings."[122]
+
+For much of his lifetime Louis XV was celebrated as a national hero. Edmé Bouchardon's equestrian statue of Louis was originally conceived to commemorate the monarch's victorious role in the War of the Austrian Succession. He portrayed the king as peacemaker. It was not unveiled until 1763, following France's defeat in the Seven Years' War. Designed as a symbol of loyalty to the king, Bouchardon's work was used by the Crown for a public relations event staged to restore public confidence in a monarchy in decline. It used art as propaganda on a grand scale.[123] This statue was located on the Place Louis XV and was torn down during the Revolution.
+
+French culture and influence were at their height in the first half of the eighteenth century, but most scholars agree that Louis XV's decisions damaged the power of France, weakened the treasury, discredited the absolute monarchy, and made it more vulnerable to distrust and destruction. Scholars point to the French Revolution, which broke out 15 years after his death.[124] Norman Davies characterized Louis XV's reign as "one of debilitating stagnation", characterized by lost wars, endless clashes between the Court and the Parlements, and religious feuds.[125] Jerome Blum described him as "a perpetual adolescent called to do a man's job."[126]
+
+The view of many historians is that Louis was unequal to the high expectations of his subjects. Robert Harris wrote in 1987 that, "Historians have depicted this ruler as one of the weakest of the Bourbons, a do-nothing king who left affairs of state to ministers while indulging in his hobbies of hunting and womanizing."[127] Harris added that ministers rose and fell according to his mistresses' opinions, seriously undermining the prestige of the monarchy.
+
+Trends in 20th century French historiography, especially the Annales School, have deprecated biography and ignored the King. English historian William Doyle wrote:
+
+The political story....of the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, by contrast, had too often been scorned, and therefore neglected, as a meaningless succession of petty intrigues in boudoirs and bedrooms, unworthy of serious attention when there were economic cycles, demographic fluctuations, rising and falling classes, and deep-seated shifts in cultural values to analyse.[128]
+
+Some scholars have ignored the king's own actions and turned instead to his image in the mind of the public. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the leader of the Annales School, noted that the king was handsome, athletic, intelligent and an excellent hunter, but that he disappointed the people. He did not keep up the practice of Mass and performing his religious obligations to the people. Le Roy Ladurie wrote that the people felt he had reduced the sacred nature of the monarchy, and thereby diminished himself.[129]
+
+According to Kenneth N. Jassie and Jeffrey Merrick, contemporary songs, poems, and public declarations typically portrayed a king as "master", unblemished "Christian", and benevolent provider ("baker"). Young Louis' failings were attributed to inexperience and manipulation by his handlers. Jassie and Merrick argued in 1994  that the king's troubles mounted steadily, and the people blamed and ridiculed his debauchery. The king ignored the famines and crises of the nation. The people reviled the king in popular protest, and finally celebrated his death. The monarchy survived—for a while—but Louis XV left his successor with a damaging legacy of popular discontent.[130]
+
+Some sermons on his death in 1774 praised the monarch and went out of their way to excuse his faults. Jeffrey Merrick wrote in 1986, "But those ecclesiastics who not only raised their eyebrows over the sins of the Beloved but also expressed doubts about his policies reflected the corporate attitude of the First Estate more accurately." They prayed the new king would restore morality at court and better serve the will of God.[131]
+
+The financial strain imposed by the wars and excesses of the royal court, and the consequent dissatisfaction with the monarchy, contributed to the national unrest that culminated in the French Revolution of 1789.[132] The historian Colin Jones argued in 2011 that Louis XV left France with serious financial difficulties: "The military disasters of the Seven Years' War led to acute state financial crisis.".[133]  Ultimately, he wrote, Louis XV failed to overcome these fiscal problems, mainly because he was incapable of pulling together conflicting parties and interests in his entourage. Although aware of the forces of anti-monarchism threatening his family's rule, he did not do anything to stop them.[134]
+
+A few scholars have defended Louis, arguing that his highly negative reputation was based on propaganda meant to justify the French Revolution. Olivier Bernier in his 1984 biography argued that Louis was both popular and a leader in reforming France. During his 59-year reign, France was never threatened by conquest as no foreign army crossed its borders (though some of its overseas colonies were lost). He was known popularly as Le Bien-aimé (the well-beloved). Many of his subjects prayed for his recovery during his serious illness in Metz in 1744. His dismissal of the Parlement of Paris and his chief minister, Choiseul, in 1771, were attempts to wrest control of government from those Louis considered corrupt. He changed the tax code to try to balance the national budget. Bernier argued that these acts would have avoided the French Revolution, but his successor, Louis XVI, reversed his policies.[135] Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret wrote that Louis XV's tarnished reputation was created fifteen years after his death, to justify the French Revolution, and that the nobility during his reign were competent.[136]
+
+E. H. Gombrich wrote in 2005, "Louis XV and Louis XVI, the Sun King's [Louis XIV] successors, were incompetent, and content merely to imitate their great predecessor's outward show of power. The pomp and magnificence remained....Finance ministers soon became expert swindlers, cheating and extorting on a grand scale.  The peasants worked till they dropped and citizens were forced to pay huge taxes."[137]
+
+Jeffrey Merrick wrote in 1986 that Louis XV's weak and ineffective rule accelerated the general decline that culminated in the French Revolution in 1789. The king was a notorious womaniser; the monarch's virility was supposed to be another way in which his power was manifested. Nevertheless, Merrick wrote, popular faith in the monarchy was shaken by the scandals of Louis’ private life and by the end of his life he had become despised.[138]
+
+Many historians agreed that in terms of culture and art, France reached a high point under Louis XV. However, he was blamed for the many diplomatic, military and economic reverses. His reign was marked by ministerial instability, while his "prestige was ruined by military failure and colonial losses", concluded Jean-Denis Lepage.[139]
+
+Louis's formal style was "Très haut, très puissant et très excellent Prince Louis XV, par la grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre", or "Most high, most potent and most excellent Prince Louis XV, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre".
+
+Louis XV had several illegitimate children, although the exact number is unknown. Historiography suggest the following as possible issue of the King:
+
+Note: Both children are officially recognized by their mother's husband, although it is alleged that the King himself was the real father. The coevals attribute the paternity of both children to Louis XV for, according to documents from the Military Archive, Françoise de Châlus' husband had been wounded in the War of the Austrian Succession (1747) becoming from that moment unable to have any offspring.  The baptism of Louis, Comte de Narbonne-Lara is another indication of that paternity.[144] His wife had become the King's mistress. Not only was it noted that he was named Louis but also his contemporaries remarked on the similarities between the young Louis and the King.
+
+Note: Both children were registered as daughters of Louis Auguste, Old Official, and citizen Lucie, both non-existent persons. In August 1774 Agnès and Aphrodite received from Louis XVI their letters of recognition of nobility (demoiselles issue de la plus ancienne noblesse de France) and following the stipulations leave by Louis XV, each of them obtained a capital of 223,000 livres and a reported annual revenue of 24,300 livres.
+
+The French line of succession upon the death of Louis XV in 1774.

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+Louis XVI  (Louis-Auguste; French pronunciation: ​[lwi sɛːz]; 23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as Citizen Louis Capet during the four months just before he was executed by guillotine. In 1765, upon the death of his father, Louis, Dauphin of France, he became the new Dauphin. Upon his grandfather Louis XV's death on 10 May 1774, he assumed the title King of France and Navarre, until 4 September 1791, when he received the title of King of the French until the monarchy was abolished on 21 September 1792.
+
+The first part of his reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to abolish serfdom, remove the taille (land tax) and the corvée (labour tax),[1] and increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolish the death penalty for deserters.[2][3] The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation. Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it led to food scarcity which, during a particularly bad harvest in 1775, prompted the masses to revolt. From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the Ancien Régime. This led to the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. Discontent among the members of France's middle and lower classes resulted in strengthened opposition to the French aristocracy and to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, were viewed as representatives. Increasing tensions and violence were marked by events such as the storming of the Bastille, during which riots in Paris forced Louis to definitively recognize the legislative authority of the National Assembly.
+
+Louis' indecisiveness and conservatism led some elements of the people of France to view him as a symbol of the perceived tyranny of the Ancien Régime, and his popularity deteriorated progressively. His unsuccessful flight to Varennes in June 1791, four months before the constitutional monarchy was declared, seemed to justify the rumors that the king tied his hopes of political salvation to the prospects of foreign intervention. The credibility of the king was deeply undermined, and the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic became an ever-increasing possibility. The growth of anti-clericalism among revolutionaries resulted in the abolition of the dîme (religious land tax) and several government policies aimed at the dechristianization of France.
+
+In a context of civil and international war, Louis XVI was suspended and arrested at the time of the Insurrection of 10 August 1792. One month later, the absolute monarchy was abolished and the First French Republic was proclaimed on 21 September 1792. Louis was then tried by the National Convention (self-instituted as a tribunal for the occasion), found guilty of high treason, and executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793, as a desacralized French citizen under the name of Citizen Louis Capet, in reference to Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian dynasty – which the revolutionaries interpreted as Louis' surname. Louis XVI was the only King of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Therese, was given over to the Austrians in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.
+
+Louis-Auguste de France, who was given the title Duc de Berry at birth, was born in the Palace of Versailles. One of seven children, he was the second surviving son of Louis, the Dauphin of France, and the grandson of Louis XV of France and of his consort, Maria Leszczyńska. His mother was Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, the daughter of Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.
+
+Louis-Auguste was overlooked by his parents who favored his older brother, Louis, duc de Bourgogne, who was regarded as bright and handsome but who died at the age of nine in 1761. Louis-Auguste, a strong and healthy boy but very shy, excelled in his studies and had a strong taste for Latin, history, geography, and astronomy and became fluent in Italian and English. He enjoyed physical activities such as hunting with his grandfather and rough play with his younger brothers, Louis-Stanislas, comte de Provence, and Charles-Philippe, comte d'Artois. From an early age, Louis-Auguste was encouraged in another of his interests, locksmithing, which was seen as a useful pursuit for a child.[4]
+
+When his father died of tuberculosis on 20 December 1765, the eleven-year-old Louis-Auguste became the new Dauphin. His mother never recovered from the loss of her husband and died on 13 March 1767, also from tuberculosis.[5] The strict and conservative education he received from the Duc de La Vauguyon, "gouverneur des Enfants de France" (governor of the Children of France), from 1760 until his marriage in 1770, did not prepare him for the throne that he was to inherit in 1774 after the death of his grandfather, Louis XV. Throughout his education, Louis-Auguste received a mixture of studies particular to religion, morality, and humanities.[6] His instructors may have also had a good hand in shaping Louis-Auguste into the indecisive king that he became. Abbé Berthier, his instructor, taught him that timidity was a value in strong monarchs, and Abbé Soldini, his confessor, instructed him not to let people read his mind.[7]
+
+On 16 May 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis-Auguste married the fourteen-year-old Habsburg Archduchess Maria Antonia (better known by the French form of her name, Marie Antoinette), his second cousin once removed and the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and his wife, the Empress Maria Theresa.[8]
+
+This marriage was met with hostility from the French public. France's alliance with Austria had pulled the country into the disastrous Seven Years' War, in which it was defeated by the British and the Prussians, both in Europe and in North America. By the time that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette were married, the French people generally disliked the Austrian alliance, and Marie-Antoinette was seen as an unwelcome foreigner.[9] For the young couple, the marriage was initially amiable but distant. Louis-Auguste's shyness and, among other factors, the young age and inexperience of the newlyweds (who were near total strangers to each other: they had met only two days before their wedding) meant that the 15-year-old bridegroom failed to consummate the union with his 14-year-old bride. His fear of being manipulated by her for imperial purposes caused him to behave coldly towards her in public.[10] Over time, the couple became closer, though while their marriage was reportedly consummated in July 1773, it did not actually happen until 1777.[11]
+
+The couple's failure to produce any children for several years placed a strain upon their marriage,[12] exacerbated by the publication of obscene pamphlets (libelles) mocking their infertility. One questioned, "Can the King do it? Can't the King do it?"[13]
+
+The reasons for the couple's initial failure to have children were debated at that time, and they have continued to be debated since. One suggestion is that Louis-Auguste suffered from a physiological dysfunction,[14] most often thought to be phimosis, a suggestion first made in late 1772 by the royal doctors.[15] Historians adhering to this view suggest that he was circumcised[16] (a common treatment for phimosis) to relieve the condition seven years after their marriage. Louis's doctors were not in favour of the surgery – the operation was delicate and traumatic, and capable of doing "as much harm as good" to an adult male. The argument for phimosis and a resulting operation is mostly seen to originate from Stefan Zweig's 1932 biography of Marie Antoinette.
+
+Most modern historians agree that Louis had no surgery[17][18][19] – for instance, as late as 1777, the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported that the King of France had definitely declined the operation.[20] Louis was frequently declared to be perfectly capable of sexual intercourse, as confirmed by Joseph II, and during the time he was supposed to have had the operation, he went out hunting almost every day, according to his journal. This would not have been possible if he had undergone a circumcision; at the very least, he would have been unable to ride to the hunt for a few weeks afterwards. The couple's sexual problems are now attributed to other factors. Antonia Fraser's biography of the queen discusses Joseph II's letter on the matter to one of his brothers after he visited Versailles in 1777. In the letter, Joseph describes in astonishingly frank detail Louis' inadequate performance in the marriage bed and Antoinette's lack of interest in conjugal activity. Joseph described the couple as "complete fumblers"; however, with his advice, Louis began to apply himself more effectively to his marital duties, and in the third week of March 1778 Marie Antoinette became pregnant.
+
+Eventually, the royal couple became the parents of four children. According to Madame Campan, Marie Antoinette's lady-in-waiting, the queen also suffered two miscarriages. The first one, in 1779, a few months after the birth of her first child, is mentioned in a letter to her daughter, written in July by empress Maria Theresa. Madame Campan states that Louis spent an entire morning consoling his wife at her bedside, and swore to secrecy everyone who knew of the occurrence. Marie Antoinette suffered a second miscarriage on the night of 2–3 November 1783.
+
+Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were the parents of four live-born children:
+
+In addition to his biological children, Louis XVI also adopted six children: "Armand" Francois-Michel Gagné (c. 1771-1792), a poor orphan adopted in 1776; Jean Amilcar (c. 1781-1793), a Senegalese slave boy given to the queen as a present by Chevalier de Boufflers in 1787, but whom she instead had freed, baptized, adopted and placed in a pension; Ernestine Lambriquet (1778-1813), daughter of two servants at the palace, who was raised as the playmate of his daughter and whom he adopted after the death of her mother in 1788; and finally "Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire (born in 1787), who was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters when her parents, an usher and his wife in service of the king, had died.[21]
+
+Of these, only Armand, Ernestine and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also formally foster children of the royal couple, simply lived on the queen's expense until her imprisonment, which proved fatal for at least Amilcar, as he was evicted from the boarding school when the fee was no longer paid, and reportedly starved to death on the street.[21] Armand and Zoe had a position which was more similar to that of Ernestine: Armand lived at court with the king and queen until he left them at the outbreak of the revolution because of his republican sympathies, and Zoe was chosen to be the playmate of the Dauphin, just as Ernestine had once been selected as the playmate of Marie-Therese, and sent away to her sisters in a convent boarding school before the Flight to Varennes in 1791.[21]
+
+When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in 1774, he was nineteen years old. He had an enormous responsibility, as the government was deeply in debt, and resentment of despotic monarchy was on the rise. He himself felt woefully unqualified to resolve the situation.
+
+As king, Louis XVI focused primarily on religious freedom and foreign policy. While none doubted his intellectual ability to rule France, it was quite clear that, although raised as the Dauphin since 1765, he lacked firmness and decisiveness. His desire to be loved by his people is evident in the prefaces of many of his edicts that would often explain the nature and good intention of his actions as benefiting the people, such as reinstating the parlements. When questioned about his decision, he said, "It may be considered politically unwise, but it seems to me to be the general wish and I want to be loved."[22] In spite of his indecisiveness, Louis XVI was determined to be a good king, stating that he "must always consult public opinion; it is never wrong."[23] He, therefore, appointed an experienced advisor, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Comte de Maurepas who, until his death in 1781, would take charge of many important ministerial functions.
+
+Among the major events of Louis XVI's reign was his signing of the Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance, on 7 November 1787, which was registered in the parlement on 29 January 1788. Granting non-Roman Catholics – Huguenots and Lutherans, as well as Jews – civil and legal status in France and the legal right to practice their faiths, this edict effectively nullified the Edict of Fontainebleau that had been law for 102 years. The Edict of Versailles did not legally proclaim freedom of religion in France – this took two more years, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 – however, it was an important step in eliminating religious tensions and it officially ended religious persecution within his realm.[24]
+
+Radical financial reforms by Turgot and Malesherbes angered the nobles and were blocked by the parlements who insisted that the King did not have the legal right to levy new taxes. So, in 1776, Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned, to be replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker supported the American Revolution, and he carried out a policy of taking out large international loans instead of raising taxes. He attempted to gain public favor in 1781 by publishing of the first ever accounting of the French Crown's expenses and accounts, the Compte-rendu au Roi. This misleading publication led the people of France to believe the kingdom ran a modest surplus.[25] When this policy of hiding and ignoring the kingdom's financial woes failed miserably, Louis dismissed and replaced him in 1783 with Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who increased public spending to "buy" the country's way out of debt. Again this failed, so Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne. When the nobles were informed of the true extent of the debt, they were shocked and rejected the plan.
+
+After this, Louis XVI and his new Controller-General des finances, Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, tried to simply force the Parlement de Paris to register the new laws and fiscal reforms. Upon the refusal of the members of the Parlement, Louis XVI tried to use his absolute power to subjugate them by every means: enforcing in many occasions the registration of his reforms (6 August 1787, 19 November 1787, and 8 May 1788), exiling all Parlement magistrates to Troyes as a punishment on 15 August 1787, prohibiting six members from attending parliamentary sessions on 19 November, arresting two very important members of the Parlement, who opposed his reforms, on 6 May 1788, and even dissolving and depriving of all power the "Parlement," replacing it with a plenary court, on 8 May 1788. The failure of these measures and displays of royal power is attributable to three decisive factors. First, the majority of the population stood in favor of the Parlement against the King, and thus continuously rebelled against him. Second, the royal treasury was financially destitute to a crippling degree, leaving it incapable of sustaining its own imposed reforms. Third, although the King enjoyed as much absolute power as his predecessors, he lacked the personal authority crucial for absolutism to function properly. Now unpopular to both the commoners and the aristocracy, Louis XVI was therefore only very briefly able to impose his decisions and reforms, for periods ranging from 2 to 4 months, before having to revoke them.
+
+As authority dissipated from him and reforms were clearly becoming unavoidable, there were increasingly loud calls for him to convoke the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614 (at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII). As a last-ditch attempt to get new monetary reforms approved, Louis XVI convoked the Estates-General on 8 August 1788, setting the date of their opening on 1 May 1789. With the convocation of the Estates-General, as in many other instances during his reign, Louis XVI placed his reputation and public image in the hands of those who were perhaps not as sensitive to the desires of the French population as he was. Because it had been so long since the Estates-General had been convened, there was some debate as to which procedures should be followed. Ultimately, the Parlement de Paris agreed that "all traditional observances should be carefully maintained to avoid the impression that the Estates-General could make things up as it went along." Under this decision, the king agreed to retain many of the traditions which had been the norm in 1614 and prior convocations of the Estates-General, but which were intolerable to a Third Estate buoyed by recent proclamations of equality. For example, the First and Second Estates proceeded into the assembly wearing their finest garments, while the Third Estate was required to wear plain, oppressively somber black, an act of alienation that Louis XVI would likely have not condoned. He seemed to regard the deputies of the Estates-General with respect: in a wave of self-important patriotism, members of the Estates refused to remove their hats in the King's presence, so Louis removed his to them.[26]
+
+This convocation was one of the events that transformed the general economic and political malaise of the country into the French Revolution. In June 1789, the Third Estate unilaterally declared itself the National Assembly. Louis XVI's attempts to control it resulted in the Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume), on 20 June, the declaration of the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and eventually to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July, which started the French Revolution. Within three short months, the majority of the king's executive authority had been transferred to the elected representatives of the Nation.
+
+French involvement in the Seven Years' War had left Louis XVI a disastrous inheritance. Britain's victories had seen them capture most of France's colonial territories. While some were returned to France at the 1763 Treaty of Paris, a vast swath of North America was ceded to the British.
+
+This had led to a strategy amongst the French leadership of seeking to rebuild the French military in order to fight a war of revenge against Britain, in which it was hoped the lost colonies could be recovered. France still maintained a strong influence in the West Indies, and in India maintained five trading posts, leaving opportunities for disputes and power-play with Great Britain.[27]
+
+In the spring of 1776, Vergennes, the Foreign Secretary, saw an opportunity to humiliate France's long-standing enemy, Great Britain, and to recover territory lost during the Seven Years' War, by supporting the American Revolution. In the same year Louis was persuaded by Pierre Beaumarchais to send supplies, ammunition, and guns to the rebels secretly. Early in 1778 he signed a formal Treaty of Alliance, and later that year France went to war with Britain. In deciding in favor of war, despite France's large financial problems, the King was materially influenced by alarmist reports after the Battle of Saratoga, which suggested that Britain was preparing to make huge concessions to the thirteen colonies and then, allied with them, to strike at French and Spanish possessions in the West Indies.[28] Spain and the Netherlands soon joined the French in an anti-British coalition. After 1778, Great Britain switched its focus to the West Indies, as defending the sugar islands was considered more important than trying to recover the thirteen colonies. France and Spain planned to invade the British Isles themselves with the Armada of 1779, but the operation never went ahead.
+
+France's initial military assistance to the American rebels was a disappointment, with defeats at Rhode Island and Savannah. In 1780, France sent Rochambeau and Grasse to help the Americans, along with large land and naval forces. The French expeditionary force arrived in North America in July 1780. The appearance of French fleets in the Caribbean was followed by the capture of a number of the sugar islands, including Tobago and Grenada.[29] In October 1781, the French naval blockade was instrumental in forcing a British army under Cornwallis to surrender at the Siege of Yorktown.[30] When news of this reached London in March 1782, the government of Lord North fell and Great Britain immediately sued for peace terms; however, France delayed the end of the war until September 1783 in the hope of overrunning more British colonies in India and the West Indies.
+
+Great Britain recognized the independence of the thirteen colonies as the United States of America, and the French war ministry rebuilt its army. However, the British defeated the main French fleet in 1782 and successfully defended Jamaica and Gibraltar. France gained little from the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the war, except the colonies of Tobago and Senegal. Louis XVI was wholly disappointed in his aims of recovering Canada, India, and other islands in the West Indies from Britain, as they were too well defended and the Royal Navy made any attempted invasion of mainland Britain impossible. The war cost 1,066 million livres, financed by new loans at high interest (with no new taxes). Necker concealed the crisis from the public by explaining only that ordinary revenues exceeded ordinary expenses, and not mentioning the loans. After he was forced from office in 1781, new taxes were levied.[31]
+
+This intervention in America was not possible without France adopting a neutral position in European affairs to avoid being drawn into a continental war which would be simply a repetition of the French policy mistakes in the Seven Years' War. Vergennes, supported by King Louis, refused to go to War to support Austria in the Bavarian Succession crisis in 1778, when Austrian Holy Roman Emperor Joseph tried to control parts of Bavaria. Vergennes and Maurepas refused to support the Austrian position, but the intervention of Marie Antoinette in favor of Austria obliged France to adopt a position more favorable to Austria, which in the treaty of Teschen was able to get in compensation a territory whose population numbered around 100,000 persons. However, this intervention was a disaster for the image of the Queen, who was named "l'Autrichienne" (a pun in French meaning "Austrian", but the "chienne" suffix can mean "bitch") on account of it.[32]
+
+Louis XVI hoped to use the American Revolutionary War as an opportunity to expel the British from India.[27] In 1782, he sealed an alliance with the Peshwa Madhu Rao Narayan. As a consequence, Bussy moved his troops to the Isle de France (now Mauritius) and later contributed to the French effort in India in 1783.[27][33] Suffren became the ally of Hyder Ali in the Second Anglo-Mysore War against British rule in India, in 1782–1783, fighting the British fleet along the coasts of India and Ceylon.[34][35]
+
+France also intervened in Cochinchina following Mgr Pigneau de Béhaine's intervention to obtain military aid. A France-Cochinchina alliance was signed through the Treaty of Versailles of 1787, between Louis XVI and Prince Nguyễn Ánh.[36]
+
+Louis XVI also encouraged major voyages of exploration. In 1785, he appointed La Pérouse to lead a sailing expedition around the world. (La Pérouse and his fleet disappeared after leaving Botany Bay in March 1788. Louis is recorded as having asked, on the morning of his execution, "Any news of La Pérouse?".)[37]
+
+There is a lack of scholarship on the subject of Louis XVI's time as a constitutional monarch, though it was a significant length of time. The reason as to why many biographers have not elaborated extensively on this time in the king's life is due to the uncertainty surrounding his actions during this period, as Louis XVI's declaration that was left behind in the Tuileries stated that he regarded his actions during constitutional reign provisional; he reflected that his "palace was a prison". This time period was exemplary in its demonstration of an institution's deliberation while in their last standing moments.[38]
+
+Louis XVI's time in his previous palace came to an end on 5 October 1789, when an angry mob of Parisian working men and women was incited by revolutionaries and marched on the Palace of Versailles, where the royal family lived. At dawn, they infiltrated the palace and attempted to kill the queen, who was associated with a frivolous lifestyle that symbolized much that was despised about the Ancien Régime. After the situation had been defused by Lafayette, head of the Garde nationale, the king and his family were brought by the crowd to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the reasoning being that the king would be more accountable to the people if he lived among them in Paris.
+
+The Revolution's principles of popular sovereignty, though central to democratic principles of later eras, marked a decisive break from the centuries-old principle of divine right that was at the heart of the French monarchy. As a result, the Revolution was opposed by many of the rural people of France and by all the governments of France's neighbors. Still, within the city of Paris and amongst the philosophers of the time, many of which were members of the National Assembly, the monarchy had next to no support. As the Revolution became more radical and the masses more uncontrollable, several of the Revolution's leading figures began to doubt its benefits. Some, like Honoré Mirabeau, secretly plotted with the Crown to restore its power in a new constitutional form.
+
+Beginning in 1791, Montmorin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, started to organize covert resistance to the revolutionary forces. Thus, the funds of the Liste Civile, voted annually by the National Assembly, were partially assigned to secret expenses in order to preserve the monarchy. Arnault Laporte, who was in charge of the Civil list, collaborated with both Montmorin and Mirabeau. After the sudden death of Mirabeau, Maximilien Radix de Sainte-Foix, a noted financier, took his place. In effect, he headed a secret council of advisers to Louis XVI, which tried to preserve the monarchy; these schemes proved unsuccessful, and were exposed later when the armoire de fer was discovered. Regarding the financial difficulties facing France, the Assembly created the Comité des Finances, and while Louis XVI attempted to declare his concern and interest in remedying the economic situations, inclusively offering to melt crown silver as a dramatic measure, it appeared to the public that the king did not understand that such statements no longer held the same meaning as they did before and that doing such a thing could not restore the economy of a country.[38]
+
+Mirabeau's death on 7 April, and Louis XVI's indecision, fatally weakened negotiations between the Crown and moderate politicians. The Third Estate leaders also had no desire in turning back or remaining moderate after their hard efforts to change the politics of the time, and so the plans for a constitutional monarchy did not last long. On one hand, Louis was nowhere near as reactionary as his brothers, the comte de Provence[citation needed] and the comte d'Artois, and he repeatedly sent messages to them requesting a halt to their attempts to launch counter-coups. This was often done through his secretly nominated regent, the Cardinal Loménie de Brienne. On the other hand, Louis was alienated from the new democratic government both by its negative reaction to the traditional role of the monarch and in its treatment of him and his family. He was particularly irked by being kept essentially as a prisoner in the Tuileries, and by the refusal of the new regime to allow him to have confessors and priests of his choice rather than 'constitutional priests' pledged to the state and not the Roman Catholic Church.
+
+On 21 June 1791, Louis XVI attempted to flee secretly with his family from Paris to the royalist fortress town of Montmédy on the northeastern border of France, where he would join the émigrés and be protected by Austria. The voyage was planned by the Swedish nobleman, and often assumed secret lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette, Axel von Fersen.[39][40]
+
+While the National Assembly worked painstakingly towards a constitution, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were involved in plans of their own. Louis had appointed Breteuil to act as plenipotentiary, dealing with other foreign heads of state in an attempt to bring about a counter-revolution. Louis himself held reservations against depending on foreign assistance. Like his mother and father, he thought that the Austrians were treacherous and the Prussians were overly ambitious.[41] As tensions in Paris rose and he was pressured to accept measures from the Assembly against his will, Louis XVI and the queen plotted to secretly escape from France. Beyond escape, they hoped to raise an "armed congress" with the help of the émigrés, as well as assistance from other nations with which they could return and, in essence, recapture France. This degree of planning reveals Louis' political determination, but it was for this determined plot that he was eventually convicted of high treason.[42] He left behind (on his bed) a 16-page written manifesto, Déclaration du roi, adressée à tous les François, à sa sortie de Paris,[43] traditionally known as the Testament politique de Louis XVI ("Political Testament of Louis XVI"), explaining his rejection of the constitutional system as illegitimate; it was printed in the newspapers. However, his indecision, many delays, and misunderstanding of France were responsible for the failure of the escape. Within 24 hours, the royal family was arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne shortly after Jean-Baptiste Drouet, who recognised the king from his profile on a 50 livres assignat[44] (paper money), had given the alert. Louis XVI and his family were taken back to Paris where they arrived on 25 June. Viewed suspiciously as traitors, they were placed under tight house arrest upon their return to the Tuileries.[45]
+
+At the individual level, the failure of the escape plans was due to a series of misadventures, delays, misinterpretations, and poor judgments.[46] In a wider perspective, the failure was attributable to the king's indecision—he repeatedly postponed the schedule, allowing for smaller problems to become severe. Furthermore, he totally misunderstood the political situation. He thought only a small number of radicals in Paris were promoting a revolution that the people as a whole rejected. He thought, mistakenly, that he was beloved by his subjects.[47] The king's flight in the short term was traumatic for France, inciting a wave of emotions that ranged from anxiety to violence to panic. Everyone realized that war was imminent. The deeper realization, that the king had in fact repudiated the Revolution, was an even greater shock for people who until then had seen him as a good king who governed as a manifestation of God's will. They felt betrayed, and as a result, Republicanism now burst out of the coffee houses and became a dominating philosophy of the rapidly radicalized French Revolution.[48]
+
+The other monarchies of Europe looked with concern upon the developments in France, and considered whether they should intervene, either in support of Louis or to take advantage of the chaos in France. The key figure was Marie-Antoinette's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. Initially, he had looked on the Revolution with equanimity. However, he became more and more disturbed as it became more and more radical. Despite this, he still hoped to avoid war.
+
+On 27 August, Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia, in consultation with émigrés French nobles, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which declared the interest of the monarchs of Europe in the well-being of Louis and his family, and threatened vague but severe consequences if anything should befall them. Although Leopold saw the Pillnitz Declaration as an easy way to appear concerned about the developments in France without committing any soldiers or finances to change them, the revolutionary leaders in Paris viewed it fearfully as a dangerous foreign attempt to undermine France's sovereignty.
+
+In addition to the ideological differences between France and the monarchical powers of Europe, there were continuing disputes over the status of Austrian estates in Alsace, and the concern of members of the National Constituent Assembly about the agitation of émigrés nobles abroad, especially in the Austrian Netherlands and the minor states of Germany.
+
+In the end, the Legislative Assembly, supported by Louis XVI, declared war on Austria ("the King of Bohemia and Hungary") first, voting for war on 20 April 1792, after a long list of grievances was presented to it by the foreign minister, Charles François Dumouriez. Dumouriez prepared an immediate invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, where he expected the local population to rise against Austrian rule. However, the Revolution had thoroughly disorganised the army, and the forces raised were insufficient for the invasion. The soldiers fled at the first sign of battle and, in one case, on 28 April 1792, murdered their general, Irish-born comte Théobald de Dillon, whom they accused of treason.[49]
+
+While the revolutionary government frantically raised fresh troops and reorganised its armies, a Prussian-Austrian army under Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick assembled at Coblenz on the Rhine. In July, the invasion began, with Brunswick's army easily taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun. The duke then issued on 25 July a proclamation called the Brunswick Manifesto, written by Louis's émigré cousin, the Prince de Condé, declaring the intent of the Austrians and Prussians to restore the king to his full powers and to treat any person or town who opposed them as rebels to be condemned to death by martial law.
+
+Contrary to its intended purpose of strengthening Louis XVI's position against the revolutionaries, the Brunswick Manifesto had the opposite effect of greatly undermining his already highly tenuous position. It was taken by many to be the final proof of collusion between the king and foreign powers in a conspiracy against his own country. The anger of the populace boiled over on 10 August when an armed mob – with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the Insurrectional Paris Commune – marched upon and invaded the Tuileries Palace. The royal family took shelter with the Legislative Assembly.
+
+Louis was officially arrested on 13 August 1792 and sent to the Temple, an ancient fortress in Paris that was used as a prison. On 21 September, the National Assembly declared France to be a Republic, and abolished the monarchy. Louis was stripped of all of his titles and honors, and from this date was known as Citoyen Louis Capet.
+
+The Girondins were partial to keeping the deposed king under arrest, both as a hostage and a guarantee for the future. Members of the Commune and the most radical deputies, who would soon form the group known as the Mountain, argued for Louis's immediate execution. The legal background of many of the deputies made it difficult for a great number of them to accept an execution without the due process of law, and it was voted that the deposed monarch be tried before the National Convention, the organ that housed the representatives of the sovereign people. In many ways, the former king's trial represented the trial of the monarchy by the revolution. It was seen as if with the death of one came the life of the other. Michelet argued that the death of the former king would lead to the acceptance of violence as a tool for happiness. He said, "If we accept the proposition that one person can be sacrificed for the happiness of the many, it will soon be demonstrated that two or three or more could also be sacrificed for the happiness of the many. Little by little, we will find reasons for sacrificing the many for the happiness of the many, and we will think it was a bargain."[50]
+
+Two events led up to the trial for Louis XVI. First, after the Battle of Valmy on 22 September 1792, General Dumouriez negotiated with the Prussians who evacuated France. Louis could no longer be considered a hostage or as leverage in negotiations with the invading forces.[51] Second, in November 1792, the armoire de fer (iron chest) incident took place at the Tuileries Palace, when the existence of the hidden safe in the king's bedroom containing compromising documents and correspondence, was revealed by François Gamain, the Versailles locksmith who had installed it. Gaiman went to Paris on 20 November and told Jean-Marie Roland, Girondinist Minister of the Interior, who ordered it opened.[52] The resulting scandal served to discredit the king. Following these two events the Girondins could no longer keep the king from trial.[51]
+
+On 11 December, among crowded and silent streets, the deposed king was brought from the Temple to stand before the Convention and hear his indictment, an accusation of high treason and crimes against the State. On 26 December, his counsel, Raymond Desèze, delivered Louis' response to the charges, with the assistance of François Tronchet and Malesherbes. Before the trial started and Louis mounted his defense to the Convention, he told his lawyers that he knew he would be found guilty and be killed, but to prepare and act as though they could win. He was resigned to and accepted his fate before the verdict was determined, but he was willing to fight to be remembered as a good king for his people.[53]
+
+The Convention would be voting on three questions: first, Is Louis guilty; second, whatever the decision, should there be an appeal to the people; and third, if found guilty, what punishment should Louis suffer? The order of the voting on each question was a compromise within the Jacobin movement between the Girondins and Mountain; neither were satisfied but both accepted.[54]
+
+On 15 January 1793, the Convention, composed of 721 deputies, voted on the verdict. Given the overwhelming evidence of Louis's collusion with the invaders, the verdict was a foregone conclusion – with 693 deputies voting guilty, none for acquittal, with 23 abstaining.[55] The next day, a roll-call vote was carried out to decide upon the fate of the former king, and the result was uncomfortably close for such a dramatic decision. 288 of the deputies voted against death and for some other alternative, mainly some means of imprisonment or exile. 72 of the deputies voted for the death penalty, but subject to several delaying conditions and reservations. The voting took a total of 36 hours.[54] 361 of the deputies voted for Louis's immediate execution. Louis was condemned to death by a majority of one vote. Philippe Égalité, formerly the Duke of Orléans and Louis' cousin, voted for Louis' execution, a cause of much future bitterness among French monarchists; he would himself be guillotined on the same scaffold, Place de la Révolution, before the end of the same year, on 6 November 1793.[56]
+
+The next day, a motion to grant Louis XVI reprieve from the death sentence was voted down: 310 of the deputies requested mercy, but 380 voted for the immediate execution of the death penalty. This decision would be final. Malesherbes wanted to break the news to Louis and bitterly lamented the verdict, but Louis told him he would see him again in a happier life and he would regret leaving a friend like Malesherbes behind. The last thing Louis said to him was that he needed to control his tears because all eyes would be upon him.[57]
+
+On Monday, 21 January 1793, Louis XVI, at age 38, was beheaded by guillotine on the  Place de la Révolution. As Louis XVI mounted the scaffold, he appeared dignified and resigned. He delivered a short speech in which he pardoned "...those who are the cause of my death.... ".[58] He then declared himself innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, praying that his blood would not fall back on France.[59] Many accounts suggest Louis XVI's desire to say more, but Antoine-Joseph Santerre, a general in the National Guard, halted the speech by ordering a drum roll. The former king was then quickly beheaded.[60] Some accounts of Louis's beheading indicate that the blade did not sever his neck entirely the first time. There are also accounts of a blood-curdling scream issuing from Louis after the blade fell but this is unlikely, since the blade severed Louis's spine. The executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, testified that the former king had bravely met his fate.[61]
+
+Immediately after his execution, Louis XVI's corpse was transported in a cart to the nearby Madeleine cemetery, located rue d'Anjou, where those guillotined at the Place de la Révolution were buried in mass graves. Before his burial, a short religious service was held in the Madeleine church (destroyed in 1799) by two priests who had sworn allegiance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Afterward, Louis XVI, his severed head placed between his feet, was buried in an unmarked grave, with quicklime spread over his body.[citation needed] The Madeleine cemetery was closed in 1794. In 1815 Louis XVIII had the remains of his brother Louis XVI and of his sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette transferred and buried in the Basilica of St Denis, the Royal necropolis of the Kings and Queens of France. Between 1816 and 1826, a commemorative monument, the Chapelle expiatoire, was erected at the location of the former cemetery and church.[citation needed]
+
+While Louis's blood dripped to the ground, several onlookers ran forward to dip their handkerchiefs in it.[62] This account was proven true in 2012 after a DNA comparison linked blood thought to be from Louis XVI's beheading to DNA taken from tissue samples originating from what was long thought to be the mummified head of his ancestor, Henry IV of France. The blood sample was taken from a squash gourd carved to commemorate the heroes of the French Revolution that had, according to legend, been used to house one of the handkerchiefs dipped in Louis's blood.[63]
+
+The 19th-century historian Jules Michelet attributed the restoration of the French monarchy to the sympathy that had been engendered by the execution of Louis XVI. Michelet's Histoire de la Révolution Française and Alphonse de Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins, in particular, showed the marks of the feelings aroused by the revolution's regicide. The two writers did not share the same sociopolitical vision, but they agreed that, even though the monarchy was rightly ended in 1792, the lives of the royal family should have been spared. Lack of compassion at that moment contributed to a radicalization of revolutionary violence and to greater divisiveness among Frenchmen. For the 20th century novelist Albert Camus the execution signaled the end of the role of God in history, for which he mourned. For the 20th century philosopher Jean-François Lyotard the regicide was the starting point of all French thought, the memory of which acts as a reminder that French modernity began under the sign of a crime.[64]
+
+Louis' daughter, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, the future Duchess of Angoulême, survived the French Revolution, and she lobbied in Rome energetically for the canonization of her father as a saint of the Catholic Church. Despite his signing of the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy", Louis had been described as a martyr by Pope Pius VI in 1793.[65] In 1820, however, a memorandum of the Congregation of Rites in Rome, declaring the impossibility of proving that Louis had been executed for religious rather than political reasons, put an end to hopes of canonization.
+
+King Louis XVI has been portrayed in numerous films. In Captain of the Guard (1930), he is played by Stuart Holmes. In Marie Antoinette (1938), he was played by Robert Morley. Jean-François Balmer portrayed him in the 1989 two-part miniseries La Révolution française. More recently, he was depicted in the 2006 film Marie Antoinette by Jason Schwartzman. In Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'était conté, Louis was portrayed by one of the film's producers, Gilbert Bokanowski, using the alias Gilbert Boka. Several portrayals have upheld the image of a bumbling, almost foolish king, such as that by Jacques Morel in the 1956 French film Marie-Antoinette reine de France and that by Terence Budd in the Lady Oscar live action film. In Start the Revolution Without Me, Louis XVI is portrayed by Hugh Griffith as a laughable cuckold. Mel Brooks played a comic version of Louis XVI in The History of the World Part 1, portraying him as a libertine who has such distaste for the peasantry he uses them as targets in skeet shooting. In the 1996 film Ridicule; Urbain Cancelier plays Louis.
+
+Louis XVI has been the subject of novels as well, including two of the alternate histories anthologized in If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931): "If Drouet's Cart Had Stuck" by Hilaire Belloc and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness" by André Maurois, which tell very different stories but both imagine Louis surviving and still reigning in the early 19th century. Louis appears in the children's book Ben and Me by Robert Lawson but does not appear in the 1953 animated short film based on the same book.
+
+Larmuseau et al. (2013)[66] tested the Y-DNA of three living members of the House of Bourbon, one descending from Louis XIII of France via King Louis Philippe I, and two from Louis XIV via Philip V of Spain, and concluded that all three men share the same STR haplotype and belonged to Haplogroup_R1b (R-M343). The three individuals were further assigned to sub-haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1b* (R-Z381*). These results contradicted an earlier DNA analysis of a handkerchief dipped in the presumptive blood of Louis XVI after his execution performed by Laluez-Fo et al. (2010).[67]
+
+Louis's formal style before the revolution was "Louis XVI, par la grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre", or "Louis XVI, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre".

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+Louis XVI  (Louis-Auguste; French pronunciation: ​[lwi sɛːz]; 23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as Citizen Louis Capet during the four months just before he was executed by guillotine. In 1765, upon the death of his father, Louis, Dauphin of France, he became the new Dauphin. Upon his grandfather Louis XV's death on 10 May 1774, he assumed the title King of France and Navarre, until 4 September 1791, when he received the title of King of the French until the monarchy was abolished on 21 September 1792.
+
+The first part of his reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to abolish serfdom, remove the taille (land tax) and the corvée (labour tax),[1] and increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolish the death penalty for deserters.[2][3] The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation. Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it led to food scarcity which, during a particularly bad harvest in 1775, prompted the masses to revolt. From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the Ancien Régime. This led to the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. Discontent among the members of France's middle and lower classes resulted in strengthened opposition to the French aristocracy and to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, were viewed as representatives. Increasing tensions and violence were marked by events such as the storming of the Bastille, during which riots in Paris forced Louis to definitively recognize the legislative authority of the National Assembly.
+
+Louis' indecisiveness and conservatism led some elements of the people of France to view him as a symbol of the perceived tyranny of the Ancien Régime, and his popularity deteriorated progressively. His unsuccessful flight to Varennes in June 1791, four months before the constitutional monarchy was declared, seemed to justify the rumors that the king tied his hopes of political salvation to the prospects of foreign intervention. The credibility of the king was deeply undermined, and the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic became an ever-increasing possibility. The growth of anti-clericalism among revolutionaries resulted in the abolition of the dîme (religious land tax) and several government policies aimed at the dechristianization of France.
+
+In a context of civil and international war, Louis XVI was suspended and arrested at the time of the Insurrection of 10 August 1792. One month later, the absolute monarchy was abolished and the First French Republic was proclaimed on 21 September 1792. Louis was then tried by the National Convention (self-instituted as a tribunal for the occasion), found guilty of high treason, and executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793, as a desacralized French citizen under the name of Citizen Louis Capet, in reference to Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian dynasty – which the revolutionaries interpreted as Louis' surname. Louis XVI was the only King of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Therese, was given over to the Austrians in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.
+
+Louis-Auguste de France, who was given the title Duc de Berry at birth, was born in the Palace of Versailles. One of seven children, he was the second surviving son of Louis, the Dauphin of France, and the grandson of Louis XV of France and of his consort, Maria Leszczyńska. His mother was Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, the daughter of Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.
+
+Louis-Auguste was overlooked by his parents who favored his older brother, Louis, duc de Bourgogne, who was regarded as bright and handsome but who died at the age of nine in 1761. Louis-Auguste, a strong and healthy boy but very shy, excelled in his studies and had a strong taste for Latin, history, geography, and astronomy and became fluent in Italian and English. He enjoyed physical activities such as hunting with his grandfather and rough play with his younger brothers, Louis-Stanislas, comte de Provence, and Charles-Philippe, comte d'Artois. From an early age, Louis-Auguste was encouraged in another of his interests, locksmithing, which was seen as a useful pursuit for a child.[4]
+
+When his father died of tuberculosis on 20 December 1765, the eleven-year-old Louis-Auguste became the new Dauphin. His mother never recovered from the loss of her husband and died on 13 March 1767, also from tuberculosis.[5] The strict and conservative education he received from the Duc de La Vauguyon, "gouverneur des Enfants de France" (governor of the Children of France), from 1760 until his marriage in 1770, did not prepare him for the throne that he was to inherit in 1774 after the death of his grandfather, Louis XV. Throughout his education, Louis-Auguste received a mixture of studies particular to religion, morality, and humanities.[6] His instructors may have also had a good hand in shaping Louis-Auguste into the indecisive king that he became. Abbé Berthier, his instructor, taught him that timidity was a value in strong monarchs, and Abbé Soldini, his confessor, instructed him not to let people read his mind.[7]
+
+On 16 May 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis-Auguste married the fourteen-year-old Habsburg Archduchess Maria Antonia (better known by the French form of her name, Marie Antoinette), his second cousin once removed and the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and his wife, the Empress Maria Theresa.[8]
+
+This marriage was met with hostility from the French public. France's alliance with Austria had pulled the country into the disastrous Seven Years' War, in which it was defeated by the British and the Prussians, both in Europe and in North America. By the time that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette were married, the French people generally disliked the Austrian alliance, and Marie-Antoinette was seen as an unwelcome foreigner.[9] For the young couple, the marriage was initially amiable but distant. Louis-Auguste's shyness and, among other factors, the young age and inexperience of the newlyweds (who were near total strangers to each other: they had met only two days before their wedding) meant that the 15-year-old bridegroom failed to consummate the union with his 14-year-old bride. His fear of being manipulated by her for imperial purposes caused him to behave coldly towards her in public.[10] Over time, the couple became closer, though while their marriage was reportedly consummated in July 1773, it did not actually happen until 1777.[11]
+
+The couple's failure to produce any children for several years placed a strain upon their marriage,[12] exacerbated by the publication of obscene pamphlets (libelles) mocking their infertility. One questioned, "Can the King do it? Can't the King do it?"[13]
+
+The reasons for the couple's initial failure to have children were debated at that time, and they have continued to be debated since. One suggestion is that Louis-Auguste suffered from a physiological dysfunction,[14] most often thought to be phimosis, a suggestion first made in late 1772 by the royal doctors.[15] Historians adhering to this view suggest that he was circumcised[16] (a common treatment for phimosis) to relieve the condition seven years after their marriage. Louis's doctors were not in favour of the surgery – the operation was delicate and traumatic, and capable of doing "as much harm as good" to an adult male. The argument for phimosis and a resulting operation is mostly seen to originate from Stefan Zweig's 1932 biography of Marie Antoinette.
+
+Most modern historians agree that Louis had no surgery[17][18][19] – for instance, as late as 1777, the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported that the King of France had definitely declined the operation.[20] Louis was frequently declared to be perfectly capable of sexual intercourse, as confirmed by Joseph II, and during the time he was supposed to have had the operation, he went out hunting almost every day, according to his journal. This would not have been possible if he had undergone a circumcision; at the very least, he would have been unable to ride to the hunt for a few weeks afterwards. The couple's sexual problems are now attributed to other factors. Antonia Fraser's biography of the queen discusses Joseph II's letter on the matter to one of his brothers after he visited Versailles in 1777. In the letter, Joseph describes in astonishingly frank detail Louis' inadequate performance in the marriage bed and Antoinette's lack of interest in conjugal activity. Joseph described the couple as "complete fumblers"; however, with his advice, Louis began to apply himself more effectively to his marital duties, and in the third week of March 1778 Marie Antoinette became pregnant.
+
+Eventually, the royal couple became the parents of four children. According to Madame Campan, Marie Antoinette's lady-in-waiting, the queen also suffered two miscarriages. The first one, in 1779, a few months after the birth of her first child, is mentioned in a letter to her daughter, written in July by empress Maria Theresa. Madame Campan states that Louis spent an entire morning consoling his wife at her bedside, and swore to secrecy everyone who knew of the occurrence. Marie Antoinette suffered a second miscarriage on the night of 2–3 November 1783.
+
+Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were the parents of four live-born children:
+
+In addition to his biological children, Louis XVI also adopted six children: "Armand" Francois-Michel Gagné (c. 1771-1792), a poor orphan adopted in 1776; Jean Amilcar (c. 1781-1793), a Senegalese slave boy given to the queen as a present by Chevalier de Boufflers in 1787, but whom she instead had freed, baptized, adopted and placed in a pension; Ernestine Lambriquet (1778-1813), daughter of two servants at the palace, who was raised as the playmate of his daughter and whom he adopted after the death of her mother in 1788; and finally "Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire (born in 1787), who was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters when her parents, an usher and his wife in service of the king, had died.[21]
+
+Of these, only Armand, Ernestine and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also formally foster children of the royal couple, simply lived on the queen's expense until her imprisonment, which proved fatal for at least Amilcar, as he was evicted from the boarding school when the fee was no longer paid, and reportedly starved to death on the street.[21] Armand and Zoe had a position which was more similar to that of Ernestine: Armand lived at court with the king and queen until he left them at the outbreak of the revolution because of his republican sympathies, and Zoe was chosen to be the playmate of the Dauphin, just as Ernestine had once been selected as the playmate of Marie-Therese, and sent away to her sisters in a convent boarding school before the Flight to Varennes in 1791.[21]
+
+When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in 1774, he was nineteen years old. He had an enormous responsibility, as the government was deeply in debt, and resentment of despotic monarchy was on the rise. He himself felt woefully unqualified to resolve the situation.
+
+As king, Louis XVI focused primarily on religious freedom and foreign policy. While none doubted his intellectual ability to rule France, it was quite clear that, although raised as the Dauphin since 1765, he lacked firmness and decisiveness. His desire to be loved by his people is evident in the prefaces of many of his edicts that would often explain the nature and good intention of his actions as benefiting the people, such as reinstating the parlements. When questioned about his decision, he said, "It may be considered politically unwise, but it seems to me to be the general wish and I want to be loved."[22] In spite of his indecisiveness, Louis XVI was determined to be a good king, stating that he "must always consult public opinion; it is never wrong."[23] He, therefore, appointed an experienced advisor, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Comte de Maurepas who, until his death in 1781, would take charge of many important ministerial functions.
+
+Among the major events of Louis XVI's reign was his signing of the Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance, on 7 November 1787, which was registered in the parlement on 29 January 1788. Granting non-Roman Catholics – Huguenots and Lutherans, as well as Jews – civil and legal status in France and the legal right to practice their faiths, this edict effectively nullified the Edict of Fontainebleau that had been law for 102 years. The Edict of Versailles did not legally proclaim freedom of religion in France – this took two more years, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 – however, it was an important step in eliminating religious tensions and it officially ended religious persecution within his realm.[24]
+
+Radical financial reforms by Turgot and Malesherbes angered the nobles and were blocked by the parlements who insisted that the King did not have the legal right to levy new taxes. So, in 1776, Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned, to be replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker supported the American Revolution, and he carried out a policy of taking out large international loans instead of raising taxes. He attempted to gain public favor in 1781 by publishing of the first ever accounting of the French Crown's expenses and accounts, the Compte-rendu au Roi. This misleading publication led the people of France to believe the kingdom ran a modest surplus.[25] When this policy of hiding and ignoring the kingdom's financial woes failed miserably, Louis dismissed and replaced him in 1783 with Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who increased public spending to "buy" the country's way out of debt. Again this failed, so Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne. When the nobles were informed of the true extent of the debt, they were shocked and rejected the plan.
+
+After this, Louis XVI and his new Controller-General des finances, Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, tried to simply force the Parlement de Paris to register the new laws and fiscal reforms. Upon the refusal of the members of the Parlement, Louis XVI tried to use his absolute power to subjugate them by every means: enforcing in many occasions the registration of his reforms (6 August 1787, 19 November 1787, and 8 May 1788), exiling all Parlement magistrates to Troyes as a punishment on 15 August 1787, prohibiting six members from attending parliamentary sessions on 19 November, arresting two very important members of the Parlement, who opposed his reforms, on 6 May 1788, and even dissolving and depriving of all power the "Parlement," replacing it with a plenary court, on 8 May 1788. The failure of these measures and displays of royal power is attributable to three decisive factors. First, the majority of the population stood in favor of the Parlement against the King, and thus continuously rebelled against him. Second, the royal treasury was financially destitute to a crippling degree, leaving it incapable of sustaining its own imposed reforms. Third, although the King enjoyed as much absolute power as his predecessors, he lacked the personal authority crucial for absolutism to function properly. Now unpopular to both the commoners and the aristocracy, Louis XVI was therefore only very briefly able to impose his decisions and reforms, for periods ranging from 2 to 4 months, before having to revoke them.
+
+As authority dissipated from him and reforms were clearly becoming unavoidable, there were increasingly loud calls for him to convoke the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614 (at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII). As a last-ditch attempt to get new monetary reforms approved, Louis XVI convoked the Estates-General on 8 August 1788, setting the date of their opening on 1 May 1789. With the convocation of the Estates-General, as in many other instances during his reign, Louis XVI placed his reputation and public image in the hands of those who were perhaps not as sensitive to the desires of the French population as he was. Because it had been so long since the Estates-General had been convened, there was some debate as to which procedures should be followed. Ultimately, the Parlement de Paris agreed that "all traditional observances should be carefully maintained to avoid the impression that the Estates-General could make things up as it went along." Under this decision, the king agreed to retain many of the traditions which had been the norm in 1614 and prior convocations of the Estates-General, but which were intolerable to a Third Estate buoyed by recent proclamations of equality. For example, the First and Second Estates proceeded into the assembly wearing their finest garments, while the Third Estate was required to wear plain, oppressively somber black, an act of alienation that Louis XVI would likely have not condoned. He seemed to regard the deputies of the Estates-General with respect: in a wave of self-important patriotism, members of the Estates refused to remove their hats in the King's presence, so Louis removed his to them.[26]
+
+This convocation was one of the events that transformed the general economic and political malaise of the country into the French Revolution. In June 1789, the Third Estate unilaterally declared itself the National Assembly. Louis XVI's attempts to control it resulted in the Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume), on 20 June, the declaration of the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and eventually to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July, which started the French Revolution. Within three short months, the majority of the king's executive authority had been transferred to the elected representatives of the Nation.
+
+French involvement in the Seven Years' War had left Louis XVI a disastrous inheritance. Britain's victories had seen them capture most of France's colonial territories. While some were returned to France at the 1763 Treaty of Paris, a vast swath of North America was ceded to the British.
+
+This had led to a strategy amongst the French leadership of seeking to rebuild the French military in order to fight a war of revenge against Britain, in which it was hoped the lost colonies could be recovered. France still maintained a strong influence in the West Indies, and in India maintained five trading posts, leaving opportunities for disputes and power-play with Great Britain.[27]
+
+In the spring of 1776, Vergennes, the Foreign Secretary, saw an opportunity to humiliate France's long-standing enemy, Great Britain, and to recover territory lost during the Seven Years' War, by supporting the American Revolution. In the same year Louis was persuaded by Pierre Beaumarchais to send supplies, ammunition, and guns to the rebels secretly. Early in 1778 he signed a formal Treaty of Alliance, and later that year France went to war with Britain. In deciding in favor of war, despite France's large financial problems, the King was materially influenced by alarmist reports after the Battle of Saratoga, which suggested that Britain was preparing to make huge concessions to the thirteen colonies and then, allied with them, to strike at French and Spanish possessions in the West Indies.[28] Spain and the Netherlands soon joined the French in an anti-British coalition. After 1778, Great Britain switched its focus to the West Indies, as defending the sugar islands was considered more important than trying to recover the thirteen colonies. France and Spain planned to invade the British Isles themselves with the Armada of 1779, but the operation never went ahead.
+
+France's initial military assistance to the American rebels was a disappointment, with defeats at Rhode Island and Savannah. In 1780, France sent Rochambeau and Grasse to help the Americans, along with large land and naval forces. The French expeditionary force arrived in North America in July 1780. The appearance of French fleets in the Caribbean was followed by the capture of a number of the sugar islands, including Tobago and Grenada.[29] In October 1781, the French naval blockade was instrumental in forcing a British army under Cornwallis to surrender at the Siege of Yorktown.[30] When news of this reached London in March 1782, the government of Lord North fell and Great Britain immediately sued for peace terms; however, France delayed the end of the war until September 1783 in the hope of overrunning more British colonies in India and the West Indies.
+
+Great Britain recognized the independence of the thirteen colonies as the United States of America, and the French war ministry rebuilt its army. However, the British defeated the main French fleet in 1782 and successfully defended Jamaica and Gibraltar. France gained little from the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the war, except the colonies of Tobago and Senegal. Louis XVI was wholly disappointed in his aims of recovering Canada, India, and other islands in the West Indies from Britain, as they were too well defended and the Royal Navy made any attempted invasion of mainland Britain impossible. The war cost 1,066 million livres, financed by new loans at high interest (with no new taxes). Necker concealed the crisis from the public by explaining only that ordinary revenues exceeded ordinary expenses, and not mentioning the loans. After he was forced from office in 1781, new taxes were levied.[31]
+
+This intervention in America was not possible without France adopting a neutral position in European affairs to avoid being drawn into a continental war which would be simply a repetition of the French policy mistakes in the Seven Years' War. Vergennes, supported by King Louis, refused to go to War to support Austria in the Bavarian Succession crisis in 1778, when Austrian Holy Roman Emperor Joseph tried to control parts of Bavaria. Vergennes and Maurepas refused to support the Austrian position, but the intervention of Marie Antoinette in favor of Austria obliged France to adopt a position more favorable to Austria, which in the treaty of Teschen was able to get in compensation a territory whose population numbered around 100,000 persons. However, this intervention was a disaster for the image of the Queen, who was named "l'Autrichienne" (a pun in French meaning "Austrian", but the "chienne" suffix can mean "bitch") on account of it.[32]
+
+Louis XVI hoped to use the American Revolutionary War as an opportunity to expel the British from India.[27] In 1782, he sealed an alliance with the Peshwa Madhu Rao Narayan. As a consequence, Bussy moved his troops to the Isle de France (now Mauritius) and later contributed to the French effort in India in 1783.[27][33] Suffren became the ally of Hyder Ali in the Second Anglo-Mysore War against British rule in India, in 1782–1783, fighting the British fleet along the coasts of India and Ceylon.[34][35]
+
+France also intervened in Cochinchina following Mgr Pigneau de Béhaine's intervention to obtain military aid. A France-Cochinchina alliance was signed through the Treaty of Versailles of 1787, between Louis XVI and Prince Nguyễn Ánh.[36]
+
+Louis XVI also encouraged major voyages of exploration. In 1785, he appointed La Pérouse to lead a sailing expedition around the world. (La Pérouse and his fleet disappeared after leaving Botany Bay in March 1788. Louis is recorded as having asked, on the morning of his execution, "Any news of La Pérouse?".)[37]
+
+There is a lack of scholarship on the subject of Louis XVI's time as a constitutional monarch, though it was a significant length of time. The reason as to why many biographers have not elaborated extensively on this time in the king's life is due to the uncertainty surrounding his actions during this period, as Louis XVI's declaration that was left behind in the Tuileries stated that he regarded his actions during constitutional reign provisional; he reflected that his "palace was a prison". This time period was exemplary in its demonstration of an institution's deliberation while in their last standing moments.[38]
+
+Louis XVI's time in his previous palace came to an end on 5 October 1789, when an angry mob of Parisian working men and women was incited by revolutionaries and marched on the Palace of Versailles, where the royal family lived. At dawn, they infiltrated the palace and attempted to kill the queen, who was associated with a frivolous lifestyle that symbolized much that was despised about the Ancien Régime. After the situation had been defused by Lafayette, head of the Garde nationale, the king and his family were brought by the crowd to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the reasoning being that the king would be more accountable to the people if he lived among them in Paris.
+
+The Revolution's principles of popular sovereignty, though central to democratic principles of later eras, marked a decisive break from the centuries-old principle of divine right that was at the heart of the French monarchy. As a result, the Revolution was opposed by many of the rural people of France and by all the governments of France's neighbors. Still, within the city of Paris and amongst the philosophers of the time, many of which were members of the National Assembly, the monarchy had next to no support. As the Revolution became more radical and the masses more uncontrollable, several of the Revolution's leading figures began to doubt its benefits. Some, like Honoré Mirabeau, secretly plotted with the Crown to restore its power in a new constitutional form.
+
+Beginning in 1791, Montmorin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, started to organize covert resistance to the revolutionary forces. Thus, the funds of the Liste Civile, voted annually by the National Assembly, were partially assigned to secret expenses in order to preserve the monarchy. Arnault Laporte, who was in charge of the Civil list, collaborated with both Montmorin and Mirabeau. After the sudden death of Mirabeau, Maximilien Radix de Sainte-Foix, a noted financier, took his place. In effect, he headed a secret council of advisers to Louis XVI, which tried to preserve the monarchy; these schemes proved unsuccessful, and were exposed later when the armoire de fer was discovered. Regarding the financial difficulties facing France, the Assembly created the Comité des Finances, and while Louis XVI attempted to declare his concern and interest in remedying the economic situations, inclusively offering to melt crown silver as a dramatic measure, it appeared to the public that the king did not understand that such statements no longer held the same meaning as they did before and that doing such a thing could not restore the economy of a country.[38]
+
+Mirabeau's death on 7 April, and Louis XVI's indecision, fatally weakened negotiations between the Crown and moderate politicians. The Third Estate leaders also had no desire in turning back or remaining moderate after their hard efforts to change the politics of the time, and so the plans for a constitutional monarchy did not last long. On one hand, Louis was nowhere near as reactionary as his brothers, the comte de Provence[citation needed] and the comte d'Artois, and he repeatedly sent messages to them requesting a halt to their attempts to launch counter-coups. This was often done through his secretly nominated regent, the Cardinal Loménie de Brienne. On the other hand, Louis was alienated from the new democratic government both by its negative reaction to the traditional role of the monarch and in its treatment of him and his family. He was particularly irked by being kept essentially as a prisoner in the Tuileries, and by the refusal of the new regime to allow him to have confessors and priests of his choice rather than 'constitutional priests' pledged to the state and not the Roman Catholic Church.
+
+On 21 June 1791, Louis XVI attempted to flee secretly with his family from Paris to the royalist fortress town of Montmédy on the northeastern border of France, where he would join the émigrés and be protected by Austria. The voyage was planned by the Swedish nobleman, and often assumed secret lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette, Axel von Fersen.[39][40]
+
+While the National Assembly worked painstakingly towards a constitution, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were involved in plans of their own. Louis had appointed Breteuil to act as plenipotentiary, dealing with other foreign heads of state in an attempt to bring about a counter-revolution. Louis himself held reservations against depending on foreign assistance. Like his mother and father, he thought that the Austrians were treacherous and the Prussians were overly ambitious.[41] As tensions in Paris rose and he was pressured to accept measures from the Assembly against his will, Louis XVI and the queen plotted to secretly escape from France. Beyond escape, they hoped to raise an "armed congress" with the help of the émigrés, as well as assistance from other nations with which they could return and, in essence, recapture France. This degree of planning reveals Louis' political determination, but it was for this determined plot that he was eventually convicted of high treason.[42] He left behind (on his bed) a 16-page written manifesto, Déclaration du roi, adressée à tous les François, à sa sortie de Paris,[43] traditionally known as the Testament politique de Louis XVI ("Political Testament of Louis XVI"), explaining his rejection of the constitutional system as illegitimate; it was printed in the newspapers. However, his indecision, many delays, and misunderstanding of France were responsible for the failure of the escape. Within 24 hours, the royal family was arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne shortly after Jean-Baptiste Drouet, who recognised the king from his profile on a 50 livres assignat[44] (paper money), had given the alert. Louis XVI and his family were taken back to Paris where they arrived on 25 June. Viewed suspiciously as traitors, they were placed under tight house arrest upon their return to the Tuileries.[45]
+
+At the individual level, the failure of the escape plans was due to a series of misadventures, delays, misinterpretations, and poor judgments.[46] In a wider perspective, the failure was attributable to the king's indecision—he repeatedly postponed the schedule, allowing for smaller problems to become severe. Furthermore, he totally misunderstood the political situation. He thought only a small number of radicals in Paris were promoting a revolution that the people as a whole rejected. He thought, mistakenly, that he was beloved by his subjects.[47] The king's flight in the short term was traumatic for France, inciting a wave of emotions that ranged from anxiety to violence to panic. Everyone realized that war was imminent. The deeper realization, that the king had in fact repudiated the Revolution, was an even greater shock for people who until then had seen him as a good king who governed as a manifestation of God's will. They felt betrayed, and as a result, Republicanism now burst out of the coffee houses and became a dominating philosophy of the rapidly radicalized French Revolution.[48]
+
+The other monarchies of Europe looked with concern upon the developments in France, and considered whether they should intervene, either in support of Louis or to take advantage of the chaos in France. The key figure was Marie-Antoinette's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. Initially, he had looked on the Revolution with equanimity. However, he became more and more disturbed as it became more and more radical. Despite this, he still hoped to avoid war.
+
+On 27 August, Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia, in consultation with émigrés French nobles, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which declared the interest of the monarchs of Europe in the well-being of Louis and his family, and threatened vague but severe consequences if anything should befall them. Although Leopold saw the Pillnitz Declaration as an easy way to appear concerned about the developments in France without committing any soldiers or finances to change them, the revolutionary leaders in Paris viewed it fearfully as a dangerous foreign attempt to undermine France's sovereignty.
+
+In addition to the ideological differences between France and the monarchical powers of Europe, there were continuing disputes over the status of Austrian estates in Alsace, and the concern of members of the National Constituent Assembly about the agitation of émigrés nobles abroad, especially in the Austrian Netherlands and the minor states of Germany.
+
+In the end, the Legislative Assembly, supported by Louis XVI, declared war on Austria ("the King of Bohemia and Hungary") first, voting for war on 20 April 1792, after a long list of grievances was presented to it by the foreign minister, Charles François Dumouriez. Dumouriez prepared an immediate invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, where he expected the local population to rise against Austrian rule. However, the Revolution had thoroughly disorganised the army, and the forces raised were insufficient for the invasion. The soldiers fled at the first sign of battle and, in one case, on 28 April 1792, murdered their general, Irish-born comte Théobald de Dillon, whom they accused of treason.[49]
+
+While the revolutionary government frantically raised fresh troops and reorganised its armies, a Prussian-Austrian army under Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick assembled at Coblenz on the Rhine. In July, the invasion began, with Brunswick's army easily taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun. The duke then issued on 25 July a proclamation called the Brunswick Manifesto, written by Louis's émigré cousin, the Prince de Condé, declaring the intent of the Austrians and Prussians to restore the king to his full powers and to treat any person or town who opposed them as rebels to be condemned to death by martial law.
+
+Contrary to its intended purpose of strengthening Louis XVI's position against the revolutionaries, the Brunswick Manifesto had the opposite effect of greatly undermining his already highly tenuous position. It was taken by many to be the final proof of collusion between the king and foreign powers in a conspiracy against his own country. The anger of the populace boiled over on 10 August when an armed mob – with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the Insurrectional Paris Commune – marched upon and invaded the Tuileries Palace. The royal family took shelter with the Legislative Assembly.
+
+Louis was officially arrested on 13 August 1792 and sent to the Temple, an ancient fortress in Paris that was used as a prison. On 21 September, the National Assembly declared France to be a Republic, and abolished the monarchy. Louis was stripped of all of his titles and honors, and from this date was known as Citoyen Louis Capet.
+
+The Girondins were partial to keeping the deposed king under arrest, both as a hostage and a guarantee for the future. Members of the Commune and the most radical deputies, who would soon form the group known as the Mountain, argued for Louis's immediate execution. The legal background of many of the deputies made it difficult for a great number of them to accept an execution without the due process of law, and it was voted that the deposed monarch be tried before the National Convention, the organ that housed the representatives of the sovereign people. In many ways, the former king's trial represented the trial of the monarchy by the revolution. It was seen as if with the death of one came the life of the other. Michelet argued that the death of the former king would lead to the acceptance of violence as a tool for happiness. He said, "If we accept the proposition that one person can be sacrificed for the happiness of the many, it will soon be demonstrated that two or three or more could also be sacrificed for the happiness of the many. Little by little, we will find reasons for sacrificing the many for the happiness of the many, and we will think it was a bargain."[50]
+
+Two events led up to the trial for Louis XVI. First, after the Battle of Valmy on 22 September 1792, General Dumouriez negotiated with the Prussians who evacuated France. Louis could no longer be considered a hostage or as leverage in negotiations with the invading forces.[51] Second, in November 1792, the armoire de fer (iron chest) incident took place at the Tuileries Palace, when the existence of the hidden safe in the king's bedroom containing compromising documents and correspondence, was revealed by François Gamain, the Versailles locksmith who had installed it. Gaiman went to Paris on 20 November and told Jean-Marie Roland, Girondinist Minister of the Interior, who ordered it opened.[52] The resulting scandal served to discredit the king. Following these two events the Girondins could no longer keep the king from trial.[51]
+
+On 11 December, among crowded and silent streets, the deposed king was brought from the Temple to stand before the Convention and hear his indictment, an accusation of high treason and crimes against the State. On 26 December, his counsel, Raymond Desèze, delivered Louis' response to the charges, with the assistance of François Tronchet and Malesherbes. Before the trial started and Louis mounted his defense to the Convention, he told his lawyers that he knew he would be found guilty and be killed, but to prepare and act as though they could win. He was resigned to and accepted his fate before the verdict was determined, but he was willing to fight to be remembered as a good king for his people.[53]
+
+The Convention would be voting on three questions: first, Is Louis guilty; second, whatever the decision, should there be an appeal to the people; and third, if found guilty, what punishment should Louis suffer? The order of the voting on each question was a compromise within the Jacobin movement between the Girondins and Mountain; neither were satisfied but both accepted.[54]
+
+On 15 January 1793, the Convention, composed of 721 deputies, voted on the verdict. Given the overwhelming evidence of Louis's collusion with the invaders, the verdict was a foregone conclusion – with 693 deputies voting guilty, none for acquittal, with 23 abstaining.[55] The next day, a roll-call vote was carried out to decide upon the fate of the former king, and the result was uncomfortably close for such a dramatic decision. 288 of the deputies voted against death and for some other alternative, mainly some means of imprisonment or exile. 72 of the deputies voted for the death penalty, but subject to several delaying conditions and reservations. The voting took a total of 36 hours.[54] 361 of the deputies voted for Louis's immediate execution. Louis was condemned to death by a majority of one vote. Philippe Égalité, formerly the Duke of Orléans and Louis' cousin, voted for Louis' execution, a cause of much future bitterness among French monarchists; he would himself be guillotined on the same scaffold, Place de la Révolution, before the end of the same year, on 6 November 1793.[56]
+
+The next day, a motion to grant Louis XVI reprieve from the death sentence was voted down: 310 of the deputies requested mercy, but 380 voted for the immediate execution of the death penalty. This decision would be final. Malesherbes wanted to break the news to Louis and bitterly lamented the verdict, but Louis told him he would see him again in a happier life and he would regret leaving a friend like Malesherbes behind. The last thing Louis said to him was that he needed to control his tears because all eyes would be upon him.[57]
+
+On Monday, 21 January 1793, Louis XVI, at age 38, was beheaded by guillotine on the  Place de la Révolution. As Louis XVI mounted the scaffold, he appeared dignified and resigned. He delivered a short speech in which he pardoned "...those who are the cause of my death.... ".[58] He then declared himself innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, praying that his blood would not fall back on France.[59] Many accounts suggest Louis XVI's desire to say more, but Antoine-Joseph Santerre, a general in the National Guard, halted the speech by ordering a drum roll. The former king was then quickly beheaded.[60] Some accounts of Louis's beheading indicate that the blade did not sever his neck entirely the first time. There are also accounts of a blood-curdling scream issuing from Louis after the blade fell but this is unlikely, since the blade severed Louis's spine. The executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, testified that the former king had bravely met his fate.[61]
+
+Immediately after his execution, Louis XVI's corpse was transported in a cart to the nearby Madeleine cemetery, located rue d'Anjou, where those guillotined at the Place de la Révolution were buried in mass graves. Before his burial, a short religious service was held in the Madeleine church (destroyed in 1799) by two priests who had sworn allegiance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Afterward, Louis XVI, his severed head placed between his feet, was buried in an unmarked grave, with quicklime spread over his body.[citation needed] The Madeleine cemetery was closed in 1794. In 1815 Louis XVIII had the remains of his brother Louis XVI and of his sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette transferred and buried in the Basilica of St Denis, the Royal necropolis of the Kings and Queens of France. Between 1816 and 1826, a commemorative monument, the Chapelle expiatoire, was erected at the location of the former cemetery and church.[citation needed]
+
+While Louis's blood dripped to the ground, several onlookers ran forward to dip their handkerchiefs in it.[62] This account was proven true in 2012 after a DNA comparison linked blood thought to be from Louis XVI's beheading to DNA taken from tissue samples originating from what was long thought to be the mummified head of his ancestor, Henry IV of France. The blood sample was taken from a squash gourd carved to commemorate the heroes of the French Revolution that had, according to legend, been used to house one of the handkerchiefs dipped in Louis's blood.[63]
+
+The 19th-century historian Jules Michelet attributed the restoration of the French monarchy to the sympathy that had been engendered by the execution of Louis XVI. Michelet's Histoire de la Révolution Française and Alphonse de Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins, in particular, showed the marks of the feelings aroused by the revolution's regicide. The two writers did not share the same sociopolitical vision, but they agreed that, even though the monarchy was rightly ended in 1792, the lives of the royal family should have been spared. Lack of compassion at that moment contributed to a radicalization of revolutionary violence and to greater divisiveness among Frenchmen. For the 20th century novelist Albert Camus the execution signaled the end of the role of God in history, for which he mourned. For the 20th century philosopher Jean-François Lyotard the regicide was the starting point of all French thought, the memory of which acts as a reminder that French modernity began under the sign of a crime.[64]
+
+Louis' daughter, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, the future Duchess of Angoulême, survived the French Revolution, and she lobbied in Rome energetically for the canonization of her father as a saint of the Catholic Church. Despite his signing of the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy", Louis had been described as a martyr by Pope Pius VI in 1793.[65] In 1820, however, a memorandum of the Congregation of Rites in Rome, declaring the impossibility of proving that Louis had been executed for religious rather than political reasons, put an end to hopes of canonization.
+
+King Louis XVI has been portrayed in numerous films. In Captain of the Guard (1930), he is played by Stuart Holmes. In Marie Antoinette (1938), he was played by Robert Morley. Jean-François Balmer portrayed him in the 1989 two-part miniseries La Révolution française. More recently, he was depicted in the 2006 film Marie Antoinette by Jason Schwartzman. In Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'était conté, Louis was portrayed by one of the film's producers, Gilbert Bokanowski, using the alias Gilbert Boka. Several portrayals have upheld the image of a bumbling, almost foolish king, such as that by Jacques Morel in the 1956 French film Marie-Antoinette reine de France and that by Terence Budd in the Lady Oscar live action film. In Start the Revolution Without Me, Louis XVI is portrayed by Hugh Griffith as a laughable cuckold. Mel Brooks played a comic version of Louis XVI in The History of the World Part 1, portraying him as a libertine who has such distaste for the peasantry he uses them as targets in skeet shooting. In the 1996 film Ridicule; Urbain Cancelier plays Louis.
+
+Louis XVI has been the subject of novels as well, including two of the alternate histories anthologized in If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931): "If Drouet's Cart Had Stuck" by Hilaire Belloc and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness" by André Maurois, which tell very different stories but both imagine Louis surviving and still reigning in the early 19th century. Louis appears in the children's book Ben and Me by Robert Lawson but does not appear in the 1953 animated short film based on the same book.
+
+Larmuseau et al. (2013)[66] tested the Y-DNA of three living members of the House of Bourbon, one descending from Louis XIII of France via King Louis Philippe I, and two from Louis XIV via Philip V of Spain, and concluded that all three men share the same STR haplotype and belonged to Haplogroup_R1b (R-M343). The three individuals were further assigned to sub-haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1b* (R-Z381*). These results contradicted an earlier DNA analysis of a handkerchief dipped in the presumptive blood of Louis XVI after his execution performed by Laluez-Fo et al. (2010).[67]
+
+Louis's formal style before the revolution was "Louis XVI, par la grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre", or "Louis XVI, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre".

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+Louis XVI  (Louis-Auguste; French pronunciation: ​[lwi sɛːz]; 23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as Citizen Louis Capet during the four months just before he was executed by guillotine. In 1765, upon the death of his father, Louis, Dauphin of France, he became the new Dauphin. Upon his grandfather Louis XV's death on 10 May 1774, he assumed the title King of France and Navarre, until 4 September 1791, when he received the title of King of the French until the monarchy was abolished on 21 September 1792.
+
+The first part of his reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to abolish serfdom, remove the taille (land tax) and the corvée (labour tax),[1] and increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolish the death penalty for deserters.[2][3] The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation. Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it led to food scarcity which, during a particularly bad harvest in 1775, prompted the masses to revolt. From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the Ancien Régime. This led to the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. Discontent among the members of France's middle and lower classes resulted in strengthened opposition to the French aristocracy and to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, were viewed as representatives. Increasing tensions and violence were marked by events such as the storming of the Bastille, during which riots in Paris forced Louis to definitively recognize the legislative authority of the National Assembly.
+
+Louis' indecisiveness and conservatism led some elements of the people of France to view him as a symbol of the perceived tyranny of the Ancien Régime, and his popularity deteriorated progressively. His unsuccessful flight to Varennes in June 1791, four months before the constitutional monarchy was declared, seemed to justify the rumors that the king tied his hopes of political salvation to the prospects of foreign intervention. The credibility of the king was deeply undermined, and the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic became an ever-increasing possibility. The growth of anti-clericalism among revolutionaries resulted in the abolition of the dîme (religious land tax) and several government policies aimed at the dechristianization of France.
+
+In a context of civil and international war, Louis XVI was suspended and arrested at the time of the Insurrection of 10 August 1792. One month later, the absolute monarchy was abolished and the First French Republic was proclaimed on 21 September 1792. Louis was then tried by the National Convention (self-instituted as a tribunal for the occasion), found guilty of high treason, and executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793, as a desacralized French citizen under the name of Citizen Louis Capet, in reference to Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian dynasty – which the revolutionaries interpreted as Louis' surname. Louis XVI was the only King of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Therese, was given over to the Austrians in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.
+
+Louis-Auguste de France, who was given the title Duc de Berry at birth, was born in the Palace of Versailles. One of seven children, he was the second surviving son of Louis, the Dauphin of France, and the grandson of Louis XV of France and of his consort, Maria Leszczyńska. His mother was Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, the daughter of Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.
+
+Louis-Auguste was overlooked by his parents who favored his older brother, Louis, duc de Bourgogne, who was regarded as bright and handsome but who died at the age of nine in 1761. Louis-Auguste, a strong and healthy boy but very shy, excelled in his studies and had a strong taste for Latin, history, geography, and astronomy and became fluent in Italian and English. He enjoyed physical activities such as hunting with his grandfather and rough play with his younger brothers, Louis-Stanislas, comte de Provence, and Charles-Philippe, comte d'Artois. From an early age, Louis-Auguste was encouraged in another of his interests, locksmithing, which was seen as a useful pursuit for a child.[4]
+
+When his father died of tuberculosis on 20 December 1765, the eleven-year-old Louis-Auguste became the new Dauphin. His mother never recovered from the loss of her husband and died on 13 March 1767, also from tuberculosis.[5] The strict and conservative education he received from the Duc de La Vauguyon, "gouverneur des Enfants de France" (governor of the Children of France), from 1760 until his marriage in 1770, did not prepare him for the throne that he was to inherit in 1774 after the death of his grandfather, Louis XV. Throughout his education, Louis-Auguste received a mixture of studies particular to religion, morality, and humanities.[6] His instructors may have also had a good hand in shaping Louis-Auguste into the indecisive king that he became. Abbé Berthier, his instructor, taught him that timidity was a value in strong monarchs, and Abbé Soldini, his confessor, instructed him not to let people read his mind.[7]
+
+On 16 May 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis-Auguste married the fourteen-year-old Habsburg Archduchess Maria Antonia (better known by the French form of her name, Marie Antoinette), his second cousin once removed and the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and his wife, the Empress Maria Theresa.[8]
+
+This marriage was met with hostility from the French public. France's alliance with Austria had pulled the country into the disastrous Seven Years' War, in which it was defeated by the British and the Prussians, both in Europe and in North America. By the time that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette were married, the French people generally disliked the Austrian alliance, and Marie-Antoinette was seen as an unwelcome foreigner.[9] For the young couple, the marriage was initially amiable but distant. Louis-Auguste's shyness and, among other factors, the young age and inexperience of the newlyweds (who were near total strangers to each other: they had met only two days before their wedding) meant that the 15-year-old bridegroom failed to consummate the union with his 14-year-old bride. His fear of being manipulated by her for imperial purposes caused him to behave coldly towards her in public.[10] Over time, the couple became closer, though while their marriage was reportedly consummated in July 1773, it did not actually happen until 1777.[11]
+
+The couple's failure to produce any children for several years placed a strain upon their marriage,[12] exacerbated by the publication of obscene pamphlets (libelles) mocking their infertility. One questioned, "Can the King do it? Can't the King do it?"[13]
+
+The reasons for the couple's initial failure to have children were debated at that time, and they have continued to be debated since. One suggestion is that Louis-Auguste suffered from a physiological dysfunction,[14] most often thought to be phimosis, a suggestion first made in late 1772 by the royal doctors.[15] Historians adhering to this view suggest that he was circumcised[16] (a common treatment for phimosis) to relieve the condition seven years after their marriage. Louis's doctors were not in favour of the surgery – the operation was delicate and traumatic, and capable of doing "as much harm as good" to an adult male. The argument for phimosis and a resulting operation is mostly seen to originate from Stefan Zweig's 1932 biography of Marie Antoinette.
+
+Most modern historians agree that Louis had no surgery[17][18][19] – for instance, as late as 1777, the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported that the King of France had definitely declined the operation.[20] Louis was frequently declared to be perfectly capable of sexual intercourse, as confirmed by Joseph II, and during the time he was supposed to have had the operation, he went out hunting almost every day, according to his journal. This would not have been possible if he had undergone a circumcision; at the very least, he would have been unable to ride to the hunt for a few weeks afterwards. The couple's sexual problems are now attributed to other factors. Antonia Fraser's biography of the queen discusses Joseph II's letter on the matter to one of his brothers after he visited Versailles in 1777. In the letter, Joseph describes in astonishingly frank detail Louis' inadequate performance in the marriage bed and Antoinette's lack of interest in conjugal activity. Joseph described the couple as "complete fumblers"; however, with his advice, Louis began to apply himself more effectively to his marital duties, and in the third week of March 1778 Marie Antoinette became pregnant.
+
+Eventually, the royal couple became the parents of four children. According to Madame Campan, Marie Antoinette's lady-in-waiting, the queen also suffered two miscarriages. The first one, in 1779, a few months after the birth of her first child, is mentioned in a letter to her daughter, written in July by empress Maria Theresa. Madame Campan states that Louis spent an entire morning consoling his wife at her bedside, and swore to secrecy everyone who knew of the occurrence. Marie Antoinette suffered a second miscarriage on the night of 2–3 November 1783.
+
+Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were the parents of four live-born children:
+
+In addition to his biological children, Louis XVI also adopted six children: "Armand" Francois-Michel Gagné (c. 1771-1792), a poor orphan adopted in 1776; Jean Amilcar (c. 1781-1793), a Senegalese slave boy given to the queen as a present by Chevalier de Boufflers in 1787, but whom she instead had freed, baptized, adopted and placed in a pension; Ernestine Lambriquet (1778-1813), daughter of two servants at the palace, who was raised as the playmate of his daughter and whom he adopted after the death of her mother in 1788; and finally "Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire (born in 1787), who was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters when her parents, an usher and his wife in service of the king, had died.[21]
+
+Of these, only Armand, Ernestine and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also formally foster children of the royal couple, simply lived on the queen's expense until her imprisonment, which proved fatal for at least Amilcar, as he was evicted from the boarding school when the fee was no longer paid, and reportedly starved to death on the street.[21] Armand and Zoe had a position which was more similar to that of Ernestine: Armand lived at court with the king and queen until he left them at the outbreak of the revolution because of his republican sympathies, and Zoe was chosen to be the playmate of the Dauphin, just as Ernestine had once been selected as the playmate of Marie-Therese, and sent away to her sisters in a convent boarding school before the Flight to Varennes in 1791.[21]
+
+When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in 1774, he was nineteen years old. He had an enormous responsibility, as the government was deeply in debt, and resentment of despotic monarchy was on the rise. He himself felt woefully unqualified to resolve the situation.
+
+As king, Louis XVI focused primarily on religious freedom and foreign policy. While none doubted his intellectual ability to rule France, it was quite clear that, although raised as the Dauphin since 1765, he lacked firmness and decisiveness. His desire to be loved by his people is evident in the prefaces of many of his edicts that would often explain the nature and good intention of his actions as benefiting the people, such as reinstating the parlements. When questioned about his decision, he said, "It may be considered politically unwise, but it seems to me to be the general wish and I want to be loved."[22] In spite of his indecisiveness, Louis XVI was determined to be a good king, stating that he "must always consult public opinion; it is never wrong."[23] He, therefore, appointed an experienced advisor, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Comte de Maurepas who, until his death in 1781, would take charge of many important ministerial functions.
+
+Among the major events of Louis XVI's reign was his signing of the Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance, on 7 November 1787, which was registered in the parlement on 29 January 1788. Granting non-Roman Catholics – Huguenots and Lutherans, as well as Jews – civil and legal status in France and the legal right to practice their faiths, this edict effectively nullified the Edict of Fontainebleau that had been law for 102 years. The Edict of Versailles did not legally proclaim freedom of religion in France – this took two more years, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 – however, it was an important step in eliminating religious tensions and it officially ended religious persecution within his realm.[24]
+
+Radical financial reforms by Turgot and Malesherbes angered the nobles and were blocked by the parlements who insisted that the King did not have the legal right to levy new taxes. So, in 1776, Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned, to be replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker supported the American Revolution, and he carried out a policy of taking out large international loans instead of raising taxes. He attempted to gain public favor in 1781 by publishing of the first ever accounting of the French Crown's expenses and accounts, the Compte-rendu au Roi. This misleading publication led the people of France to believe the kingdom ran a modest surplus.[25] When this policy of hiding and ignoring the kingdom's financial woes failed miserably, Louis dismissed and replaced him in 1783 with Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who increased public spending to "buy" the country's way out of debt. Again this failed, so Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne. When the nobles were informed of the true extent of the debt, they were shocked and rejected the plan.
+
+After this, Louis XVI and his new Controller-General des finances, Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, tried to simply force the Parlement de Paris to register the new laws and fiscal reforms. Upon the refusal of the members of the Parlement, Louis XVI tried to use his absolute power to subjugate them by every means: enforcing in many occasions the registration of his reforms (6 August 1787, 19 November 1787, and 8 May 1788), exiling all Parlement magistrates to Troyes as a punishment on 15 August 1787, prohibiting six members from attending parliamentary sessions on 19 November, arresting two very important members of the Parlement, who opposed his reforms, on 6 May 1788, and even dissolving and depriving of all power the "Parlement," replacing it with a plenary court, on 8 May 1788. The failure of these measures and displays of royal power is attributable to three decisive factors. First, the majority of the population stood in favor of the Parlement against the King, and thus continuously rebelled against him. Second, the royal treasury was financially destitute to a crippling degree, leaving it incapable of sustaining its own imposed reforms. Third, although the King enjoyed as much absolute power as his predecessors, he lacked the personal authority crucial for absolutism to function properly. Now unpopular to both the commoners and the aristocracy, Louis XVI was therefore only very briefly able to impose his decisions and reforms, for periods ranging from 2 to 4 months, before having to revoke them.
+
+As authority dissipated from him and reforms were clearly becoming unavoidable, there were increasingly loud calls for him to convoke the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614 (at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII). As a last-ditch attempt to get new monetary reforms approved, Louis XVI convoked the Estates-General on 8 August 1788, setting the date of their opening on 1 May 1789. With the convocation of the Estates-General, as in many other instances during his reign, Louis XVI placed his reputation and public image in the hands of those who were perhaps not as sensitive to the desires of the French population as he was. Because it had been so long since the Estates-General had been convened, there was some debate as to which procedures should be followed. Ultimately, the Parlement de Paris agreed that "all traditional observances should be carefully maintained to avoid the impression that the Estates-General could make things up as it went along." Under this decision, the king agreed to retain many of the traditions which had been the norm in 1614 and prior convocations of the Estates-General, but which were intolerable to a Third Estate buoyed by recent proclamations of equality. For example, the First and Second Estates proceeded into the assembly wearing their finest garments, while the Third Estate was required to wear plain, oppressively somber black, an act of alienation that Louis XVI would likely have not condoned. He seemed to regard the deputies of the Estates-General with respect: in a wave of self-important patriotism, members of the Estates refused to remove their hats in the King's presence, so Louis removed his to them.[26]
+
+This convocation was one of the events that transformed the general economic and political malaise of the country into the French Revolution. In June 1789, the Third Estate unilaterally declared itself the National Assembly. Louis XVI's attempts to control it resulted in the Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume), on 20 June, the declaration of the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and eventually to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July, which started the French Revolution. Within three short months, the majority of the king's executive authority had been transferred to the elected representatives of the Nation.
+
+French involvement in the Seven Years' War had left Louis XVI a disastrous inheritance. Britain's victories had seen them capture most of France's colonial territories. While some were returned to France at the 1763 Treaty of Paris, a vast swath of North America was ceded to the British.
+
+This had led to a strategy amongst the French leadership of seeking to rebuild the French military in order to fight a war of revenge against Britain, in which it was hoped the lost colonies could be recovered. France still maintained a strong influence in the West Indies, and in India maintained five trading posts, leaving opportunities for disputes and power-play with Great Britain.[27]
+
+In the spring of 1776, Vergennes, the Foreign Secretary, saw an opportunity to humiliate France's long-standing enemy, Great Britain, and to recover territory lost during the Seven Years' War, by supporting the American Revolution. In the same year Louis was persuaded by Pierre Beaumarchais to send supplies, ammunition, and guns to the rebels secretly. Early in 1778 he signed a formal Treaty of Alliance, and later that year France went to war with Britain. In deciding in favor of war, despite France's large financial problems, the King was materially influenced by alarmist reports after the Battle of Saratoga, which suggested that Britain was preparing to make huge concessions to the thirteen colonies and then, allied with them, to strike at French and Spanish possessions in the West Indies.[28] Spain and the Netherlands soon joined the French in an anti-British coalition. After 1778, Great Britain switched its focus to the West Indies, as defending the sugar islands was considered more important than trying to recover the thirteen colonies. France and Spain planned to invade the British Isles themselves with the Armada of 1779, but the operation never went ahead.
+
+France's initial military assistance to the American rebels was a disappointment, with defeats at Rhode Island and Savannah. In 1780, France sent Rochambeau and Grasse to help the Americans, along with large land and naval forces. The French expeditionary force arrived in North America in July 1780. The appearance of French fleets in the Caribbean was followed by the capture of a number of the sugar islands, including Tobago and Grenada.[29] In October 1781, the French naval blockade was instrumental in forcing a British army under Cornwallis to surrender at the Siege of Yorktown.[30] When news of this reached London in March 1782, the government of Lord North fell and Great Britain immediately sued for peace terms; however, France delayed the end of the war until September 1783 in the hope of overrunning more British colonies in India and the West Indies.
+
+Great Britain recognized the independence of the thirteen colonies as the United States of America, and the French war ministry rebuilt its army. However, the British defeated the main French fleet in 1782 and successfully defended Jamaica and Gibraltar. France gained little from the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the war, except the colonies of Tobago and Senegal. Louis XVI was wholly disappointed in his aims of recovering Canada, India, and other islands in the West Indies from Britain, as they were too well defended and the Royal Navy made any attempted invasion of mainland Britain impossible. The war cost 1,066 million livres, financed by new loans at high interest (with no new taxes). Necker concealed the crisis from the public by explaining only that ordinary revenues exceeded ordinary expenses, and not mentioning the loans. After he was forced from office in 1781, new taxes were levied.[31]
+
+This intervention in America was not possible without France adopting a neutral position in European affairs to avoid being drawn into a continental war which would be simply a repetition of the French policy mistakes in the Seven Years' War. Vergennes, supported by King Louis, refused to go to War to support Austria in the Bavarian Succession crisis in 1778, when Austrian Holy Roman Emperor Joseph tried to control parts of Bavaria. Vergennes and Maurepas refused to support the Austrian position, but the intervention of Marie Antoinette in favor of Austria obliged France to adopt a position more favorable to Austria, which in the treaty of Teschen was able to get in compensation a territory whose population numbered around 100,000 persons. However, this intervention was a disaster for the image of the Queen, who was named "l'Autrichienne" (a pun in French meaning "Austrian", but the "chienne" suffix can mean "bitch") on account of it.[32]
+
+Louis XVI hoped to use the American Revolutionary War as an opportunity to expel the British from India.[27] In 1782, he sealed an alliance with the Peshwa Madhu Rao Narayan. As a consequence, Bussy moved his troops to the Isle de France (now Mauritius) and later contributed to the French effort in India in 1783.[27][33] Suffren became the ally of Hyder Ali in the Second Anglo-Mysore War against British rule in India, in 1782–1783, fighting the British fleet along the coasts of India and Ceylon.[34][35]
+
+France also intervened in Cochinchina following Mgr Pigneau de Béhaine's intervention to obtain military aid. A France-Cochinchina alliance was signed through the Treaty of Versailles of 1787, between Louis XVI and Prince Nguyễn Ánh.[36]
+
+Louis XVI also encouraged major voyages of exploration. In 1785, he appointed La Pérouse to lead a sailing expedition around the world. (La Pérouse and his fleet disappeared after leaving Botany Bay in March 1788. Louis is recorded as having asked, on the morning of his execution, "Any news of La Pérouse?".)[37]
+
+There is a lack of scholarship on the subject of Louis XVI's time as a constitutional monarch, though it was a significant length of time. The reason as to why many biographers have not elaborated extensively on this time in the king's life is due to the uncertainty surrounding his actions during this period, as Louis XVI's declaration that was left behind in the Tuileries stated that he regarded his actions during constitutional reign provisional; he reflected that his "palace was a prison". This time period was exemplary in its demonstration of an institution's deliberation while in their last standing moments.[38]
+
+Louis XVI's time in his previous palace came to an end on 5 October 1789, when an angry mob of Parisian working men and women was incited by revolutionaries and marched on the Palace of Versailles, where the royal family lived. At dawn, they infiltrated the palace and attempted to kill the queen, who was associated with a frivolous lifestyle that symbolized much that was despised about the Ancien Régime. After the situation had been defused by Lafayette, head of the Garde nationale, the king and his family were brought by the crowd to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the reasoning being that the king would be more accountable to the people if he lived among them in Paris.
+
+The Revolution's principles of popular sovereignty, though central to democratic principles of later eras, marked a decisive break from the centuries-old principle of divine right that was at the heart of the French monarchy. As a result, the Revolution was opposed by many of the rural people of France and by all the governments of France's neighbors. Still, within the city of Paris and amongst the philosophers of the time, many of which were members of the National Assembly, the monarchy had next to no support. As the Revolution became more radical and the masses more uncontrollable, several of the Revolution's leading figures began to doubt its benefits. Some, like Honoré Mirabeau, secretly plotted with the Crown to restore its power in a new constitutional form.
+
+Beginning in 1791, Montmorin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, started to organize covert resistance to the revolutionary forces. Thus, the funds of the Liste Civile, voted annually by the National Assembly, were partially assigned to secret expenses in order to preserve the monarchy. Arnault Laporte, who was in charge of the Civil list, collaborated with both Montmorin and Mirabeau. After the sudden death of Mirabeau, Maximilien Radix de Sainte-Foix, a noted financier, took his place. In effect, he headed a secret council of advisers to Louis XVI, which tried to preserve the monarchy; these schemes proved unsuccessful, and were exposed later when the armoire de fer was discovered. Regarding the financial difficulties facing France, the Assembly created the Comité des Finances, and while Louis XVI attempted to declare his concern and interest in remedying the economic situations, inclusively offering to melt crown silver as a dramatic measure, it appeared to the public that the king did not understand that such statements no longer held the same meaning as they did before and that doing such a thing could not restore the economy of a country.[38]
+
+Mirabeau's death on 7 April, and Louis XVI's indecision, fatally weakened negotiations between the Crown and moderate politicians. The Third Estate leaders also had no desire in turning back or remaining moderate after their hard efforts to change the politics of the time, and so the plans for a constitutional monarchy did not last long. On one hand, Louis was nowhere near as reactionary as his brothers, the comte de Provence[citation needed] and the comte d'Artois, and he repeatedly sent messages to them requesting a halt to their attempts to launch counter-coups. This was often done through his secretly nominated regent, the Cardinal Loménie de Brienne. On the other hand, Louis was alienated from the new democratic government both by its negative reaction to the traditional role of the monarch and in its treatment of him and his family. He was particularly irked by being kept essentially as a prisoner in the Tuileries, and by the refusal of the new regime to allow him to have confessors and priests of his choice rather than 'constitutional priests' pledged to the state and not the Roman Catholic Church.
+
+On 21 June 1791, Louis XVI attempted to flee secretly with his family from Paris to the royalist fortress town of Montmédy on the northeastern border of France, where he would join the émigrés and be protected by Austria. The voyage was planned by the Swedish nobleman, and often assumed secret lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette, Axel von Fersen.[39][40]
+
+While the National Assembly worked painstakingly towards a constitution, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were involved in plans of their own. Louis had appointed Breteuil to act as plenipotentiary, dealing with other foreign heads of state in an attempt to bring about a counter-revolution. Louis himself held reservations against depending on foreign assistance. Like his mother and father, he thought that the Austrians were treacherous and the Prussians were overly ambitious.[41] As tensions in Paris rose and he was pressured to accept measures from the Assembly against his will, Louis XVI and the queen plotted to secretly escape from France. Beyond escape, they hoped to raise an "armed congress" with the help of the émigrés, as well as assistance from other nations with which they could return and, in essence, recapture France. This degree of planning reveals Louis' political determination, but it was for this determined plot that he was eventually convicted of high treason.[42] He left behind (on his bed) a 16-page written manifesto, Déclaration du roi, adressée à tous les François, à sa sortie de Paris,[43] traditionally known as the Testament politique de Louis XVI ("Political Testament of Louis XVI"), explaining his rejection of the constitutional system as illegitimate; it was printed in the newspapers. However, his indecision, many delays, and misunderstanding of France were responsible for the failure of the escape. Within 24 hours, the royal family was arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne shortly after Jean-Baptiste Drouet, who recognised the king from his profile on a 50 livres assignat[44] (paper money), had given the alert. Louis XVI and his family were taken back to Paris where they arrived on 25 June. Viewed suspiciously as traitors, they were placed under tight house arrest upon their return to the Tuileries.[45]
+
+At the individual level, the failure of the escape plans was due to a series of misadventures, delays, misinterpretations, and poor judgments.[46] In a wider perspective, the failure was attributable to the king's indecision—he repeatedly postponed the schedule, allowing for smaller problems to become severe. Furthermore, he totally misunderstood the political situation. He thought only a small number of radicals in Paris were promoting a revolution that the people as a whole rejected. He thought, mistakenly, that he was beloved by his subjects.[47] The king's flight in the short term was traumatic for France, inciting a wave of emotions that ranged from anxiety to violence to panic. Everyone realized that war was imminent. The deeper realization, that the king had in fact repudiated the Revolution, was an even greater shock for people who until then had seen him as a good king who governed as a manifestation of God's will. They felt betrayed, and as a result, Republicanism now burst out of the coffee houses and became a dominating philosophy of the rapidly radicalized French Revolution.[48]
+
+The other monarchies of Europe looked with concern upon the developments in France, and considered whether they should intervene, either in support of Louis or to take advantage of the chaos in France. The key figure was Marie-Antoinette's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. Initially, he had looked on the Revolution with equanimity. However, he became more and more disturbed as it became more and more radical. Despite this, he still hoped to avoid war.
+
+On 27 August, Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia, in consultation with émigrés French nobles, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which declared the interest of the monarchs of Europe in the well-being of Louis and his family, and threatened vague but severe consequences if anything should befall them. Although Leopold saw the Pillnitz Declaration as an easy way to appear concerned about the developments in France without committing any soldiers or finances to change them, the revolutionary leaders in Paris viewed it fearfully as a dangerous foreign attempt to undermine France's sovereignty.
+
+In addition to the ideological differences between France and the monarchical powers of Europe, there were continuing disputes over the status of Austrian estates in Alsace, and the concern of members of the National Constituent Assembly about the agitation of émigrés nobles abroad, especially in the Austrian Netherlands and the minor states of Germany.
+
+In the end, the Legislative Assembly, supported by Louis XVI, declared war on Austria ("the King of Bohemia and Hungary") first, voting for war on 20 April 1792, after a long list of grievances was presented to it by the foreign minister, Charles François Dumouriez. Dumouriez prepared an immediate invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, where he expected the local population to rise against Austrian rule. However, the Revolution had thoroughly disorganised the army, and the forces raised were insufficient for the invasion. The soldiers fled at the first sign of battle and, in one case, on 28 April 1792, murdered their general, Irish-born comte Théobald de Dillon, whom they accused of treason.[49]
+
+While the revolutionary government frantically raised fresh troops and reorganised its armies, a Prussian-Austrian army under Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick assembled at Coblenz on the Rhine. In July, the invasion began, with Brunswick's army easily taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun. The duke then issued on 25 July a proclamation called the Brunswick Manifesto, written by Louis's émigré cousin, the Prince de Condé, declaring the intent of the Austrians and Prussians to restore the king to his full powers and to treat any person or town who opposed them as rebels to be condemned to death by martial law.
+
+Contrary to its intended purpose of strengthening Louis XVI's position against the revolutionaries, the Brunswick Manifesto had the opposite effect of greatly undermining his already highly tenuous position. It was taken by many to be the final proof of collusion between the king and foreign powers in a conspiracy against his own country. The anger of the populace boiled over on 10 August when an armed mob – with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the Insurrectional Paris Commune – marched upon and invaded the Tuileries Palace. The royal family took shelter with the Legislative Assembly.
+
+Louis was officially arrested on 13 August 1792 and sent to the Temple, an ancient fortress in Paris that was used as a prison. On 21 September, the National Assembly declared France to be a Republic, and abolished the monarchy. Louis was stripped of all of his titles and honors, and from this date was known as Citoyen Louis Capet.
+
+The Girondins were partial to keeping the deposed king under arrest, both as a hostage and a guarantee for the future. Members of the Commune and the most radical deputies, who would soon form the group known as the Mountain, argued for Louis's immediate execution. The legal background of many of the deputies made it difficult for a great number of them to accept an execution without the due process of law, and it was voted that the deposed monarch be tried before the National Convention, the organ that housed the representatives of the sovereign people. In many ways, the former king's trial represented the trial of the monarchy by the revolution. It was seen as if with the death of one came the life of the other. Michelet argued that the death of the former king would lead to the acceptance of violence as a tool for happiness. He said, "If we accept the proposition that one person can be sacrificed for the happiness of the many, it will soon be demonstrated that two or three or more could also be sacrificed for the happiness of the many. Little by little, we will find reasons for sacrificing the many for the happiness of the many, and we will think it was a bargain."[50]
+
+Two events led up to the trial for Louis XVI. First, after the Battle of Valmy on 22 September 1792, General Dumouriez negotiated with the Prussians who evacuated France. Louis could no longer be considered a hostage or as leverage in negotiations with the invading forces.[51] Second, in November 1792, the armoire de fer (iron chest) incident took place at the Tuileries Palace, when the existence of the hidden safe in the king's bedroom containing compromising documents and correspondence, was revealed by François Gamain, the Versailles locksmith who had installed it. Gaiman went to Paris on 20 November and told Jean-Marie Roland, Girondinist Minister of the Interior, who ordered it opened.[52] The resulting scandal served to discredit the king. Following these two events the Girondins could no longer keep the king from trial.[51]
+
+On 11 December, among crowded and silent streets, the deposed king was brought from the Temple to stand before the Convention and hear his indictment, an accusation of high treason and crimes against the State. On 26 December, his counsel, Raymond Desèze, delivered Louis' response to the charges, with the assistance of François Tronchet and Malesherbes. Before the trial started and Louis mounted his defense to the Convention, he told his lawyers that he knew he would be found guilty and be killed, but to prepare and act as though they could win. He was resigned to and accepted his fate before the verdict was determined, but he was willing to fight to be remembered as a good king for his people.[53]
+
+The Convention would be voting on three questions: first, Is Louis guilty; second, whatever the decision, should there be an appeal to the people; and third, if found guilty, what punishment should Louis suffer? The order of the voting on each question was a compromise within the Jacobin movement between the Girondins and Mountain; neither were satisfied but both accepted.[54]
+
+On 15 January 1793, the Convention, composed of 721 deputies, voted on the verdict. Given the overwhelming evidence of Louis's collusion with the invaders, the verdict was a foregone conclusion – with 693 deputies voting guilty, none for acquittal, with 23 abstaining.[55] The next day, a roll-call vote was carried out to decide upon the fate of the former king, and the result was uncomfortably close for such a dramatic decision. 288 of the deputies voted against death and for some other alternative, mainly some means of imprisonment or exile. 72 of the deputies voted for the death penalty, but subject to several delaying conditions and reservations. The voting took a total of 36 hours.[54] 361 of the deputies voted for Louis's immediate execution. Louis was condemned to death by a majority of one vote. Philippe Égalité, formerly the Duke of Orléans and Louis' cousin, voted for Louis' execution, a cause of much future bitterness among French monarchists; he would himself be guillotined on the same scaffold, Place de la Révolution, before the end of the same year, on 6 November 1793.[56]
+
+The next day, a motion to grant Louis XVI reprieve from the death sentence was voted down: 310 of the deputies requested mercy, but 380 voted for the immediate execution of the death penalty. This decision would be final. Malesherbes wanted to break the news to Louis and bitterly lamented the verdict, but Louis told him he would see him again in a happier life and he would regret leaving a friend like Malesherbes behind. The last thing Louis said to him was that he needed to control his tears because all eyes would be upon him.[57]
+
+On Monday, 21 January 1793, Louis XVI, at age 38, was beheaded by guillotine on the  Place de la Révolution. As Louis XVI mounted the scaffold, he appeared dignified and resigned. He delivered a short speech in which he pardoned "...those who are the cause of my death.... ".[58] He then declared himself innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, praying that his blood would not fall back on France.[59] Many accounts suggest Louis XVI's desire to say more, but Antoine-Joseph Santerre, a general in the National Guard, halted the speech by ordering a drum roll. The former king was then quickly beheaded.[60] Some accounts of Louis's beheading indicate that the blade did not sever his neck entirely the first time. There are also accounts of a blood-curdling scream issuing from Louis after the blade fell but this is unlikely, since the blade severed Louis's spine. The executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, testified that the former king had bravely met his fate.[61]
+
+Immediately after his execution, Louis XVI's corpse was transported in a cart to the nearby Madeleine cemetery, located rue d'Anjou, where those guillotined at the Place de la Révolution were buried in mass graves. Before his burial, a short religious service was held in the Madeleine church (destroyed in 1799) by two priests who had sworn allegiance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Afterward, Louis XVI, his severed head placed between his feet, was buried in an unmarked grave, with quicklime spread over his body.[citation needed] The Madeleine cemetery was closed in 1794. In 1815 Louis XVIII had the remains of his brother Louis XVI and of his sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette transferred and buried in the Basilica of St Denis, the Royal necropolis of the Kings and Queens of France. Between 1816 and 1826, a commemorative monument, the Chapelle expiatoire, was erected at the location of the former cemetery and church.[citation needed]
+
+While Louis's blood dripped to the ground, several onlookers ran forward to dip their handkerchiefs in it.[62] This account was proven true in 2012 after a DNA comparison linked blood thought to be from Louis XVI's beheading to DNA taken from tissue samples originating from what was long thought to be the mummified head of his ancestor, Henry IV of France. The blood sample was taken from a squash gourd carved to commemorate the heroes of the French Revolution that had, according to legend, been used to house one of the handkerchiefs dipped in Louis's blood.[63]
+
+The 19th-century historian Jules Michelet attributed the restoration of the French monarchy to the sympathy that had been engendered by the execution of Louis XVI. Michelet's Histoire de la Révolution Française and Alphonse de Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins, in particular, showed the marks of the feelings aroused by the revolution's regicide. The two writers did not share the same sociopolitical vision, but they agreed that, even though the monarchy was rightly ended in 1792, the lives of the royal family should have been spared. Lack of compassion at that moment contributed to a radicalization of revolutionary violence and to greater divisiveness among Frenchmen. For the 20th century novelist Albert Camus the execution signaled the end of the role of God in history, for which he mourned. For the 20th century philosopher Jean-François Lyotard the regicide was the starting point of all French thought, the memory of which acts as a reminder that French modernity began under the sign of a crime.[64]
+
+Louis' daughter, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, the future Duchess of Angoulême, survived the French Revolution, and she lobbied in Rome energetically for the canonization of her father as a saint of the Catholic Church. Despite his signing of the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy", Louis had been described as a martyr by Pope Pius VI in 1793.[65] In 1820, however, a memorandum of the Congregation of Rites in Rome, declaring the impossibility of proving that Louis had been executed for religious rather than political reasons, put an end to hopes of canonization.
+
+King Louis XVI has been portrayed in numerous films. In Captain of the Guard (1930), he is played by Stuart Holmes. In Marie Antoinette (1938), he was played by Robert Morley. Jean-François Balmer portrayed him in the 1989 two-part miniseries La Révolution française. More recently, he was depicted in the 2006 film Marie Antoinette by Jason Schwartzman. In Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'était conté, Louis was portrayed by one of the film's producers, Gilbert Bokanowski, using the alias Gilbert Boka. Several portrayals have upheld the image of a bumbling, almost foolish king, such as that by Jacques Morel in the 1956 French film Marie-Antoinette reine de France and that by Terence Budd in the Lady Oscar live action film. In Start the Revolution Without Me, Louis XVI is portrayed by Hugh Griffith as a laughable cuckold. Mel Brooks played a comic version of Louis XVI in The History of the World Part 1, portraying him as a libertine who has such distaste for the peasantry he uses them as targets in skeet shooting. In the 1996 film Ridicule; Urbain Cancelier plays Louis.
+
+Louis XVI has been the subject of novels as well, including two of the alternate histories anthologized in If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931): "If Drouet's Cart Had Stuck" by Hilaire Belloc and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness" by André Maurois, which tell very different stories but both imagine Louis surviving and still reigning in the early 19th century. Louis appears in the children's book Ben and Me by Robert Lawson but does not appear in the 1953 animated short film based on the same book.
+
+Larmuseau et al. (2013)[66] tested the Y-DNA of three living members of the House of Bourbon, one descending from Louis XIII of France via King Louis Philippe I, and two from Louis XIV via Philip V of Spain, and concluded that all three men share the same STR haplotype and belonged to Haplogroup_R1b (R-M343). The three individuals were further assigned to sub-haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1b* (R-Z381*). These results contradicted an earlier DNA analysis of a handkerchief dipped in the presumptive blood of Louis XVI after his execution performed by Laluez-Fo et al. (2010).[67]
+
+Louis's formal style before the revolution was "Louis XVI, par la grâce de Dieu, roi de France et de Navarre", or "Louis XVI, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre".

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+Louis XVII (born Louis Charles, Duke of Normandy; 27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795) was the younger son of King Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie Antoinette. His older brother, Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, died in June 1789, a little over a month before the start of the French Revolution. At his brother's death he became the new Dauphin (heir apparent to the throne), a title he held until 1791, when the new constitution accorded the heir apparent the style of Prince Royal.
+
+When his father was executed on 21 January 1793, during the middle period of the French Revolution, he automatically succeeded as the king of France, Louis XVII, in the eyes of the royalists. France was by then a republic, so he never actually ruled. Nevertheless, in 1814  after the Bourbon Restoration, his uncle acceded to the throne and was proclaimed Louis XVIII.
+
+Louis-Charles de France was born at the Palace of Versailles, the second son and third child of his parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.[1] He was named after his father and his mother's favourite sister Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily, who was known as Charlotte in the family, Charles being the masculine version of her name. His younger sister, Sophie, was born a little over a year later. He became the Dauphin on the death of his elder brother, Louis-Joseph, on 4 June 1789.
+
+As customary in royal families, Louis-Charles was cared for by multiple people. Queen Marie Antoinette appointed governesses to look after all three of her children. Louis-Charles' original governess was Yolande de Polastron, duchesse de Polignac, who left France on the night of 16–17 July 1789, at the outbreak of the Revolution, at the urging of Louis XVI.[2] She was replaced by the marquise Louise Élisabeth de Tourzel. Additionally, the queen selected Agathe de Rambaud to be the official nurse of Louis-Charles. Alain Decaux wrote:
+
+"Madame de Rambaud was officially in charge of the care of the Dauphin from the day of his birth until 10 August 1792; in other words, for seven years. During these seven years, she never left him, she cradled him, took care of him, dressed him, comforted him, and scolded him. Many times, more than Marie Antoinette, she was a true mother for him".[3]
+
+Some have suggested that Axel von Fersen, who was romantically linked with Marie Antoinette, was the father of her son. The fact that Louis Charles was born exactly nine months after he returned to court was noted, but this theory was debunked by most scholars, who reject it, observing that the time of his conception corresponded perfectly in the time that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had spent a lot of time together. Marie Antoinette, who gained massive weight because of her pregnancies, including this one (she was described as "very fat" by the king of Sweden), retained her charisma with an imposing figure in her court, where she had lot of admirers, but she remained a faithful, strong-willed wife and a stern but loving mother.[4][citation needed]
+
+On 6 October 1789, the royal family was forced by a Parisian mob mostly composed of women to move from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where they spent the next three years as prisoners under the daily surveillance of the national guards who did not spare any humiliation to the royal family; at that time Marie Antoinette was always surrounded by guards, even in her bedroom at night and these guards were present when the Queen was allowed to see her children.
+
+The family lived a secluded life, and Marie Antoinette dedicated most of her time to her two children under the daily surveillance of the national guards who kept her hands behind her back and searched everybody from the Queen to the children to see if any letters were smuggled to the royal prisoner.[5] On 21 June 1791, the family tried to escape in what is known as the Flight to Varennes, but the attempt failed. After the family was recognized, they were brought back to Paris. When the Tuileries Palace was stormed by an armed mob on 10 August 1792, the royal family sought refuge at the Legislative Assembly.
+
+On 13 August, the royal family was imprisoned in the tower of the Temple. At first, their conditions were not extremely harsh, but they were prisoners and were re-styled as "Capets" by the newborn Republic. On 11 December, at the beginning of his trial, Louis XVI was separated from his family.
+
+At his birth, Louis-Charles, a Fils de France ("Son of France"), was given the title of Duke of Normandy, and, on 4 June 1789, when Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, his elder brother, died, the four-year-old became Dauphin of France, title he held until September 1791, when France became a constitutional monarchy. Under the new constitution, the heir-apparent to the throne of France, formerly "Dauphin", was restyled Prince Royal. Louis-Charles held that title until the fall of the monarchy on 21 September 1792. At the death of his father on 21 January 1793, royalists and foreign powers intent on restoring the monarchy held him to be the new king of France, with the title of Louis XVII. From his exile in Hamm, in today's North Rhine-Westphalia, his uncle, the Count of Provence and future Louis XVIII, who had emigrated on 21 June 1791, appointed himself Regent for the young imprisoned king.
+
+Immediately following Louis XVI's execution, plots were hatched for the escape of the prisoners from the Temple, the chief of which were engineered by the Chevalier de Jarjayes [fr], the Baron de Batz, and Lady Atkyns. All came to nothing.
+
+On 3 July, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and put in the care of Antoine Simon, a cobbler who had been named his guardian by the Committee of Public Safety and tasked to transform the former young prince into a staunch republican citizen.
+
+The tales told by royalist writers of the cruelty inflicted by Simon and his wife on the child are not proven. Louis Charles' sister, Marie Therese, wrote in her memoires about the "monster Simon", as did Alcide Beauchesne. Antoine Simon's wife Marie-Jeanne, in fact, took great care of the child's person. Stories survive narrating how he was encouraged to eat and drink to excess and learned the language of the gutter. The foreign secretaries of Britain and Spain also heard accounts from their spies that the boy was raped by prostitutes in order to infect him with venereal diseases to supply the Commune with manufactured "evidence" against the Queen.[6] However, the scenes related by Alcide de Beauchesne [fr] of the physical martyrdom of the child are not supported by any testimony, though he was at this time seen by a great number of people.
+
+On 6 October, Pache, Chaumette, Jacques Hébert and others visited him and secured his signature to charges of sexual molestation against his mother and his aunt.[6] The next day he met  with his elder sister Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte for the last time.
+
+On 19 January 1794, the Simons left the Temple, after securing a receipt for the safe transfer of their ward, who was declared to be in good health. A large part of the Temple records from that time onward disappeared under the Bourbon Restoration,[citation needed] making knowledge of the facts impossible. Two days after the departure of the Simons, Louis-Charles is said by the Restoration historians to have been put in a dark room which was barricaded like the cage of a wild animal. The story runs that food was passed through the bars to the boy, who survived despite the accumulated filth of his surroundings.
+
+Robespierre visited Marie-Thérèse on 11 May, but no one, according to the legend, entered the dauphin's room for six months until Barras visited the prison after the 9th Thermidor (27 July 1794). Barras's account of the visit describes the child as suffering from extreme neglect, but conveys no idea of the alleged walling in. It is nevertheless certain that during the first half of 1794 Louis-Charles was very strictly secluded; he had no special guardian, but was under the charge of guards who changed from day to day.
+
+The boy made no complaint to Barras of any ill treatment. He was then cleaned and re-clothed. His room was cleaned, and during the day he was visited by his new attendant, Jean Jacques Christophe Laurent (1770–1807), a creole from Martinique. From 8 November onward, Laurent had assistance from a man named Gomin.
+
+Louis-Charles was then taken out for fresh air and walks on the roof of the Tower. From about the time of Gomin's arrival, he was inspected, not by delegates of the Commune, but by representatives of the civil committee of the 48 sections of Paris. The rare recurrence of the same inspectors would obviously facilitate fraud, if any such was intended. From the end of October onward, the child maintained an obstinate silence, explained by Laurent as a determination taken on the day he made his deposition against his mother. On 19 December 1794 he was visited by three commissioners from the Committee of Public Safety — J. B. Harmand de la Meuse, J. B. C. Mathieu and J. Reverchon — who extracted no word from him.
+
+On 31 March 1795, Étienne Lasne was appointed to be the child's guardian in replacement of Laurent. In May 1795, the boy was seriously ill, and a doctor, P. J. Desault, who had visited him seven months earlier, was summoned. However, on 1 June, Desault died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison, and it was some days before doctors Philippe-Jean Pelletan and Dumangin were called.
+
+Louis-Charles died on 8 June 1795. The next day an autopsy was conducted by Pelletan, at which it was stated that a child apparently about ten years of age, "which the commissioners told us was the late Louis Capet's son", had died of a scrofulous infection of long standing. "Scrofula" as it was previously known, is nowadays called Tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis referring to a lymphadenitis (chronic lymph node swelling or infection) of the neck (cervical lymph nodes) lymph nodes associated with tuberculosis.[7][8]
+
+During the autopsy, the physician Dr. Pelletan was shocked to see the countless scars which covered the body of Louis-Charles. The scars were the result of the physical abuse the child suffered while imprisoned in the Temple.[9]
+
+Louis-Charles was buried on 10 June in the Sainte Marguerite cemetery, but no stone was erected to mark the spot. A skull was found there in 1846 and identified as his, though later re-examination in 1893 showed it to be from a teenager and therefore unlikely to be his.[10]
+
+Following a tradition of preserving royal hearts, Louis-Charles's heart was removed and smuggled out during the autopsy by the overseeing physician, Philippe-Jean Pelletan. Thus, the heart of Louis-Charles was not interred with the rest of the body. Dr. Pelletan stored the smuggled heart in distilled wine in order to preserve it. However, after 8 to 10 years the distilled wine had evaporated, and the heart was further kept dry.[9]
+
+After the Restoration in 1815, Dr. Pelletan attempted to give the heart to Louis-Charles's uncle, Louis XVIII; the latter refused because he could not bring himself to believe that was the heart of his nephew. Dr. Pelletan then donated the heart to the Archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen.
+
+Following the Revolution of 1830, and the plundering of the palace, the son of Pelletan found the relic in the remnants of the palace and placed it in the crystal urn, in which it still resides today. After his death in 1879, Eduard Dumont received the heart.[9]
+
+In 1895, the nephew of the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, Don Carlos de Bourbon, a pretender to the throne of Spain accepted the relic from a friend of Eduart Dumont, Paul Cottin. The relic was held near Vienna, Austria at the castle of Frohsdorf. The son of Carlos, Jaime, Duke of Madrid, in 1909 inherited the heart, and gave it to his sister, Beatriz.[1][2]
+
+Finally two granddaughters of Don Carlos offered the heart to the president of the Memorial of Saint-Denis in Paris, Duc de Bauffremont, where he put the heart and its crystal urn in the necropolis of the Kings of France, the burial place of Louis-Charles's parents and other members of the French royal family.[9]
+
+In December 1999, public notaries witnessed a section of the heart muscle of the aorta removed from the rest of the heart, and the transfer of the samples into a sealed envelope, and then the opening of the sealed envelope in the laboratory to be tested. Scientists using DNA samples from Queen Anne of Romania, and her brother Andre de Bourbon-Parme, maternal relatives of Louis XVII, and from a strand of Marie-Antoinette's hair, thus proved the young royal's identity. Historian Jean Tulard wrote: "This [mummified] heart is ... almost certainly that of Louis XVII. We can never be 100 per cent sure but this is about as sure as it gets".[11][12]
+
+French Legitimists organized the heart's burial in the Basilica on 8 June 2004, next to the remains of Louis's parents. For the first time in over a century a royal ceremony took place in France, complete with the fleur-de-lis standard and a royal crown.[13][14][15]
+
+As rumors quickly spread that the body buried was not that of Louis-Charles and that he had been spirited away alive by sympathizers, the legend of the "Lost Dauphin" was born. When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, some one hundred claimants came forward. Would-be royal heirs continued to appear across Europe for decades afterward and some of their descendants still have small but loyal retinues of followers today. Popular candidates for the Lost Dauphin included John James Audubon, the naturalist; Eleazer Williams, a missionary from Wisconsin of Mohawk Native American descent; and Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker. However, DNA testing conducted in 1993 proved that Naundorff was not the Dauphin.[16]
+
+Karl Wilhelm Naundorff's story rested on a series of complicated intrigues. According to him, Barras determined to save the dauphin in order to please Joséphine de Beauharnais,[citation needed] the future empress, having conceived the idea of using the dauphin's existence as a means of dominating the comte de Provence in the event of a restoration. The dauphin was concealed in the fourth storey of the Tower, a wooden figure being substituted for him. Laurent, to protect himself from the consequences of the substitution, replaced the wooden figure with a deaf mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death certificate. The deaf mute was also concealed in the Temple. It was not the dead child, but the dauphin who left the prison in the coffin, to be retrieved by friends before it reached the cemetery.
+
+Naundorff arrived in Berlin in 1810, with papers giving the name Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. He said he was escaping persecution and settled at Spandau in 1812 as a clockmaker, marrying Johanna Einert in 1818. In 1822 he removed to Brandenburg an der Havel, and in 1828 to Crossen, near Frankfurt (Oder). He was imprisoned from 1825 to 1828 for coining, though apparently on insufficient evidence, and in 1833 came to push his claims in Paris, where he was recognised as the dauphin by many persons formerly connected with the court of Louis XVI. Expelled from France in 1836, the day after bringing a suit against the duchess of Angoulême for the restitution of the dauphin's private property, he lived in exile until his death at Delft on 10 August 1845, and his tomb was inscribed "Louis XVII., roi de France et de Navarre (Charles Louis, duc de Normandie)". The Dutch authorities who had inscribed on his death certificate the name of Charles Louis de Bourbon, duc de Normandie (Louis XVII) permitted his son to bear the name de Bourbon, and when the family appealed in 1850–51, and again in 1874, for the restitution of their civil rights as heirs of Louis XVI, no less an advocate than Jules Favre pled their cause.
+
+Baron de Richemont's tale that Jeanne Simon, who was genuinely attached to him, smuggled him out in a basket, is simple and more credible, and does not necessarily invalidate the story of the subsequent operations with the deaf mute and the scrofulous patient, Laurent in that case being deceived from the beginning, but it renders them extremely unlikely.
+
+Richemont, alias Henri Éthelbert-Louis-Hector Hébert, was in prison in Milan for seven years and began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. In 1833, he was again arrested, was brought to trial in the following year and condemned to twelve years' imprisonment. He escaped after a few months and left the country, to return in 1840. He died at Gleizé on 10 August 1853, the name of Louis Charles de France being inscribed on his tomb until the government ordered its removal.
+
+Another pretender was Reverend Eleazar Williams, a Mohawk-born Protestant missionary, and an advocate for land rights of Native Americans. While at the house Francis Vinton, William began shaking and trembling upon seeing a portrait of Antoine Simon, a member of the sans-culottes, claiming the portrait has "haunted me, day, and night, as long as I can remember." Simon was rumored to have physically abused the dauphin while he was imprisoned at the Temple.[17] Francis Vinton was convinced by Eleazar William's reaction, that Williams was Louis-Charles. Williams claims he has no recollection of how he escaped his imprisonment at the Temple, or his early years in France.[17]
+
+He was a missionary to Native Americans when the prince de Joinville, son of Louis-Philippe, met him, and after some conversation asked him to sign a document abdicating his rights in favour of Louis-Philippe, in return for which he, the dauphin (alias Eleazar Williams), was to receive the private inheritance which was his. This Eleazar Williams refused. Williams's story is generally regarded as false.
+
+Louis XVII's remains were not interred with ceremony. "At seven o'clock the police commissary ordered the body to be taken up, and that they should proceed to the cemetery. It was the season of the longest days, and therefore the interment did not take place in secrecy and at night, as some misinformed narrators have said or written; it took place in broad daylight, and attracted a great concourse of people before the gates of the Temple palace." Added, "The funeral entered the cemetery of Ste. Marguerite, not by the church, as some accounts assert, but by the old gate of the cemetery. The interment was made in the corner, on the left, at a distance of eight or nine feet from the enclosure wall, and at an equal distance from a small house, which subsequently served as a school. The grave was filled up,—no mound marked its place, and not even a trace remained of the interment! Not till then did the commissaries of police and the municipality withdraw, and enter the house opposite the church to draw up the declaration of interment."[18]
+
+Strangely, the account of the substitution in the Temple deceived royalists and republicans alike. Lady Atkyns was trying by every possible means to get the dauphin out of his prison when he may already have been in safe hands. A child was in fact delivered to her agents, but he was a deaf mute. That there was a complicated fraud on the guardians of the dauphin was considered by a succession of writers from 1850 onwards, and more recently by Frédéric Barbey, who wisely attempts no ultimate solution. When the partisans of Richemont or Naundorff come to the post-Temple careers of their heroes, they become in most cases so uncritical as to be unconvincing.
+
+By 1900, there were over 100 pretenders who had presented themselves to be the "lost-dauphin". The popularity of the false-dauphins peaked in the wake of the 1830 Revolution, and waned over the course of the century. Unlike the deaths of his parents which were a national spectacle, the dauphin's death was a matter of administrative and medical record, consequently easier to repudiate.[17] The myth of the substitution before the death of Louis-Charles was popularized and encouraged by Jean-Joseph Regnault Warin's immense popular novel Le Cimetière de la Madeleine in 1800. Pretenders increased in regularity after the accession of King Louis XVIII in the Bourbon Restoration. Following the Revolution of 1830 pretender claims were treated with heightened seriousness in France because of their ability to serve as critiques of the King Louis-Philippe. The premise of a Bourbon claimant challenging the legitimacy of Louis-Phillppe's legitimacy, certainly served as the reason for the aggression of which the pretenders were pursued in the courts.[17]
+
+To his mourners and his impersonators, Louis-Charles offered the opportunity of a transformative and mythical future, beyond the problems of the present. The royalists were able to reverse the child abuse claims with which the revolution charged Marie-Antoinette during her trial, directing them at the revolution itself, for harming Louis-Charles.[17]
+
+In 2000, Philippe Delorme arranged for DNA testing of the heart as well as bone samples from Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. Ernst Brinkmann of Münster University and Belgian genetics professor Jean-Jacques Cassiman of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, conducted mitochondrial DNA tests in 2000 using samples from Marie-Antoinette, her sisters Maria Johanna Gabriela and Maria Josepha, their mother, Maria Theresa, and two living direct descendants in strict maternal line of Maria Theresa, Queen Anne of Romania and her brother, Prince André de Bourbon Parme. The tests proved that Naundorff was not the dauphin, and the heart was that of Louis-Charles.
+
+In 2004, the heart of Louis XVII was transferred to the Saint-Denis basilica, the traditional burial place for France's kings and queens. At the Mass, 12-year-old Prince Amaury de Bourbon-Parme carried the heart and placed it in a niche beside the tombs of Louis-Charles' parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.[11]
+
+From 29 June to 1 October 2018 the Museum of the French Revolution showed an exhibition on Louis XVII.[19]
+
+Primary sources
+
+Other material

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+Louis XVII (born Louis Charles, Duke of Normandy; 27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795) was the younger son of King Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie Antoinette. His older brother, Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, died in June 1789, a little over a month before the start of the French Revolution. At his brother's death he became the new Dauphin (heir apparent to the throne), a title he held until 1791, when the new constitution accorded the heir apparent the style of Prince Royal.
+
+When his father was executed on 21 January 1793, during the middle period of the French Revolution, he automatically succeeded as the king of France, Louis XVII, in the eyes of the royalists. France was by then a republic, so he never actually ruled. Nevertheless, in 1814  after the Bourbon Restoration, his uncle acceded to the throne and was proclaimed Louis XVIII.
+
+Louis-Charles de France was born at the Palace of Versailles, the second son and third child of his parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.[1] He was named after his father and his mother's favourite sister Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily, who was known as Charlotte in the family, Charles being the masculine version of her name. His younger sister, Sophie, was born a little over a year later. He became the Dauphin on the death of his elder brother, Louis-Joseph, on 4 June 1789.
+
+As customary in royal families, Louis-Charles was cared for by multiple people. Queen Marie Antoinette appointed governesses to look after all three of her children. Louis-Charles' original governess was Yolande de Polastron, duchesse de Polignac, who left France on the night of 16–17 July 1789, at the outbreak of the Revolution, at the urging of Louis XVI.[2] She was replaced by the marquise Louise Élisabeth de Tourzel. Additionally, the queen selected Agathe de Rambaud to be the official nurse of Louis-Charles. Alain Decaux wrote:
+
+"Madame de Rambaud was officially in charge of the care of the Dauphin from the day of his birth until 10 August 1792; in other words, for seven years. During these seven years, she never left him, she cradled him, took care of him, dressed him, comforted him, and scolded him. Many times, more than Marie Antoinette, she was a true mother for him".[3]
+
+Some have suggested that Axel von Fersen, who was romantically linked with Marie Antoinette, was the father of her son. The fact that Louis Charles was born exactly nine months after he returned to court was noted, but this theory was debunked by most scholars, who reject it, observing that the time of his conception corresponded perfectly in the time that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had spent a lot of time together. Marie Antoinette, who gained massive weight because of her pregnancies, including this one (she was described as "very fat" by the king of Sweden), retained her charisma with an imposing figure in her court, where she had lot of admirers, but she remained a faithful, strong-willed wife and a stern but loving mother.[4][citation needed]
+
+On 6 October 1789, the royal family was forced by a Parisian mob mostly composed of women to move from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where they spent the next three years as prisoners under the daily surveillance of the national guards who did not spare any humiliation to the royal family; at that time Marie Antoinette was always surrounded by guards, even in her bedroom at night and these guards were present when the Queen was allowed to see her children.
+
+The family lived a secluded life, and Marie Antoinette dedicated most of her time to her two children under the daily surveillance of the national guards who kept her hands behind her back and searched everybody from the Queen to the children to see if any letters were smuggled to the royal prisoner.[5] On 21 June 1791, the family tried to escape in what is known as the Flight to Varennes, but the attempt failed. After the family was recognized, they were brought back to Paris. When the Tuileries Palace was stormed by an armed mob on 10 August 1792, the royal family sought refuge at the Legislative Assembly.
+
+On 13 August, the royal family was imprisoned in the tower of the Temple. At first, their conditions were not extremely harsh, but they were prisoners and were re-styled as "Capets" by the newborn Republic. On 11 December, at the beginning of his trial, Louis XVI was separated from his family.
+
+At his birth, Louis-Charles, a Fils de France ("Son of France"), was given the title of Duke of Normandy, and, on 4 June 1789, when Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, his elder brother, died, the four-year-old became Dauphin of France, title he held until September 1791, when France became a constitutional monarchy. Under the new constitution, the heir-apparent to the throne of France, formerly "Dauphin", was restyled Prince Royal. Louis-Charles held that title until the fall of the monarchy on 21 September 1792. At the death of his father on 21 January 1793, royalists and foreign powers intent on restoring the monarchy held him to be the new king of France, with the title of Louis XVII. From his exile in Hamm, in today's North Rhine-Westphalia, his uncle, the Count of Provence and future Louis XVIII, who had emigrated on 21 June 1791, appointed himself Regent for the young imprisoned king.
+
+Immediately following Louis XVI's execution, plots were hatched for the escape of the prisoners from the Temple, the chief of which were engineered by the Chevalier de Jarjayes [fr], the Baron de Batz, and Lady Atkyns. All came to nothing.
+
+On 3 July, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and put in the care of Antoine Simon, a cobbler who had been named his guardian by the Committee of Public Safety and tasked to transform the former young prince into a staunch republican citizen.
+
+The tales told by royalist writers of the cruelty inflicted by Simon and his wife on the child are not proven. Louis Charles' sister, Marie Therese, wrote in her memoires about the "monster Simon", as did Alcide Beauchesne. Antoine Simon's wife Marie-Jeanne, in fact, took great care of the child's person. Stories survive narrating how he was encouraged to eat and drink to excess and learned the language of the gutter. The foreign secretaries of Britain and Spain also heard accounts from their spies that the boy was raped by prostitutes in order to infect him with venereal diseases to supply the Commune with manufactured "evidence" against the Queen.[6] However, the scenes related by Alcide de Beauchesne [fr] of the physical martyrdom of the child are not supported by any testimony, though he was at this time seen by a great number of people.
+
+On 6 October, Pache, Chaumette, Jacques Hébert and others visited him and secured his signature to charges of sexual molestation against his mother and his aunt.[6] The next day he met  with his elder sister Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte for the last time.
+
+On 19 January 1794, the Simons left the Temple, after securing a receipt for the safe transfer of their ward, who was declared to be in good health. A large part of the Temple records from that time onward disappeared under the Bourbon Restoration,[citation needed] making knowledge of the facts impossible. Two days after the departure of the Simons, Louis-Charles is said by the Restoration historians to have been put in a dark room which was barricaded like the cage of a wild animal. The story runs that food was passed through the bars to the boy, who survived despite the accumulated filth of his surroundings.
+
+Robespierre visited Marie-Thérèse on 11 May, but no one, according to the legend, entered the dauphin's room for six months until Barras visited the prison after the 9th Thermidor (27 July 1794). Barras's account of the visit describes the child as suffering from extreme neglect, but conveys no idea of the alleged walling in. It is nevertheless certain that during the first half of 1794 Louis-Charles was very strictly secluded; he had no special guardian, but was under the charge of guards who changed from day to day.
+
+The boy made no complaint to Barras of any ill treatment. He was then cleaned and re-clothed. His room was cleaned, and during the day he was visited by his new attendant, Jean Jacques Christophe Laurent (1770–1807), a creole from Martinique. From 8 November onward, Laurent had assistance from a man named Gomin.
+
+Louis-Charles was then taken out for fresh air and walks on the roof of the Tower. From about the time of Gomin's arrival, he was inspected, not by delegates of the Commune, but by representatives of the civil committee of the 48 sections of Paris. The rare recurrence of the same inspectors would obviously facilitate fraud, if any such was intended. From the end of October onward, the child maintained an obstinate silence, explained by Laurent as a determination taken on the day he made his deposition against his mother. On 19 December 1794 he was visited by three commissioners from the Committee of Public Safety — J. B. Harmand de la Meuse, J. B. C. Mathieu and J. Reverchon — who extracted no word from him.
+
+On 31 March 1795, Étienne Lasne was appointed to be the child's guardian in replacement of Laurent. In May 1795, the boy was seriously ill, and a doctor, P. J. Desault, who had visited him seven months earlier, was summoned. However, on 1 June, Desault died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison, and it was some days before doctors Philippe-Jean Pelletan and Dumangin were called.
+
+Louis-Charles died on 8 June 1795. The next day an autopsy was conducted by Pelletan, at which it was stated that a child apparently about ten years of age, "which the commissioners told us was the late Louis Capet's son", had died of a scrofulous infection of long standing. "Scrofula" as it was previously known, is nowadays called Tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis referring to a lymphadenitis (chronic lymph node swelling or infection) of the neck (cervical lymph nodes) lymph nodes associated with tuberculosis.[7][8]
+
+During the autopsy, the physician Dr. Pelletan was shocked to see the countless scars which covered the body of Louis-Charles. The scars were the result of the physical abuse the child suffered while imprisoned in the Temple.[9]
+
+Louis-Charles was buried on 10 June in the Sainte Marguerite cemetery, but no stone was erected to mark the spot. A skull was found there in 1846 and identified as his, though later re-examination in 1893 showed it to be from a teenager and therefore unlikely to be his.[10]
+
+Following a tradition of preserving royal hearts, Louis-Charles's heart was removed and smuggled out during the autopsy by the overseeing physician, Philippe-Jean Pelletan. Thus, the heart of Louis-Charles was not interred with the rest of the body. Dr. Pelletan stored the smuggled heart in distilled wine in order to preserve it. However, after 8 to 10 years the distilled wine had evaporated, and the heart was further kept dry.[9]
+
+After the Restoration in 1815, Dr. Pelletan attempted to give the heart to Louis-Charles's uncle, Louis XVIII; the latter refused because he could not bring himself to believe that was the heart of his nephew. Dr. Pelletan then donated the heart to the Archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen.
+
+Following the Revolution of 1830, and the plundering of the palace, the son of Pelletan found the relic in the remnants of the palace and placed it in the crystal urn, in which it still resides today. After his death in 1879, Eduard Dumont received the heart.[9]
+
+In 1895, the nephew of the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, Don Carlos de Bourbon, a pretender to the throne of Spain accepted the relic from a friend of Eduart Dumont, Paul Cottin. The relic was held near Vienna, Austria at the castle of Frohsdorf. The son of Carlos, Jaime, Duke of Madrid, in 1909 inherited the heart, and gave it to his sister, Beatriz.[1][2]
+
+Finally two granddaughters of Don Carlos offered the heart to the president of the Memorial of Saint-Denis in Paris, Duc de Bauffremont, where he put the heart and its crystal urn in the necropolis of the Kings of France, the burial place of Louis-Charles's parents and other members of the French royal family.[9]
+
+In December 1999, public notaries witnessed a section of the heart muscle of the aorta removed from the rest of the heart, and the transfer of the samples into a sealed envelope, and then the opening of the sealed envelope in the laboratory to be tested. Scientists using DNA samples from Queen Anne of Romania, and her brother Andre de Bourbon-Parme, maternal relatives of Louis XVII, and from a strand of Marie-Antoinette's hair, thus proved the young royal's identity. Historian Jean Tulard wrote: "This [mummified] heart is ... almost certainly that of Louis XVII. We can never be 100 per cent sure but this is about as sure as it gets".[11][12]
+
+French Legitimists organized the heart's burial in the Basilica on 8 June 2004, next to the remains of Louis's parents. For the first time in over a century a royal ceremony took place in France, complete with the fleur-de-lis standard and a royal crown.[13][14][15]
+
+As rumors quickly spread that the body buried was not that of Louis-Charles and that he had been spirited away alive by sympathizers, the legend of the "Lost Dauphin" was born. When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, some one hundred claimants came forward. Would-be royal heirs continued to appear across Europe for decades afterward and some of their descendants still have small but loyal retinues of followers today. Popular candidates for the Lost Dauphin included John James Audubon, the naturalist; Eleazer Williams, a missionary from Wisconsin of Mohawk Native American descent; and Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker. However, DNA testing conducted in 1993 proved that Naundorff was not the Dauphin.[16]
+
+Karl Wilhelm Naundorff's story rested on a series of complicated intrigues. According to him, Barras determined to save the dauphin in order to please Joséphine de Beauharnais,[citation needed] the future empress, having conceived the idea of using the dauphin's existence as a means of dominating the comte de Provence in the event of a restoration. The dauphin was concealed in the fourth storey of the Tower, a wooden figure being substituted for him. Laurent, to protect himself from the consequences of the substitution, replaced the wooden figure with a deaf mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death certificate. The deaf mute was also concealed in the Temple. It was not the dead child, but the dauphin who left the prison in the coffin, to be retrieved by friends before it reached the cemetery.
+
+Naundorff arrived in Berlin in 1810, with papers giving the name Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. He said he was escaping persecution and settled at Spandau in 1812 as a clockmaker, marrying Johanna Einert in 1818. In 1822 he removed to Brandenburg an der Havel, and in 1828 to Crossen, near Frankfurt (Oder). He was imprisoned from 1825 to 1828 for coining, though apparently on insufficient evidence, and in 1833 came to push his claims in Paris, where he was recognised as the dauphin by many persons formerly connected with the court of Louis XVI. Expelled from France in 1836, the day after bringing a suit against the duchess of Angoulême for the restitution of the dauphin's private property, he lived in exile until his death at Delft on 10 August 1845, and his tomb was inscribed "Louis XVII., roi de France et de Navarre (Charles Louis, duc de Normandie)". The Dutch authorities who had inscribed on his death certificate the name of Charles Louis de Bourbon, duc de Normandie (Louis XVII) permitted his son to bear the name de Bourbon, and when the family appealed in 1850–51, and again in 1874, for the restitution of their civil rights as heirs of Louis XVI, no less an advocate than Jules Favre pled their cause.
+
+Baron de Richemont's tale that Jeanne Simon, who was genuinely attached to him, smuggled him out in a basket, is simple and more credible, and does not necessarily invalidate the story of the subsequent operations with the deaf mute and the scrofulous patient, Laurent in that case being deceived from the beginning, but it renders them extremely unlikely.
+
+Richemont, alias Henri Éthelbert-Louis-Hector Hébert, was in prison in Milan for seven years and began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. In 1833, he was again arrested, was brought to trial in the following year and condemned to twelve years' imprisonment. He escaped after a few months and left the country, to return in 1840. He died at Gleizé on 10 August 1853, the name of Louis Charles de France being inscribed on his tomb until the government ordered its removal.
+
+Another pretender was Reverend Eleazar Williams, a Mohawk-born Protestant missionary, and an advocate for land rights of Native Americans. While at the house Francis Vinton, William began shaking and trembling upon seeing a portrait of Antoine Simon, a member of the sans-culottes, claiming the portrait has "haunted me, day, and night, as long as I can remember." Simon was rumored to have physically abused the dauphin while he was imprisoned at the Temple.[17] Francis Vinton was convinced by Eleazar William's reaction, that Williams was Louis-Charles. Williams claims he has no recollection of how he escaped his imprisonment at the Temple, or his early years in France.[17]
+
+He was a missionary to Native Americans when the prince de Joinville, son of Louis-Philippe, met him, and after some conversation asked him to sign a document abdicating his rights in favour of Louis-Philippe, in return for which he, the dauphin (alias Eleazar Williams), was to receive the private inheritance which was his. This Eleazar Williams refused. Williams's story is generally regarded as false.
+
+Louis XVII's remains were not interred with ceremony. "At seven o'clock the police commissary ordered the body to be taken up, and that they should proceed to the cemetery. It was the season of the longest days, and therefore the interment did not take place in secrecy and at night, as some misinformed narrators have said or written; it took place in broad daylight, and attracted a great concourse of people before the gates of the Temple palace." Added, "The funeral entered the cemetery of Ste. Marguerite, not by the church, as some accounts assert, but by the old gate of the cemetery. The interment was made in the corner, on the left, at a distance of eight or nine feet from the enclosure wall, and at an equal distance from a small house, which subsequently served as a school. The grave was filled up,—no mound marked its place, and not even a trace remained of the interment! Not till then did the commissaries of police and the municipality withdraw, and enter the house opposite the church to draw up the declaration of interment."[18]
+
+Strangely, the account of the substitution in the Temple deceived royalists and republicans alike. Lady Atkyns was trying by every possible means to get the dauphin out of his prison when he may already have been in safe hands. A child was in fact delivered to her agents, but he was a deaf mute. That there was a complicated fraud on the guardians of the dauphin was considered by a succession of writers from 1850 onwards, and more recently by Frédéric Barbey, who wisely attempts no ultimate solution. When the partisans of Richemont or Naundorff come to the post-Temple careers of their heroes, they become in most cases so uncritical as to be unconvincing.
+
+By 1900, there were over 100 pretenders who had presented themselves to be the "lost-dauphin". The popularity of the false-dauphins peaked in the wake of the 1830 Revolution, and waned over the course of the century. Unlike the deaths of his parents which were a national spectacle, the dauphin's death was a matter of administrative and medical record, consequently easier to repudiate.[17] The myth of the substitution before the death of Louis-Charles was popularized and encouraged by Jean-Joseph Regnault Warin's immense popular novel Le Cimetière de la Madeleine in 1800. Pretenders increased in regularity after the accession of King Louis XVIII in the Bourbon Restoration. Following the Revolution of 1830 pretender claims were treated with heightened seriousness in France because of their ability to serve as critiques of the King Louis-Philippe. The premise of a Bourbon claimant challenging the legitimacy of Louis-Phillppe's legitimacy, certainly served as the reason for the aggression of which the pretenders were pursued in the courts.[17]
+
+To his mourners and his impersonators, Louis-Charles offered the opportunity of a transformative and mythical future, beyond the problems of the present. The royalists were able to reverse the child abuse claims with which the revolution charged Marie-Antoinette during her trial, directing them at the revolution itself, for harming Louis-Charles.[17]
+
+In 2000, Philippe Delorme arranged for DNA testing of the heart as well as bone samples from Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. Ernst Brinkmann of Münster University and Belgian genetics professor Jean-Jacques Cassiman of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, conducted mitochondrial DNA tests in 2000 using samples from Marie-Antoinette, her sisters Maria Johanna Gabriela and Maria Josepha, their mother, Maria Theresa, and two living direct descendants in strict maternal line of Maria Theresa, Queen Anne of Romania and her brother, Prince André de Bourbon Parme. The tests proved that Naundorff was not the dauphin, and the heart was that of Louis-Charles.
+
+In 2004, the heart of Louis XVII was transferred to the Saint-Denis basilica, the traditional burial place for France's kings and queens. At the Mass, 12-year-old Prince Amaury de Bourbon-Parme carried the heart and placed it in a niche beside the tombs of Louis-Charles' parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.[11]
+
+From 29 June to 1 October 2018 the Museum of the French Revolution showed an exhibition on Louis XVII.[19]
+
+Primary sources
+
+Other material

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+
+
+Louis XVIII (Louis Stanislas Xavier; 17 November 1755 – 16 September 1824), known as the Desired (French: le Désiré),[2][3] was King of France from 1814 to 1824, except for the Hundred Days in 1815. He spent twenty-three years in exile: during the French Revolution and the First French Empire (1791–1814); and during the Hundred Days.
+
+Until his accession to the throne of France, he held the title of Count of Provence as brother of King Louis XVI. On 21 September 1792, the National Convention abolished the monarchy and deposed Louis XVI, who was later executed by guillotine.[4] When his young nephew Louis XVII died in prison in June 1795, the Count of Provence proclaimed himself (titular) king under the name Louis XVIII.[5]
+
+Following the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic era, Louis XVIII lived in exile in Prussia, England, and Russia.[6] When the Sixth Coalition finally defeated Napoleon in 1814, Louis XVIII was placed in what he, and the French royalists, considered his rightful position. However, Napoleon escaped from his exile in Elba and restored his French Empire. Louis XVIII fled, and a Seventh Coalition declared war on the French Empire, defeated Napoleon again, and again restored Louis XVIII to the French throne.
+
+Louis XVIII ruled as king for slightly less than a decade. The government of the Bourbon Restoration was a constitutional monarchy, unlike the Ancien Régime, which was absolutist. As a constitutional monarch, Louis XVIII's royal prerogative was reduced substantially by the Charter of 1814, France's new constitution. His return in 1815 led to a second wave of White Terror headed by the Ultra-royalist faction. The following year, Louis dissolved the unpopular parliament, referred to as the Chambre introuvable, giving rise to the liberal Doctrinaires. His reign was further marked by the formation of the Quintuple Alliance and a military intervention in Spain. Louis had no children, so upon his death the crown passed to his brother, Charles X.[7] Louis XVIII was the last French monarch to die while still reigning, as Charles X (1824–1830) abdicated and both Louis Philippe I (1830–1848) and Napoleon III (1852–1870) were deposed.
+
+Louis Stanislas Xavier, styled Count of Provence from birth, was born on 17 November 1755 in the Palace of Versailles, a younger son of Louis, Dauphin of France, and his wife Maria Josepha of Saxony. He was the grandson of the reigning King Louis XV. As a son of the Dauphin, he was a Fils de France. He was christened Louis Stanislas Xavier six months after his birth, in accordance with Bourbon family tradition, being nameless before his baptism. By this act, he also became a Knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit.
+The name of Louis was bestowed because it was typical of a prince of France; Stanislas was chosen to honour his great-grandfather King Stanisław I of Poland; and Xavier was chosen for Saint Francis Xavier, whom his mother's family held as one of their patron saints.[8]
+
+At the time of his birth, Louis Stanislas was fourth in line to the throne of France, behind his father and his two elder brothers: Louis Joseph Xavier, Duke of Burgundy, and Louis Auguste, Duke of Berry. The former died in 1761, leaving Louis Auguste as heir to their father until the Dauphin's own premature death in 1765. The two deaths elevated Louis Stanislas to second in the line of succession, while his brother Louis Auguste acquired the title of Dauphin.[9]
+
+Louis Stanislas found comfort in his governess, Madame de Marsan, Governess of the Children of France, as he was her favourite among his siblings.[10] Louis Stanislas was taken away from his governess when he turned seven, the age at which the education of boys of royal blood and of the nobility was turned over to men. Antoine de Quélen de Stuer de Caussade, Duke of La Vauguyon, a friend of his father, was named as his governor.
+
+Louis Stanislas was an intelligent boy, excelling in the classics. His education was of the same quality and consistency as that of his older brother, Louis Auguste, despite the fact that Louis Auguste was heir and Louis Stanislas was not.[10] Louis Stanislas's education was quite religious in nature; several of his teachers were priests, such as Jean-Gilles du Coëtlosquet, Bishop of Limoges; the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet; and the Jesuit Guillaume-François Berthier.[11] La Vauguyon drilled into young Louis Stanislas and his brothers the way he thought princes should "know how to withdraw themselves, to like to work," and "to know how to reason correctly".
+
+In April 1771, when he was 15, Louis Stanislas's education was formally concluded, and his own independent household was established,[12] which astounded contemporaries with its extravagance: in 1773, the number of his servants reached 390.[13] In the same month his household was founded, Louis was granted several titles by his grandfather, Louis XV: Duke of Anjou, Count of Maine, Count of Perche, and Count of Senoches.[14] During this period of his life he was often known by the title Count of Provence.
+
+On 17 December 1773, he was inaugurated as a Grand Master of the Order of St. Lazarus.
+
+On 16 April 1771, Louis Stanislas was married by proxy to Princess Maria Giuseppina of Savoy. The in-person ceremony was conducted on 14 May at the Palace of Versailles. Marie Joséphine (as she was known in France) was a daughter of Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy (later King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia), and his wife Maria Antonia Ferdinanda of Spain.
+
+A luxurious ball followed the wedding on 20 May.[15] Louis Stanislas found his wife repulsive; she was considered ugly, tedious, and ignorant of the customs of the court of Versailles. The marriage remained unconsummated for years. Biographers disagree about the reason. The most common theories propose Louis Stanislas' alleged impotence (according to biographer Antonia Fraser) or his unwillingness to sleep with his wife due to her poor personal hygiene. She never brushed her teeth, plucked her eyebrows, or used any perfumes.[16] At the time of his marriage, Louis Stanislas was obese and waddled instead of walked. He never exercised and continued to eat enormous amounts of food.[17]
+
+Despite the fact that Louis Stanislas was not infatuated with his wife, he boasted that the two enjoyed vigorous conjugal relations – but such declarations were held in low esteem by courtiers at Versailles. He also proclaimed his wife to be pregnant merely to spite Louis Auguste and his wife Marie Antoinette, who had not yet consummated their marriage.[18] The Dauphin and Louis Stanislas did not enjoy a harmonious relationship and often quarrelled,[19] as did their wives.[20] Louis Stanislas did impregnate his wife in 1774, having conquered his aversion. However, the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.[21] A second pregnancy in 1781 also miscarried, and the marriage remained childless.[8][22]
+
+On 27 April 1774, Louis XV fell ill after contracting smallpox and died a few days later on 10 May, aged 64.[23] Louis Stanislas' elder brother, the Dauphin Louis Auguste, succeeded their grandfather as King Louis XVI.[24] As eldest brother of the King, Louis Stanislas received the title Monsieur. Louis Stanislas longed for political influence. He attempted to gain admittance to the King's council in 1774, but failed. Louis Stanislas was left in a political limbo that he called "a gap of 12 years in my political life".[25] Louis XVI granted Louis Stanislas revenues from the Duchy of Alençon in December 1774. The duchy was given to enhance Louis Stanislas' prestige. However, the appanage generated only 300,000 livres a year, an amount much lower than it had been at its peak in the fourteenth century.[14]
+
+Louis Stanislas travelled about France more than other members of the Royal Family, who rarely left the Île-de-France. In 1774, he accompanied his sister Clotilde to Chambéry on the journey to meet her bridegroom Charles Emmanuel, Prince of Piedmont, heir to the throne of Sardinia. In 1775, he visited Lyon and also his spinster aunts Adélaïde and Victoire while they were taking the waters at Vichy.[13] The four provincial tours that Louis Stanislas took before the year 1791 amounted to a total of three months.[26]
+
+On 5 May 1778, Dr. Lassonne, Marie Antoinette's private physician, confirmed her pregnancy.[27] On 19 December 1778, the Queen gave birth to a daughter, who was named Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France and given the honorific title Madame Royale. That the baby was a girl came as a relief to the Count of Provence, who kept his position as heir to Louis XVI, since Salic Law excluded women from acceding to the throne of France.[28][29] However, Louis Stanislas did not remain heir to the throne much longer. On 22 October 1781, Marie Antoinette gave birth to the Dauphin Louis Joseph. Louis Stanislas and his brother, the Count of Artois, served as godfathers by proxy for Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, the Queen's brother.[30] When Marie Antoinette gave birth to her second son, Louis Charles, in March 1785, Louis Stanislas slid further down the line of succession.[31]
+
+In 1780, Anne Nompar de Caumont, Countess of Balbi, entered the service of Marie Joséphine. Louis Stanislas soon fell in love with his wife's new lady-in-waiting and installed her as his mistress,[32] which resulted in the couple's already limited affection for each other cooling entirely.[33] Louis Stanislas commissioned a pavilion for his mistress on a parcel of land  at Versailles which became known as the Parc Balbi.[34]
+
+Louis Stanislas lived a quiet and sedentary lifestyle at this point, not having a great deal to do since his self-proclaimed political exclusion in 1774. He kept himself occupied with his vast library of over 11,000 books at Balbi's pavilion, reading for several hours each morning.[35] In the early 1780s, he also incurred huge debts totalling 10 million livres, which his brother Louis XVI paid.[36]
+
+An Assembly of Notables (the members consisted of magistrates, mayors, nobles and clergy) was convened in February 1787 to ratify the financial reforms sought by the Controller-General of Finance Charles Alexandre de Calonne. This provided the Count of Provence, who abhorred the radical reforms proposed by Calonne, his long-awaiting opportunity to establish himself in politics.[37] The reforms proposed a new property tax,[38] and new elected provincial assemblies which would have a say in local taxation.[39] Calonne's proposition was rejected outright by the notables, and, as a result, Louis XVI dismissed him. The Archbishop of Toulouse, Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, acquired Calonne's ministry. Brienne attempted to salvage Calonne's reforms, but ultimately failed to convince the notables to approve them. A frustrated Louis XVI dissolved the assembly.[40]
+
+Brienne's reforms were then submitted to the Parlement of Paris in the hopes that they would be approved. (A parlement was responsible for ratifying the King's edicts; each province had its own parlement, but the Parlement of Paris was the most significant of all.) The Parlement of Paris refused to accept Brienne's proposals and declared that any new taxation would have to be approved by an Estates-General (the nominal parliament of France). Louis XVI and Brienne took a hostile stance against this rejection, and Louis XVI had to implement a "bed of justice" (Lit de justice), which automatically registered an edict in the Parlement of Paris, to ratify the desired reforms. On 8 May, two of the leading members of the Parlement of Paris were arrested. There was rioting in Brittany, Provence, Burgundy and Béarn in reaction to their arrest. This unrest was engineered by local magistrates and nobles, who enticed the people to revolt against the Lit de Justice, which was quite unfavourable to the nobles and magistrates. The clergy also joined the provincial cause, and condemned Brienne's tax reforms. Brienne conceded defeat in July and agreed to a convocation of the Estates-General to meet in 1789. He resigned from his post in August and was replaced by the Swiss magnate Jacques Necker.[41]
+
+In November 1788, a second Assembly of Notables was convened by Jacques Necker, to consider the makeup of the next Estates-General.[42] The Parlement de Paris recommended that the Estates should be the same as they were at the last assembly, in 1614 (this would mean that the clergy and nobility would have more representation than the Third Estate).[43] The notables rejected the "dual representation" proposal. Louis Stanislas was the only notable to vote to increase the size of the Third Estate.[44] Necker disregarded the notables' judgment, and convinced Louis XVI to grant the extra representation  the king duly obliging on 27 December.[45]
+
+The Estates-General were convened in May 1789 to ratify financial reforms.[46] The Count of Provence favoured a stalwart position against the Third Estate and its demands for tax reform. On 17 June, the Third Estate declared itself a National Assembly, an Assembly not of the Estates, but of the people.
+
+The Count of Provence urged the King to act strongly against the declaration, while the King's popular minister Jacques Necker aimed at reaching a compromise with the new assembly. Louis XVI was characteristically indecisive. On 9 July, the assembly declared itself a National Constituent Assembly that would give France a Constitution. On 11 July, Louis XVI dismissed Necker, which led to widespread rioting across Paris. On 12 July, the sabre charge of the cavalry regiment of Charles-Eugène de Lorraine, prince de Lambesc, against a crowd gathered at the Tuileries gardens, sparked the Storming of the Bastille two days later.[47][48]
+
+On 16 July, the King's brother, the Count of Artois, left France with his wife and children, along with many other courtiers.[49] Artois and his family took up residence in Turin, the capital city of his father-in-law's Kingdom of Sardinia, with the family of the Princes of Condé.[50]
+
+The Count of Provence decided to remain at Versailles.[51] When the Royal Family plotted to abscond from Versailles to Metz, Provence advised the King not to leave, a suggestion he accepted.[52]
+
+The Royal Family was forced to leave the palace at Versailles on the day after the Women's March on Versailles, 5 October 1789.[53] They were taken to Paris. There, the Count of Provence and his wife lodged in the Luxembourg Palace, while the rest of the Royal Family stayed in the Tuileries Palace.[54] In March 1791, the National Assembly created a law outlining the regency of Louis Charles in case his father died while he was still too young to reign. This law awarded the regency to Louis Charles' nearest male relative in France (at that time the Count of Provence), and after him, the Duke of Orleans, thus bypassing the Count of Artois. If Orleans were unavailable, the regency would be submitted to election.[55]
+
+The Count of Provence and his wife fled to the Austrian Netherlands in conjunction with the royal family's failed Flight to Varennes in June 1791.[56]
+
+When the Count of Provence arrived in the Low Countries, he proclaimed himself de facto regent of France. He exploited a document that he and Louis XVI had written[57] before the latter's failed escape to Varennes. The document gave him the regency in the event of his brother's death or inability to perform his role as king. He would join the other princes-in-exile at Coblenz soon after his escape. It was there that he, the Count of Artois, and the Condé princes proclaimed that their objective was to invade France. Louis XVI was greatly annoyed by his brothers' behaviour. Provence sent emissaries to various European courts asking for financial aid, soldiers, and munition. Artois secured a castle for the court in exile in the Electorate of Trier (or "Treves"), where their maternal uncle, Clemens Wenceslaus of Saxony, was the Archbishop-Elector. The activities of the émigrés bore fruit when the rulers of Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire gathered at Dresden. They released the Declaration of Pillnitz in August 1791, which urged Europe to intervene in France if Louis XVI or his family were threatened. Provence's endorsement of the declaration was not well received in France, either by the ordinary citizens or by Louis XVI himself.[58]
+
+In January 1792, the Legislative Assembly declared that all of the émigrés were traitors to France. Their property and titles were confiscated.[59] The monarchy of France was abolished by the National Convention on 21 September 1792.[60]
+
+Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. This left his young son, Louis Charles, as the titular King. The princes-in-exile proclaimed Louis Charles "Louis XVII of France". The Count of Provence now unilaterally declared himself regent for his nephew, who was too young to be head of the House of Bourbon.[61]
+
+The young King, still a minor, died in June 1795. His only surviving sibling was his sister Marie-Thérèse, who was not considered a candidate for the throne because of France's traditional adherence to Salic law. Thus on 16 June, the princes-in-exile declared the Count of Provence "King Louis XVIII". The new king accepted their declaration soon after.[62] Louis XVIII busied himself drafting a manifesto in response to Louis XVII's death. The manifesto, known as the "Declaration of Verona", was Louis XVIII's attempt to introduce the French people to his politics. The Declaration of Verona beckoned France back into the arms of the monarchy, "which for fourteen centuries was the glory of France".[20]
+
+Louis XVIII negotiated the release of Marie-Thérèse from her Paris prison in 1795. He desperately wanted her to marry her first cousin, Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, the son of the Count of Artois. Louis XVIII deceived his niece by telling her that her parents' last wishes were for her to marry Louis-Antoine, and she duly agreed to Louis XVIII's wishes.[63]
+
+Louis XVIII was forced to abandon Verona when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Republic of Venice in 1796.[64]
+
+Louis XVIII had been vying for the custody of his niece Marie-Thérèse since her release from the Temple Tower in December 1795. He succeeded when Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, agreed to relinquish his custody of her in 1796. She had been staying in Vienna with her Habsburg relatives since January 1796.[64] Louis XVIII moved to Blankenburg in the Duchy of Brunswick after his departure from Verona. He lived in a modest two-bedroom apartment over a shop.[65] Louis XVIII was forced to leave Blankenburg when King Frederick William II of Prussia died. In light of this, Marie-Thérèse decided to wait a while longer before reuniting with her uncle.[66]
+
+In 1798, Tsar Paul I of Russia offered Louis the use of Jelgava Palace in Courland (now Latvia). The Tsar also guaranteed Louis' safety and bestowed on him a generous pension,[65] though later discontinued payment.[67] Marie-Thérèse finally joined Louis XVIII at Jelgava in 1799.[68] In the winter of 1798–1799, Louis XVIII wrote a biography of Marie Antoinette titled Réflexions historiques sur Marie Antoinette. Moreover, being surrounded at Jelgava with many old courtiers, he attempted to recreate the court life of Versailles, re-establishing various of the former court ceremonies, including the lever and coucher (ceremonies that accompanied waking and bedding, respectively).[69]
+
+On 9 June 1799, Marie-Thérèse married her cousin Louis-Antoine at the Jelgava Palace. Desperate to display to the world a united family, Louis XVIII ordered his wife Queen Marie Joséphine, who at the time was living  apart from her husband in Schleswig-Holstein, to attend the wedding. Furthermore she was to come without her long-time friend (and rumoured lover) Marguerite de Gourbillon. The Queen refused to leave her friend behind, creating an unpleasant situation that rivalled the wedding in notoriety.[70] Louis XVIII knew that his nephew Louis-Antoine was not compatible with Marie-Thérèse. Despite this, he still pressed for the marriage, which proved to be quite unhappy and produced no children.[71]
+
+In 1800, Louis XVIII attempted to strike up a correspondence with Napoleon Bonaparte (now First Consul of France), urging him to restore the Bourbons to their throne, but the future emperor was impervious to this idea and continued to consolidate his own position as ruler of France.[72]
+
+Louis XVIII encouraged his niece to write her memoirs, as he wished them to be used as Bourbon propaganda. In 1796 and 1803, Louis also used the diaries of Louis XVI's final attendants in the same way.[69] In January 1801, Tsar Paul told Louis XVIII that he could no longer live in Russia. The court at Jelgava was so low on funds that it had to auction some of its possessions to afford the journey out of Russia. Marie-Thérèse even sold a diamond necklace that the Emperor Paul had given her as a wedding gift.[67]
+
+Marie-Thérèse persuaded Queen Louise of Prussia to give her family refuge on Prussian territory. Though Louise consented, the Bourbons were forced to assume pseudonyms. With Louis XVIII using the title Comte d'Isle, named after his estate in Languedoc and at times spelt as Comte de Lille.[73] After an arduous journey from Jelgava,[74] he and his family took up residence in the years 1801-1804 at the Łazienki Palace in Warsaw, a city which was then part of the province of South Prussia. According to Wirydianna Fiszerowa, a contemporary living there at the time, the Prussian local authorities, wishing to honour the arrivals, had music played, but trying to give this a national and patriotic character, unwittingly chose La Marseillaise, the hymn of the First French Republic with unflattering allusions to both Louis XVI and Louis XVIII. They later apologised for their mistake.[73]
+
+It was very soon after their arrival that Louis and Marie-Thérèse learned of the death of Tsar Paul I. Louis hoped that Paul's successor, Alexander I, would repudiate his father's banishment of the Bourbons, which he later did. Louis then intended to set off to the Kingdom of Naples. The Count of Artois asked Louis to send his son, Louis-Antoine, and daughter-in-law, Marie-Thérèse, to him in Edinburgh, but the King did not do so at that time. Artois had an allowance from King George III of Great Britain and he sent some money to Louis, whose court-in-exile was not only being spied on by Napoleonic agents[75] but was also being forced to make significant economies, financed as it was mainly from interest owed by the Emperor Francis II on valuables his aunt, Marie Antoinette, had removed from France.[76]
+
+In 1803, Napoleon tried to force Louis XVIII to renounce his right to the throne of France, but Louis refused.[77] In May the following year, 1804, Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French. In July,  Louis XVIII and his nephew departed for Sweden for a Bourbon family conference, where Louis XVIII, the Count of Artois, and the Duke of Angoulême issued a statement condemning Napoleon's move.[78] When the King of Prussia decreed that Louis XVIII would have to leave Prussian territory, and hence Warsaw, Tsar Alexander I invited Louis XVIII to resume residence in Jelgava, which he did. However, having to live under less generous conditions than those enjoyed under Paul I, Louis XVIII decided to embark for England as soon as possible.[79]
+
+As time went on, Louis XVIII realised that France would never accept an attempt to return to the Ancien Régime. Accordingly, in 1805 he reformulated his public policies with a view to reclaiming his throne, issuing a declaration that was far more liberal than his earlier pronouncements. This repudiated his Declaration of Verona, promised to abolish conscription, retain the Napoleonic administrative and judicial system, reduce taxes, eliminate political prisons, and guarantee amnesty to everyone who did not oppose a Bourbon Restoration. The opinions expressed in the declaration were largely those of the Antoine de Bésiade, Count of Avaray, Louis's closest advisor in exile.[80]
+
+Louis XVIII was forced once again to leave Jelgava when Tsar Alexander informed him that his safety could not be guaranteed in continental Europe. In July 1807, Louis boarded a Swedish frigate bound for Stockholm, bringing with him only the Duke of Angoulême. This stay in Sweden was short-lived since   in November 1807 he disembarked at Great Yarmouth, on the Eastern coast of England. He then took up residence in Gosfield Hall, leased to him by the Marquess of Buckingham.[81]
+
+In 1808, Louis brought his wife and queen, Marie Joséphine, to join him in England. His stay at Gosfield Hall did not last long; he soon moved to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, where over one hundred courtiers were housed.[82] The King paid £500 in rent each year to the owner of the estate, Sir George Lee. The Prince of Wales (the future George IV of Great Britain) was very charitable to the exiled Bourbons. As Prince Regent, he granted them permanent right of asylum and extremely generous allowances.[83]
+
+The Count of Artois did not join the court-in-exile in Hartwell, preferring to continue his frivolous life in London. Louis's friend the Count of Avaray left Hartwell for Madeira in 1809, and died there in 1811. Louis replaced Avaray with the Comte de Blacas as his principal political advisor. Queen Marie Joséphine died on 13 November 1810.[84] That same winter, Louis suffered a particularly severe attack of gout, which was a recurring problem for him at Hartwell, and he had to take to a wheelchair.[85]
+
+In 1812, Napoleon I embarked on an invasion of Russia, initiating a war which would prove to be the turning point in his fortunes. The expedition failed miserably, and Napoleon was forced to retreat with an army in tatters.
+
+In 1813, Louis XVIII issued another declaration from Hartwell. The Declaration of Hartwell was even more liberal than his Declaration of 1805, asserting that those who had served Napoleon or the Republic would not suffer repercussions for their acts, and that the original owners of the Biens nationaux (lands confiscated from the nobility and clergy during the Revolution) would be compensated for their losses.[86]
+
+Allied troops entered Paris on 31 March 1814.[87] Louis, unable to walk, had sent the Count of Artois to France in January 1814 and issued letters patent appointing Artois Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom in the event of his being restored as king. On 11 April, five days after the French Senate had invited Louis to resume the throne of France, Napoleon I abdicated.[88][89]
+
+The Count of Artois ruled as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom until his brother's arrival in Paris on 3 May. Upon his return, the King displayed himself to his subjects by staging a procession through the city.[90] He took up residence in the Tuileries Palace the same day. His niece, the Duchess of Angoulême, fainted at the sight of the Tuileries, where she had been imprisoned during the time of the French Revolution.[91]
+
+Napoleon's senate called Louis XVIII to the throne on the condition that he would accept a constitution that entailed recognition of the Republic and the Empire, a bicameral parliament elected every year, and the tri-colour flag of the aforementioned regimes.[92] Louis XVIII opposed the senate's constitution and stated that he was "disbanding the current senate in all the crimes of Bonaparte, and appealing to the French people". The senatorial constitution was burned in a theatre in royalist Bordeaux, and the Municipal Council of Lyon voted for a speech that defamed the senate.[93]
+
+The Great Powers occupying Paris demanded that Louis XVIII implement a constitution.[94] Louis responded with the Charter of 1814, which included many progressive provisions: freedom of religion, a legislature composed of a lower house styled the Chamber of Deputies[95] and an upper huse, styled the Chamber of Peers. The press would enjoy a degree of freedom, and there would be a provision that the former owners of the Biens nationaux, confiscated during the Revolution, would be compensated.[96] The constitution had 76 articles. Taxation was to be voted on by the chambers. Catholicism was to be the official religion of France. To be eligible for membership in the Chamber of Deputies, one had to pay over 1,000 francs per year in tax, and be over the age of forty. The King would appoint peers to the Chamber of Peers on a hereditary basis, or for life at his discretion. Deputies would be elected every five years, with one fifth of them up for election each year.[97] There were 90,000 citizens eligible to vote.[98]
+
+Louis XVIII signed the Treaty of Paris on 30 May 1814. The treaty gave France her 1792 borders, which extended east of the Rhine. She had to pay no war indemnity, and the occupying armies of the Sixth Coalition withdrew immediately from French soil. These generous terms would be reversed in the next Treaty of Paris after the Hundred Days (Napoleon's return to France in 1815).[99]
+
+It did not take Louis XVIII long to go back on one of his many promises. He and his Comptroller-General of Finance Baron Louis were determined not to let the exchequer fall into deficit (there was a 75 million franc debt inherited from Napoleon I), and took fiscal measures to ensure this. Louis XVIII assured the French that the unpopular taxes on tobacco, wine and salt would be abolished when he was restored, but he failed to do so, which led to rioting in Bordeaux. Expenditure on the army was slashed in the 1815 budget – in 1814, the military had accounted for 55% of government spending.[100]
+
+Louis XVIII admitted the Count of Artois and his nephews the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry to the Royal Council in May 1814, upon its establishment. The council was informally headed by Prince Talleyrand.[101] Louis XVIII took a large interest in the goings-on of the Congress of Vienna (set up to redraw the map of Europe after Napoleon's demise). Talleyrand represented France at the proceedings. Louis was horrified by Prussia's intention to annex the Kingdom of Saxony, to which he was attached because his mother was born a Saxon princess, and he was also concerned that Prussia would dominate Germany. He also wished the Duchy of Parma to be restored to the Parma branch of the Bourbons, and not to the former Empress Marie-Louise of France, as was being suggested by the Allies.[102] Louis also protested at the Allies' inaction in Naples, where he wanted the Napoleonic usurper Joachim Murat removed in favour of the Neapolitan Bourbons.
+
+On behalf of the Allies, Austria agreed to send a force to the Kingdom of Naples to depose Murat in February 1815, when it was learned that Murat corresponded with Napoleon, which was explicitly forbidden by a recent treaty. In fact, Murat never did actually write to Napoleon, but Louis, intent on restoring the Neapolitan Bourbons at any cost, had taken care to have such a correspondence forged, and subsidised the Austrian expedition with 25 million francs.[103]
+
+Louis XVIII succeeded in getting the Neapolitan Bourbons restored immediately. Parma, however, was bestowed upon Empress Marie-Louise for life, and the Parma Bourbons were given the Duchy of Lucca until the death of Marie-Louise.
+
+On 26 February 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped his island prison of Elba and embarked for France. He arrived with about 1,000 troops near Cannes on 1 March. Louis XVIII was not particularly worried by Bonaparte's excursion, as such small numbers of troops could be easily overcome. There was, however, a major underlying problem for the Bourbons: Louis XVIII had failed to purge the military of its Bonapartist troops. This led to mass desertions from the Bourbon armies to Bonaparte's. Furthermore, Louis XVIII could not join the campaign against Napoleon in the south of France because he was suffering from another case of gout.[104] Minister of War Marshal Soult dispatched Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans (later King Louis Philippe I), the Count of Artois, and Marshal MacDonald to apprehend Napoleon.[105]
+
+Louis XVIII's underestimation of Bonaparte proved disastrous. On 19 March, the army stationed outside Paris defected to Bonaparte, leaving the city vulnerable to attack.[106] That same day, Louis XVIII quit the capital with a small escort at midnight, first travelling to Lille, and then crossing the border into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, halting in Ghent.[107] Other leaders, most prominently Tsar Alexander I, debated whether in the case of a second victory over the French Empire, the Duke of Orleans should be proclaimed king instead of Louis XVIII.[108]
+
+However, Napoleon did not rule France again for very long, suffering a decisive defeat at the hands of the armies of the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June. The Allies came to the consensus that Louis XVIII should be restored to the throne of France.[109]
+
+Louis XVIII returned to France promptly after Napoleon's defeat to ensure his second restoration "in the baggage train of the enemy", i.e. with Wellington's troops.[110] The Duke of Wellington used King Louis' person to open up the route to Paris, as some fortresses refused to surrender to the Allies, but agreed to do so for their king. King Louis arrived at Cambrai on 26 June, where he released a proclamation stating that those who served the Emperor in the Hundred Days would not be persecuted, except for the "instigators". It was also acknowledged that Louis XVIII's government might have made mistakes during the First Restoration.[111] King Louis was worried that the counter-revolutionary element sought revenge. He promised to grant a constitution that would guarantee the public debt, freedom of the press and of religion, and equality before the law. It would guarantee the full property rights of those who had purchased national lands during the revolution.  He kept his promises.[112]
+
+On 29 June, a deputation of five from among the members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers approached Wellington about putting a foreign prince on the throne of France. Wellington rejected their pleas outright, declaring that "[Louis XVIII is] the best way to preserve the integrity of France"[113] and ordered the delegation to espouse King Louis' cause.[114] The King entered Paris on 8 July to a boisterous reception: the Tuileries Palace gardens were thronged with bystanders, and, according to the Duke of Wellington, the acclamation of the crowds there were so loud during that evening that he could not converse with the King.[115]
+
+Although the Ultra faction of returning exiles wanted revenge and were eager to punish the usurpers and restore the old regime, the new king rejected that advice. He instead called for continuity and reconciliation, and a search for peace and prosperity. The exiles were not given back their lands and property, although they eventually received repayment in the form of bonds.  The Catholic Church was favoured.  The electorate was limited to the richest men in France, most of whom had supported Napoleon. In foreign policy he removed Talleyrand, and continued most of Napoleon's policies in peaceful fashion. He kept to the policy of minimizing Austria's role but reversed Napoleon's friendly overtures to Spain and the Ottomans, [116][117][118]
+
+The King's role in politics was voluntarily diminished; he assigned most of his duties to his council. During the summer of 1815, he and his ministry embarked on a series of reforms. The Royal Council, an informal group of ministers that advised Louis XVIII, was dissolved and replaced by a tighter knit privy council, the "Ministère de Roi". Artois, Berry and Angoulême were purged from the new "ministère", and Talleyrand was appointed as the first Président du Conseil, i.e. Prime Minister of France.[119] On 14 July, the ministry dissolved the units of the army deemed "rebellious". Hereditary peerage was re-established  by the ministry at Louis' behest.[120]
+
+In August, elections for the Chamber of Deputies returned unfavourable results for Talleyrand. The ministry hoped for moderate deputies, but the electorate voted almost exclusively for ultra-royalists, resulting in the so-called Chambre introuvable. The Duchess of Angoulême and the Count of Artois pressured King Louis for the dismissal of his obsolete ministry. Talleyrand tendered his resignation on 20 September. Louis XVIII chose the Duke of Richelieu to be his new Prime Minister. Richelieu was chosen because he was acceptable to Louis' family and to the reactionary Chamber of Deputies.[121]
+
+Anti-Napoleonic sentiment was high in Southern France, and this was prominently displayed in the White Terror, which saw the purge of all important Napoleonic officials from government, along with the execution or assassination of others. Popular vengeance led to barbarous acts against some of these officials. Guillaume Marie Anne Brune (a Napoleonic marshal) was savagely assassinated, and his remains thrown into the Rhône River.[122] Louis XVIII publicly deplored such illegal acts, but vehemently supported the prosecution of those marshals of the army who had helped Napoleon in the Hundred Days.[123][124] Louis XVIII's government executed Napoleon's Marshal Ney in December 1815 for treason. The King's confidants Charles François, Marquis de Bonnay, and the Duke de La Chatre advised him to inflict firm punishments on the “traitors”.
+
+The King was reluctant to shed blood, and this greatly irritated the ultra-reactionary Chamber of Deputies, who felt that Louis XVIII was not executing enough.[125] The government issued a proclamation of amnesty to the “traitors” in January 1816, but such trials as had already begun took their course. That same declaration also banned any member of the House of Bonaparte from owning property in, or entering, France.[126] It is estimated that between 50,000 – 80,000 officials were purged from the government during what was known as the Second White Terror.[127]
+
+In November 1815, Louis XVIII's government had to sign another Treaty of Paris that formally ended Napoleon's Hundred Days. The previous treaty had been quite favourable to France, but this one took a hard line. France's borders were now less extensive, being drawn back to their 1790 extent. France had to pay for an army to occupy her, for at least five years, at a cost of 150 million francs per year. France also had to pay a war indemnity of 700 million francs to the Allies.[128]
+
+In 1818, the Chambers passed a military law that increased the size of the army by over 100,000. In October of the same year, Louis XVIII's foreign minister, the Duke of Richelieu, succeeded in convincing the Allied Powers to withdraw their armies early in exchange for a sum of over 200 million francs.[129]
+
+Louis XVIII chose many centrist cabinets, as he wanted to appease the populace, much to the dismay of his brother, the ultra-royalist Count of Artois.[130] Louis always dreaded the day he would die, believing that his brother, and heir, Artois, would abandon the centrist government for an ultra-royalist autocracy, which would not bring favourable results.[131]
+
+King Louis disliked the premier prince du sang, Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, and took every opportunity to snub him,[132] denying him the title of "Royal Highness", partly out of resentment for the Duke's father's role in voting for Louis XVI's execution. Louis XVIII's nephew, the Duke of Berry, was assassinated at the Paris Opera on 14 February 1820. The Royal Family was grief-stricken[133] and Louis XVIII broke an ancient tradition by attending his nephew's funeral, whereas  previous kings of France could not have any association with death.[134] The death of the Duke of Berry meant that the House of Orleans was more likely to succeed to the throne.
+
+Berry was the only member of the family thought to be able to beget children. His wife gave birth to a posthumous son in September, Henry, Duke of Bordeaux,[133] nicknamed Dieudonné (God-given) by the Bourbons because he was thought to have secured the future of the dynasty. However the Bourbon succession was still in doubt. The Chamber of Deputies proposed amending Salic law to allow the Duchess of Angoulême to accede to the throne.[135] On 12 June 1820, the Chambers ratified legislation that increased the number of deputies from 258 to 430. The extra deputies were to be elected by the wealthiest quarter of the population in each département. These individuals now effectively had two votes.[136] Around the same time as the “law of the two votes”, Louis XVIII began to receive visits every Wednesday from a lady named Zoé Talon, and ordered that nobody should disturb him while he was with her. It was rumoured that he inhaled snuff from her breasts,[137] which earned her the nickname of tabatière (snuffbox).[138] In 1823, France embarked on a military intervention in Spain, where a revolt had occurred against the King Ferdinand VII. France succeeded in crushing the rebellion,[139] in a campaign headed by the Duke of Angoulême.[140]
+
+Louis XVIII's health began to fail in the spring of 1824. He was suffering from obesity, gout and gangrene, both dry and wet, in his legs and spine. Louis died on 16 September 1824 surrounded by the extended Royal Family and some government officials. He was succeeded by his youngest brother, the Count of Artois, as Charles X.[141]
+
+Louis XVIII was the last French monarch, and the only one after 1774, to die while still ruling. He was interred at the Basilica of St Denis, the necropolis of French kings.
+
+The French line of succession upon the death of Louis XVIII in 1824.
+
+
+

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+
+Louis XVIII (Louis Stanislas Xavier; 17 November 1755 – 16 September 1824), known as the Desired (French: le Désiré),[2][3] was King of France from 1814 to 1824, except for the Hundred Days in 1815. He spent twenty-three years in exile: during the French Revolution and the First French Empire (1791–1814); and during the Hundred Days.
+
+Until his accession to the throne of France, he held the title of Count of Provence as brother of King Louis XVI. On 21 September 1792, the National Convention abolished the monarchy and deposed Louis XVI, who was later executed by guillotine.[4] When his young nephew Louis XVII died in prison in June 1795, the Count of Provence proclaimed himself (titular) king under the name Louis XVIII.[5]
+
+Following the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic era, Louis XVIII lived in exile in Prussia, England, and Russia.[6] When the Sixth Coalition finally defeated Napoleon in 1814, Louis XVIII was placed in what he, and the French royalists, considered his rightful position. However, Napoleon escaped from his exile in Elba and restored his French Empire. Louis XVIII fled, and a Seventh Coalition declared war on the French Empire, defeated Napoleon again, and again restored Louis XVIII to the French throne.
+
+Louis XVIII ruled as king for slightly less than a decade. The government of the Bourbon Restoration was a constitutional monarchy, unlike the Ancien Régime, which was absolutist. As a constitutional monarch, Louis XVIII's royal prerogative was reduced substantially by the Charter of 1814, France's new constitution. His return in 1815 led to a second wave of White Terror headed by the Ultra-royalist faction. The following year, Louis dissolved the unpopular parliament, referred to as the Chambre introuvable, giving rise to the liberal Doctrinaires. His reign was further marked by the formation of the Quintuple Alliance and a military intervention in Spain. Louis had no children, so upon his death the crown passed to his brother, Charles X.[7] Louis XVIII was the last French monarch to die while still reigning, as Charles X (1824–1830) abdicated and both Louis Philippe I (1830–1848) and Napoleon III (1852–1870) were deposed.
+
+Louis Stanislas Xavier, styled Count of Provence from birth, was born on 17 November 1755 in the Palace of Versailles, a younger son of Louis, Dauphin of France, and his wife Maria Josepha of Saxony. He was the grandson of the reigning King Louis XV. As a son of the Dauphin, he was a Fils de France. He was christened Louis Stanislas Xavier six months after his birth, in accordance with Bourbon family tradition, being nameless before his baptism. By this act, he also became a Knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit.
+The name of Louis was bestowed because it was typical of a prince of France; Stanislas was chosen to honour his great-grandfather King Stanisław I of Poland; and Xavier was chosen for Saint Francis Xavier, whom his mother's family held as one of their patron saints.[8]
+
+At the time of his birth, Louis Stanislas was fourth in line to the throne of France, behind his father and his two elder brothers: Louis Joseph Xavier, Duke of Burgundy, and Louis Auguste, Duke of Berry. The former died in 1761, leaving Louis Auguste as heir to their father until the Dauphin's own premature death in 1765. The two deaths elevated Louis Stanislas to second in the line of succession, while his brother Louis Auguste acquired the title of Dauphin.[9]
+
+Louis Stanislas found comfort in his governess, Madame de Marsan, Governess of the Children of France, as he was her favourite among his siblings.[10] Louis Stanislas was taken away from his governess when he turned seven, the age at which the education of boys of royal blood and of the nobility was turned over to men. Antoine de Quélen de Stuer de Caussade, Duke of La Vauguyon, a friend of his father, was named as his governor.
+
+Louis Stanislas was an intelligent boy, excelling in the classics. His education was of the same quality and consistency as that of his older brother, Louis Auguste, despite the fact that Louis Auguste was heir and Louis Stanislas was not.[10] Louis Stanislas's education was quite religious in nature; several of his teachers were priests, such as Jean-Gilles du Coëtlosquet, Bishop of Limoges; the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet; and the Jesuit Guillaume-François Berthier.[11] La Vauguyon drilled into young Louis Stanislas and his brothers the way he thought princes should "know how to withdraw themselves, to like to work," and "to know how to reason correctly".
+
+In April 1771, when he was 15, Louis Stanislas's education was formally concluded, and his own independent household was established,[12] which astounded contemporaries with its extravagance: in 1773, the number of his servants reached 390.[13] In the same month his household was founded, Louis was granted several titles by his grandfather, Louis XV: Duke of Anjou, Count of Maine, Count of Perche, and Count of Senoches.[14] During this period of his life he was often known by the title Count of Provence.
+
+On 17 December 1773, he was inaugurated as a Grand Master of the Order of St. Lazarus.
+
+On 16 April 1771, Louis Stanislas was married by proxy to Princess Maria Giuseppina of Savoy. The in-person ceremony was conducted on 14 May at the Palace of Versailles. Marie Joséphine (as she was known in France) was a daughter of Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy (later King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia), and his wife Maria Antonia Ferdinanda of Spain.
+
+A luxurious ball followed the wedding on 20 May.[15] Louis Stanislas found his wife repulsive; she was considered ugly, tedious, and ignorant of the customs of the court of Versailles. The marriage remained unconsummated for years. Biographers disagree about the reason. The most common theories propose Louis Stanislas' alleged impotence (according to biographer Antonia Fraser) or his unwillingness to sleep with his wife due to her poor personal hygiene. She never brushed her teeth, plucked her eyebrows, or used any perfumes.[16] At the time of his marriage, Louis Stanislas was obese and waddled instead of walked. He never exercised and continued to eat enormous amounts of food.[17]
+
+Despite the fact that Louis Stanislas was not infatuated with his wife, he boasted that the two enjoyed vigorous conjugal relations – but such declarations were held in low esteem by courtiers at Versailles. He also proclaimed his wife to be pregnant merely to spite Louis Auguste and his wife Marie Antoinette, who had not yet consummated their marriage.[18] The Dauphin and Louis Stanislas did not enjoy a harmonious relationship and often quarrelled,[19] as did their wives.[20] Louis Stanislas did impregnate his wife in 1774, having conquered his aversion. However, the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.[21] A second pregnancy in 1781 also miscarried, and the marriage remained childless.[8][22]
+
+On 27 April 1774, Louis XV fell ill after contracting smallpox and died a few days later on 10 May, aged 64.[23] Louis Stanislas' elder brother, the Dauphin Louis Auguste, succeeded their grandfather as King Louis XVI.[24] As eldest brother of the King, Louis Stanislas received the title Monsieur. Louis Stanislas longed for political influence. He attempted to gain admittance to the King's council in 1774, but failed. Louis Stanislas was left in a political limbo that he called "a gap of 12 years in my political life".[25] Louis XVI granted Louis Stanislas revenues from the Duchy of Alençon in December 1774. The duchy was given to enhance Louis Stanislas' prestige. However, the appanage generated only 300,000 livres a year, an amount much lower than it had been at its peak in the fourteenth century.[14]
+
+Louis Stanislas travelled about France more than other members of the Royal Family, who rarely left the Île-de-France. In 1774, he accompanied his sister Clotilde to Chambéry on the journey to meet her bridegroom Charles Emmanuel, Prince of Piedmont, heir to the throne of Sardinia. In 1775, he visited Lyon and also his spinster aunts Adélaïde and Victoire while they were taking the waters at Vichy.[13] The four provincial tours that Louis Stanislas took before the year 1791 amounted to a total of three months.[26]
+
+On 5 May 1778, Dr. Lassonne, Marie Antoinette's private physician, confirmed her pregnancy.[27] On 19 December 1778, the Queen gave birth to a daughter, who was named Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France and given the honorific title Madame Royale. That the baby was a girl came as a relief to the Count of Provence, who kept his position as heir to Louis XVI, since Salic Law excluded women from acceding to the throne of France.[28][29] However, Louis Stanislas did not remain heir to the throne much longer. On 22 October 1781, Marie Antoinette gave birth to the Dauphin Louis Joseph. Louis Stanislas and his brother, the Count of Artois, served as godfathers by proxy for Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, the Queen's brother.[30] When Marie Antoinette gave birth to her second son, Louis Charles, in March 1785, Louis Stanislas slid further down the line of succession.[31]
+
+In 1780, Anne Nompar de Caumont, Countess of Balbi, entered the service of Marie Joséphine. Louis Stanislas soon fell in love with his wife's new lady-in-waiting and installed her as his mistress,[32] which resulted in the couple's already limited affection for each other cooling entirely.[33] Louis Stanislas commissioned a pavilion for his mistress on a parcel of land  at Versailles which became known as the Parc Balbi.[34]
+
+Louis Stanislas lived a quiet and sedentary lifestyle at this point, not having a great deal to do since his self-proclaimed political exclusion in 1774. He kept himself occupied with his vast library of over 11,000 books at Balbi's pavilion, reading for several hours each morning.[35] In the early 1780s, he also incurred huge debts totalling 10 million livres, which his brother Louis XVI paid.[36]
+
+An Assembly of Notables (the members consisted of magistrates, mayors, nobles and clergy) was convened in February 1787 to ratify the financial reforms sought by the Controller-General of Finance Charles Alexandre de Calonne. This provided the Count of Provence, who abhorred the radical reforms proposed by Calonne, his long-awaiting opportunity to establish himself in politics.[37] The reforms proposed a new property tax,[38] and new elected provincial assemblies which would have a say in local taxation.[39] Calonne's proposition was rejected outright by the notables, and, as a result, Louis XVI dismissed him. The Archbishop of Toulouse, Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, acquired Calonne's ministry. Brienne attempted to salvage Calonne's reforms, but ultimately failed to convince the notables to approve them. A frustrated Louis XVI dissolved the assembly.[40]
+
+Brienne's reforms were then submitted to the Parlement of Paris in the hopes that they would be approved. (A parlement was responsible for ratifying the King's edicts; each province had its own parlement, but the Parlement of Paris was the most significant of all.) The Parlement of Paris refused to accept Brienne's proposals and declared that any new taxation would have to be approved by an Estates-General (the nominal parliament of France). Louis XVI and Brienne took a hostile stance against this rejection, and Louis XVI had to implement a "bed of justice" (Lit de justice), which automatically registered an edict in the Parlement of Paris, to ratify the desired reforms. On 8 May, two of the leading members of the Parlement of Paris were arrested. There was rioting in Brittany, Provence, Burgundy and Béarn in reaction to their arrest. This unrest was engineered by local magistrates and nobles, who enticed the people to revolt against the Lit de Justice, which was quite unfavourable to the nobles and magistrates. The clergy also joined the provincial cause, and condemned Brienne's tax reforms. Brienne conceded defeat in July and agreed to a convocation of the Estates-General to meet in 1789. He resigned from his post in August and was replaced by the Swiss magnate Jacques Necker.[41]
+
+In November 1788, a second Assembly of Notables was convened by Jacques Necker, to consider the makeup of the next Estates-General.[42] The Parlement de Paris recommended that the Estates should be the same as they were at the last assembly, in 1614 (this would mean that the clergy and nobility would have more representation than the Third Estate).[43] The notables rejected the "dual representation" proposal. Louis Stanislas was the only notable to vote to increase the size of the Third Estate.[44] Necker disregarded the notables' judgment, and convinced Louis XVI to grant the extra representation  the king duly obliging on 27 December.[45]
+
+The Estates-General were convened in May 1789 to ratify financial reforms.[46] The Count of Provence favoured a stalwart position against the Third Estate and its demands for tax reform. On 17 June, the Third Estate declared itself a National Assembly, an Assembly not of the Estates, but of the people.
+
+The Count of Provence urged the King to act strongly against the declaration, while the King's popular minister Jacques Necker aimed at reaching a compromise with the new assembly. Louis XVI was characteristically indecisive. On 9 July, the assembly declared itself a National Constituent Assembly that would give France a Constitution. On 11 July, Louis XVI dismissed Necker, which led to widespread rioting across Paris. On 12 July, the sabre charge of the cavalry regiment of Charles-Eugène de Lorraine, prince de Lambesc, against a crowd gathered at the Tuileries gardens, sparked the Storming of the Bastille two days later.[47][48]
+
+On 16 July, the King's brother, the Count of Artois, left France with his wife and children, along with many other courtiers.[49] Artois and his family took up residence in Turin, the capital city of his father-in-law's Kingdom of Sardinia, with the family of the Princes of Condé.[50]
+
+The Count of Provence decided to remain at Versailles.[51] When the Royal Family plotted to abscond from Versailles to Metz, Provence advised the King not to leave, a suggestion he accepted.[52]
+
+The Royal Family was forced to leave the palace at Versailles on the day after the Women's March on Versailles, 5 October 1789.[53] They were taken to Paris. There, the Count of Provence and his wife lodged in the Luxembourg Palace, while the rest of the Royal Family stayed in the Tuileries Palace.[54] In March 1791, the National Assembly created a law outlining the regency of Louis Charles in case his father died while he was still too young to reign. This law awarded the regency to Louis Charles' nearest male relative in France (at that time the Count of Provence), and after him, the Duke of Orleans, thus bypassing the Count of Artois. If Orleans were unavailable, the regency would be submitted to election.[55]
+
+The Count of Provence and his wife fled to the Austrian Netherlands in conjunction with the royal family's failed Flight to Varennes in June 1791.[56]
+
+When the Count of Provence arrived in the Low Countries, he proclaimed himself de facto regent of France. He exploited a document that he and Louis XVI had written[57] before the latter's failed escape to Varennes. The document gave him the regency in the event of his brother's death or inability to perform his role as king. He would join the other princes-in-exile at Coblenz soon after his escape. It was there that he, the Count of Artois, and the Condé princes proclaimed that their objective was to invade France. Louis XVI was greatly annoyed by his brothers' behaviour. Provence sent emissaries to various European courts asking for financial aid, soldiers, and munition. Artois secured a castle for the court in exile in the Electorate of Trier (or "Treves"), where their maternal uncle, Clemens Wenceslaus of Saxony, was the Archbishop-Elector. The activities of the émigrés bore fruit when the rulers of Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire gathered at Dresden. They released the Declaration of Pillnitz in August 1791, which urged Europe to intervene in France if Louis XVI or his family were threatened. Provence's endorsement of the declaration was not well received in France, either by the ordinary citizens or by Louis XVI himself.[58]
+
+In January 1792, the Legislative Assembly declared that all of the émigrés were traitors to France. Their property and titles were confiscated.[59] The monarchy of France was abolished by the National Convention on 21 September 1792.[60]
+
+Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. This left his young son, Louis Charles, as the titular King. The princes-in-exile proclaimed Louis Charles "Louis XVII of France". The Count of Provence now unilaterally declared himself regent for his nephew, who was too young to be head of the House of Bourbon.[61]
+
+The young King, still a minor, died in June 1795. His only surviving sibling was his sister Marie-Thérèse, who was not considered a candidate for the throne because of France's traditional adherence to Salic law. Thus on 16 June, the princes-in-exile declared the Count of Provence "King Louis XVIII". The new king accepted their declaration soon after.[62] Louis XVIII busied himself drafting a manifesto in response to Louis XVII's death. The manifesto, known as the "Declaration of Verona", was Louis XVIII's attempt to introduce the French people to his politics. The Declaration of Verona beckoned France back into the arms of the monarchy, "which for fourteen centuries was the glory of France".[20]
+
+Louis XVIII negotiated the release of Marie-Thérèse from her Paris prison in 1795. He desperately wanted her to marry her first cousin, Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, the son of the Count of Artois. Louis XVIII deceived his niece by telling her that her parents' last wishes were for her to marry Louis-Antoine, and she duly agreed to Louis XVIII's wishes.[63]
+
+Louis XVIII was forced to abandon Verona when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Republic of Venice in 1796.[64]
+
+Louis XVIII had been vying for the custody of his niece Marie-Thérèse since her release from the Temple Tower in December 1795. He succeeded when Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, agreed to relinquish his custody of her in 1796. She had been staying in Vienna with her Habsburg relatives since January 1796.[64] Louis XVIII moved to Blankenburg in the Duchy of Brunswick after his departure from Verona. He lived in a modest two-bedroom apartment over a shop.[65] Louis XVIII was forced to leave Blankenburg when King Frederick William II of Prussia died. In light of this, Marie-Thérèse decided to wait a while longer before reuniting with her uncle.[66]
+
+In 1798, Tsar Paul I of Russia offered Louis the use of Jelgava Palace in Courland (now Latvia). The Tsar also guaranteed Louis' safety and bestowed on him a generous pension,[65] though later discontinued payment.[67] Marie-Thérèse finally joined Louis XVIII at Jelgava in 1799.[68] In the winter of 1798–1799, Louis XVIII wrote a biography of Marie Antoinette titled Réflexions historiques sur Marie Antoinette. Moreover, being surrounded at Jelgava with many old courtiers, he attempted to recreate the court life of Versailles, re-establishing various of the former court ceremonies, including the lever and coucher (ceremonies that accompanied waking and bedding, respectively).[69]
+
+On 9 June 1799, Marie-Thérèse married her cousin Louis-Antoine at the Jelgava Palace. Desperate to display to the world a united family, Louis XVIII ordered his wife Queen Marie Joséphine, who at the time was living  apart from her husband in Schleswig-Holstein, to attend the wedding. Furthermore she was to come without her long-time friend (and rumoured lover) Marguerite de Gourbillon. The Queen refused to leave her friend behind, creating an unpleasant situation that rivalled the wedding in notoriety.[70] Louis XVIII knew that his nephew Louis-Antoine was not compatible with Marie-Thérèse. Despite this, he still pressed for the marriage, which proved to be quite unhappy and produced no children.[71]
+
+In 1800, Louis XVIII attempted to strike up a correspondence with Napoleon Bonaparte (now First Consul of France), urging him to restore the Bourbons to their throne, but the future emperor was impervious to this idea and continued to consolidate his own position as ruler of France.[72]
+
+Louis XVIII encouraged his niece to write her memoirs, as he wished them to be used as Bourbon propaganda. In 1796 and 1803, Louis also used the diaries of Louis XVI's final attendants in the same way.[69] In January 1801, Tsar Paul told Louis XVIII that he could no longer live in Russia. The court at Jelgava was so low on funds that it had to auction some of its possessions to afford the journey out of Russia. Marie-Thérèse even sold a diamond necklace that the Emperor Paul had given her as a wedding gift.[67]
+
+Marie-Thérèse persuaded Queen Louise of Prussia to give her family refuge on Prussian territory. Though Louise consented, the Bourbons were forced to assume pseudonyms. With Louis XVIII using the title Comte d'Isle, named after his estate in Languedoc and at times spelt as Comte de Lille.[73] After an arduous journey from Jelgava,[74] he and his family took up residence in the years 1801-1804 at the Łazienki Palace in Warsaw, a city which was then part of the province of South Prussia. According to Wirydianna Fiszerowa, a contemporary living there at the time, the Prussian local authorities, wishing to honour the arrivals, had music played, but trying to give this a national and patriotic character, unwittingly chose La Marseillaise, the hymn of the First French Republic with unflattering allusions to both Louis XVI and Louis XVIII. They later apologised for their mistake.[73]
+
+It was very soon after their arrival that Louis and Marie-Thérèse learned of the death of Tsar Paul I. Louis hoped that Paul's successor, Alexander I, would repudiate his father's banishment of the Bourbons, which he later did. Louis then intended to set off to the Kingdom of Naples. The Count of Artois asked Louis to send his son, Louis-Antoine, and daughter-in-law, Marie-Thérèse, to him in Edinburgh, but the King did not do so at that time. Artois had an allowance from King George III of Great Britain and he sent some money to Louis, whose court-in-exile was not only being spied on by Napoleonic agents[75] but was also being forced to make significant economies, financed as it was mainly from interest owed by the Emperor Francis II on valuables his aunt, Marie Antoinette, had removed from France.[76]
+
+In 1803, Napoleon tried to force Louis XVIII to renounce his right to the throne of France, but Louis refused.[77] In May the following year, 1804, Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French. In July,  Louis XVIII and his nephew departed for Sweden for a Bourbon family conference, where Louis XVIII, the Count of Artois, and the Duke of Angoulême issued a statement condemning Napoleon's move.[78] When the King of Prussia decreed that Louis XVIII would have to leave Prussian territory, and hence Warsaw, Tsar Alexander I invited Louis XVIII to resume residence in Jelgava, which he did. However, having to live under less generous conditions than those enjoyed under Paul I, Louis XVIII decided to embark for England as soon as possible.[79]
+
+As time went on, Louis XVIII realised that France would never accept an attempt to return to the Ancien Régime. Accordingly, in 1805 he reformulated his public policies with a view to reclaiming his throne, issuing a declaration that was far more liberal than his earlier pronouncements. This repudiated his Declaration of Verona, promised to abolish conscription, retain the Napoleonic administrative and judicial system, reduce taxes, eliminate political prisons, and guarantee amnesty to everyone who did not oppose a Bourbon Restoration. The opinions expressed in the declaration were largely those of the Antoine de Bésiade, Count of Avaray, Louis's closest advisor in exile.[80]
+
+Louis XVIII was forced once again to leave Jelgava when Tsar Alexander informed him that his safety could not be guaranteed in continental Europe. In July 1807, Louis boarded a Swedish frigate bound for Stockholm, bringing with him only the Duke of Angoulême. This stay in Sweden was short-lived since   in November 1807 he disembarked at Great Yarmouth, on the Eastern coast of England. He then took up residence in Gosfield Hall, leased to him by the Marquess of Buckingham.[81]
+
+In 1808, Louis brought his wife and queen, Marie Joséphine, to join him in England. His stay at Gosfield Hall did not last long; he soon moved to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, where over one hundred courtiers were housed.[82] The King paid £500 in rent each year to the owner of the estate, Sir George Lee. The Prince of Wales (the future George IV of Great Britain) was very charitable to the exiled Bourbons. As Prince Regent, he granted them permanent right of asylum and extremely generous allowances.[83]
+
+The Count of Artois did not join the court-in-exile in Hartwell, preferring to continue his frivolous life in London. Louis's friend the Count of Avaray left Hartwell for Madeira in 1809, and died there in 1811. Louis replaced Avaray with the Comte de Blacas as his principal political advisor. Queen Marie Joséphine died on 13 November 1810.[84] That same winter, Louis suffered a particularly severe attack of gout, which was a recurring problem for him at Hartwell, and he had to take to a wheelchair.[85]
+
+In 1812, Napoleon I embarked on an invasion of Russia, initiating a war which would prove to be the turning point in his fortunes. The expedition failed miserably, and Napoleon was forced to retreat with an army in tatters.
+
+In 1813, Louis XVIII issued another declaration from Hartwell. The Declaration of Hartwell was even more liberal than his Declaration of 1805, asserting that those who had served Napoleon or the Republic would not suffer repercussions for their acts, and that the original owners of the Biens nationaux (lands confiscated from the nobility and clergy during the Revolution) would be compensated for their losses.[86]
+
+Allied troops entered Paris on 31 March 1814.[87] Louis, unable to walk, had sent the Count of Artois to France in January 1814 and issued letters patent appointing Artois Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom in the event of his being restored as king. On 11 April, five days after the French Senate had invited Louis to resume the throne of France, Napoleon I abdicated.[88][89]
+
+The Count of Artois ruled as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom until his brother's arrival in Paris on 3 May. Upon his return, the King displayed himself to his subjects by staging a procession through the city.[90] He took up residence in the Tuileries Palace the same day. His niece, the Duchess of Angoulême, fainted at the sight of the Tuileries, where she had been imprisoned during the time of the French Revolution.[91]
+
+Napoleon's senate called Louis XVIII to the throne on the condition that he would accept a constitution that entailed recognition of the Republic and the Empire, a bicameral parliament elected every year, and the tri-colour flag of the aforementioned regimes.[92] Louis XVIII opposed the senate's constitution and stated that he was "disbanding the current senate in all the crimes of Bonaparte, and appealing to the French people". The senatorial constitution was burned in a theatre in royalist Bordeaux, and the Municipal Council of Lyon voted for a speech that defamed the senate.[93]
+
+The Great Powers occupying Paris demanded that Louis XVIII implement a constitution.[94] Louis responded with the Charter of 1814, which included many progressive provisions: freedom of religion, a legislature composed of a lower house styled the Chamber of Deputies[95] and an upper huse, styled the Chamber of Peers. The press would enjoy a degree of freedom, and there would be a provision that the former owners of the Biens nationaux, confiscated during the Revolution, would be compensated.[96] The constitution had 76 articles. Taxation was to be voted on by the chambers. Catholicism was to be the official religion of France. To be eligible for membership in the Chamber of Deputies, one had to pay over 1,000 francs per year in tax, and be over the age of forty. The King would appoint peers to the Chamber of Peers on a hereditary basis, or for life at his discretion. Deputies would be elected every five years, with one fifth of them up for election each year.[97] There were 90,000 citizens eligible to vote.[98]
+
+Louis XVIII signed the Treaty of Paris on 30 May 1814. The treaty gave France her 1792 borders, which extended east of the Rhine. She had to pay no war indemnity, and the occupying armies of the Sixth Coalition withdrew immediately from French soil. These generous terms would be reversed in the next Treaty of Paris after the Hundred Days (Napoleon's return to France in 1815).[99]
+
+It did not take Louis XVIII long to go back on one of his many promises. He and his Comptroller-General of Finance Baron Louis were determined not to let the exchequer fall into deficit (there was a 75 million franc debt inherited from Napoleon I), and took fiscal measures to ensure this. Louis XVIII assured the French that the unpopular taxes on tobacco, wine and salt would be abolished when he was restored, but he failed to do so, which led to rioting in Bordeaux. Expenditure on the army was slashed in the 1815 budget – in 1814, the military had accounted for 55% of government spending.[100]
+
+Louis XVIII admitted the Count of Artois and his nephews the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry to the Royal Council in May 1814, upon its establishment. The council was informally headed by Prince Talleyrand.[101] Louis XVIII took a large interest in the goings-on of the Congress of Vienna (set up to redraw the map of Europe after Napoleon's demise). Talleyrand represented France at the proceedings. Louis was horrified by Prussia's intention to annex the Kingdom of Saxony, to which he was attached because his mother was born a Saxon princess, and he was also concerned that Prussia would dominate Germany. He also wished the Duchy of Parma to be restored to the Parma branch of the Bourbons, and not to the former Empress Marie-Louise of France, as was being suggested by the Allies.[102] Louis also protested at the Allies' inaction in Naples, where he wanted the Napoleonic usurper Joachim Murat removed in favour of the Neapolitan Bourbons.
+
+On behalf of the Allies, Austria agreed to send a force to the Kingdom of Naples to depose Murat in February 1815, when it was learned that Murat corresponded with Napoleon, which was explicitly forbidden by a recent treaty. In fact, Murat never did actually write to Napoleon, but Louis, intent on restoring the Neapolitan Bourbons at any cost, had taken care to have such a correspondence forged, and subsidised the Austrian expedition with 25 million francs.[103]
+
+Louis XVIII succeeded in getting the Neapolitan Bourbons restored immediately. Parma, however, was bestowed upon Empress Marie-Louise for life, and the Parma Bourbons were given the Duchy of Lucca until the death of Marie-Louise.
+
+On 26 February 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped his island prison of Elba and embarked for France. He arrived with about 1,000 troops near Cannes on 1 March. Louis XVIII was not particularly worried by Bonaparte's excursion, as such small numbers of troops could be easily overcome. There was, however, a major underlying problem for the Bourbons: Louis XVIII had failed to purge the military of its Bonapartist troops. This led to mass desertions from the Bourbon armies to Bonaparte's. Furthermore, Louis XVIII could not join the campaign against Napoleon in the south of France because he was suffering from another case of gout.[104] Minister of War Marshal Soult dispatched Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans (later King Louis Philippe I), the Count of Artois, and Marshal MacDonald to apprehend Napoleon.[105]
+
+Louis XVIII's underestimation of Bonaparte proved disastrous. On 19 March, the army stationed outside Paris defected to Bonaparte, leaving the city vulnerable to attack.[106] That same day, Louis XVIII quit the capital with a small escort at midnight, first travelling to Lille, and then crossing the border into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, halting in Ghent.[107] Other leaders, most prominently Tsar Alexander I, debated whether in the case of a second victory over the French Empire, the Duke of Orleans should be proclaimed king instead of Louis XVIII.[108]
+
+However, Napoleon did not rule France again for very long, suffering a decisive defeat at the hands of the armies of the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June. The Allies came to the consensus that Louis XVIII should be restored to the throne of France.[109]
+
+Louis XVIII returned to France promptly after Napoleon's defeat to ensure his second restoration "in the baggage train of the enemy", i.e. with Wellington's troops.[110] The Duke of Wellington used King Louis' person to open up the route to Paris, as some fortresses refused to surrender to the Allies, but agreed to do so for their king. King Louis arrived at Cambrai on 26 June, where he released a proclamation stating that those who served the Emperor in the Hundred Days would not be persecuted, except for the "instigators". It was also acknowledged that Louis XVIII's government might have made mistakes during the First Restoration.[111] King Louis was worried that the counter-revolutionary element sought revenge. He promised to grant a constitution that would guarantee the public debt, freedom of the press and of religion, and equality before the law. It would guarantee the full property rights of those who had purchased national lands during the revolution.  He kept his promises.[112]
+
+On 29 June, a deputation of five from among the members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers approached Wellington about putting a foreign prince on the throne of France. Wellington rejected their pleas outright, declaring that "[Louis XVIII is] the best way to preserve the integrity of France"[113] and ordered the delegation to espouse King Louis' cause.[114] The King entered Paris on 8 July to a boisterous reception: the Tuileries Palace gardens were thronged with bystanders, and, according to the Duke of Wellington, the acclamation of the crowds there were so loud during that evening that he could not converse with the King.[115]
+
+Although the Ultra faction of returning exiles wanted revenge and were eager to punish the usurpers and restore the old regime, the new king rejected that advice. He instead called for continuity and reconciliation, and a search for peace and prosperity. The exiles were not given back their lands and property, although they eventually received repayment in the form of bonds.  The Catholic Church was favoured.  The electorate was limited to the richest men in France, most of whom had supported Napoleon. In foreign policy he removed Talleyrand, and continued most of Napoleon's policies in peaceful fashion. He kept to the policy of minimizing Austria's role but reversed Napoleon's friendly overtures to Spain and the Ottomans, [116][117][118]
+
+The King's role in politics was voluntarily diminished; he assigned most of his duties to his council. During the summer of 1815, he and his ministry embarked on a series of reforms. The Royal Council, an informal group of ministers that advised Louis XVIII, was dissolved and replaced by a tighter knit privy council, the "Ministère de Roi". Artois, Berry and Angoulême were purged from the new "ministère", and Talleyrand was appointed as the first Président du Conseil, i.e. Prime Minister of France.[119] On 14 July, the ministry dissolved the units of the army deemed "rebellious". Hereditary peerage was re-established  by the ministry at Louis' behest.[120]
+
+In August, elections for the Chamber of Deputies returned unfavourable results for Talleyrand. The ministry hoped for moderate deputies, but the electorate voted almost exclusively for ultra-royalists, resulting in the so-called Chambre introuvable. The Duchess of Angoulême and the Count of Artois pressured King Louis for the dismissal of his obsolete ministry. Talleyrand tendered his resignation on 20 September. Louis XVIII chose the Duke of Richelieu to be his new Prime Minister. Richelieu was chosen because he was acceptable to Louis' family and to the reactionary Chamber of Deputies.[121]
+
+Anti-Napoleonic sentiment was high in Southern France, and this was prominently displayed in the White Terror, which saw the purge of all important Napoleonic officials from government, along with the execution or assassination of others. Popular vengeance led to barbarous acts against some of these officials. Guillaume Marie Anne Brune (a Napoleonic marshal) was savagely assassinated, and his remains thrown into the Rhône River.[122] Louis XVIII publicly deplored such illegal acts, but vehemently supported the prosecution of those marshals of the army who had helped Napoleon in the Hundred Days.[123][124] Louis XVIII's government executed Napoleon's Marshal Ney in December 1815 for treason. The King's confidants Charles François, Marquis de Bonnay, and the Duke de La Chatre advised him to inflict firm punishments on the “traitors”.
+
+The King was reluctant to shed blood, and this greatly irritated the ultra-reactionary Chamber of Deputies, who felt that Louis XVIII was not executing enough.[125] The government issued a proclamation of amnesty to the “traitors” in January 1816, but such trials as had already begun took their course. That same declaration also banned any member of the House of Bonaparte from owning property in, or entering, France.[126] It is estimated that between 50,000 – 80,000 officials were purged from the government during what was known as the Second White Terror.[127]
+
+In November 1815, Louis XVIII's government had to sign another Treaty of Paris that formally ended Napoleon's Hundred Days. The previous treaty had been quite favourable to France, but this one took a hard line. France's borders were now less extensive, being drawn back to their 1790 extent. France had to pay for an army to occupy her, for at least five years, at a cost of 150 million francs per year. France also had to pay a war indemnity of 700 million francs to the Allies.[128]
+
+In 1818, the Chambers passed a military law that increased the size of the army by over 100,000. In October of the same year, Louis XVIII's foreign minister, the Duke of Richelieu, succeeded in convincing the Allied Powers to withdraw their armies early in exchange for a sum of over 200 million francs.[129]
+
+Louis XVIII chose many centrist cabinets, as he wanted to appease the populace, much to the dismay of his brother, the ultra-royalist Count of Artois.[130] Louis always dreaded the day he would die, believing that his brother, and heir, Artois, would abandon the centrist government for an ultra-royalist autocracy, which would not bring favourable results.[131]
+
+King Louis disliked the premier prince du sang, Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, and took every opportunity to snub him,[132] denying him the title of "Royal Highness", partly out of resentment for the Duke's father's role in voting for Louis XVI's execution. Louis XVIII's nephew, the Duke of Berry, was assassinated at the Paris Opera on 14 February 1820. The Royal Family was grief-stricken[133] and Louis XVIII broke an ancient tradition by attending his nephew's funeral, whereas  previous kings of France could not have any association with death.[134] The death of the Duke of Berry meant that the House of Orleans was more likely to succeed to the throne.
+
+Berry was the only member of the family thought to be able to beget children. His wife gave birth to a posthumous son in September, Henry, Duke of Bordeaux,[133] nicknamed Dieudonné (God-given) by the Bourbons because he was thought to have secured the future of the dynasty. However the Bourbon succession was still in doubt. The Chamber of Deputies proposed amending Salic law to allow the Duchess of Angoulême to accede to the throne.[135] On 12 June 1820, the Chambers ratified legislation that increased the number of deputies from 258 to 430. The extra deputies were to be elected by the wealthiest quarter of the population in each département. These individuals now effectively had two votes.[136] Around the same time as the “law of the two votes”, Louis XVIII began to receive visits every Wednesday from a lady named Zoé Talon, and ordered that nobody should disturb him while he was with her. It was rumoured that he inhaled snuff from her breasts,[137] which earned her the nickname of tabatière (snuffbox).[138] In 1823, France embarked on a military intervention in Spain, where a revolt had occurred against the King Ferdinand VII. France succeeded in crushing the rebellion,[139] in a campaign headed by the Duke of Angoulême.[140]
+
+Louis XVIII's health began to fail in the spring of 1824. He was suffering from obesity, gout and gangrene, both dry and wet, in his legs and spine. Louis died on 16 September 1824 surrounded by the extended Royal Family and some government officials. He was succeeded by his youngest brother, the Count of Artois, as Charles X.[141]
+
+Louis XVIII was the last French monarch, and the only one after 1774, to die while still ruling. He was interred at the Basilica of St Denis, the necropolis of French kings.
+
+The French line of succession upon the death of Louis XVIII in 1824.
+
+
+

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+
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+See Subspecies of Canis lupus
+
+The wolf (Canis lupus[a]), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise non-domestic/feral subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of Canidae, males averaging 40 kg (88 lb) and females 37 kg (82 lb). Wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height. The wolf is also distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. The wolf is nonetheless related closely enough to smaller Canis species, such as the coyote and the golden jackal, to produce fertile hybrids with them. The banded fur of a wolf is usually mottled white, brown, gray, and black, although subspecies in the arctic region may be nearly all white.
+
+Of all members of the genus Canis, the wolf is most specialized for cooperative game hunting as demonstrated by its physical adaptations to tackling large prey, its more social nature, and its highly advanced expressive behaviour. It travels in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring. Offspring may leave to form their own packs on the onset of sexual maturity and in response to competition for food within the pack. Wolves are also territorial and fights over territory are among the principal causes of wolf mortality. The wolf is mainly a carnivore and feeds on large wild hooved mammals as well as smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs. Pathogens and parasites, notably rabies, may infect wolves.
+
+The global wild wolf population was estimated to be 300,000 in 2003 and is considered to be of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Wolves have a long history of interactions with humans, having been despised and hunted in most pastoral communities because of their attacks on livestock, while conversely being respected in some agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Although the fear of wolves exists in many human societies, the majority of recorded attacks on people have been attributed to animals suffering from rabies. Wolf attacks on humans are rare because wolves are relatively few, live away from people, and have developed a fear of humans because of their experiences with hunters, ranchers, and shepherds.
+
+The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos).[4][5] The name "gray wolf" refers to the grayish colour of the species.[6]
+
+Since pre-Christian times, Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons took on wulf as a prefix or suffix in their names. Examples include Wulfhere ("Wolf Army", or "He whose army is the wolf"), Cynewulf ("Royal Wolf"), Cēnwulf ("Bold Wolf"), Wulfheard ("Wolf-hard"), Earnwulf ("Eagle Wolf"), Wulfstān ("Wolf Stone") Æðelwulf ("Noble Wolf"), Wolfhroc ("Wolf-Frock"), Wolfhetan ("Wolf Hide"), Isangrim ("Gray Mask"), Scrutolf ("Garb Wolf"), Wolfgang ("Wolf Gait") and Wolfdregil ("Wolf Runner").[7]
+
+Gray wolf
+
+Coyote
+
+African golden wolf
+
+Ethiopian wolf
+
+Golden jackal
+
+Dhole
+
+African wild dog
+
+Side-striped jackal
+
+Black-backed jackal
+
+In 1758, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus published in his Systema Naturae the binomial nomenclature.[3] Canis is the Latin word meaning "dog",[9] and under this genus he listed the doglike carnivores including domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals. He classified the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, and the wolf as Canis lupus.[3] Linnaeus considered the dog to be a separate species from the wolf because of its cauda recurvata—its upturning tail—which is not found in any other canid.[10]
+
+In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under C. lupus 36 wild subspecies, and proposed two additional subspecies: familiaris (Linnaeus, 1758) and dingo (Meyer, 1793). Wozencraft included hallstromi—the New Guinea singing dog—as a taxonomic synonym for the dingo. Wozencraft referred to a 1999 mitochondrial DNA study as one of the guides in forming his decision, and listed the 38 subspecies of C. lupus under the biological common name of "wolf", the nominate subspecies being the Eurasian wolf (C. l. lupus) based on the type specimen that Linnaeus studied in Sweden.[11] Studies using paleogenomic techniques reveal that the modern wolf and the dog are sister taxa, as modern wolves are not closely related to the population of wolves that was first domesticated.[12] In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/Species Survival Commission's Canid Specialist Group considered the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo to be feral dogs Canis familiaris, and therefore should not be assessed for the IUCN Red List.[13]
+
+The phylogenetic descent of the extant wolf C. lupus from C. etruscus through C. mosbachensis is widely accepted.[14] The earliest fossils of C. lupus were found in what was once eastern Beringia at Old Crow, Yukon, Canada, and at Cripple Creek Sump, Fairbanks, Alaska. The age is not agreed upon but could date to one million years ago. Considerable morphological diversity existed among wolves by the Late Pleistocene. They had more robust skulls and teeth than modern wolves, often with a shortened snout, a pronounced development of the temporalis muscle, and robust premolars. It is proposed that these features were specialized adaptations for the processing of carcass and bone associated with the hunting and scavenging of Pleistocene megafauna. Compared with modern wolves, some Pleistocene wolves showed an increase in tooth breakage similar to that seen in the extinct dire wolf. This suggests they either often processed carcasses, or that they competed with other carnivores and needed to consume their prey quickly. Compared with those found in the modern spotted hyena, the frequency and location of tooth fractures in these wolves indicates they were habitual bone crackers.[15] In June 2019, the severed yet preserved head of a Pleistocene wolf, dated to over 40,000 years ago, was found close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia, Russia, near the Arctic Circle. The head was about 16 in (41 cm) long, much bigger than a modern wolf's head.[16][17][18]
+
+Genomic studies suggest modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population[19][20][21] that existed 20,000 years ago.[19] Studies in 2017 and 2018 found that the Himalayan wolf is part of a lineage that is basal to other wolves and split from them 691,000–740,000 years ago.[22][23] Other wolves appear to have originated in Beringia in an expansion that was driven by the huge ecological changes during the close of the Late Pleistocene.[23] A study in 2016 indicates that a population bottleneck was followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original morphologically diverse wolf populations were out-competed and replaced by more modern wolves.[24]
+
+A 2016 genomic study suggests that Old World and New World wolves split around 12,500 years ago followed by the divergence of the lineage that led to dogs from other Old World wolves around 11,100–12,300 years ago.[21] An extinct Late Pleistocene wolf may have been the ancestor of the dog,[25][15] with the dog's similarity to the extant wolf being the result of genetic admixture between the two.[15] The dingo, Basenji, Tibetan Mastiff and Chinese indigenous breeds are basal members of the domestic dog clade. The divergence time for wolves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is estimated to be fairly recent at around 1,600 years ago. Among New World wolves, the Mexican wolf diverged around 5,400 years ago.[21]
+
+In the distant past, there has been gene flow between African golden wolves, golden jackals, and gray wolves. The African golden wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African golden wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula shows admixture with Middle Eastern wolves and dogs.[26] There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves. This indicates the golden jackal ancestry found in North American wolves may have occurred before the divergence of the Eurasian and North American wolves.[27]
+
+The common ancestor of the coyote and the wolf has admixed with a ghost population of an extinct unidentified canid. This canid is genetically close to the dhole and evolved after the divergence of the African hunting dog from the other canid species. The basal position of the coyote compared to the wolf is proposed to be due to the coyote retaining more of the mitochondrial genome of this unidentified canid.[26] Similarly, a museum specimen of a wolf from southern China collected in 1963 showed a genome that was 12–14% admixed from this unknown canid.[28] In North America, most coyotes and wolves show varying degrees of past genetic admixture. The red wolf of the southeastern United States is a hybrid animal with 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry. In addition, there was found to be 60%:40% wolf to coyote genetics in Eastern timber wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes region wolves.[27]
+
+In more recent times, some male Italian wolves originated from dog ancestry, which indicates female wolves will breed with male dogs in the wild.[29] In the Caucasus Mountains, 10% of dogs including livestock guardian dogs, are first generation hybrids.[30] Although mating between golden jackals and wolves has never been observed, evidence of jackal-wolf hybridization was discovered through mitochondrial DNA analysis of jackals living in the Caucasus Mountains[30] and in Bulgaria.[31]
+
+The wolf is the largest member of the Canidae family,[32] and is further distinguished from coyotes and jackals by a broader snout, shorter ears, a shorter torso and a longer tail.[33][32] It is slender and powerfully built with a large, deeply descending rib cage, a sloping back, and a heavily muscled neck.[34] The wolf's legs are moderately longer than those of other canids, which enables the animal to move swiftly, and to overcome the deep snow that covers most of its geographical range in winter.[35] The ears are relatively small and triangular.[34] The wolf's head is large and heavy, with a wide forehead, strong jaws and a long, blunt muzzle.[36] The skull is 230–280 mm (9–11 in) in length and 130–150 mm (5–6 in) in width.[37] The teeth are heavy and large, making them better suited to crushing bone than those of other canids. They are not as specialized as those found in hyenas though.[38][39] Its molars have a flat chewing surface, but not to the same extent as the coyote, whose diet contains more vegetable matter.[40] Females tend to have narrower muzzles and foreheads, thinner necks, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders than males.[41]
+
+Adult wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height.[36] The tail measures 29–50 cm (11–20 in) in length, the ears 90–110 mm (3 1⁄2–4 3⁄8 in) in height, and the hind feet are 220–250 mm (8 5⁄8–9 7⁄8 in).[42] The size and weight of the modern wolf increases proportionally with latitude in accord with Bergmann's rule.[43] The mean body mass of the wolf is 40 kg (88 lb), the smallest specimen recorded at 12 kg (26 lb) and the largest at 79.4 kg (175 lb).[44][36] On average, European wolves weigh 38.5 kg (85 lb), North American wolves 36 kg (79 lb), and Indian and Arabian wolves 25 kg (55 lb).[45] Females in any given wolf population typically weigh 2.3–4.5 kg (5–10 lb) less than males. Wolves weighing over 54 kg (119 lb) are uncommon, though exceptionally large individuals have been recorded in Alaska and Canada.[46] In middle Russia, exceptionally large males are given a maximum weight of 69–79 kg (152–174 lb).[42]
+
+The wolf has very dense and fluffy winter fur, with a short undercoat and long, coarse guard hairs.[36] Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in spring and grow back in autumn.[45] The longest hairs occur on the back, particularly on the front quarters and neck. Especially long hairs grow on the shoulders and almost form a crest on the upper part of the neck. The hairs on the cheeks are elongated and form tufts. The ears are covered in short hairs and project from the fur. Short, elastic and closely adjacent hairs are present on the limbs from the elbows down to the calcaneal tendons.[36] The winter fur is highly resistant to the cold. Wolves in northern climates can rest comfortably in open areas at −40 °C (−40 °F) by placing their muzzles between the rear legs and covering their faces with their tail. Wolf fur provides better insulation than dog fur and does not collect ice when warm breath is condensed against it.[45]
+
+In cold climates, the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin to conserve body heat. The warmth of the foot pads is regulated independently from the rest of the body and is maintained at just above tissue-freezing point where the pads come in contact with ice and snow.[47] In warm climates, the fur is coarser and scarcer than in northern wolves.[36] Female wolves tend to have smoother furred limbs than males and generally develop the smoothest overall coats as they age. Older wolves generally have more white hairs on the tip of the tail, along the nose, and on the forehead. Winter fur is retained longest by lactating females, although with some hair loss around their teats.[41] Hair length on the middle of the back is 60–70 mm (2 3⁄8–2 3⁄4 in), and the guard hairs on the shoulders generally do not exceed 90 mm (3 1⁄2 in), but can reach 110–130 mm (4 3⁄8–5 1⁄8 in).[36]
+
+A wolf's coat colour is determined by its guard hairs. Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black.[48] The coat of the Eurasian wolf is a mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colours with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. The top of the head, forehead, under and between the eyes, and between the eyes and ears is gray with a reddish film. The neck is ochreous. Long, black tips on the hairs along the back form a broad stripe, with black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest and rear of the body. The sides of the body, tail, and outer limbs are a pale dirty ochreous colour, while the inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white. Apart from those wolves which are pure white or black, these tones vary little across geographical areas, although the patterns of these colours vary between individuals.[49]
+
+In North America, the coat colours of wolves follow Gloger's rule, wolves in the Canadian arctic being white and those in southern Canada, the U.S., and Mexico being predominantly gray. In some areas of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the coat colour is predominantly black, some being blue-gray and some with silver and black.[48] Differences in coat colour between sexes is absent in Eurasia;[50] females tend to have redder tones in North America.[51] Black-coloured wolves in North America acquired their colour from wolf-dog admixture after the first arrival of dogs that accompanied humans across the Bering Strait 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.[52] Research into the inheritance of white colour from dogs into wolves has yet to be undertaken.[53]
+
+Wolves occurred originally across Eurasia and North America. Deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of what it once was. The wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) in much of Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and in Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains.[2] Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.[40]
+
+Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be divided into large size 240–650 kg (530–1,430 lb) and medium size 23–130 kg (51–287 lb), and have a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members.[54][55] The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey,[40] with a pack of 15 able to bring down an adult moose.[56] The variation in diet between wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey.[57]
+
+In North America, the wolf's diet is dominated by wild large hoofed mammals (ungulates) and medium-sized mammals. In Asia and Europe, their diet is dominated by wild medium-sized hoofed mammals and domestic species. The wolf depends on wild species, and if these are not readily available, as in Asia, the wolf is more reliant on domestic species.[57] Across Eurasia, wolves prey mostly on moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar.[58] In North America, important range-wide prey are elk, moose, caribou, white-tailed deer and mule deer.[59] Wolves can digest their meal in a few hours and can feed several times in one day, making quick use of large quantities of meat.[60] A well-fed wolf stores fat under the skin, around the heart, intestines, kidneys, and bone marrow, particularly during the autumn and winter.[61]
+
+Nonetheless, wolves are not fussy eaters. Smaller-sized animals that may supplement their diet include rodents, hares, insectivores and smaller carnivores. They frequently eat waterfowl and their eggs. When such foods are insufficient, they prey on lizards, snakes, frogs, and large insects when available.[62] Wolves in northern Minnesota prey on northern pike in freshwater streams.[63] The diet of coastal wolves in Alaska includes 20% salmon,[64] while those of coastal wolves in British Columbia includes 25% marine sources, and those on the nearby islands 75%.[65]
+
+In Europe, wolves eat apples, pears, figs, melons, berries and cherries. In North America, wolves eat blueberries and raspberries. Wolves also eat grass, which may provide some vitamins.[66] They are known to eat the berries of mountain-ash, lily of the valley, bilberries, cowberries, European black nightshade, grain crops, and the shoots of reeds.[62]
+
+In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion.[62] In Eurasian areas with dense human activity, many wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage.[58] Prey in North America continue to occupy suitable habitats with low human density, the wolves eating livestock and garbage only in dire circumstances.[67] Cannibalism is not uncommon in wolves during harsh winters, when packs often attack weak or injured wolves and may eat the bodies of dead pack members.[62][68][69]
+
+Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur. In North America, incidents of wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them.[70] According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921, the infamous Custer Wolf relied on coyotes to accompany him and warn him of danger. Though they fed from his kills, he never allowed them to approach him.[71] Interactions have been observed in Eurasia between wolves and golden jackals, the latter's numbers being comparatively small in areas with high wolf densities.[36][70][72] Wolves also kill red, Arctic and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them.[36][73]
+
+Brown bears typically dominate wolf packs in disputes over carcasses, while wolf packs mostly prevail against bears when defending their den sites. Both species kill each other's young. Wolves eat the brown bears they kill, while brown bears seem to eat only young wolves.[74] Wolf interactions with American black bears are much rarer because of differences in habitat preferences. Wolves have been recorded on numerous occasions actively seeking out American black bears in their dens and killing them without eating them. Unlike brown bears, American black bears frequently lose against wolves in disputes over kills.[75] Wolves also dominate and sometimes kill wolverines, and will chase off those that attempt to scavenge from their kills. Wolverines escape from wolves in caves or up trees.[76]
+
+Wolves may interact and compete with felids, such as the Eurasian lynx, which may feed on smaller prey where wolves are present[77] and may be suppressed by large wolf populations.[78] Wolves encounter cougars along portions of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges. Wolves and cougars typically avoid encountering each other by hunting at different elevations for different prey (niche partitioning). In winter, when snow accumulation forces their prey into valleys, interactions between the two species become more likely. Wolves in packs usually dominate cougars and can steal their kills or even kill them,[79] while one-to-one encounters tend to be dominated by the cat. There are several documented cases of cougars killing wolves.[80] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities and disrupting the feline's behaviour.[81] Wolf and Siberian tiger interactions are well-documented in the Russian Far East, where tigers significantly depress wolf numbers, sometimes to the point of localized extinction. Only human depletion of tiger numbers appears to protect wolves from competitive exclusion from them. With perhaps only four proven records of tigers killing wolves, these cases are rare; attacks appear to be competitive rather than predatory in nature.[82][77]
+
+In Israel, Central Asia and India wolves may encounter striped hyenas, usually in disputes over carcasses. Striped hyenas feed extensively on wolf-killed carcasses in areas where the two species interact. One-to-one, hyenas dominate wolves, and may prey on them,[83] but wolf packs can drive off single or outnumbered hyenas.[84][85] There is at least one case in Israel of a hyena associating and cooperating with a wolf pack. It is proposed that the hyena could benefit from the wolves' superior ability to hunt large, agile prey. The wolves could benefit from the hyena's superior sense of smell, to locate and dig out tortoises, to crack open large bones, and to tear open discarded food containers like tin cans.[86]
+
+
+
+The wolf is a social animal.[36] Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one.[87] The wolf's basic social unit is the nuclear family consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring.[36] The average pack size in North America is eight wolves and in Europe 5.5 wolves.[43] The average pack across Eurasia consists of a family of eight wolves (two adults, juveniles, and yearlings),[36] or sometimes two or three such families,[40] with examples of exceptionally large packs consisting of up to 42 wolves being known.[88] Cortisol levels in wolves rise significantly when a pack member dies, indicating the presence of stress.[89] During times of prey abundance caused by calving or migration, different wolf packs may join together temporarily.[36]
+
+Offspring typically stay in the pack for 10–54 months before dispersing.[90] Triggers for dispersal include the onset of sexual maturity and competition within the pack for food.[91] The distance travelled by dispersing wolves varies widely; some stay in the vicinity of the parental group, while other individuals may travel great distances of upwards of 206 km (128 mi), 390 km (240 mi), and 670 km (420 mi) from their natal (birth) packs.[92] A new pack is usually founded by an unrelated dispersing male and female, travelling together in search of an area devoid of other hostile packs.[93] Wolf packs rarely adopt other wolves into their fold and typically kill them. In the rare cases where other wolves are adopted, the adoptee is almost invariably an immature animal of one to three years old, and unlikely to compete for breeding rights with the mated pair. This usually occurs between the months of February and May. Adoptee males may mate with an available pack female and then form their own pack. In some cases, a lone wolf is adopted into a pack to replace a deceased breeder.[88]
+
+Wolves are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive assuring a steady supply of prey. Territory size depends largely on the amount of prey available and the age of the pack's pups. They tend to increase in size in areas with low prey populations,[94] or when the pups reach the age of six months when they have the same nutritional needs as adults.[95] Wolf packs travel constantly in search of prey, covering roughly 9% of their territory per day, on average 25 km/d (16 mi/d). The core of their territory is on average 35 km2 (14 sq mi) where they spend 50% of their time.[94] Prey density tends to be much higher on the territory's periphery. Except out of desperation, wolves tend to avoid hunting on the fringes of their range to avoid fatal confrontations with neighbouring packs.[96] The smallest territory on record was held by a pack of six wolves in northeastern Minnesota, which occupied an estimated 33 km2 (13 sq mi), while the largest was held by an Alaskan pack of ten wolves encompassing 6,272 km2 (2,422 sq mi).[95] Wolf packs are typically settled, and usually leave their accustomed ranges only during severe food shortages.[36]
+
+Wolves advertise their territories to other packs through howling and scent marking. Scent marking involves urine, feces, and anal gland scents. This is more effective at advertising territory than howling and is often used in combination with scratch marks. Wolves increase their rate of scent marking when they encounter the marks of wolves from other packs. Lone wolves will rarely mark, but newly bonded pairs will scent mark the most.[40] These marks are generally left every 240 m (260 yd) throughout the territory on regular travelways and junctions. Such markers can last for two to three weeks,[95] and are typically placed near rocks, boulders, trees, or the skeletons of large animals.[36] Territorial fights are among the principal causes of wolf mortality, one study concluding that 14–65% of wolf deaths in Minnesota and the Denali National Park and Preserve were due to other wolves.[97]
+
+Wolves communicate to anticipate what their pack mates or other wolves might do next.[98] This includes the use of vocalization, body posture, scent, touch, and taste.[99] The phases of the moon have no effect on wolf vocalization, and despite popular belief, wolves do not howl at the moon.[100] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[101] Wolf howls can under certain conditions be heard over areas of up to 130 km2 (50 sq mi).[40] Other vocalizations include growls, barks and whines. Wolves do not bark as loudly or continuously as dogs do in confrontations, rather barking a few times and then retreating from a perceived danger.[102] Aggressive or self-assertive wolves are characterized by their slow and deliberate movements, high body posture and raised hackles, while submissive ones carry their bodies low, flatten their fur, and lower their ears and tail.[103] Raised leg urination is considered to be one of the most important forms of scent communication in the wolf, making up 60–80% of all scent marks observed.[104]
+
+Wolves are monogamous, mated pairs usually remaining together for life. Should one of the pair die, another mate is found quickly.[105] With wolves in the wild, inbreeding does not occur where outbreeding is possible.[106] Wolves become mature at the age of two years and sexually mature from the age of three years.[105] The age of first breeding in wolves depends largely on environmental factors: when food is plentiful, or when wolf populations are heavily managed, wolves can rear pups at younger ages to better exploit abundant resources. Females are capable of producing pups every year, one litter annually being the average.[107] Oestrus and rut begin in the second half of winter and lasts for two weeks.[105]
+
+Dens are usually constructed for pups during the summer period. When building dens, females make use of natural shelters like fissures in rocks, cliffs overhanging riverbanks and holes thickly covered by vegetation. Sometimes, the den is the appropriated burrow of smaller animals such as foxes, badgers or marmots. An appropriated den is often widened and partly remade. On rare occasions, female wolves dig burrows themselves, which are usually small and short with one to three openings. The den is usually constructed not more than 500 m (550 yd) away from a water source. It typically faces southwards where it can be better warmed by sunlight exposure, and the snow can thaw more quickly. Resting places, play areas for the pups, and food remains are commonly found around wolf dens. The odor of urine and rotting food emanating from the denning area often attracts scavenging birds like magpies and ravens. Though they mostly avoid areas within human sight, wolves have been known to nest near domiciles, paved roads and railways.[108] During pregnancy, female wolves remain in a den located away from the peripheral zone of their territories, where violent encounters with other packs are less likely to occur.[109]
+
+The gestation period lasts 62–75 days with pups usually being born in the spring months or early summer in very cold places such as on the tundra. Young females give birth to four to five young, and older females from six to eight young and up to 14. Their mortality rate is 60–80%.[110] Newborn wolf pups look similar to German Shepherd Dog pups.[111] They are born blind and deaf and are covered in short soft grayish-brown fur. They weigh 300–500 g (10 1⁄2–17 3⁄4 oz) at birth and begin to see after nine to 12 days. The milk canines erupt after one month. Pups first leave the den after three weeks. At one-and-a-half months of age, they are agile enough to flee from danger. Mother wolves do not leave the den for the first few weeks, relying on the fathers to provide food for them and their young. Pups begin to eat solid food at the age of three to four weeks. They have a fast growth rate during their first four months of life: during this period, a pup's weight can increase nearly 30 times.[110][112] Wolf pups begin play-fighting at the age of three weeks, though unlike young coyotes and foxes, their bites are gentle and controlled. Actual fights to establish hierarchy usually occur at five to eight weeks of age. This is in contrast to young coyotes and foxes, which may begin fighting even before the onset of play behaviour.[113] By autumn, the pups are mature enough to accompany the adults on hunts for large prey.[109]
+
+Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs; single wolves have occasionally been observed to kill large prey such as moose, bison and muskoxen unaided.[114][115] This contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.[115] The size of a wolf hunting pack is related to the number of pups that survived the previous winter, adult survival, and the rate of dispersing wolves leaving the pack. The optimal pack size for hunting elk is four wolves, and for bison a large pack size is more successful.[116]
+
+As well as their physical adaptations for hunting hoofed mammals, wolves possess certain behavioural, cognitive, and psychological adaptations to assist with their hunting lifestyle. Wolves are excellent learners that match or outperform domestic dogs. They can use gaze to focus attention on where other wolves are looking. This is important because wolves do not use vocalization when hunting. In laboratory tests, they appear to exhibit insight, foresight, understanding, and the ability to plan. [117] To survive, wolves must be able to solve two problems—finding a prey animal, then confronting it.[117]
+
+Wolves move around their territory when hunting, using the same trails for extended periods. After snowfalls, wolves find their old trails and continue using them. These follow the banks of rivers, the shorelines of lakes, through ravines overgrown with shrubs, through plantations, or roads and human paths.[118] Wolves are nocturnal predators. During the winter, a pack will commence hunting in the twilight of early evening and will hunt all night, traveling tens of kilometres. Sometimes hunting large prey occurs during the day. During the summer, wolves generally tend to hunt individually, ambushing their prey and rarely giving pursuit.[119]
+
+The wolf usually travels at a loping pace, placing one of its paws directly in front of the other. This gait can be maintained for hours at a rate of 8–9 km/h (5.0–5.6 mph).[120] On bare paths, a wolf can quickly achieve speeds of 50–60 km/h (31–37 mph). The wolf has a running gait of 55–70 km/h (34–43 mph), can leap 5 m (16 ft) horizontally in a single bound, and can maintain rapid pursuit for at least 20 minutes.[92] A wolf's foot is large and flexible, which allows it to tread on a wide variety of terrain. A wolf's legs are long compared to their body size allowing them to travel up to 76 km (47 mi) in 12 hours. This adaptation allows wolves to locate prey within hours, but it can take days to find prey that can be killed without great risk. Moose and deer live singly in the summer. Caribou live in herds of thousands which presents dangers for wolves. Elk live in small herds and these are a safer target.[117]
+
+A wolf carries its head at the same level as its back, lifting it only when alert.[36] In one study, wolves detected moose using scent ten times, vision six times, and once by following tracks in the snow. Their vision is as good as a human's, and they can smell prey at least 2.4 km (1 1⁄2 mi) away. One wolf travelled to a herd 103 km (64 mi) away. A human can detect the smell of a forest fire over the same distance from downwind. The wolf's sense of smell is at least comparable to that of the domestic dog, which is at least 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's.[117]
+
+When hunting large gregarious prey, wolves will try to isolate an individual from its group.[121] If successful, a wolf pack can bring down game that will feed it for days, but one error in judgement can lead to serious injury or death. Most large prey have developed defensive adaptations and behaviours. Wolves have been killed while attempting to bring down bison, elk, moose, muskoxen, and even by one of their smallest hoofed prey, the white-tailed deer.[117] Although people often believe that wolves can easily overcome any of their prey, their success rate in hunting hoofed prey is usually low.[122]
+
+Generally, bison, elk, and moose will stand their ground, then the wolves must struggle with them to bring them down. Often caribou and deer will flee, but sometimes deer also make a stand. With smaller prey like beaver, geese, and hares, there is no risk to the wolf.[117] If the targeted animal stands its ground, wolves either ignore it, or try to intimidate it into running.[114] Wolves, or even a wolf on its own, will attempt to frighten a herd into panicking and dispersing.[123]
+
+When wolves encounter prey that flees, they give chase. The speed of sprinting prey is closely related to the speed of their main predators. Wolves can run at 56–64 km/h (35–40 mph) across several kilometres and will often pursue prey for at least 1 km (1⁄2 mi). One wolf chased a caribou for 8 km (5 mi), another chased and tracked a deer for 20 km (12 mi), and one 11-year-old wolf chased and caught an Arctic hare after seven minutes. Most wolf prey will try to run to water, where they will either escape or be better placed to attempt to ward off the wolves.[117]
+
+The wolf must give chase and gain on its fleeing prey, slow it down by biting through thick hair and hide, and then disable it enough to begin feeding.[117] After chasing and then confronting a large prey animal, the wolf makes use of its 6 cm (2 1⁄2 in) fangs and its powerful masseter muscles to deliver a bite force of 28 kg/cm2 (400 lbf/in2), which is capable of breaking open the skulls of many of its prey animals. The wolf leaps at its quarry and tears at it. One wolf was observed being dragged for dozens of metres attached to the hind leg of a moose; another was seen being dragged over a fallen log while attached to a bull elk's nose.[116]
+
+The most common point of wolf attacks on moose is the upper hind legs.[124][125][126] Hind leg wounds are inflicted from the rear, midway up the hock with the canine teeth. These leave gaping skin perforations over 4 cm (1 1⁄2 in) in diameter. Although blood loss, muscle damage, and tendon exposure may occur, there is no evidence of hamstringing. Attacks also occur on the fleshy nose, the back and sides of the neck, the ears, and the perineum.[126] Wolves may wound large prey and then lie around resting for hours before killing it when it is weaker due to blood loss, thereby lessening the risk of injury to themselves.[127]
+
+With medium-sized prey, such as roe deer or sheep, wolves kill by biting the throat, severing nerve tracks and the carotid artery, thus causing the animal to die within a few seconds to a minute. With small, mouselike prey, wolves leap in a high arc and immobilize it with their forepaws.[128] When prey is vulnerable and abundant, wolves may occasionally surplus kill. Such instances are common with domestic animals, but rare with wild prey. In the wild, surplus killing occurs primarily during late winter or spring, when snow is unusually deep (thus impeding the movements of prey)[129] or during the denning period, when den bound wolves require a ready supply of meat.[130] Medium-sized prey are especially vulnerable to surplus killing, as the swift throat-biting method allows wolves to kill one animal quickly and move on to another.[128]
+
+Once prey is brought down, wolves begin to feed excitedly, ripping and tugging at the carcass in all directions, and bolting down large chunks of it.[131] The breeding pair typically monopolizes food to continue producing pups. When food is scarce, this is done at the expense of other family members, especially non-pups.[132] The breeding pair typically eats first. They usually work the hardest at killing prey, and may rest after a long hunt and allow the rest of the family to eat undisturbed. Once the breeding pair has finished eating, the rest of the family tears off pieces of the carcass and transports them to secluded areas where they can eat in peace. Wolves typically commence feeding by consuming the larger internal organs, like the heart, liver, lungs, and stomach lining. The kidneys and spleen are eaten once they are exposed, followed by the muscles.[133] A wolf can eat 15–19% of its body weight in a single feeding.[61]
+
+Viral diseases carried by wolves include: rabies, canine distemper, canine parvovirus, infectious canine hepatitis, papillomatosis, and canine coronavirus.[134] Wolves are a major host for rabies in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and India.[135] In wolves, the incubation period is eight to 21 days, and results in the host becoming agitated, deserting its pack, and travelling up to 80 km (50 mi) a day, thus increasing the risk of infecting other wolves. Infected wolves do not show any fear of humans, most documented wolf attacks on people being attributed to rabid animals. Although canine distemper is lethal in dogs, it has not been recorded to kill wolves, except in Canada and Alaska. The canine parvovirus, which causes death by dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and endotoxic shock or sepsis, is largely survivable in wolves, but can be lethal to pups. Wolves may catch infectious canine hepatitis from dogs, though there are no records of wolves dying from it. Papillomatosis has been recorded only once in wolves, and likely does not cause serious illness or death, though it may alter feeding behaviours. The canine coronavirus has been recorded in Alaskan wolves, infections being most prevalent in winter months.[134]
+
+Bacterial diseases carried by wolves include: brucellosis, Lyme disease, leptospirosis, tularemia, bovine tuberculosis,[136] listeriosis and anthrax.[135] Wolves can catch Brucella suis from wild and domestic reindeer. While adult wolves tend not to show any clinical signs, it can severely weaken the pups of infected females. Although lyme disease can debilitate individual wolves, it does not appear to significantly affect wolf populations. Leptospirosis can be contracted through contact with infected prey or urine, and can cause fever, anorexia, vomiting, anemia, hematuria, icterus, and death. Wolves living near farms are more vulnerable to the disease than those living in the wilderness, probably because of prolonged contact with infected domestic animal waste. Wolves may catch tularemia from lagomorph prey, though its effect on wolves is unknown. Although bovine tuberculosis is not considered a major threat to wolves, it has been recorded to have killed two wolf pups in Canada.[136]
+
+Wolves carry ectoparasites and endoparasites; those in the former Soviet Union have been recorded to carry at least 50 species.[135] Most of these parasites infect wolves without adverse effects, though the effects may become more serious in sick or malnourished specimens.[137] Parasitic infection in wolves is of particular concern to people. Wolves can spread them to dogs, which in turn can carry the parasites to humans. In areas where wolves inhabit pastoral areas, the parasites can be spread to livestock.[135]
+
+Wolves are often infested with a variety of arthropod exoparasites, including fleas, ticks, lice, and mites. The most harmful to wolves, particularly pups, is the mange mite (Sarcoptes scabiei),[137] though they rarely develop full-blown mange, unlike foxes.[36] Lice, such as Trichodectes canis, may cause sickness in wolves, but rarely death. Ticks of the genus Ixodes can infect wolves with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.[137] The tick Dermacentor pictus also infests wolves. Other ectoparasites include chewing lice, sucking lice and the fleas Pulex irritans and Ctenocephalides canis.[36]
+
+Endoparasites known to infect wolves include: protozoans and helminths (flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and thorny-headed worms). Of 30,000 protozoan species, only a few have been recorded to infect wolves: Isospora, Toxoplasma, Sarcocystis, Babesia, and Giardia.[137] Some wolves carry Neospora caninum, which can be spread to cattle and is correlated with bovine miscarriages.[138] Among flukes, the most common in North American wolves is Alaria, which infects small rodents and amphibians that are eaten by wolves. Upon reaching maturity, Alaria migrates to the wolf's intestine, but does little harm. Metorchis conjunctus, which enters wolves through eating fish, infects the wolf's liver or gall bladder, causing liver disease, inflammation of the pancreas, and emaciation. Most other fluke species reside in the wolf's intestine, though Paragonimus westermani lives in the lungs. Tapeworms are commonly found in wolves, as their primary hosts are ungulates, small mammals, and fish, which wolves feed upon. Tapeworms generally cause little harm in wolves, though this depends on the number and size of the parasites, and the sensitivity of the host. Symptoms often include constipation, toxic and allergic reactions, irritation of the intestinal mucosa, and malnutrition. Infections by the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus in ungulate populations tend to increase in areas with high wolf densities, as wolves can shed Echinoccocus eggs in their feces onto grazing areas.[137]
+
+Wolves can carry over 30 roundworm species, though most roundworm infections appear benign, depending on the number of worms and the age of the host. Ancylostoma caninum attaches itself on the intestinal wall to feed on the host's blood, and can cause hyperchromic anemia, emaciation, diarrhea, and possibly death. Toxocara canis, a hookworm known to infect wolf pups in the uterus, can cause intestinal irritation, bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea. Wolves may catch Dioctophyma renale from minks, which infects the kidneys, and can grow to lengths of 100 cm (40 in). D. renale causes the complete destruction of the kidney's functional tissue and can be fatal if both kidneys are infected. Wolves can tolerate low levels of Dirofilaria immitis for many years without showing any ill effects, though high levels can kill wolves through cardiac enlargement and congestive hepatopathy. Wolves probably become infected with Trichinella spiralis by eating infected ungulates. Although T. spiralis is not known to produce clinical signs in wolves, it can cause emaciation, salivation, and crippling muscle pains in dogs. Thorny-headed worms rarely infect wolves, though three species have been identified in Russian wolves: Nicolla skrjabini, Macrocantorhynchus catulinus, and Moniliformis moniliformis.[137]
+
+The global wild wolf population in 2003 was estimated at 300,000.[139] Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s. This has fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range as a result of legal protection, changes in land use, and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the wolf. Despite these threats, the IUCN classifies the wolf as Least Concern on its Red List due to its relatively widespread range and stable population. The species is listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in its Appendix II, indicating that it is not threatened with extinction. However, those wolf populations living in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan are listed in its Appendix I, indicating that these may become extinct without restrictions on their trade.[2]
+
+In Canada, 50,000–60,000 wolves live in 80% of their historical range, making Canada an important stronghold for the species.[40] Under Canadian law, First Nations people can hunt wolves without restrictions, but others must acquire licenses for the hunting and trapping seasons. As many as 4,000 wolves may be harvested in Canada each year.[140] The wolf is a protected species in national parks under the Canada National Parks Act.[141] In Alaska, 7,000–11,000 wolves are found on 85% of the state's 1,517,733 km2 (586,000 sq mi). Wolves may be hunted or trapped with a license; around 1,200 wolves are harvested annually.[142]
+
+In the contiguous United States, wolf declines were caused by the expansion of agriculture, the decimation of the wolf's main prey species like the American bison, and extermination campaigns.[40] Wolves were given protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and have since returned to parts of their former range thanks to both natural recolonizations and reintroductions.[143] Wolf populations in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan number over 4,000 as of 2018.[144] Wolves also occupy much of the northern Rocky Mountains region, with at least 1,704 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as of 2015. They have also established populations in Washington and Oregon.[145] In Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated from 1977 to 1980 in capturing all Mexican wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction and established captive breeding programs for reintroduction.[146] As of 2018, there were 230 Mexican wolves living in Mexico, 64 in Arizona, 67 in New Mexico, and 240 in captive breeding programs in both countries.[147]
+
+Europe, excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, has 17,000 wolves in more than 28 countries.[148] In the European Union, the wolf is strictly protected under the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Appendix II) and the 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Annex II and IV). There is extensive legal protection in many European countries, although there are national exceptions and enforcement is variable and often non-existent.[2]
+
+Wolves have been persecuted in Europe for centuries, having been exterminated in Great Britain by 1684, in Ireland by 1770, in Central Europe by 1899, in France by the 1930s, and in much of Scandinavia by the early 1970s. They continued to survive in parts of Finland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.[149] Since 1980, European wolves have rebounded and expanded into parts of their former range. The decline of the traditional pastoral and rural economies seems to have ended the need to exterminate the wolf in parts of Europe.[140] As of 2016, estimates of wolf numbers include: 4,000 in the Balkans, 3,460–3,849 in the Carpathian Mountains, 1,700–2,240 in the Baltic states, 1,100–2,400 in the Italian peninsula, and around 2,500 in the northwest Iberian peninsula as of 2007.[148]
+
+In the former Soviet Union, wolf populations have retained much of their historical range despite Soviet-era large scale extermination campaigns. Their numbers range from 1,500 in Georgia, to 20,000 in Kazakhstan and up to 45,000 in Russia.[150] In Russia, the wolf is regarded as a pest because of its attacks on livestock, and wolf management means controlling their numbers by destroying them throughout the year. Russian history over the past century shows that reduced hunting leads to an abundance of wolves.[151] The Russian government has continued to pay bounties for wolves and annual harvests of 20-30% do not appear to significantly affect their numbers.[152]
+
+During the 19th century, wolves were widespread in many parts of the Holy Land east and west of the Jordan River, but decreased considerably in number between 1964 and 1980, largely due to persecution by farmers.[153] In the Middle East, only Israel and Oman give wolves explicit legal protection.[154] Israel has protected its wolves since 1954 and has maintained a moderately sized population of 150 through effective enforcement of conservation policies. These wolves have moved into neighboring countries. Approximately 300–600 wolves inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.[155] The wolf also appears to be widespread in Iran.[156] Turkey has an estimated population of about 7,000 wolves.[157] Outside of Turkey, wolf populations in the Middle East may total 1,000–2,000.[154]
+
+In southern Asia, the northern regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important strongholds for wolves. The wolf has been protected in India since 1972.[158] Hindus traditionally considered the hunting of wolves, even dangerous ones, as taboo, for fear of causing a bad harvest. The Santals considered them fair game, as they did every other forest-dwelling animal.[159] During British rule in India, wolves were not considered game species, and were killed primarily in response to them attacking game herds, livestock, and people.[160] The Indian wolf is distributed across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.[161] As of 2019, it is estimated that there are around 2,000–3,000 Indian wolves in the country.[162] In East Asia, Mongolia's population numbers 10,000–20,000. In China, Heilongjiang has roughly 650 wolves, Xinjiang has 10,000 and Tibet has 2,000.[163] 2017 evidence suggests that wolves range across all of mainland China.[164] Wolves have been historically persecuted in China[165] but have been legally protected since 1998.[166] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed in 1905.[167]
+
+The wolf is a common motif in the mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout its historical range. The Ancient Greeks associated wolves with Apollo, the god of light and order.[168] The Ancient Romans connected the wolf with their god of war and agriculture Mars,[169] and believed their city's founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf.[170] Norse mythology includes the feared giant wolf Fenrir, eldest child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda,[171] and Geri and Freki, Odin's faithful pets.[172] The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, who viewed it as the lord of all animals and as the only effective defender against evil.[173]
+
+In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. When humans killed it, they were punished with death, destruction and the loss of immortality.[174] For the Pawnee, Sirius is the "wolf star" and its disappearance and reappearance signified the wolf moving to and from the spirit world. Both the Pawnee and Blackfoot call the Milky Way the "wolf trail".[175] The wolf is also an important totem animal for the Tlingit and Tsimshian.[176] In Chinese astronomy, the wolf represents Sirius as the "blue beast" and the star itself is called the "heavenly wolf".[177] In China, the wolf was traditionally associated with greed and cruelty and wolf epithets were used to describe negative behaviours such as cruelty ("wolf's heart"), mistrust ("wolf's look") and lechery ("wolf-sex").[178]
+
+Tengrism places high importance on the wolf, as it is thought that, when howling, it is praying to Tengri, thus making it the only creature other than man to worship a deity.[179] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the wolf is ridden by gods of protection. In Vedic Hinduism, the wolf is a symbol of the night and the daytime quail must escape from its jaws.[178] In Hindu mythology, Krishna, to convince the people of Vraja to migrate to Vṛndāvana, creates hundreds of wolves from his hairs, which frighten the inhabitants of Vraja into making the journey.[180] In Tantric Buddhism, wolves are depicted as inhabitants of graveyards and destroyers of corpses.[178] In Zoroastrianism, the wolf has been demonized as the creation of Ahriman.[181]
+
+The concept of people turning into wolves has been present in many cultures. One Greek myth tells of Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his evil deeds.[182] The legend of the werewolf has been widespread in European folklore and involves people willingly turning into wolves to attack and kill others.[183] The Navajo have traditionally believed that witches would turn into wolves by donning wolf skins and would kill people and raid graveyards.[184] The Dena'ina believed wolves were once men and viewed them as brothers.[168] Similarly, in Turkic mythology wolves were believed to be the ancestors of their people.[185]
+
+Aesop featured wolves in several of his fables, playing on the concerns of Ancient Greece's settled, sheep-herding world. His most famous is the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is directed at those who knowingly raise false alarms, and from which the idiomatic phrase "to cry wolf" is derived. Some of his other fables concentrate on maintaining the trust between shepherds and guard dogs in their vigilance against wolves, as well as anxieties over the close relationship between wolves and dogs. Although Aesop used wolves to warn, criticize and moralize about human behaviour, his portrayals added to the wolf's image as a deceitful and dangerous animal.[186] The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have used wolves as illustrations of the dangers his followers, whom he represents as sheep, would face should they follow him.(Matthew 7:15, Matthew 10:16 and Acts 20:29).[187] In the Jataka tales the wolf is portrayed as a trickster, including one story in which it makes a hunter stop playing dead by pulling on his club.[188] In another story, the wolf tricks and eats some rats by pretending to be lame but is foiled by the chief rat.[189]
+
+Isengrim the wolf, a character first appearing in the 12th-century Latin poem Ysengrimus, is a major character in the Reynard Cycle, where he stands for the low nobility, whilst his adversary, Reynard the fox, represents the peasant hero. Isengrim is forever the victim of Reynard's wit and cruelty, often dying at the end of each story.[190] The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood", first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, is considered to have further contributed to the wolf's negative reputation in the Western world. The Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a villain capable of imitating human speech and disguising itself with human clothing. The character has been interpreted as an allegorical sexual predator.[191] Villainous wolf characters also appear in The Three Little Pigs and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats".[192] The hunting of wolves, and their attacks on humans and livestock, feature prominently in Russian literature, and are included in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev, and others. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chekhov's Peasants both feature scenes in which wolves are hunted with hounds and Borzois.[193] The musical Peter and the Wolf involves a wolf being captured for eating a farm duck, but is spared and sent to a zoo.[194]
+
+Wolves are among the central characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His portrayal of wolves has been praised posthumously by wolf biologists for his depiction of them: rather than being villainous or gluttonous, as was common in wolf portrayals at the time of the book's publication, they are shown as living in amiable family groups and drawing on the experience of infirm but experienced elder pack members.[195] Farley Mowat's largely fictional 1963 memoir Never Cry Wolf is widely considered to be the most popular book on wolves, having been adapted into a Hollywood film and taught in several schools decades after its publication. Although credited with having changed popular perceptions on wolves by portraying them as loving, cooperative and noble, it has been criticized for its idealization of wolves and its factual inaccuracies.[196][197][198] Lü Jiamin's 2004 semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem uses wolves as symbols of freedom and independence. He associates the Mongolian nomads with wolves and compares the Han Chinese of the present day to sheep, claiming they accept any leadership. As such, the novel has caused controversy with the Chinese Communist Party.[199][200]
+
+The wolf is a frequent charge in English heraldry. It is illustrated as a supporter on the shields of Lord Welby, Rendel, and Viscount Wolseley, and can be found on the coat of arms of Lovett and the vast majority of the Wilsons and Lows. The demi-wolf is a common crest, appearing in the arms and crests of members of many families, including that of the Wolfes, whose crest depicts a demi-wolf holding a crown in its paws, in reference to the assistance the family gave to Charles II during the Battle of Worcester. Wolf heads are common in Scottish heraldry, particularly in the coats of Clan Robertson and Skene. The wolf is the most common animal in Spanish heraldry and is often depicted as carrying a lamb in its mouth, or across its back.[201]
+
+The wolf is featured on the flags of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Pawnee.[202] The Chechen wolf has been a symbol of the Chechen Nation.[203] In modern times, the wolf is widely used as an emblem for military and paramilitary groups. It is the unofficial symbol of the spetsnaz, and serves as the logo of the Turkish Gray Wolves. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Serb paramilitary units adopted the wolf as their symbol, including the White Wolves and the Wolves of Vučjak.[204]
+
+Human presence appears to stress wolves, as seen by increased cortisol levels in instances such as snowmobiling near their territory.[205]
+
+Livestock depredation has been one of the primary reasons for hunting wolves and can pose a severe problem for wolf conservation. As well as causing economic losses, the threat of wolf predation causes great stress on livestock producers, and no foolproof solution of preventing such attacks short of exterminating wolves has been found.[206] Some nations help offset economic losses to wolves through compensation programs or state insurance.[207] Domesticated animals are easy prey for wolves, as they have been bred under constant human protection, and are thus unable to defend themselves very well.[208] Wolves typically resort to attacking livestock when wild prey is depleted. In Eurasia, a large part of the diet of some wolf populations consists of livestock, while such incidents are rare in North America, where healthy populations of wild prey have been largely restored.[206]
+
+The majority of losses occur during the summer grazing period, untended livestock in remote pastures being the most vulnerable to wolf predation.[209] The most frequently targeted livestock species are sheep (Europe), domestic reindeer (northern Scandinavia), goats (India), horses (Mongolia), cattle and turkeys (North America).[206] The number of animals killed in single attacks varies according to species: most attacks on cattle and horses result in one death, while turkeys, sheep and domestic reindeer may be killed in surplus.[210] Wolves mainly attack livestock when the animals are grazing, though they occasionally break into fenced enclosures.[211]
+
+A review of the studies on the competitive effects of dogs on sympatric carnivores did not mention any research on competition between dogs and wolves.[212][213] Competition would favour the wolf, which is known to kill dogs; however wolves usually live in pairs or in small packs in areas with high human persecution, giving them a disadvantage facing large groups of dogs.[213][214]
+
+Wolves kill dogs on occasion, and some wolf populations rely on dogs as an important food source. In Croatia, wolves kill more dogs than sheep, and wolves in Russia appear to limit stray dog populations. Wolves may display unusually bold behaviour when attacking dogs accompanied by people, sometimes ignoring nearby humans. Wolf attacks on dogs may occur both in house yards and in forests. Wolf attacks on hunting dogs are considered a major problem in Scandinavia and Wisconsin.[206][215] The most frequently killed hunting breeds in Scandinavia are Harriers, older animals being most at risk, likely because they are less timid than younger animals, and react to the presence of wolves differently. Large hunting dogs such as Swedish Elkhounds are more likely to survive wolf attacks because of their better ability to defend themselves.[215]
+
+Although the number of dogs killed each year by wolves is relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves' entering villages and farmyards to prey on them. In many cultures, dogs are seen as family members, or at least working team members, and losing one can lead to strong emotional responses such as demanding more liberal hunting regulations.[213]
+
+Dogs that are employed to guard sheep help to mitigate human–wolf conflicts, and are often proposed as one of the non-lethal tools in the conservation of wolves.[213][216] Shepherd dogs are not particularly aggressive, but they can disrupt potential wolf predation by displaying what is to the wolf ambiguous behaviours, such as barking, social greeting, invitation to play or aggression. The historical use of shepherd dogs across Eurasia has been effective against wolf predation,[213][217] especially when confining sheep in the presence of several livestock guardian dogs.[213][218] Shepherd dogs are sometimes killed by wolves.[213]
+
+The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey.[219] How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people.[220] Although wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed.[219]
+
+Predatory attacks may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase.[219] Cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.[36] The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women.[219] Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the summer period in the evening hours, and often within human settlements.[221]
+
+Cases of rabid wolves are low when compared to other species, as wolves do not serve as primary reservoirs of the disease, but can be infected by animals such as dogs, jackals and foxes. Incidents of rabies in wolves are very rare in North America, though numerous in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. Wolves apparently develop the "furious" phase of rabies to a very high degree. This, coupled with their size and strength, makes rabid wolves perhaps the most dangerous of rabid animals.[219] Bites from rabid wolves are 15 times more dangerous than those of rabid dogs.[222] Rabid wolves usually act alone, travelling large distances and often biting large numbers of people and domestic animals. Most rabid wolf attacks occur in the spring and autumn periods. Unlike with predatory attacks, the victims of rabid wolves are not eaten, and the attacks generally occur only on a single day. The victims are chosen at random, though most cases involve adult men. During the fifty years up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, and more than two hundred in southern Asia.[219]
+
+Theodore Roosevelt said wolves are difficult to hunt because of their elusiveness, sharp senses, high endurance, and ability to quickly incapacitate and kill a dog.[223] Historic methods included killing of spring-born litters in their dens, coursing with dogs (usually combinations of sighthounds, Bloodhounds and Fox Terriers), poisoning with strychnine, and trapping.[224][225]
+
+A popular method of wolf hunting in Russia involves trapping a pack within a small area by encircling it with fladry poles carrying a human scent. This method relies heavily on the wolf's fear of human scents, though it can lose its effectiveness when wolves become accustomed to the odor. Some hunters can lure wolves by imitating their calls. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, wolves are traditionally hunted with eagles and falcons, though this practice is declining, as experienced falconers are becoming few in number. Shooting wolves from aircraft is highly effective, due to increased visibility and direct lines of fire.[225] Several types of dog, including the Borzoi and Kyrgyz Tajgan, have been specifically bred for wolf hunting.[213]
+
+Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes kept as exotic pets. Although closely related to domestic dogs, wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, being generally less responsive to human commands and more likely to act aggressively. A person is more likely to be fatally mauled by a pet wolf or wolf-dog hybrid than by a dog.[226]
+

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+
+
+
+
+Architecture (Latin architectura, from the Greek ἀρχιτέκτων arkhitekton "architect", from ἀρχι- "chief" and τέκτων "creator") is both the process and the product of planning, designing, and constructing buildings or other structures.[3] Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols and as works of art. Historical civilizations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements.[4]
+
+Architecture can mean:
+
+The philosophy of architecture is a branch of philosophy of art, dealing with aesthetic value of architecture, its semantics and relations with development of culture. Many philosophers and theoreticians frome Plato to Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Robert Venturi and Ludwig Wittgenstein have concerned themselves with the nature of architecture and whether or not architecture is distinguished from building.[8]
+
+The earliest surviving written work on the subject of architecture is De architectura by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the early 1st century AD.[9] According to Vitruvius, a good building should satisfy the three principles of firmitas, utilitas, venustas,[10][11] commonly known by the original translation – firmness, commodity and delight. An equivalent in modern English would be:
+
+According to Vitruvius, the architect should strive to fulfill each of these three attributes as well as possible. Leon Battista Alberti, who elaborates on the ideas of Vitruvius in his treatise, De re aedificatoria, saw beauty primarily as a matter of proportion, although ornament also played a part. For Alberti, the rules of proportion were those that governed the idealised human figure, the Golden mean.
+
+The most important aspect of beauty was, therefore, an inherent part of an object, rather than something applied superficially, and was based on universal, recognisable truths. The notion of style in the arts was not developed until the 16th century, with the writing of Vasari.[12] By the 18th century, his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects had been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and English.
+
+In the early 19th century, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin wrote Contrasts (1836) that, as the titled suggested, contrasted the modern, industrial world, which he disparaged, with an idealized image of neo-medieval world. Gothic architecture, Pugin believed, was the only "true Christian form of architecture."
+
+The 19th-century English art critic, John Ruskin, in his Seven Lamps of Architecture, published 1849, was much narrower in his view of what constituted architecture. Architecture was the "art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by men ... that the sight of them" contributes "to his mental health, power, and pleasure".[13] For Ruskin, the aesthetic was of overriding significance. His work goes on to state that a building is not truly a work of architecture unless it is in some way "adorned". For Ruskin, a well-constructed, well-proportioned, functional building needed string courses or rustication, at the very least.[13]
+
+On the difference between the ideals of architecture and mere construction, the renowned 20th-century architect Le Corbusier wrote: "You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces: that is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture".[14]
+
+Le Corbusier's contemporary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said "Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins."[15]
+
+The notable 19th-century architect of skyscrapers, Louis Sullivan, promoted an overriding precept to architectural design: "Form follows function".
+
+While the notion that structural and aesthetic considerations should be entirely subject to functionality was met with both popularity and skepticism, it had the effect of introducing the concept of "function" in place of Vitruvius' "utility". "Function" came to be seen as encompassing all criteria of the use, perception and enjoyment of a building, not only practical but also aesthetic, psychological and cultural.
+
+Nunzia Rondanini stated, "Through its aesthetic dimension architecture goes beyond the functional aspects that it has in common with other human sciences. Through its own particular way of expressing values, architecture can stimulate and influence social life without presuming that, in and of itself, it will promote social development.'
+
+To restrict the meaning of (architectural) formalism to art for art's sake is not only reactionary; it can also be a purposeless quest for perfection or originality which degrades form into a mere instrumentality".[16]
+
+Among the philosophies that have influenced modern architects and their approach to building design are Rationalism, Empiricism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction and Phenomenology.
+
+In the late 20th century a new concept was added to those included in the compass of both structure and function, the consideration of sustainability, hence sustainable architecture. To satisfy the contemporary ethos a building should be constructed in a manner which is environmentally friendly in terms of the production of its materials, its impact upon the natural and built environment of its surrounding area and the demands that it makes upon non-sustainable power sources for heating, cooling, water and waste management, and lighting.
+
+Building first evolved out of the dynamics between needs (shelter, security, worship, etc.) and means (available building materials and attendant skills). As human cultures developed and knowledge began to be formalized through oral traditions and practices, building became a craft, and "architecture" is the name given to the most highly formalized and respected versions of that craft. It is widely assumed that architectural success was the product of a process of trial and error, with progressively less trial and more replication as the results of the process proved increasingly satisfactory. What is termed vernacular architecture continues to be produced in many parts of the world.
+
+Vernacular architecture in Norway: wood and elevated-level
+
+In Lesotho: rondavel stones.
+
+Yola hut -Tagoat Co. Wexford Ireland
+
+Early human settlements were mostly rural. Expending economies resulted in the creation of urban areas which in some cases grew and evolved very rapidly, such as that of Çatal Höyük in Anatolia and Mohenjo Daro of the Indus Valley Civilization in modern-day Pakistan.
+
+Neolithic settlements and "cities" include Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, Jericho in the Levant, Mehrgarh in Pakistan, Knap of Howar and Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, Scotland, and the  Cucuteni-Trypillian culture settlements in Romania, Moldova and Ukraine.
+
+In many ancient civilizations such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, architecture and urbanism reflected the constant engagement with the divine and the supernatural, and many ancient cultures resorted to monumentality in architecture to represent symbolically the political power of the ruler, the ruling elite, or the state itself.
+
+The architecture and urbanism of the Classical civilizations such as the Greek and the Roman evolved from civic ideals rather than religious or empirical ones and new building types emerged. Architectural "style" developed in the form of the Classical orders. Roman architecture was influenced by Greek architecture as they incorporated many Greek elements into their building practices.[17]
+
+Texts on architecture have been written since ancient time. These texts provided both general advice and specific formal prescriptions or canons. Some examples of canons are found in the writings of the 1st-century BCE Roman Architect Vitruvius. Some of the most important early examples of canonic architecture are religious.
+
+The Pyramids at Giza in Egypt
+
+Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan
+
+The Parthenon in Athens, Greece.
+
+Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain.
+
+The architecture of different parts of Asia developed along different lines from that of Europe; Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh architecture each having different characteristics. Indian and Chinese architecture have had great influence on the surrounding regions, while Japanese architecture has not.  Buddhist architecture, in particular, showed great regional diversity. Hindu temple architecture, which developed from around the 5th century CE, is in theory governed by concepts laid down in the Shastras, and is concerned with expressing the macrocosm and the microcosm. In many Asian countries, pantheistic religion led to architectural forms that were designed specifically to enhance the natural landscape.
+
+In many parts of Asia, even the grandest houses were relatively lightweight structures mainly using wood until recent times, and there are few survivals of great age.  Buddhism was associated with a move to stone and brick religious structures, probably beginning as rock-cut architecture, which has often survived very well.
+
+Early Asian writings on architecture include the Kao Gong Ji of China from the 7th–5th centuries BCE; the Shilpa Shastras of ancient India;  Manjusri Vasthu Vidya Sastra of Sri Lanka and Araniko of Nepal .
+
+Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, South Korea.
+
+Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion), Kyoto, Japan.
+
+Islamic architecture began in the 7th century CE, incorporating architectural forms from the ancient Middle East and Byzantium, but also developing features to suit the religious and social needs of the society. Examples can be found throughout the Middle East, Turkey, North Africa, the Indian Sub-continent  and in parts of Europe, such as Spain, Albania, and the Balkan States, as the result of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.
+[18][19]
+
+Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem.
+
+Taj Mahal in Agra, India.
+
+Alhambra, Granada, Spain.
+
+Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran
+
+Stari Most, 16th-c. Ottoman bridge & UNESCO site in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
+
+In Europe during the Medieval period, guilds were formed by craftsmen to organize their trades and written contracts have survived, particularly in relation to ecclesiastical buildings. The role of architect was usually one with that of master mason, or Magister lathomorum as they are sometimes described in contemporary documents.
+
+The major architectural undertakings were the buildings of abbeys and cathedrals. From about 900 CE onward, the movements of both clerics and tradesmen carried architectural knowledge across Europe, resulting in the pan-European styles Romanesque and Gothic.
+
+Also, a significant part of the Middle Ages architectural heritage is numerous fortifications across the continent. From Balkans to Spain, and from Malta to Estonia, these buildings represent an important part of European heritage.
+
+Notre Dame de Paris, France.
+
+The Tower of London, England.
+
+Doge's Palace, Venice, Italy.
+
+In Renaissance Europe, from about 1400 onwards, there was a revival of Classical learning accompanied by the development of Renaissance humanism, which placed greater emphasis on the role of the individual in society than had been the case during the Medieval period. Buildings were ascribed to specific architects – Brunelleschi, Alberti, Michelangelo, Palladio – and the cult of the individual had begun. There was still no dividing line between artist, architect and engineer, or any of the related vocations, and the appellation was often one of regional preference.
+
+A revival of the Classical style in architecture was accompanied by a burgeoning of science and engineering, which affected the proportions and structure of buildings. At this stage, it was still possible for an artist to design a bridge as the level of structural calculations involved was within the scope of the generalist.
+
+St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, Italy.
+
+Palazzo Farnese, Rome, Italy.
+
+Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy.
+
+With the emerging knowledge in scientific fields and the rise of new materials and technology, architecture and engineering began to separate, and the architect began to concentrate on aesthetics and the humanist aspects, often at the expense of technical aspects of building design. There was also the rise of the "gentleman architect" who usually dealt with wealthy clients and concentrated predominantly on visual qualities derived usually from historical prototypes, typified by the many country houses of Great Britain that were created in the Neo Gothic or Scottish baronial styles.
+Formal architectural training in the 19th century, for example at École des Beaux-Arts in France, gave much emphasis to the production of beautiful drawings and little to context and feasibility.
+
+Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution laid open the door for mass production and consumption. Aesthetics became a criterion for the middle class as ornamented products, once within the province of expensive craftsmanship, became cheaper under machine production.
+
+Vernacular architecture became increasingly ornamental. Housebuilders could use current architectural design in their work by combining features found in pattern books and architectural journals.
+
+Palais Garnier, Paris, France.
+
+Pont Alexandre III Paris, France.
+
+Congeso Nacional Palace, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
+
+Around the beginning of the 20th century, general dissatisfaction with the emphasis on revivalist architecture and elaborate decoration gave rise to many new lines of thought that served as precursors to Modern architecture. Notable among these is the Deutscher Werkbund, formed in 1907 to produce better quality machine-made objects. The rise of the profession of industrial design is usually placed here. Following this lead, the Bauhaus school, founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919, redefined the architectural bounds prior set throughout history, viewing the creation of a building as the ultimate synthesis—the apex—of art, craft, and technology.
+
+When modern architecture was first practised, it was an avant-garde movement with moral, philosophical, and aesthetic underpinnings. Immediately after World War I, pioneering modernist architects sought to develop a completely new style appropriate for a new post-war social and economic order, focused on meeting the needs of the middle and working classes. They rejected the architectural practice of the academic refinement of historical styles which served the rapidly declining aristocratic order. The approach of the Modernist architects was to reduce buildings to pure forms, removing historical references and ornament in favor of functional details. Buildings displayed their functional and structural elements, exposing steel beams and concrete surfaces instead of hiding them behind decorative forms. Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright developed organic architecture, in which the form was defined by its environment and purpose, with an aim to promote harmony between human habitation and the natural world with prime examples being Robie House and Fallingwater.
+
+Architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer worked to create beauty based on the inherent qualities of building materials and modern construction techniques, trading traditional historic forms for simplified geometric forms, celebrating the new means and methods made possible by the Industrial Revolution, including steel-frame construction, which gave birth to high-rise superstructures. Fazlur Rahman Khan's development of the tube structure was a technological break-through in building ever higher.  By mid-century, Modernism had morphed into the International Style, an aesthetic epitomized in many ways by the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center designed by Minoru Yamasaki.
+
+The Bauhaus school building in Dessau, Germany.
+
+Guggenheim Museum, New York City, United States.
+
+Cathedral of Brasília, Brazil.
+
+Willis Tower, Chicago, United States
+
+Many architects resisted modernism, finding it devoid of the decorative richness of historical styles. As the first generation of modernists began to die after World War II, the second generation of architects including Paul Rudolph, Marcel Breuer, and Eero Saarinen tried to expand the aesthetics of modernism with Brutalism, buildings with expressive sculptural façades made of unfinished concrete. But an even new younger postwar generation critiqued modernism and Brutalism for being too austere, standardized, monotone, and not taking into account the richness of human experience offered in historical buildings across time and in different places and cultures.
+
+One such reaction to the cold aesthetic of modernism and Brutalism is the school of metaphoric architecture, which includes such things as biomorphism and zoomorphic architecture, both using nature as the primary source of inspiration and design.  While it is considered by some to be merely an aspect of postmodernism, others consider it to be a school in its own right and a later development of expressionist architecture.[20]
+
+Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, architectural phenomenology emerged as an important movement in the early reaction against modernism, with architects like Charles Moore in the United States, Christian Norberg-Schulz in Norway, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Vittorio Gregotti, Michele Valori, Bruno Zevi in Italy, who collectively popularized an interest in a new contemporary architecture aimed at expanding human experience using historical buildings as models and precedents.[21] Postmodernism produced a style that combined contemporary building technology and cheap materials, with the aesthetics of older pre-modern and non-modern styles, from high classical architecture to popular or vernacular regional building styles. Robert Venturi famously defined postmodern architecture as a "decorated shed" (an ordinary building which is functionally designed inside and embellished on the outside), and upheld it against modernist and brutalist "ducks" (buildings with unnecessarily expressive tectonic forms).[22]
+
+The Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic.
+
+Sydney Opera House, Australia.
+
+The Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
+
+Since the 1980s, as the complexity of buildings began to increase (in terms of structural systems, services, energy and technologies), the field of architecture became multi-disciplinary with specializations for each project type, technological expertise or project delivery methods. Moreover, there has been an increased separation of the 'design' architect [Notes 1] from the 'project' architect who ensures that the project meets the required standards and deals with matters of liability.[Notes 2] The preparatory processes for the design of any large building have become increasingly complicated, and require preliminary studies of such matters as durability, sustainability, quality, money, and compliance with local laws. A large structure can no longer be the design of one person but must be the work of many.
+Modernism and Postmodernism have been criticised by some members of the architectural profession who feel that successful architecture is not a personal, philosophical, or aesthetic pursuit by individualists; rather it has to consider everyday needs of people and use technology to create liveable environments, with the design process being informed by studies of behavioral, environmental, and social sciences.
+
+Environmental sustainability has become a mainstream issue, with a profound effect on the architectural profession. Many developers, those who support the financing of buildings, have become educated to encourage the facilitation of environmentally sustainable design, rather than solutions based primarily on immediate cost. Major examples of this can be found in passive solar building design, greener roof designs, biodegradable materials, and more attention to a structure's energy usage. This major shift in architecture has also changed architecture schools to focus more on the environment. There has been an acceleration in the number of buildings that seek to meet green building sustainable design principles. Sustainable practices that were at the core of vernacular architecture increasingly provide inspiration for environmentally and socially sustainable contemporary techniques.[23] The U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system has been instrumental in this.[24][quantify]
+
+Concurrently, the recent movements of New Urbanism, metaphoric architecture and New Classical Architecture promote a sustainable approach towards construction that appreciates and develops smart growth, architectural tradition and classical design.[25][26] This in contrast to modernist and globally uniform architecture, as well as leaning against solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl.[27] Glass curtain walls, which were the hallmark of the ultra modern urban life in many countries surfaced even in developing countries like Nigeria where international styles had been represented since the mid 20th Century mostly because of the leanings of foreign-trained architects.[28]
+
+Beijing National Stadium, China.
+
+London City Hall, England.
+
+Auditorio de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
+
+Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor public areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioral, or aesthetic outcomes.[29] It involves the systematic investigation of existing social, ecological, and soil conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of interventions that will produce the desired outcome.  The scope of the profession includes landscape design; site planning; stormwater management; environmental restoration; parks and recreation planning; visual resource management; green infrastructure planning and provision; and private estate and residence landscape master planning and design; all at varying scales of design, planning and management. A practitioner in the profession of landscape architecture is called a landscape architect.
+
+Interior architecture is the design of a space which has been created by structural boundaries and the human interaction within these boundaries.  It can also be the initial design and plan for use, then later redesign to accommodate a changed purpose, or a significantly revised design for adaptive reuse of the building shell.[30] The latter is often part of sustainable architecture practices, conserving resources through "recycling" a structure by adaptive redesign.  Generally referred to as the spatial art of environmental design, form and practice, interior architecture is the process through which the interiors of buildings are designed, concerned with all aspects of the human uses of structural spaces.  Put simply, interior architecture is the design of an interior in architectural terms.
+
+Naval architecture, also known as naval engineering, is an engineering discipline dealing with the engineering design process, shipbuilding, maintenance, and operation of marine vessels and structures.[31][32] Naval architecture involves basic and applied research, design, development, design evaluation and calculations during all stages of the life of a marine vehicle. Preliminary design of the vessel, its detailed design, construction, trials, operation and maintenance, launching and dry-docking are the main activities involved. Ship design calculations are also required for ships being modified (by means of conversion, rebuilding, modernization, or repair). Naval architecture also involves the formulation of safety regulations and damage control rules and the approval and certification of ship designs to meet statutory and non-statutory requirements.
+
+Urban design is the process of designing and shaping the physical features of cities, towns, and villages. In contrast to architecture, which focuses on the design of individual buildings, urban design deals with the larger scale of groups of buildings, streets and public spaces, whole neighborhoods and districts, and entire cities, with the goal of making urban areas functional, attractive, and sustainable.[33]
+
+Urban design is an interdisciplinary field that utilizes elements of many built environment professions, including landscape architecture, urban planning, architecture, civil engineering and municipal engineering.[34] It is common for professionals in all these disciplines to practice urban design. In more recent times different sub-subfields of urban design have emerged such as strategic urban design, landscape urbanism, water-sensitive urban design, and sustainable urbanism.
+
+"Architecture" is used as a metaphor for many modern techniques or fields for structuring abstractions.  These include:

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+See Subspecies of Canis lupus
+
+The wolf (Canis lupus[a]), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise non-domestic/feral subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of Canidae, males averaging 40 kg (88 lb) and females 37 kg (82 lb). Wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height. The wolf is also distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. The wolf is nonetheless related closely enough to smaller Canis species, such as the coyote and the golden jackal, to produce fertile hybrids with them. The banded fur of a wolf is usually mottled white, brown, gray, and black, although subspecies in the arctic region may be nearly all white.
+
+Of all members of the genus Canis, the wolf is most specialized for cooperative game hunting as demonstrated by its physical adaptations to tackling large prey, its more social nature, and its highly advanced expressive behaviour. It travels in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring. Offspring may leave to form their own packs on the onset of sexual maturity and in response to competition for food within the pack. Wolves are also territorial and fights over territory are among the principal causes of wolf mortality. The wolf is mainly a carnivore and feeds on large wild hooved mammals as well as smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs. Pathogens and parasites, notably rabies, may infect wolves.
+
+The global wild wolf population was estimated to be 300,000 in 2003 and is considered to be of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Wolves have a long history of interactions with humans, having been despised and hunted in most pastoral communities because of their attacks on livestock, while conversely being respected in some agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Although the fear of wolves exists in many human societies, the majority of recorded attacks on people have been attributed to animals suffering from rabies. Wolf attacks on humans are rare because wolves are relatively few, live away from people, and have developed a fear of humans because of their experiences with hunters, ranchers, and shepherds.
+
+The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos).[4][5] The name "gray wolf" refers to the grayish colour of the species.[6]
+
+Since pre-Christian times, Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons took on wulf as a prefix or suffix in their names. Examples include Wulfhere ("Wolf Army", or "He whose army is the wolf"), Cynewulf ("Royal Wolf"), Cēnwulf ("Bold Wolf"), Wulfheard ("Wolf-hard"), Earnwulf ("Eagle Wolf"), Wulfstān ("Wolf Stone") Æðelwulf ("Noble Wolf"), Wolfhroc ("Wolf-Frock"), Wolfhetan ("Wolf Hide"), Isangrim ("Gray Mask"), Scrutolf ("Garb Wolf"), Wolfgang ("Wolf Gait") and Wolfdregil ("Wolf Runner").[7]
+
+Gray wolf
+
+Coyote
+
+African golden wolf
+
+Ethiopian wolf
+
+Golden jackal
+
+Dhole
+
+African wild dog
+
+Side-striped jackal
+
+Black-backed jackal
+
+In 1758, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus published in his Systema Naturae the binomial nomenclature.[3] Canis is the Latin word meaning "dog",[9] and under this genus he listed the doglike carnivores including domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals. He classified the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, and the wolf as Canis lupus.[3] Linnaeus considered the dog to be a separate species from the wolf because of its cauda recurvata—its upturning tail—which is not found in any other canid.[10]
+
+In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under C. lupus 36 wild subspecies, and proposed two additional subspecies: familiaris (Linnaeus, 1758) and dingo (Meyer, 1793). Wozencraft included hallstromi—the New Guinea singing dog—as a taxonomic synonym for the dingo. Wozencraft referred to a 1999 mitochondrial DNA study as one of the guides in forming his decision, and listed the 38 subspecies of C. lupus under the biological common name of "wolf", the nominate subspecies being the Eurasian wolf (C. l. lupus) based on the type specimen that Linnaeus studied in Sweden.[11] Studies using paleogenomic techniques reveal that the modern wolf and the dog are sister taxa, as modern wolves are not closely related to the population of wolves that was first domesticated.[12] In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/Species Survival Commission's Canid Specialist Group considered the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo to be feral dogs Canis familiaris, and therefore should not be assessed for the IUCN Red List.[13]
+
+The phylogenetic descent of the extant wolf C. lupus from C. etruscus through C. mosbachensis is widely accepted.[14] The earliest fossils of C. lupus were found in what was once eastern Beringia at Old Crow, Yukon, Canada, and at Cripple Creek Sump, Fairbanks, Alaska. The age is not agreed upon but could date to one million years ago. Considerable morphological diversity existed among wolves by the Late Pleistocene. They had more robust skulls and teeth than modern wolves, often with a shortened snout, a pronounced development of the temporalis muscle, and robust premolars. It is proposed that these features were specialized adaptations for the processing of carcass and bone associated with the hunting and scavenging of Pleistocene megafauna. Compared with modern wolves, some Pleistocene wolves showed an increase in tooth breakage similar to that seen in the extinct dire wolf. This suggests they either often processed carcasses, or that they competed with other carnivores and needed to consume their prey quickly. Compared with those found in the modern spotted hyena, the frequency and location of tooth fractures in these wolves indicates they were habitual bone crackers.[15] In June 2019, the severed yet preserved head of a Pleistocene wolf, dated to over 40,000 years ago, was found close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia, Russia, near the Arctic Circle. The head was about 16 in (41 cm) long, much bigger than a modern wolf's head.[16][17][18]
+
+Genomic studies suggest modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population[19][20][21] that existed 20,000 years ago.[19] Studies in 2017 and 2018 found that the Himalayan wolf is part of a lineage that is basal to other wolves and split from them 691,000–740,000 years ago.[22][23] Other wolves appear to have originated in Beringia in an expansion that was driven by the huge ecological changes during the close of the Late Pleistocene.[23] A study in 2016 indicates that a population bottleneck was followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original morphologically diverse wolf populations were out-competed and replaced by more modern wolves.[24]
+
+A 2016 genomic study suggests that Old World and New World wolves split around 12,500 years ago followed by the divergence of the lineage that led to dogs from other Old World wolves around 11,100–12,300 years ago.[21] An extinct Late Pleistocene wolf may have been the ancestor of the dog,[25][15] with the dog's similarity to the extant wolf being the result of genetic admixture between the two.[15] The dingo, Basenji, Tibetan Mastiff and Chinese indigenous breeds are basal members of the domestic dog clade. The divergence time for wolves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is estimated to be fairly recent at around 1,600 years ago. Among New World wolves, the Mexican wolf diverged around 5,400 years ago.[21]
+
+In the distant past, there has been gene flow between African golden wolves, golden jackals, and gray wolves. The African golden wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African golden wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula shows admixture with Middle Eastern wolves and dogs.[26] There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves. This indicates the golden jackal ancestry found in North American wolves may have occurred before the divergence of the Eurasian and North American wolves.[27]
+
+The common ancestor of the coyote and the wolf has admixed with a ghost population of an extinct unidentified canid. This canid is genetically close to the dhole and evolved after the divergence of the African hunting dog from the other canid species. The basal position of the coyote compared to the wolf is proposed to be due to the coyote retaining more of the mitochondrial genome of this unidentified canid.[26] Similarly, a museum specimen of a wolf from southern China collected in 1963 showed a genome that was 12–14% admixed from this unknown canid.[28] In North America, most coyotes and wolves show varying degrees of past genetic admixture. The red wolf of the southeastern United States is a hybrid animal with 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry. In addition, there was found to be 60%:40% wolf to coyote genetics in Eastern timber wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes region wolves.[27]
+
+In more recent times, some male Italian wolves originated from dog ancestry, which indicates female wolves will breed with male dogs in the wild.[29] In the Caucasus Mountains, 10% of dogs including livestock guardian dogs, are first generation hybrids.[30] Although mating between golden jackals and wolves has never been observed, evidence of jackal-wolf hybridization was discovered through mitochondrial DNA analysis of jackals living in the Caucasus Mountains[30] and in Bulgaria.[31]
+
+The wolf is the largest member of the Canidae family,[32] and is further distinguished from coyotes and jackals by a broader snout, shorter ears, a shorter torso and a longer tail.[33][32] It is slender and powerfully built with a large, deeply descending rib cage, a sloping back, and a heavily muscled neck.[34] The wolf's legs are moderately longer than those of other canids, which enables the animal to move swiftly, and to overcome the deep snow that covers most of its geographical range in winter.[35] The ears are relatively small and triangular.[34] The wolf's head is large and heavy, with a wide forehead, strong jaws and a long, blunt muzzle.[36] The skull is 230–280 mm (9–11 in) in length and 130–150 mm (5–6 in) in width.[37] The teeth are heavy and large, making them better suited to crushing bone than those of other canids. They are not as specialized as those found in hyenas though.[38][39] Its molars have a flat chewing surface, but not to the same extent as the coyote, whose diet contains more vegetable matter.[40] Females tend to have narrower muzzles and foreheads, thinner necks, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders than males.[41]
+
+Adult wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height.[36] The tail measures 29–50 cm (11–20 in) in length, the ears 90–110 mm (3 1⁄2–4 3⁄8 in) in height, and the hind feet are 220–250 mm (8 5⁄8–9 7⁄8 in).[42] The size and weight of the modern wolf increases proportionally with latitude in accord with Bergmann's rule.[43] The mean body mass of the wolf is 40 kg (88 lb), the smallest specimen recorded at 12 kg (26 lb) and the largest at 79.4 kg (175 lb).[44][36] On average, European wolves weigh 38.5 kg (85 lb), North American wolves 36 kg (79 lb), and Indian and Arabian wolves 25 kg (55 lb).[45] Females in any given wolf population typically weigh 2.3–4.5 kg (5–10 lb) less than males. Wolves weighing over 54 kg (119 lb) are uncommon, though exceptionally large individuals have been recorded in Alaska and Canada.[46] In middle Russia, exceptionally large males are given a maximum weight of 69–79 kg (152–174 lb).[42]
+
+The wolf has very dense and fluffy winter fur, with a short undercoat and long, coarse guard hairs.[36] Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in spring and grow back in autumn.[45] The longest hairs occur on the back, particularly on the front quarters and neck. Especially long hairs grow on the shoulders and almost form a crest on the upper part of the neck. The hairs on the cheeks are elongated and form tufts. The ears are covered in short hairs and project from the fur. Short, elastic and closely adjacent hairs are present on the limbs from the elbows down to the calcaneal tendons.[36] The winter fur is highly resistant to the cold. Wolves in northern climates can rest comfortably in open areas at −40 °C (−40 °F) by placing their muzzles between the rear legs and covering their faces with their tail. Wolf fur provides better insulation than dog fur and does not collect ice when warm breath is condensed against it.[45]
+
+In cold climates, the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin to conserve body heat. The warmth of the foot pads is regulated independently from the rest of the body and is maintained at just above tissue-freezing point where the pads come in contact with ice and snow.[47] In warm climates, the fur is coarser and scarcer than in northern wolves.[36] Female wolves tend to have smoother furred limbs than males and generally develop the smoothest overall coats as they age. Older wolves generally have more white hairs on the tip of the tail, along the nose, and on the forehead. Winter fur is retained longest by lactating females, although with some hair loss around their teats.[41] Hair length on the middle of the back is 60–70 mm (2 3⁄8–2 3⁄4 in), and the guard hairs on the shoulders generally do not exceed 90 mm (3 1⁄2 in), but can reach 110–130 mm (4 3⁄8–5 1⁄8 in).[36]
+
+A wolf's coat colour is determined by its guard hairs. Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black.[48] The coat of the Eurasian wolf is a mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colours with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. The top of the head, forehead, under and between the eyes, and between the eyes and ears is gray with a reddish film. The neck is ochreous. Long, black tips on the hairs along the back form a broad stripe, with black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest and rear of the body. The sides of the body, tail, and outer limbs are a pale dirty ochreous colour, while the inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white. Apart from those wolves which are pure white or black, these tones vary little across geographical areas, although the patterns of these colours vary between individuals.[49]
+
+In North America, the coat colours of wolves follow Gloger's rule, wolves in the Canadian arctic being white and those in southern Canada, the U.S., and Mexico being predominantly gray. In some areas of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the coat colour is predominantly black, some being blue-gray and some with silver and black.[48] Differences in coat colour between sexes is absent in Eurasia;[50] females tend to have redder tones in North America.[51] Black-coloured wolves in North America acquired their colour from wolf-dog admixture after the first arrival of dogs that accompanied humans across the Bering Strait 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.[52] Research into the inheritance of white colour from dogs into wolves has yet to be undertaken.[53]
+
+Wolves occurred originally across Eurasia and North America. Deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of what it once was. The wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) in much of Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and in Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains.[2] Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.[40]
+
+Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be divided into large size 240–650 kg (530–1,430 lb) and medium size 23–130 kg (51–287 lb), and have a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members.[54][55] The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey,[40] with a pack of 15 able to bring down an adult moose.[56] The variation in diet between wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey.[57]
+
+In North America, the wolf's diet is dominated by wild large hoofed mammals (ungulates) and medium-sized mammals. In Asia and Europe, their diet is dominated by wild medium-sized hoofed mammals and domestic species. The wolf depends on wild species, and if these are not readily available, as in Asia, the wolf is more reliant on domestic species.[57] Across Eurasia, wolves prey mostly on moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar.[58] In North America, important range-wide prey are elk, moose, caribou, white-tailed deer and mule deer.[59] Wolves can digest their meal in a few hours and can feed several times in one day, making quick use of large quantities of meat.[60] A well-fed wolf stores fat under the skin, around the heart, intestines, kidneys, and bone marrow, particularly during the autumn and winter.[61]
+
+Nonetheless, wolves are not fussy eaters. Smaller-sized animals that may supplement their diet include rodents, hares, insectivores and smaller carnivores. They frequently eat waterfowl and their eggs. When such foods are insufficient, they prey on lizards, snakes, frogs, and large insects when available.[62] Wolves in northern Minnesota prey on northern pike in freshwater streams.[63] The diet of coastal wolves in Alaska includes 20% salmon,[64] while those of coastal wolves in British Columbia includes 25% marine sources, and those on the nearby islands 75%.[65]
+
+In Europe, wolves eat apples, pears, figs, melons, berries and cherries. In North America, wolves eat blueberries and raspberries. Wolves also eat grass, which may provide some vitamins.[66] They are known to eat the berries of mountain-ash, lily of the valley, bilberries, cowberries, European black nightshade, grain crops, and the shoots of reeds.[62]
+
+In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion.[62] In Eurasian areas with dense human activity, many wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage.[58] Prey in North America continue to occupy suitable habitats with low human density, the wolves eating livestock and garbage only in dire circumstances.[67] Cannibalism is not uncommon in wolves during harsh winters, when packs often attack weak or injured wolves and may eat the bodies of dead pack members.[62][68][69]
+
+Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur. In North America, incidents of wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them.[70] According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921, the infamous Custer Wolf relied on coyotes to accompany him and warn him of danger. Though they fed from his kills, he never allowed them to approach him.[71] Interactions have been observed in Eurasia between wolves and golden jackals, the latter's numbers being comparatively small in areas with high wolf densities.[36][70][72] Wolves also kill red, Arctic and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them.[36][73]
+
+Brown bears typically dominate wolf packs in disputes over carcasses, while wolf packs mostly prevail against bears when defending their den sites. Both species kill each other's young. Wolves eat the brown bears they kill, while brown bears seem to eat only young wolves.[74] Wolf interactions with American black bears are much rarer because of differences in habitat preferences. Wolves have been recorded on numerous occasions actively seeking out American black bears in their dens and killing them without eating them. Unlike brown bears, American black bears frequently lose against wolves in disputes over kills.[75] Wolves also dominate and sometimes kill wolverines, and will chase off those that attempt to scavenge from their kills. Wolverines escape from wolves in caves or up trees.[76]
+
+Wolves may interact and compete with felids, such as the Eurasian lynx, which may feed on smaller prey where wolves are present[77] and may be suppressed by large wolf populations.[78] Wolves encounter cougars along portions of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges. Wolves and cougars typically avoid encountering each other by hunting at different elevations for different prey (niche partitioning). In winter, when snow accumulation forces their prey into valleys, interactions between the two species become more likely. Wolves in packs usually dominate cougars and can steal their kills or even kill them,[79] while one-to-one encounters tend to be dominated by the cat. There are several documented cases of cougars killing wolves.[80] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities and disrupting the feline's behaviour.[81] Wolf and Siberian tiger interactions are well-documented in the Russian Far East, where tigers significantly depress wolf numbers, sometimes to the point of localized extinction. Only human depletion of tiger numbers appears to protect wolves from competitive exclusion from them. With perhaps only four proven records of tigers killing wolves, these cases are rare; attacks appear to be competitive rather than predatory in nature.[82][77]
+
+In Israel, Central Asia and India wolves may encounter striped hyenas, usually in disputes over carcasses. Striped hyenas feed extensively on wolf-killed carcasses in areas where the two species interact. One-to-one, hyenas dominate wolves, and may prey on them,[83] but wolf packs can drive off single or outnumbered hyenas.[84][85] There is at least one case in Israel of a hyena associating and cooperating with a wolf pack. It is proposed that the hyena could benefit from the wolves' superior ability to hunt large, agile prey. The wolves could benefit from the hyena's superior sense of smell, to locate and dig out tortoises, to crack open large bones, and to tear open discarded food containers like tin cans.[86]
+
+
+
+The wolf is a social animal.[36] Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one.[87] The wolf's basic social unit is the nuclear family consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring.[36] The average pack size in North America is eight wolves and in Europe 5.5 wolves.[43] The average pack across Eurasia consists of a family of eight wolves (two adults, juveniles, and yearlings),[36] or sometimes two or three such families,[40] with examples of exceptionally large packs consisting of up to 42 wolves being known.[88] Cortisol levels in wolves rise significantly when a pack member dies, indicating the presence of stress.[89] During times of prey abundance caused by calving or migration, different wolf packs may join together temporarily.[36]
+
+Offspring typically stay in the pack for 10–54 months before dispersing.[90] Triggers for dispersal include the onset of sexual maturity and competition within the pack for food.[91] The distance travelled by dispersing wolves varies widely; some stay in the vicinity of the parental group, while other individuals may travel great distances of upwards of 206 km (128 mi), 390 km (240 mi), and 670 km (420 mi) from their natal (birth) packs.[92] A new pack is usually founded by an unrelated dispersing male and female, travelling together in search of an area devoid of other hostile packs.[93] Wolf packs rarely adopt other wolves into their fold and typically kill them. In the rare cases where other wolves are adopted, the adoptee is almost invariably an immature animal of one to three years old, and unlikely to compete for breeding rights with the mated pair. This usually occurs between the months of February and May. Adoptee males may mate with an available pack female and then form their own pack. In some cases, a lone wolf is adopted into a pack to replace a deceased breeder.[88]
+
+Wolves are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive assuring a steady supply of prey. Territory size depends largely on the amount of prey available and the age of the pack's pups. They tend to increase in size in areas with low prey populations,[94] or when the pups reach the age of six months when they have the same nutritional needs as adults.[95] Wolf packs travel constantly in search of prey, covering roughly 9% of their territory per day, on average 25 km/d (16 mi/d). The core of their territory is on average 35 km2 (14 sq mi) where they spend 50% of their time.[94] Prey density tends to be much higher on the territory's periphery. Except out of desperation, wolves tend to avoid hunting on the fringes of their range to avoid fatal confrontations with neighbouring packs.[96] The smallest territory on record was held by a pack of six wolves in northeastern Minnesota, which occupied an estimated 33 km2 (13 sq mi), while the largest was held by an Alaskan pack of ten wolves encompassing 6,272 km2 (2,422 sq mi).[95] Wolf packs are typically settled, and usually leave their accustomed ranges only during severe food shortages.[36]
+
+Wolves advertise their territories to other packs through howling and scent marking. Scent marking involves urine, feces, and anal gland scents. This is more effective at advertising territory than howling and is often used in combination with scratch marks. Wolves increase their rate of scent marking when they encounter the marks of wolves from other packs. Lone wolves will rarely mark, but newly bonded pairs will scent mark the most.[40] These marks are generally left every 240 m (260 yd) throughout the territory on regular travelways and junctions. Such markers can last for two to three weeks,[95] and are typically placed near rocks, boulders, trees, or the skeletons of large animals.[36] Territorial fights are among the principal causes of wolf mortality, one study concluding that 14–65% of wolf deaths in Minnesota and the Denali National Park and Preserve were due to other wolves.[97]
+
+Wolves communicate to anticipate what their pack mates or other wolves might do next.[98] This includes the use of vocalization, body posture, scent, touch, and taste.[99] The phases of the moon have no effect on wolf vocalization, and despite popular belief, wolves do not howl at the moon.[100] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[101] Wolf howls can under certain conditions be heard over areas of up to 130 km2 (50 sq mi).[40] Other vocalizations include growls, barks and whines. Wolves do not bark as loudly or continuously as dogs do in confrontations, rather barking a few times and then retreating from a perceived danger.[102] Aggressive or self-assertive wolves are characterized by their slow and deliberate movements, high body posture and raised hackles, while submissive ones carry their bodies low, flatten their fur, and lower their ears and tail.[103] Raised leg urination is considered to be one of the most important forms of scent communication in the wolf, making up 60–80% of all scent marks observed.[104]
+
+Wolves are monogamous, mated pairs usually remaining together for life. Should one of the pair die, another mate is found quickly.[105] With wolves in the wild, inbreeding does not occur where outbreeding is possible.[106] Wolves become mature at the age of two years and sexually mature from the age of three years.[105] The age of first breeding in wolves depends largely on environmental factors: when food is plentiful, or when wolf populations are heavily managed, wolves can rear pups at younger ages to better exploit abundant resources. Females are capable of producing pups every year, one litter annually being the average.[107] Oestrus and rut begin in the second half of winter and lasts for two weeks.[105]
+
+Dens are usually constructed for pups during the summer period. When building dens, females make use of natural shelters like fissures in rocks, cliffs overhanging riverbanks and holes thickly covered by vegetation. Sometimes, the den is the appropriated burrow of smaller animals such as foxes, badgers or marmots. An appropriated den is often widened and partly remade. On rare occasions, female wolves dig burrows themselves, which are usually small and short with one to three openings. The den is usually constructed not more than 500 m (550 yd) away from a water source. It typically faces southwards where it can be better warmed by sunlight exposure, and the snow can thaw more quickly. Resting places, play areas for the pups, and food remains are commonly found around wolf dens. The odor of urine and rotting food emanating from the denning area often attracts scavenging birds like magpies and ravens. Though they mostly avoid areas within human sight, wolves have been known to nest near domiciles, paved roads and railways.[108] During pregnancy, female wolves remain in a den located away from the peripheral zone of their territories, where violent encounters with other packs are less likely to occur.[109]
+
+The gestation period lasts 62–75 days with pups usually being born in the spring months or early summer in very cold places such as on the tundra. Young females give birth to four to five young, and older females from six to eight young and up to 14. Their mortality rate is 60–80%.[110] Newborn wolf pups look similar to German Shepherd Dog pups.[111] They are born blind and deaf and are covered in short soft grayish-brown fur. They weigh 300–500 g (10 1⁄2–17 3⁄4 oz) at birth and begin to see after nine to 12 days. The milk canines erupt after one month. Pups first leave the den after three weeks. At one-and-a-half months of age, they are agile enough to flee from danger. Mother wolves do not leave the den for the first few weeks, relying on the fathers to provide food for them and their young. Pups begin to eat solid food at the age of three to four weeks. They have a fast growth rate during their first four months of life: during this period, a pup's weight can increase nearly 30 times.[110][112] Wolf pups begin play-fighting at the age of three weeks, though unlike young coyotes and foxes, their bites are gentle and controlled. Actual fights to establish hierarchy usually occur at five to eight weeks of age. This is in contrast to young coyotes and foxes, which may begin fighting even before the onset of play behaviour.[113] By autumn, the pups are mature enough to accompany the adults on hunts for large prey.[109]
+
+Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs; single wolves have occasionally been observed to kill large prey such as moose, bison and muskoxen unaided.[114][115] This contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.[115] The size of a wolf hunting pack is related to the number of pups that survived the previous winter, adult survival, and the rate of dispersing wolves leaving the pack. The optimal pack size for hunting elk is four wolves, and for bison a large pack size is more successful.[116]
+
+As well as their physical adaptations for hunting hoofed mammals, wolves possess certain behavioural, cognitive, and psychological adaptations to assist with their hunting lifestyle. Wolves are excellent learners that match or outperform domestic dogs. They can use gaze to focus attention on where other wolves are looking. This is important because wolves do not use vocalization when hunting. In laboratory tests, they appear to exhibit insight, foresight, understanding, and the ability to plan. [117] To survive, wolves must be able to solve two problems—finding a prey animal, then confronting it.[117]
+
+Wolves move around their territory when hunting, using the same trails for extended periods. After snowfalls, wolves find their old trails and continue using them. These follow the banks of rivers, the shorelines of lakes, through ravines overgrown with shrubs, through plantations, or roads and human paths.[118] Wolves are nocturnal predators. During the winter, a pack will commence hunting in the twilight of early evening and will hunt all night, traveling tens of kilometres. Sometimes hunting large prey occurs during the day. During the summer, wolves generally tend to hunt individually, ambushing their prey and rarely giving pursuit.[119]
+
+The wolf usually travels at a loping pace, placing one of its paws directly in front of the other. This gait can be maintained for hours at a rate of 8–9 km/h (5.0–5.6 mph).[120] On bare paths, a wolf can quickly achieve speeds of 50–60 km/h (31–37 mph). The wolf has a running gait of 55–70 km/h (34–43 mph), can leap 5 m (16 ft) horizontally in a single bound, and can maintain rapid pursuit for at least 20 minutes.[92] A wolf's foot is large and flexible, which allows it to tread on a wide variety of terrain. A wolf's legs are long compared to their body size allowing them to travel up to 76 km (47 mi) in 12 hours. This adaptation allows wolves to locate prey within hours, but it can take days to find prey that can be killed without great risk. Moose and deer live singly in the summer. Caribou live in herds of thousands which presents dangers for wolves. Elk live in small herds and these are a safer target.[117]
+
+A wolf carries its head at the same level as its back, lifting it only when alert.[36] In one study, wolves detected moose using scent ten times, vision six times, and once by following tracks in the snow. Their vision is as good as a human's, and they can smell prey at least 2.4 km (1 1⁄2 mi) away. One wolf travelled to a herd 103 km (64 mi) away. A human can detect the smell of a forest fire over the same distance from downwind. The wolf's sense of smell is at least comparable to that of the domestic dog, which is at least 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's.[117]
+
+When hunting large gregarious prey, wolves will try to isolate an individual from its group.[121] If successful, a wolf pack can bring down game that will feed it for days, but one error in judgement can lead to serious injury or death. Most large prey have developed defensive adaptations and behaviours. Wolves have been killed while attempting to bring down bison, elk, moose, muskoxen, and even by one of their smallest hoofed prey, the white-tailed deer.[117] Although people often believe that wolves can easily overcome any of their prey, their success rate in hunting hoofed prey is usually low.[122]
+
+Generally, bison, elk, and moose will stand their ground, then the wolves must struggle with them to bring them down. Often caribou and deer will flee, but sometimes deer also make a stand. With smaller prey like beaver, geese, and hares, there is no risk to the wolf.[117] If the targeted animal stands its ground, wolves either ignore it, or try to intimidate it into running.[114] Wolves, or even a wolf on its own, will attempt to frighten a herd into panicking and dispersing.[123]
+
+When wolves encounter prey that flees, they give chase. The speed of sprinting prey is closely related to the speed of their main predators. Wolves can run at 56–64 km/h (35–40 mph) across several kilometres and will often pursue prey for at least 1 km (1⁄2 mi). One wolf chased a caribou for 8 km (5 mi), another chased and tracked a deer for 20 km (12 mi), and one 11-year-old wolf chased and caught an Arctic hare after seven minutes. Most wolf prey will try to run to water, where they will either escape or be better placed to attempt to ward off the wolves.[117]
+
+The wolf must give chase and gain on its fleeing prey, slow it down by biting through thick hair and hide, and then disable it enough to begin feeding.[117] After chasing and then confronting a large prey animal, the wolf makes use of its 6 cm (2 1⁄2 in) fangs and its powerful masseter muscles to deliver a bite force of 28 kg/cm2 (400 lbf/in2), which is capable of breaking open the skulls of many of its prey animals. The wolf leaps at its quarry and tears at it. One wolf was observed being dragged for dozens of metres attached to the hind leg of a moose; another was seen being dragged over a fallen log while attached to a bull elk's nose.[116]
+
+The most common point of wolf attacks on moose is the upper hind legs.[124][125][126] Hind leg wounds are inflicted from the rear, midway up the hock with the canine teeth. These leave gaping skin perforations over 4 cm (1 1⁄2 in) in diameter. Although blood loss, muscle damage, and tendon exposure may occur, there is no evidence of hamstringing. Attacks also occur on the fleshy nose, the back and sides of the neck, the ears, and the perineum.[126] Wolves may wound large prey and then lie around resting for hours before killing it when it is weaker due to blood loss, thereby lessening the risk of injury to themselves.[127]
+
+With medium-sized prey, such as roe deer or sheep, wolves kill by biting the throat, severing nerve tracks and the carotid artery, thus causing the animal to die within a few seconds to a minute. With small, mouselike prey, wolves leap in a high arc and immobilize it with their forepaws.[128] When prey is vulnerable and abundant, wolves may occasionally surplus kill. Such instances are common with domestic animals, but rare with wild prey. In the wild, surplus killing occurs primarily during late winter or spring, when snow is unusually deep (thus impeding the movements of prey)[129] or during the denning period, when den bound wolves require a ready supply of meat.[130] Medium-sized prey are especially vulnerable to surplus killing, as the swift throat-biting method allows wolves to kill one animal quickly and move on to another.[128]
+
+Once prey is brought down, wolves begin to feed excitedly, ripping and tugging at the carcass in all directions, and bolting down large chunks of it.[131] The breeding pair typically monopolizes food to continue producing pups. When food is scarce, this is done at the expense of other family members, especially non-pups.[132] The breeding pair typically eats first. They usually work the hardest at killing prey, and may rest after a long hunt and allow the rest of the family to eat undisturbed. Once the breeding pair has finished eating, the rest of the family tears off pieces of the carcass and transports them to secluded areas where they can eat in peace. Wolves typically commence feeding by consuming the larger internal organs, like the heart, liver, lungs, and stomach lining. The kidneys and spleen are eaten once they are exposed, followed by the muscles.[133] A wolf can eat 15–19% of its body weight in a single feeding.[61]
+
+Viral diseases carried by wolves include: rabies, canine distemper, canine parvovirus, infectious canine hepatitis, papillomatosis, and canine coronavirus.[134] Wolves are a major host for rabies in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and India.[135] In wolves, the incubation period is eight to 21 days, and results in the host becoming agitated, deserting its pack, and travelling up to 80 km (50 mi) a day, thus increasing the risk of infecting other wolves. Infected wolves do not show any fear of humans, most documented wolf attacks on people being attributed to rabid animals. Although canine distemper is lethal in dogs, it has not been recorded to kill wolves, except in Canada and Alaska. The canine parvovirus, which causes death by dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and endotoxic shock or sepsis, is largely survivable in wolves, but can be lethal to pups. Wolves may catch infectious canine hepatitis from dogs, though there are no records of wolves dying from it. Papillomatosis has been recorded only once in wolves, and likely does not cause serious illness or death, though it may alter feeding behaviours. The canine coronavirus has been recorded in Alaskan wolves, infections being most prevalent in winter months.[134]
+
+Bacterial diseases carried by wolves include: brucellosis, Lyme disease, leptospirosis, tularemia, bovine tuberculosis,[136] listeriosis and anthrax.[135] Wolves can catch Brucella suis from wild and domestic reindeer. While adult wolves tend not to show any clinical signs, it can severely weaken the pups of infected females. Although lyme disease can debilitate individual wolves, it does not appear to significantly affect wolf populations. Leptospirosis can be contracted through contact with infected prey or urine, and can cause fever, anorexia, vomiting, anemia, hematuria, icterus, and death. Wolves living near farms are more vulnerable to the disease than those living in the wilderness, probably because of prolonged contact with infected domestic animal waste. Wolves may catch tularemia from lagomorph prey, though its effect on wolves is unknown. Although bovine tuberculosis is not considered a major threat to wolves, it has been recorded to have killed two wolf pups in Canada.[136]
+
+Wolves carry ectoparasites and endoparasites; those in the former Soviet Union have been recorded to carry at least 50 species.[135] Most of these parasites infect wolves without adverse effects, though the effects may become more serious in sick or malnourished specimens.[137] Parasitic infection in wolves is of particular concern to people. Wolves can spread them to dogs, which in turn can carry the parasites to humans. In areas where wolves inhabit pastoral areas, the parasites can be spread to livestock.[135]
+
+Wolves are often infested with a variety of arthropod exoparasites, including fleas, ticks, lice, and mites. The most harmful to wolves, particularly pups, is the mange mite (Sarcoptes scabiei),[137] though they rarely develop full-blown mange, unlike foxes.[36] Lice, such as Trichodectes canis, may cause sickness in wolves, but rarely death. Ticks of the genus Ixodes can infect wolves with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.[137] The tick Dermacentor pictus also infests wolves. Other ectoparasites include chewing lice, sucking lice and the fleas Pulex irritans and Ctenocephalides canis.[36]
+
+Endoparasites known to infect wolves include: protozoans and helminths (flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and thorny-headed worms). Of 30,000 protozoan species, only a few have been recorded to infect wolves: Isospora, Toxoplasma, Sarcocystis, Babesia, and Giardia.[137] Some wolves carry Neospora caninum, which can be spread to cattle and is correlated with bovine miscarriages.[138] Among flukes, the most common in North American wolves is Alaria, which infects small rodents and amphibians that are eaten by wolves. Upon reaching maturity, Alaria migrates to the wolf's intestine, but does little harm. Metorchis conjunctus, which enters wolves through eating fish, infects the wolf's liver or gall bladder, causing liver disease, inflammation of the pancreas, and emaciation. Most other fluke species reside in the wolf's intestine, though Paragonimus westermani lives in the lungs. Tapeworms are commonly found in wolves, as their primary hosts are ungulates, small mammals, and fish, which wolves feed upon. Tapeworms generally cause little harm in wolves, though this depends on the number and size of the parasites, and the sensitivity of the host. Symptoms often include constipation, toxic and allergic reactions, irritation of the intestinal mucosa, and malnutrition. Infections by the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus in ungulate populations tend to increase in areas with high wolf densities, as wolves can shed Echinoccocus eggs in their feces onto grazing areas.[137]
+
+Wolves can carry over 30 roundworm species, though most roundworm infections appear benign, depending on the number of worms and the age of the host. Ancylostoma caninum attaches itself on the intestinal wall to feed on the host's blood, and can cause hyperchromic anemia, emaciation, diarrhea, and possibly death. Toxocara canis, a hookworm known to infect wolf pups in the uterus, can cause intestinal irritation, bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea. Wolves may catch Dioctophyma renale from minks, which infects the kidneys, and can grow to lengths of 100 cm (40 in). D. renale causes the complete destruction of the kidney's functional tissue and can be fatal if both kidneys are infected. Wolves can tolerate low levels of Dirofilaria immitis for many years without showing any ill effects, though high levels can kill wolves through cardiac enlargement and congestive hepatopathy. Wolves probably become infected with Trichinella spiralis by eating infected ungulates. Although T. spiralis is not known to produce clinical signs in wolves, it can cause emaciation, salivation, and crippling muscle pains in dogs. Thorny-headed worms rarely infect wolves, though three species have been identified in Russian wolves: Nicolla skrjabini, Macrocantorhynchus catulinus, and Moniliformis moniliformis.[137]
+
+The global wild wolf population in 2003 was estimated at 300,000.[139] Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s. This has fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range as a result of legal protection, changes in land use, and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the wolf. Despite these threats, the IUCN classifies the wolf as Least Concern on its Red List due to its relatively widespread range and stable population. The species is listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in its Appendix II, indicating that it is not threatened with extinction. However, those wolf populations living in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan are listed in its Appendix I, indicating that these may become extinct without restrictions on their trade.[2]
+
+In Canada, 50,000–60,000 wolves live in 80% of their historical range, making Canada an important stronghold for the species.[40] Under Canadian law, First Nations people can hunt wolves without restrictions, but others must acquire licenses for the hunting and trapping seasons. As many as 4,000 wolves may be harvested in Canada each year.[140] The wolf is a protected species in national parks under the Canada National Parks Act.[141] In Alaska, 7,000–11,000 wolves are found on 85% of the state's 1,517,733 km2 (586,000 sq mi). Wolves may be hunted or trapped with a license; around 1,200 wolves are harvested annually.[142]
+
+In the contiguous United States, wolf declines were caused by the expansion of agriculture, the decimation of the wolf's main prey species like the American bison, and extermination campaigns.[40] Wolves were given protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and have since returned to parts of their former range thanks to both natural recolonizations and reintroductions.[143] Wolf populations in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan number over 4,000 as of 2018.[144] Wolves also occupy much of the northern Rocky Mountains region, with at least 1,704 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as of 2015. They have also established populations in Washington and Oregon.[145] In Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated from 1977 to 1980 in capturing all Mexican wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction and established captive breeding programs for reintroduction.[146] As of 2018, there were 230 Mexican wolves living in Mexico, 64 in Arizona, 67 in New Mexico, and 240 in captive breeding programs in both countries.[147]
+
+Europe, excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, has 17,000 wolves in more than 28 countries.[148] In the European Union, the wolf is strictly protected under the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Appendix II) and the 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Annex II and IV). There is extensive legal protection in many European countries, although there are national exceptions and enforcement is variable and often non-existent.[2]
+
+Wolves have been persecuted in Europe for centuries, having been exterminated in Great Britain by 1684, in Ireland by 1770, in Central Europe by 1899, in France by the 1930s, and in much of Scandinavia by the early 1970s. They continued to survive in parts of Finland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.[149] Since 1980, European wolves have rebounded and expanded into parts of their former range. The decline of the traditional pastoral and rural economies seems to have ended the need to exterminate the wolf in parts of Europe.[140] As of 2016, estimates of wolf numbers include: 4,000 in the Balkans, 3,460–3,849 in the Carpathian Mountains, 1,700–2,240 in the Baltic states, 1,100–2,400 in the Italian peninsula, and around 2,500 in the northwest Iberian peninsula as of 2007.[148]
+
+In the former Soviet Union, wolf populations have retained much of their historical range despite Soviet-era large scale extermination campaigns. Their numbers range from 1,500 in Georgia, to 20,000 in Kazakhstan and up to 45,000 in Russia.[150] In Russia, the wolf is regarded as a pest because of its attacks on livestock, and wolf management means controlling their numbers by destroying them throughout the year. Russian history over the past century shows that reduced hunting leads to an abundance of wolves.[151] The Russian government has continued to pay bounties for wolves and annual harvests of 20-30% do not appear to significantly affect their numbers.[152]
+
+During the 19th century, wolves were widespread in many parts of the Holy Land east and west of the Jordan River, but decreased considerably in number between 1964 and 1980, largely due to persecution by farmers.[153] In the Middle East, only Israel and Oman give wolves explicit legal protection.[154] Israel has protected its wolves since 1954 and has maintained a moderately sized population of 150 through effective enforcement of conservation policies. These wolves have moved into neighboring countries. Approximately 300–600 wolves inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.[155] The wolf also appears to be widespread in Iran.[156] Turkey has an estimated population of about 7,000 wolves.[157] Outside of Turkey, wolf populations in the Middle East may total 1,000–2,000.[154]
+
+In southern Asia, the northern regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important strongholds for wolves. The wolf has been protected in India since 1972.[158] Hindus traditionally considered the hunting of wolves, even dangerous ones, as taboo, for fear of causing a bad harvest. The Santals considered them fair game, as they did every other forest-dwelling animal.[159] During British rule in India, wolves were not considered game species, and were killed primarily in response to them attacking game herds, livestock, and people.[160] The Indian wolf is distributed across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.[161] As of 2019, it is estimated that there are around 2,000–3,000 Indian wolves in the country.[162] In East Asia, Mongolia's population numbers 10,000–20,000. In China, Heilongjiang has roughly 650 wolves, Xinjiang has 10,000 and Tibet has 2,000.[163] 2017 evidence suggests that wolves range across all of mainland China.[164] Wolves have been historically persecuted in China[165] but have been legally protected since 1998.[166] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed in 1905.[167]
+
+The wolf is a common motif in the mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout its historical range. The Ancient Greeks associated wolves with Apollo, the god of light and order.[168] The Ancient Romans connected the wolf with their god of war and agriculture Mars,[169] and believed their city's founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf.[170] Norse mythology includes the feared giant wolf Fenrir, eldest child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda,[171] and Geri and Freki, Odin's faithful pets.[172] The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, who viewed it as the lord of all animals and as the only effective defender against evil.[173]
+
+In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. When humans killed it, they were punished with death, destruction and the loss of immortality.[174] For the Pawnee, Sirius is the "wolf star" and its disappearance and reappearance signified the wolf moving to and from the spirit world. Both the Pawnee and Blackfoot call the Milky Way the "wolf trail".[175] The wolf is also an important totem animal for the Tlingit and Tsimshian.[176] In Chinese astronomy, the wolf represents Sirius as the "blue beast" and the star itself is called the "heavenly wolf".[177] In China, the wolf was traditionally associated with greed and cruelty and wolf epithets were used to describe negative behaviours such as cruelty ("wolf's heart"), mistrust ("wolf's look") and lechery ("wolf-sex").[178]
+
+Tengrism places high importance on the wolf, as it is thought that, when howling, it is praying to Tengri, thus making it the only creature other than man to worship a deity.[179] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the wolf is ridden by gods of protection. In Vedic Hinduism, the wolf is a symbol of the night and the daytime quail must escape from its jaws.[178] In Hindu mythology, Krishna, to convince the people of Vraja to migrate to Vṛndāvana, creates hundreds of wolves from his hairs, which frighten the inhabitants of Vraja into making the journey.[180] In Tantric Buddhism, wolves are depicted as inhabitants of graveyards and destroyers of corpses.[178] In Zoroastrianism, the wolf has been demonized as the creation of Ahriman.[181]
+
+The concept of people turning into wolves has been present in many cultures. One Greek myth tells of Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his evil deeds.[182] The legend of the werewolf has been widespread in European folklore and involves people willingly turning into wolves to attack and kill others.[183] The Navajo have traditionally believed that witches would turn into wolves by donning wolf skins and would kill people and raid graveyards.[184] The Dena'ina believed wolves were once men and viewed them as brothers.[168] Similarly, in Turkic mythology wolves were believed to be the ancestors of their people.[185]
+
+Aesop featured wolves in several of his fables, playing on the concerns of Ancient Greece's settled, sheep-herding world. His most famous is the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is directed at those who knowingly raise false alarms, and from which the idiomatic phrase "to cry wolf" is derived. Some of his other fables concentrate on maintaining the trust between shepherds and guard dogs in their vigilance against wolves, as well as anxieties over the close relationship between wolves and dogs. Although Aesop used wolves to warn, criticize and moralize about human behaviour, his portrayals added to the wolf's image as a deceitful and dangerous animal.[186] The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have used wolves as illustrations of the dangers his followers, whom he represents as sheep, would face should they follow him.(Matthew 7:15, Matthew 10:16 and Acts 20:29).[187] In the Jataka tales the wolf is portrayed as a trickster, including one story in which it makes a hunter stop playing dead by pulling on his club.[188] In another story, the wolf tricks and eats some rats by pretending to be lame but is foiled by the chief rat.[189]
+
+Isengrim the wolf, a character first appearing in the 12th-century Latin poem Ysengrimus, is a major character in the Reynard Cycle, where he stands for the low nobility, whilst his adversary, Reynard the fox, represents the peasant hero. Isengrim is forever the victim of Reynard's wit and cruelty, often dying at the end of each story.[190] The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood", first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, is considered to have further contributed to the wolf's negative reputation in the Western world. The Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a villain capable of imitating human speech and disguising itself with human clothing. The character has been interpreted as an allegorical sexual predator.[191] Villainous wolf characters also appear in The Three Little Pigs and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats".[192] The hunting of wolves, and their attacks on humans and livestock, feature prominently in Russian literature, and are included in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev, and others. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chekhov's Peasants both feature scenes in which wolves are hunted with hounds and Borzois.[193] The musical Peter and the Wolf involves a wolf being captured for eating a farm duck, but is spared and sent to a zoo.[194]
+
+Wolves are among the central characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His portrayal of wolves has been praised posthumously by wolf biologists for his depiction of them: rather than being villainous or gluttonous, as was common in wolf portrayals at the time of the book's publication, they are shown as living in amiable family groups and drawing on the experience of infirm but experienced elder pack members.[195] Farley Mowat's largely fictional 1963 memoir Never Cry Wolf is widely considered to be the most popular book on wolves, having been adapted into a Hollywood film and taught in several schools decades after its publication. Although credited with having changed popular perceptions on wolves by portraying them as loving, cooperative and noble, it has been criticized for its idealization of wolves and its factual inaccuracies.[196][197][198] Lü Jiamin's 2004 semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem uses wolves as symbols of freedom and independence. He associates the Mongolian nomads with wolves and compares the Han Chinese of the present day to sheep, claiming they accept any leadership. As such, the novel has caused controversy with the Chinese Communist Party.[199][200]
+
+The wolf is a frequent charge in English heraldry. It is illustrated as a supporter on the shields of Lord Welby, Rendel, and Viscount Wolseley, and can be found on the coat of arms of Lovett and the vast majority of the Wilsons and Lows. The demi-wolf is a common crest, appearing in the arms and crests of members of many families, including that of the Wolfes, whose crest depicts a demi-wolf holding a crown in its paws, in reference to the assistance the family gave to Charles II during the Battle of Worcester. Wolf heads are common in Scottish heraldry, particularly in the coats of Clan Robertson and Skene. The wolf is the most common animal in Spanish heraldry and is often depicted as carrying a lamb in its mouth, or across its back.[201]
+
+The wolf is featured on the flags of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Pawnee.[202] The Chechen wolf has been a symbol of the Chechen Nation.[203] In modern times, the wolf is widely used as an emblem for military and paramilitary groups. It is the unofficial symbol of the spetsnaz, and serves as the logo of the Turkish Gray Wolves. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Serb paramilitary units adopted the wolf as their symbol, including the White Wolves and the Wolves of Vučjak.[204]
+
+Human presence appears to stress wolves, as seen by increased cortisol levels in instances such as snowmobiling near their territory.[205]
+
+Livestock depredation has been one of the primary reasons for hunting wolves and can pose a severe problem for wolf conservation. As well as causing economic losses, the threat of wolf predation causes great stress on livestock producers, and no foolproof solution of preventing such attacks short of exterminating wolves has been found.[206] Some nations help offset economic losses to wolves through compensation programs or state insurance.[207] Domesticated animals are easy prey for wolves, as they have been bred under constant human protection, and are thus unable to defend themselves very well.[208] Wolves typically resort to attacking livestock when wild prey is depleted. In Eurasia, a large part of the diet of some wolf populations consists of livestock, while such incidents are rare in North America, where healthy populations of wild prey have been largely restored.[206]
+
+The majority of losses occur during the summer grazing period, untended livestock in remote pastures being the most vulnerable to wolf predation.[209] The most frequently targeted livestock species are sheep (Europe), domestic reindeer (northern Scandinavia), goats (India), horses (Mongolia), cattle and turkeys (North America).[206] The number of animals killed in single attacks varies according to species: most attacks on cattle and horses result in one death, while turkeys, sheep and domestic reindeer may be killed in surplus.[210] Wolves mainly attack livestock when the animals are grazing, though they occasionally break into fenced enclosures.[211]
+
+A review of the studies on the competitive effects of dogs on sympatric carnivores did not mention any research on competition between dogs and wolves.[212][213] Competition would favour the wolf, which is known to kill dogs; however wolves usually live in pairs or in small packs in areas with high human persecution, giving them a disadvantage facing large groups of dogs.[213][214]
+
+Wolves kill dogs on occasion, and some wolf populations rely on dogs as an important food source. In Croatia, wolves kill more dogs than sheep, and wolves in Russia appear to limit stray dog populations. Wolves may display unusually bold behaviour when attacking dogs accompanied by people, sometimes ignoring nearby humans. Wolf attacks on dogs may occur both in house yards and in forests. Wolf attacks on hunting dogs are considered a major problem in Scandinavia and Wisconsin.[206][215] The most frequently killed hunting breeds in Scandinavia are Harriers, older animals being most at risk, likely because they are less timid than younger animals, and react to the presence of wolves differently. Large hunting dogs such as Swedish Elkhounds are more likely to survive wolf attacks because of their better ability to defend themselves.[215]
+
+Although the number of dogs killed each year by wolves is relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves' entering villages and farmyards to prey on them. In many cultures, dogs are seen as family members, or at least working team members, and losing one can lead to strong emotional responses such as demanding more liberal hunting regulations.[213]
+
+Dogs that are employed to guard sheep help to mitigate human–wolf conflicts, and are often proposed as one of the non-lethal tools in the conservation of wolves.[213][216] Shepherd dogs are not particularly aggressive, but they can disrupt potential wolf predation by displaying what is to the wolf ambiguous behaviours, such as barking, social greeting, invitation to play or aggression. The historical use of shepherd dogs across Eurasia has been effective against wolf predation,[213][217] especially when confining sheep in the presence of several livestock guardian dogs.[213][218] Shepherd dogs are sometimes killed by wolves.[213]
+
+The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey.[219] How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people.[220] Although wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed.[219]
+
+Predatory attacks may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase.[219] Cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.[36] The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women.[219] Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the summer period in the evening hours, and often within human settlements.[221]
+
+Cases of rabid wolves are low when compared to other species, as wolves do not serve as primary reservoirs of the disease, but can be infected by animals such as dogs, jackals and foxes. Incidents of rabies in wolves are very rare in North America, though numerous in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. Wolves apparently develop the "furious" phase of rabies to a very high degree. This, coupled with their size and strength, makes rabid wolves perhaps the most dangerous of rabid animals.[219] Bites from rabid wolves are 15 times more dangerous than those of rabid dogs.[222] Rabid wolves usually act alone, travelling large distances and often biting large numbers of people and domestic animals. Most rabid wolf attacks occur in the spring and autumn periods. Unlike with predatory attacks, the victims of rabid wolves are not eaten, and the attacks generally occur only on a single day. The victims are chosen at random, though most cases involve adult men. During the fifty years up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, and more than two hundred in southern Asia.[219]
+
+Theodore Roosevelt said wolves are difficult to hunt because of their elusiveness, sharp senses, high endurance, and ability to quickly incapacitate and kill a dog.[223] Historic methods included killing of spring-born litters in their dens, coursing with dogs (usually combinations of sighthounds, Bloodhounds and Fox Terriers), poisoning with strychnine, and trapping.[224][225]
+
+A popular method of wolf hunting in Russia involves trapping a pack within a small area by encircling it with fladry poles carrying a human scent. This method relies heavily on the wolf's fear of human scents, though it can lose its effectiveness when wolves become accustomed to the odor. Some hunters can lure wolves by imitating their calls. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, wolves are traditionally hunted with eagles and falcons, though this practice is declining, as experienced falconers are becoming few in number. Shooting wolves from aircraft is highly effective, due to increased visibility and direct lines of fire.[225] Several types of dog, including the Borzoi and Kyrgyz Tajgan, have been specifically bred for wolf hunting.[213]
+
+Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes kept as exotic pets. Although closely related to domestic dogs, wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, being generally less responsive to human commands and more likely to act aggressively. A person is more likely to be fatally mauled by a pet wolf or wolf-dog hybrid than by a dog.[226]
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+See Subspecies of Canis lupus
+
+The wolf (Canis lupus[a]), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise non-domestic/feral subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of Canidae, males averaging 40 kg (88 lb) and females 37 kg (82 lb). Wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height. The wolf is also distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. The wolf is nonetheless related closely enough to smaller Canis species, such as the coyote and the golden jackal, to produce fertile hybrids with them. The banded fur of a wolf is usually mottled white, brown, gray, and black, although subspecies in the arctic region may be nearly all white.
+
+Of all members of the genus Canis, the wolf is most specialized for cooperative game hunting as demonstrated by its physical adaptations to tackling large prey, its more social nature, and its highly advanced expressive behaviour. It travels in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring. Offspring may leave to form their own packs on the onset of sexual maturity and in response to competition for food within the pack. Wolves are also territorial and fights over territory are among the principal causes of wolf mortality. The wolf is mainly a carnivore and feeds on large wild hooved mammals as well as smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs. Pathogens and parasites, notably rabies, may infect wolves.
+
+The global wild wolf population was estimated to be 300,000 in 2003 and is considered to be of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Wolves have a long history of interactions with humans, having been despised and hunted in most pastoral communities because of their attacks on livestock, while conversely being respected in some agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Although the fear of wolves exists in many human societies, the majority of recorded attacks on people have been attributed to animals suffering from rabies. Wolf attacks on humans are rare because wolves are relatively few, live away from people, and have developed a fear of humans because of their experiences with hunters, ranchers, and shepherds.
+
+The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos).[4][5] The name "gray wolf" refers to the grayish colour of the species.[6]
+
+Since pre-Christian times, Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons took on wulf as a prefix or suffix in their names. Examples include Wulfhere ("Wolf Army", or "He whose army is the wolf"), Cynewulf ("Royal Wolf"), Cēnwulf ("Bold Wolf"), Wulfheard ("Wolf-hard"), Earnwulf ("Eagle Wolf"), Wulfstān ("Wolf Stone") Æðelwulf ("Noble Wolf"), Wolfhroc ("Wolf-Frock"), Wolfhetan ("Wolf Hide"), Isangrim ("Gray Mask"), Scrutolf ("Garb Wolf"), Wolfgang ("Wolf Gait") and Wolfdregil ("Wolf Runner").[7]
+
+Gray wolf
+
+Coyote
+
+African golden wolf
+
+Ethiopian wolf
+
+Golden jackal
+
+Dhole
+
+African wild dog
+
+Side-striped jackal
+
+Black-backed jackal
+
+In 1758, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus published in his Systema Naturae the binomial nomenclature.[3] Canis is the Latin word meaning "dog",[9] and under this genus he listed the doglike carnivores including domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals. He classified the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, and the wolf as Canis lupus.[3] Linnaeus considered the dog to be a separate species from the wolf because of its cauda recurvata—its upturning tail—which is not found in any other canid.[10]
+
+In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under C. lupus 36 wild subspecies, and proposed two additional subspecies: familiaris (Linnaeus, 1758) and dingo (Meyer, 1793). Wozencraft included hallstromi—the New Guinea singing dog—as a taxonomic synonym for the dingo. Wozencraft referred to a 1999 mitochondrial DNA study as one of the guides in forming his decision, and listed the 38 subspecies of C. lupus under the biological common name of "wolf", the nominate subspecies being the Eurasian wolf (C. l. lupus) based on the type specimen that Linnaeus studied in Sweden.[11] Studies using paleogenomic techniques reveal that the modern wolf and the dog are sister taxa, as modern wolves are not closely related to the population of wolves that was first domesticated.[12] In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/Species Survival Commission's Canid Specialist Group considered the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo to be feral dogs Canis familiaris, and therefore should not be assessed for the IUCN Red List.[13]
+
+The phylogenetic descent of the extant wolf C. lupus from C. etruscus through C. mosbachensis is widely accepted.[14] The earliest fossils of C. lupus were found in what was once eastern Beringia at Old Crow, Yukon, Canada, and at Cripple Creek Sump, Fairbanks, Alaska. The age is not agreed upon but could date to one million years ago. Considerable morphological diversity existed among wolves by the Late Pleistocene. They had more robust skulls and teeth than modern wolves, often with a shortened snout, a pronounced development of the temporalis muscle, and robust premolars. It is proposed that these features were specialized adaptations for the processing of carcass and bone associated with the hunting and scavenging of Pleistocene megafauna. Compared with modern wolves, some Pleistocene wolves showed an increase in tooth breakage similar to that seen in the extinct dire wolf. This suggests they either often processed carcasses, or that they competed with other carnivores and needed to consume their prey quickly. Compared with those found in the modern spotted hyena, the frequency and location of tooth fractures in these wolves indicates they were habitual bone crackers.[15] In June 2019, the severed yet preserved head of a Pleistocene wolf, dated to over 40,000 years ago, was found close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia, Russia, near the Arctic Circle. The head was about 16 in (41 cm) long, much bigger than a modern wolf's head.[16][17][18]
+
+Genomic studies suggest modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population[19][20][21] that existed 20,000 years ago.[19] Studies in 2017 and 2018 found that the Himalayan wolf is part of a lineage that is basal to other wolves and split from them 691,000–740,000 years ago.[22][23] Other wolves appear to have originated in Beringia in an expansion that was driven by the huge ecological changes during the close of the Late Pleistocene.[23] A study in 2016 indicates that a population bottleneck was followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original morphologically diverse wolf populations were out-competed and replaced by more modern wolves.[24]
+
+A 2016 genomic study suggests that Old World and New World wolves split around 12,500 years ago followed by the divergence of the lineage that led to dogs from other Old World wolves around 11,100–12,300 years ago.[21] An extinct Late Pleistocene wolf may have been the ancestor of the dog,[25][15] with the dog's similarity to the extant wolf being the result of genetic admixture between the two.[15] The dingo, Basenji, Tibetan Mastiff and Chinese indigenous breeds are basal members of the domestic dog clade. The divergence time for wolves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is estimated to be fairly recent at around 1,600 years ago. Among New World wolves, the Mexican wolf diverged around 5,400 years ago.[21]
+
+In the distant past, there has been gene flow between African golden wolves, golden jackals, and gray wolves. The African golden wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African golden wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula shows admixture with Middle Eastern wolves and dogs.[26] There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves. This indicates the golden jackal ancestry found in North American wolves may have occurred before the divergence of the Eurasian and North American wolves.[27]
+
+The common ancestor of the coyote and the wolf has admixed with a ghost population of an extinct unidentified canid. This canid is genetically close to the dhole and evolved after the divergence of the African hunting dog from the other canid species. The basal position of the coyote compared to the wolf is proposed to be due to the coyote retaining more of the mitochondrial genome of this unidentified canid.[26] Similarly, a museum specimen of a wolf from southern China collected in 1963 showed a genome that was 12–14% admixed from this unknown canid.[28] In North America, most coyotes and wolves show varying degrees of past genetic admixture. The red wolf of the southeastern United States is a hybrid animal with 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry. In addition, there was found to be 60%:40% wolf to coyote genetics in Eastern timber wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes region wolves.[27]
+
+In more recent times, some male Italian wolves originated from dog ancestry, which indicates female wolves will breed with male dogs in the wild.[29] In the Caucasus Mountains, 10% of dogs including livestock guardian dogs, are first generation hybrids.[30] Although mating between golden jackals and wolves has never been observed, evidence of jackal-wolf hybridization was discovered through mitochondrial DNA analysis of jackals living in the Caucasus Mountains[30] and in Bulgaria.[31]
+
+The wolf is the largest member of the Canidae family,[32] and is further distinguished from coyotes and jackals by a broader snout, shorter ears, a shorter torso and a longer tail.[33][32] It is slender and powerfully built with a large, deeply descending rib cage, a sloping back, and a heavily muscled neck.[34] The wolf's legs are moderately longer than those of other canids, which enables the animal to move swiftly, and to overcome the deep snow that covers most of its geographical range in winter.[35] The ears are relatively small and triangular.[34] The wolf's head is large and heavy, with a wide forehead, strong jaws and a long, blunt muzzle.[36] The skull is 230–280 mm (9–11 in) in length and 130–150 mm (5–6 in) in width.[37] The teeth are heavy and large, making them better suited to crushing bone than those of other canids. They are not as specialized as those found in hyenas though.[38][39] Its molars have a flat chewing surface, but not to the same extent as the coyote, whose diet contains more vegetable matter.[40] Females tend to have narrower muzzles and foreheads, thinner necks, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders than males.[41]
+
+Adult wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height.[36] The tail measures 29–50 cm (11–20 in) in length, the ears 90–110 mm (3 1⁄2–4 3⁄8 in) in height, and the hind feet are 220–250 mm (8 5⁄8–9 7⁄8 in).[42] The size and weight of the modern wolf increases proportionally with latitude in accord with Bergmann's rule.[43] The mean body mass of the wolf is 40 kg (88 lb), the smallest specimen recorded at 12 kg (26 lb) and the largest at 79.4 kg (175 lb).[44][36] On average, European wolves weigh 38.5 kg (85 lb), North American wolves 36 kg (79 lb), and Indian and Arabian wolves 25 kg (55 lb).[45] Females in any given wolf population typically weigh 2.3–4.5 kg (5–10 lb) less than males. Wolves weighing over 54 kg (119 lb) are uncommon, though exceptionally large individuals have been recorded in Alaska and Canada.[46] In middle Russia, exceptionally large males are given a maximum weight of 69–79 kg (152–174 lb).[42]
+
+The wolf has very dense and fluffy winter fur, with a short undercoat and long, coarse guard hairs.[36] Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in spring and grow back in autumn.[45] The longest hairs occur on the back, particularly on the front quarters and neck. Especially long hairs grow on the shoulders and almost form a crest on the upper part of the neck. The hairs on the cheeks are elongated and form tufts. The ears are covered in short hairs and project from the fur. Short, elastic and closely adjacent hairs are present on the limbs from the elbows down to the calcaneal tendons.[36] The winter fur is highly resistant to the cold. Wolves in northern climates can rest comfortably in open areas at −40 °C (−40 °F) by placing their muzzles between the rear legs and covering their faces with their tail. Wolf fur provides better insulation than dog fur and does not collect ice when warm breath is condensed against it.[45]
+
+In cold climates, the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin to conserve body heat. The warmth of the foot pads is regulated independently from the rest of the body and is maintained at just above tissue-freezing point where the pads come in contact with ice and snow.[47] In warm climates, the fur is coarser and scarcer than in northern wolves.[36] Female wolves tend to have smoother furred limbs than males and generally develop the smoothest overall coats as they age. Older wolves generally have more white hairs on the tip of the tail, along the nose, and on the forehead. Winter fur is retained longest by lactating females, although with some hair loss around their teats.[41] Hair length on the middle of the back is 60–70 mm (2 3⁄8–2 3⁄4 in), and the guard hairs on the shoulders generally do not exceed 90 mm (3 1⁄2 in), but can reach 110–130 mm (4 3⁄8–5 1⁄8 in).[36]
+
+A wolf's coat colour is determined by its guard hairs. Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black.[48] The coat of the Eurasian wolf is a mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colours with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. The top of the head, forehead, under and between the eyes, and between the eyes and ears is gray with a reddish film. The neck is ochreous. Long, black tips on the hairs along the back form a broad stripe, with black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest and rear of the body. The sides of the body, tail, and outer limbs are a pale dirty ochreous colour, while the inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white. Apart from those wolves which are pure white or black, these tones vary little across geographical areas, although the patterns of these colours vary between individuals.[49]
+
+In North America, the coat colours of wolves follow Gloger's rule, wolves in the Canadian arctic being white and those in southern Canada, the U.S., and Mexico being predominantly gray. In some areas of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the coat colour is predominantly black, some being blue-gray and some with silver and black.[48] Differences in coat colour between sexes is absent in Eurasia;[50] females tend to have redder tones in North America.[51] Black-coloured wolves in North America acquired their colour from wolf-dog admixture after the first arrival of dogs that accompanied humans across the Bering Strait 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.[52] Research into the inheritance of white colour from dogs into wolves has yet to be undertaken.[53]
+
+Wolves occurred originally across Eurasia and North America. Deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of what it once was. The wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) in much of Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and in Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains.[2] Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.[40]
+
+Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be divided into large size 240–650 kg (530–1,430 lb) and medium size 23–130 kg (51–287 lb), and have a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members.[54][55] The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey,[40] with a pack of 15 able to bring down an adult moose.[56] The variation in diet between wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey.[57]
+
+In North America, the wolf's diet is dominated by wild large hoofed mammals (ungulates) and medium-sized mammals. In Asia and Europe, their diet is dominated by wild medium-sized hoofed mammals and domestic species. The wolf depends on wild species, and if these are not readily available, as in Asia, the wolf is more reliant on domestic species.[57] Across Eurasia, wolves prey mostly on moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar.[58] In North America, important range-wide prey are elk, moose, caribou, white-tailed deer and mule deer.[59] Wolves can digest their meal in a few hours and can feed several times in one day, making quick use of large quantities of meat.[60] A well-fed wolf stores fat under the skin, around the heart, intestines, kidneys, and bone marrow, particularly during the autumn and winter.[61]
+
+Nonetheless, wolves are not fussy eaters. Smaller-sized animals that may supplement their diet include rodents, hares, insectivores and smaller carnivores. They frequently eat waterfowl and their eggs. When such foods are insufficient, they prey on lizards, snakes, frogs, and large insects when available.[62] Wolves in northern Minnesota prey on northern pike in freshwater streams.[63] The diet of coastal wolves in Alaska includes 20% salmon,[64] while those of coastal wolves in British Columbia includes 25% marine sources, and those on the nearby islands 75%.[65]
+
+In Europe, wolves eat apples, pears, figs, melons, berries and cherries. In North America, wolves eat blueberries and raspberries. Wolves also eat grass, which may provide some vitamins.[66] They are known to eat the berries of mountain-ash, lily of the valley, bilberries, cowberries, European black nightshade, grain crops, and the shoots of reeds.[62]
+
+In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion.[62] In Eurasian areas with dense human activity, many wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage.[58] Prey in North America continue to occupy suitable habitats with low human density, the wolves eating livestock and garbage only in dire circumstances.[67] Cannibalism is not uncommon in wolves during harsh winters, when packs often attack weak or injured wolves and may eat the bodies of dead pack members.[62][68][69]
+
+Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur. In North America, incidents of wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them.[70] According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921, the infamous Custer Wolf relied on coyotes to accompany him and warn him of danger. Though they fed from his kills, he never allowed them to approach him.[71] Interactions have been observed in Eurasia between wolves and golden jackals, the latter's numbers being comparatively small in areas with high wolf densities.[36][70][72] Wolves also kill red, Arctic and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them.[36][73]
+
+Brown bears typically dominate wolf packs in disputes over carcasses, while wolf packs mostly prevail against bears when defending their den sites. Both species kill each other's young. Wolves eat the brown bears they kill, while brown bears seem to eat only young wolves.[74] Wolf interactions with American black bears are much rarer because of differences in habitat preferences. Wolves have been recorded on numerous occasions actively seeking out American black bears in their dens and killing them without eating them. Unlike brown bears, American black bears frequently lose against wolves in disputes over kills.[75] Wolves also dominate and sometimes kill wolverines, and will chase off those that attempt to scavenge from their kills. Wolverines escape from wolves in caves or up trees.[76]
+
+Wolves may interact and compete with felids, such as the Eurasian lynx, which may feed on smaller prey where wolves are present[77] and may be suppressed by large wolf populations.[78] Wolves encounter cougars along portions of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges. Wolves and cougars typically avoid encountering each other by hunting at different elevations for different prey (niche partitioning). In winter, when snow accumulation forces their prey into valleys, interactions between the two species become more likely. Wolves in packs usually dominate cougars and can steal their kills or even kill them,[79] while one-to-one encounters tend to be dominated by the cat. There are several documented cases of cougars killing wolves.[80] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities and disrupting the feline's behaviour.[81] Wolf and Siberian tiger interactions are well-documented in the Russian Far East, where tigers significantly depress wolf numbers, sometimes to the point of localized extinction. Only human depletion of tiger numbers appears to protect wolves from competitive exclusion from them. With perhaps only four proven records of tigers killing wolves, these cases are rare; attacks appear to be competitive rather than predatory in nature.[82][77]
+
+In Israel, Central Asia and India wolves may encounter striped hyenas, usually in disputes over carcasses. Striped hyenas feed extensively on wolf-killed carcasses in areas where the two species interact. One-to-one, hyenas dominate wolves, and may prey on them,[83] but wolf packs can drive off single or outnumbered hyenas.[84][85] There is at least one case in Israel of a hyena associating and cooperating with a wolf pack. It is proposed that the hyena could benefit from the wolves' superior ability to hunt large, agile prey. The wolves could benefit from the hyena's superior sense of smell, to locate and dig out tortoises, to crack open large bones, and to tear open discarded food containers like tin cans.[86]
+
+
+
+The wolf is a social animal.[36] Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one.[87] The wolf's basic social unit is the nuclear family consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring.[36] The average pack size in North America is eight wolves and in Europe 5.5 wolves.[43] The average pack across Eurasia consists of a family of eight wolves (two adults, juveniles, and yearlings),[36] or sometimes two or three such families,[40] with examples of exceptionally large packs consisting of up to 42 wolves being known.[88] Cortisol levels in wolves rise significantly when a pack member dies, indicating the presence of stress.[89] During times of prey abundance caused by calving or migration, different wolf packs may join together temporarily.[36]
+
+Offspring typically stay in the pack for 10–54 months before dispersing.[90] Triggers for dispersal include the onset of sexual maturity and competition within the pack for food.[91] The distance travelled by dispersing wolves varies widely; some stay in the vicinity of the parental group, while other individuals may travel great distances of upwards of 206 km (128 mi), 390 km (240 mi), and 670 km (420 mi) from their natal (birth) packs.[92] A new pack is usually founded by an unrelated dispersing male and female, travelling together in search of an area devoid of other hostile packs.[93] Wolf packs rarely adopt other wolves into their fold and typically kill them. In the rare cases where other wolves are adopted, the adoptee is almost invariably an immature animal of one to three years old, and unlikely to compete for breeding rights with the mated pair. This usually occurs between the months of February and May. Adoptee males may mate with an available pack female and then form their own pack. In some cases, a lone wolf is adopted into a pack to replace a deceased breeder.[88]
+
+Wolves are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive assuring a steady supply of prey. Territory size depends largely on the amount of prey available and the age of the pack's pups. They tend to increase in size in areas with low prey populations,[94] or when the pups reach the age of six months when they have the same nutritional needs as adults.[95] Wolf packs travel constantly in search of prey, covering roughly 9% of their territory per day, on average 25 km/d (16 mi/d). The core of their territory is on average 35 km2 (14 sq mi) where they spend 50% of their time.[94] Prey density tends to be much higher on the territory's periphery. Except out of desperation, wolves tend to avoid hunting on the fringes of their range to avoid fatal confrontations with neighbouring packs.[96] The smallest territory on record was held by a pack of six wolves in northeastern Minnesota, which occupied an estimated 33 km2 (13 sq mi), while the largest was held by an Alaskan pack of ten wolves encompassing 6,272 km2 (2,422 sq mi).[95] Wolf packs are typically settled, and usually leave their accustomed ranges only during severe food shortages.[36]
+
+Wolves advertise their territories to other packs through howling and scent marking. Scent marking involves urine, feces, and anal gland scents. This is more effective at advertising territory than howling and is often used in combination with scratch marks. Wolves increase their rate of scent marking when they encounter the marks of wolves from other packs. Lone wolves will rarely mark, but newly bonded pairs will scent mark the most.[40] These marks are generally left every 240 m (260 yd) throughout the territory on regular travelways and junctions. Such markers can last for two to three weeks,[95] and are typically placed near rocks, boulders, trees, or the skeletons of large animals.[36] Territorial fights are among the principal causes of wolf mortality, one study concluding that 14–65% of wolf deaths in Minnesota and the Denali National Park and Preserve were due to other wolves.[97]
+
+Wolves communicate to anticipate what their pack mates or other wolves might do next.[98] This includes the use of vocalization, body posture, scent, touch, and taste.[99] The phases of the moon have no effect on wolf vocalization, and despite popular belief, wolves do not howl at the moon.[100] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[101] Wolf howls can under certain conditions be heard over areas of up to 130 km2 (50 sq mi).[40] Other vocalizations include growls, barks and whines. Wolves do not bark as loudly or continuously as dogs do in confrontations, rather barking a few times and then retreating from a perceived danger.[102] Aggressive or self-assertive wolves are characterized by their slow and deliberate movements, high body posture and raised hackles, while submissive ones carry their bodies low, flatten their fur, and lower their ears and tail.[103] Raised leg urination is considered to be one of the most important forms of scent communication in the wolf, making up 60–80% of all scent marks observed.[104]
+
+Wolves are monogamous, mated pairs usually remaining together for life. Should one of the pair die, another mate is found quickly.[105] With wolves in the wild, inbreeding does not occur where outbreeding is possible.[106] Wolves become mature at the age of two years and sexually mature from the age of three years.[105] The age of first breeding in wolves depends largely on environmental factors: when food is plentiful, or when wolf populations are heavily managed, wolves can rear pups at younger ages to better exploit abundant resources. Females are capable of producing pups every year, one litter annually being the average.[107] Oestrus and rut begin in the second half of winter and lasts for two weeks.[105]
+
+Dens are usually constructed for pups during the summer period. When building dens, females make use of natural shelters like fissures in rocks, cliffs overhanging riverbanks and holes thickly covered by vegetation. Sometimes, the den is the appropriated burrow of smaller animals such as foxes, badgers or marmots. An appropriated den is often widened and partly remade. On rare occasions, female wolves dig burrows themselves, which are usually small and short with one to three openings. The den is usually constructed not more than 500 m (550 yd) away from a water source. It typically faces southwards where it can be better warmed by sunlight exposure, and the snow can thaw more quickly. Resting places, play areas for the pups, and food remains are commonly found around wolf dens. The odor of urine and rotting food emanating from the denning area often attracts scavenging birds like magpies and ravens. Though they mostly avoid areas within human sight, wolves have been known to nest near domiciles, paved roads and railways.[108] During pregnancy, female wolves remain in a den located away from the peripheral zone of their territories, where violent encounters with other packs are less likely to occur.[109]
+
+The gestation period lasts 62–75 days with pups usually being born in the spring months or early summer in very cold places such as on the tundra. Young females give birth to four to five young, and older females from six to eight young and up to 14. Their mortality rate is 60–80%.[110] Newborn wolf pups look similar to German Shepherd Dog pups.[111] They are born blind and deaf and are covered in short soft grayish-brown fur. They weigh 300–500 g (10 1⁄2–17 3⁄4 oz) at birth and begin to see after nine to 12 days. The milk canines erupt after one month. Pups first leave the den after three weeks. At one-and-a-half months of age, they are agile enough to flee from danger. Mother wolves do not leave the den for the first few weeks, relying on the fathers to provide food for them and their young. Pups begin to eat solid food at the age of three to four weeks. They have a fast growth rate during their first four months of life: during this period, a pup's weight can increase nearly 30 times.[110][112] Wolf pups begin play-fighting at the age of three weeks, though unlike young coyotes and foxes, their bites are gentle and controlled. Actual fights to establish hierarchy usually occur at five to eight weeks of age. This is in contrast to young coyotes and foxes, which may begin fighting even before the onset of play behaviour.[113] By autumn, the pups are mature enough to accompany the adults on hunts for large prey.[109]
+
+Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs; single wolves have occasionally been observed to kill large prey such as moose, bison and muskoxen unaided.[114][115] This contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.[115] The size of a wolf hunting pack is related to the number of pups that survived the previous winter, adult survival, and the rate of dispersing wolves leaving the pack. The optimal pack size for hunting elk is four wolves, and for bison a large pack size is more successful.[116]
+
+As well as their physical adaptations for hunting hoofed mammals, wolves possess certain behavioural, cognitive, and psychological adaptations to assist with their hunting lifestyle. Wolves are excellent learners that match or outperform domestic dogs. They can use gaze to focus attention on where other wolves are looking. This is important because wolves do not use vocalization when hunting. In laboratory tests, they appear to exhibit insight, foresight, understanding, and the ability to plan. [117] To survive, wolves must be able to solve two problems—finding a prey animal, then confronting it.[117]
+
+Wolves move around their territory when hunting, using the same trails for extended periods. After snowfalls, wolves find their old trails and continue using them. These follow the banks of rivers, the shorelines of lakes, through ravines overgrown with shrubs, through plantations, or roads and human paths.[118] Wolves are nocturnal predators. During the winter, a pack will commence hunting in the twilight of early evening and will hunt all night, traveling tens of kilometres. Sometimes hunting large prey occurs during the day. During the summer, wolves generally tend to hunt individually, ambushing their prey and rarely giving pursuit.[119]
+
+The wolf usually travels at a loping pace, placing one of its paws directly in front of the other. This gait can be maintained for hours at a rate of 8–9 km/h (5.0–5.6 mph).[120] On bare paths, a wolf can quickly achieve speeds of 50–60 km/h (31–37 mph). The wolf has a running gait of 55–70 km/h (34–43 mph), can leap 5 m (16 ft) horizontally in a single bound, and can maintain rapid pursuit for at least 20 minutes.[92] A wolf's foot is large and flexible, which allows it to tread on a wide variety of terrain. A wolf's legs are long compared to their body size allowing them to travel up to 76 km (47 mi) in 12 hours. This adaptation allows wolves to locate prey within hours, but it can take days to find prey that can be killed without great risk. Moose and deer live singly in the summer. Caribou live in herds of thousands which presents dangers for wolves. Elk live in small herds and these are a safer target.[117]
+
+A wolf carries its head at the same level as its back, lifting it only when alert.[36] In one study, wolves detected moose using scent ten times, vision six times, and once by following tracks in the snow. Their vision is as good as a human's, and they can smell prey at least 2.4 km (1 1⁄2 mi) away. One wolf travelled to a herd 103 km (64 mi) away. A human can detect the smell of a forest fire over the same distance from downwind. The wolf's sense of smell is at least comparable to that of the domestic dog, which is at least 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's.[117]
+
+When hunting large gregarious prey, wolves will try to isolate an individual from its group.[121] If successful, a wolf pack can bring down game that will feed it for days, but one error in judgement can lead to serious injury or death. Most large prey have developed defensive adaptations and behaviours. Wolves have been killed while attempting to bring down bison, elk, moose, muskoxen, and even by one of their smallest hoofed prey, the white-tailed deer.[117] Although people often believe that wolves can easily overcome any of their prey, their success rate in hunting hoofed prey is usually low.[122]
+
+Generally, bison, elk, and moose will stand their ground, then the wolves must struggle with them to bring them down. Often caribou and deer will flee, but sometimes deer also make a stand. With smaller prey like beaver, geese, and hares, there is no risk to the wolf.[117] If the targeted animal stands its ground, wolves either ignore it, or try to intimidate it into running.[114] Wolves, or even a wolf on its own, will attempt to frighten a herd into panicking and dispersing.[123]
+
+When wolves encounter prey that flees, they give chase. The speed of sprinting prey is closely related to the speed of their main predators. Wolves can run at 56–64 km/h (35–40 mph) across several kilometres and will often pursue prey for at least 1 km (1⁄2 mi). One wolf chased a caribou for 8 km (5 mi), another chased and tracked a deer for 20 km (12 mi), and one 11-year-old wolf chased and caught an Arctic hare after seven minutes. Most wolf prey will try to run to water, where they will either escape or be better placed to attempt to ward off the wolves.[117]
+
+The wolf must give chase and gain on its fleeing prey, slow it down by biting through thick hair and hide, and then disable it enough to begin feeding.[117] After chasing and then confronting a large prey animal, the wolf makes use of its 6 cm (2 1⁄2 in) fangs and its powerful masseter muscles to deliver a bite force of 28 kg/cm2 (400 lbf/in2), which is capable of breaking open the skulls of many of its prey animals. The wolf leaps at its quarry and tears at it. One wolf was observed being dragged for dozens of metres attached to the hind leg of a moose; another was seen being dragged over a fallen log while attached to a bull elk's nose.[116]
+
+The most common point of wolf attacks on moose is the upper hind legs.[124][125][126] Hind leg wounds are inflicted from the rear, midway up the hock with the canine teeth. These leave gaping skin perforations over 4 cm (1 1⁄2 in) in diameter. Although blood loss, muscle damage, and tendon exposure may occur, there is no evidence of hamstringing. Attacks also occur on the fleshy nose, the back and sides of the neck, the ears, and the perineum.[126] Wolves may wound large prey and then lie around resting for hours before killing it when it is weaker due to blood loss, thereby lessening the risk of injury to themselves.[127]
+
+With medium-sized prey, such as roe deer or sheep, wolves kill by biting the throat, severing nerve tracks and the carotid artery, thus causing the animal to die within a few seconds to a minute. With small, mouselike prey, wolves leap in a high arc and immobilize it with their forepaws.[128] When prey is vulnerable and abundant, wolves may occasionally surplus kill. Such instances are common with domestic animals, but rare with wild prey. In the wild, surplus killing occurs primarily during late winter or spring, when snow is unusually deep (thus impeding the movements of prey)[129] or during the denning period, when den bound wolves require a ready supply of meat.[130] Medium-sized prey are especially vulnerable to surplus killing, as the swift throat-biting method allows wolves to kill one animal quickly and move on to another.[128]
+
+Once prey is brought down, wolves begin to feed excitedly, ripping and tugging at the carcass in all directions, and bolting down large chunks of it.[131] The breeding pair typically monopolizes food to continue producing pups. When food is scarce, this is done at the expense of other family members, especially non-pups.[132] The breeding pair typically eats first. They usually work the hardest at killing prey, and may rest after a long hunt and allow the rest of the family to eat undisturbed. Once the breeding pair has finished eating, the rest of the family tears off pieces of the carcass and transports them to secluded areas where they can eat in peace. Wolves typically commence feeding by consuming the larger internal organs, like the heart, liver, lungs, and stomach lining. The kidneys and spleen are eaten once they are exposed, followed by the muscles.[133] A wolf can eat 15–19% of its body weight in a single feeding.[61]
+
+Viral diseases carried by wolves include: rabies, canine distemper, canine parvovirus, infectious canine hepatitis, papillomatosis, and canine coronavirus.[134] Wolves are a major host for rabies in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and India.[135] In wolves, the incubation period is eight to 21 days, and results in the host becoming agitated, deserting its pack, and travelling up to 80 km (50 mi) a day, thus increasing the risk of infecting other wolves. Infected wolves do not show any fear of humans, most documented wolf attacks on people being attributed to rabid animals. Although canine distemper is lethal in dogs, it has not been recorded to kill wolves, except in Canada and Alaska. The canine parvovirus, which causes death by dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and endotoxic shock or sepsis, is largely survivable in wolves, but can be lethal to pups. Wolves may catch infectious canine hepatitis from dogs, though there are no records of wolves dying from it. Papillomatosis has been recorded only once in wolves, and likely does not cause serious illness or death, though it may alter feeding behaviours. The canine coronavirus has been recorded in Alaskan wolves, infections being most prevalent in winter months.[134]
+
+Bacterial diseases carried by wolves include: brucellosis, Lyme disease, leptospirosis, tularemia, bovine tuberculosis,[136] listeriosis and anthrax.[135] Wolves can catch Brucella suis from wild and domestic reindeer. While adult wolves tend not to show any clinical signs, it can severely weaken the pups of infected females. Although lyme disease can debilitate individual wolves, it does not appear to significantly affect wolf populations. Leptospirosis can be contracted through contact with infected prey or urine, and can cause fever, anorexia, vomiting, anemia, hematuria, icterus, and death. Wolves living near farms are more vulnerable to the disease than those living in the wilderness, probably because of prolonged contact with infected domestic animal waste. Wolves may catch tularemia from lagomorph prey, though its effect on wolves is unknown. Although bovine tuberculosis is not considered a major threat to wolves, it has been recorded to have killed two wolf pups in Canada.[136]
+
+Wolves carry ectoparasites and endoparasites; those in the former Soviet Union have been recorded to carry at least 50 species.[135] Most of these parasites infect wolves without adverse effects, though the effects may become more serious in sick or malnourished specimens.[137] Parasitic infection in wolves is of particular concern to people. Wolves can spread them to dogs, which in turn can carry the parasites to humans. In areas where wolves inhabit pastoral areas, the parasites can be spread to livestock.[135]
+
+Wolves are often infested with a variety of arthropod exoparasites, including fleas, ticks, lice, and mites. The most harmful to wolves, particularly pups, is the mange mite (Sarcoptes scabiei),[137] though they rarely develop full-blown mange, unlike foxes.[36] Lice, such as Trichodectes canis, may cause sickness in wolves, but rarely death. Ticks of the genus Ixodes can infect wolves with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.[137] The tick Dermacentor pictus also infests wolves. Other ectoparasites include chewing lice, sucking lice and the fleas Pulex irritans and Ctenocephalides canis.[36]
+
+Endoparasites known to infect wolves include: protozoans and helminths (flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and thorny-headed worms). Of 30,000 protozoan species, only a few have been recorded to infect wolves: Isospora, Toxoplasma, Sarcocystis, Babesia, and Giardia.[137] Some wolves carry Neospora caninum, which can be spread to cattle and is correlated with bovine miscarriages.[138] Among flukes, the most common in North American wolves is Alaria, which infects small rodents and amphibians that are eaten by wolves. Upon reaching maturity, Alaria migrates to the wolf's intestine, but does little harm. Metorchis conjunctus, which enters wolves through eating fish, infects the wolf's liver or gall bladder, causing liver disease, inflammation of the pancreas, and emaciation. Most other fluke species reside in the wolf's intestine, though Paragonimus westermani lives in the lungs. Tapeworms are commonly found in wolves, as their primary hosts are ungulates, small mammals, and fish, which wolves feed upon. Tapeworms generally cause little harm in wolves, though this depends on the number and size of the parasites, and the sensitivity of the host. Symptoms often include constipation, toxic and allergic reactions, irritation of the intestinal mucosa, and malnutrition. Infections by the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus in ungulate populations tend to increase in areas with high wolf densities, as wolves can shed Echinoccocus eggs in their feces onto grazing areas.[137]
+
+Wolves can carry over 30 roundworm species, though most roundworm infections appear benign, depending on the number of worms and the age of the host. Ancylostoma caninum attaches itself on the intestinal wall to feed on the host's blood, and can cause hyperchromic anemia, emaciation, diarrhea, and possibly death. Toxocara canis, a hookworm known to infect wolf pups in the uterus, can cause intestinal irritation, bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea. Wolves may catch Dioctophyma renale from minks, which infects the kidneys, and can grow to lengths of 100 cm (40 in). D. renale causes the complete destruction of the kidney's functional tissue and can be fatal if both kidneys are infected. Wolves can tolerate low levels of Dirofilaria immitis for many years without showing any ill effects, though high levels can kill wolves through cardiac enlargement and congestive hepatopathy. Wolves probably become infected with Trichinella spiralis by eating infected ungulates. Although T. spiralis is not known to produce clinical signs in wolves, it can cause emaciation, salivation, and crippling muscle pains in dogs. Thorny-headed worms rarely infect wolves, though three species have been identified in Russian wolves: Nicolla skrjabini, Macrocantorhynchus catulinus, and Moniliformis moniliformis.[137]
+
+The global wild wolf population in 2003 was estimated at 300,000.[139] Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s. This has fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range as a result of legal protection, changes in land use, and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the wolf. Despite these threats, the IUCN classifies the wolf as Least Concern on its Red List due to its relatively widespread range and stable population. The species is listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in its Appendix II, indicating that it is not threatened with extinction. However, those wolf populations living in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan are listed in its Appendix I, indicating that these may become extinct without restrictions on their trade.[2]
+
+In Canada, 50,000–60,000 wolves live in 80% of their historical range, making Canada an important stronghold for the species.[40] Under Canadian law, First Nations people can hunt wolves without restrictions, but others must acquire licenses for the hunting and trapping seasons. As many as 4,000 wolves may be harvested in Canada each year.[140] The wolf is a protected species in national parks under the Canada National Parks Act.[141] In Alaska, 7,000–11,000 wolves are found on 85% of the state's 1,517,733 km2 (586,000 sq mi). Wolves may be hunted or trapped with a license; around 1,200 wolves are harvested annually.[142]
+
+In the contiguous United States, wolf declines were caused by the expansion of agriculture, the decimation of the wolf's main prey species like the American bison, and extermination campaigns.[40] Wolves were given protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and have since returned to parts of their former range thanks to both natural recolonizations and reintroductions.[143] Wolf populations in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan number over 4,000 as of 2018.[144] Wolves also occupy much of the northern Rocky Mountains region, with at least 1,704 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as of 2015. They have also established populations in Washington and Oregon.[145] In Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated from 1977 to 1980 in capturing all Mexican wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction and established captive breeding programs for reintroduction.[146] As of 2018, there were 230 Mexican wolves living in Mexico, 64 in Arizona, 67 in New Mexico, and 240 in captive breeding programs in both countries.[147]
+
+Europe, excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, has 17,000 wolves in more than 28 countries.[148] In the European Union, the wolf is strictly protected under the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Appendix II) and the 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Annex II and IV). There is extensive legal protection in many European countries, although there are national exceptions and enforcement is variable and often non-existent.[2]
+
+Wolves have been persecuted in Europe for centuries, having been exterminated in Great Britain by 1684, in Ireland by 1770, in Central Europe by 1899, in France by the 1930s, and in much of Scandinavia by the early 1970s. They continued to survive in parts of Finland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.[149] Since 1980, European wolves have rebounded and expanded into parts of their former range. The decline of the traditional pastoral and rural economies seems to have ended the need to exterminate the wolf in parts of Europe.[140] As of 2016, estimates of wolf numbers include: 4,000 in the Balkans, 3,460–3,849 in the Carpathian Mountains, 1,700–2,240 in the Baltic states, 1,100–2,400 in the Italian peninsula, and around 2,500 in the northwest Iberian peninsula as of 2007.[148]
+
+In the former Soviet Union, wolf populations have retained much of their historical range despite Soviet-era large scale extermination campaigns. Their numbers range from 1,500 in Georgia, to 20,000 in Kazakhstan and up to 45,000 in Russia.[150] In Russia, the wolf is regarded as a pest because of its attacks on livestock, and wolf management means controlling their numbers by destroying them throughout the year. Russian history over the past century shows that reduced hunting leads to an abundance of wolves.[151] The Russian government has continued to pay bounties for wolves and annual harvests of 20-30% do not appear to significantly affect their numbers.[152]
+
+During the 19th century, wolves were widespread in many parts of the Holy Land east and west of the Jordan River, but decreased considerably in number between 1964 and 1980, largely due to persecution by farmers.[153] In the Middle East, only Israel and Oman give wolves explicit legal protection.[154] Israel has protected its wolves since 1954 and has maintained a moderately sized population of 150 through effective enforcement of conservation policies. These wolves have moved into neighboring countries. Approximately 300–600 wolves inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.[155] The wolf also appears to be widespread in Iran.[156] Turkey has an estimated population of about 7,000 wolves.[157] Outside of Turkey, wolf populations in the Middle East may total 1,000–2,000.[154]
+
+In southern Asia, the northern regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important strongholds for wolves. The wolf has been protected in India since 1972.[158] Hindus traditionally considered the hunting of wolves, even dangerous ones, as taboo, for fear of causing a bad harvest. The Santals considered them fair game, as they did every other forest-dwelling animal.[159] During British rule in India, wolves were not considered game species, and were killed primarily in response to them attacking game herds, livestock, and people.[160] The Indian wolf is distributed across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.[161] As of 2019, it is estimated that there are around 2,000–3,000 Indian wolves in the country.[162] In East Asia, Mongolia's population numbers 10,000–20,000. In China, Heilongjiang has roughly 650 wolves, Xinjiang has 10,000 and Tibet has 2,000.[163] 2017 evidence suggests that wolves range across all of mainland China.[164] Wolves have been historically persecuted in China[165] but have been legally protected since 1998.[166] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed in 1905.[167]
+
+The wolf is a common motif in the mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout its historical range. The Ancient Greeks associated wolves with Apollo, the god of light and order.[168] The Ancient Romans connected the wolf with their god of war and agriculture Mars,[169] and believed their city's founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf.[170] Norse mythology includes the feared giant wolf Fenrir, eldest child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda,[171] and Geri and Freki, Odin's faithful pets.[172] The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, who viewed it as the lord of all animals and as the only effective defender against evil.[173]
+
+In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. When humans killed it, they were punished with death, destruction and the loss of immortality.[174] For the Pawnee, Sirius is the "wolf star" and its disappearance and reappearance signified the wolf moving to and from the spirit world. Both the Pawnee and Blackfoot call the Milky Way the "wolf trail".[175] The wolf is also an important totem animal for the Tlingit and Tsimshian.[176] In Chinese astronomy, the wolf represents Sirius as the "blue beast" and the star itself is called the "heavenly wolf".[177] In China, the wolf was traditionally associated with greed and cruelty and wolf epithets were used to describe negative behaviours such as cruelty ("wolf's heart"), mistrust ("wolf's look") and lechery ("wolf-sex").[178]
+
+Tengrism places high importance on the wolf, as it is thought that, when howling, it is praying to Tengri, thus making it the only creature other than man to worship a deity.[179] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the wolf is ridden by gods of protection. In Vedic Hinduism, the wolf is a symbol of the night and the daytime quail must escape from its jaws.[178] In Hindu mythology, Krishna, to convince the people of Vraja to migrate to Vṛndāvana, creates hundreds of wolves from his hairs, which frighten the inhabitants of Vraja into making the journey.[180] In Tantric Buddhism, wolves are depicted as inhabitants of graveyards and destroyers of corpses.[178] In Zoroastrianism, the wolf has been demonized as the creation of Ahriman.[181]
+
+The concept of people turning into wolves has been present in many cultures. One Greek myth tells of Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his evil deeds.[182] The legend of the werewolf has been widespread in European folklore and involves people willingly turning into wolves to attack and kill others.[183] The Navajo have traditionally believed that witches would turn into wolves by donning wolf skins and would kill people and raid graveyards.[184] The Dena'ina believed wolves were once men and viewed them as brothers.[168] Similarly, in Turkic mythology wolves were believed to be the ancestors of their people.[185]
+
+Aesop featured wolves in several of his fables, playing on the concerns of Ancient Greece's settled, sheep-herding world. His most famous is the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is directed at those who knowingly raise false alarms, and from which the idiomatic phrase "to cry wolf" is derived. Some of his other fables concentrate on maintaining the trust between shepherds and guard dogs in their vigilance against wolves, as well as anxieties over the close relationship between wolves and dogs. Although Aesop used wolves to warn, criticize and moralize about human behaviour, his portrayals added to the wolf's image as a deceitful and dangerous animal.[186] The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have used wolves as illustrations of the dangers his followers, whom he represents as sheep, would face should they follow him.(Matthew 7:15, Matthew 10:16 and Acts 20:29).[187] In the Jataka tales the wolf is portrayed as a trickster, including one story in which it makes a hunter stop playing dead by pulling on his club.[188] In another story, the wolf tricks and eats some rats by pretending to be lame but is foiled by the chief rat.[189]
+
+Isengrim the wolf, a character first appearing in the 12th-century Latin poem Ysengrimus, is a major character in the Reynard Cycle, where he stands for the low nobility, whilst his adversary, Reynard the fox, represents the peasant hero. Isengrim is forever the victim of Reynard's wit and cruelty, often dying at the end of each story.[190] The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood", first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, is considered to have further contributed to the wolf's negative reputation in the Western world. The Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a villain capable of imitating human speech and disguising itself with human clothing. The character has been interpreted as an allegorical sexual predator.[191] Villainous wolf characters also appear in The Three Little Pigs and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats".[192] The hunting of wolves, and their attacks on humans and livestock, feature prominently in Russian literature, and are included in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev, and others. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chekhov's Peasants both feature scenes in which wolves are hunted with hounds and Borzois.[193] The musical Peter and the Wolf involves a wolf being captured for eating a farm duck, but is spared and sent to a zoo.[194]
+
+Wolves are among the central characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His portrayal of wolves has been praised posthumously by wolf biologists for his depiction of them: rather than being villainous or gluttonous, as was common in wolf portrayals at the time of the book's publication, they are shown as living in amiable family groups and drawing on the experience of infirm but experienced elder pack members.[195] Farley Mowat's largely fictional 1963 memoir Never Cry Wolf is widely considered to be the most popular book on wolves, having been adapted into a Hollywood film and taught in several schools decades after its publication. Although credited with having changed popular perceptions on wolves by portraying them as loving, cooperative and noble, it has been criticized for its idealization of wolves and its factual inaccuracies.[196][197][198] Lü Jiamin's 2004 semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem uses wolves as symbols of freedom and independence. He associates the Mongolian nomads with wolves and compares the Han Chinese of the present day to sheep, claiming they accept any leadership. As such, the novel has caused controversy with the Chinese Communist Party.[199][200]
+
+The wolf is a frequent charge in English heraldry. It is illustrated as a supporter on the shields of Lord Welby, Rendel, and Viscount Wolseley, and can be found on the coat of arms of Lovett and the vast majority of the Wilsons and Lows. The demi-wolf is a common crest, appearing in the arms and crests of members of many families, including that of the Wolfes, whose crest depicts a demi-wolf holding a crown in its paws, in reference to the assistance the family gave to Charles II during the Battle of Worcester. Wolf heads are common in Scottish heraldry, particularly in the coats of Clan Robertson and Skene. The wolf is the most common animal in Spanish heraldry and is often depicted as carrying a lamb in its mouth, or across its back.[201]
+
+The wolf is featured on the flags of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Pawnee.[202] The Chechen wolf has been a symbol of the Chechen Nation.[203] In modern times, the wolf is widely used as an emblem for military and paramilitary groups. It is the unofficial symbol of the spetsnaz, and serves as the logo of the Turkish Gray Wolves. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Serb paramilitary units adopted the wolf as their symbol, including the White Wolves and the Wolves of Vučjak.[204]
+
+Human presence appears to stress wolves, as seen by increased cortisol levels in instances such as snowmobiling near their territory.[205]
+
+Livestock depredation has been one of the primary reasons for hunting wolves and can pose a severe problem for wolf conservation. As well as causing economic losses, the threat of wolf predation causes great stress on livestock producers, and no foolproof solution of preventing such attacks short of exterminating wolves has been found.[206] Some nations help offset economic losses to wolves through compensation programs or state insurance.[207] Domesticated animals are easy prey for wolves, as they have been bred under constant human protection, and are thus unable to defend themselves very well.[208] Wolves typically resort to attacking livestock when wild prey is depleted. In Eurasia, a large part of the diet of some wolf populations consists of livestock, while such incidents are rare in North America, where healthy populations of wild prey have been largely restored.[206]
+
+The majority of losses occur during the summer grazing period, untended livestock in remote pastures being the most vulnerable to wolf predation.[209] The most frequently targeted livestock species are sheep (Europe), domestic reindeer (northern Scandinavia), goats (India), horses (Mongolia), cattle and turkeys (North America).[206] The number of animals killed in single attacks varies according to species: most attacks on cattle and horses result in one death, while turkeys, sheep and domestic reindeer may be killed in surplus.[210] Wolves mainly attack livestock when the animals are grazing, though they occasionally break into fenced enclosures.[211]
+
+A review of the studies on the competitive effects of dogs on sympatric carnivores did not mention any research on competition between dogs and wolves.[212][213] Competition would favour the wolf, which is known to kill dogs; however wolves usually live in pairs or in small packs in areas with high human persecution, giving them a disadvantage facing large groups of dogs.[213][214]
+
+Wolves kill dogs on occasion, and some wolf populations rely on dogs as an important food source. In Croatia, wolves kill more dogs than sheep, and wolves in Russia appear to limit stray dog populations. Wolves may display unusually bold behaviour when attacking dogs accompanied by people, sometimes ignoring nearby humans. Wolf attacks on dogs may occur both in house yards and in forests. Wolf attacks on hunting dogs are considered a major problem in Scandinavia and Wisconsin.[206][215] The most frequently killed hunting breeds in Scandinavia are Harriers, older animals being most at risk, likely because they are less timid than younger animals, and react to the presence of wolves differently. Large hunting dogs such as Swedish Elkhounds are more likely to survive wolf attacks because of their better ability to defend themselves.[215]
+
+Although the number of dogs killed each year by wolves is relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves' entering villages and farmyards to prey on them. In many cultures, dogs are seen as family members, or at least working team members, and losing one can lead to strong emotional responses such as demanding more liberal hunting regulations.[213]
+
+Dogs that are employed to guard sheep help to mitigate human–wolf conflicts, and are often proposed as one of the non-lethal tools in the conservation of wolves.[213][216] Shepherd dogs are not particularly aggressive, but they can disrupt potential wolf predation by displaying what is to the wolf ambiguous behaviours, such as barking, social greeting, invitation to play or aggression. The historical use of shepherd dogs across Eurasia has been effective against wolf predation,[213][217] especially when confining sheep in the presence of several livestock guardian dogs.[213][218] Shepherd dogs are sometimes killed by wolves.[213]
+
+The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey.[219] How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people.[220] Although wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed.[219]
+
+Predatory attacks may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase.[219] Cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.[36] The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women.[219] Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the summer period in the evening hours, and often within human settlements.[221]
+
+Cases of rabid wolves are low when compared to other species, as wolves do not serve as primary reservoirs of the disease, but can be infected by animals such as dogs, jackals and foxes. Incidents of rabies in wolves are very rare in North America, though numerous in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. Wolves apparently develop the "furious" phase of rabies to a very high degree. This, coupled with their size and strength, makes rabid wolves perhaps the most dangerous of rabid animals.[219] Bites from rabid wolves are 15 times more dangerous than those of rabid dogs.[222] Rabid wolves usually act alone, travelling large distances and often biting large numbers of people and domestic animals. Most rabid wolf attacks occur in the spring and autumn periods. Unlike with predatory attacks, the victims of rabid wolves are not eaten, and the attacks generally occur only on a single day. The victims are chosen at random, though most cases involve adult men. During the fifty years up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, and more than two hundred in southern Asia.[219]
+
+Theodore Roosevelt said wolves are difficult to hunt because of their elusiveness, sharp senses, high endurance, and ability to quickly incapacitate and kill a dog.[223] Historic methods included killing of spring-born litters in their dens, coursing with dogs (usually combinations of sighthounds, Bloodhounds and Fox Terriers), poisoning with strychnine, and trapping.[224][225]
+
+A popular method of wolf hunting in Russia involves trapping a pack within a small area by encircling it with fladry poles carrying a human scent. This method relies heavily on the wolf's fear of human scents, though it can lose its effectiveness when wolves become accustomed to the odor. Some hunters can lure wolves by imitating their calls. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, wolves are traditionally hunted with eagles and falcons, though this practice is declining, as experienced falconers are becoming few in number. Shooting wolves from aircraft is highly effective, due to increased visibility and direct lines of fire.[225] Several types of dog, including the Borzoi and Kyrgyz Tajgan, have been specifically bred for wolf hunting.[213]
+
+Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes kept as exotic pets. Although closely related to domestic dogs, wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, being generally less responsive to human commands and more likely to act aggressively. A person is more likely to be fatally mauled by a pet wolf or wolf-dog hybrid than by a dog.[226]
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+See Subspecies of Canis lupus
+
+The wolf (Canis lupus[a]), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise non-domestic/feral subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of Canidae, males averaging 40 kg (88 lb) and females 37 kg (82 lb). Wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height. The wolf is also distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. The wolf is nonetheless related closely enough to smaller Canis species, such as the coyote and the golden jackal, to produce fertile hybrids with them. The banded fur of a wolf is usually mottled white, brown, gray, and black, although subspecies in the arctic region may be nearly all white.
+
+Of all members of the genus Canis, the wolf is most specialized for cooperative game hunting as demonstrated by its physical adaptations to tackling large prey, its more social nature, and its highly advanced expressive behaviour. It travels in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring. Offspring may leave to form their own packs on the onset of sexual maturity and in response to competition for food within the pack. Wolves are also territorial and fights over territory are among the principal causes of wolf mortality. The wolf is mainly a carnivore and feeds on large wild hooved mammals as well as smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs. Pathogens and parasites, notably rabies, may infect wolves.
+
+The global wild wolf population was estimated to be 300,000 in 2003 and is considered to be of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Wolves have a long history of interactions with humans, having been despised and hunted in most pastoral communities because of their attacks on livestock, while conversely being respected in some agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Although the fear of wolves exists in many human societies, the majority of recorded attacks on people have been attributed to animals suffering from rabies. Wolf attacks on humans are rare because wolves are relatively few, live away from people, and have developed a fear of humans because of their experiences with hunters, ranchers, and shepherds.
+
+The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos).[4][5] The name "gray wolf" refers to the grayish colour of the species.[6]
+
+Since pre-Christian times, Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons took on wulf as a prefix or suffix in their names. Examples include Wulfhere ("Wolf Army", or "He whose army is the wolf"), Cynewulf ("Royal Wolf"), Cēnwulf ("Bold Wolf"), Wulfheard ("Wolf-hard"), Earnwulf ("Eagle Wolf"), Wulfstān ("Wolf Stone") Æðelwulf ("Noble Wolf"), Wolfhroc ("Wolf-Frock"), Wolfhetan ("Wolf Hide"), Isangrim ("Gray Mask"), Scrutolf ("Garb Wolf"), Wolfgang ("Wolf Gait") and Wolfdregil ("Wolf Runner").[7]
+
+Gray wolf
+
+Coyote
+
+African golden wolf
+
+Ethiopian wolf
+
+Golden jackal
+
+Dhole
+
+African wild dog
+
+Side-striped jackal
+
+Black-backed jackal
+
+In 1758, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus published in his Systema Naturae the binomial nomenclature.[3] Canis is the Latin word meaning "dog",[9] and under this genus he listed the doglike carnivores including domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals. He classified the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, and the wolf as Canis lupus.[3] Linnaeus considered the dog to be a separate species from the wolf because of its cauda recurvata—its upturning tail—which is not found in any other canid.[10]
+
+In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under C. lupus 36 wild subspecies, and proposed two additional subspecies: familiaris (Linnaeus, 1758) and dingo (Meyer, 1793). Wozencraft included hallstromi—the New Guinea singing dog—as a taxonomic synonym for the dingo. Wozencraft referred to a 1999 mitochondrial DNA study as one of the guides in forming his decision, and listed the 38 subspecies of C. lupus under the biological common name of "wolf", the nominate subspecies being the Eurasian wolf (C. l. lupus) based on the type specimen that Linnaeus studied in Sweden.[11] Studies using paleogenomic techniques reveal that the modern wolf and the dog are sister taxa, as modern wolves are not closely related to the population of wolves that was first domesticated.[12] In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/Species Survival Commission's Canid Specialist Group considered the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo to be feral dogs Canis familiaris, and therefore should not be assessed for the IUCN Red List.[13]
+
+The phylogenetic descent of the extant wolf C. lupus from C. etruscus through C. mosbachensis is widely accepted.[14] The earliest fossils of C. lupus were found in what was once eastern Beringia at Old Crow, Yukon, Canada, and at Cripple Creek Sump, Fairbanks, Alaska. The age is not agreed upon but could date to one million years ago. Considerable morphological diversity existed among wolves by the Late Pleistocene. They had more robust skulls and teeth than modern wolves, often with a shortened snout, a pronounced development of the temporalis muscle, and robust premolars. It is proposed that these features were specialized adaptations for the processing of carcass and bone associated with the hunting and scavenging of Pleistocene megafauna. Compared with modern wolves, some Pleistocene wolves showed an increase in tooth breakage similar to that seen in the extinct dire wolf. This suggests they either often processed carcasses, or that they competed with other carnivores and needed to consume their prey quickly. Compared with those found in the modern spotted hyena, the frequency and location of tooth fractures in these wolves indicates they were habitual bone crackers.[15] In June 2019, the severed yet preserved head of a Pleistocene wolf, dated to over 40,000 years ago, was found close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia, Russia, near the Arctic Circle. The head was about 16 in (41 cm) long, much bigger than a modern wolf's head.[16][17][18]
+
+Genomic studies suggest modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population[19][20][21] that existed 20,000 years ago.[19] Studies in 2017 and 2018 found that the Himalayan wolf is part of a lineage that is basal to other wolves and split from them 691,000–740,000 years ago.[22][23] Other wolves appear to have originated in Beringia in an expansion that was driven by the huge ecological changes during the close of the Late Pleistocene.[23] A study in 2016 indicates that a population bottleneck was followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original morphologically diverse wolf populations were out-competed and replaced by more modern wolves.[24]
+
+A 2016 genomic study suggests that Old World and New World wolves split around 12,500 years ago followed by the divergence of the lineage that led to dogs from other Old World wolves around 11,100–12,300 years ago.[21] An extinct Late Pleistocene wolf may have been the ancestor of the dog,[25][15] with the dog's similarity to the extant wolf being the result of genetic admixture between the two.[15] The dingo, Basenji, Tibetan Mastiff and Chinese indigenous breeds are basal members of the domestic dog clade. The divergence time for wolves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is estimated to be fairly recent at around 1,600 years ago. Among New World wolves, the Mexican wolf diverged around 5,400 years ago.[21]
+
+In the distant past, there has been gene flow between African golden wolves, golden jackals, and gray wolves. The African golden wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African golden wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula shows admixture with Middle Eastern wolves and dogs.[26] There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves. This indicates the golden jackal ancestry found in North American wolves may have occurred before the divergence of the Eurasian and North American wolves.[27]
+
+The common ancestor of the coyote and the wolf has admixed with a ghost population of an extinct unidentified canid. This canid is genetically close to the dhole and evolved after the divergence of the African hunting dog from the other canid species. The basal position of the coyote compared to the wolf is proposed to be due to the coyote retaining more of the mitochondrial genome of this unidentified canid.[26] Similarly, a museum specimen of a wolf from southern China collected in 1963 showed a genome that was 12–14% admixed from this unknown canid.[28] In North America, most coyotes and wolves show varying degrees of past genetic admixture. The red wolf of the southeastern United States is a hybrid animal with 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry. In addition, there was found to be 60%:40% wolf to coyote genetics in Eastern timber wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes region wolves.[27]
+
+In more recent times, some male Italian wolves originated from dog ancestry, which indicates female wolves will breed with male dogs in the wild.[29] In the Caucasus Mountains, 10% of dogs including livestock guardian dogs, are first generation hybrids.[30] Although mating between golden jackals and wolves has never been observed, evidence of jackal-wolf hybridization was discovered through mitochondrial DNA analysis of jackals living in the Caucasus Mountains[30] and in Bulgaria.[31]
+
+The wolf is the largest member of the Canidae family,[32] and is further distinguished from coyotes and jackals by a broader snout, shorter ears, a shorter torso and a longer tail.[33][32] It is slender and powerfully built with a large, deeply descending rib cage, a sloping back, and a heavily muscled neck.[34] The wolf's legs are moderately longer than those of other canids, which enables the animal to move swiftly, and to overcome the deep snow that covers most of its geographical range in winter.[35] The ears are relatively small and triangular.[34] The wolf's head is large and heavy, with a wide forehead, strong jaws and a long, blunt muzzle.[36] The skull is 230–280 mm (9–11 in) in length and 130–150 mm (5–6 in) in width.[37] The teeth are heavy and large, making them better suited to crushing bone than those of other canids. They are not as specialized as those found in hyenas though.[38][39] Its molars have a flat chewing surface, but not to the same extent as the coyote, whose diet contains more vegetable matter.[40] Females tend to have narrower muzzles and foreheads, thinner necks, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders than males.[41]
+
+Adult wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height.[36] The tail measures 29–50 cm (11–20 in) in length, the ears 90–110 mm (3 1⁄2–4 3⁄8 in) in height, and the hind feet are 220–250 mm (8 5⁄8–9 7⁄8 in).[42] The size and weight of the modern wolf increases proportionally with latitude in accord with Bergmann's rule.[43] The mean body mass of the wolf is 40 kg (88 lb), the smallest specimen recorded at 12 kg (26 lb) and the largest at 79.4 kg (175 lb).[44][36] On average, European wolves weigh 38.5 kg (85 lb), North American wolves 36 kg (79 lb), and Indian and Arabian wolves 25 kg (55 lb).[45] Females in any given wolf population typically weigh 2.3–4.5 kg (5–10 lb) less than males. Wolves weighing over 54 kg (119 lb) are uncommon, though exceptionally large individuals have been recorded in Alaska and Canada.[46] In middle Russia, exceptionally large males are given a maximum weight of 69–79 kg (152–174 lb).[42]
+
+The wolf has very dense and fluffy winter fur, with a short undercoat and long, coarse guard hairs.[36] Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in spring and grow back in autumn.[45] The longest hairs occur on the back, particularly on the front quarters and neck. Especially long hairs grow on the shoulders and almost form a crest on the upper part of the neck. The hairs on the cheeks are elongated and form tufts. The ears are covered in short hairs and project from the fur. Short, elastic and closely adjacent hairs are present on the limbs from the elbows down to the calcaneal tendons.[36] The winter fur is highly resistant to the cold. Wolves in northern climates can rest comfortably in open areas at −40 °C (−40 °F) by placing their muzzles between the rear legs and covering their faces with their tail. Wolf fur provides better insulation than dog fur and does not collect ice when warm breath is condensed against it.[45]
+
+In cold climates, the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin to conserve body heat. The warmth of the foot pads is regulated independently from the rest of the body and is maintained at just above tissue-freezing point where the pads come in contact with ice and snow.[47] In warm climates, the fur is coarser and scarcer than in northern wolves.[36] Female wolves tend to have smoother furred limbs than males and generally develop the smoothest overall coats as they age. Older wolves generally have more white hairs on the tip of the tail, along the nose, and on the forehead. Winter fur is retained longest by lactating females, although with some hair loss around their teats.[41] Hair length on the middle of the back is 60–70 mm (2 3⁄8–2 3⁄4 in), and the guard hairs on the shoulders generally do not exceed 90 mm (3 1⁄2 in), but can reach 110–130 mm (4 3⁄8–5 1⁄8 in).[36]
+
+A wolf's coat colour is determined by its guard hairs. Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black.[48] The coat of the Eurasian wolf is a mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colours with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. The top of the head, forehead, under and between the eyes, and between the eyes and ears is gray with a reddish film. The neck is ochreous. Long, black tips on the hairs along the back form a broad stripe, with black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest and rear of the body. The sides of the body, tail, and outer limbs are a pale dirty ochreous colour, while the inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white. Apart from those wolves which are pure white or black, these tones vary little across geographical areas, although the patterns of these colours vary between individuals.[49]
+
+In North America, the coat colours of wolves follow Gloger's rule, wolves in the Canadian arctic being white and those in southern Canada, the U.S., and Mexico being predominantly gray. In some areas of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the coat colour is predominantly black, some being blue-gray and some with silver and black.[48] Differences in coat colour between sexes is absent in Eurasia;[50] females tend to have redder tones in North America.[51] Black-coloured wolves in North America acquired their colour from wolf-dog admixture after the first arrival of dogs that accompanied humans across the Bering Strait 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.[52] Research into the inheritance of white colour from dogs into wolves has yet to be undertaken.[53]
+
+Wolves occurred originally across Eurasia and North America. Deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of what it once was. The wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) in much of Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and in Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains.[2] Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.[40]
+
+Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be divided into large size 240–650 kg (530–1,430 lb) and medium size 23–130 kg (51–287 lb), and have a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members.[54][55] The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey,[40] with a pack of 15 able to bring down an adult moose.[56] The variation in diet between wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey.[57]
+
+In North America, the wolf's diet is dominated by wild large hoofed mammals (ungulates) and medium-sized mammals. In Asia and Europe, their diet is dominated by wild medium-sized hoofed mammals and domestic species. The wolf depends on wild species, and if these are not readily available, as in Asia, the wolf is more reliant on domestic species.[57] Across Eurasia, wolves prey mostly on moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar.[58] In North America, important range-wide prey are elk, moose, caribou, white-tailed deer and mule deer.[59] Wolves can digest their meal in a few hours and can feed several times in one day, making quick use of large quantities of meat.[60] A well-fed wolf stores fat under the skin, around the heart, intestines, kidneys, and bone marrow, particularly during the autumn and winter.[61]
+
+Nonetheless, wolves are not fussy eaters. Smaller-sized animals that may supplement their diet include rodents, hares, insectivores and smaller carnivores. They frequently eat waterfowl and their eggs. When such foods are insufficient, they prey on lizards, snakes, frogs, and large insects when available.[62] Wolves in northern Minnesota prey on northern pike in freshwater streams.[63] The diet of coastal wolves in Alaska includes 20% salmon,[64] while those of coastal wolves in British Columbia includes 25% marine sources, and those on the nearby islands 75%.[65]
+
+In Europe, wolves eat apples, pears, figs, melons, berries and cherries. In North America, wolves eat blueberries and raspberries. Wolves also eat grass, which may provide some vitamins.[66] They are known to eat the berries of mountain-ash, lily of the valley, bilberries, cowberries, European black nightshade, grain crops, and the shoots of reeds.[62]
+
+In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion.[62] In Eurasian areas with dense human activity, many wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage.[58] Prey in North America continue to occupy suitable habitats with low human density, the wolves eating livestock and garbage only in dire circumstances.[67] Cannibalism is not uncommon in wolves during harsh winters, when packs often attack weak or injured wolves and may eat the bodies of dead pack members.[62][68][69]
+
+Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur. In North America, incidents of wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them.[70] According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921, the infamous Custer Wolf relied on coyotes to accompany him and warn him of danger. Though they fed from his kills, he never allowed them to approach him.[71] Interactions have been observed in Eurasia between wolves and golden jackals, the latter's numbers being comparatively small in areas with high wolf densities.[36][70][72] Wolves also kill red, Arctic and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them.[36][73]
+
+Brown bears typically dominate wolf packs in disputes over carcasses, while wolf packs mostly prevail against bears when defending their den sites. Both species kill each other's young. Wolves eat the brown bears they kill, while brown bears seem to eat only young wolves.[74] Wolf interactions with American black bears are much rarer because of differences in habitat preferences. Wolves have been recorded on numerous occasions actively seeking out American black bears in their dens and killing them without eating them. Unlike brown bears, American black bears frequently lose against wolves in disputes over kills.[75] Wolves also dominate and sometimes kill wolverines, and will chase off those that attempt to scavenge from their kills. Wolverines escape from wolves in caves or up trees.[76]
+
+Wolves may interact and compete with felids, such as the Eurasian lynx, which may feed on smaller prey where wolves are present[77] and may be suppressed by large wolf populations.[78] Wolves encounter cougars along portions of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges. Wolves and cougars typically avoid encountering each other by hunting at different elevations for different prey (niche partitioning). In winter, when snow accumulation forces their prey into valleys, interactions between the two species become more likely. Wolves in packs usually dominate cougars and can steal their kills or even kill them,[79] while one-to-one encounters tend to be dominated by the cat. There are several documented cases of cougars killing wolves.[80] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities and disrupting the feline's behaviour.[81] Wolf and Siberian tiger interactions are well-documented in the Russian Far East, where tigers significantly depress wolf numbers, sometimes to the point of localized extinction. Only human depletion of tiger numbers appears to protect wolves from competitive exclusion from them. With perhaps only four proven records of tigers killing wolves, these cases are rare; attacks appear to be competitive rather than predatory in nature.[82][77]
+
+In Israel, Central Asia and India wolves may encounter striped hyenas, usually in disputes over carcasses. Striped hyenas feed extensively on wolf-killed carcasses in areas where the two species interact. One-to-one, hyenas dominate wolves, and may prey on them,[83] but wolf packs can drive off single or outnumbered hyenas.[84][85] There is at least one case in Israel of a hyena associating and cooperating with a wolf pack. It is proposed that the hyena could benefit from the wolves' superior ability to hunt large, agile prey. The wolves could benefit from the hyena's superior sense of smell, to locate and dig out tortoises, to crack open large bones, and to tear open discarded food containers like tin cans.[86]
+
+
+
+The wolf is a social animal.[36] Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one.[87] The wolf's basic social unit is the nuclear family consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring.[36] The average pack size in North America is eight wolves and in Europe 5.5 wolves.[43] The average pack across Eurasia consists of a family of eight wolves (two adults, juveniles, and yearlings),[36] or sometimes two or three such families,[40] with examples of exceptionally large packs consisting of up to 42 wolves being known.[88] Cortisol levels in wolves rise significantly when a pack member dies, indicating the presence of stress.[89] During times of prey abundance caused by calving or migration, different wolf packs may join together temporarily.[36]
+
+Offspring typically stay in the pack for 10–54 months before dispersing.[90] Triggers for dispersal include the onset of sexual maturity and competition within the pack for food.[91] The distance travelled by dispersing wolves varies widely; some stay in the vicinity of the parental group, while other individuals may travel great distances of upwards of 206 km (128 mi), 390 km (240 mi), and 670 km (420 mi) from their natal (birth) packs.[92] A new pack is usually founded by an unrelated dispersing male and female, travelling together in search of an area devoid of other hostile packs.[93] Wolf packs rarely adopt other wolves into their fold and typically kill them. In the rare cases where other wolves are adopted, the adoptee is almost invariably an immature animal of one to three years old, and unlikely to compete for breeding rights with the mated pair. This usually occurs between the months of February and May. Adoptee males may mate with an available pack female and then form their own pack. In some cases, a lone wolf is adopted into a pack to replace a deceased breeder.[88]
+
+Wolves are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive assuring a steady supply of prey. Territory size depends largely on the amount of prey available and the age of the pack's pups. They tend to increase in size in areas with low prey populations,[94] or when the pups reach the age of six months when they have the same nutritional needs as adults.[95] Wolf packs travel constantly in search of prey, covering roughly 9% of their territory per day, on average 25 km/d (16 mi/d). The core of their territory is on average 35 km2 (14 sq mi) where they spend 50% of their time.[94] Prey density tends to be much higher on the territory's periphery. Except out of desperation, wolves tend to avoid hunting on the fringes of their range to avoid fatal confrontations with neighbouring packs.[96] The smallest territory on record was held by a pack of six wolves in northeastern Minnesota, which occupied an estimated 33 km2 (13 sq mi), while the largest was held by an Alaskan pack of ten wolves encompassing 6,272 km2 (2,422 sq mi).[95] Wolf packs are typically settled, and usually leave their accustomed ranges only during severe food shortages.[36]
+
+Wolves advertise their territories to other packs through howling and scent marking. Scent marking involves urine, feces, and anal gland scents. This is more effective at advertising territory than howling and is often used in combination with scratch marks. Wolves increase their rate of scent marking when they encounter the marks of wolves from other packs. Lone wolves will rarely mark, but newly bonded pairs will scent mark the most.[40] These marks are generally left every 240 m (260 yd) throughout the territory on regular travelways and junctions. Such markers can last for two to three weeks,[95] and are typically placed near rocks, boulders, trees, or the skeletons of large animals.[36] Territorial fights are among the principal causes of wolf mortality, one study concluding that 14–65% of wolf deaths in Minnesota and the Denali National Park and Preserve were due to other wolves.[97]
+
+Wolves communicate to anticipate what their pack mates or other wolves might do next.[98] This includes the use of vocalization, body posture, scent, touch, and taste.[99] The phases of the moon have no effect on wolf vocalization, and despite popular belief, wolves do not howl at the moon.[100] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[101] Wolf howls can under certain conditions be heard over areas of up to 130 km2 (50 sq mi).[40] Other vocalizations include growls, barks and whines. Wolves do not bark as loudly or continuously as dogs do in confrontations, rather barking a few times and then retreating from a perceived danger.[102] Aggressive or self-assertive wolves are characterized by their slow and deliberate movements, high body posture and raised hackles, while submissive ones carry their bodies low, flatten their fur, and lower their ears and tail.[103] Raised leg urination is considered to be one of the most important forms of scent communication in the wolf, making up 60–80% of all scent marks observed.[104]
+
+Wolves are monogamous, mated pairs usually remaining together for life. Should one of the pair die, another mate is found quickly.[105] With wolves in the wild, inbreeding does not occur where outbreeding is possible.[106] Wolves become mature at the age of two years and sexually mature from the age of three years.[105] The age of first breeding in wolves depends largely on environmental factors: when food is plentiful, or when wolf populations are heavily managed, wolves can rear pups at younger ages to better exploit abundant resources. Females are capable of producing pups every year, one litter annually being the average.[107] Oestrus and rut begin in the second half of winter and lasts for two weeks.[105]
+
+Dens are usually constructed for pups during the summer period. When building dens, females make use of natural shelters like fissures in rocks, cliffs overhanging riverbanks and holes thickly covered by vegetation. Sometimes, the den is the appropriated burrow of smaller animals such as foxes, badgers or marmots. An appropriated den is often widened and partly remade. On rare occasions, female wolves dig burrows themselves, which are usually small and short with one to three openings. The den is usually constructed not more than 500 m (550 yd) away from a water source. It typically faces southwards where it can be better warmed by sunlight exposure, and the snow can thaw more quickly. Resting places, play areas for the pups, and food remains are commonly found around wolf dens. The odor of urine and rotting food emanating from the denning area often attracts scavenging birds like magpies and ravens. Though they mostly avoid areas within human sight, wolves have been known to nest near domiciles, paved roads and railways.[108] During pregnancy, female wolves remain in a den located away from the peripheral zone of their territories, where violent encounters with other packs are less likely to occur.[109]
+
+The gestation period lasts 62–75 days with pups usually being born in the spring months or early summer in very cold places such as on the tundra. Young females give birth to four to five young, and older females from six to eight young and up to 14. Their mortality rate is 60–80%.[110] Newborn wolf pups look similar to German Shepherd Dog pups.[111] They are born blind and deaf and are covered in short soft grayish-brown fur. They weigh 300–500 g (10 1⁄2–17 3⁄4 oz) at birth and begin to see after nine to 12 days. The milk canines erupt after one month. Pups first leave the den after three weeks. At one-and-a-half months of age, they are agile enough to flee from danger. Mother wolves do not leave the den for the first few weeks, relying on the fathers to provide food for them and their young. Pups begin to eat solid food at the age of three to four weeks. They have a fast growth rate during their first four months of life: during this period, a pup's weight can increase nearly 30 times.[110][112] Wolf pups begin play-fighting at the age of three weeks, though unlike young coyotes and foxes, their bites are gentle and controlled. Actual fights to establish hierarchy usually occur at five to eight weeks of age. This is in contrast to young coyotes and foxes, which may begin fighting even before the onset of play behaviour.[113] By autumn, the pups are mature enough to accompany the adults on hunts for large prey.[109]
+
+Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs; single wolves have occasionally been observed to kill large prey such as moose, bison and muskoxen unaided.[114][115] This contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.[115] The size of a wolf hunting pack is related to the number of pups that survived the previous winter, adult survival, and the rate of dispersing wolves leaving the pack. The optimal pack size for hunting elk is four wolves, and for bison a large pack size is more successful.[116]
+
+As well as their physical adaptations for hunting hoofed mammals, wolves possess certain behavioural, cognitive, and psychological adaptations to assist with their hunting lifestyle. Wolves are excellent learners that match or outperform domestic dogs. They can use gaze to focus attention on where other wolves are looking. This is important because wolves do not use vocalization when hunting. In laboratory tests, they appear to exhibit insight, foresight, understanding, and the ability to plan. [117] To survive, wolves must be able to solve two problems—finding a prey animal, then confronting it.[117]
+
+Wolves move around their territory when hunting, using the same trails for extended periods. After snowfalls, wolves find their old trails and continue using them. These follow the banks of rivers, the shorelines of lakes, through ravines overgrown with shrubs, through plantations, or roads and human paths.[118] Wolves are nocturnal predators. During the winter, a pack will commence hunting in the twilight of early evening and will hunt all night, traveling tens of kilometres. Sometimes hunting large prey occurs during the day. During the summer, wolves generally tend to hunt individually, ambushing their prey and rarely giving pursuit.[119]
+
+The wolf usually travels at a loping pace, placing one of its paws directly in front of the other. This gait can be maintained for hours at a rate of 8–9 km/h (5.0–5.6 mph).[120] On bare paths, a wolf can quickly achieve speeds of 50–60 km/h (31–37 mph). The wolf has a running gait of 55–70 km/h (34–43 mph), can leap 5 m (16 ft) horizontally in a single bound, and can maintain rapid pursuit for at least 20 minutes.[92] A wolf's foot is large and flexible, which allows it to tread on a wide variety of terrain. A wolf's legs are long compared to their body size allowing them to travel up to 76 km (47 mi) in 12 hours. This adaptation allows wolves to locate prey within hours, but it can take days to find prey that can be killed without great risk. Moose and deer live singly in the summer. Caribou live in herds of thousands which presents dangers for wolves. Elk live in small herds and these are a safer target.[117]
+
+A wolf carries its head at the same level as its back, lifting it only when alert.[36] In one study, wolves detected moose using scent ten times, vision six times, and once by following tracks in the snow. Their vision is as good as a human's, and they can smell prey at least 2.4 km (1 1⁄2 mi) away. One wolf travelled to a herd 103 km (64 mi) away. A human can detect the smell of a forest fire over the same distance from downwind. The wolf's sense of smell is at least comparable to that of the domestic dog, which is at least 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's.[117]
+
+When hunting large gregarious prey, wolves will try to isolate an individual from its group.[121] If successful, a wolf pack can bring down game that will feed it for days, but one error in judgement can lead to serious injury or death. Most large prey have developed defensive adaptations and behaviours. Wolves have been killed while attempting to bring down bison, elk, moose, muskoxen, and even by one of their smallest hoofed prey, the white-tailed deer.[117] Although people often believe that wolves can easily overcome any of their prey, their success rate in hunting hoofed prey is usually low.[122]
+
+Generally, bison, elk, and moose will stand their ground, then the wolves must struggle with them to bring them down. Often caribou and deer will flee, but sometimes deer also make a stand. With smaller prey like beaver, geese, and hares, there is no risk to the wolf.[117] If the targeted animal stands its ground, wolves either ignore it, or try to intimidate it into running.[114] Wolves, or even a wolf on its own, will attempt to frighten a herd into panicking and dispersing.[123]
+
+When wolves encounter prey that flees, they give chase. The speed of sprinting prey is closely related to the speed of their main predators. Wolves can run at 56–64 km/h (35–40 mph) across several kilometres and will often pursue prey for at least 1 km (1⁄2 mi). One wolf chased a caribou for 8 km (5 mi), another chased and tracked a deer for 20 km (12 mi), and one 11-year-old wolf chased and caught an Arctic hare after seven minutes. Most wolf prey will try to run to water, where they will either escape or be better placed to attempt to ward off the wolves.[117]
+
+The wolf must give chase and gain on its fleeing prey, slow it down by biting through thick hair and hide, and then disable it enough to begin feeding.[117] After chasing and then confronting a large prey animal, the wolf makes use of its 6 cm (2 1⁄2 in) fangs and its powerful masseter muscles to deliver a bite force of 28 kg/cm2 (400 lbf/in2), which is capable of breaking open the skulls of many of its prey animals. The wolf leaps at its quarry and tears at it. One wolf was observed being dragged for dozens of metres attached to the hind leg of a moose; another was seen being dragged over a fallen log while attached to a bull elk's nose.[116]
+
+The most common point of wolf attacks on moose is the upper hind legs.[124][125][126] Hind leg wounds are inflicted from the rear, midway up the hock with the canine teeth. These leave gaping skin perforations over 4 cm (1 1⁄2 in) in diameter. Although blood loss, muscle damage, and tendon exposure may occur, there is no evidence of hamstringing. Attacks also occur on the fleshy nose, the back and sides of the neck, the ears, and the perineum.[126] Wolves may wound large prey and then lie around resting for hours before killing it when it is weaker due to blood loss, thereby lessening the risk of injury to themselves.[127]
+
+With medium-sized prey, such as roe deer or sheep, wolves kill by biting the throat, severing nerve tracks and the carotid artery, thus causing the animal to die within a few seconds to a minute. With small, mouselike prey, wolves leap in a high arc and immobilize it with their forepaws.[128] When prey is vulnerable and abundant, wolves may occasionally surplus kill. Such instances are common with domestic animals, but rare with wild prey. In the wild, surplus killing occurs primarily during late winter or spring, when snow is unusually deep (thus impeding the movements of prey)[129] or during the denning period, when den bound wolves require a ready supply of meat.[130] Medium-sized prey are especially vulnerable to surplus killing, as the swift throat-biting method allows wolves to kill one animal quickly and move on to another.[128]
+
+Once prey is brought down, wolves begin to feed excitedly, ripping and tugging at the carcass in all directions, and bolting down large chunks of it.[131] The breeding pair typically monopolizes food to continue producing pups. When food is scarce, this is done at the expense of other family members, especially non-pups.[132] The breeding pair typically eats first. They usually work the hardest at killing prey, and may rest after a long hunt and allow the rest of the family to eat undisturbed. Once the breeding pair has finished eating, the rest of the family tears off pieces of the carcass and transports them to secluded areas where they can eat in peace. Wolves typically commence feeding by consuming the larger internal organs, like the heart, liver, lungs, and stomach lining. The kidneys and spleen are eaten once they are exposed, followed by the muscles.[133] A wolf can eat 15–19% of its body weight in a single feeding.[61]
+
+Viral diseases carried by wolves include: rabies, canine distemper, canine parvovirus, infectious canine hepatitis, papillomatosis, and canine coronavirus.[134] Wolves are a major host for rabies in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and India.[135] In wolves, the incubation period is eight to 21 days, and results in the host becoming agitated, deserting its pack, and travelling up to 80 km (50 mi) a day, thus increasing the risk of infecting other wolves. Infected wolves do not show any fear of humans, most documented wolf attacks on people being attributed to rabid animals. Although canine distemper is lethal in dogs, it has not been recorded to kill wolves, except in Canada and Alaska. The canine parvovirus, which causes death by dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and endotoxic shock or sepsis, is largely survivable in wolves, but can be lethal to pups. Wolves may catch infectious canine hepatitis from dogs, though there are no records of wolves dying from it. Papillomatosis has been recorded only once in wolves, and likely does not cause serious illness or death, though it may alter feeding behaviours. The canine coronavirus has been recorded in Alaskan wolves, infections being most prevalent in winter months.[134]
+
+Bacterial diseases carried by wolves include: brucellosis, Lyme disease, leptospirosis, tularemia, bovine tuberculosis,[136] listeriosis and anthrax.[135] Wolves can catch Brucella suis from wild and domestic reindeer. While adult wolves tend not to show any clinical signs, it can severely weaken the pups of infected females. Although lyme disease can debilitate individual wolves, it does not appear to significantly affect wolf populations. Leptospirosis can be contracted through contact with infected prey or urine, and can cause fever, anorexia, vomiting, anemia, hematuria, icterus, and death. Wolves living near farms are more vulnerable to the disease than those living in the wilderness, probably because of prolonged contact with infected domestic animal waste. Wolves may catch tularemia from lagomorph prey, though its effect on wolves is unknown. Although bovine tuberculosis is not considered a major threat to wolves, it has been recorded to have killed two wolf pups in Canada.[136]
+
+Wolves carry ectoparasites and endoparasites; those in the former Soviet Union have been recorded to carry at least 50 species.[135] Most of these parasites infect wolves without adverse effects, though the effects may become more serious in sick or malnourished specimens.[137] Parasitic infection in wolves is of particular concern to people. Wolves can spread them to dogs, which in turn can carry the parasites to humans. In areas where wolves inhabit pastoral areas, the parasites can be spread to livestock.[135]
+
+Wolves are often infested with a variety of arthropod exoparasites, including fleas, ticks, lice, and mites. The most harmful to wolves, particularly pups, is the mange mite (Sarcoptes scabiei),[137] though they rarely develop full-blown mange, unlike foxes.[36] Lice, such as Trichodectes canis, may cause sickness in wolves, but rarely death. Ticks of the genus Ixodes can infect wolves with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.[137] The tick Dermacentor pictus also infests wolves. Other ectoparasites include chewing lice, sucking lice and the fleas Pulex irritans and Ctenocephalides canis.[36]
+
+Endoparasites known to infect wolves include: protozoans and helminths (flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and thorny-headed worms). Of 30,000 protozoan species, only a few have been recorded to infect wolves: Isospora, Toxoplasma, Sarcocystis, Babesia, and Giardia.[137] Some wolves carry Neospora caninum, which can be spread to cattle and is correlated with bovine miscarriages.[138] Among flukes, the most common in North American wolves is Alaria, which infects small rodents and amphibians that are eaten by wolves. Upon reaching maturity, Alaria migrates to the wolf's intestine, but does little harm. Metorchis conjunctus, which enters wolves through eating fish, infects the wolf's liver or gall bladder, causing liver disease, inflammation of the pancreas, and emaciation. Most other fluke species reside in the wolf's intestine, though Paragonimus westermani lives in the lungs. Tapeworms are commonly found in wolves, as their primary hosts are ungulates, small mammals, and fish, which wolves feed upon. Tapeworms generally cause little harm in wolves, though this depends on the number and size of the parasites, and the sensitivity of the host. Symptoms often include constipation, toxic and allergic reactions, irritation of the intestinal mucosa, and malnutrition. Infections by the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus in ungulate populations tend to increase in areas with high wolf densities, as wolves can shed Echinoccocus eggs in their feces onto grazing areas.[137]
+
+Wolves can carry over 30 roundworm species, though most roundworm infections appear benign, depending on the number of worms and the age of the host. Ancylostoma caninum attaches itself on the intestinal wall to feed on the host's blood, and can cause hyperchromic anemia, emaciation, diarrhea, and possibly death. Toxocara canis, a hookworm known to infect wolf pups in the uterus, can cause intestinal irritation, bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea. Wolves may catch Dioctophyma renale from minks, which infects the kidneys, and can grow to lengths of 100 cm (40 in). D. renale causes the complete destruction of the kidney's functional tissue and can be fatal if both kidneys are infected. Wolves can tolerate low levels of Dirofilaria immitis for many years without showing any ill effects, though high levels can kill wolves through cardiac enlargement and congestive hepatopathy. Wolves probably become infected with Trichinella spiralis by eating infected ungulates. Although T. spiralis is not known to produce clinical signs in wolves, it can cause emaciation, salivation, and crippling muscle pains in dogs. Thorny-headed worms rarely infect wolves, though three species have been identified in Russian wolves: Nicolla skrjabini, Macrocantorhynchus catulinus, and Moniliformis moniliformis.[137]
+
+The global wild wolf population in 2003 was estimated at 300,000.[139] Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s. This has fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range as a result of legal protection, changes in land use, and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the wolf. Despite these threats, the IUCN classifies the wolf as Least Concern on its Red List due to its relatively widespread range and stable population. The species is listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in its Appendix II, indicating that it is not threatened with extinction. However, those wolf populations living in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan are listed in its Appendix I, indicating that these may become extinct without restrictions on their trade.[2]
+
+In Canada, 50,000–60,000 wolves live in 80% of their historical range, making Canada an important stronghold for the species.[40] Under Canadian law, First Nations people can hunt wolves without restrictions, but others must acquire licenses for the hunting and trapping seasons. As many as 4,000 wolves may be harvested in Canada each year.[140] The wolf is a protected species in national parks under the Canada National Parks Act.[141] In Alaska, 7,000–11,000 wolves are found on 85% of the state's 1,517,733 km2 (586,000 sq mi). Wolves may be hunted or trapped with a license; around 1,200 wolves are harvested annually.[142]
+
+In the contiguous United States, wolf declines were caused by the expansion of agriculture, the decimation of the wolf's main prey species like the American bison, and extermination campaigns.[40] Wolves were given protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and have since returned to parts of their former range thanks to both natural recolonizations and reintroductions.[143] Wolf populations in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan number over 4,000 as of 2018.[144] Wolves also occupy much of the northern Rocky Mountains region, with at least 1,704 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as of 2015. They have also established populations in Washington and Oregon.[145] In Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated from 1977 to 1980 in capturing all Mexican wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction and established captive breeding programs for reintroduction.[146] As of 2018, there were 230 Mexican wolves living in Mexico, 64 in Arizona, 67 in New Mexico, and 240 in captive breeding programs in both countries.[147]
+
+Europe, excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, has 17,000 wolves in more than 28 countries.[148] In the European Union, the wolf is strictly protected under the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Appendix II) and the 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Annex II and IV). There is extensive legal protection in many European countries, although there are national exceptions and enforcement is variable and often non-existent.[2]
+
+Wolves have been persecuted in Europe for centuries, having been exterminated in Great Britain by 1684, in Ireland by 1770, in Central Europe by 1899, in France by the 1930s, and in much of Scandinavia by the early 1970s. They continued to survive in parts of Finland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.[149] Since 1980, European wolves have rebounded and expanded into parts of their former range. The decline of the traditional pastoral and rural economies seems to have ended the need to exterminate the wolf in parts of Europe.[140] As of 2016, estimates of wolf numbers include: 4,000 in the Balkans, 3,460–3,849 in the Carpathian Mountains, 1,700–2,240 in the Baltic states, 1,100–2,400 in the Italian peninsula, and around 2,500 in the northwest Iberian peninsula as of 2007.[148]
+
+In the former Soviet Union, wolf populations have retained much of their historical range despite Soviet-era large scale extermination campaigns. Their numbers range from 1,500 in Georgia, to 20,000 in Kazakhstan and up to 45,000 in Russia.[150] In Russia, the wolf is regarded as a pest because of its attacks on livestock, and wolf management means controlling their numbers by destroying them throughout the year. Russian history over the past century shows that reduced hunting leads to an abundance of wolves.[151] The Russian government has continued to pay bounties for wolves and annual harvests of 20-30% do not appear to significantly affect their numbers.[152]
+
+During the 19th century, wolves were widespread in many parts of the Holy Land east and west of the Jordan River, but decreased considerably in number between 1964 and 1980, largely due to persecution by farmers.[153] In the Middle East, only Israel and Oman give wolves explicit legal protection.[154] Israel has protected its wolves since 1954 and has maintained a moderately sized population of 150 through effective enforcement of conservation policies. These wolves have moved into neighboring countries. Approximately 300–600 wolves inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.[155] The wolf also appears to be widespread in Iran.[156] Turkey has an estimated population of about 7,000 wolves.[157] Outside of Turkey, wolf populations in the Middle East may total 1,000–2,000.[154]
+
+In southern Asia, the northern regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important strongholds for wolves. The wolf has been protected in India since 1972.[158] Hindus traditionally considered the hunting of wolves, even dangerous ones, as taboo, for fear of causing a bad harvest. The Santals considered them fair game, as they did every other forest-dwelling animal.[159] During British rule in India, wolves were not considered game species, and were killed primarily in response to them attacking game herds, livestock, and people.[160] The Indian wolf is distributed across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.[161] As of 2019, it is estimated that there are around 2,000–3,000 Indian wolves in the country.[162] In East Asia, Mongolia's population numbers 10,000–20,000. In China, Heilongjiang has roughly 650 wolves, Xinjiang has 10,000 and Tibet has 2,000.[163] 2017 evidence suggests that wolves range across all of mainland China.[164] Wolves have been historically persecuted in China[165] but have been legally protected since 1998.[166] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed in 1905.[167]
+
+The wolf is a common motif in the mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout its historical range. The Ancient Greeks associated wolves with Apollo, the god of light and order.[168] The Ancient Romans connected the wolf with their god of war and agriculture Mars,[169] and believed their city's founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf.[170] Norse mythology includes the feared giant wolf Fenrir, eldest child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda,[171] and Geri and Freki, Odin's faithful pets.[172] The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, who viewed it as the lord of all animals and as the only effective defender against evil.[173]
+
+In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. When humans killed it, they were punished with death, destruction and the loss of immortality.[174] For the Pawnee, Sirius is the "wolf star" and its disappearance and reappearance signified the wolf moving to and from the spirit world. Both the Pawnee and Blackfoot call the Milky Way the "wolf trail".[175] The wolf is also an important totem animal for the Tlingit and Tsimshian.[176] In Chinese astronomy, the wolf represents Sirius as the "blue beast" and the star itself is called the "heavenly wolf".[177] In China, the wolf was traditionally associated with greed and cruelty and wolf epithets were used to describe negative behaviours such as cruelty ("wolf's heart"), mistrust ("wolf's look") and lechery ("wolf-sex").[178]
+
+Tengrism places high importance on the wolf, as it is thought that, when howling, it is praying to Tengri, thus making it the only creature other than man to worship a deity.[179] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the wolf is ridden by gods of protection. In Vedic Hinduism, the wolf is a symbol of the night and the daytime quail must escape from its jaws.[178] In Hindu mythology, Krishna, to convince the people of Vraja to migrate to Vṛndāvana, creates hundreds of wolves from his hairs, which frighten the inhabitants of Vraja into making the journey.[180] In Tantric Buddhism, wolves are depicted as inhabitants of graveyards and destroyers of corpses.[178] In Zoroastrianism, the wolf has been demonized as the creation of Ahriman.[181]
+
+The concept of people turning into wolves has been present in many cultures. One Greek myth tells of Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his evil deeds.[182] The legend of the werewolf has been widespread in European folklore and involves people willingly turning into wolves to attack and kill others.[183] The Navajo have traditionally believed that witches would turn into wolves by donning wolf skins and would kill people and raid graveyards.[184] The Dena'ina believed wolves were once men and viewed them as brothers.[168] Similarly, in Turkic mythology wolves were believed to be the ancestors of their people.[185]
+
+Aesop featured wolves in several of his fables, playing on the concerns of Ancient Greece's settled, sheep-herding world. His most famous is the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is directed at those who knowingly raise false alarms, and from which the idiomatic phrase "to cry wolf" is derived. Some of his other fables concentrate on maintaining the trust between shepherds and guard dogs in their vigilance against wolves, as well as anxieties over the close relationship between wolves and dogs. Although Aesop used wolves to warn, criticize and moralize about human behaviour, his portrayals added to the wolf's image as a deceitful and dangerous animal.[186] The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have used wolves as illustrations of the dangers his followers, whom he represents as sheep, would face should they follow him.(Matthew 7:15, Matthew 10:16 and Acts 20:29).[187] In the Jataka tales the wolf is portrayed as a trickster, including one story in which it makes a hunter stop playing dead by pulling on his club.[188] In another story, the wolf tricks and eats some rats by pretending to be lame but is foiled by the chief rat.[189]
+
+Isengrim the wolf, a character first appearing in the 12th-century Latin poem Ysengrimus, is a major character in the Reynard Cycle, where he stands for the low nobility, whilst his adversary, Reynard the fox, represents the peasant hero. Isengrim is forever the victim of Reynard's wit and cruelty, often dying at the end of each story.[190] The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood", first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, is considered to have further contributed to the wolf's negative reputation in the Western world. The Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a villain capable of imitating human speech and disguising itself with human clothing. The character has been interpreted as an allegorical sexual predator.[191] Villainous wolf characters also appear in The Three Little Pigs and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats".[192] The hunting of wolves, and their attacks on humans and livestock, feature prominently in Russian literature, and are included in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev, and others. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chekhov's Peasants both feature scenes in which wolves are hunted with hounds and Borzois.[193] The musical Peter and the Wolf involves a wolf being captured for eating a farm duck, but is spared and sent to a zoo.[194]
+
+Wolves are among the central characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His portrayal of wolves has been praised posthumously by wolf biologists for his depiction of them: rather than being villainous or gluttonous, as was common in wolf portrayals at the time of the book's publication, they are shown as living in amiable family groups and drawing on the experience of infirm but experienced elder pack members.[195] Farley Mowat's largely fictional 1963 memoir Never Cry Wolf is widely considered to be the most popular book on wolves, having been adapted into a Hollywood film and taught in several schools decades after its publication. Although credited with having changed popular perceptions on wolves by portraying them as loving, cooperative and noble, it has been criticized for its idealization of wolves and its factual inaccuracies.[196][197][198] Lü Jiamin's 2004 semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem uses wolves as symbols of freedom and independence. He associates the Mongolian nomads with wolves and compares the Han Chinese of the present day to sheep, claiming they accept any leadership. As such, the novel has caused controversy with the Chinese Communist Party.[199][200]
+
+The wolf is a frequent charge in English heraldry. It is illustrated as a supporter on the shields of Lord Welby, Rendel, and Viscount Wolseley, and can be found on the coat of arms of Lovett and the vast majority of the Wilsons and Lows. The demi-wolf is a common crest, appearing in the arms and crests of members of many families, including that of the Wolfes, whose crest depicts a demi-wolf holding a crown in its paws, in reference to the assistance the family gave to Charles II during the Battle of Worcester. Wolf heads are common in Scottish heraldry, particularly in the coats of Clan Robertson and Skene. The wolf is the most common animal in Spanish heraldry and is often depicted as carrying a lamb in its mouth, or across its back.[201]
+
+The wolf is featured on the flags of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Pawnee.[202] The Chechen wolf has been a symbol of the Chechen Nation.[203] In modern times, the wolf is widely used as an emblem for military and paramilitary groups. It is the unofficial symbol of the spetsnaz, and serves as the logo of the Turkish Gray Wolves. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Serb paramilitary units adopted the wolf as their symbol, including the White Wolves and the Wolves of Vučjak.[204]
+
+Human presence appears to stress wolves, as seen by increased cortisol levels in instances such as snowmobiling near their territory.[205]
+
+Livestock depredation has been one of the primary reasons for hunting wolves and can pose a severe problem for wolf conservation. As well as causing economic losses, the threat of wolf predation causes great stress on livestock producers, and no foolproof solution of preventing such attacks short of exterminating wolves has been found.[206] Some nations help offset economic losses to wolves through compensation programs or state insurance.[207] Domesticated animals are easy prey for wolves, as they have been bred under constant human protection, and are thus unable to defend themselves very well.[208] Wolves typically resort to attacking livestock when wild prey is depleted. In Eurasia, a large part of the diet of some wolf populations consists of livestock, while such incidents are rare in North America, where healthy populations of wild prey have been largely restored.[206]
+
+The majority of losses occur during the summer grazing period, untended livestock in remote pastures being the most vulnerable to wolf predation.[209] The most frequently targeted livestock species are sheep (Europe), domestic reindeer (northern Scandinavia), goats (India), horses (Mongolia), cattle and turkeys (North America).[206] The number of animals killed in single attacks varies according to species: most attacks on cattle and horses result in one death, while turkeys, sheep and domestic reindeer may be killed in surplus.[210] Wolves mainly attack livestock when the animals are grazing, though they occasionally break into fenced enclosures.[211]
+
+A review of the studies on the competitive effects of dogs on sympatric carnivores did not mention any research on competition between dogs and wolves.[212][213] Competition would favour the wolf, which is known to kill dogs; however wolves usually live in pairs or in small packs in areas with high human persecution, giving them a disadvantage facing large groups of dogs.[213][214]
+
+Wolves kill dogs on occasion, and some wolf populations rely on dogs as an important food source. In Croatia, wolves kill more dogs than sheep, and wolves in Russia appear to limit stray dog populations. Wolves may display unusually bold behaviour when attacking dogs accompanied by people, sometimes ignoring nearby humans. Wolf attacks on dogs may occur both in house yards and in forests. Wolf attacks on hunting dogs are considered a major problem in Scandinavia and Wisconsin.[206][215] The most frequently killed hunting breeds in Scandinavia are Harriers, older animals being most at risk, likely because they are less timid than younger animals, and react to the presence of wolves differently. Large hunting dogs such as Swedish Elkhounds are more likely to survive wolf attacks because of their better ability to defend themselves.[215]
+
+Although the number of dogs killed each year by wolves is relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves' entering villages and farmyards to prey on them. In many cultures, dogs are seen as family members, or at least working team members, and losing one can lead to strong emotional responses such as demanding more liberal hunting regulations.[213]
+
+Dogs that are employed to guard sheep help to mitigate human–wolf conflicts, and are often proposed as one of the non-lethal tools in the conservation of wolves.[213][216] Shepherd dogs are not particularly aggressive, but they can disrupt potential wolf predation by displaying what is to the wolf ambiguous behaviours, such as barking, social greeting, invitation to play or aggression. The historical use of shepherd dogs across Eurasia has been effective against wolf predation,[213][217] especially when confining sheep in the presence of several livestock guardian dogs.[213][218] Shepherd dogs are sometimes killed by wolves.[213]
+
+The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey.[219] How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people.[220] Although wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed.[219]
+
+Predatory attacks may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase.[219] Cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.[36] The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women.[219] Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the summer period in the evening hours, and often within human settlements.[221]
+
+Cases of rabid wolves are low when compared to other species, as wolves do not serve as primary reservoirs of the disease, but can be infected by animals such as dogs, jackals and foxes. Incidents of rabies in wolves are very rare in North America, though numerous in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. Wolves apparently develop the "furious" phase of rabies to a very high degree. This, coupled with their size and strength, makes rabid wolves perhaps the most dangerous of rabid animals.[219] Bites from rabid wolves are 15 times more dangerous than those of rabid dogs.[222] Rabid wolves usually act alone, travelling large distances and often biting large numbers of people and domestic animals. Most rabid wolf attacks occur in the spring and autumn periods. Unlike with predatory attacks, the victims of rabid wolves are not eaten, and the attacks generally occur only on a single day. The victims are chosen at random, though most cases involve adult men. During the fifty years up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, and more than two hundred in southern Asia.[219]
+
+Theodore Roosevelt said wolves are difficult to hunt because of their elusiveness, sharp senses, high endurance, and ability to quickly incapacitate and kill a dog.[223] Historic methods included killing of spring-born litters in their dens, coursing with dogs (usually combinations of sighthounds, Bloodhounds and Fox Terriers), poisoning with strychnine, and trapping.[224][225]
+
+A popular method of wolf hunting in Russia involves trapping a pack within a small area by encircling it with fladry poles carrying a human scent. This method relies heavily on the wolf's fear of human scents, though it can lose its effectiveness when wolves become accustomed to the odor. Some hunters can lure wolves by imitating their calls. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, wolves are traditionally hunted with eagles and falcons, though this practice is declining, as experienced falconers are becoming few in number. Shooting wolves from aircraft is highly effective, due to increased visibility and direct lines of fire.[225] Several types of dog, including the Borzoi and Kyrgyz Tajgan, have been specifically bred for wolf hunting.[213]
+
+Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes kept as exotic pets. Although closely related to domestic dogs, wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, being generally less responsive to human commands and more likely to act aggressively. A person is more likely to be fatally mauled by a pet wolf or wolf-dog hybrid than by a dog.[226]
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+See Subspecies of Canis lupus
+
+The wolf (Canis lupus[a]), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise non-domestic/feral subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of Canidae, males averaging 40 kg (88 lb) and females 37 kg (82 lb). Wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height. The wolf is also distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. The wolf is nonetheless related closely enough to smaller Canis species, such as the coyote and the golden jackal, to produce fertile hybrids with them. The banded fur of a wolf is usually mottled white, brown, gray, and black, although subspecies in the arctic region may be nearly all white.
+
+Of all members of the genus Canis, the wolf is most specialized for cooperative game hunting as demonstrated by its physical adaptations to tackling large prey, its more social nature, and its highly advanced expressive behaviour. It travels in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring. Offspring may leave to form their own packs on the onset of sexual maturity and in response to competition for food within the pack. Wolves are also territorial and fights over territory are among the principal causes of wolf mortality. The wolf is mainly a carnivore and feeds on large wild hooved mammals as well as smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs. Pathogens and parasites, notably rabies, may infect wolves.
+
+The global wild wolf population was estimated to be 300,000 in 2003 and is considered to be of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Wolves have a long history of interactions with humans, having been despised and hunted in most pastoral communities because of their attacks on livestock, while conversely being respected in some agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Although the fear of wolves exists in many human societies, the majority of recorded attacks on people have been attributed to animals suffering from rabies. Wolf attacks on humans are rare because wolves are relatively few, live away from people, and have developed a fear of humans because of their experiences with hunters, ranchers, and shepherds.
+
+The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos).[4][5] The name "gray wolf" refers to the grayish colour of the species.[6]
+
+Since pre-Christian times, Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons took on wulf as a prefix or suffix in their names. Examples include Wulfhere ("Wolf Army", or "He whose army is the wolf"), Cynewulf ("Royal Wolf"), Cēnwulf ("Bold Wolf"), Wulfheard ("Wolf-hard"), Earnwulf ("Eagle Wolf"), Wulfstān ("Wolf Stone") Æðelwulf ("Noble Wolf"), Wolfhroc ("Wolf-Frock"), Wolfhetan ("Wolf Hide"), Isangrim ("Gray Mask"), Scrutolf ("Garb Wolf"), Wolfgang ("Wolf Gait") and Wolfdregil ("Wolf Runner").[7]
+
+Gray wolf
+
+Coyote
+
+African golden wolf
+
+Ethiopian wolf
+
+Golden jackal
+
+Dhole
+
+African wild dog
+
+Side-striped jackal
+
+Black-backed jackal
+
+In 1758, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus published in his Systema Naturae the binomial nomenclature.[3] Canis is the Latin word meaning "dog",[9] and under this genus he listed the doglike carnivores including domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals. He classified the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, and the wolf as Canis lupus.[3] Linnaeus considered the dog to be a separate species from the wolf because of its cauda recurvata—its upturning tail—which is not found in any other canid.[10]
+
+In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under C. lupus 36 wild subspecies, and proposed two additional subspecies: familiaris (Linnaeus, 1758) and dingo (Meyer, 1793). Wozencraft included hallstromi—the New Guinea singing dog—as a taxonomic synonym for the dingo. Wozencraft referred to a 1999 mitochondrial DNA study as one of the guides in forming his decision, and listed the 38 subspecies of C. lupus under the biological common name of "wolf", the nominate subspecies being the Eurasian wolf (C. l. lupus) based on the type specimen that Linnaeus studied in Sweden.[11] Studies using paleogenomic techniques reveal that the modern wolf and the dog are sister taxa, as modern wolves are not closely related to the population of wolves that was first domesticated.[12] In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/Species Survival Commission's Canid Specialist Group considered the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo to be feral dogs Canis familiaris, and therefore should not be assessed for the IUCN Red List.[13]
+
+The phylogenetic descent of the extant wolf C. lupus from C. etruscus through C. mosbachensis is widely accepted.[14] The earliest fossils of C. lupus were found in what was once eastern Beringia at Old Crow, Yukon, Canada, and at Cripple Creek Sump, Fairbanks, Alaska. The age is not agreed upon but could date to one million years ago. Considerable morphological diversity existed among wolves by the Late Pleistocene. They had more robust skulls and teeth than modern wolves, often with a shortened snout, a pronounced development of the temporalis muscle, and robust premolars. It is proposed that these features were specialized adaptations for the processing of carcass and bone associated with the hunting and scavenging of Pleistocene megafauna. Compared with modern wolves, some Pleistocene wolves showed an increase in tooth breakage similar to that seen in the extinct dire wolf. This suggests they either often processed carcasses, or that they competed with other carnivores and needed to consume their prey quickly. Compared with those found in the modern spotted hyena, the frequency and location of tooth fractures in these wolves indicates they were habitual bone crackers.[15] In June 2019, the severed yet preserved head of a Pleistocene wolf, dated to over 40,000 years ago, was found close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia, Russia, near the Arctic Circle. The head was about 16 in (41 cm) long, much bigger than a modern wolf's head.[16][17][18]
+
+Genomic studies suggest modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population[19][20][21] that existed 20,000 years ago.[19] Studies in 2017 and 2018 found that the Himalayan wolf is part of a lineage that is basal to other wolves and split from them 691,000–740,000 years ago.[22][23] Other wolves appear to have originated in Beringia in an expansion that was driven by the huge ecological changes during the close of the Late Pleistocene.[23] A study in 2016 indicates that a population bottleneck was followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original morphologically diverse wolf populations were out-competed and replaced by more modern wolves.[24]
+
+A 2016 genomic study suggests that Old World and New World wolves split around 12,500 years ago followed by the divergence of the lineage that led to dogs from other Old World wolves around 11,100–12,300 years ago.[21] An extinct Late Pleistocene wolf may have been the ancestor of the dog,[25][15] with the dog's similarity to the extant wolf being the result of genetic admixture between the two.[15] The dingo, Basenji, Tibetan Mastiff and Chinese indigenous breeds are basal members of the domestic dog clade. The divergence time for wolves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is estimated to be fairly recent at around 1,600 years ago. Among New World wolves, the Mexican wolf diverged around 5,400 years ago.[21]
+
+In the distant past, there has been gene flow between African golden wolves, golden jackals, and gray wolves. The African golden wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African golden wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula shows admixture with Middle Eastern wolves and dogs.[26] There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves. This indicates the golden jackal ancestry found in North American wolves may have occurred before the divergence of the Eurasian and North American wolves.[27]
+
+The common ancestor of the coyote and the wolf has admixed with a ghost population of an extinct unidentified canid. This canid is genetically close to the dhole and evolved after the divergence of the African hunting dog from the other canid species. The basal position of the coyote compared to the wolf is proposed to be due to the coyote retaining more of the mitochondrial genome of this unidentified canid.[26] Similarly, a museum specimen of a wolf from southern China collected in 1963 showed a genome that was 12–14% admixed from this unknown canid.[28] In North America, most coyotes and wolves show varying degrees of past genetic admixture. The red wolf of the southeastern United States is a hybrid animal with 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry. In addition, there was found to be 60%:40% wolf to coyote genetics in Eastern timber wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes region wolves.[27]
+
+In more recent times, some male Italian wolves originated from dog ancestry, which indicates female wolves will breed with male dogs in the wild.[29] In the Caucasus Mountains, 10% of dogs including livestock guardian dogs, are first generation hybrids.[30] Although mating between golden jackals and wolves has never been observed, evidence of jackal-wolf hybridization was discovered through mitochondrial DNA analysis of jackals living in the Caucasus Mountains[30] and in Bulgaria.[31]
+
+The wolf is the largest member of the Canidae family,[32] and is further distinguished from coyotes and jackals by a broader snout, shorter ears, a shorter torso and a longer tail.[33][32] It is slender and powerfully built with a large, deeply descending rib cage, a sloping back, and a heavily muscled neck.[34] The wolf's legs are moderately longer than those of other canids, which enables the animal to move swiftly, and to overcome the deep snow that covers most of its geographical range in winter.[35] The ears are relatively small and triangular.[34] The wolf's head is large and heavy, with a wide forehead, strong jaws and a long, blunt muzzle.[36] The skull is 230–280 mm (9–11 in) in length and 130–150 mm (5–6 in) in width.[37] The teeth are heavy and large, making them better suited to crushing bone than those of other canids. They are not as specialized as those found in hyenas though.[38][39] Its molars have a flat chewing surface, but not to the same extent as the coyote, whose diet contains more vegetable matter.[40] Females tend to have narrower muzzles and foreheads, thinner necks, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders than males.[41]
+
+Adult wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height.[36] The tail measures 29–50 cm (11–20 in) in length, the ears 90–110 mm (3 1⁄2–4 3⁄8 in) in height, and the hind feet are 220–250 mm (8 5⁄8–9 7⁄8 in).[42] The size and weight of the modern wolf increases proportionally with latitude in accord with Bergmann's rule.[43] The mean body mass of the wolf is 40 kg (88 lb), the smallest specimen recorded at 12 kg (26 lb) and the largest at 79.4 kg (175 lb).[44][36] On average, European wolves weigh 38.5 kg (85 lb), North American wolves 36 kg (79 lb), and Indian and Arabian wolves 25 kg (55 lb).[45] Females in any given wolf population typically weigh 2.3–4.5 kg (5–10 lb) less than males. Wolves weighing over 54 kg (119 lb) are uncommon, though exceptionally large individuals have been recorded in Alaska and Canada.[46] In middle Russia, exceptionally large males are given a maximum weight of 69–79 kg (152–174 lb).[42]
+
+The wolf has very dense and fluffy winter fur, with a short undercoat and long, coarse guard hairs.[36] Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in spring and grow back in autumn.[45] The longest hairs occur on the back, particularly on the front quarters and neck. Especially long hairs grow on the shoulders and almost form a crest on the upper part of the neck. The hairs on the cheeks are elongated and form tufts. The ears are covered in short hairs and project from the fur. Short, elastic and closely adjacent hairs are present on the limbs from the elbows down to the calcaneal tendons.[36] The winter fur is highly resistant to the cold. Wolves in northern climates can rest comfortably in open areas at −40 °C (−40 °F) by placing their muzzles between the rear legs and covering their faces with their tail. Wolf fur provides better insulation than dog fur and does not collect ice when warm breath is condensed against it.[45]
+
+In cold climates, the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin to conserve body heat. The warmth of the foot pads is regulated independently from the rest of the body and is maintained at just above tissue-freezing point where the pads come in contact with ice and snow.[47] In warm climates, the fur is coarser and scarcer than in northern wolves.[36] Female wolves tend to have smoother furred limbs than males and generally develop the smoothest overall coats as they age. Older wolves generally have more white hairs on the tip of the tail, along the nose, and on the forehead. Winter fur is retained longest by lactating females, although with some hair loss around their teats.[41] Hair length on the middle of the back is 60–70 mm (2 3⁄8–2 3⁄4 in), and the guard hairs on the shoulders generally do not exceed 90 mm (3 1⁄2 in), but can reach 110–130 mm (4 3⁄8–5 1⁄8 in).[36]
+
+A wolf's coat colour is determined by its guard hairs. Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black.[48] The coat of the Eurasian wolf is a mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colours with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. The top of the head, forehead, under and between the eyes, and between the eyes and ears is gray with a reddish film. The neck is ochreous. Long, black tips on the hairs along the back form a broad stripe, with black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest and rear of the body. The sides of the body, tail, and outer limbs are a pale dirty ochreous colour, while the inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white. Apart from those wolves which are pure white or black, these tones vary little across geographical areas, although the patterns of these colours vary between individuals.[49]
+
+In North America, the coat colours of wolves follow Gloger's rule, wolves in the Canadian arctic being white and those in southern Canada, the U.S., and Mexico being predominantly gray. In some areas of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the coat colour is predominantly black, some being blue-gray and some with silver and black.[48] Differences in coat colour between sexes is absent in Eurasia;[50] females tend to have redder tones in North America.[51] Black-coloured wolves in North America acquired their colour from wolf-dog admixture after the first arrival of dogs that accompanied humans across the Bering Strait 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.[52] Research into the inheritance of white colour from dogs into wolves has yet to be undertaken.[53]
+
+Wolves occurred originally across Eurasia and North America. Deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of what it once was. The wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) in much of Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and in Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains.[2] Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.[40]
+
+Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be divided into large size 240–650 kg (530–1,430 lb) and medium size 23–130 kg (51–287 lb), and have a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members.[54][55] The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey,[40] with a pack of 15 able to bring down an adult moose.[56] The variation in diet between wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey.[57]
+
+In North America, the wolf's diet is dominated by wild large hoofed mammals (ungulates) and medium-sized mammals. In Asia and Europe, their diet is dominated by wild medium-sized hoofed mammals and domestic species. The wolf depends on wild species, and if these are not readily available, as in Asia, the wolf is more reliant on domestic species.[57] Across Eurasia, wolves prey mostly on moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar.[58] In North America, important range-wide prey are elk, moose, caribou, white-tailed deer and mule deer.[59] Wolves can digest their meal in a few hours and can feed several times in one day, making quick use of large quantities of meat.[60] A well-fed wolf stores fat under the skin, around the heart, intestines, kidneys, and bone marrow, particularly during the autumn and winter.[61]
+
+Nonetheless, wolves are not fussy eaters. Smaller-sized animals that may supplement their diet include rodents, hares, insectivores and smaller carnivores. They frequently eat waterfowl and their eggs. When such foods are insufficient, they prey on lizards, snakes, frogs, and large insects when available.[62] Wolves in northern Minnesota prey on northern pike in freshwater streams.[63] The diet of coastal wolves in Alaska includes 20% salmon,[64] while those of coastal wolves in British Columbia includes 25% marine sources, and those on the nearby islands 75%.[65]
+
+In Europe, wolves eat apples, pears, figs, melons, berries and cherries. In North America, wolves eat blueberries and raspberries. Wolves also eat grass, which may provide some vitamins.[66] They are known to eat the berries of mountain-ash, lily of the valley, bilberries, cowberries, European black nightshade, grain crops, and the shoots of reeds.[62]
+
+In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion.[62] In Eurasian areas with dense human activity, many wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage.[58] Prey in North America continue to occupy suitable habitats with low human density, the wolves eating livestock and garbage only in dire circumstances.[67] Cannibalism is not uncommon in wolves during harsh winters, when packs often attack weak or injured wolves and may eat the bodies of dead pack members.[62][68][69]
+
+Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur. In North America, incidents of wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them.[70] According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921, the infamous Custer Wolf relied on coyotes to accompany him and warn him of danger. Though they fed from his kills, he never allowed them to approach him.[71] Interactions have been observed in Eurasia between wolves and golden jackals, the latter's numbers being comparatively small in areas with high wolf densities.[36][70][72] Wolves also kill red, Arctic and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them.[36][73]
+
+Brown bears typically dominate wolf packs in disputes over carcasses, while wolf packs mostly prevail against bears when defending their den sites. Both species kill each other's young. Wolves eat the brown bears they kill, while brown bears seem to eat only young wolves.[74] Wolf interactions with American black bears are much rarer because of differences in habitat preferences. Wolves have been recorded on numerous occasions actively seeking out American black bears in their dens and killing them without eating them. Unlike brown bears, American black bears frequently lose against wolves in disputes over kills.[75] Wolves also dominate and sometimes kill wolverines, and will chase off those that attempt to scavenge from their kills. Wolverines escape from wolves in caves or up trees.[76]
+
+Wolves may interact and compete with felids, such as the Eurasian lynx, which may feed on smaller prey where wolves are present[77] and may be suppressed by large wolf populations.[78] Wolves encounter cougars along portions of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges. Wolves and cougars typically avoid encountering each other by hunting at different elevations for different prey (niche partitioning). In winter, when snow accumulation forces their prey into valleys, interactions between the two species become more likely. Wolves in packs usually dominate cougars and can steal their kills or even kill them,[79] while one-to-one encounters tend to be dominated by the cat. There are several documented cases of cougars killing wolves.[80] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities and disrupting the feline's behaviour.[81] Wolf and Siberian tiger interactions are well-documented in the Russian Far East, where tigers significantly depress wolf numbers, sometimes to the point of localized extinction. Only human depletion of tiger numbers appears to protect wolves from competitive exclusion from them. With perhaps only four proven records of tigers killing wolves, these cases are rare; attacks appear to be competitive rather than predatory in nature.[82][77]
+
+In Israel, Central Asia and India wolves may encounter striped hyenas, usually in disputes over carcasses. Striped hyenas feed extensively on wolf-killed carcasses in areas where the two species interact. One-to-one, hyenas dominate wolves, and may prey on them,[83] but wolf packs can drive off single or outnumbered hyenas.[84][85] There is at least one case in Israel of a hyena associating and cooperating with a wolf pack. It is proposed that the hyena could benefit from the wolves' superior ability to hunt large, agile prey. The wolves could benefit from the hyena's superior sense of smell, to locate and dig out tortoises, to crack open large bones, and to tear open discarded food containers like tin cans.[86]
+
+
+
+The wolf is a social animal.[36] Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one.[87] The wolf's basic social unit is the nuclear family consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring.[36] The average pack size in North America is eight wolves and in Europe 5.5 wolves.[43] The average pack across Eurasia consists of a family of eight wolves (two adults, juveniles, and yearlings),[36] or sometimes two or three such families,[40] with examples of exceptionally large packs consisting of up to 42 wolves being known.[88] Cortisol levels in wolves rise significantly when a pack member dies, indicating the presence of stress.[89] During times of prey abundance caused by calving or migration, different wolf packs may join together temporarily.[36]
+
+Offspring typically stay in the pack for 10–54 months before dispersing.[90] Triggers for dispersal include the onset of sexual maturity and competition within the pack for food.[91] The distance travelled by dispersing wolves varies widely; some stay in the vicinity of the parental group, while other individuals may travel great distances of upwards of 206 km (128 mi), 390 km (240 mi), and 670 km (420 mi) from their natal (birth) packs.[92] A new pack is usually founded by an unrelated dispersing male and female, travelling together in search of an area devoid of other hostile packs.[93] Wolf packs rarely adopt other wolves into their fold and typically kill them. In the rare cases where other wolves are adopted, the adoptee is almost invariably an immature animal of one to three years old, and unlikely to compete for breeding rights with the mated pair. This usually occurs between the months of February and May. Adoptee males may mate with an available pack female and then form their own pack. In some cases, a lone wolf is adopted into a pack to replace a deceased breeder.[88]
+
+Wolves are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive assuring a steady supply of prey. Territory size depends largely on the amount of prey available and the age of the pack's pups. They tend to increase in size in areas with low prey populations,[94] or when the pups reach the age of six months when they have the same nutritional needs as adults.[95] Wolf packs travel constantly in search of prey, covering roughly 9% of their territory per day, on average 25 km/d (16 mi/d). The core of their territory is on average 35 km2 (14 sq mi) where they spend 50% of their time.[94] Prey density tends to be much higher on the territory's periphery. Except out of desperation, wolves tend to avoid hunting on the fringes of their range to avoid fatal confrontations with neighbouring packs.[96] The smallest territory on record was held by a pack of six wolves in northeastern Minnesota, which occupied an estimated 33 km2 (13 sq mi), while the largest was held by an Alaskan pack of ten wolves encompassing 6,272 km2 (2,422 sq mi).[95] Wolf packs are typically settled, and usually leave their accustomed ranges only during severe food shortages.[36]
+
+Wolves advertise their territories to other packs through howling and scent marking. Scent marking involves urine, feces, and anal gland scents. This is more effective at advertising territory than howling and is often used in combination with scratch marks. Wolves increase their rate of scent marking when they encounter the marks of wolves from other packs. Lone wolves will rarely mark, but newly bonded pairs will scent mark the most.[40] These marks are generally left every 240 m (260 yd) throughout the territory on regular travelways and junctions. Such markers can last for two to three weeks,[95] and are typically placed near rocks, boulders, trees, or the skeletons of large animals.[36] Territorial fights are among the principal causes of wolf mortality, one study concluding that 14–65% of wolf deaths in Minnesota and the Denali National Park and Preserve were due to other wolves.[97]
+
+Wolves communicate to anticipate what their pack mates or other wolves might do next.[98] This includes the use of vocalization, body posture, scent, touch, and taste.[99] The phases of the moon have no effect on wolf vocalization, and despite popular belief, wolves do not howl at the moon.[100] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[101] Wolf howls can under certain conditions be heard over areas of up to 130 km2 (50 sq mi).[40] Other vocalizations include growls, barks and whines. Wolves do not bark as loudly or continuously as dogs do in confrontations, rather barking a few times and then retreating from a perceived danger.[102] Aggressive or self-assertive wolves are characterized by their slow and deliberate movements, high body posture and raised hackles, while submissive ones carry their bodies low, flatten their fur, and lower their ears and tail.[103] Raised leg urination is considered to be one of the most important forms of scent communication in the wolf, making up 60–80% of all scent marks observed.[104]
+
+Wolves are monogamous, mated pairs usually remaining together for life. Should one of the pair die, another mate is found quickly.[105] With wolves in the wild, inbreeding does not occur where outbreeding is possible.[106] Wolves become mature at the age of two years and sexually mature from the age of three years.[105] The age of first breeding in wolves depends largely on environmental factors: when food is plentiful, or when wolf populations are heavily managed, wolves can rear pups at younger ages to better exploit abundant resources. Females are capable of producing pups every year, one litter annually being the average.[107] Oestrus and rut begin in the second half of winter and lasts for two weeks.[105]
+
+Dens are usually constructed for pups during the summer period. When building dens, females make use of natural shelters like fissures in rocks, cliffs overhanging riverbanks and holes thickly covered by vegetation. Sometimes, the den is the appropriated burrow of smaller animals such as foxes, badgers or marmots. An appropriated den is often widened and partly remade. On rare occasions, female wolves dig burrows themselves, which are usually small and short with one to three openings. The den is usually constructed not more than 500 m (550 yd) away from a water source. It typically faces southwards where it can be better warmed by sunlight exposure, and the snow can thaw more quickly. Resting places, play areas for the pups, and food remains are commonly found around wolf dens. The odor of urine and rotting food emanating from the denning area often attracts scavenging birds like magpies and ravens. Though they mostly avoid areas within human sight, wolves have been known to nest near domiciles, paved roads and railways.[108] During pregnancy, female wolves remain in a den located away from the peripheral zone of their territories, where violent encounters with other packs are less likely to occur.[109]
+
+The gestation period lasts 62–75 days with pups usually being born in the spring months or early summer in very cold places such as on the tundra. Young females give birth to four to five young, and older females from six to eight young and up to 14. Their mortality rate is 60–80%.[110] Newborn wolf pups look similar to German Shepherd Dog pups.[111] They are born blind and deaf and are covered in short soft grayish-brown fur. They weigh 300–500 g (10 1⁄2–17 3⁄4 oz) at birth and begin to see after nine to 12 days. The milk canines erupt after one month. Pups first leave the den after three weeks. At one-and-a-half months of age, they are agile enough to flee from danger. Mother wolves do not leave the den for the first few weeks, relying on the fathers to provide food for them and their young. Pups begin to eat solid food at the age of three to four weeks. They have a fast growth rate during their first four months of life: during this period, a pup's weight can increase nearly 30 times.[110][112] Wolf pups begin play-fighting at the age of three weeks, though unlike young coyotes and foxes, their bites are gentle and controlled. Actual fights to establish hierarchy usually occur at five to eight weeks of age. This is in contrast to young coyotes and foxes, which may begin fighting even before the onset of play behaviour.[113] By autumn, the pups are mature enough to accompany the adults on hunts for large prey.[109]
+
+Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs; single wolves have occasionally been observed to kill large prey such as moose, bison and muskoxen unaided.[114][115] This contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.[115] The size of a wolf hunting pack is related to the number of pups that survived the previous winter, adult survival, and the rate of dispersing wolves leaving the pack. The optimal pack size for hunting elk is four wolves, and for bison a large pack size is more successful.[116]
+
+As well as their physical adaptations for hunting hoofed mammals, wolves possess certain behavioural, cognitive, and psychological adaptations to assist with their hunting lifestyle. Wolves are excellent learners that match or outperform domestic dogs. They can use gaze to focus attention on where other wolves are looking. This is important because wolves do not use vocalization when hunting. In laboratory tests, they appear to exhibit insight, foresight, understanding, and the ability to plan. [117] To survive, wolves must be able to solve two problems—finding a prey animal, then confronting it.[117]
+
+Wolves move around their territory when hunting, using the same trails for extended periods. After snowfalls, wolves find their old trails and continue using them. These follow the banks of rivers, the shorelines of lakes, through ravines overgrown with shrubs, through plantations, or roads and human paths.[118] Wolves are nocturnal predators. During the winter, a pack will commence hunting in the twilight of early evening and will hunt all night, traveling tens of kilometres. Sometimes hunting large prey occurs during the day. During the summer, wolves generally tend to hunt individually, ambushing their prey and rarely giving pursuit.[119]
+
+The wolf usually travels at a loping pace, placing one of its paws directly in front of the other. This gait can be maintained for hours at a rate of 8–9 km/h (5.0–5.6 mph).[120] On bare paths, a wolf can quickly achieve speeds of 50–60 km/h (31–37 mph). The wolf has a running gait of 55–70 km/h (34–43 mph), can leap 5 m (16 ft) horizontally in a single bound, and can maintain rapid pursuit for at least 20 minutes.[92] A wolf's foot is large and flexible, which allows it to tread on a wide variety of terrain. A wolf's legs are long compared to their body size allowing them to travel up to 76 km (47 mi) in 12 hours. This adaptation allows wolves to locate prey within hours, but it can take days to find prey that can be killed without great risk. Moose and deer live singly in the summer. Caribou live in herds of thousands which presents dangers for wolves. Elk live in small herds and these are a safer target.[117]
+
+A wolf carries its head at the same level as its back, lifting it only when alert.[36] In one study, wolves detected moose using scent ten times, vision six times, and once by following tracks in the snow. Their vision is as good as a human's, and they can smell prey at least 2.4 km (1 1⁄2 mi) away. One wolf travelled to a herd 103 km (64 mi) away. A human can detect the smell of a forest fire over the same distance from downwind. The wolf's sense of smell is at least comparable to that of the domestic dog, which is at least 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's.[117]
+
+When hunting large gregarious prey, wolves will try to isolate an individual from its group.[121] If successful, a wolf pack can bring down game that will feed it for days, but one error in judgement can lead to serious injury or death. Most large prey have developed defensive adaptations and behaviours. Wolves have been killed while attempting to bring down bison, elk, moose, muskoxen, and even by one of their smallest hoofed prey, the white-tailed deer.[117] Although people often believe that wolves can easily overcome any of their prey, their success rate in hunting hoofed prey is usually low.[122]
+
+Generally, bison, elk, and moose will stand their ground, then the wolves must struggle with them to bring them down. Often caribou and deer will flee, but sometimes deer also make a stand. With smaller prey like beaver, geese, and hares, there is no risk to the wolf.[117] If the targeted animal stands its ground, wolves either ignore it, or try to intimidate it into running.[114] Wolves, or even a wolf on its own, will attempt to frighten a herd into panicking and dispersing.[123]
+
+When wolves encounter prey that flees, they give chase. The speed of sprinting prey is closely related to the speed of their main predators. Wolves can run at 56–64 km/h (35–40 mph) across several kilometres and will often pursue prey for at least 1 km (1⁄2 mi). One wolf chased a caribou for 8 km (5 mi), another chased and tracked a deer for 20 km (12 mi), and one 11-year-old wolf chased and caught an Arctic hare after seven minutes. Most wolf prey will try to run to water, where they will either escape or be better placed to attempt to ward off the wolves.[117]
+
+The wolf must give chase and gain on its fleeing prey, slow it down by biting through thick hair and hide, and then disable it enough to begin feeding.[117] After chasing and then confronting a large prey animal, the wolf makes use of its 6 cm (2 1⁄2 in) fangs and its powerful masseter muscles to deliver a bite force of 28 kg/cm2 (400 lbf/in2), which is capable of breaking open the skulls of many of its prey animals. The wolf leaps at its quarry and tears at it. One wolf was observed being dragged for dozens of metres attached to the hind leg of a moose; another was seen being dragged over a fallen log while attached to a bull elk's nose.[116]
+
+The most common point of wolf attacks on moose is the upper hind legs.[124][125][126] Hind leg wounds are inflicted from the rear, midway up the hock with the canine teeth. These leave gaping skin perforations over 4 cm (1 1⁄2 in) in diameter. Although blood loss, muscle damage, and tendon exposure may occur, there is no evidence of hamstringing. Attacks also occur on the fleshy nose, the back and sides of the neck, the ears, and the perineum.[126] Wolves may wound large prey and then lie around resting for hours before killing it when it is weaker due to blood loss, thereby lessening the risk of injury to themselves.[127]
+
+With medium-sized prey, such as roe deer or sheep, wolves kill by biting the throat, severing nerve tracks and the carotid artery, thus causing the animal to die within a few seconds to a minute. With small, mouselike prey, wolves leap in a high arc and immobilize it with their forepaws.[128] When prey is vulnerable and abundant, wolves may occasionally surplus kill. Such instances are common with domestic animals, but rare with wild prey. In the wild, surplus killing occurs primarily during late winter or spring, when snow is unusually deep (thus impeding the movements of prey)[129] or during the denning period, when den bound wolves require a ready supply of meat.[130] Medium-sized prey are especially vulnerable to surplus killing, as the swift throat-biting method allows wolves to kill one animal quickly and move on to another.[128]
+
+Once prey is brought down, wolves begin to feed excitedly, ripping and tugging at the carcass in all directions, and bolting down large chunks of it.[131] The breeding pair typically monopolizes food to continue producing pups. When food is scarce, this is done at the expense of other family members, especially non-pups.[132] The breeding pair typically eats first. They usually work the hardest at killing prey, and may rest after a long hunt and allow the rest of the family to eat undisturbed. Once the breeding pair has finished eating, the rest of the family tears off pieces of the carcass and transports them to secluded areas where they can eat in peace. Wolves typically commence feeding by consuming the larger internal organs, like the heart, liver, lungs, and stomach lining. The kidneys and spleen are eaten once they are exposed, followed by the muscles.[133] A wolf can eat 15–19% of its body weight in a single feeding.[61]
+
+Viral diseases carried by wolves include: rabies, canine distemper, canine parvovirus, infectious canine hepatitis, papillomatosis, and canine coronavirus.[134] Wolves are a major host for rabies in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and India.[135] In wolves, the incubation period is eight to 21 days, and results in the host becoming agitated, deserting its pack, and travelling up to 80 km (50 mi) a day, thus increasing the risk of infecting other wolves. Infected wolves do not show any fear of humans, most documented wolf attacks on people being attributed to rabid animals. Although canine distemper is lethal in dogs, it has not been recorded to kill wolves, except in Canada and Alaska. The canine parvovirus, which causes death by dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and endotoxic shock or sepsis, is largely survivable in wolves, but can be lethal to pups. Wolves may catch infectious canine hepatitis from dogs, though there are no records of wolves dying from it. Papillomatosis has been recorded only once in wolves, and likely does not cause serious illness or death, though it may alter feeding behaviours. The canine coronavirus has been recorded in Alaskan wolves, infections being most prevalent in winter months.[134]
+
+Bacterial diseases carried by wolves include: brucellosis, Lyme disease, leptospirosis, tularemia, bovine tuberculosis,[136] listeriosis and anthrax.[135] Wolves can catch Brucella suis from wild and domestic reindeer. While adult wolves tend not to show any clinical signs, it can severely weaken the pups of infected females. Although lyme disease can debilitate individual wolves, it does not appear to significantly affect wolf populations. Leptospirosis can be contracted through contact with infected prey or urine, and can cause fever, anorexia, vomiting, anemia, hematuria, icterus, and death. Wolves living near farms are more vulnerable to the disease than those living in the wilderness, probably because of prolonged contact with infected domestic animal waste. Wolves may catch tularemia from lagomorph prey, though its effect on wolves is unknown. Although bovine tuberculosis is not considered a major threat to wolves, it has been recorded to have killed two wolf pups in Canada.[136]
+
+Wolves carry ectoparasites and endoparasites; those in the former Soviet Union have been recorded to carry at least 50 species.[135] Most of these parasites infect wolves without adverse effects, though the effects may become more serious in sick or malnourished specimens.[137] Parasitic infection in wolves is of particular concern to people. Wolves can spread them to dogs, which in turn can carry the parasites to humans. In areas where wolves inhabit pastoral areas, the parasites can be spread to livestock.[135]
+
+Wolves are often infested with a variety of arthropod exoparasites, including fleas, ticks, lice, and mites. The most harmful to wolves, particularly pups, is the mange mite (Sarcoptes scabiei),[137] though they rarely develop full-blown mange, unlike foxes.[36] Lice, such as Trichodectes canis, may cause sickness in wolves, but rarely death. Ticks of the genus Ixodes can infect wolves with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.[137] The tick Dermacentor pictus also infests wolves. Other ectoparasites include chewing lice, sucking lice and the fleas Pulex irritans and Ctenocephalides canis.[36]
+
+Endoparasites known to infect wolves include: protozoans and helminths (flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and thorny-headed worms). Of 30,000 protozoan species, only a few have been recorded to infect wolves: Isospora, Toxoplasma, Sarcocystis, Babesia, and Giardia.[137] Some wolves carry Neospora caninum, which can be spread to cattle and is correlated with bovine miscarriages.[138] Among flukes, the most common in North American wolves is Alaria, which infects small rodents and amphibians that are eaten by wolves. Upon reaching maturity, Alaria migrates to the wolf's intestine, but does little harm. Metorchis conjunctus, which enters wolves through eating fish, infects the wolf's liver or gall bladder, causing liver disease, inflammation of the pancreas, and emaciation. Most other fluke species reside in the wolf's intestine, though Paragonimus westermani lives in the lungs. Tapeworms are commonly found in wolves, as their primary hosts are ungulates, small mammals, and fish, which wolves feed upon. Tapeworms generally cause little harm in wolves, though this depends on the number and size of the parasites, and the sensitivity of the host. Symptoms often include constipation, toxic and allergic reactions, irritation of the intestinal mucosa, and malnutrition. Infections by the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus in ungulate populations tend to increase in areas with high wolf densities, as wolves can shed Echinoccocus eggs in their feces onto grazing areas.[137]
+
+Wolves can carry over 30 roundworm species, though most roundworm infections appear benign, depending on the number of worms and the age of the host. Ancylostoma caninum attaches itself on the intestinal wall to feed on the host's blood, and can cause hyperchromic anemia, emaciation, diarrhea, and possibly death. Toxocara canis, a hookworm known to infect wolf pups in the uterus, can cause intestinal irritation, bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea. Wolves may catch Dioctophyma renale from minks, which infects the kidneys, and can grow to lengths of 100 cm (40 in). D. renale causes the complete destruction of the kidney's functional tissue and can be fatal if both kidneys are infected. Wolves can tolerate low levels of Dirofilaria immitis for many years without showing any ill effects, though high levels can kill wolves through cardiac enlargement and congestive hepatopathy. Wolves probably become infected with Trichinella spiralis by eating infected ungulates. Although T. spiralis is not known to produce clinical signs in wolves, it can cause emaciation, salivation, and crippling muscle pains in dogs. Thorny-headed worms rarely infect wolves, though three species have been identified in Russian wolves: Nicolla skrjabini, Macrocantorhynchus catulinus, and Moniliformis moniliformis.[137]
+
+The global wild wolf population in 2003 was estimated at 300,000.[139] Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s. This has fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range as a result of legal protection, changes in land use, and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the wolf. Despite these threats, the IUCN classifies the wolf as Least Concern on its Red List due to its relatively widespread range and stable population. The species is listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in its Appendix II, indicating that it is not threatened with extinction. However, those wolf populations living in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan are listed in its Appendix I, indicating that these may become extinct without restrictions on their trade.[2]
+
+In Canada, 50,000–60,000 wolves live in 80% of their historical range, making Canada an important stronghold for the species.[40] Under Canadian law, First Nations people can hunt wolves without restrictions, but others must acquire licenses for the hunting and trapping seasons. As many as 4,000 wolves may be harvested in Canada each year.[140] The wolf is a protected species in national parks under the Canada National Parks Act.[141] In Alaska, 7,000–11,000 wolves are found on 85% of the state's 1,517,733 km2 (586,000 sq mi). Wolves may be hunted or trapped with a license; around 1,200 wolves are harvested annually.[142]
+
+In the contiguous United States, wolf declines were caused by the expansion of agriculture, the decimation of the wolf's main prey species like the American bison, and extermination campaigns.[40] Wolves were given protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and have since returned to parts of their former range thanks to both natural recolonizations and reintroductions.[143] Wolf populations in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan number over 4,000 as of 2018.[144] Wolves also occupy much of the northern Rocky Mountains region, with at least 1,704 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as of 2015. They have also established populations in Washington and Oregon.[145] In Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated from 1977 to 1980 in capturing all Mexican wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction and established captive breeding programs for reintroduction.[146] As of 2018, there were 230 Mexican wolves living in Mexico, 64 in Arizona, 67 in New Mexico, and 240 in captive breeding programs in both countries.[147]
+
+Europe, excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, has 17,000 wolves in more than 28 countries.[148] In the European Union, the wolf is strictly protected under the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Appendix II) and the 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Annex II and IV). There is extensive legal protection in many European countries, although there are national exceptions and enforcement is variable and often non-existent.[2]
+
+Wolves have been persecuted in Europe for centuries, having been exterminated in Great Britain by 1684, in Ireland by 1770, in Central Europe by 1899, in France by the 1930s, and in much of Scandinavia by the early 1970s. They continued to survive in parts of Finland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.[149] Since 1980, European wolves have rebounded and expanded into parts of their former range. The decline of the traditional pastoral and rural economies seems to have ended the need to exterminate the wolf in parts of Europe.[140] As of 2016, estimates of wolf numbers include: 4,000 in the Balkans, 3,460–3,849 in the Carpathian Mountains, 1,700–2,240 in the Baltic states, 1,100–2,400 in the Italian peninsula, and around 2,500 in the northwest Iberian peninsula as of 2007.[148]
+
+In the former Soviet Union, wolf populations have retained much of their historical range despite Soviet-era large scale extermination campaigns. Their numbers range from 1,500 in Georgia, to 20,000 in Kazakhstan and up to 45,000 in Russia.[150] In Russia, the wolf is regarded as a pest because of its attacks on livestock, and wolf management means controlling their numbers by destroying them throughout the year. Russian history over the past century shows that reduced hunting leads to an abundance of wolves.[151] The Russian government has continued to pay bounties for wolves and annual harvests of 20-30% do not appear to significantly affect their numbers.[152]
+
+During the 19th century, wolves were widespread in many parts of the Holy Land east and west of the Jordan River, but decreased considerably in number between 1964 and 1980, largely due to persecution by farmers.[153] In the Middle East, only Israel and Oman give wolves explicit legal protection.[154] Israel has protected its wolves since 1954 and has maintained a moderately sized population of 150 through effective enforcement of conservation policies. These wolves have moved into neighboring countries. Approximately 300–600 wolves inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.[155] The wolf also appears to be widespread in Iran.[156] Turkey has an estimated population of about 7,000 wolves.[157] Outside of Turkey, wolf populations in the Middle East may total 1,000–2,000.[154]
+
+In southern Asia, the northern regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important strongholds for wolves. The wolf has been protected in India since 1972.[158] Hindus traditionally considered the hunting of wolves, even dangerous ones, as taboo, for fear of causing a bad harvest. The Santals considered them fair game, as they did every other forest-dwelling animal.[159] During British rule in India, wolves were not considered game species, and were killed primarily in response to them attacking game herds, livestock, and people.[160] The Indian wolf is distributed across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.[161] As of 2019, it is estimated that there are around 2,000–3,000 Indian wolves in the country.[162] In East Asia, Mongolia's population numbers 10,000–20,000. In China, Heilongjiang has roughly 650 wolves, Xinjiang has 10,000 and Tibet has 2,000.[163] 2017 evidence suggests that wolves range across all of mainland China.[164] Wolves have been historically persecuted in China[165] but have been legally protected since 1998.[166] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed in 1905.[167]
+
+The wolf is a common motif in the mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout its historical range. The Ancient Greeks associated wolves with Apollo, the god of light and order.[168] The Ancient Romans connected the wolf with their god of war and agriculture Mars,[169] and believed their city's founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf.[170] Norse mythology includes the feared giant wolf Fenrir, eldest child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda,[171] and Geri and Freki, Odin's faithful pets.[172] The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, who viewed it as the lord of all animals and as the only effective defender against evil.[173]
+
+In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. When humans killed it, they were punished with death, destruction and the loss of immortality.[174] For the Pawnee, Sirius is the "wolf star" and its disappearance and reappearance signified the wolf moving to and from the spirit world. Both the Pawnee and Blackfoot call the Milky Way the "wolf trail".[175] The wolf is also an important totem animal for the Tlingit and Tsimshian.[176] In Chinese astronomy, the wolf represents Sirius as the "blue beast" and the star itself is called the "heavenly wolf".[177] In China, the wolf was traditionally associated with greed and cruelty and wolf epithets were used to describe negative behaviours such as cruelty ("wolf's heart"), mistrust ("wolf's look") and lechery ("wolf-sex").[178]
+
+Tengrism places high importance on the wolf, as it is thought that, when howling, it is praying to Tengri, thus making it the only creature other than man to worship a deity.[179] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the wolf is ridden by gods of protection. In Vedic Hinduism, the wolf is a symbol of the night and the daytime quail must escape from its jaws.[178] In Hindu mythology, Krishna, to convince the people of Vraja to migrate to Vṛndāvana, creates hundreds of wolves from his hairs, which frighten the inhabitants of Vraja into making the journey.[180] In Tantric Buddhism, wolves are depicted as inhabitants of graveyards and destroyers of corpses.[178] In Zoroastrianism, the wolf has been demonized as the creation of Ahriman.[181]
+
+The concept of people turning into wolves has been present in many cultures. One Greek myth tells of Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his evil deeds.[182] The legend of the werewolf has been widespread in European folklore and involves people willingly turning into wolves to attack and kill others.[183] The Navajo have traditionally believed that witches would turn into wolves by donning wolf skins and would kill people and raid graveyards.[184] The Dena'ina believed wolves were once men and viewed them as brothers.[168] Similarly, in Turkic mythology wolves were believed to be the ancestors of their people.[185]
+
+Aesop featured wolves in several of his fables, playing on the concerns of Ancient Greece's settled, sheep-herding world. His most famous is the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is directed at those who knowingly raise false alarms, and from which the idiomatic phrase "to cry wolf" is derived. Some of his other fables concentrate on maintaining the trust between shepherds and guard dogs in their vigilance against wolves, as well as anxieties over the close relationship between wolves and dogs. Although Aesop used wolves to warn, criticize and moralize about human behaviour, his portrayals added to the wolf's image as a deceitful and dangerous animal.[186] The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have used wolves as illustrations of the dangers his followers, whom he represents as sheep, would face should they follow him.(Matthew 7:15, Matthew 10:16 and Acts 20:29).[187] In the Jataka tales the wolf is portrayed as a trickster, including one story in which it makes a hunter stop playing dead by pulling on his club.[188] In another story, the wolf tricks and eats some rats by pretending to be lame but is foiled by the chief rat.[189]
+
+Isengrim the wolf, a character first appearing in the 12th-century Latin poem Ysengrimus, is a major character in the Reynard Cycle, where he stands for the low nobility, whilst his adversary, Reynard the fox, represents the peasant hero. Isengrim is forever the victim of Reynard's wit and cruelty, often dying at the end of each story.[190] The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood", first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, is considered to have further contributed to the wolf's negative reputation in the Western world. The Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a villain capable of imitating human speech and disguising itself with human clothing. The character has been interpreted as an allegorical sexual predator.[191] Villainous wolf characters also appear in The Three Little Pigs and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats".[192] The hunting of wolves, and their attacks on humans and livestock, feature prominently in Russian literature, and are included in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev, and others. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chekhov's Peasants both feature scenes in which wolves are hunted with hounds and Borzois.[193] The musical Peter and the Wolf involves a wolf being captured for eating a farm duck, but is spared and sent to a zoo.[194]
+
+Wolves are among the central characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His portrayal of wolves has been praised posthumously by wolf biologists for his depiction of them: rather than being villainous or gluttonous, as was common in wolf portrayals at the time of the book's publication, they are shown as living in amiable family groups and drawing on the experience of infirm but experienced elder pack members.[195] Farley Mowat's largely fictional 1963 memoir Never Cry Wolf is widely considered to be the most popular book on wolves, having been adapted into a Hollywood film and taught in several schools decades after its publication. Although credited with having changed popular perceptions on wolves by portraying them as loving, cooperative and noble, it has been criticized for its idealization of wolves and its factual inaccuracies.[196][197][198] Lü Jiamin's 2004 semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem uses wolves as symbols of freedom and independence. He associates the Mongolian nomads with wolves and compares the Han Chinese of the present day to sheep, claiming they accept any leadership. As such, the novel has caused controversy with the Chinese Communist Party.[199][200]
+
+The wolf is a frequent charge in English heraldry. It is illustrated as a supporter on the shields of Lord Welby, Rendel, and Viscount Wolseley, and can be found on the coat of arms of Lovett and the vast majority of the Wilsons and Lows. The demi-wolf is a common crest, appearing in the arms and crests of members of many families, including that of the Wolfes, whose crest depicts a demi-wolf holding a crown in its paws, in reference to the assistance the family gave to Charles II during the Battle of Worcester. Wolf heads are common in Scottish heraldry, particularly in the coats of Clan Robertson and Skene. The wolf is the most common animal in Spanish heraldry and is often depicted as carrying a lamb in its mouth, or across its back.[201]
+
+The wolf is featured on the flags of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Pawnee.[202] The Chechen wolf has been a symbol of the Chechen Nation.[203] In modern times, the wolf is widely used as an emblem for military and paramilitary groups. It is the unofficial symbol of the spetsnaz, and serves as the logo of the Turkish Gray Wolves. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Serb paramilitary units adopted the wolf as their symbol, including the White Wolves and the Wolves of Vučjak.[204]
+
+Human presence appears to stress wolves, as seen by increased cortisol levels in instances such as snowmobiling near their territory.[205]
+
+Livestock depredation has been one of the primary reasons for hunting wolves and can pose a severe problem for wolf conservation. As well as causing economic losses, the threat of wolf predation causes great stress on livestock producers, and no foolproof solution of preventing such attacks short of exterminating wolves has been found.[206] Some nations help offset economic losses to wolves through compensation programs or state insurance.[207] Domesticated animals are easy prey for wolves, as they have been bred under constant human protection, and are thus unable to defend themselves very well.[208] Wolves typically resort to attacking livestock when wild prey is depleted. In Eurasia, a large part of the diet of some wolf populations consists of livestock, while such incidents are rare in North America, where healthy populations of wild prey have been largely restored.[206]
+
+The majority of losses occur during the summer grazing period, untended livestock in remote pastures being the most vulnerable to wolf predation.[209] The most frequently targeted livestock species are sheep (Europe), domestic reindeer (northern Scandinavia), goats (India), horses (Mongolia), cattle and turkeys (North America).[206] The number of animals killed in single attacks varies according to species: most attacks on cattle and horses result in one death, while turkeys, sheep and domestic reindeer may be killed in surplus.[210] Wolves mainly attack livestock when the animals are grazing, though they occasionally break into fenced enclosures.[211]
+
+A review of the studies on the competitive effects of dogs on sympatric carnivores did not mention any research on competition between dogs and wolves.[212][213] Competition would favour the wolf, which is known to kill dogs; however wolves usually live in pairs or in small packs in areas with high human persecution, giving them a disadvantage facing large groups of dogs.[213][214]
+
+Wolves kill dogs on occasion, and some wolf populations rely on dogs as an important food source. In Croatia, wolves kill more dogs than sheep, and wolves in Russia appear to limit stray dog populations. Wolves may display unusually bold behaviour when attacking dogs accompanied by people, sometimes ignoring nearby humans. Wolf attacks on dogs may occur both in house yards and in forests. Wolf attacks on hunting dogs are considered a major problem in Scandinavia and Wisconsin.[206][215] The most frequently killed hunting breeds in Scandinavia are Harriers, older animals being most at risk, likely because they are less timid than younger animals, and react to the presence of wolves differently. Large hunting dogs such as Swedish Elkhounds are more likely to survive wolf attacks because of their better ability to defend themselves.[215]
+
+Although the number of dogs killed each year by wolves is relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves' entering villages and farmyards to prey on them. In many cultures, dogs are seen as family members, or at least working team members, and losing one can lead to strong emotional responses such as demanding more liberal hunting regulations.[213]
+
+Dogs that are employed to guard sheep help to mitigate human–wolf conflicts, and are often proposed as one of the non-lethal tools in the conservation of wolves.[213][216] Shepherd dogs are not particularly aggressive, but they can disrupt potential wolf predation by displaying what is to the wolf ambiguous behaviours, such as barking, social greeting, invitation to play or aggression. The historical use of shepherd dogs across Eurasia has been effective against wolf predation,[213][217] especially when confining sheep in the presence of several livestock guardian dogs.[213][218] Shepherd dogs are sometimes killed by wolves.[213]
+
+The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey.[219] How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people.[220] Although wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed.[219]
+
+Predatory attacks may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase.[219] Cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.[36] The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women.[219] Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the summer period in the evening hours, and often within human settlements.[221]
+
+Cases of rabid wolves are low when compared to other species, as wolves do not serve as primary reservoirs of the disease, but can be infected by animals such as dogs, jackals and foxes. Incidents of rabies in wolves are very rare in North America, though numerous in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. Wolves apparently develop the "furious" phase of rabies to a very high degree. This, coupled with their size and strength, makes rabid wolves perhaps the most dangerous of rabid animals.[219] Bites from rabid wolves are 15 times more dangerous than those of rabid dogs.[222] Rabid wolves usually act alone, travelling large distances and often biting large numbers of people and domestic animals. Most rabid wolf attacks occur in the spring and autumn periods. Unlike with predatory attacks, the victims of rabid wolves are not eaten, and the attacks generally occur only on a single day. The victims are chosen at random, though most cases involve adult men. During the fifty years up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, and more than two hundred in southern Asia.[219]
+
+Theodore Roosevelt said wolves are difficult to hunt because of their elusiveness, sharp senses, high endurance, and ability to quickly incapacitate and kill a dog.[223] Historic methods included killing of spring-born litters in their dens, coursing with dogs (usually combinations of sighthounds, Bloodhounds and Fox Terriers), poisoning with strychnine, and trapping.[224][225]
+
+A popular method of wolf hunting in Russia involves trapping a pack within a small area by encircling it with fladry poles carrying a human scent. This method relies heavily on the wolf's fear of human scents, though it can lose its effectiveness when wolves become accustomed to the odor. Some hunters can lure wolves by imitating their calls. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, wolves are traditionally hunted with eagles and falcons, though this practice is declining, as experienced falconers are becoming few in number. Shooting wolves from aircraft is highly effective, due to increased visibility and direct lines of fire.[225] Several types of dog, including the Borzoi and Kyrgyz Tajgan, have been specifically bred for wolf hunting.[213]
+
+Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes kept as exotic pets. Although closely related to domestic dogs, wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, being generally less responsive to human commands and more likely to act aggressively. A person is more likely to be fatally mauled by a pet wolf or wolf-dog hybrid than by a dog.[226]
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+See Subspecies of Canis lupus
+
+The wolf (Canis lupus[a]), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise non-domestic/feral subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of Canidae, males averaging 40 kg (88 lb) and females 37 kg (82 lb). Wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height. The wolf is also distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. The wolf is nonetheless related closely enough to smaller Canis species, such as the coyote and the golden jackal, to produce fertile hybrids with them. The banded fur of a wolf is usually mottled white, brown, gray, and black, although subspecies in the arctic region may be nearly all white.
+
+Of all members of the genus Canis, the wolf is most specialized for cooperative game hunting as demonstrated by its physical adaptations to tackling large prey, its more social nature, and its highly advanced expressive behaviour. It travels in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring. Offspring may leave to form their own packs on the onset of sexual maturity and in response to competition for food within the pack. Wolves are also territorial and fights over territory are among the principal causes of wolf mortality. The wolf is mainly a carnivore and feeds on large wild hooved mammals as well as smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs. Pathogens and parasites, notably rabies, may infect wolves.
+
+The global wild wolf population was estimated to be 300,000 in 2003 and is considered to be of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Wolves have a long history of interactions with humans, having been despised and hunted in most pastoral communities because of their attacks on livestock, while conversely being respected in some agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Although the fear of wolves exists in many human societies, the majority of recorded attacks on people have been attributed to animals suffering from rabies. Wolf attacks on humans are rare because wolves are relatively few, live away from people, and have developed a fear of humans because of their experiences with hunters, ranchers, and shepherds.
+
+The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos).[4][5] The name "gray wolf" refers to the grayish colour of the species.[6]
+
+Since pre-Christian times, Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons took on wulf as a prefix or suffix in their names. Examples include Wulfhere ("Wolf Army", or "He whose army is the wolf"), Cynewulf ("Royal Wolf"), Cēnwulf ("Bold Wolf"), Wulfheard ("Wolf-hard"), Earnwulf ("Eagle Wolf"), Wulfstān ("Wolf Stone") Æðelwulf ("Noble Wolf"), Wolfhroc ("Wolf-Frock"), Wolfhetan ("Wolf Hide"), Isangrim ("Gray Mask"), Scrutolf ("Garb Wolf"), Wolfgang ("Wolf Gait") and Wolfdregil ("Wolf Runner").[7]
+
+Gray wolf
+
+Coyote
+
+African golden wolf
+
+Ethiopian wolf
+
+Golden jackal
+
+Dhole
+
+African wild dog
+
+Side-striped jackal
+
+Black-backed jackal
+
+In 1758, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus published in his Systema Naturae the binomial nomenclature.[3] Canis is the Latin word meaning "dog",[9] and under this genus he listed the doglike carnivores including domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals. He classified the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, and the wolf as Canis lupus.[3] Linnaeus considered the dog to be a separate species from the wolf because of its cauda recurvata—its upturning tail—which is not found in any other canid.[10]
+
+In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under C. lupus 36 wild subspecies, and proposed two additional subspecies: familiaris (Linnaeus, 1758) and dingo (Meyer, 1793). Wozencraft included hallstromi—the New Guinea singing dog—as a taxonomic synonym for the dingo. Wozencraft referred to a 1999 mitochondrial DNA study as one of the guides in forming his decision, and listed the 38 subspecies of C. lupus under the biological common name of "wolf", the nominate subspecies being the Eurasian wolf (C. l. lupus) based on the type specimen that Linnaeus studied in Sweden.[11] Studies using paleogenomic techniques reveal that the modern wolf and the dog are sister taxa, as modern wolves are not closely related to the population of wolves that was first domesticated.[12] In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/Species Survival Commission's Canid Specialist Group considered the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo to be feral dogs Canis familiaris, and therefore should not be assessed for the IUCN Red List.[13]
+
+The phylogenetic descent of the extant wolf C. lupus from C. etruscus through C. mosbachensis is widely accepted.[14] The earliest fossils of C. lupus were found in what was once eastern Beringia at Old Crow, Yukon, Canada, and at Cripple Creek Sump, Fairbanks, Alaska. The age is not agreed upon but could date to one million years ago. Considerable morphological diversity existed among wolves by the Late Pleistocene. They had more robust skulls and teeth than modern wolves, often with a shortened snout, a pronounced development of the temporalis muscle, and robust premolars. It is proposed that these features were specialized adaptations for the processing of carcass and bone associated with the hunting and scavenging of Pleistocene megafauna. Compared with modern wolves, some Pleistocene wolves showed an increase in tooth breakage similar to that seen in the extinct dire wolf. This suggests they either often processed carcasses, or that they competed with other carnivores and needed to consume their prey quickly. Compared with those found in the modern spotted hyena, the frequency and location of tooth fractures in these wolves indicates they were habitual bone crackers.[15] In June 2019, the severed yet preserved head of a Pleistocene wolf, dated to over 40,000 years ago, was found close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia, Russia, near the Arctic Circle. The head was about 16 in (41 cm) long, much bigger than a modern wolf's head.[16][17][18]
+
+Genomic studies suggest modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population[19][20][21] that existed 20,000 years ago.[19] Studies in 2017 and 2018 found that the Himalayan wolf is part of a lineage that is basal to other wolves and split from them 691,000–740,000 years ago.[22][23] Other wolves appear to have originated in Beringia in an expansion that was driven by the huge ecological changes during the close of the Late Pleistocene.[23] A study in 2016 indicates that a population bottleneck was followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original morphologically diverse wolf populations were out-competed and replaced by more modern wolves.[24]
+
+A 2016 genomic study suggests that Old World and New World wolves split around 12,500 years ago followed by the divergence of the lineage that led to dogs from other Old World wolves around 11,100–12,300 years ago.[21] An extinct Late Pleistocene wolf may have been the ancestor of the dog,[25][15] with the dog's similarity to the extant wolf being the result of genetic admixture between the two.[15] The dingo, Basenji, Tibetan Mastiff and Chinese indigenous breeds are basal members of the domestic dog clade. The divergence time for wolves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is estimated to be fairly recent at around 1,600 years ago. Among New World wolves, the Mexican wolf diverged around 5,400 years ago.[21]
+
+In the distant past, there has been gene flow between African golden wolves, golden jackals, and gray wolves. The African golden wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African golden wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula shows admixture with Middle Eastern wolves and dogs.[26] There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves. This indicates the golden jackal ancestry found in North American wolves may have occurred before the divergence of the Eurasian and North American wolves.[27]
+
+The common ancestor of the coyote and the wolf has admixed with a ghost population of an extinct unidentified canid. This canid is genetically close to the dhole and evolved after the divergence of the African hunting dog from the other canid species. The basal position of the coyote compared to the wolf is proposed to be due to the coyote retaining more of the mitochondrial genome of this unidentified canid.[26] Similarly, a museum specimen of a wolf from southern China collected in 1963 showed a genome that was 12–14% admixed from this unknown canid.[28] In North America, most coyotes and wolves show varying degrees of past genetic admixture. The red wolf of the southeastern United States is a hybrid animal with 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry. In addition, there was found to be 60%:40% wolf to coyote genetics in Eastern timber wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes region wolves.[27]
+
+In more recent times, some male Italian wolves originated from dog ancestry, which indicates female wolves will breed with male dogs in the wild.[29] In the Caucasus Mountains, 10% of dogs including livestock guardian dogs, are first generation hybrids.[30] Although mating between golden jackals and wolves has never been observed, evidence of jackal-wolf hybridization was discovered through mitochondrial DNA analysis of jackals living in the Caucasus Mountains[30] and in Bulgaria.[31]
+
+The wolf is the largest member of the Canidae family,[32] and is further distinguished from coyotes and jackals by a broader snout, shorter ears, a shorter torso and a longer tail.[33][32] It is slender and powerfully built with a large, deeply descending rib cage, a sloping back, and a heavily muscled neck.[34] The wolf's legs are moderately longer than those of other canids, which enables the animal to move swiftly, and to overcome the deep snow that covers most of its geographical range in winter.[35] The ears are relatively small and triangular.[34] The wolf's head is large and heavy, with a wide forehead, strong jaws and a long, blunt muzzle.[36] The skull is 230–280 mm (9–11 in) in length and 130–150 mm (5–6 in) in width.[37] The teeth are heavy and large, making them better suited to crushing bone than those of other canids. They are not as specialized as those found in hyenas though.[38][39] Its molars have a flat chewing surface, but not to the same extent as the coyote, whose diet contains more vegetable matter.[40] Females tend to have narrower muzzles and foreheads, thinner necks, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders than males.[41]
+
+Adult wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height.[36] The tail measures 29–50 cm (11–20 in) in length, the ears 90–110 mm (3 1⁄2–4 3⁄8 in) in height, and the hind feet are 220–250 mm (8 5⁄8–9 7⁄8 in).[42] The size and weight of the modern wolf increases proportionally with latitude in accord with Bergmann's rule.[43] The mean body mass of the wolf is 40 kg (88 lb), the smallest specimen recorded at 12 kg (26 lb) and the largest at 79.4 kg (175 lb).[44][36] On average, European wolves weigh 38.5 kg (85 lb), North American wolves 36 kg (79 lb), and Indian and Arabian wolves 25 kg (55 lb).[45] Females in any given wolf population typically weigh 2.3–4.5 kg (5–10 lb) less than males. Wolves weighing over 54 kg (119 lb) are uncommon, though exceptionally large individuals have been recorded in Alaska and Canada.[46] In middle Russia, exceptionally large males are given a maximum weight of 69–79 kg (152–174 lb).[42]
+
+The wolf has very dense and fluffy winter fur, with a short undercoat and long, coarse guard hairs.[36] Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in spring and grow back in autumn.[45] The longest hairs occur on the back, particularly on the front quarters and neck. Especially long hairs grow on the shoulders and almost form a crest on the upper part of the neck. The hairs on the cheeks are elongated and form tufts. The ears are covered in short hairs and project from the fur. Short, elastic and closely adjacent hairs are present on the limbs from the elbows down to the calcaneal tendons.[36] The winter fur is highly resistant to the cold. Wolves in northern climates can rest comfortably in open areas at −40 °C (−40 °F) by placing their muzzles between the rear legs and covering their faces with their tail. Wolf fur provides better insulation than dog fur and does not collect ice when warm breath is condensed against it.[45]
+
+In cold climates, the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin to conserve body heat. The warmth of the foot pads is regulated independently from the rest of the body and is maintained at just above tissue-freezing point where the pads come in contact with ice and snow.[47] In warm climates, the fur is coarser and scarcer than in northern wolves.[36] Female wolves tend to have smoother furred limbs than males and generally develop the smoothest overall coats as they age. Older wolves generally have more white hairs on the tip of the tail, along the nose, and on the forehead. Winter fur is retained longest by lactating females, although with some hair loss around their teats.[41] Hair length on the middle of the back is 60–70 mm (2 3⁄8–2 3⁄4 in), and the guard hairs on the shoulders generally do not exceed 90 mm (3 1⁄2 in), but can reach 110–130 mm (4 3⁄8–5 1⁄8 in).[36]
+
+A wolf's coat colour is determined by its guard hairs. Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black.[48] The coat of the Eurasian wolf is a mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colours with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. The top of the head, forehead, under and between the eyes, and between the eyes and ears is gray with a reddish film. The neck is ochreous. Long, black tips on the hairs along the back form a broad stripe, with black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest and rear of the body. The sides of the body, tail, and outer limbs are a pale dirty ochreous colour, while the inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white. Apart from those wolves which are pure white or black, these tones vary little across geographical areas, although the patterns of these colours vary between individuals.[49]
+
+In North America, the coat colours of wolves follow Gloger's rule, wolves in the Canadian arctic being white and those in southern Canada, the U.S., and Mexico being predominantly gray. In some areas of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the coat colour is predominantly black, some being blue-gray and some with silver and black.[48] Differences in coat colour between sexes is absent in Eurasia;[50] females tend to have redder tones in North America.[51] Black-coloured wolves in North America acquired their colour from wolf-dog admixture after the first arrival of dogs that accompanied humans across the Bering Strait 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.[52] Research into the inheritance of white colour from dogs into wolves has yet to be undertaken.[53]
+
+Wolves occurred originally across Eurasia and North America. Deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of what it once was. The wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) in much of Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and in Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains.[2] Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.[40]
+
+Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be divided into large size 240–650 kg (530–1,430 lb) and medium size 23–130 kg (51–287 lb), and have a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members.[54][55] The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey,[40] with a pack of 15 able to bring down an adult moose.[56] The variation in diet between wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey.[57]
+
+In North America, the wolf's diet is dominated by wild large hoofed mammals (ungulates) and medium-sized mammals. In Asia and Europe, their diet is dominated by wild medium-sized hoofed mammals and domestic species. The wolf depends on wild species, and if these are not readily available, as in Asia, the wolf is more reliant on domestic species.[57] Across Eurasia, wolves prey mostly on moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar.[58] In North America, important range-wide prey are elk, moose, caribou, white-tailed deer and mule deer.[59] Wolves can digest their meal in a few hours and can feed several times in one day, making quick use of large quantities of meat.[60] A well-fed wolf stores fat under the skin, around the heart, intestines, kidneys, and bone marrow, particularly during the autumn and winter.[61]
+
+Nonetheless, wolves are not fussy eaters. Smaller-sized animals that may supplement their diet include rodents, hares, insectivores and smaller carnivores. They frequently eat waterfowl and their eggs. When such foods are insufficient, they prey on lizards, snakes, frogs, and large insects when available.[62] Wolves in northern Minnesota prey on northern pike in freshwater streams.[63] The diet of coastal wolves in Alaska includes 20% salmon,[64] while those of coastal wolves in British Columbia includes 25% marine sources, and those on the nearby islands 75%.[65]
+
+In Europe, wolves eat apples, pears, figs, melons, berries and cherries. In North America, wolves eat blueberries and raspberries. Wolves also eat grass, which may provide some vitamins.[66] They are known to eat the berries of mountain-ash, lily of the valley, bilberries, cowberries, European black nightshade, grain crops, and the shoots of reeds.[62]
+
+In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion.[62] In Eurasian areas with dense human activity, many wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage.[58] Prey in North America continue to occupy suitable habitats with low human density, the wolves eating livestock and garbage only in dire circumstances.[67] Cannibalism is not uncommon in wolves during harsh winters, when packs often attack weak or injured wolves and may eat the bodies of dead pack members.[62][68][69]
+
+Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur. In North America, incidents of wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them.[70] According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921, the infamous Custer Wolf relied on coyotes to accompany him and warn him of danger. Though they fed from his kills, he never allowed them to approach him.[71] Interactions have been observed in Eurasia between wolves and golden jackals, the latter's numbers being comparatively small in areas with high wolf densities.[36][70][72] Wolves also kill red, Arctic and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them.[36][73]
+
+Brown bears typically dominate wolf packs in disputes over carcasses, while wolf packs mostly prevail against bears when defending their den sites. Both species kill each other's young. Wolves eat the brown bears they kill, while brown bears seem to eat only young wolves.[74] Wolf interactions with American black bears are much rarer because of differences in habitat preferences. Wolves have been recorded on numerous occasions actively seeking out American black bears in their dens and killing them without eating them. Unlike brown bears, American black bears frequently lose against wolves in disputes over kills.[75] Wolves also dominate and sometimes kill wolverines, and will chase off those that attempt to scavenge from their kills. Wolverines escape from wolves in caves or up trees.[76]
+
+Wolves may interact and compete with felids, such as the Eurasian lynx, which may feed on smaller prey where wolves are present[77] and may be suppressed by large wolf populations.[78] Wolves encounter cougars along portions of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges. Wolves and cougars typically avoid encountering each other by hunting at different elevations for different prey (niche partitioning). In winter, when snow accumulation forces their prey into valleys, interactions between the two species become more likely. Wolves in packs usually dominate cougars and can steal their kills or even kill them,[79] while one-to-one encounters tend to be dominated by the cat. There are several documented cases of cougars killing wolves.[80] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities and disrupting the feline's behaviour.[81] Wolf and Siberian tiger interactions are well-documented in the Russian Far East, where tigers significantly depress wolf numbers, sometimes to the point of localized extinction. Only human depletion of tiger numbers appears to protect wolves from competitive exclusion from them. With perhaps only four proven records of tigers killing wolves, these cases are rare; attacks appear to be competitive rather than predatory in nature.[82][77]
+
+In Israel, Central Asia and India wolves may encounter striped hyenas, usually in disputes over carcasses. Striped hyenas feed extensively on wolf-killed carcasses in areas where the two species interact. One-to-one, hyenas dominate wolves, and may prey on them,[83] but wolf packs can drive off single or outnumbered hyenas.[84][85] There is at least one case in Israel of a hyena associating and cooperating with a wolf pack. It is proposed that the hyena could benefit from the wolves' superior ability to hunt large, agile prey. The wolves could benefit from the hyena's superior sense of smell, to locate and dig out tortoises, to crack open large bones, and to tear open discarded food containers like tin cans.[86]
+
+
+
+The wolf is a social animal.[36] Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one.[87] The wolf's basic social unit is the nuclear family consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring.[36] The average pack size in North America is eight wolves and in Europe 5.5 wolves.[43] The average pack across Eurasia consists of a family of eight wolves (two adults, juveniles, and yearlings),[36] or sometimes two or three such families,[40] with examples of exceptionally large packs consisting of up to 42 wolves being known.[88] Cortisol levels in wolves rise significantly when a pack member dies, indicating the presence of stress.[89] During times of prey abundance caused by calving or migration, different wolf packs may join together temporarily.[36]
+
+Offspring typically stay in the pack for 10–54 months before dispersing.[90] Triggers for dispersal include the onset of sexual maturity and competition within the pack for food.[91] The distance travelled by dispersing wolves varies widely; some stay in the vicinity of the parental group, while other individuals may travel great distances of upwards of 206 km (128 mi), 390 km (240 mi), and 670 km (420 mi) from their natal (birth) packs.[92] A new pack is usually founded by an unrelated dispersing male and female, travelling together in search of an area devoid of other hostile packs.[93] Wolf packs rarely adopt other wolves into their fold and typically kill them. In the rare cases where other wolves are adopted, the adoptee is almost invariably an immature animal of one to three years old, and unlikely to compete for breeding rights with the mated pair. This usually occurs between the months of February and May. Adoptee males may mate with an available pack female and then form their own pack. In some cases, a lone wolf is adopted into a pack to replace a deceased breeder.[88]
+
+Wolves are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive assuring a steady supply of prey. Territory size depends largely on the amount of prey available and the age of the pack's pups. They tend to increase in size in areas with low prey populations,[94] or when the pups reach the age of six months when they have the same nutritional needs as adults.[95] Wolf packs travel constantly in search of prey, covering roughly 9% of their territory per day, on average 25 km/d (16 mi/d). The core of their territory is on average 35 km2 (14 sq mi) where they spend 50% of their time.[94] Prey density tends to be much higher on the territory's periphery. Except out of desperation, wolves tend to avoid hunting on the fringes of their range to avoid fatal confrontations with neighbouring packs.[96] The smallest territory on record was held by a pack of six wolves in northeastern Minnesota, which occupied an estimated 33 km2 (13 sq mi), while the largest was held by an Alaskan pack of ten wolves encompassing 6,272 km2 (2,422 sq mi).[95] Wolf packs are typically settled, and usually leave their accustomed ranges only during severe food shortages.[36]
+
+Wolves advertise their territories to other packs through howling and scent marking. Scent marking involves urine, feces, and anal gland scents. This is more effective at advertising territory than howling and is often used in combination with scratch marks. Wolves increase their rate of scent marking when they encounter the marks of wolves from other packs. Lone wolves will rarely mark, but newly bonded pairs will scent mark the most.[40] These marks are generally left every 240 m (260 yd) throughout the territory on regular travelways and junctions. Such markers can last for two to three weeks,[95] and are typically placed near rocks, boulders, trees, or the skeletons of large animals.[36] Territorial fights are among the principal causes of wolf mortality, one study concluding that 14–65% of wolf deaths in Minnesota and the Denali National Park and Preserve were due to other wolves.[97]
+
+Wolves communicate to anticipate what their pack mates or other wolves might do next.[98] This includes the use of vocalization, body posture, scent, touch, and taste.[99] The phases of the moon have no effect on wolf vocalization, and despite popular belief, wolves do not howl at the moon.[100] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[101] Wolf howls can under certain conditions be heard over areas of up to 130 km2 (50 sq mi).[40] Other vocalizations include growls, barks and whines. Wolves do not bark as loudly or continuously as dogs do in confrontations, rather barking a few times and then retreating from a perceived danger.[102] Aggressive or self-assertive wolves are characterized by their slow and deliberate movements, high body posture and raised hackles, while submissive ones carry their bodies low, flatten their fur, and lower their ears and tail.[103] Raised leg urination is considered to be one of the most important forms of scent communication in the wolf, making up 60–80% of all scent marks observed.[104]
+
+Wolves are monogamous, mated pairs usually remaining together for life. Should one of the pair die, another mate is found quickly.[105] With wolves in the wild, inbreeding does not occur where outbreeding is possible.[106] Wolves become mature at the age of two years and sexually mature from the age of three years.[105] The age of first breeding in wolves depends largely on environmental factors: when food is plentiful, or when wolf populations are heavily managed, wolves can rear pups at younger ages to better exploit abundant resources. Females are capable of producing pups every year, one litter annually being the average.[107] Oestrus and rut begin in the second half of winter and lasts for two weeks.[105]
+
+Dens are usually constructed for pups during the summer period. When building dens, females make use of natural shelters like fissures in rocks, cliffs overhanging riverbanks and holes thickly covered by vegetation. Sometimes, the den is the appropriated burrow of smaller animals such as foxes, badgers or marmots. An appropriated den is often widened and partly remade. On rare occasions, female wolves dig burrows themselves, which are usually small and short with one to three openings. The den is usually constructed not more than 500 m (550 yd) away from a water source. It typically faces southwards where it can be better warmed by sunlight exposure, and the snow can thaw more quickly. Resting places, play areas for the pups, and food remains are commonly found around wolf dens. The odor of urine and rotting food emanating from the denning area often attracts scavenging birds like magpies and ravens. Though they mostly avoid areas within human sight, wolves have been known to nest near domiciles, paved roads and railways.[108] During pregnancy, female wolves remain in a den located away from the peripheral zone of their territories, where violent encounters with other packs are less likely to occur.[109]
+
+The gestation period lasts 62–75 days with pups usually being born in the spring months or early summer in very cold places such as on the tundra. Young females give birth to four to five young, and older females from six to eight young and up to 14. Their mortality rate is 60–80%.[110] Newborn wolf pups look similar to German Shepherd Dog pups.[111] They are born blind and deaf and are covered in short soft grayish-brown fur. They weigh 300–500 g (10 1⁄2–17 3⁄4 oz) at birth and begin to see after nine to 12 days. The milk canines erupt after one month. Pups first leave the den after three weeks. At one-and-a-half months of age, they are agile enough to flee from danger. Mother wolves do not leave the den for the first few weeks, relying on the fathers to provide food for them and their young. Pups begin to eat solid food at the age of three to four weeks. They have a fast growth rate during their first four months of life: during this period, a pup's weight can increase nearly 30 times.[110][112] Wolf pups begin play-fighting at the age of three weeks, though unlike young coyotes and foxes, their bites are gentle and controlled. Actual fights to establish hierarchy usually occur at five to eight weeks of age. This is in contrast to young coyotes and foxes, which may begin fighting even before the onset of play behaviour.[113] By autumn, the pups are mature enough to accompany the adults on hunts for large prey.[109]
+
+Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs; single wolves have occasionally been observed to kill large prey such as moose, bison and muskoxen unaided.[114][115] This contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.[115] The size of a wolf hunting pack is related to the number of pups that survived the previous winter, adult survival, and the rate of dispersing wolves leaving the pack. The optimal pack size for hunting elk is four wolves, and for bison a large pack size is more successful.[116]
+
+As well as their physical adaptations for hunting hoofed mammals, wolves possess certain behavioural, cognitive, and psychological adaptations to assist with their hunting lifestyle. Wolves are excellent learners that match or outperform domestic dogs. They can use gaze to focus attention on where other wolves are looking. This is important because wolves do not use vocalization when hunting. In laboratory tests, they appear to exhibit insight, foresight, understanding, and the ability to plan. [117] To survive, wolves must be able to solve two problems—finding a prey animal, then confronting it.[117]
+
+Wolves move around their territory when hunting, using the same trails for extended periods. After snowfalls, wolves find their old trails and continue using them. These follow the banks of rivers, the shorelines of lakes, through ravines overgrown with shrubs, through plantations, or roads and human paths.[118] Wolves are nocturnal predators. During the winter, a pack will commence hunting in the twilight of early evening and will hunt all night, traveling tens of kilometres. Sometimes hunting large prey occurs during the day. During the summer, wolves generally tend to hunt individually, ambushing their prey and rarely giving pursuit.[119]
+
+The wolf usually travels at a loping pace, placing one of its paws directly in front of the other. This gait can be maintained for hours at a rate of 8–9 km/h (5.0–5.6 mph).[120] On bare paths, a wolf can quickly achieve speeds of 50–60 km/h (31–37 mph). The wolf has a running gait of 55–70 km/h (34–43 mph), can leap 5 m (16 ft) horizontally in a single bound, and can maintain rapid pursuit for at least 20 minutes.[92] A wolf's foot is large and flexible, which allows it to tread on a wide variety of terrain. A wolf's legs are long compared to their body size allowing them to travel up to 76 km (47 mi) in 12 hours. This adaptation allows wolves to locate prey within hours, but it can take days to find prey that can be killed without great risk. Moose and deer live singly in the summer. Caribou live in herds of thousands which presents dangers for wolves. Elk live in small herds and these are a safer target.[117]
+
+A wolf carries its head at the same level as its back, lifting it only when alert.[36] In one study, wolves detected moose using scent ten times, vision six times, and once by following tracks in the snow. Their vision is as good as a human's, and they can smell prey at least 2.4 km (1 1⁄2 mi) away. One wolf travelled to a herd 103 km (64 mi) away. A human can detect the smell of a forest fire over the same distance from downwind. The wolf's sense of smell is at least comparable to that of the domestic dog, which is at least 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's.[117]
+
+When hunting large gregarious prey, wolves will try to isolate an individual from its group.[121] If successful, a wolf pack can bring down game that will feed it for days, but one error in judgement can lead to serious injury or death. Most large prey have developed defensive adaptations and behaviours. Wolves have been killed while attempting to bring down bison, elk, moose, muskoxen, and even by one of their smallest hoofed prey, the white-tailed deer.[117] Although people often believe that wolves can easily overcome any of their prey, their success rate in hunting hoofed prey is usually low.[122]
+
+Generally, bison, elk, and moose will stand their ground, then the wolves must struggle with them to bring them down. Often caribou and deer will flee, but sometimes deer also make a stand. With smaller prey like beaver, geese, and hares, there is no risk to the wolf.[117] If the targeted animal stands its ground, wolves either ignore it, or try to intimidate it into running.[114] Wolves, or even a wolf on its own, will attempt to frighten a herd into panicking and dispersing.[123]
+
+When wolves encounter prey that flees, they give chase. The speed of sprinting prey is closely related to the speed of their main predators. Wolves can run at 56–64 km/h (35–40 mph) across several kilometres and will often pursue prey for at least 1 km (1⁄2 mi). One wolf chased a caribou for 8 km (5 mi), another chased and tracked a deer for 20 km (12 mi), and one 11-year-old wolf chased and caught an Arctic hare after seven minutes. Most wolf prey will try to run to water, where they will either escape or be better placed to attempt to ward off the wolves.[117]
+
+The wolf must give chase and gain on its fleeing prey, slow it down by biting through thick hair and hide, and then disable it enough to begin feeding.[117] After chasing and then confronting a large prey animal, the wolf makes use of its 6 cm (2 1⁄2 in) fangs and its powerful masseter muscles to deliver a bite force of 28 kg/cm2 (400 lbf/in2), which is capable of breaking open the skulls of many of its prey animals. The wolf leaps at its quarry and tears at it. One wolf was observed being dragged for dozens of metres attached to the hind leg of a moose; another was seen being dragged over a fallen log while attached to a bull elk's nose.[116]
+
+The most common point of wolf attacks on moose is the upper hind legs.[124][125][126] Hind leg wounds are inflicted from the rear, midway up the hock with the canine teeth. These leave gaping skin perforations over 4 cm (1 1⁄2 in) in diameter. Although blood loss, muscle damage, and tendon exposure may occur, there is no evidence of hamstringing. Attacks also occur on the fleshy nose, the back and sides of the neck, the ears, and the perineum.[126] Wolves may wound large prey and then lie around resting for hours before killing it when it is weaker due to blood loss, thereby lessening the risk of injury to themselves.[127]
+
+With medium-sized prey, such as roe deer or sheep, wolves kill by biting the throat, severing nerve tracks and the carotid artery, thus causing the animal to die within a few seconds to a minute. With small, mouselike prey, wolves leap in a high arc and immobilize it with their forepaws.[128] When prey is vulnerable and abundant, wolves may occasionally surplus kill. Such instances are common with domestic animals, but rare with wild prey. In the wild, surplus killing occurs primarily during late winter or spring, when snow is unusually deep (thus impeding the movements of prey)[129] or during the denning period, when den bound wolves require a ready supply of meat.[130] Medium-sized prey are especially vulnerable to surplus killing, as the swift throat-biting method allows wolves to kill one animal quickly and move on to another.[128]
+
+Once prey is brought down, wolves begin to feed excitedly, ripping and tugging at the carcass in all directions, and bolting down large chunks of it.[131] The breeding pair typically monopolizes food to continue producing pups. When food is scarce, this is done at the expense of other family members, especially non-pups.[132] The breeding pair typically eats first. They usually work the hardest at killing prey, and may rest after a long hunt and allow the rest of the family to eat undisturbed. Once the breeding pair has finished eating, the rest of the family tears off pieces of the carcass and transports them to secluded areas where they can eat in peace. Wolves typically commence feeding by consuming the larger internal organs, like the heart, liver, lungs, and stomach lining. The kidneys and spleen are eaten once they are exposed, followed by the muscles.[133] A wolf can eat 15–19% of its body weight in a single feeding.[61]
+
+Viral diseases carried by wolves include: rabies, canine distemper, canine parvovirus, infectious canine hepatitis, papillomatosis, and canine coronavirus.[134] Wolves are a major host for rabies in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and India.[135] In wolves, the incubation period is eight to 21 days, and results in the host becoming agitated, deserting its pack, and travelling up to 80 km (50 mi) a day, thus increasing the risk of infecting other wolves. Infected wolves do not show any fear of humans, most documented wolf attacks on people being attributed to rabid animals. Although canine distemper is lethal in dogs, it has not been recorded to kill wolves, except in Canada and Alaska. The canine parvovirus, which causes death by dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and endotoxic shock or sepsis, is largely survivable in wolves, but can be lethal to pups. Wolves may catch infectious canine hepatitis from dogs, though there are no records of wolves dying from it. Papillomatosis has been recorded only once in wolves, and likely does not cause serious illness or death, though it may alter feeding behaviours. The canine coronavirus has been recorded in Alaskan wolves, infections being most prevalent in winter months.[134]
+
+Bacterial diseases carried by wolves include: brucellosis, Lyme disease, leptospirosis, tularemia, bovine tuberculosis,[136] listeriosis and anthrax.[135] Wolves can catch Brucella suis from wild and domestic reindeer. While adult wolves tend not to show any clinical signs, it can severely weaken the pups of infected females. Although lyme disease can debilitate individual wolves, it does not appear to significantly affect wolf populations. Leptospirosis can be contracted through contact with infected prey or urine, and can cause fever, anorexia, vomiting, anemia, hematuria, icterus, and death. Wolves living near farms are more vulnerable to the disease than those living in the wilderness, probably because of prolonged contact with infected domestic animal waste. Wolves may catch tularemia from lagomorph prey, though its effect on wolves is unknown. Although bovine tuberculosis is not considered a major threat to wolves, it has been recorded to have killed two wolf pups in Canada.[136]
+
+Wolves carry ectoparasites and endoparasites; those in the former Soviet Union have been recorded to carry at least 50 species.[135] Most of these parasites infect wolves without adverse effects, though the effects may become more serious in sick or malnourished specimens.[137] Parasitic infection in wolves is of particular concern to people. Wolves can spread them to dogs, which in turn can carry the parasites to humans. In areas where wolves inhabit pastoral areas, the parasites can be spread to livestock.[135]
+
+Wolves are often infested with a variety of arthropod exoparasites, including fleas, ticks, lice, and mites. The most harmful to wolves, particularly pups, is the mange mite (Sarcoptes scabiei),[137] though they rarely develop full-blown mange, unlike foxes.[36] Lice, such as Trichodectes canis, may cause sickness in wolves, but rarely death. Ticks of the genus Ixodes can infect wolves with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.[137] The tick Dermacentor pictus also infests wolves. Other ectoparasites include chewing lice, sucking lice and the fleas Pulex irritans and Ctenocephalides canis.[36]
+
+Endoparasites known to infect wolves include: protozoans and helminths (flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and thorny-headed worms). Of 30,000 protozoan species, only a few have been recorded to infect wolves: Isospora, Toxoplasma, Sarcocystis, Babesia, and Giardia.[137] Some wolves carry Neospora caninum, which can be spread to cattle and is correlated with bovine miscarriages.[138] Among flukes, the most common in North American wolves is Alaria, which infects small rodents and amphibians that are eaten by wolves. Upon reaching maturity, Alaria migrates to the wolf's intestine, but does little harm. Metorchis conjunctus, which enters wolves through eating fish, infects the wolf's liver or gall bladder, causing liver disease, inflammation of the pancreas, and emaciation. Most other fluke species reside in the wolf's intestine, though Paragonimus westermani lives in the lungs. Tapeworms are commonly found in wolves, as their primary hosts are ungulates, small mammals, and fish, which wolves feed upon. Tapeworms generally cause little harm in wolves, though this depends on the number and size of the parasites, and the sensitivity of the host. Symptoms often include constipation, toxic and allergic reactions, irritation of the intestinal mucosa, and malnutrition. Infections by the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus in ungulate populations tend to increase in areas with high wolf densities, as wolves can shed Echinoccocus eggs in their feces onto grazing areas.[137]
+
+Wolves can carry over 30 roundworm species, though most roundworm infections appear benign, depending on the number of worms and the age of the host. Ancylostoma caninum attaches itself on the intestinal wall to feed on the host's blood, and can cause hyperchromic anemia, emaciation, diarrhea, and possibly death. Toxocara canis, a hookworm known to infect wolf pups in the uterus, can cause intestinal irritation, bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea. Wolves may catch Dioctophyma renale from minks, which infects the kidneys, and can grow to lengths of 100 cm (40 in). D. renale causes the complete destruction of the kidney's functional tissue and can be fatal if both kidneys are infected. Wolves can tolerate low levels of Dirofilaria immitis for many years without showing any ill effects, though high levels can kill wolves through cardiac enlargement and congestive hepatopathy. Wolves probably become infected with Trichinella spiralis by eating infected ungulates. Although T. spiralis is not known to produce clinical signs in wolves, it can cause emaciation, salivation, and crippling muscle pains in dogs. Thorny-headed worms rarely infect wolves, though three species have been identified in Russian wolves: Nicolla skrjabini, Macrocantorhynchus catulinus, and Moniliformis moniliformis.[137]
+
+The global wild wolf population in 2003 was estimated at 300,000.[139] Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s. This has fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range as a result of legal protection, changes in land use, and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the wolf. Despite these threats, the IUCN classifies the wolf as Least Concern on its Red List due to its relatively widespread range and stable population. The species is listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in its Appendix II, indicating that it is not threatened with extinction. However, those wolf populations living in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan are listed in its Appendix I, indicating that these may become extinct without restrictions on their trade.[2]
+
+In Canada, 50,000–60,000 wolves live in 80% of their historical range, making Canada an important stronghold for the species.[40] Under Canadian law, First Nations people can hunt wolves without restrictions, but others must acquire licenses for the hunting and trapping seasons. As many as 4,000 wolves may be harvested in Canada each year.[140] The wolf is a protected species in national parks under the Canada National Parks Act.[141] In Alaska, 7,000–11,000 wolves are found on 85% of the state's 1,517,733 km2 (586,000 sq mi). Wolves may be hunted or trapped with a license; around 1,200 wolves are harvested annually.[142]
+
+In the contiguous United States, wolf declines were caused by the expansion of agriculture, the decimation of the wolf's main prey species like the American bison, and extermination campaigns.[40] Wolves were given protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and have since returned to parts of their former range thanks to both natural recolonizations and reintroductions.[143] Wolf populations in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan number over 4,000 as of 2018.[144] Wolves also occupy much of the northern Rocky Mountains region, with at least 1,704 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as of 2015. They have also established populations in Washington and Oregon.[145] In Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated from 1977 to 1980 in capturing all Mexican wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction and established captive breeding programs for reintroduction.[146] As of 2018, there were 230 Mexican wolves living in Mexico, 64 in Arizona, 67 in New Mexico, and 240 in captive breeding programs in both countries.[147]
+
+Europe, excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, has 17,000 wolves in more than 28 countries.[148] In the European Union, the wolf is strictly protected under the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Appendix II) and the 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Annex II and IV). There is extensive legal protection in many European countries, although there are national exceptions and enforcement is variable and often non-existent.[2]
+
+Wolves have been persecuted in Europe for centuries, having been exterminated in Great Britain by 1684, in Ireland by 1770, in Central Europe by 1899, in France by the 1930s, and in much of Scandinavia by the early 1970s. They continued to survive in parts of Finland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.[149] Since 1980, European wolves have rebounded and expanded into parts of their former range. The decline of the traditional pastoral and rural economies seems to have ended the need to exterminate the wolf in parts of Europe.[140] As of 2016, estimates of wolf numbers include: 4,000 in the Balkans, 3,460–3,849 in the Carpathian Mountains, 1,700–2,240 in the Baltic states, 1,100–2,400 in the Italian peninsula, and around 2,500 in the northwest Iberian peninsula as of 2007.[148]
+
+In the former Soviet Union, wolf populations have retained much of their historical range despite Soviet-era large scale extermination campaigns. Their numbers range from 1,500 in Georgia, to 20,000 in Kazakhstan and up to 45,000 in Russia.[150] In Russia, the wolf is regarded as a pest because of its attacks on livestock, and wolf management means controlling their numbers by destroying them throughout the year. Russian history over the past century shows that reduced hunting leads to an abundance of wolves.[151] The Russian government has continued to pay bounties for wolves and annual harvests of 20-30% do not appear to significantly affect their numbers.[152]
+
+During the 19th century, wolves were widespread in many parts of the Holy Land east and west of the Jordan River, but decreased considerably in number between 1964 and 1980, largely due to persecution by farmers.[153] In the Middle East, only Israel and Oman give wolves explicit legal protection.[154] Israel has protected its wolves since 1954 and has maintained a moderately sized population of 150 through effective enforcement of conservation policies. These wolves have moved into neighboring countries. Approximately 300–600 wolves inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.[155] The wolf also appears to be widespread in Iran.[156] Turkey has an estimated population of about 7,000 wolves.[157] Outside of Turkey, wolf populations in the Middle East may total 1,000–2,000.[154]
+
+In southern Asia, the northern regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important strongholds for wolves. The wolf has been protected in India since 1972.[158] Hindus traditionally considered the hunting of wolves, even dangerous ones, as taboo, for fear of causing a bad harvest. The Santals considered them fair game, as they did every other forest-dwelling animal.[159] During British rule in India, wolves were not considered game species, and were killed primarily in response to them attacking game herds, livestock, and people.[160] The Indian wolf is distributed across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.[161] As of 2019, it is estimated that there are around 2,000–3,000 Indian wolves in the country.[162] In East Asia, Mongolia's population numbers 10,000–20,000. In China, Heilongjiang has roughly 650 wolves, Xinjiang has 10,000 and Tibet has 2,000.[163] 2017 evidence suggests that wolves range across all of mainland China.[164] Wolves have been historically persecuted in China[165] but have been legally protected since 1998.[166] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed in 1905.[167]
+
+The wolf is a common motif in the mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout its historical range. The Ancient Greeks associated wolves with Apollo, the god of light and order.[168] The Ancient Romans connected the wolf with their god of war and agriculture Mars,[169] and believed their city's founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf.[170] Norse mythology includes the feared giant wolf Fenrir, eldest child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda,[171] and Geri and Freki, Odin's faithful pets.[172] The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, who viewed it as the lord of all animals and as the only effective defender against evil.[173]
+
+In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. When humans killed it, they were punished with death, destruction and the loss of immortality.[174] For the Pawnee, Sirius is the "wolf star" and its disappearance and reappearance signified the wolf moving to and from the spirit world. Both the Pawnee and Blackfoot call the Milky Way the "wolf trail".[175] The wolf is also an important totem animal for the Tlingit and Tsimshian.[176] In Chinese astronomy, the wolf represents Sirius as the "blue beast" and the star itself is called the "heavenly wolf".[177] In China, the wolf was traditionally associated with greed and cruelty and wolf epithets were used to describe negative behaviours such as cruelty ("wolf's heart"), mistrust ("wolf's look") and lechery ("wolf-sex").[178]
+
+Tengrism places high importance on the wolf, as it is thought that, when howling, it is praying to Tengri, thus making it the only creature other than man to worship a deity.[179] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the wolf is ridden by gods of protection. In Vedic Hinduism, the wolf is a symbol of the night and the daytime quail must escape from its jaws.[178] In Hindu mythology, Krishna, to convince the people of Vraja to migrate to Vṛndāvana, creates hundreds of wolves from his hairs, which frighten the inhabitants of Vraja into making the journey.[180] In Tantric Buddhism, wolves are depicted as inhabitants of graveyards and destroyers of corpses.[178] In Zoroastrianism, the wolf has been demonized as the creation of Ahriman.[181]
+
+The concept of people turning into wolves has been present in many cultures. One Greek myth tells of Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his evil deeds.[182] The legend of the werewolf has been widespread in European folklore and involves people willingly turning into wolves to attack and kill others.[183] The Navajo have traditionally believed that witches would turn into wolves by donning wolf skins and would kill people and raid graveyards.[184] The Dena'ina believed wolves were once men and viewed them as brothers.[168] Similarly, in Turkic mythology wolves were believed to be the ancestors of their people.[185]
+
+Aesop featured wolves in several of his fables, playing on the concerns of Ancient Greece's settled, sheep-herding world. His most famous is the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is directed at those who knowingly raise false alarms, and from which the idiomatic phrase "to cry wolf" is derived. Some of his other fables concentrate on maintaining the trust between shepherds and guard dogs in their vigilance against wolves, as well as anxieties over the close relationship between wolves and dogs. Although Aesop used wolves to warn, criticize and moralize about human behaviour, his portrayals added to the wolf's image as a deceitful and dangerous animal.[186] The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have used wolves as illustrations of the dangers his followers, whom he represents as sheep, would face should they follow him.(Matthew 7:15, Matthew 10:16 and Acts 20:29).[187] In the Jataka tales the wolf is portrayed as a trickster, including one story in which it makes a hunter stop playing dead by pulling on his club.[188] In another story, the wolf tricks and eats some rats by pretending to be lame but is foiled by the chief rat.[189]
+
+Isengrim the wolf, a character first appearing in the 12th-century Latin poem Ysengrimus, is a major character in the Reynard Cycle, where he stands for the low nobility, whilst his adversary, Reynard the fox, represents the peasant hero. Isengrim is forever the victim of Reynard's wit and cruelty, often dying at the end of each story.[190] The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood", first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, is considered to have further contributed to the wolf's negative reputation in the Western world. The Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a villain capable of imitating human speech and disguising itself with human clothing. The character has been interpreted as an allegorical sexual predator.[191] Villainous wolf characters also appear in The Three Little Pigs and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats".[192] The hunting of wolves, and their attacks on humans and livestock, feature prominently in Russian literature, and are included in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev, and others. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chekhov's Peasants both feature scenes in which wolves are hunted with hounds and Borzois.[193] The musical Peter and the Wolf involves a wolf being captured for eating a farm duck, but is spared and sent to a zoo.[194]
+
+Wolves are among the central characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His portrayal of wolves has been praised posthumously by wolf biologists for his depiction of them: rather than being villainous or gluttonous, as was common in wolf portrayals at the time of the book's publication, they are shown as living in amiable family groups and drawing on the experience of infirm but experienced elder pack members.[195] Farley Mowat's largely fictional 1963 memoir Never Cry Wolf is widely considered to be the most popular book on wolves, having been adapted into a Hollywood film and taught in several schools decades after its publication. Although credited with having changed popular perceptions on wolves by portraying them as loving, cooperative and noble, it has been criticized for its idealization of wolves and its factual inaccuracies.[196][197][198] Lü Jiamin's 2004 semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem uses wolves as symbols of freedom and independence. He associates the Mongolian nomads with wolves and compares the Han Chinese of the present day to sheep, claiming they accept any leadership. As such, the novel has caused controversy with the Chinese Communist Party.[199][200]
+
+The wolf is a frequent charge in English heraldry. It is illustrated as a supporter on the shields of Lord Welby, Rendel, and Viscount Wolseley, and can be found on the coat of arms of Lovett and the vast majority of the Wilsons and Lows. The demi-wolf is a common crest, appearing in the arms and crests of members of many families, including that of the Wolfes, whose crest depicts a demi-wolf holding a crown in its paws, in reference to the assistance the family gave to Charles II during the Battle of Worcester. Wolf heads are common in Scottish heraldry, particularly in the coats of Clan Robertson and Skene. The wolf is the most common animal in Spanish heraldry and is often depicted as carrying a lamb in its mouth, or across its back.[201]
+
+The wolf is featured on the flags of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Pawnee.[202] The Chechen wolf has been a symbol of the Chechen Nation.[203] In modern times, the wolf is widely used as an emblem for military and paramilitary groups. It is the unofficial symbol of the spetsnaz, and serves as the logo of the Turkish Gray Wolves. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Serb paramilitary units adopted the wolf as their symbol, including the White Wolves and the Wolves of Vučjak.[204]
+
+Human presence appears to stress wolves, as seen by increased cortisol levels in instances such as snowmobiling near their territory.[205]
+
+Livestock depredation has been one of the primary reasons for hunting wolves and can pose a severe problem for wolf conservation. As well as causing economic losses, the threat of wolf predation causes great stress on livestock producers, and no foolproof solution of preventing such attacks short of exterminating wolves has been found.[206] Some nations help offset economic losses to wolves through compensation programs or state insurance.[207] Domesticated animals are easy prey for wolves, as they have been bred under constant human protection, and are thus unable to defend themselves very well.[208] Wolves typically resort to attacking livestock when wild prey is depleted. In Eurasia, a large part of the diet of some wolf populations consists of livestock, while such incidents are rare in North America, where healthy populations of wild prey have been largely restored.[206]
+
+The majority of losses occur during the summer grazing period, untended livestock in remote pastures being the most vulnerable to wolf predation.[209] The most frequently targeted livestock species are sheep (Europe), domestic reindeer (northern Scandinavia), goats (India), horses (Mongolia), cattle and turkeys (North America).[206] The number of animals killed in single attacks varies according to species: most attacks on cattle and horses result in one death, while turkeys, sheep and domestic reindeer may be killed in surplus.[210] Wolves mainly attack livestock when the animals are grazing, though they occasionally break into fenced enclosures.[211]
+
+A review of the studies on the competitive effects of dogs on sympatric carnivores did not mention any research on competition between dogs and wolves.[212][213] Competition would favour the wolf, which is known to kill dogs; however wolves usually live in pairs or in small packs in areas with high human persecution, giving them a disadvantage facing large groups of dogs.[213][214]
+
+Wolves kill dogs on occasion, and some wolf populations rely on dogs as an important food source. In Croatia, wolves kill more dogs than sheep, and wolves in Russia appear to limit stray dog populations. Wolves may display unusually bold behaviour when attacking dogs accompanied by people, sometimes ignoring nearby humans. Wolf attacks on dogs may occur both in house yards and in forests. Wolf attacks on hunting dogs are considered a major problem in Scandinavia and Wisconsin.[206][215] The most frequently killed hunting breeds in Scandinavia are Harriers, older animals being most at risk, likely because they are less timid than younger animals, and react to the presence of wolves differently. Large hunting dogs such as Swedish Elkhounds are more likely to survive wolf attacks because of their better ability to defend themselves.[215]
+
+Although the number of dogs killed each year by wolves is relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves' entering villages and farmyards to prey on them. In many cultures, dogs are seen as family members, or at least working team members, and losing one can lead to strong emotional responses such as demanding more liberal hunting regulations.[213]
+
+Dogs that are employed to guard sheep help to mitigate human–wolf conflicts, and are often proposed as one of the non-lethal tools in the conservation of wolves.[213][216] Shepherd dogs are not particularly aggressive, but they can disrupt potential wolf predation by displaying what is to the wolf ambiguous behaviours, such as barking, social greeting, invitation to play or aggression. The historical use of shepherd dogs across Eurasia has been effective against wolf predation,[213][217] especially when confining sheep in the presence of several livestock guardian dogs.[213][218] Shepherd dogs are sometimes killed by wolves.[213]
+
+The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey.[219] How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people.[220] Although wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed.[219]
+
+Predatory attacks may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase.[219] Cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.[36] The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women.[219] Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the summer period in the evening hours, and often within human settlements.[221]
+
+Cases of rabid wolves are low when compared to other species, as wolves do not serve as primary reservoirs of the disease, but can be infected by animals such as dogs, jackals and foxes. Incidents of rabies in wolves are very rare in North America, though numerous in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. Wolves apparently develop the "furious" phase of rabies to a very high degree. This, coupled with their size and strength, makes rabid wolves perhaps the most dangerous of rabid animals.[219] Bites from rabid wolves are 15 times more dangerous than those of rabid dogs.[222] Rabid wolves usually act alone, travelling large distances and often biting large numbers of people and domestic animals. Most rabid wolf attacks occur in the spring and autumn periods. Unlike with predatory attacks, the victims of rabid wolves are not eaten, and the attacks generally occur only on a single day. The victims are chosen at random, though most cases involve adult men. During the fifty years up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, and more than two hundred in southern Asia.[219]
+
+Theodore Roosevelt said wolves are difficult to hunt because of their elusiveness, sharp senses, high endurance, and ability to quickly incapacitate and kill a dog.[223] Historic methods included killing of spring-born litters in their dens, coursing with dogs (usually combinations of sighthounds, Bloodhounds and Fox Terriers), poisoning with strychnine, and trapping.[224][225]
+
+A popular method of wolf hunting in Russia involves trapping a pack within a small area by encircling it with fladry poles carrying a human scent. This method relies heavily on the wolf's fear of human scents, though it can lose its effectiveness when wolves become accustomed to the odor. Some hunters can lure wolves by imitating their calls. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, wolves are traditionally hunted with eagles and falcons, though this practice is declining, as experienced falconers are becoming few in number. Shooting wolves from aircraft is highly effective, due to increased visibility and direct lines of fire.[225] Several types of dog, including the Borzoi and Kyrgyz Tajgan, have been specifically bred for wolf hunting.[213]
+
+Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes kept as exotic pets. Although closely related to domestic dogs, wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, being generally less responsive to human commands and more likely to act aggressively. A person is more likely to be fatally mauled by a pet wolf or wolf-dog hybrid than by a dog.[226]
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+Lourdes (/lʊərd/,[2] also US: /lʊərdz/,[3][4] French: [luʁd]; Occitan: Lorda [ˈluɾðɔ]) is a small market town lying in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It is part of the Hautes-Pyrénées department in the Occitanie region in southwestern France. Prior to the mid-19th century, the town was best known for the Château fort de Lourdes, a fortified castle that rises up from a rocky escarpment at its center.
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+In 1858 Lourdes rose to prominence in France and abroad due to the Marian apparitions claimed to have been seen by the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous, who was later canonized. Shortly thereafter the city with the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes became one of the world's most important sites of pilgrimage and religious tourism.
+
+The current municipal area of Lourdes was inhabited in prehistoric times. In Roman times it had to be, since the first century BC, an oppidum hill where today stands the fortress, as is testified by the numerous finds that came to light in the second half of the nineteenth century (remains of walls, fragments of a citadel, a pagan temple dedicated to the gods of water). Its buildings were discovered soon after the demolition of the parish of Saint Pierre (which took place in the early twentieth century), along with remains of pottery and three votive altars. In the fifth century, the temple was replaced by an early Christian church, destroyed later because of a fire. In the immediate vicinity of the place of worship was a necropolis of whose date and size there are no notes. The presence in the locality of a Roman road (and a possible second path perpendicular to the previous one) that connected the Pyrenean piedmont with Narbonne led to the hypothesis that the town could match quell'oppidum novum mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary.
+
+From 732 to 778, Lourdes was possessed by Muslims of Al-Andalus.[5] However, during the 8th century, Lourdes and its fortress became the focus of skirmishes between Mirat, the Muslim local leader, and Charlemagne, King of the Franks. Charlemagne had been laying siege to Mirat in the fortress for some time, but the Moor had so far refused to surrender. According to legend, an eagle unexpectedly appeared and dropped an enormous trout at the feet of Mirat. It was seen as such a bad omen that Mirat was persuaded to surrender to the Queen of the Sky by the local bishop. He visited the Black Virgin of Puy to offer gifts, so he could make sure this was the best course of action and, astounded by its exceptional beauty, he decided to surrender the fort and converted to Christianity. On the day of his baptism, Mirat took on the name of Lorus, which was given to the town, now known as Lourdes.
+
+Little is known of Lourdes in the period from the barbarian invasions to the Carolingian period when the town was part of the County of Bigorre. The fortress was at times the seat of counts and, during the Albigensian Crusade, it was the subject of disputes between various local lords. Ultimately it came under the domination of the Counts of Champagne. In the fourteenth century Lourdes was first occupied by Philip the Fair, then, during the Hundred Years' War, by the English, who controlled it for nearly half a century, from 1360 to 1407, through local feudal lords such as Pierre Arnaud de Béarn and, later, his brother Jean de Béarn. The English were able to take advantage of the excellent strategic situation and the prosperity of an eleventh century market that had been increasingly consolidated thanks to its proximity and good communications with Toulouse and Spain, managing to secure important gains for those who held the town. In the town, which developed in the valley, east of the fort, there were 243 fires at the beginning of the fifteenth century, compared to 150 of the thirteenth century.
+
+After being the residency of the Bigorre counts, Lourdes was given to England by the Brétigny Treaty which bought a temporary peace to France during the course of the Hundred Years War with the result that the French lost the town to the English, from 1360. In 1405, Charles VI laid siege to the castle during the course of the Hundred Years War and eventually captured the town from the English following the 18-month siege.
+
+During the late 16th century, France was ravaged by the Wars of Religion between the Roman Catholics and the Huguenots. In 1569, Count Gabriel de Montgomery attacked the nearby town of Tarbes when Queen Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre established Protestantism there. The town was overrun, in 1592, by forces of the Catholic League and the Catholic faith was re-established in the area. In 1607 Lourdes finally became part of the Kingdom of France.
+
+The castle became a jail under Louis XV but, in 1789, the General Estates Assembly ordered the liberation of prisoners. Following the rise of Napoleon in 1803, he again made the Castle an Estate jail. Towards the end of the Peninsular War between France, Spain, Portugal, and Britain in 1814, British and Allied forces, under the Duke of Wellington, entered France and took control of the region and followed Marshall Soult's army, defeating the French near the adjoining town of Tarbes before the final battle, outside Toulouse on 10 April 1814, brought the war to an end.
+
+Up until 1858, Lourdes was a quiet, modest, county town with a population of only some 4,000 inhabitants. The castle was occupied by an infantry garrison. The town was a place people passed through on their way to the waters at Barèges, Cauterets, Luz-Saint-Sauveur and Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and for mountaineers on their way to Gavarnie.
+
+Then on 11 February 1858, the 14-year-old local girl Bernadette Soubirous claimed a beautiful lady appeared to her in the remote Grotto of Massabielle. This lady later identified herself as "the Immaculate Conception" and the faithful believed her to be the Blessed Virgin Mary. The lady appeared 18 times, and by 1859 thousands of pilgrims were visiting Lourdes. A statue of Our Lady of Lourdes was erected at the site in 1864.
+
+Since the apparitions, Lourdes has become one of the world's leading Catholic Marian shrines. Pope John Paul II visited the shrine twice, on 15 August 1983, and 14–15 August 2004. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI authorized special indulgences to mark the 150th anniversary of Our Lady of Lourdes.[6]
+
+Lourdes is located in southern France in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains near the prime meridian. It is overlooked from the south by the Pyrenean peaks of Aneto, Montaigu, and Vignemale (3,298 m), while around the town there are three summits reaching up to 1,000 m (3,280.84 ft) which are known as the Béout, the Petit Jer (with its three crosses) and the Grand Jer (with its single cross). The Grand Jer is accessible via the funicular railway of the Pic du Jer. The Béout was once accessible by cable car, although this has fallen into disrepair. A pavilion is still visible on the summit.
+
+Lourdes lies at an elevation of 420 m (1,380 ft) and in a central position through which runs the fast-flowing river Gave de Pau from the south, coming from its source at Gavarnie; into it flow several smaller rivers from Barèges and Cauterets. The Gave then branches off to the west towards the Béarn, running past the banks of the Grotto and on downstream to Pau and then Biarritz.
+
+On land bordered by a loop of the Gave de Pau is an outcrop of rock called Massabielle (from masse vieille: "old mass"). On the northern aspect of this rock, near the riverbank, is a naturally occurring, irregularly shaped shallow cave or grotto, in which the apparitions of 1858 took place.[7]
+
+According to believers, the Virgin Mary appeared to Maria Bernada Sobirós (in her native Occitan language) on a total of eighteen occasions at Lourdes (Lorda in her local Occitan language). Lourdes has become a major place of Roman Catholic pilgrimage and of miraculous healings. The 150th Jubilee of the first apparition took place on 11 February 2008 with an outdoor Mass attended by approximately 45,000 pilgrims.
+
+Today Lourdes has a population of around 15,000, but it is able to take in some 5,000,000 pilgrims and tourists every season. With about 270 hotels, Lourdes has the second greatest number of hotels per square kilometer in France after Paris.[8] Some of the deluxe hotels like Grand Hotel Moderne, Hotel Grand de la Grotte, Hotel St. Etienne, Hotel Majestic and Hotel Roissy are located here.
+
+In the evening of February 11, 1858, a young Roman Catholic girl, Bernadette, went to fetch some firewood with her sister and another companion when a Lady who was indescribably beautiful appeared to her at the Massabielle grotto. Although the Lady did not tell Bernadette her name when asked at first, she told her to return to the grotto. On subsequent visits, the Lady revealed herself to be the "Immaculate Conception". This was a reference to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception which had been defined only four years earlier in 1854 by Pope Pius IX, stating that the Virgin Mary herself had been conceived without sin. Bernadette, having only a rudimentary knowledge of the Catholic faith, did not understand what this meant but she reported it to her parish priest, Father Peyremale. He, though initially very skeptical of Bernadette's claims, became convinced when he heard this because he knew the young girl had no knowledge of the doctrine. The Lady also told Bernadette to dig in the ground at a certain spot and to drink from the small spring of water that began to bubble up. Almost immediately cures were reported from drinking the water. And yet the water has been shown through repeated testing not to have any special curative properties. Today thousands of gallons of water gush from the source of the spring, and pilgrims are able to bathe in it. Countless purported miracle cures have been documented there, from the healing of nervous disorders and cancers to cases of paralysis and even of blindness. 
+During the Apparitions, Bernadette Soubirous prayed the Rosary. Pope John Paul II wrote: "The Rosary of the Virgin Mary [is] a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness".[9]
+
+The climate of Lourdes, due to the proximity of the city to the Atlantic, is oceanic (Cfb in the Koeppen climate classification). It is quite mild for most of the year with moderate rainfall in summer and quite high rainfall in winter – about 120 rainy days and more than 1,000 mm (39 in) of average annual precipitation. The summers are warm, the autumn and spring mild, while winter is cool. Because of the proximity of the city to the Pyrenees, Lourdes, like other areas of the Pyrenean Piedmont, however, can be affected in winter by sporadic waves of frost: in January 1985 the thermometer marked -17° Fahrenheit, 9 °C (historical record from 1934 to the present). A summer temperature of 102° Fahrenheit, 39 °C, was recorded in August 2003. The reference station of Lourdes is to Tarbes-Ossun-Lourdes, located approximately 9 km (5.6 mi) from the town, in the airport area of Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrénées, 360 m.
+
+Yearly from March to October the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is a place of mass pilgrimage from Europe and other parts of the world. The spring water from the grotto is believed by some Catholics to possess healing properties.
+
+An estimated 200 million people have visited the shrine since 1860,[10] and the Roman Catholic Church has officially recognized 69 healings considered miraculous.
+Cures are examined using Church criteria for authenticity and authentic miracle healing with no physical or psychological basis other than the healing power of the water.[11]
+
+Tours from all over the world are organized to visit the Sanctuary. Connected with this pilgrimage is often the consumption of or bathing in the Lourdes water which wells out of the Grotto.
+
+At the time of the apparitions, the grotto was on common land which was used by the villagers variously for pasturing animals, collecting firewood and as a garbage dump, and it possessed a reputation for being an unpleasant place.[12]
+
+The five-domed St. Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church in Lourdes was designed by Myroslav Nimciv, while its Byzantine interior polychrome decorations were executed by artist Jerzy Nowosielski and the iconostasis by Petro Kholodny. The church was consecrated in 1982. It is about a 10-minute walk from the basilica and the grotto, on a street named in honour of Ukraine, 8 Rue de l'Ukraine, situated on a narrow piece of property close to the railroad station. Visible from the basilica, the height of the building makes up for its narrow breadth.[13]
+
+Lourdes is twinned with:[14]
+
+Although the town is most famous for its shrines it is also notable for its Rugby union team, FC Lourdes, which during the mid-twentieth century was one of the most successful teams in France, winning the national championship 8 times from 1948 to 1968. Their most famous player is Jean Prat who represented his country 51 times.
+
+There is also an amateur association football team in the town.
+
+Since 2015, the local mountain biking course has been home to a UCI Downhill World Cup round each season.
+
+Lourdes is served by Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrénées Airport situated 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) from the town centre. (Many visitors also fly to Pau Pyrénées Airport.) This airport is served by HOP! which provides three daily and two weekend air services to Paris-Orly. Jetairfly offers a connection of two flights a week during the summer.[15] along with Ryanair from London Stansted, Dublin, Lisbon, Kraków and Milan Bergamo; Air Malta from Malta and Lufthansa from Brussels with two and three flights a week, respectively.[15] Meridiana connects to Rome and Air Nostrum (Iberia Regional) offers two flights per week to Madrid Barajas. The airport also offers seasonal charter flights to and from the largest European cities. The town's railway station Gare de Lourdes is served by SNCF and TGV trains, including a high-speed TGV service from Paris which takes four-and-a-half hours. Many pilgrims also arrive via bus service from France and Spain.
+
+Lourdes has two main schools, one public and one private. The private school, the "Lycée Peyramale St Joseph", was founded by two monks just two years before the apparitions; it is named after the priest Dominique Peyramale, who was present during the apparitions. It celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2007. The newer public school is called the "Lycée de Sarsan".

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@@ -0,0 +1,196 @@
+
+
+
+
+†Ursus maritimus tyrannus(?)
+
+Ursus eogroenlandicus
+Ursus groenlandicus
+Ursus jenaensis
+Ursus labradorensis
+Ursus marinus
+Ursus polaris
+Ursus spitzbergensis
+Ursus ungavensis
+Thalarctos maritimus
+
+The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is a hypercarnivorous bear whose native range lies largely within the Arctic Circle, encompassing the Arctic Ocean, its surrounding seas and surrounding land masses. It is a large bear, approximately the same size as the omnivorous Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi).[5] A boar (adult male) weighs around 350–700 kg (772–1,543 lb),[6] while a sow (adult female) is about half that size. Polar bears are the largest land carnivores currently in existence, rivaled only by the Kodiak bear.[7] Although it is the sister species of the brown bear,[8] it has evolved to occupy a narrower ecological niche, with many body characteristics adapted for cold temperatures, for moving across snow, ice and open water, and for hunting seals, which make up most of its diet.[9] Although most polar bears are born on land, they spend most of their time on the sea ice. Their scientific name means "maritime bear" and derives from this fact. Polar bears hunt their preferred food of seals from the edge of sea ice, often living off fat reserves when no sea ice is present. Because of their dependence on the sea ice, polar bears are classified as marine mammals.[10]
+
+Because of expected habitat loss caused by climate change, the polar bear is classified as a vulnerable species. For decades, large-scale hunting raised international concern for the future of the species, but populations rebounded after controls and quotas began to take effect.[11] For thousands of years, the polar bear has been a key figure in the material, spiritual, and cultural life of circumpolar peoples, and polar bears remain important in their cultures. Historically, the polar bear has also been known as the "white bear".[12] It is sometimes referred to as the "nanook", based on the Inuit term nanuq.[13]
+
+Constantine John Phipps was the first to describe the polar bear as a distinct species in 1774.[3][2] He chose the scientific name Ursus maritimus, the Latin for 'maritime bear',[14] due to the animal's native habitat. The Inuit refer to the animal as nanook (transliterated as nanuq in the Inupiat language).[15][13] The Yupik also refer to the bear as nanuuk in Siberian Yupik.[16] The bear is umka in the Chukchi language. In Russian, it is usually called бе́лый медве́дь (bélyj medvédj, the white bear), though an older word still in use is ошку́й (Oshkúj, which comes from the Komi oski, "bear").[17] In Quebec, the polar bear is referred to as ours blanc ("white bear") or ours polaire ("polar bear").[18] In the Norwegian-administered Svalbard archipelago, the polar bear is referred to as Isbjørn ("ice bear").
+
+The polar bear was previously considered to be in its own genus, Thalarctos.[19] However, evidence of hybrids between polar bears and brown bears, and of the recent evolutionary divergence of the two species, does not support the establishment of this separate genus, and the accepted scientific name is now therefore Ursus maritimus, as Phipps originally proposed.[2]
+
+The bear family, Ursidae, is thought to have split from other carnivorans about 38 million years ago.[20] The subfamily Ursinae originated approximately 4.2 million years ago.[21] The oldest known polar bear fossil is a 130,000 to 110,000-year-old jaw bone, found on Prince Charles Foreland in 2004.[22] Fossils show that between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, the polar bear's molar teeth changed significantly from those of the brown bear.[23] Polar bears are thought to have diverged from a population of brown bears that became isolated during a period of glaciation in the Pleistocene[4] from the eastern part of Siberia (from Kamchatka and the Kolym Peninsula).[23]
+
+The evidence from DNA analysis is more complex. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the polar bear diverged from the brown bear, Ursus arctos, roughly 150,000 years ago.[22] Further, some clades of brown bear, as assessed by their mtDNA, were thought to be more closely related to polar bears than to other brown bears,[24] meaning that the brown bear might not be considered a species under some species concepts, but paraphyletic.[25] The mtDNA of extinct Irish brown bears is particularly close to polar bears.[26] A comparison of the nuclear genome of polar bears with that of brown bears revealed a different pattern, the two forming genetically distinct clades that diverged approximately 603,000 years ago,[27] although the latest research is based on analysis of the complete genomes (rather than just the mitochondria or partial nuclear genomes) of polar and brown bears, and establishes the divergence of polar and brown bears at 400,000 years ago.[28]
+
+However, the two species have mated intermittently for all that time, most likely coming into contact with each other during warming periods, when polar bears were driven onto land and brown bears migrated northward. Most brown bears have about 2 percent genetic material from polar bears, but one population, the ABC Islands bears, has between 5 percent and 10 percent polar bear genes, indicating more frequent and recent mating.[29] Polar bears can breed with brown bears to produce fertile grizzly–polar bear hybrids;[4][30] rather than indicating that they have only recently diverged, the new evidence suggests more frequent mating has continued over a longer period of time, and thus the two bears remain genetically similar.[29] However, because neither species can survive long in the other's ecological niche, and because they have different morphology, metabolism, social and feeding behaviours, and other phenotypic characteristics, the two bears are generally classified as separate species.[31]
+
+When the polar bear was originally documented, two subspecies were identified: the American polar bear (Ursus maritimus maritimus) by Constantine J. Phipps in 1774, and the Siberian polar bear (Ursus maritimus marinus) by Peter Simon Pallas in 1776.[32] This distinction has since been invalidated.[33][34][35] One alleged fossil subspecies has been identified: Ursus maritimus tyrannus, which became extinct during the Pleistocene. U.m. tyrannus was significantly larger than the living subspecies.[4] However, recent reanalysis of the fossil suggests that it was actually a brown bear.[1]
+
+The polar bear is found in the Arctic Circle and adjacent land masses as far south as Newfoundland. Due to the absence of human development in its remote habitat, it retains more of its original range than any other extant carnivore.[36] While they are rare north of 88°, there is evidence that they range all the way across the Arctic, and as far south as James Bay in Canada. Their southernmost range is near the boundary between the subarctic and humid continental climate zones. They can occasionally drift widely with the sea ice, and there have been anecdotal sightings as far south as Berlevåg on the Norwegian mainland and the Kuril Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk. It is difficult to estimate a global population of polar bears as much of the range has been poorly studied; however, biologists use a working estimate of about 20–25,000 or 22–31,000 polar bears worldwide.[2][37][38]
+
+There are 19 generally recognized, discrete subpopulations, though polar bears are thought to exist only in low densities in the area of the Arctic Basin.[37][39] The subpopulations display seasonal fidelity to particular areas, but DNA studies show that they are not reproductively isolated.[35] The 13 North American subpopulations range from the Beaufort Sea south to Hudson Bay and east to Baffin Bay in western Greenland and account for about 54% of the global population.[40]
+
+The range includes the territory of five nations: Denmark (Greenland), Norway (Svalbard), Russia, the United States (Alaska) and Canada. These five nations are the signatories of the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, which mandates cooperation on research and conservation efforts throughout the polar bear's range.[41] Bears sometimes swim to Iceland from Greenland—about 600 sightings since the country's settlement in the 9th century AD, and five in the 21st century as of 2016[update]—and are always killed because of their danger, and the cost and difficulty of repatriation.[42]
+
+Modern methods of tracking polar bear populations have been implemented only since the mid-1980s, and are expensive to perform consistently over a large area. The most accurate counts require flying a helicopter in the Arctic climate to find polar bears, shooting a tranquilizer dart at the bear to sedate it, and then tagging the bear. In Nunavut, some Inuit have reported increases in bear sightings around human settlements in recent years, leading to a belief that populations are increasing. Scientists have responded by noting that hungry bears may be congregating around human settlements, leading to the illusion that populations are higher than they actually are.[43] The Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission takes the position that "estimates of subpopulation size or sustainable harvest levels should not be made solely on the basis of traditional ecological knowledge without supporting scientific studies."[44]
+
+Of the 19 recognized polar bear subpopulations, one is in decline, two are increasing, seven are stable, and nine have insufficient data, as of 2017.[45]
+
+The polar bear is a marine mammal because it spends many months of the year at sea.[46] However, it is the only living marine mammal with powerful, large limbs and feet that allow them to cover kilometres on foot and run on land.[47] Its preferred habitat is the annual sea ice covering the waters over the continental shelf and the Arctic inter-island archipelagos. These areas, known as the "Arctic ring of life", have high biological productivity in comparison to the deep waters of the high Arctic.[36][48] The polar bear tends to frequent areas where sea ice meets water, such as polynyas and leads (temporary stretches of open water in Arctic ice), to hunt the seals that make up most of its diet.[49] Freshwater is limited in these environments because it is either locked up in snow or saline. Polar bears are able to produce water through the metabolism of fats found in seal blubber,[50] and are therefore found primarily along the perimeter of the polar ice pack, rather than in the Polar Basin close to the North Pole where the density of seals is low.[51]
+
+Annual ice contains areas of water that appear and disappear throughout the year as the weather changes. Seals migrate in response to these changes, and polar bears must follow their prey. In Hudson Bay, James Bay, and some other areas, the ice melts completely each summer (an event often referred to as "ice-floe breakup"), forcing polar bears to go onto land and wait through the months until the next freeze-up.[48] In the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, polar bears retreat each summer to the ice further north that remains frozen year-round.
+
+The only other bear similar in size to the polar bear is the Kodiak bear, which is a subspecies of brown bear.[52] Adult male polar bears weigh 350–700 kg (772–1,543 lb) and measure 2.4–3 metres (7 ft 10 in–9 ft 10 in) in total length.[53] Around the Beaufort Sea, however, mature males reportedly average 450 kg (992 lb).[54] Adult females are roughly half the size of males and normally weigh 150–250 kg (331–551 lb), measuring 1.8–2.4 metres (5 ft 11 in–7 ft 10 in) in length. Elsewhere, a slightly larger estimated average weight of 260 kg (573 lb) was claimed for adult females.[55] When pregnant, however, females can weigh as much as 500 kg (1,102 lb).[53] The polar bear is among the most sexually dimorphic of mammals, surpassed only by the pinnipeds such as elephant seals.[56] The largest polar bear on record, reportedly weighing 1,002 kg (2,209 lb), was a male shot at Kotzebue Sound in northwestern Alaska in 1960. This specimen, when mounted, stood 3.39 m (11 ft 1 in) tall on its hindlegs. The shoulder height of an adult polar bear is 122 to 160 cm (4 ft 0 in to 5 ft 3 in).[57][58] While all bears are short-tailed, the polar bear's tail is relatively the shortest amongst living bears, ranging from 7 to 13 cm (2.8 to 5.1 in) in length.[59]
+
+Compared with its closest relative, the brown bear, the polar bear has a more elongated body build and a longer skull and nose.[31] As predicted by Allen's rule for a northerly animal, the legs are stocky and the ears and tail are small.[31] However, the feet are very large to distribute load when walking on snow or thin ice and to provide propulsion when swimming; they may measure 30 cm (12 in) across in an adult.[60] The pads of the paws are covered with small, soft papillae (dermal bumps), which provide traction on the ice. The polar bear's claws are short and stocky compared to those of the brown bear, perhaps to serve the former's need to grip heavy prey and ice.[31] The claws are deeply scooped on the underside to assist in digging in the ice of the natural habitat. Research of injury patterns in polar bear forelimbs found injuries to the right forelimb to be more frequent than those to the left, suggesting, perhaps, right-handedness.[61] Unlike the brown bear, polar bears in captivity are rarely overweight or particularly large, possibly as a reaction to the warm conditions of most zoos.
+
+The 42 teeth of a polar bear reflect its highly carnivorous diet. The cheek teeth are smaller and more jagged than in the brown bear, and the canines are larger and sharper. The dental formula is 3.1.4.23.1.4.3.[31]
+
+Polar bears are superbly insulated by up to 10 cm (4 in) of adipose tissue,[60] their hide and their fur; they overheat at temperatures above 10 °C (50 °F), and are nearly invisible under infrared photography.[62] Polar bear fur consists of a layer of dense underfur and an outer layer of guard hairs, which appear white to tan but are actually transparent.[60] Two genes that are known to influence melanin production, LYST and AIM1, are both mutated in polar bears, possibly leading to the absence on this pigment in their fur.[63] The guard hair is 5–15 cm (2–6 in) over most of the body.[64] Polar bears gradually moult from May to August,[65] but, unlike other Arctic mammals, they do not shed their coat for a darker shade to provide camouflage in summer conditions.[66] The hollow guard hairs of a polar bear coat were once thought to act as fiber-optic tubes to conduct light to its black skin, where it could be absorbed; however, this hypothesis was disproved by a study in 1998.[67]
+
+The white coat usually yellows with age. When kept in captivity in warm, humid conditions, the fur may turn a pale shade of green due to algae growing inside the guard hairs.[68] Males have significantly longer hairs on their forelegs, which increase in length until the bear reaches 14 years of age. The male's ornamental foreleg hair is thought to attract females, serving a similar function to the lion's mane.[69]
+
+The polar bear has an extremely well developed sense of smell, being able to detect seals nearly 1.6 km (1 mi) away and buried under 1 m (3 ft) of snow. Its hearing is about as acute as that of a human, and its vision is also good at long distances.[70]
+
+The polar bear is an excellent swimmer and often will swim for days.[71] One bear swam continuously for 9 days in the frigid Bering Sea for 700 km (400 mi) to reach ice far from land. She then travelled another 1,800 km (1,100 mi). During the swim, the bear lost 22% of her body mass and her yearling cub died.[72] With its body fat providing buoyancy, the bear swims in a dog paddle fashion using its large forepaws for propulsion. Polar bears can swim 10 km/h (6 mph). When walking, the polar bear tends to have a lumbering gait and maintains an average speed of around 5.6 km/h (3.5 mph).[73] When sprinting, they can reach up to 40 km/h (25 mph).[74]
+
+Unlike brown bears, polar bears are not territorial. Although stereotyped as being voraciously aggressive, they are normally cautious in confrontations, and often choose to escape rather than fight.[75] Satiated polar bears rarely attack humans unless severely provoked.[76][77] However, due to their lack of prior human interaction, hungry polar bears are extremely unpredictable, fearless towards people and are known to kill and sometimes eat humans.[78] Many attacks by brown bears are the result of surprising the animal, which is not the case with the polar bear. Polar bears are stealth hunters, and the victim is often unaware of the bear's presence until the attack is underway. Whereas brown bears often maul a person and then leave, polar bear attacks are more likely to be predatory and are almost always fatal.[79] However, due to the very small human population around the Arctic, such attacks are rare. Michio Hoshino, a Japanese wildlife photographer, was once pursued briefly by a hungry male polar bear in northern Alaska. According to Hoshino, the bear started running but Hoshino made it to his truck. The bear was able to reach the truck and tore one of the doors off the truck before Hoshino was able to drive off.[80]
+
+In general, adult polar bears live solitary lives. Yet, they have often been seen playing together for hours at a time and even sleeping in an embrace,[78] and polar bear zoologist Nikita Ovsianikov has described adult males as having "well-developed friendships."[75] Cubs are especially playful as well. Among young males in particular, play-fighting may be a means of practicing for serious competition during mating seasons later in life.[81] Polar bears are usually quiet but do communicate with various sounds and vocalizations. Females communicate with their young with moans and chuffs, and the distress calls of both cubs and subadults consists of bleats.[82] Cubs may hum while nursing.[83] When nervous, bears produce huffs, chuffs and snorts while hisses, growls and roars are signs of aggression.[82] Chemical communication can also be important: bears leave behind their scent in their tracks which allow individuals to keep track of one another in the vast Arctic wilderness.[84]
+
+In 1992, a photographer near Churchill took a now widely circulated set of photographs of a polar bear playing with a Canadian Eskimo Dog (Canis lupus familiaris) a tenth of its size.[85][86] The pair wrestled harmlessly together each afternoon for 10 days in a row for no apparent reason, although the bear may have been trying to demonstrate its friendliness in the hope of sharing the kennel's food. This kind of social interaction is uncommon; it is far more typical for polar bears to behave aggressively towards dogs.[85]
+
+The polar bear is the most carnivorous member of the bear family, and throughout most of its range, its diet primarily consists of ringed (Pusa hispida) and bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus).[88] The Arctic is home to millions of seals, which become prey when they surface in holes in the ice in order to breathe, or when they haul out on the ice to rest.[87][89] Polar bears hunt primarily at the interface between ice, water, and air; they only rarely catch seals on land or in open water.[90]
+
+The polar bear's most common hunting method is called still-hunting:[91] the bear uses its excellent sense of smell to locate a seal breathing hole, and crouches nearby in silence for a seal to appear. The bear may lie in wait for several hours. When the seal exhales, the bear smells its breath, reaches into the hole with a forepaw, and drags it out onto the ice. The polar bear kills the seal by biting its head to crush its skull. The polar bear also hunts by stalking seals resting on the ice: upon spotting a seal, it walks to within 90 m (100 yd), and then crouches. If the seal does not notice, the bear creeps to within 9 to 12 m (30 to 40 ft) of the seal and then suddenly rushes forth to attack.[87] A third hunting method is to raid the birth lairs that female seals create in the snow.[91]
+
+A widespread legend tells that polar bears cover their black noses with their paws when hunting. This behaviour, if it happens, is rare – although the story exists in the oral history of northern peoples and in accounts by early Arctic explorers, there is no record of an eyewitness account of the behaviour in recent decades.[73]
+
+Mature bears tend to eat only the calorie-rich skin and blubber of the seal, which are highly digestible,[92] whereas younger bears consume the protein-rich red meat.[87] Studies have also photographed polar bears scaling near-vertical cliffs, to eat birds' chicks and eggs.[93] For subadult bears, which are independent of their mother but have not yet gained enough experience and body size to successfully hunt seals, scavenging the carcasses from other bears' kills is an important source of nutrition. Subadults may also be forced to accept a half-eaten carcass if they kill a seal but cannot defend it from larger polar bears. After feeding, polar bears wash themselves with water or snow.[73]
+
+Although polar bears are extraordinarily powerful, its primary prey species, the ringed seal, is much smaller than itself, and many of the seals hunted are pups rather than adults. Ringed seals are born weighing 5.4 kg (12 lb) and grown to an estimated average weight of only 60 kg (130 lb).[94][95] They also in places prey heavily upon the harp seal (Pagophilus groenlandicus) or the harbour seal. The bearded seal, on the other hand, can be nearly the same size as the bear itself, averaging 270 kg (600 lb).[95] Adult male bearded seals, at 350 to 500 kg (770 to 1,100 lb) are too large for a female bear to overtake, and so are potential prey only for mature male bears.[96] Large males also occasionally attempt to hunt and kill even larger prey items.[97] It can kill an adult walrus (Odobenus rosmarus),[95][98] although this is rarely attempted. At up to 2,000 kg (4,400 lb) and a typical adult mass range of 600 to 1,500 kg (1,300 to 3,300 lb), a walrus can be more than twice the bear's weight,[99] has extremely thick skin and has up to 1-metre (3 ft)-long ivory tusks that can be used as formidable weapons. A polar bear may charge a group of walruses, with the goal of separating a young, infirm, or injured walrus from the pod. They will even attack adult walruses when their diving holes have frozen over or intercept them before they can get back to the diving hole in the ice. Yet, polar bears will very seldom attack full-grown adult walruses, with the largest male walrus probably invulnerable unless otherwise injured or incapacitated. Since an attack on a walrus tends to be an extremely protracted and exhausting venture, bears have been known to back down from the attack after making the initial injury to the walrus.[98] Polar bears have also been seen to prey on beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas)[95] and narwhals (Monodon monoceros),[95] by swiping at them at breathing holes. The whales are of similar size to the walrus and nearly as difficult for the bear to subdue.[100][101] Most terrestrial animals in the Arctic can outrun the polar bear on land as polar bears overheat quickly, and most marine animals the bear encounters can outswim it. In some areas, the polar bear's diet is supplemented by walrus calves and by the carcasses of dead adult walruses or whales, whose blubber is readily devoured even when rotten.[78] Polar bears sometimes swim underwater to catch fish like the Arctic charr or the fourhorn sculpin.[89]
+
+With the exception of pregnant females, polar bears are active year-round, although they have a vestigial hibernation induction trigger in their blood. Unlike brown and black bears, polar bears are capable of fasting for up to several months during late summer and early fall, when they cannot hunt for seals because the sea is unfrozen.[102] When sea ice is unavailable during summer and early autumn, some populations live off fat reserves for months at a time,[62] as polar bears do not 'hibernate' any time of the year.[103]
+
+Being both curious animals and scavengers,[99][104] polar bears investigate and consume garbage where they come into contact with humans.[95][99] Polar bears may attempt to consume almost anything they can find, including hazardous substances such as styrofoam, plastic, car batteries, ethylene glycol, hydraulic fluid, and motor oil.[99][104] The dump in Churchill, Manitoba was closed in 2006 to protect bears, and waste is now recycled or transported to Thompson, Manitoba.[105][106]
+
+Although seal predation is the primary and an indispensable way of life for most polar bears, when alternatives are present they are quite flexible. Polar bears consume a wide variety of other wild foods, including muskox (Ovibos moschatus), reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), birds, eggs, rodents, crabs, other crustaceans and other polar bears. They may also eat plants, including berries, roots, and kelp;[107] however, none of these have been a significant part of their diet,[99] except for beachcast marine mammal carcasses. Given the change in climate, with ice breaking up in areas such as the Hudson Bay earlier than it used to, polar bears are exploiting food resources such as snow geese and eggs, and plants such as lyme grass in increased quantities.[108]
+
+When stalking land animals, such as muskox, reindeer,[107] and even willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus), polar bears appear to make use of vegetative cover and wind direction to bring them as close to their prey as possible before attacking. Polar bears have been observed to hunt the small Svalbard reindeer (R. t. platyrhynchus), which weigh only 40 to 60 kg (90 to 130 lb) as adults, as well as the barren-ground caribou (R. t. groenlandicus), which is about twice as heavy as that.[109][110] Adult muskox, which can weigh 450 kg (1,000 lb) or more, are a more formidable quarry.[111] Although ungulates are not typical prey, the killing of one during the summer months can greatly increase the odds of survival during that lean period. Like the brown bear, most ungulate prey of polar bears is likely to be young, sickly or injured specimens rather than healthy adults.[110] The polar bear's metabolism is specialized to require large amounts of fat from marine mammals, and it cannot derive sufficient caloric intake from terrestrial food.[112][113]
+
+In their southern range, especially near Hudson Bay and James Bay, Canadian polar bears endure all summer without sea ice to hunt from.[107] Here, their food ecology shows their dietary flexibility. They still manage to consume some seals, but they are food-deprived in summer as only marine mammal carcasses are an important alternative without sea ice, especially carcasses of the beluga whale. These alternatives may reduce the rate of weight loss of bears when on land.[114] One scientist found that 71% of the Hudson Bay bears had fed on seaweed (marine algae) and that about half were feeding on birds[95] such as the dovekie and sea ducks, especially the long-tailed duck (53%) and common eider, by swimming underwater to catch them. They were also diving to feed on blue mussels and other underwater food sources like the green sea urchin. 24% had eaten moss recently, 19% had consumed grass, 34% had eaten black crowberry and about half had consumed willows.[107] This study illustrates the polar bear's dietary flexibility but it does not represent its life history elsewhere. Most polar bears elsewhere will never have access to these alternatives, except for the marine mammal carcasses that are important wherever they occur.
+
+In Svalbard, polar bears were observed to kill white-beaked dolphins during spring, when the dolphins were trapped in the sea ice. The bears then proceeded to cache the carcasses, which remained and were eaten during the ice-free summer and autumn.[115]
+
+Courtship and mating take place on the sea ice in April and May, when polar bears congregate in the best seal hunting areas.[116] A male may follow the tracks of a breeding female for 100 km (60 mi) or more, and after finding her engage in intense fighting with other males over mating rights, fights that often result in scars and broken teeth.[116] Polar bears have a generally polygynous mating system; recent genetic testing of mothers and cubs, however, has uncovered cases of litters in which cubs have different fathers.[117] Partners stay together and mate repeatedly for an entire week; the mating ritual induces ovulation in the female.[118]
+
+After mating, the fertilized egg remains in a suspended state until August or September. During these four months, the pregnant female eats prodigious amounts of food, gaining at least 200 kg (440 lb) and often more than doubling her body weight.[116]
+
+When the ice floes are at their minimum in the fall, ending the possibility of hunting, each pregnant female digs a maternity den consisting of a narrow entrance tunnel leading to one to three chambers. Most maternity dens are in snowdrifts, but may also be made underground in permafrost if it is not sufficiently cold yet for snow.[116] In most subpopulations, maternity dens are situated on land a few kilometres from the coast, and the individuals in a subpopulation tend to reuse the same denning areas each year.[36] The polar bears that do not den on land make their dens on the sea ice. In the den, she enters a dormant state similar to hibernation. This hibernation-like state does not consist of continuous sleeping; however, the bear's heart rate slows from 46 to 27 beats per minute.[119] Her body temperature does not decrease during this period as it would for a typical mammal in hibernation.[62][120]
+
+Between November and February, cubs are born blind, covered with a light down fur, and weighing less than 0.9 kg (2.0 lb),[118] but in captivity they might be delivered in the earlier months. The earliest recorded birth of polar bears in captivity was on 11 October 2011 in the Toronto Zoo.[121] On average, each litter has two cubs. The family remains in the den until mid-February to mid-April, with the mother maintaining her fast while nursing her cubs on a fat-rich milk. By the time the mother breaks open the entrance to the den, her cubs weigh about 10 to 15 kilograms (22 to 33 lb). For about 12 to 15 days, the family spends time outside the den while remaining in its vicinity, the mother grazing on vegetation while the cubs become used to walking and playing. Then they begin the long walk from the denning area to the sea ice, where the mother can once again catch seals. Depending on the timing of ice-floe breakup in the fall, she may have fasted for up to eight months.[116] During this time, cubs playfully imitate the mother's hunting methods in preparation for later life.[122]
+
+Female polar bears have been known to adopt other cubs. Multiple cases of adoption of wild cubs have been confirmed by genetic testing.[123] Adult bears of either gender occasionally kill and eat polar bear cubs.[124][125] As of 2006, in Alaska, 42% of cubs were reaching 12 months of age, down from 65% in 1991.[126] In most areas, cubs are weaned at two and a half years of age, when the mother chases them away or abandons them. The Western Hudson Bay subpopulation is unusual in that its female polar bears sometimes wean their cubs at only one and a half years.[116] This was the case for 40% of cubs there in the early 1980s; however by the 1990s, fewer than 20% of cubs were weaned this young.[127] After the mother leaves, sibling cubs sometimes travel and share food together for weeks or months.[78]
+
+Females begin to breed at the age of four years in most areas, and five years in the area of the Beaufort Sea. Males usually reach sexual maturity at six years; however, as competition for females is fierce, many do not breed until the age of eight or ten.[116] A study in Hudson Bay indicated that both the reproductive success and the maternal weight of females peaked in their mid-teens.Maternal success appeared to decline after this point, possibly because of an age-related impairment in the ability to store the fat necessary to rear cubs.[128]
+
+Polar bears appear to be less affected by infectious diseases and parasites than most terrestrial mammals.[129] Polar bears are especially susceptible to Trichinella, a parasitic roundworm they contract through cannibalism,[130] although infections are usually not fatal. Only one case of a polar bear with rabies has been documented, even though polar bears frequently interact with Arctic foxes, which often carry rabies.[129] Bacterial leptospirosis and Morbillivirus have been recorded. Polar bears sometimes have problems with various skin diseases that may be caused by mites or other parasites.
+
+Polar bears rarely live beyond 25 years.[131] The oldest wild bears on record died at age 32, whereas the oldest captive was a female who died in 1991, age 43.[132] The causes of death in wild adult polar bears are poorly understood, as carcasses are rarely found in the species's frigid habitat. In the wild, old polar bears eventually become too weak to catch food, and gradually starve to death. Polar bears injured in fights or accidents may either die from their injuries, or become unable to hunt effectively, leading to starvation.[129]
+
+The polar bear is the apex predator within its range, and is a keystone species for the Arctic.[133] Several animal species, particularly Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) and glaucous gulls (Larus hyperboreus), routinely scavenge polar bear kills.[73]
+
+The relationship between ringed seals and polar bears is so close that the abundance of ringed seals in some areas appears to regulate the density of polar bears, while polar bear predation in turn regulates density and reproductive success of ringed seals.[90] The evolutionary pressure of polar bear predation on seals probably accounts for some significant differences between Arctic and Antarctic seals. Compared to the Antarctic, where there is no major surface predator, Arctic seals use more breathing holes per individual, appear more restless when hauled out on the ice, and rarely defecate on the ice. The baby fur of most Arctic seal species is white, presumably to provide camouflage from predators, whereas Antarctic seals all have dark fur at birth.[73]
+
+Brown bears tend to dominate polar bears in disputes over carcasses,[134] and dead polar bear cubs have been found in brown bear dens.[135] Wolves are rarely encountered by polar bears, though there are two records of Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos) packs killing polar bear cubs.[136] Adult polar bears are occasionally vulnerable to predation by orcas (Orcinus orca) while swimming, but they are rarely reported as taken and bears are likely to avoid entering the water if possible if they detect an orca pod in the area. The melting sea ice in the Arctic may be causing an increase of orcas in the Arctic sea, which may increase the risk of predation on polar bears but also may benefit the bears by providing more whale carcasses that they can scavenge.[137][138] The remains of polar bears have found in the stomachs of large Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus), although it certainly cannot be ruled out that the bears were merely scavenged by this slow-moving, unusual shark.[139][140] A rather unlikely killer of a grown polar bear has reportedly included a wolverine (Gulo gulo), anecedotely reported to have suffocated a bear in a zoo with a bite to the throat during a conflict. This report may well be dubious, however.[141] Polar bears are sometimes the host of arctic mites such as Alaskozetes antarcticus.[73]
+
+Researchers tracked 52 sows in the southern Beaufort Sea off Alaska with GPS system collars; no boars were involved in the study due to males' necks being too thick for the GPS-equipped collars. Fifty long-distance swims were recorded; the longest at 354 kilometres (220 mi), with an average of 155 kilometres (96 mi). The length of these swims ranged from most of a day to ten days. Ten of the sows had a cub swim with them and after a year, six cubs survived. The study did not determine if the others lost their cubs before, during, or some time after their long swims. Researchers do not know whether or not this is a new behaviour; before polar ice shrinkage, they opined that there was probably neither the need nor opportunity to swim such long distances.[142]
+
+The polar bear may swim underwater for up to three minutes to approach seals on shore or on ice floes.[143][144]
+
+Polar bears have long provided important raw materials for Arctic peoples, including the Inuit, Yupik, Chukchi, Nenets, Russian Pomors and others. Hunters commonly used teams of dogs to distract the bear, allowing the hunter to spear the bear or shoot it with arrows at closer range.[145] Almost all parts of captured animals had a use.[146] The fur was used in particular to make trousers and, by the Nenets, to make galoshes-like outer footwear called tobok; the meat is edible, despite some risk of trichinosis; the fat was used in food and as a fuel for lighting homes, alongside seal and whale blubber; sinews were used as thread for sewing clothes; the gallbladder and sometimes heart were dried and powdered for medicinal purposes; the large canine teeth were highly valued as talismans.[147] Only the liver was not used, as its high concentration of vitamin A is poisonous. As a carnivore, which feeds largely upon fish-eating carnivores, the polar bear ingests large amounts of vitamin A that is stored in their livers. The resulting high concentrations cause Hypervitaminosis A,[148] Hunters make sure to either toss the liver into the sea or bury it in order to spare their dogs from potential poisoning.[147] Traditional subsistence hunting was on a small enough scale to not significantly affect polar bear populations, mostly because of the sparseness of the human population in polar bear habitat.[149]
+
+In Russia, polar bear furs were already being commercially traded in the 14th century, though it was of low value compared to Arctic fox or even reindeer fur.[147] The growth of the human population in the Eurasian Arctic in the 16th and 17th century, together with the advent of firearms and increasing trade, dramatically increased the harvest of polar bears.[62][150] However, since polar bear fur has always played a marginal commercial role, data on the historical harvest is fragmentary. It is known, for example, that already in the winter of 1784/1785 Russian Pomors on Spitsbergen harvested 150 polar bears in Magdalenefjorden. In the early 20th century, Norwegian hunters were harvesting 300 bears per year at the same location. Estimates of total historical harvest suggest that from the beginning of the 18th century, roughly 400 to 500 animals were being harvested annually in northern Eurasia, reaching a peak of 1,300 to 1,500 animals in the early 20th century, and falling off as the numbers began dwindling.[147]
+
+In the first half of the 20th century, mechanized and overpoweringly efficient methods of hunting and trapping came into use in North America as well. Polar bears were chased from snowmobiles, icebreakers, and airplanes, the latter practice described in a 1965 New York Times editorial as being "about as sporting as machine gunning a cow."[151] Norwegians used "self-killing guns", comprising a loaded rifle in a baited box that was placed at the level of a bear's head, and which fired when the string attached to the bait was pulled.[152] The numbers taken grew rapidly in the 1960s, peaking around 1968 with a global total of 1,250 bears that year.[153]
+
+Concerns over the future survival of the species led to the development of national regulations on polar bear hunting, beginning in the mid-1950s. The Soviet Union banned all hunting in 1956. Canada began imposing hunting quotas in 1968. Norway passed a series of increasingly strict regulations from 1965 to 1973, and has completely banned hunting since then. The United States began regulating hunting in 1971 and adopted the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. In 1973, the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears was signed by all five nations whose territory is inhabited by polar bears: Canada, Denmark, Norway, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Member countries agreed to place restrictions on recreational and commercial hunting, ban hunting from aircraft and icebreakers, and conduct further research.[154] The treaty allows hunting "by local people using traditional methods". Norway is the only country of the five in which all harvest of polar bears is banned. The agreement was a rare case of international cooperation during the Cold War. Biologist Ian Stirling commented, "For many years, the conservation of polar bears was the only subject in the entire Arctic that nations from both sides of the Iron Curtain could agree upon sufficiently to sign an agreement. Such was the intensity of human fascination with this magnificent predator, the only marine bear."[155]
+
+Agreements have been made between countries to co-manage their shared polar bear subpopulations. After several years of negotiations, Russia and the United States signed an agreement in October 2000 to jointly set quotas for indigenous subsistence hunting in Alaska and Chukotka.[156] The treaty was ratified in October 2007.[157] In September 2015, the polar bear range states agreed upon a "circumpolar action plan" describing their conservation strategy for polar bears.[158]
+
+Although the United States government has proposed that polar bears be transferred to Appendix I of CITES, which would ban all international trade in polar bear parts, polar bears currently remain listed under Appendix II.[159] This decision was approved of by members of the IUCN and TRAFFIC, who determined that such an uplisting was unlikely to confer a conservation benefit.[160]
+
+Polar bears were designated "Not at Risk" in April 1986 and uplisted to "Special Concern" in April 1991. This status was re-evaluated and confirmed in April 1999, November 2002, and April 2008. Polar bears continue to be listed as a species of special concern in Canada because of their sensitivity to overharvest and because of an expected range contraction caused by loss of Arctic sea ice.[161]
+
+More than 600 bears are killed per year by humans across Canada,[45] a rate calculated by scientists to be unsustainable for some areas, notably Baffin Bay.[37] Canada has allowed sport hunters accompanied by local guides and dog-sled teams since 1970,[162] but the practice was not common until the 1980s.[163] The guiding of sport hunters provides meaningful employment and an important source of income for northern communities in which economic opportunities are few.[43] Sport hunting can bring CDN$20,000 to $35,000 per bear into northern communities, which until recently has been mostly from American hunters.[164]
+
+The territory of Nunavut accounts for the location 80% of annual kills in Canada. In 2005, the government of Nunavut increased the quota from 400 to 518 bears,[164] despite protests from the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group.[165] In two areas where harvest levels have been increased based on increased sightings, science-based studies have indicated declining populations, and a third area is considered data-deficient.[166] While most of that quota is hunted by the indigenous Inuit people, a growing share is sold to recreational hunters. (0.8% in the 1970s, 7.1% in the 1980s, and 14.6% in the 1990s)[163] Nunavut polar bear biologist, Mitchell Taylor, who was formerly responsible for polar bear conservation in the territory, has insisted that bear numbers are being sustained under current hunting limits.[167] In 2010, the 2005 increase was partially reversed. Government of Nunavut officials announced that the polar bear quota for the Baffin Bay region would be gradually reduced from 105 per year to 65 by the year 2013.[168] The Government of the Northwest Territories maintain their own quota of 72 to 103 bears within the Inuvialuit communities of which some are set aside for sports hunters.[citation needed] Environment Canada also banned the export from Canada of fur, claws, skulls and other products from polar bears harvested in Baffin Bay as of 1 January 2010.[168]
+
+Because of the way polar bear hunting quotas are managed in Canada, attempts to discourage sport hunting would actually increase the number of bears killed in the short term. Canada allocates a certain number of permits each year to sport and subsistence hunting, and those that are not used for sport hunting are re-allocated to indigenous subsistence hunting. Whereas northern communities kill all the polar bears they are permitted to take each year, only half of sport hunters with permits actually manage to kill a polar bear. If a sport hunter does not kill a polar bear before his or her permit expires, the permit cannot be transferred to another hunter.[43]
+
+In August 2011, Environment Canada published a national polar bear conservation strategy.[169]
+
+In Greenland, hunting restrictions were first introduced in 1994 and expanded by executive order in 2005.[39] Until 2005 Greenland placed no limit on hunting by indigenous people. However, in 2006 it imposed a limit of 150, while also allowed recreational hunting for the first time.[170] Other provisions included year-round protection of cubs and mothers, restrictions on weapons used and various administrative requirements to catalogue kills.[39]
+
+Polar bears were hunted heavily in Svalbard, Norway throughout the 19th century and to as recently as 1973, when the conservation treaty was signed. 900 bears a year were harvested in the 1920s and after World War II, there were as many as 400–500 harvested annually. Some regulations of hunting did exist. In 1927, poisoning was outlawed while in 1939, certain denning sights were declared off limits. The killing of females and cubs was made illegal in 1965. Killing of polar bears decreased somewhat 25–30 years before the treaty. Despite this, the polar bear population continued to decline and by 1973, only around 1000 bears were left in Svalbard. Only with the passage of the treaty did they begin to recover.[171]
+
+The Soviet Union banned the harvest of polar bears in 1956; however, poaching continued and is estimated to pose a serious threat to the polar bear population.[39] In recent years, polar bears have approached coastal villages in Chukotka more frequently due to the shrinking of the sea ice, endangering humans and raising concerns that illegal hunting would become even more prevalent. In 2007, the Russian government made subsistence hunting legal for indigenous Chukotkan peoples only, a move supported by Russia's most prominent bear researchers and the World Wide Fund for Nature as a means to curb poaching.[172]
+
+Polar bears are currently listed as "Rare", of "Uncertain Status", or "Rehabilitated and rehabilitating" in the Red Data Book of Russia, depending on population.[173] In 2010, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment published a strategy for polar bear conservation in Russia.[174]
+
+The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 afforded polar bears some protection in the United States. It banned hunting (except by indigenous subsistence hunters), banned importing of polar bear parts (except polar bear pelts taken legally in Canada), and banned the harassment of polar bears. On 15 May 2008, the United States Department of the Interior listed the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, citing the melting of Arctic sea ice as the primary threat to the polar bear.[175] It banned all importing of polar bear trophies. Importing products made from polar bears had been prohibited from 1972 to 1994 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and restricted between 1994 and 2008. Under those restrictions, permits from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service were required to import sport-hunted polar bear trophies taken in hunting expeditions in Canada. The permit process required that the bear be taken from an area with quotas based on sound management principles.[176] Since 1994, hundreds of sport-hunted polar bear trophies have been imported into the U.S.[177] In 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a draft conservation management plan for polar bears to improve their status under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.[178]
+
+Polar bear population sizes and trends are difficult to estimate accurately because they occupy remote home ranges and exist at low population densities. Polar bear fieldwork can also be hazardous to researchers.[179] As of 2015, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports that the global population of polar bears is 22,000 to 31,000, and the current population trend is unknown. Nevertheless, polar bears are listed as "Vulnerable" under criterion A3c, which indicates an expected population decrease of ≥30% over the next three generations (~34.5 years) due to "decline in area of occupancy, extent of occurrence and/or quality of habitat". Risks to the polar bear include climate change, pollution in the form of toxic contaminants, conflicts with shipping, oil and gas exploration and development, and human-bear interactions including harvesting and possible stresses from recreational polar-bear watching.[2]
+
+According to the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear is important as an indicator of Arctic ecosystem health. Polar bears are studied to gain understanding of what is happening throughout the Arctic, because at-risk polar bears are often a sign of something wrong with the Arctic marine ecosystem.[180]
+
+The International Union for Conservation of Nature, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, United States Geological Survey and many leading polar bear biologists have expressed grave concerns about the impact of climate change, including the belief that the current warming trend imperils the survival of the polar bear.[36][181][182][183][184][185]
+
+The key danger posed by climate change is malnutrition or starvation due to habitat loss. Polar bears hunt seals from a platform of sea ice. Rising temperatures cause the sea ice to melt earlier in the year, driving the bears to shore before they have built sufficient fat reserves to survive the period of scarce food in the late summer and early fall.[127] Reduction in sea-ice cover also forces bears to swim longer distances, which further depletes their energy stores and occasionally leads to drowning.[186] Thinner sea ice tends to deform more easily, which appears to make it more difficult for polar bears to access seals.[90] Insufficient nourishment leads to lower reproductive rates in adult females and lower survival rates in cubs and juvenile bears, in addition to poorer body condition in bears of all ages.[36]
+
+In addition to creating nutritional stress, a warming climate is expected to affect various other aspects of polar bear life: Changes in sea ice affect the ability of pregnant females to build suitable maternity dens.[30] As the distance increases between the pack ice and the coast, females must swim longer distances to reach favoured denning areas on land. Thawing of permafrost would affect the bears who traditionally den underground, and warm winters could result in den roofs collapsing or having reduced insulative value. For the polar bears that currently den on multi-year ice, increased ice mobility may result in longer distances for mothers and young cubs to walk when they return to seal-hunting areas in the spring.[36] Disease-causing bacteria and parasites would flourish more readily in a warmer climate.[90]
+
+Problematic interactions between polar bears and humans, such as foraging by bears in garbage dumps, have historically been more prevalent in years when ice-floe breakup occurred early and local polar bears were relatively thin. Increased human-bear interactions, including fatal attacks on humans, are likely to increase as the sea ice shrinks and hungry bears try to find food on land.[181]
+
+The effects of climate change are most profound in the southern part of the polar bear's range, and this is indeed where significant degradation of local populations has been observed.[185] The Western Hudson Bay subpopulation, in a southern part of the range, also happens to be one of the best-studied polar bear subpopulations. This subpopulation feeds heavily on ringed seals in late spring, when newly weaned and easily hunted seal pups are abundant. The late spring hunting season ends for polar bears when the ice begins to melt and break up, and they fast or eat little during the summer until the sea freezes again.[166]
+
+Due to warming air temperatures, ice-floe breakup in western Hudson Bay is currently occurring three weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago, reducing the duration of the polar bear feeding season. The body condition of polar bears has declined during this period; the average weight of lone (and likely pregnant) female polar bears was approximately 290 kg (640 lb) in 1980 and 230 kg (510 lb) in 2004.[166] Between 1987 and 2004, the Western Hudson Bay population declined by 22%,[187] although the population was listed as "stable" as of 2017.[45] As the climate change melts sea ice, the U.S. Geological Survey projects that two-thirds of polar bears will disappear by 2050.[188]
+
+In Alaska, the effects of sea ice shrinkage have contributed to higher mortality rates in polar bear cubs, and have led to changes in the denning locations of pregnant females.[126] The proportion of maternity dens on sea ice has changed from 62% between the years 1985 through 1994, to 37% over the years 1998 through 2004. Thus, now the Alaskan population more resembles the world population in that it is more likely to den on land.[189] In recent years, polar bears in the Arctic have undertaken longer than usual swims to find prey, possibly resulting in four recorded drownings in the unusually large ice pack regression of 2005.[186]
+
+A new development is that polar bears have begun ranging to new territory. While not unheard of but still uncommon, polar bears have been sighted increasingly in larger numbers ashore, staying on the mainland for longer periods of time during the summer months, particularly in North Canada, traveling farther inland.[190] This may cause an increased reliance on terrestrial diets, such as goose eggs, waterfowl and caribou,[191] as well as increased human–bear conflict.[190]
+
+Polar bears accumulate high levels of persistent organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and chlorinated pesticides. Due to their position at the top of the ecological pyramid, with a diet heavy in blubber in which halocarbons concentrate, their bodies are among the most contaminated of Arctic mammals.[192] Halocarbons (also known as organohalogens) are known to be toxic to other animals, because they mimic hormone chemistry, and biomarkers such as immunoglobulin G and retinol suggest similar effects on polar bears. PCBs have received the most study, and they have been associated with birth defects and immune system deficiency.[193]
+
+Many chemicals, such as PCBs and DDT, have been internationally banned due to the recognition of their harm on the environment. Their concentrations in polar bear tissues continued to rise for decades after being banned, as these chemicals spread through the food chain. Since then, the trend seems to have abated, with tissue concentrations of PCBs declining between studies performed from 1989 to 1993 and studies performed from 1996 to 2002. During the same time periods, DDT was found to be notably lower in the Western Hudson Bay population only.[194]
+
+Oil and gas development in polar bear habitat can affect the bears in a variety of ways. An oil spill in the Arctic would most likely concentrate in the areas where polar bears and their prey are also concentrated, such as sea ice leads.[2] Because polar bears rely partly on their fur for insulation and soiling of the fur by oil reduces its insulative value, oil spills put bears at risk of dying from hypothermia. Polar bears exposed to oil spill conditions have been observed to lick the oil from their fur, leading to fatal kidney failure.[102] Maternity dens, used by pregnant females and by females with infants, can also be disturbed by nearby oil exploration and development. Disturbance of these sensitive sites may trigger the mother to abandon her den prematurely, or abandon her litter altogether.[2]
+
+Steven Amstrup and other U.S. Geological Survey scientists have predicted two-thirds of the world's polar bears may disappear by 2050, based on moderate projections for the shrinking of summer sea ice caused by climate change,[90][188] though the validity of this study has been debated.[195][196] The bears could disappear from Europe, Asia, and Alaska, and be depleted from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and areas off the northern Greenland coast. By 2080, they could disappear from Greenland entirely and from the northern Canadian coast, leaving only dwindling numbers in the interior Arctic Archipelago.[90] However, in the short term, some polar bear populations in historically colder regions of the Arctic may temporarily benefit from a milder climate, as multiyear ice that is too thick for seals to create breathing holes is replaced by thinner annual ice.[197]
+
+Polar bears diverged from brown bears 400,000–600,000 years ago and have survived past periods of climate fluctuation. It has been claimed that polar bears will be able to adapt to terrestrial food sources as the sea ice they use to hunt seals disappears.[198] However, most polar bear biologists think that polar bears will be unable to completely offset the loss of calorie-rich seal blubber with terrestrial foods, and that they will be outcompeted by brown bears in this terrestrial niche, ultimately leading to a population decline.[199]
+
+Warnings about the future of the polar bear are often contrasted with the fact that worldwide population estimates have increased over the past 50 years and are relatively stable today.[200][201] Some estimates of the global population are around 5,000 to 10,000 in the early 1970s;[202] other estimates were 20,000 to 40,000 during the 1980s.[48][62] Current estimates put the global population at between 20,000 and 25,000[39] or 22,000 and 31,000.[2]
+
+There are several reasons for the apparent discordance between past and projected population trends: estimates from the 1950s and 1960s were based on stories from explorers and hunters rather than on scientific surveys.[203][204][205][206] Second, controls of harvesting were introduced that allowed this previously overhunted species to recover. Third, the recent effects of climate change have affected sea ice abundance in different areas to varying degrees.[203]
+
+Debate over the listing of the polar bear under endangered species legislation has put conservation groups and Canada's Inuit at opposing positions;[43] the Nunavut government and many northern residents have condemned the U.S. initiative to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.[207][208] Many Inuit believe the polar bear population is increasing, and restrictions on commercial sport-hunting are likely to lead to a loss of income to their communities.[43][209]
+
+For the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, polar bears have long played an important cultural and material role.[146][147] Polar bear remains have been found at hunting sites dating to 2,500 to 3,000 years ago[149] and 1,500-year-old cave paintings of polar bears have been found in the Chukchi Peninsula. Indeed, it has been suggested that Arctic peoples' skills in seal hunting and igloo construction has been in part acquired from the polar bears themselves.[147]
+
+The Inuit and Alaska Natives have many folk tales featuring the bears including legends in which bears are humans when inside their own houses and put on bear hides when going outside, and stories of how the constellation that is said to resemble a great bear surrounded by dogs came into being. These legends reveal a deep respect for the polar bear, which is portrayed as both spiritually powerful and closely akin to humans. The human-like posture of bears when standing and sitting, and the resemblance of a skinned bear carcass to the human body, have probably contributed to the belief that the spirits of humans and bears were interchangeable.[145]
+
+Among the Chukchi and Yupik of eastern Siberia, there was a longstanding shamanistic ritual of "thanksgiving" to the hunted polar bear. After killing the animal, its head and skin were removed and cleaned and brought into the home, and a feast was held in the hunting camp in its honor. To appease the spirit of the bear, traditional song and drum music was played, and the skull was ceremonially fed and offered a pipe.[210] Only once the spirit was appeased was the skull be separated from the skin, taken beyond the bounds of the homestead, and placed in the ground, facing north.[147]
+
+The Nenets of north-central Siberia placed particular value on the talismanic power of the prominent canine teeth. These were traded in the villages of the lower Yenisei and Khatanga rivers to the forest-dwelling peoples further south, who would sew them into their hats as protection against brown bears. It was believed that the "little nephew" (the brown bear) would not dare to attack a man wearing the tooth of its powerful "big uncle", the polar bear. The skulls of killed polar bears were buried at sacred sites, and altars, called sedyangi, were constructed out of the skulls. Several such sites have been preserved on the Yamal Peninsula.[147]
+
+Their distinctive appearance and their association with the Arctic have made polar bears popular icons, especially in those areas where they are native. The Canadian two-dollar coin carries an image of a lone polar bear on its reverse side, while a special millennium edition featured three.[211] Vehicle licence plates in the Northwest Territories in Canada are in the shape of a polar bear, as was the case in Nunavut until 2012; these now display polar bear artwork instead.[212] The polar bear is the mascot of Bowdoin College, Maine; the University of Alaska Fairbanks; and the 1988 Winter Olympics held in Calgary.[213][214][215] The Eisbären Berlin hockey team uses a roaring polar bear as their logo, and the Charlotte, North Carolina hockey team the Charlotte Checkers uses a polar bear named Chubby Checker as their mascot. [216]
+
+Coca-Cola has used images of the polar bear in its advertising,[217] and Polar Beverages, Nelvana, Bundaberg Rum, Klondike bars, and Fox's Glacier Mints all feature polar bears in their logos.
+
+Polar bears are popular in fiction, particularly in books for children or teenagers. For example, The Polar Bear Son is adapted from a traditional Inuit tale.[218] The animated television series Noah's Island features a polar bear named Noah as the protagonist. Polar bears feature prominently in East (North Child in the UK) by Edith Pattou,[219] The Bear by Raymond Briggs (adapted into an animated short in 1998),[220] and Chris d'Lacey's The Fire Within series.[221] The panserbjørne of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials are sapient, dignified polar bears who exhibit anthropomorphic qualities, and feature prominently in the 2007 film adaptation of The Golden Compass.[222] The television series Lost features polar bears living on the tropical island setting.[223]
+

en/3557.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,193 @@
+
+
+
+
+Amphicynodontinae
+Hemicyoninae
+Ursavinae
+Agriotheriinae
+Ailuropodinae
+Tremarctinae
+Ursinae
+
+Bears are carnivoran mammals of the family Ursidae. They are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans. There are eight species in existence: Asiatic black bears (also called moon bears), brown bears (which include grizzly bears), giant pandas, North American black bears, polar bears, sloth bears, spectacled bears (also called Andean bears), and sun bears[1]. Although only eight species of bears are extant, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern Hemisphere and partially in the Southern Hemisphere. Bears are found on the continents of North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. Common characteristics of modern bears include large bodies with stocky legs, long snouts, small rounded ears, shaggy hair, plantigrade paws with five nonretractile claws, and short tails.
+
+While the polar bear is mostly carnivorous, and the giant panda feeds almost entirely on bamboo, the remaining six species are omnivorous with varied diets. With the exception of courting individuals and mothers with their young, bears are typically solitary animals. They may be diurnal or nocturnal and have an excellent sense of smell. Despite their heavy build and awkward gait, they are adept runners, climbers, and swimmers.  Bears use shelters, such as caves and logs, as their dens; most species occupy their dens during the winter for a long period of hibernation, up to 100 days.
+
+Bears have been hunted since prehistoric times for their meat and fur; they have been used for bear-baiting and other forms of entertainment, such as being made to dance. With their powerful physical presence, they play a prominent role in the arts, mythology, and other cultural aspects of various human societies. In modern times, bears have come under pressure through encroachment on their habitats and illegal trade in bear parts, including the Asian bile bear market. The IUCN lists six bear species as vulnerable or endangered, and even least concern species, such as the brown bear, are at risk of extirpation in certain countries. The poaching and international trade of these most threatened populations are prohibited, but still ongoing.
+
+The English word "bear" comes from Old English bera and belongs to a family of names for the bear in Germanic languages, such as Swedish björn, also used as a first name. This form is conventionally said to be related to a Proto-Indo-European word for "brown", so that "bear" would mean "the brown one".[2][3] However, Ringe notes that while this etymology is semantically plausible, a word meaning "brown" of this form cannot be found in Proto-Indo-European. He suggests instead that "bear" is from the Proto-Indo-European word *ǵʰwḗr- ~ *ǵʰwér "wild animal".[4] This terminology for the animal originated as a taboo avoidance term: proto-Germanic tribes replaced their original word for bear—arkto—with this euphemistic expression out of fear that speaking the animal's true name might cause it to appear.[5][6] According to author Ralph Keyes, this is the oldest known euphemism.[7]
+
+Bear taxon names such as Arctoidea and Helarctos come from the ancient Greek ἄρκτος (arktos), meaning bear,[8] as do the names "arctic" and "antarctic", via the name of the constellation Ursa Major, the "Great Bear", prominent in the northern sky.[9]
+
+Bear taxon names such as Ursidae and Ursus come from Latin Ursus/Ursa, he-bear/she-bear.[9] The female first name "Ursula", originally derived from a Christian saint's name, means "little she-bear" (diminutive of Latin ursa). In Switzerland, the male first name "Urs" is especially popular, while the name of the canton and city of Bern is derived from Bär, German for bear. The Germanic name Bernard (including Bernhardt and similar forms) means "bear-brave", "bear-hardy", or "bold bear".[10][11] The Old English name Beowulf is a kenning, "bee-wolf",  for bear, in turn meaning a brave warrior.[12]
+
+The family Ursidae is one of nine families in the suborder Caniformia, or "doglike" carnivorans, within the order Carnivora. Bears' closest living relatives are the pinnipeds, canids, and musteloids.[13] Modern bears comprise eight species in three subfamilies: Ailuropodinae (monotypic with the giant panda), Tremarctinae (monotypic with the spectacled bear), and Ursinae (containing six species divided into one to three genera, depending on the authority). Nuclear chromosome analysis show that the karyotype of the six ursine bears is nearly identical, with each having 74 chromosomes (see Ursid hybrid), whereas the giant panda has 42 chromosomes and the spectacled bear 52. These smaller numbers can be explained by the fusing of some chromosomes, and the banding patterns on these match those of the ursine species, but differ from those of procyonids, which supports the inclusion of these two species in Ursidae rather than in Procyonidae, where they had been placed by some earlier authorities.[14]
+
+The earliest members of Ursidae belong to the extinct subfamily Amphicynodontinae, including Parictis (late Eocene to early middle Miocene, 38–18 Mya) and the slightly younger Allocyon (early Oligocene, 34–30 Mya), both from North America. These animals looked very different from today's bears, being small and raccoon-like in overall appearance, with diets perhaps more similar to that of a badger. Parictis does not appear in Eurasia and Africa until the Miocene.[15] It is unclear whether late-Eocene ursids were also present in Eurasia, although faunal exchange across the Bering land bridge may have been possible during a major sea level low stand as early as the late Eocene (about 37 Mya) and continuing into the early Oligocene.[16] European genera morphologically very similar to Allocyon, and to the much younger American Kolponomos (about 18 Mya),[17] are known from the Oligocene, including Amphicticeps and Amphicynodon.[16] There has been various morphological evidence linking amphicynodontines with pinnipeds, as both groups were semi-aquatic, otter-like mammals.[18][19][20] In addition to the support of the pinniped–amphicynodontine clade, other morphological and some molecular evidence supports bears being the closet living relatives to pinnipeds.[21][22][23][19][24][19][20]
+
+The raccoon-sized, dog-like Cephalogale is the oldest-known member of the subfamily Hemicyoninae, which first appeared during the middle Oligocene in Eurasia about 30 Mya.[16] The subfamily includes the younger genera Phoberocyon (20–15 Mya), and Plithocyon (15–7 Mya). A Cephalogale-like species gave rise to the genus Ursavus during the early Oligocene (30–28 Mya); this genus proliferated into many species in Asia and is ancestral to all living bears. Species of Ursavus subsequently entered North America, together with Amphicynodon and Cephalogale, during the early Miocene (21–18 Mya). Members of the living lineages of bears diverged from Ursavus between 15 and 20 Mya,[25][26] likely via the species Ursavus elmensis. Based on genetic and morphological data, the Ailuropodinae (pandas) were the first to diverge from other living bears about 19 Mya, although no fossils of this group have been found before about 5 Mya.[27]
+
+The New World short-faced bears (Tremarctinae) differentiated from Ursinae following a dispersal event into North America during the mid-Miocene (about 13 Mya).[27] They invaded South America (≈2.5 or 1.2 Ma) following formation of the Isthmus of Panama.[28] Their earliest fossil representative is Plionarctos in North America (c. 10–2 Ma). This genus is probably the direct ancestor to the North American short-faced bears (genus Arctodus), the South American short-faced bears (Arctotherium), and the spectacled bears, Tremarctos, represented by both an extinct North American species (T. floridanus), and the lone surviving representative of the Tremarctinae, the South American spectacled bear (T. ornatus).[16]
+
+The subfamily Ursinae experienced a dramatic proliferation of taxa about 5.3–4.5 Mya, coincident with major environmental changes; the first members of the genus Ursus appeared around this time.[27] The sloth bear is a modern survivor of one of the earliest lineages to diverge during this radiation event (5.3 Mya); it took on its peculiar morphology, related to its diet of termites and ants, no later than by the early Pleistocene. By 3–4 Mya, the species Ursus minimus appears in the fossil record of Europe; apart from its size, it was nearly identical to today's Asian black bear. It is likely ancestral to all bears within Ursinae, perhaps aside from the sloth bear. Two lineages evolved from U. minimus: the black bears (including the sun bear, the Asian black bear, and the American black bear); and the brown bears (which includes the polar bear). Modern brown bears evolved from U. minimus via Ursus etruscus, which itself is ancestral to the extinct Pleistocene cave bear. Species of Ursinae have migrated repeatedly into North America from Eurasia as early as 4 Mya during the early Pliocene.[29][30] The polar bear is the most recently evolved species and descended from a population of brown bears that became isolated in northern latitudes by glaciation 400,000 years ago.[31]
+
+The bears form a clade within the Carnivora. The cladogram is based on molecular phylogeny of six genes in Flynn, 2005.[32]
+
+Feliformia
+
+Canidae
+
+†Hemicyonidae
+
+Ursidae
+
+Pinnipedia
+
+Ailuridae
+
+Procyonidae
+
+Mustelidae
+
+Note that although they are called "bears" in some languages, red pandas and raccoons and their close relatives are not bears, but rather musteloids.[32]
+
+There are two phylogenetic hypotheses on the relationships among extant and fossil bear species. One is all species of bears are classified in seven subfamilies as adopted here and related articles: Amphicynodontinae, Hemicyoninae, Ursavinae, Agriotheriinae, Ailuropodinae, Tremarctinae, and Ursinae.[33][34][35][36] Below is a cladogram of the subfamilies of bears after McLellan and Reiner (1992)[33] and Qiu et al. (2014):[36]
+
+Amphicynodontinae
+
+Hemicyoninae
+
+Ursavinae
+
+Agriotheriinae
+
+Ailuropodinae
+
+Tremarctinae
+
+Ursinae
+
+The second alternative phylogenetic hypothesis was implemented by McKenna et al. (1997) is to classify all the bear species into the superfamily Ursoidea, with Hemicyoninae and Agriotheriinae being classified in the family "Hemicyonidae".[37] Amphicynodontinae under this classification were classified as stem-pinnipeds in the superfamily Phocoidea.[37] In the McKenna and Bell classification both bears and pinnipeds in a parvorder of carnivoran mammals known as Ursida, along with the extinct bear dogs of the family Amphicyonidae.[37] Below is the cladogram based on McKenna and Bell (1997) classification:[37]
+
+Amphicyonidae
+
+Amphicynodontidae
+
+Pinnipedia
+
+Hemicyoninae
+
+Agriotheriinae
+
+Ursavinae
+
+Ailuropodinae
+
+Tremarctinae
+
+Ursinae
+
+The phylogeny of extant bear species is shown in a cladogram based on complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from Yu et al. (2007)[38] The giant panda, followed by the spectacled bear are clearly the oldest species. The relationships of the other species are not very well resolved, though the polar bear and the brown bear form a close grouping.[14]
+
+Brown bear
+
+Polar bear
+
+Asian black bear
+
+American black bear
+
+Sun bear
+
+Sloth bear
+
+Spectacled bear
+
+Giant panda
+
+The bear family includes the most massive extant terrestrial members of the order Carnivora.[a] The polar bear is considered to be the largest extant species,[40] with adult males weighing 350–700 kilograms (770–1,500 pounds) and measuring 2.4–3 metres (7 ft 10 in–9 ft 10 in) in total length.[41] The smallest species is the sun bear, which ranges 25–65 kg (55–145 lb) in weight and 100–140 cm (40–55 in) in length.[42] Prehistoric North and South American short-faced bears were the largest species known to have lived. The latter estimated to have weighed 1,600 kg (3,500 lb) and stood 3.4 m (11 ft 2 in) tall.[43][44] Body weight varies throughout the year in bears of temperate and arctic climates, as they build up fat reserves in the summer and autumn and lose weight during the winter.[45]
+
+Bears are generally bulky and robust animals with short tails. They are sexually dimorphic with regard to size, with males typically being larger.[46][47] Larger species tend to show increased levels of sexual dimorphism in comparison to smaller species.[47] Relying as they do on strength rather than speed, bears have relatively short limbs with thick bones to support their bulk. The shoulder blades and the pelvis are correspondingly massive. The limbs are much straighter than those of the big cats as there is no need for them to flex in the same way due to the differences in their gait. The strong forelimbs are used to catch prey, to excavate dens, to dig out burrowing animals, to turn over rocks and logs to locate prey, and to club large creatures.[45]
+
+Unlike most other land carnivorans, bears are plantigrade. They distribute their weight toward the hind feet, which makes them look lumbering when they walk. They are capable of bursts of speed but soon tire, and as a result mostly rely on ambush rather than the chase. Bears can stand on their hind feet and sit up straight with remarkable balance. Their front paws are flexible enough to grasp fruit and leaves. Bears' non-retractable claws are used for digging, climbing, tearing, and catching prey. The claws on the front feet are larger than those on the back and may be a hindrance when climbing trees; black bears are the most arboreal of the bears, and have the shortest claws. Pandas are unique in having a bony extension on the wrist of the front feet which acts as a thumb, and is used for gripping bamboo shoots as the animals feed.[45]
+
+Most mammals have agouti hair, with each individual hair shaft having bands of color corresponding to two different types of melanin pigment. Bears however have a single type of melanin and the hairs have a single color throughout their length, apart from the tip which is sometimes a different shade. The coat consists of long guard hairs, which form a protective shaggy covering, and short dense hairs which form an insulating layer trapping air close to the skin. The shaggy coat helps maintain body heat during winter hibernation and is shed in the spring leaving a shorter summer coat. Polar bears have hollow, translucent guard hairs which gain heat from the sun and conduct it to the dark-colored skin below. They have a thick layer of blubber for extra insulation, and the soles of their feet have a dense pad of fur.[45] While bears tend to be uniform in color, some species may have markings on the chest or face and the giant panda has a bold black-and-white pelage.[48]
+
+Bears have small rounded ears so as to minimize heat loss, but neither their hearing or sight are particularly acute. Unlike many other carnivorans they have color vision, perhaps to help them distinguish ripe nuts and fruits. They are unique among carnivorans in not having touch-sensitive whiskers on the muzzle; however, they have an excellent sense of smell, better than that of the dog, or possibly any other mammal. They use smell for signalling to each other (either to warn off rivals or detect mates) and for finding food. Smell is the principal sense used by bears to locate most of their food, and they have excellent memories which helps them to relocate places where they have found food before.[45]
+
+The skulls of bears are massive, providing anchorage for the powerful masseter and temporal jaw muscles. The canine teeth are large but mostly used for display, and the molar teeth flat and crushing. Unlike most other members of the Carnivora, bears have relatively undeveloped carnassial teeth, and their teeth are adapted for a diet that includes a significant amount of vegetable matter.[45] Considerable variation occurs in dental formula even within a given species. This may indicate bears are still in the process of evolving from a mainly meat-eating diet to a predominantly herbivorous one. Polar bears appear to have secondarily re-evolved carnassial-like cheek teeth, as their diets have switched back towards carnivory.[49] Sloth bears lack lower central incisors and use their protusible lips for sucking up the termites on which they feed.[45] The general dental formula for living bears is:
+3.1.2–4.23.1.2–4.3.[45] The structure of the larynx of bears appears to be the most basal of the caniforms.[50] They possess air pouches connected to the pharynx which may amplify their vocalizations.[51]
+
+Bears have a fairly simple digestive system typical for carnivorans, with a single stomach, short undifferentiated intestines and no cecum.[52][53] Even the herbivorous giant panda still has the digestive system of a carnivore, as well as carnivore-specific genes. Its ability to digest cellulose is ascribed to the microbes in its gut.[54] Bears must spend much of their time feeding in order to gain enough nutrition from foliage. The panda, in particular, spends 12–15 hours a day feeding.[55]
+
+Extant bears are found in sixty countries primarily in the Northern Hemisphere and are concentrated in Asia, North America, and Europe. An exception is the spectacled bear; native to South America, it inhabits the Andean region.[56] The sun bear's range extends below the equator in Southeast Asia.[57] The Atlas bear, a subspecies of the brown bear was distributed in North Africa from Morocco to Libya, but it became extinct around the 1870s.[58]
+
+The most widespread species is the brown bear, which occurs from Western Europe eastwards through Asia to the western areas of North America. The American black bear is restricted to North America, and the polar bear is restricted to the Arctic Sea. All the remaining species of bear are Asian.[56] They occur in a range of habitats which include tropical lowland rainforest, both coniferous and broadleaf forests, prairies, steppes, montane grassland, alpine scree slopes, Arctic tundra and in the case of the polar bear, ice floes.[56][59] Bears may dig their dens in hillsides or use caves, hollow logs and dense vegetation for shelter.[59]
+
+Brown and American black bears are generally diurnal, meaning that they are active for the most part during the day, though they may forage substantially by night.[60] Other species may be nocturnal, active at night, though female sloth bears with cubs may feed more at daytime to avoid competition from conspecifics and nocturnal predators.[61] Bears are overwhelmingly solitary and are considered to be the most asocial of all the Carnivora. The only times bears are encountered in groups are mothers with young or occasional seasonal bounties of rich food (such as salmon runs).[62][63] Fights between males can occur and older individuals may have extensive scarring, which suggests that maintaining dominance can be intense.[64] With their acute sense of smell, bears can locate carcasses from several kilometres away. They use olfaction to locate other foods, encounter mates, avoid rivals and recognize their cubs.[45]
+
+Most bears are opportunistic omnivores and consume more plant than animal matter. They eat anything from leaves, roots, and berries to insects, carrion, fresh meat, and fish, and have digestive systems and teeth adapted to such a diet.[56] At the extremes are the almost entirely herbivorous giant panda and the mostly carnivorous polar bear. However, all bears feed on any food source that becomes seasonally available.[55] For example, Asiatic black bears in Taiwan consume large numbers of acorns when these are most common, and switch to ungulates at other times of the year.[65]
+
+When foraging for plants, bears choose to eat them at the stage when they are at their most nutritious and digestible, typically avoiding older grasses, sedges and leaves.[53][55] Hence, in more northern temperate areas, browsing and grazing is more common early in spring and later becomes more restricted.[66] Knowing when plants are ripe for eating is a learned behavior.[55] Berries may be foraged in bushes or at the tops of trees, and bears try to maximize the number of berries consumed versus foliage.[66] In autumn, some bear species forage large amounts of naturally fermented fruits, which affects their behavior.[67] Smaller bears climb trees to obtain mast (edible reproductive parts, such as acorns).[68] Such masts can be very important to the diets of these species, and mast failures may result in long-range movements by bears looking for alternative food sources.[69] Brown bears, with their powerful digging abilities, commonly eat roots.[66] The panda's diet is over 99% bamboo,[70] of 30 different species. Its strong jaws are adapted for crushing the tough stems of these plants, though they prefer to eat the more nutritious leaves.[71][72] Bromeliads can make up to 50% of the diet of the spectacled bear, which also has strong jaws to bite them open.[73]
+
+The sloth bear, though not as specialized as polar bears and the panda, has lost several front teeth usually seen in bears, and developed a long, suctioning tongue to feed on the ants, termites, and other burrowing insects they favour. At certain times of the year, these insects can make up 90% of their diets.[74] Some species may raid the nests of wasps and bees for the honey and immature insects, in spite of stinging from the adults.[75] Sun bears use their long tongues to lick up both insects and honey.[76] Fish are an important source of food for some species, and brown bears in particular gather in large numbers at salmon runs. Typically, a bear plunges into the water and seizes a fish with its jaws or front paws. The preferred parts to eat are the brain and eggs. Small burrowing mammals like rodents may be dug out and eaten.[77][66]
+
+The brown bear and both species of black bears sometimes take large ungulates, such as deer and bovids, mostly the young and weak.[65][78][77] These animals may be taken by a short rush and ambush, though hiding young may be stiffed out and pounced on.[66][79] The polar bear mainly preys on seals, stalking them from the ice or breaking into their dens. They primarily eat the highly digestible blubber.[80][77] Large mammalian prey is typically killed by a bite to the head or neck, or (in the case of young) simply pinned down and mauled.[66][81] Predatory behavior in bears is typically taught to the young by the mother.[77]
+
+Bears are prolific scavengers and kleptoparasites, stealing food caches from rodents, and carcasses from other predators.[53][82] For hibernating species, weight gain is important as it provides nourishment during winter dormancy. A brown bear can eat 41 kg (90 lb) of food and gain 2–3 kg (4–7 lb) of fat a day prior to entering its den.[83]
+
+Bears produce a number of vocal and non-vocal sounds. Tongue-clicking, grunting or chuffing many be made in cordial situations, such as between mothers and cubs or courting couples, while moaning, huffing, snorting or blowing air is made when an individual is stressed. Barking is produced during times of alarm, excitement or to give away the animal's position. Warning sounds include jaw-clicking and lip-popping, while teeth-chatters, bellows, growls, roars and pulsing sounds are made in aggressive encounters. Cubs may squeal, bawl, bleat or scream when in distress and make motor-like humming when comfortable or nursing.[50][84][85][86][87][88]
+
+Bears sometimes communicate with visual displays such as standing upright, which exaggerates the individual's size. The chest markings of some species may add to this intimidating display. Staring is an aggressive act and the facial markings of spectacled bears and giant pandas may help draw attention to the eyes during agonistic encounters.[48] Individuals may approach each other by stiff-legged walking with the head lowered. Dominance between bears is asserted by making a frontal orientation, showing the canine teeth, muzzle twisting and neck stretching.  A subordinate may respond with a lateral orientation, by turning away and dropping the head and by sitting or lying down.[63][89]
+
+Bears may mark territory by rubbing against trees and other objects which may serve to spread their scent. This is usually accompanied by clawing and biting the object. Bark may be spread around to draw attention to the marking post.[90] Pandas are known to mark objects with urine and a waxy substance from their anal glands.[91] Polar bears leave behind their scent in their tracks which allow individuals to keep track of one another in the vast Arctic wilderness.[92]
+
+The mating system of bears has variously been described as a form of polygyny, promiscuity and serial monogamy.[93][94][95] During the breeding season, males take notice of females in their vicinity and females become more tolerant of males. A male bear may visit a female continuously over a period of several days or weeks, depending on the species, to test her reproductive state. During this time period, males try to prevent rivals from interacting with their mate. Courtship may be brief, although in some Asian species, courting pairs may engage in wrestling, hugging, mock fighting and vocalizing. Ovulation is induced by mating, which can last up to 30 minutes depending on the species.[94]
+
+Gestation typically lasts 6–9 months, including delayed implantation, and litter size numbers up to four cubs.[96] Giant pandas may give birth to twins but they can only suckle one young and the other is left to die.[97] In northern living species, birth takes place during winter dormancy. Cubs are born blind and helpless with at most a thin layer of hair, relying on their mother for warmth. The milk of the female bear is rich in fat and antibodies and cubs may suckle for up to a year after they are born. By 2–3 months, cubs can follow their mother outside the den. They usually follow her on foot, but sloth bear cubs may ride on their mother's back.[96][59] Male bears play no role in raising young. Infanticide, where an adult male kills the cubs of another, has been recorded in polar bears, brown bears and American black bears but not in other species.[98] Males kill young to bring the female into estrus.[99] Cubs may flee and the mother defends them even at the cost of her life.[100][101][102]
+
+In some species, offspring may become independent around the next spring, through some may stay until the female successfully mates again. Bears reach sexual maturity shortly after they disperse; at around 3–6 years depending on the species. Male Alaskan brown bears and polar bears may continue to grow until they are 11 years old.[96] Lifespan may also vary between species. The brown bear can live an average of 25 years.[103]
+
+Bears of northern regions, including the American black bear and the grizzly bear, hibernate in the winter.[104][105] During hibernation, the bear's metabolism slows down, its body temperature decreases slightly, and its heart rate slows from a normal value of 55 to just 9 beats per minute.[106] Bears normally do not wake during their hibernation, and can go the entire period without eating, drinking, urinating, or defecating.[45] A fecal plug is formed in the colon, and is expelled when the bear wakes in the spring.[107] If they have stored enough body fat, their muscles remain in good condition, and their protein maintenance requirements are met from recycling waste urea.[45] Female bears give birth during the hibernation period, and are roused when doing so.[105]
+
+Bears do not have many predators. The most important are humans, and as they started cultivating crops, they increasingly came in conflict with the bears that raided them. Since the invention of firearms, people have been able to kill bears with greater ease.[108] Felids like the tiger may also prey on bears,[109][110] particularly cubs, which may also be threatened by canids.[14][95]
+
+Bears are parasitized by eighty species of parasites, including single-celled protozoans and gastro-intestinal worms, and nematodes and flukes in their heart, liver, lungs and bloodstream. Externally they have ticks, fleas and lice. A study of American black bears found seventeen species of endoparasite including the protozoan Sarcocystis, the parasitic worm Diphyllobothrium mansonoides, and the nematodes Dirofilaria immitis, Capillaria aerophila, Physaloptera sp., Strongyloides sp. and others. Of these, D. mansonoides and adult C. aerophila were causing pathological symptoms.[111] By contrast, polar bears have few parasites; many parasitic species need a secondary, usually terrestrial, host, and the polar bear's life style is such that few alternative hosts exist in their environment. The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii has been found in polar bears, and the nematode Trichinella nativa can cause a serious infection and decline in older polar bears.[112] Bears in North America are sometimes infected by a Morbillivirus similar to the canine distemper virus.[113] They are susceptible to infectious canine hepatitis (CAV-1), with free-living black bears dying rapidly of encephalitis and hepatitis.[114]
+
+In modern times, bears have come under pressure through encroachment on their habitats[115] and illegal trade in bear parts, including the Asian bile bear market, though hunting is now banned, largely replaced by farming.[116] The IUCN lists six bear species as vulnerable;[117] even the two least concern species, the brown bear and the American black bear,[117] are at risk of extirpation in certain areas. In general these two species inhabit remote areas with little interaction with humans, and the main non-natural causes of mortality are hunting, trapping, road-kill and depredation.[118]
+
+Laws have been passed in many areas of the world to protect bears from habitat destruction. Public perception of bears is often positive, as people identify with bears due to their omnivorous diets, their ability to stand on two legs, and their symbolic importance.[119] Support for bear protection is widespread, at least in more affluent societies.[120] The giant panda has become a worldwide symbol of conservation. The Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries, which are home to around 30% of the wild panda population, gained a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation in 2006.[121] Where bears raid crops or attack livestock, they may come into conflict with humans.[122][123] In poorer rural regions, attitudes may be more shaped by the dangers posed by bears, and the economic costs they cause to farmers and ranchers.[122]
+
+Several bear species are dangerous to humans, especially in areas where they have become used to people; elsewhere, they generally avoid humans. Injuries caused by bears are rare, but are widely reported.[124] Bears may attack humans in response to being startled, in defense of young or food, or even for predatory reasons.[125]
+
+Bears in captivity have for centuries been used for entertainment. They have been trained to dance,[126] and were kept for baiting in Europe at least since the 16th century. There were five bear-baiting gardens in Southwark, London at that time; archaeological remains of three of these have survived.[127] Across Europe, nomadic Romani bear handlers called Ursari lived by busking with their bears from the 12th century.[128]
+
+Bears have been hunted for sport, food, and folk medicine. Their meat is dark and stringy, like a tough cut of beef. In Cantonese cuisine, bear paws are considered a delicacy. Bear meat should be cooked thoroughly, as it can be infected with the parasite Trichinella spiralis.[129][130]
+
+The peoples of eastern Asia use bears' body parts and secretions (notably their gallbladders and bile) as part of traditional Chinese medicine. More than 12,000 bears are thought to be kept on farms in China, Vietnam, and South Korea for the production of bile. Trade in bear products is prohibited under CITES, but bear bile has been detected in shampoos, wine and herbal medicines sold in Canada, the United States and Australia.[131]
+
+There is evidence of prehistoric bear worship, though this is disputed by archaeologists.[132] It is possible that bear worship existed in early Chinese and Ainu cultures.[133] The prehistoric Finns,[134] Siberian peoples[135] and more recently Koreans considered the bear as the spirit of their forefathers.[136] In many Native American cultures, the bear is a symbol of rebirth because of its hibernation and re-emergence.[137] The image of the mother bear was prevalent throughout societies in North America and Eurasia, based on the female's devotion and protection of her cubs.[138] Japanese folklore features the Onikuma, a "demon bear" that walks upright.[139] The Ainu of northern Japan, a different people from the Japanese, saw the bear instead as sacred; Hirasawa Byozan painted a scene in documentary style of a bear sacrifice in an Ainu temple, complete with offerings to the dead animal's spirit.[140]
+
+In Korean mythology, a tiger and a bear prayed to Hwanung, the son of the Lord of Heaven, that they might become human. Upon hearing their prayers, Hwanung gave them 20 cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort, ordering them to eat only this sacred food and remain out of the sunlight for 100 days. The tiger gave up after about twenty days and left the cave. However, the bear persevered and was transformed into a woman. The bear and the tiger are said to represent two tribes that sought the favor of the heavenly prince.[141] The bear-woman (Ungnyeo; 웅녀/熊女) was grateful and made offerings to Hwanung.  However, she lacked a husband, and soon became sad and prayed beneath a  "divine birch" tree (Korean: 신단수; Hanja: 神檀樹; RR: shindansu) to be blessed with a child. Hwanung, moved by her prayers, took her for his wife and soon she gave birth to a son named Dangun Wanggeom – who was the legendary founder of Gojoseon, the first ever Korean kingdom.[142]
+
+Artio (Dea Artio in the Gallo-Roman religion) was a Celtic bear goddess. Evidence of her worship has notably been found at Bern, itself named for the bear. Her name is derived from the Celtic word for "bear", artos.[143] In ancient Greece, archaic cult of Artemis in bear form survived into Classical times at Brauron, where young Athenian girls passed an initiation right as arktai "she bears".[144] For Artemis and one of her nymphs as a she-bear, see the myth of Callisto.
+
+The constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the great and little bears, are named for their supposed resemblance to bears, from the time of Ptolemy.[b][9] The nearby star Arcturus means "guardian of the bear", as if it were watching the two constellations.[146] Ursa Major has been associated with a bear for as much as 13,000 years since Paleolithic times, in the widespread Cosmic Hunt myths. These are found on both sides of the Bering land bridge, which was lost to the sea some 11,000 years ago.[147]
+
+Pliny the Elder's Natural History (1st century AD) claims that "when first born, [bears] are shapeless masses of white flesh, a little larger than mice; their claws alone being prominent. The mother then licks them gradually into proper shape."[148] This belief was echoed by authors of bestiaries throughout the medieval period.[149]
+
+Bears are mentioned in the Bible; the Second Book of Kings relates the story of the prophet Elisha calling on them to eat the youths who taunted him.[150]  Legends of saints taming bears are common in the Alpine zone. In the arms of the bishopric of Freising, the bear is the dangerous totem animal tamed by St. Corbinian and made to carry his civilized baggage over the mountains. Bears similarly feature in the legends of St. Romedius, Saint Gall and Saint Columbanus. This recurrent motif was used by the Church as a symbol of the victory of Christianity over paganism.[151] In the Norse settlements of northern England during the 10th century, a type of "hogback" grave cover of a long narrow block of stone, with a shaped apex like the roof beam of a long house, is carved with a muzzled, thus Christianized, bear clasping each gable end, as in the church at Brompton, North Yorkshire and across the British Isles.[152]
+
+Lāčplēsis, meaning "Bear-slayer", is a Latvian legendary hero who is said to have killed a bear by ripping its jaws apart with his bare hands. However, as revealed in the end of the long epic describing his life, Lāčplēsis' own mother had been a she-bear, and his superhuman strength resided in his bear ears. The modern Latvian military award Order of Lāčplēsis, called for the hero, is also known as The Order of the Bear-Slayer.[citation needed]
+
+In the Hindu epic poem The Ramayana, the sloth bear or Asian black bear Jambavan is depicted as the king of bears and helps the title hero Rama defeat the epic's antagonist Ravana and reunite with his queen Sita.[153][154]
+
+Bears are popular in children's stories, including Winnie the Pooh,[155] Paddington Bear,[156] Gentle Ben[157] and "The Brown Bear of Norway".[158] An early version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears",[159] was published as "The Three Bears" in 1837 by Robert Southey, many times retold, and illustrated in 1918 by Arthur Rackham.[160] The Hanna-Barbera character Yogi Bear has appeared in numerous comic books, animated television shows and films.[161][162] The Care Bears began as greeting cards in 1982, and were featured as toys, on clothing and in film.[163] Around the world, many children—and some adults—have teddy bears, stuffed toys in the form of bears, named after the American statesman Theodore Roosevelt when in 1902 he had refused to shoot an American black bear tied to a tree.[164]
+
+Bears, like other animals, may symbolize nations. In 1911, the British satirical magazine Punch published a cartoon about the Anglo-Russian Entente by Leonard Raven-Hill in which the British lion watches as the Russian bear sits on the tail of the Persian cat.[165] The Russian Bear has been a common national personification for Russia from the 16th century onward.[166] Smokey Bear has become a part of American culture since his introduction in 1944, with his message "Only you can prevent forest fires".[167] In the United Kingdom, the bear and staff feature on the heraldic arms of the county of Warwickshire.[168] Bears appear in the canting arms of two cities, Bern and Berlin.[169]
+
+The International Association for Bear Research & Management, also known as the International Bear Association, and the Bear Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission, a part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature focus on the natural history, management, and conservation of bears. Bear Trust International works for wild bears and other wildlife through four core program initiatives, namely Conservation Education, Wild Bear Research, Wild Bear Management, and Habitat Conservation.[170]
+
+Specialty organizations for each of the eight species of bears worldwide include:
+

en/3558.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,196 @@
+
+
+
+
+†Ursus maritimus tyrannus(?)
+
+Ursus eogroenlandicus
+Ursus groenlandicus
+Ursus jenaensis
+Ursus labradorensis
+Ursus marinus
+Ursus polaris
+Ursus spitzbergensis
+Ursus ungavensis
+Thalarctos maritimus
+
+The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is a hypercarnivorous bear whose native range lies largely within the Arctic Circle, encompassing the Arctic Ocean, its surrounding seas and surrounding land masses. It is a large bear, approximately the same size as the omnivorous Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi).[5] A boar (adult male) weighs around 350–700 kg (772–1,543 lb),[6] while a sow (adult female) is about half that size. Polar bears are the largest land carnivores currently in existence, rivaled only by the Kodiak bear.[7] Although it is the sister species of the brown bear,[8] it has evolved to occupy a narrower ecological niche, with many body characteristics adapted for cold temperatures, for moving across snow, ice and open water, and for hunting seals, which make up most of its diet.[9] Although most polar bears are born on land, they spend most of their time on the sea ice. Their scientific name means "maritime bear" and derives from this fact. Polar bears hunt their preferred food of seals from the edge of sea ice, often living off fat reserves when no sea ice is present. Because of their dependence on the sea ice, polar bears are classified as marine mammals.[10]
+
+Because of expected habitat loss caused by climate change, the polar bear is classified as a vulnerable species. For decades, large-scale hunting raised international concern for the future of the species, but populations rebounded after controls and quotas began to take effect.[11] For thousands of years, the polar bear has been a key figure in the material, spiritual, and cultural life of circumpolar peoples, and polar bears remain important in their cultures. Historically, the polar bear has also been known as the "white bear".[12] It is sometimes referred to as the "nanook", based on the Inuit term nanuq.[13]
+
+Constantine John Phipps was the first to describe the polar bear as a distinct species in 1774.[3][2] He chose the scientific name Ursus maritimus, the Latin for 'maritime bear',[14] due to the animal's native habitat. The Inuit refer to the animal as nanook (transliterated as nanuq in the Inupiat language).[15][13] The Yupik also refer to the bear as nanuuk in Siberian Yupik.[16] The bear is umka in the Chukchi language. In Russian, it is usually called бе́лый медве́дь (bélyj medvédj, the white bear), though an older word still in use is ошку́й (Oshkúj, which comes from the Komi oski, "bear").[17] In Quebec, the polar bear is referred to as ours blanc ("white bear") or ours polaire ("polar bear").[18] In the Norwegian-administered Svalbard archipelago, the polar bear is referred to as Isbjørn ("ice bear").
+
+The polar bear was previously considered to be in its own genus, Thalarctos.[19] However, evidence of hybrids between polar bears and brown bears, and of the recent evolutionary divergence of the two species, does not support the establishment of this separate genus, and the accepted scientific name is now therefore Ursus maritimus, as Phipps originally proposed.[2]
+
+The bear family, Ursidae, is thought to have split from other carnivorans about 38 million years ago.[20] The subfamily Ursinae originated approximately 4.2 million years ago.[21] The oldest known polar bear fossil is a 130,000 to 110,000-year-old jaw bone, found on Prince Charles Foreland in 2004.[22] Fossils show that between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, the polar bear's molar teeth changed significantly from those of the brown bear.[23] Polar bears are thought to have diverged from a population of brown bears that became isolated during a period of glaciation in the Pleistocene[4] from the eastern part of Siberia (from Kamchatka and the Kolym Peninsula).[23]
+
+The evidence from DNA analysis is more complex. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the polar bear diverged from the brown bear, Ursus arctos, roughly 150,000 years ago.[22] Further, some clades of brown bear, as assessed by their mtDNA, were thought to be more closely related to polar bears than to other brown bears,[24] meaning that the brown bear might not be considered a species under some species concepts, but paraphyletic.[25] The mtDNA of extinct Irish brown bears is particularly close to polar bears.[26] A comparison of the nuclear genome of polar bears with that of brown bears revealed a different pattern, the two forming genetically distinct clades that diverged approximately 603,000 years ago,[27] although the latest research is based on analysis of the complete genomes (rather than just the mitochondria or partial nuclear genomes) of polar and brown bears, and establishes the divergence of polar and brown bears at 400,000 years ago.[28]
+
+However, the two species have mated intermittently for all that time, most likely coming into contact with each other during warming periods, when polar bears were driven onto land and brown bears migrated northward. Most brown bears have about 2 percent genetic material from polar bears, but one population, the ABC Islands bears, has between 5 percent and 10 percent polar bear genes, indicating more frequent and recent mating.[29] Polar bears can breed with brown bears to produce fertile grizzly–polar bear hybrids;[4][30] rather than indicating that they have only recently diverged, the new evidence suggests more frequent mating has continued over a longer period of time, and thus the two bears remain genetically similar.[29] However, because neither species can survive long in the other's ecological niche, and because they have different morphology, metabolism, social and feeding behaviours, and other phenotypic characteristics, the two bears are generally classified as separate species.[31]
+
+When the polar bear was originally documented, two subspecies were identified: the American polar bear (Ursus maritimus maritimus) by Constantine J. Phipps in 1774, and the Siberian polar bear (Ursus maritimus marinus) by Peter Simon Pallas in 1776.[32] This distinction has since been invalidated.[33][34][35] One alleged fossil subspecies has been identified: Ursus maritimus tyrannus, which became extinct during the Pleistocene. U.m. tyrannus was significantly larger than the living subspecies.[4] However, recent reanalysis of the fossil suggests that it was actually a brown bear.[1]
+
+The polar bear is found in the Arctic Circle and adjacent land masses as far south as Newfoundland. Due to the absence of human development in its remote habitat, it retains more of its original range than any other extant carnivore.[36] While they are rare north of 88°, there is evidence that they range all the way across the Arctic, and as far south as James Bay in Canada. Their southernmost range is near the boundary between the subarctic and humid continental climate zones. They can occasionally drift widely with the sea ice, and there have been anecdotal sightings as far south as Berlevåg on the Norwegian mainland and the Kuril Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk. It is difficult to estimate a global population of polar bears as much of the range has been poorly studied; however, biologists use a working estimate of about 20–25,000 or 22–31,000 polar bears worldwide.[2][37][38]
+
+There are 19 generally recognized, discrete subpopulations, though polar bears are thought to exist only in low densities in the area of the Arctic Basin.[37][39] The subpopulations display seasonal fidelity to particular areas, but DNA studies show that they are not reproductively isolated.[35] The 13 North American subpopulations range from the Beaufort Sea south to Hudson Bay and east to Baffin Bay in western Greenland and account for about 54% of the global population.[40]
+
+The range includes the territory of five nations: Denmark (Greenland), Norway (Svalbard), Russia, the United States (Alaska) and Canada. These five nations are the signatories of the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, which mandates cooperation on research and conservation efforts throughout the polar bear's range.[41] Bears sometimes swim to Iceland from Greenland—about 600 sightings since the country's settlement in the 9th century AD, and five in the 21st century as of 2016[update]—and are always killed because of their danger, and the cost and difficulty of repatriation.[42]
+
+Modern methods of tracking polar bear populations have been implemented only since the mid-1980s, and are expensive to perform consistently over a large area. The most accurate counts require flying a helicopter in the Arctic climate to find polar bears, shooting a tranquilizer dart at the bear to sedate it, and then tagging the bear. In Nunavut, some Inuit have reported increases in bear sightings around human settlements in recent years, leading to a belief that populations are increasing. Scientists have responded by noting that hungry bears may be congregating around human settlements, leading to the illusion that populations are higher than they actually are.[43] The Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission takes the position that "estimates of subpopulation size or sustainable harvest levels should not be made solely on the basis of traditional ecological knowledge without supporting scientific studies."[44]
+
+Of the 19 recognized polar bear subpopulations, one is in decline, two are increasing, seven are stable, and nine have insufficient data, as of 2017.[45]
+
+The polar bear is a marine mammal because it spends many months of the year at sea.[46] However, it is the only living marine mammal with powerful, large limbs and feet that allow them to cover kilometres on foot and run on land.[47] Its preferred habitat is the annual sea ice covering the waters over the continental shelf and the Arctic inter-island archipelagos. These areas, known as the "Arctic ring of life", have high biological productivity in comparison to the deep waters of the high Arctic.[36][48] The polar bear tends to frequent areas where sea ice meets water, such as polynyas and leads (temporary stretches of open water in Arctic ice), to hunt the seals that make up most of its diet.[49] Freshwater is limited in these environments because it is either locked up in snow or saline. Polar bears are able to produce water through the metabolism of fats found in seal blubber,[50] and are therefore found primarily along the perimeter of the polar ice pack, rather than in the Polar Basin close to the North Pole where the density of seals is low.[51]
+
+Annual ice contains areas of water that appear and disappear throughout the year as the weather changes. Seals migrate in response to these changes, and polar bears must follow their prey. In Hudson Bay, James Bay, and some other areas, the ice melts completely each summer (an event often referred to as "ice-floe breakup"), forcing polar bears to go onto land and wait through the months until the next freeze-up.[48] In the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, polar bears retreat each summer to the ice further north that remains frozen year-round.
+
+The only other bear similar in size to the polar bear is the Kodiak bear, which is a subspecies of brown bear.[52] Adult male polar bears weigh 350–700 kg (772–1,543 lb) and measure 2.4–3 metres (7 ft 10 in–9 ft 10 in) in total length.[53] Around the Beaufort Sea, however, mature males reportedly average 450 kg (992 lb).[54] Adult females are roughly half the size of males and normally weigh 150–250 kg (331–551 lb), measuring 1.8–2.4 metres (5 ft 11 in–7 ft 10 in) in length. Elsewhere, a slightly larger estimated average weight of 260 kg (573 lb) was claimed for adult females.[55] When pregnant, however, females can weigh as much as 500 kg (1,102 lb).[53] The polar bear is among the most sexually dimorphic of mammals, surpassed only by the pinnipeds such as elephant seals.[56] The largest polar bear on record, reportedly weighing 1,002 kg (2,209 lb), was a male shot at Kotzebue Sound in northwestern Alaska in 1960. This specimen, when mounted, stood 3.39 m (11 ft 1 in) tall on its hindlegs. The shoulder height of an adult polar bear is 122 to 160 cm (4 ft 0 in to 5 ft 3 in).[57][58] While all bears are short-tailed, the polar bear's tail is relatively the shortest amongst living bears, ranging from 7 to 13 cm (2.8 to 5.1 in) in length.[59]
+
+Compared with its closest relative, the brown bear, the polar bear has a more elongated body build and a longer skull and nose.[31] As predicted by Allen's rule for a northerly animal, the legs are stocky and the ears and tail are small.[31] However, the feet are very large to distribute load when walking on snow or thin ice and to provide propulsion when swimming; they may measure 30 cm (12 in) across in an adult.[60] The pads of the paws are covered with small, soft papillae (dermal bumps), which provide traction on the ice. The polar bear's claws are short and stocky compared to those of the brown bear, perhaps to serve the former's need to grip heavy prey and ice.[31] The claws are deeply scooped on the underside to assist in digging in the ice of the natural habitat. Research of injury patterns in polar bear forelimbs found injuries to the right forelimb to be more frequent than those to the left, suggesting, perhaps, right-handedness.[61] Unlike the brown bear, polar bears in captivity are rarely overweight or particularly large, possibly as a reaction to the warm conditions of most zoos.
+
+The 42 teeth of a polar bear reflect its highly carnivorous diet. The cheek teeth are smaller and more jagged than in the brown bear, and the canines are larger and sharper. The dental formula is 3.1.4.23.1.4.3.[31]
+
+Polar bears are superbly insulated by up to 10 cm (4 in) of adipose tissue,[60] their hide and their fur; they overheat at temperatures above 10 °C (50 °F), and are nearly invisible under infrared photography.[62] Polar bear fur consists of a layer of dense underfur and an outer layer of guard hairs, which appear white to tan but are actually transparent.[60] Two genes that are known to influence melanin production, LYST and AIM1, are both mutated in polar bears, possibly leading to the absence on this pigment in their fur.[63] The guard hair is 5–15 cm (2–6 in) over most of the body.[64] Polar bears gradually moult from May to August,[65] but, unlike other Arctic mammals, they do not shed their coat for a darker shade to provide camouflage in summer conditions.[66] The hollow guard hairs of a polar bear coat were once thought to act as fiber-optic tubes to conduct light to its black skin, where it could be absorbed; however, this hypothesis was disproved by a study in 1998.[67]
+
+The white coat usually yellows with age. When kept in captivity in warm, humid conditions, the fur may turn a pale shade of green due to algae growing inside the guard hairs.[68] Males have significantly longer hairs on their forelegs, which increase in length until the bear reaches 14 years of age. The male's ornamental foreleg hair is thought to attract females, serving a similar function to the lion's mane.[69]
+
+The polar bear has an extremely well developed sense of smell, being able to detect seals nearly 1.6 km (1 mi) away and buried under 1 m (3 ft) of snow. Its hearing is about as acute as that of a human, and its vision is also good at long distances.[70]
+
+The polar bear is an excellent swimmer and often will swim for days.[71] One bear swam continuously for 9 days in the frigid Bering Sea for 700 km (400 mi) to reach ice far from land. She then travelled another 1,800 km (1,100 mi). During the swim, the bear lost 22% of her body mass and her yearling cub died.[72] With its body fat providing buoyancy, the bear swims in a dog paddle fashion using its large forepaws for propulsion. Polar bears can swim 10 km/h (6 mph). When walking, the polar bear tends to have a lumbering gait and maintains an average speed of around 5.6 km/h (3.5 mph).[73] When sprinting, they can reach up to 40 km/h (25 mph).[74]
+
+Unlike brown bears, polar bears are not territorial. Although stereotyped as being voraciously aggressive, they are normally cautious in confrontations, and often choose to escape rather than fight.[75] Satiated polar bears rarely attack humans unless severely provoked.[76][77] However, due to their lack of prior human interaction, hungry polar bears are extremely unpredictable, fearless towards people and are known to kill and sometimes eat humans.[78] Many attacks by brown bears are the result of surprising the animal, which is not the case with the polar bear. Polar bears are stealth hunters, and the victim is often unaware of the bear's presence until the attack is underway. Whereas brown bears often maul a person and then leave, polar bear attacks are more likely to be predatory and are almost always fatal.[79] However, due to the very small human population around the Arctic, such attacks are rare. Michio Hoshino, a Japanese wildlife photographer, was once pursued briefly by a hungry male polar bear in northern Alaska. According to Hoshino, the bear started running but Hoshino made it to his truck. The bear was able to reach the truck and tore one of the doors off the truck before Hoshino was able to drive off.[80]
+
+In general, adult polar bears live solitary lives. Yet, they have often been seen playing together for hours at a time and even sleeping in an embrace,[78] and polar bear zoologist Nikita Ovsianikov has described adult males as having "well-developed friendships."[75] Cubs are especially playful as well. Among young males in particular, play-fighting may be a means of practicing for serious competition during mating seasons later in life.[81] Polar bears are usually quiet but do communicate with various sounds and vocalizations. Females communicate with their young with moans and chuffs, and the distress calls of both cubs and subadults consists of bleats.[82] Cubs may hum while nursing.[83] When nervous, bears produce huffs, chuffs and snorts while hisses, growls and roars are signs of aggression.[82] Chemical communication can also be important: bears leave behind their scent in their tracks which allow individuals to keep track of one another in the vast Arctic wilderness.[84]
+
+In 1992, a photographer near Churchill took a now widely circulated set of photographs of a polar bear playing with a Canadian Eskimo Dog (Canis lupus familiaris) a tenth of its size.[85][86] The pair wrestled harmlessly together each afternoon for 10 days in a row for no apparent reason, although the bear may have been trying to demonstrate its friendliness in the hope of sharing the kennel's food. This kind of social interaction is uncommon; it is far more typical for polar bears to behave aggressively towards dogs.[85]
+
+The polar bear is the most carnivorous member of the bear family, and throughout most of its range, its diet primarily consists of ringed (Pusa hispida) and bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus).[88] The Arctic is home to millions of seals, which become prey when they surface in holes in the ice in order to breathe, or when they haul out on the ice to rest.[87][89] Polar bears hunt primarily at the interface between ice, water, and air; they only rarely catch seals on land or in open water.[90]
+
+The polar bear's most common hunting method is called still-hunting:[91] the bear uses its excellent sense of smell to locate a seal breathing hole, and crouches nearby in silence for a seal to appear. The bear may lie in wait for several hours. When the seal exhales, the bear smells its breath, reaches into the hole with a forepaw, and drags it out onto the ice. The polar bear kills the seal by biting its head to crush its skull. The polar bear also hunts by stalking seals resting on the ice: upon spotting a seal, it walks to within 90 m (100 yd), and then crouches. If the seal does not notice, the bear creeps to within 9 to 12 m (30 to 40 ft) of the seal and then suddenly rushes forth to attack.[87] A third hunting method is to raid the birth lairs that female seals create in the snow.[91]
+
+A widespread legend tells that polar bears cover their black noses with their paws when hunting. This behaviour, if it happens, is rare – although the story exists in the oral history of northern peoples and in accounts by early Arctic explorers, there is no record of an eyewitness account of the behaviour in recent decades.[73]
+
+Mature bears tend to eat only the calorie-rich skin and blubber of the seal, which are highly digestible,[92] whereas younger bears consume the protein-rich red meat.[87] Studies have also photographed polar bears scaling near-vertical cliffs, to eat birds' chicks and eggs.[93] For subadult bears, which are independent of their mother but have not yet gained enough experience and body size to successfully hunt seals, scavenging the carcasses from other bears' kills is an important source of nutrition. Subadults may also be forced to accept a half-eaten carcass if they kill a seal but cannot defend it from larger polar bears. After feeding, polar bears wash themselves with water or snow.[73]
+
+Although polar bears are extraordinarily powerful, its primary prey species, the ringed seal, is much smaller than itself, and many of the seals hunted are pups rather than adults. Ringed seals are born weighing 5.4 kg (12 lb) and grown to an estimated average weight of only 60 kg (130 lb).[94][95] They also in places prey heavily upon the harp seal (Pagophilus groenlandicus) or the harbour seal. The bearded seal, on the other hand, can be nearly the same size as the bear itself, averaging 270 kg (600 lb).[95] Adult male bearded seals, at 350 to 500 kg (770 to 1,100 lb) are too large for a female bear to overtake, and so are potential prey only for mature male bears.[96] Large males also occasionally attempt to hunt and kill even larger prey items.[97] It can kill an adult walrus (Odobenus rosmarus),[95][98] although this is rarely attempted. At up to 2,000 kg (4,400 lb) and a typical adult mass range of 600 to 1,500 kg (1,300 to 3,300 lb), a walrus can be more than twice the bear's weight,[99] has extremely thick skin and has up to 1-metre (3 ft)-long ivory tusks that can be used as formidable weapons. A polar bear may charge a group of walruses, with the goal of separating a young, infirm, or injured walrus from the pod. They will even attack adult walruses when their diving holes have frozen over or intercept them before they can get back to the diving hole in the ice. Yet, polar bears will very seldom attack full-grown adult walruses, with the largest male walrus probably invulnerable unless otherwise injured or incapacitated. Since an attack on a walrus tends to be an extremely protracted and exhausting venture, bears have been known to back down from the attack after making the initial injury to the walrus.[98] Polar bears have also been seen to prey on beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas)[95] and narwhals (Monodon monoceros),[95] by swiping at them at breathing holes. The whales are of similar size to the walrus and nearly as difficult for the bear to subdue.[100][101] Most terrestrial animals in the Arctic can outrun the polar bear on land as polar bears overheat quickly, and most marine animals the bear encounters can outswim it. In some areas, the polar bear's diet is supplemented by walrus calves and by the carcasses of dead adult walruses or whales, whose blubber is readily devoured even when rotten.[78] Polar bears sometimes swim underwater to catch fish like the Arctic charr or the fourhorn sculpin.[89]
+
+With the exception of pregnant females, polar bears are active year-round, although they have a vestigial hibernation induction trigger in their blood. Unlike brown and black bears, polar bears are capable of fasting for up to several months during late summer and early fall, when they cannot hunt for seals because the sea is unfrozen.[102] When sea ice is unavailable during summer and early autumn, some populations live off fat reserves for months at a time,[62] as polar bears do not 'hibernate' any time of the year.[103]
+
+Being both curious animals and scavengers,[99][104] polar bears investigate and consume garbage where they come into contact with humans.[95][99] Polar bears may attempt to consume almost anything they can find, including hazardous substances such as styrofoam, plastic, car batteries, ethylene glycol, hydraulic fluid, and motor oil.[99][104] The dump in Churchill, Manitoba was closed in 2006 to protect bears, and waste is now recycled or transported to Thompson, Manitoba.[105][106]
+
+Although seal predation is the primary and an indispensable way of life for most polar bears, when alternatives are present they are quite flexible. Polar bears consume a wide variety of other wild foods, including muskox (Ovibos moschatus), reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), birds, eggs, rodents, crabs, other crustaceans and other polar bears. They may also eat plants, including berries, roots, and kelp;[107] however, none of these have been a significant part of their diet,[99] except for beachcast marine mammal carcasses. Given the change in climate, with ice breaking up in areas such as the Hudson Bay earlier than it used to, polar bears are exploiting food resources such as snow geese and eggs, and plants such as lyme grass in increased quantities.[108]
+
+When stalking land animals, such as muskox, reindeer,[107] and even willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus), polar bears appear to make use of vegetative cover and wind direction to bring them as close to their prey as possible before attacking. Polar bears have been observed to hunt the small Svalbard reindeer (R. t. platyrhynchus), which weigh only 40 to 60 kg (90 to 130 lb) as adults, as well as the barren-ground caribou (R. t. groenlandicus), which is about twice as heavy as that.[109][110] Adult muskox, which can weigh 450 kg (1,000 lb) or more, are a more formidable quarry.[111] Although ungulates are not typical prey, the killing of one during the summer months can greatly increase the odds of survival during that lean period. Like the brown bear, most ungulate prey of polar bears is likely to be young, sickly or injured specimens rather than healthy adults.[110] The polar bear's metabolism is specialized to require large amounts of fat from marine mammals, and it cannot derive sufficient caloric intake from terrestrial food.[112][113]
+
+In their southern range, especially near Hudson Bay and James Bay, Canadian polar bears endure all summer without sea ice to hunt from.[107] Here, their food ecology shows their dietary flexibility. They still manage to consume some seals, but they are food-deprived in summer as only marine mammal carcasses are an important alternative without sea ice, especially carcasses of the beluga whale. These alternatives may reduce the rate of weight loss of bears when on land.[114] One scientist found that 71% of the Hudson Bay bears had fed on seaweed (marine algae) and that about half were feeding on birds[95] such as the dovekie and sea ducks, especially the long-tailed duck (53%) and common eider, by swimming underwater to catch them. They were also diving to feed on blue mussels and other underwater food sources like the green sea urchin. 24% had eaten moss recently, 19% had consumed grass, 34% had eaten black crowberry and about half had consumed willows.[107] This study illustrates the polar bear's dietary flexibility but it does not represent its life history elsewhere. Most polar bears elsewhere will never have access to these alternatives, except for the marine mammal carcasses that are important wherever they occur.
+
+In Svalbard, polar bears were observed to kill white-beaked dolphins during spring, when the dolphins were trapped in the sea ice. The bears then proceeded to cache the carcasses, which remained and were eaten during the ice-free summer and autumn.[115]
+
+Courtship and mating take place on the sea ice in April and May, when polar bears congregate in the best seal hunting areas.[116] A male may follow the tracks of a breeding female for 100 km (60 mi) or more, and after finding her engage in intense fighting with other males over mating rights, fights that often result in scars and broken teeth.[116] Polar bears have a generally polygynous mating system; recent genetic testing of mothers and cubs, however, has uncovered cases of litters in which cubs have different fathers.[117] Partners stay together and mate repeatedly for an entire week; the mating ritual induces ovulation in the female.[118]
+
+After mating, the fertilized egg remains in a suspended state until August or September. During these four months, the pregnant female eats prodigious amounts of food, gaining at least 200 kg (440 lb) and often more than doubling her body weight.[116]
+
+When the ice floes are at their minimum in the fall, ending the possibility of hunting, each pregnant female digs a maternity den consisting of a narrow entrance tunnel leading to one to three chambers. Most maternity dens are in snowdrifts, but may also be made underground in permafrost if it is not sufficiently cold yet for snow.[116] In most subpopulations, maternity dens are situated on land a few kilometres from the coast, and the individuals in a subpopulation tend to reuse the same denning areas each year.[36] The polar bears that do not den on land make their dens on the sea ice. In the den, she enters a dormant state similar to hibernation. This hibernation-like state does not consist of continuous sleeping; however, the bear's heart rate slows from 46 to 27 beats per minute.[119] Her body temperature does not decrease during this period as it would for a typical mammal in hibernation.[62][120]
+
+Between November and February, cubs are born blind, covered with a light down fur, and weighing less than 0.9 kg (2.0 lb),[118] but in captivity they might be delivered in the earlier months. The earliest recorded birth of polar bears in captivity was on 11 October 2011 in the Toronto Zoo.[121] On average, each litter has two cubs. The family remains in the den until mid-February to mid-April, with the mother maintaining her fast while nursing her cubs on a fat-rich milk. By the time the mother breaks open the entrance to the den, her cubs weigh about 10 to 15 kilograms (22 to 33 lb). For about 12 to 15 days, the family spends time outside the den while remaining in its vicinity, the mother grazing on vegetation while the cubs become used to walking and playing. Then they begin the long walk from the denning area to the sea ice, where the mother can once again catch seals. Depending on the timing of ice-floe breakup in the fall, she may have fasted for up to eight months.[116] During this time, cubs playfully imitate the mother's hunting methods in preparation for later life.[122]
+
+Female polar bears have been known to adopt other cubs. Multiple cases of adoption of wild cubs have been confirmed by genetic testing.[123] Adult bears of either gender occasionally kill and eat polar bear cubs.[124][125] As of 2006, in Alaska, 42% of cubs were reaching 12 months of age, down from 65% in 1991.[126] In most areas, cubs are weaned at two and a half years of age, when the mother chases them away or abandons them. The Western Hudson Bay subpopulation is unusual in that its female polar bears sometimes wean their cubs at only one and a half years.[116] This was the case for 40% of cubs there in the early 1980s; however by the 1990s, fewer than 20% of cubs were weaned this young.[127] After the mother leaves, sibling cubs sometimes travel and share food together for weeks or months.[78]
+
+Females begin to breed at the age of four years in most areas, and five years in the area of the Beaufort Sea. Males usually reach sexual maturity at six years; however, as competition for females is fierce, many do not breed until the age of eight or ten.[116] A study in Hudson Bay indicated that both the reproductive success and the maternal weight of females peaked in their mid-teens.Maternal success appeared to decline after this point, possibly because of an age-related impairment in the ability to store the fat necessary to rear cubs.[128]
+
+Polar bears appear to be less affected by infectious diseases and parasites than most terrestrial mammals.[129] Polar bears are especially susceptible to Trichinella, a parasitic roundworm they contract through cannibalism,[130] although infections are usually not fatal. Only one case of a polar bear with rabies has been documented, even though polar bears frequently interact with Arctic foxes, which often carry rabies.[129] Bacterial leptospirosis and Morbillivirus have been recorded. Polar bears sometimes have problems with various skin diseases that may be caused by mites or other parasites.
+
+Polar bears rarely live beyond 25 years.[131] The oldest wild bears on record died at age 32, whereas the oldest captive was a female who died in 1991, age 43.[132] The causes of death in wild adult polar bears are poorly understood, as carcasses are rarely found in the species's frigid habitat. In the wild, old polar bears eventually become too weak to catch food, and gradually starve to death. Polar bears injured in fights or accidents may either die from their injuries, or become unable to hunt effectively, leading to starvation.[129]
+
+The polar bear is the apex predator within its range, and is a keystone species for the Arctic.[133] Several animal species, particularly Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) and glaucous gulls (Larus hyperboreus), routinely scavenge polar bear kills.[73]
+
+The relationship between ringed seals and polar bears is so close that the abundance of ringed seals in some areas appears to regulate the density of polar bears, while polar bear predation in turn regulates density and reproductive success of ringed seals.[90] The evolutionary pressure of polar bear predation on seals probably accounts for some significant differences between Arctic and Antarctic seals. Compared to the Antarctic, where there is no major surface predator, Arctic seals use more breathing holes per individual, appear more restless when hauled out on the ice, and rarely defecate on the ice. The baby fur of most Arctic seal species is white, presumably to provide camouflage from predators, whereas Antarctic seals all have dark fur at birth.[73]
+
+Brown bears tend to dominate polar bears in disputes over carcasses,[134] and dead polar bear cubs have been found in brown bear dens.[135] Wolves are rarely encountered by polar bears, though there are two records of Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos) packs killing polar bear cubs.[136] Adult polar bears are occasionally vulnerable to predation by orcas (Orcinus orca) while swimming, but they are rarely reported as taken and bears are likely to avoid entering the water if possible if they detect an orca pod in the area. The melting sea ice in the Arctic may be causing an increase of orcas in the Arctic sea, which may increase the risk of predation on polar bears but also may benefit the bears by providing more whale carcasses that they can scavenge.[137][138] The remains of polar bears have found in the stomachs of large Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus), although it certainly cannot be ruled out that the bears were merely scavenged by this slow-moving, unusual shark.[139][140] A rather unlikely killer of a grown polar bear has reportedly included a wolverine (Gulo gulo), anecedotely reported to have suffocated a bear in a zoo with a bite to the throat during a conflict. This report may well be dubious, however.[141] Polar bears are sometimes the host of arctic mites such as Alaskozetes antarcticus.[73]
+
+Researchers tracked 52 sows in the southern Beaufort Sea off Alaska with GPS system collars; no boars were involved in the study due to males' necks being too thick for the GPS-equipped collars. Fifty long-distance swims were recorded; the longest at 354 kilometres (220 mi), with an average of 155 kilometres (96 mi). The length of these swims ranged from most of a day to ten days. Ten of the sows had a cub swim with them and after a year, six cubs survived. The study did not determine if the others lost their cubs before, during, or some time after their long swims. Researchers do not know whether or not this is a new behaviour; before polar ice shrinkage, they opined that there was probably neither the need nor opportunity to swim such long distances.[142]
+
+The polar bear may swim underwater for up to three minutes to approach seals on shore or on ice floes.[143][144]
+
+Polar bears have long provided important raw materials for Arctic peoples, including the Inuit, Yupik, Chukchi, Nenets, Russian Pomors and others. Hunters commonly used teams of dogs to distract the bear, allowing the hunter to spear the bear or shoot it with arrows at closer range.[145] Almost all parts of captured animals had a use.[146] The fur was used in particular to make trousers and, by the Nenets, to make galoshes-like outer footwear called tobok; the meat is edible, despite some risk of trichinosis; the fat was used in food and as a fuel for lighting homes, alongside seal and whale blubber; sinews were used as thread for sewing clothes; the gallbladder and sometimes heart were dried and powdered for medicinal purposes; the large canine teeth were highly valued as talismans.[147] Only the liver was not used, as its high concentration of vitamin A is poisonous. As a carnivore, which feeds largely upon fish-eating carnivores, the polar bear ingests large amounts of vitamin A that is stored in their livers. The resulting high concentrations cause Hypervitaminosis A,[148] Hunters make sure to either toss the liver into the sea or bury it in order to spare their dogs from potential poisoning.[147] Traditional subsistence hunting was on a small enough scale to not significantly affect polar bear populations, mostly because of the sparseness of the human population in polar bear habitat.[149]
+
+In Russia, polar bear furs were already being commercially traded in the 14th century, though it was of low value compared to Arctic fox or even reindeer fur.[147] The growth of the human population in the Eurasian Arctic in the 16th and 17th century, together with the advent of firearms and increasing trade, dramatically increased the harvest of polar bears.[62][150] However, since polar bear fur has always played a marginal commercial role, data on the historical harvest is fragmentary. It is known, for example, that already in the winter of 1784/1785 Russian Pomors on Spitsbergen harvested 150 polar bears in Magdalenefjorden. In the early 20th century, Norwegian hunters were harvesting 300 bears per year at the same location. Estimates of total historical harvest suggest that from the beginning of the 18th century, roughly 400 to 500 animals were being harvested annually in northern Eurasia, reaching a peak of 1,300 to 1,500 animals in the early 20th century, and falling off as the numbers began dwindling.[147]
+
+In the first half of the 20th century, mechanized and overpoweringly efficient methods of hunting and trapping came into use in North America as well. Polar bears were chased from snowmobiles, icebreakers, and airplanes, the latter practice described in a 1965 New York Times editorial as being "about as sporting as machine gunning a cow."[151] Norwegians used "self-killing guns", comprising a loaded rifle in a baited box that was placed at the level of a bear's head, and which fired when the string attached to the bait was pulled.[152] The numbers taken grew rapidly in the 1960s, peaking around 1968 with a global total of 1,250 bears that year.[153]
+
+Concerns over the future survival of the species led to the development of national regulations on polar bear hunting, beginning in the mid-1950s. The Soviet Union banned all hunting in 1956. Canada began imposing hunting quotas in 1968. Norway passed a series of increasingly strict regulations from 1965 to 1973, and has completely banned hunting since then. The United States began regulating hunting in 1971 and adopted the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. In 1973, the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears was signed by all five nations whose territory is inhabited by polar bears: Canada, Denmark, Norway, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Member countries agreed to place restrictions on recreational and commercial hunting, ban hunting from aircraft and icebreakers, and conduct further research.[154] The treaty allows hunting "by local people using traditional methods". Norway is the only country of the five in which all harvest of polar bears is banned. The agreement was a rare case of international cooperation during the Cold War. Biologist Ian Stirling commented, "For many years, the conservation of polar bears was the only subject in the entire Arctic that nations from both sides of the Iron Curtain could agree upon sufficiently to sign an agreement. Such was the intensity of human fascination with this magnificent predator, the only marine bear."[155]
+
+Agreements have been made between countries to co-manage their shared polar bear subpopulations. After several years of negotiations, Russia and the United States signed an agreement in October 2000 to jointly set quotas for indigenous subsistence hunting in Alaska and Chukotka.[156] The treaty was ratified in October 2007.[157] In September 2015, the polar bear range states agreed upon a "circumpolar action plan" describing their conservation strategy for polar bears.[158]
+
+Although the United States government has proposed that polar bears be transferred to Appendix I of CITES, which would ban all international trade in polar bear parts, polar bears currently remain listed under Appendix II.[159] This decision was approved of by members of the IUCN and TRAFFIC, who determined that such an uplisting was unlikely to confer a conservation benefit.[160]
+
+Polar bears were designated "Not at Risk" in April 1986 and uplisted to "Special Concern" in April 1991. This status was re-evaluated and confirmed in April 1999, November 2002, and April 2008. Polar bears continue to be listed as a species of special concern in Canada because of their sensitivity to overharvest and because of an expected range contraction caused by loss of Arctic sea ice.[161]
+
+More than 600 bears are killed per year by humans across Canada,[45] a rate calculated by scientists to be unsustainable for some areas, notably Baffin Bay.[37] Canada has allowed sport hunters accompanied by local guides and dog-sled teams since 1970,[162] but the practice was not common until the 1980s.[163] The guiding of sport hunters provides meaningful employment and an important source of income for northern communities in which economic opportunities are few.[43] Sport hunting can bring CDN$20,000 to $35,000 per bear into northern communities, which until recently has been mostly from American hunters.[164]
+
+The territory of Nunavut accounts for the location 80% of annual kills in Canada. In 2005, the government of Nunavut increased the quota from 400 to 518 bears,[164] despite protests from the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group.[165] In two areas where harvest levels have been increased based on increased sightings, science-based studies have indicated declining populations, and a third area is considered data-deficient.[166] While most of that quota is hunted by the indigenous Inuit people, a growing share is sold to recreational hunters. (0.8% in the 1970s, 7.1% in the 1980s, and 14.6% in the 1990s)[163] Nunavut polar bear biologist, Mitchell Taylor, who was formerly responsible for polar bear conservation in the territory, has insisted that bear numbers are being sustained under current hunting limits.[167] In 2010, the 2005 increase was partially reversed. Government of Nunavut officials announced that the polar bear quota for the Baffin Bay region would be gradually reduced from 105 per year to 65 by the year 2013.[168] The Government of the Northwest Territories maintain their own quota of 72 to 103 bears within the Inuvialuit communities of which some are set aside for sports hunters.[citation needed] Environment Canada also banned the export from Canada of fur, claws, skulls and other products from polar bears harvested in Baffin Bay as of 1 January 2010.[168]
+
+Because of the way polar bear hunting quotas are managed in Canada, attempts to discourage sport hunting would actually increase the number of bears killed in the short term. Canada allocates a certain number of permits each year to sport and subsistence hunting, and those that are not used for sport hunting are re-allocated to indigenous subsistence hunting. Whereas northern communities kill all the polar bears they are permitted to take each year, only half of sport hunters with permits actually manage to kill a polar bear. If a sport hunter does not kill a polar bear before his or her permit expires, the permit cannot be transferred to another hunter.[43]
+
+In August 2011, Environment Canada published a national polar bear conservation strategy.[169]
+
+In Greenland, hunting restrictions were first introduced in 1994 and expanded by executive order in 2005.[39] Until 2005 Greenland placed no limit on hunting by indigenous people. However, in 2006 it imposed a limit of 150, while also allowed recreational hunting for the first time.[170] Other provisions included year-round protection of cubs and mothers, restrictions on weapons used and various administrative requirements to catalogue kills.[39]
+
+Polar bears were hunted heavily in Svalbard, Norway throughout the 19th century and to as recently as 1973, when the conservation treaty was signed. 900 bears a year were harvested in the 1920s and after World War II, there were as many as 400–500 harvested annually. Some regulations of hunting did exist. In 1927, poisoning was outlawed while in 1939, certain denning sights were declared off limits. The killing of females and cubs was made illegal in 1965. Killing of polar bears decreased somewhat 25–30 years before the treaty. Despite this, the polar bear population continued to decline and by 1973, only around 1000 bears were left in Svalbard. Only with the passage of the treaty did they begin to recover.[171]
+
+The Soviet Union banned the harvest of polar bears in 1956; however, poaching continued and is estimated to pose a serious threat to the polar bear population.[39] In recent years, polar bears have approached coastal villages in Chukotka more frequently due to the shrinking of the sea ice, endangering humans and raising concerns that illegal hunting would become even more prevalent. In 2007, the Russian government made subsistence hunting legal for indigenous Chukotkan peoples only, a move supported by Russia's most prominent bear researchers and the World Wide Fund for Nature as a means to curb poaching.[172]
+
+Polar bears are currently listed as "Rare", of "Uncertain Status", or "Rehabilitated and rehabilitating" in the Red Data Book of Russia, depending on population.[173] In 2010, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment published a strategy for polar bear conservation in Russia.[174]
+
+The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 afforded polar bears some protection in the United States. It banned hunting (except by indigenous subsistence hunters), banned importing of polar bear parts (except polar bear pelts taken legally in Canada), and banned the harassment of polar bears. On 15 May 2008, the United States Department of the Interior listed the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, citing the melting of Arctic sea ice as the primary threat to the polar bear.[175] It banned all importing of polar bear trophies. Importing products made from polar bears had been prohibited from 1972 to 1994 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and restricted between 1994 and 2008. Under those restrictions, permits from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service were required to import sport-hunted polar bear trophies taken in hunting expeditions in Canada. The permit process required that the bear be taken from an area with quotas based on sound management principles.[176] Since 1994, hundreds of sport-hunted polar bear trophies have been imported into the U.S.[177] In 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a draft conservation management plan for polar bears to improve their status under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.[178]
+
+Polar bear population sizes and trends are difficult to estimate accurately because they occupy remote home ranges and exist at low population densities. Polar bear fieldwork can also be hazardous to researchers.[179] As of 2015, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports that the global population of polar bears is 22,000 to 31,000, and the current population trend is unknown. Nevertheless, polar bears are listed as "Vulnerable" under criterion A3c, which indicates an expected population decrease of ≥30% over the next three generations (~34.5 years) due to "decline in area of occupancy, extent of occurrence and/or quality of habitat". Risks to the polar bear include climate change, pollution in the form of toxic contaminants, conflicts with shipping, oil and gas exploration and development, and human-bear interactions including harvesting and possible stresses from recreational polar-bear watching.[2]
+
+According to the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear is important as an indicator of Arctic ecosystem health. Polar bears are studied to gain understanding of what is happening throughout the Arctic, because at-risk polar bears are often a sign of something wrong with the Arctic marine ecosystem.[180]
+
+The International Union for Conservation of Nature, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, United States Geological Survey and many leading polar bear biologists have expressed grave concerns about the impact of climate change, including the belief that the current warming trend imperils the survival of the polar bear.[36][181][182][183][184][185]
+
+The key danger posed by climate change is malnutrition or starvation due to habitat loss. Polar bears hunt seals from a platform of sea ice. Rising temperatures cause the sea ice to melt earlier in the year, driving the bears to shore before they have built sufficient fat reserves to survive the period of scarce food in the late summer and early fall.[127] Reduction in sea-ice cover also forces bears to swim longer distances, which further depletes their energy stores and occasionally leads to drowning.[186] Thinner sea ice tends to deform more easily, which appears to make it more difficult for polar bears to access seals.[90] Insufficient nourishment leads to lower reproductive rates in adult females and lower survival rates in cubs and juvenile bears, in addition to poorer body condition in bears of all ages.[36]
+
+In addition to creating nutritional stress, a warming climate is expected to affect various other aspects of polar bear life: Changes in sea ice affect the ability of pregnant females to build suitable maternity dens.[30] As the distance increases between the pack ice and the coast, females must swim longer distances to reach favoured denning areas on land. Thawing of permafrost would affect the bears who traditionally den underground, and warm winters could result in den roofs collapsing or having reduced insulative value. For the polar bears that currently den on multi-year ice, increased ice mobility may result in longer distances for mothers and young cubs to walk when they return to seal-hunting areas in the spring.[36] Disease-causing bacteria and parasites would flourish more readily in a warmer climate.[90]
+
+Problematic interactions between polar bears and humans, such as foraging by bears in garbage dumps, have historically been more prevalent in years when ice-floe breakup occurred early and local polar bears were relatively thin. Increased human-bear interactions, including fatal attacks on humans, are likely to increase as the sea ice shrinks and hungry bears try to find food on land.[181]
+
+The effects of climate change are most profound in the southern part of the polar bear's range, and this is indeed where significant degradation of local populations has been observed.[185] The Western Hudson Bay subpopulation, in a southern part of the range, also happens to be one of the best-studied polar bear subpopulations. This subpopulation feeds heavily on ringed seals in late spring, when newly weaned and easily hunted seal pups are abundant. The late spring hunting season ends for polar bears when the ice begins to melt and break up, and they fast or eat little during the summer until the sea freezes again.[166]
+
+Due to warming air temperatures, ice-floe breakup in western Hudson Bay is currently occurring three weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago, reducing the duration of the polar bear feeding season. The body condition of polar bears has declined during this period; the average weight of lone (and likely pregnant) female polar bears was approximately 290 kg (640 lb) in 1980 and 230 kg (510 lb) in 2004.[166] Between 1987 and 2004, the Western Hudson Bay population declined by 22%,[187] although the population was listed as "stable" as of 2017.[45] As the climate change melts sea ice, the U.S. Geological Survey projects that two-thirds of polar bears will disappear by 2050.[188]
+
+In Alaska, the effects of sea ice shrinkage have contributed to higher mortality rates in polar bear cubs, and have led to changes in the denning locations of pregnant females.[126] The proportion of maternity dens on sea ice has changed from 62% between the years 1985 through 1994, to 37% over the years 1998 through 2004. Thus, now the Alaskan population more resembles the world population in that it is more likely to den on land.[189] In recent years, polar bears in the Arctic have undertaken longer than usual swims to find prey, possibly resulting in four recorded drownings in the unusually large ice pack regression of 2005.[186]
+
+A new development is that polar bears have begun ranging to new territory. While not unheard of but still uncommon, polar bears have been sighted increasingly in larger numbers ashore, staying on the mainland for longer periods of time during the summer months, particularly in North Canada, traveling farther inland.[190] This may cause an increased reliance on terrestrial diets, such as goose eggs, waterfowl and caribou,[191] as well as increased human–bear conflict.[190]
+
+Polar bears accumulate high levels of persistent organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and chlorinated pesticides. Due to their position at the top of the ecological pyramid, with a diet heavy in blubber in which halocarbons concentrate, their bodies are among the most contaminated of Arctic mammals.[192] Halocarbons (also known as organohalogens) are known to be toxic to other animals, because they mimic hormone chemistry, and biomarkers such as immunoglobulin G and retinol suggest similar effects on polar bears. PCBs have received the most study, and they have been associated with birth defects and immune system deficiency.[193]
+
+Many chemicals, such as PCBs and DDT, have been internationally banned due to the recognition of their harm on the environment. Their concentrations in polar bear tissues continued to rise for decades after being banned, as these chemicals spread through the food chain. Since then, the trend seems to have abated, with tissue concentrations of PCBs declining between studies performed from 1989 to 1993 and studies performed from 1996 to 2002. During the same time periods, DDT was found to be notably lower in the Western Hudson Bay population only.[194]
+
+Oil and gas development in polar bear habitat can affect the bears in a variety of ways. An oil spill in the Arctic would most likely concentrate in the areas where polar bears and their prey are also concentrated, such as sea ice leads.[2] Because polar bears rely partly on their fur for insulation and soiling of the fur by oil reduces its insulative value, oil spills put bears at risk of dying from hypothermia. Polar bears exposed to oil spill conditions have been observed to lick the oil from their fur, leading to fatal kidney failure.[102] Maternity dens, used by pregnant females and by females with infants, can also be disturbed by nearby oil exploration and development. Disturbance of these sensitive sites may trigger the mother to abandon her den prematurely, or abandon her litter altogether.[2]
+
+Steven Amstrup and other U.S. Geological Survey scientists have predicted two-thirds of the world's polar bears may disappear by 2050, based on moderate projections for the shrinking of summer sea ice caused by climate change,[90][188] though the validity of this study has been debated.[195][196] The bears could disappear from Europe, Asia, and Alaska, and be depleted from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and areas off the northern Greenland coast. By 2080, they could disappear from Greenland entirely and from the northern Canadian coast, leaving only dwindling numbers in the interior Arctic Archipelago.[90] However, in the short term, some polar bear populations in historically colder regions of the Arctic may temporarily benefit from a milder climate, as multiyear ice that is too thick for seals to create breathing holes is replaced by thinner annual ice.[197]
+
+Polar bears diverged from brown bears 400,000–600,000 years ago and have survived past periods of climate fluctuation. It has been claimed that polar bears will be able to adapt to terrestrial food sources as the sea ice they use to hunt seals disappears.[198] However, most polar bear biologists think that polar bears will be unable to completely offset the loss of calorie-rich seal blubber with terrestrial foods, and that they will be outcompeted by brown bears in this terrestrial niche, ultimately leading to a population decline.[199]
+
+Warnings about the future of the polar bear are often contrasted with the fact that worldwide population estimates have increased over the past 50 years and are relatively stable today.[200][201] Some estimates of the global population are around 5,000 to 10,000 in the early 1970s;[202] other estimates were 20,000 to 40,000 during the 1980s.[48][62] Current estimates put the global population at between 20,000 and 25,000[39] or 22,000 and 31,000.[2]
+
+There are several reasons for the apparent discordance between past and projected population trends: estimates from the 1950s and 1960s were based on stories from explorers and hunters rather than on scientific surveys.[203][204][205][206] Second, controls of harvesting were introduced that allowed this previously overhunted species to recover. Third, the recent effects of climate change have affected sea ice abundance in different areas to varying degrees.[203]
+
+Debate over the listing of the polar bear under endangered species legislation has put conservation groups and Canada's Inuit at opposing positions;[43] the Nunavut government and many northern residents have condemned the U.S. initiative to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.[207][208] Many Inuit believe the polar bear population is increasing, and restrictions on commercial sport-hunting are likely to lead to a loss of income to their communities.[43][209]
+
+For the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, polar bears have long played an important cultural and material role.[146][147] Polar bear remains have been found at hunting sites dating to 2,500 to 3,000 years ago[149] and 1,500-year-old cave paintings of polar bears have been found in the Chukchi Peninsula. Indeed, it has been suggested that Arctic peoples' skills in seal hunting and igloo construction has been in part acquired from the polar bears themselves.[147]
+
+The Inuit and Alaska Natives have many folk tales featuring the bears including legends in which bears are humans when inside their own houses and put on bear hides when going outside, and stories of how the constellation that is said to resemble a great bear surrounded by dogs came into being. These legends reveal a deep respect for the polar bear, which is portrayed as both spiritually powerful and closely akin to humans. The human-like posture of bears when standing and sitting, and the resemblance of a skinned bear carcass to the human body, have probably contributed to the belief that the spirits of humans and bears were interchangeable.[145]
+
+Among the Chukchi and Yupik of eastern Siberia, there was a longstanding shamanistic ritual of "thanksgiving" to the hunted polar bear. After killing the animal, its head and skin were removed and cleaned and brought into the home, and a feast was held in the hunting camp in its honor. To appease the spirit of the bear, traditional song and drum music was played, and the skull was ceremonially fed and offered a pipe.[210] Only once the spirit was appeased was the skull be separated from the skin, taken beyond the bounds of the homestead, and placed in the ground, facing north.[147]
+
+The Nenets of north-central Siberia placed particular value on the talismanic power of the prominent canine teeth. These were traded in the villages of the lower Yenisei and Khatanga rivers to the forest-dwelling peoples further south, who would sew them into their hats as protection against brown bears. It was believed that the "little nephew" (the brown bear) would not dare to attack a man wearing the tooth of its powerful "big uncle", the polar bear. The skulls of killed polar bears were buried at sacred sites, and altars, called sedyangi, were constructed out of the skulls. Several such sites have been preserved on the Yamal Peninsula.[147]
+
+Their distinctive appearance and their association with the Arctic have made polar bears popular icons, especially in those areas where they are native. The Canadian two-dollar coin carries an image of a lone polar bear on its reverse side, while a special millennium edition featured three.[211] Vehicle licence plates in the Northwest Territories in Canada are in the shape of a polar bear, as was the case in Nunavut until 2012; these now display polar bear artwork instead.[212] The polar bear is the mascot of Bowdoin College, Maine; the University of Alaska Fairbanks; and the 1988 Winter Olympics held in Calgary.[213][214][215] The Eisbären Berlin hockey team uses a roaring polar bear as their logo, and the Charlotte, North Carolina hockey team the Charlotte Checkers uses a polar bear named Chubby Checker as their mascot. [216]
+
+Coca-Cola has used images of the polar bear in its advertising,[217] and Polar Beverages, Nelvana, Bundaberg Rum, Klondike bars, and Fox's Glacier Mints all feature polar bears in their logos.
+
+Polar bears are popular in fiction, particularly in books for children or teenagers. For example, The Polar Bear Son is adapted from a traditional Inuit tale.[218] The animated television series Noah's Island features a polar bear named Noah as the protagonist. Polar bears feature prominently in East (North Child in the UK) by Edith Pattou,[219] The Bear by Raymond Briggs (adapted into an animated short in 1998),[220] and Chris d'Lacey's The Fire Within series.[221] The panserbjørne of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials are sapient, dignified polar bears who exhibit anthropomorphic qualities, and feature prominently in the 2007 film adaptation of The Golden Compass.[222] The television series Lost features polar bears living on the tropical island setting.[223]
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+
+
+See Subspecies of Canis lupus
+
+The wolf (Canis lupus[a]), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as colloquially understood, comprise non-domestic/feral subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of Canidae, males averaging 40 kg (88 lb) and females 37 kg (82 lb). Wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height. The wolf is also distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. The wolf is nonetheless related closely enough to smaller Canis species, such as the coyote and the golden jackal, to produce fertile hybrids with them. The banded fur of a wolf is usually mottled white, brown, gray, and black, although subspecies in the arctic region may be nearly all white.
+
+Of all members of the genus Canis, the wolf is most specialized for cooperative game hunting as demonstrated by its physical adaptations to tackling large prey, its more social nature, and its highly advanced expressive behaviour. It travels in nuclear families consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring. Offspring may leave to form their own packs on the onset of sexual maturity and in response to competition for food within the pack. Wolves are also territorial and fights over territory are among the principal causes of wolf mortality. The wolf is mainly a carnivore and feeds on large wild hooved mammals as well as smaller animals, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs. Pathogens and parasites, notably rabies, may infect wolves.
+
+The global wild wolf population was estimated to be 300,000 in 2003 and is considered to be of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Wolves have a long history of interactions with humans, having been despised and hunted in most pastoral communities because of their attacks on livestock, while conversely being respected in some agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Although the fear of wolves exists in many human societies, the majority of recorded attacks on people have been attributed to animals suffering from rabies. Wolf attacks on humans are rare because wolves are relatively few, live away from people, and have developed a fear of humans because of their experiences with hunters, ranchers, and shepherds.
+
+The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos).[4][5] The name "gray wolf" refers to the grayish colour of the species.[6]
+
+Since pre-Christian times, Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons took on wulf as a prefix or suffix in their names. Examples include Wulfhere ("Wolf Army", or "He whose army is the wolf"), Cynewulf ("Royal Wolf"), Cēnwulf ("Bold Wolf"), Wulfheard ("Wolf-hard"), Earnwulf ("Eagle Wolf"), Wulfstān ("Wolf Stone") Æðelwulf ("Noble Wolf"), Wolfhroc ("Wolf-Frock"), Wolfhetan ("Wolf Hide"), Isangrim ("Gray Mask"), Scrutolf ("Garb Wolf"), Wolfgang ("Wolf Gait") and Wolfdregil ("Wolf Runner").[7]
+
+Gray wolf
+
+Coyote
+
+African golden wolf
+
+Ethiopian wolf
+
+Golden jackal
+
+Dhole
+
+African wild dog
+
+Side-striped jackal
+
+Black-backed jackal
+
+In 1758, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus published in his Systema Naturae the binomial nomenclature.[3] Canis is the Latin word meaning "dog",[9] and under this genus he listed the doglike carnivores including domestic dogs, wolves, and jackals. He classified the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, and the wolf as Canis lupus.[3] Linnaeus considered the dog to be a separate species from the wolf because of its cauda recurvata—its upturning tail—which is not found in any other canid.[10]
+
+In the third edition of Mammal Species of the World published in 2005, the mammalogist W. Christopher Wozencraft listed under C. lupus 36 wild subspecies, and proposed two additional subspecies: familiaris (Linnaeus, 1758) and dingo (Meyer, 1793). Wozencraft included hallstromi—the New Guinea singing dog—as a taxonomic synonym for the dingo. Wozencraft referred to a 1999 mitochondrial DNA study as one of the guides in forming his decision, and listed the 38 subspecies of C. lupus under the biological common name of "wolf", the nominate subspecies being the Eurasian wolf (C. l. lupus) based on the type specimen that Linnaeus studied in Sweden.[11] Studies using paleogenomic techniques reveal that the modern wolf and the dog are sister taxa, as modern wolves are not closely related to the population of wolves that was first domesticated.[12] In 2019, a workshop hosted by the IUCN/Species Survival Commission's Canid Specialist Group considered the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo to be feral dogs Canis familiaris, and therefore should not be assessed for the IUCN Red List.[13]
+
+The phylogenetic descent of the extant wolf C. lupus from C. etruscus through C. mosbachensis is widely accepted.[14] The earliest fossils of C. lupus were found in what was once eastern Beringia at Old Crow, Yukon, Canada, and at Cripple Creek Sump, Fairbanks, Alaska. The age is not agreed upon but could date to one million years ago. Considerable morphological diversity existed among wolves by the Late Pleistocene. They had more robust skulls and teeth than modern wolves, often with a shortened snout, a pronounced development of the temporalis muscle, and robust premolars. It is proposed that these features were specialized adaptations for the processing of carcass and bone associated with the hunting and scavenging of Pleistocene megafauna. Compared with modern wolves, some Pleistocene wolves showed an increase in tooth breakage similar to that seen in the extinct dire wolf. This suggests they either often processed carcasses, or that they competed with other carnivores and needed to consume their prey quickly. Compared with those found in the modern spotted hyena, the frequency and location of tooth fractures in these wolves indicates they were habitual bone crackers.[15] In June 2019, the severed yet preserved head of a Pleistocene wolf, dated to over 40,000 years ago, was found close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia, Russia, near the Arctic Circle. The head was about 16 in (41 cm) long, much bigger than a modern wolf's head.[16][17][18]
+
+Genomic studies suggest modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population[19][20][21] that existed 20,000 years ago.[19] Studies in 2017 and 2018 found that the Himalayan wolf is part of a lineage that is basal to other wolves and split from them 691,000–740,000 years ago.[22][23] Other wolves appear to have originated in Beringia in an expansion that was driven by the huge ecological changes during the close of the Late Pleistocene.[23] A study in 2016 indicates that a population bottleneck was followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original morphologically diverse wolf populations were out-competed and replaced by more modern wolves.[24]
+
+A 2016 genomic study suggests that Old World and New World wolves split around 12,500 years ago followed by the divergence of the lineage that led to dogs from other Old World wolves around 11,100–12,300 years ago.[21] An extinct Late Pleistocene wolf may have been the ancestor of the dog,[25][15] with the dog's similarity to the extant wolf being the result of genetic admixture between the two.[15] The dingo, Basenji, Tibetan Mastiff and Chinese indigenous breeds are basal members of the domestic dog clade. The divergence time for wolves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is estimated to be fairly recent at around 1,600 years ago. Among New World wolves, the Mexican wolf diverged around 5,400 years ago.[21]
+
+In the distant past, there has been gene flow between African golden wolves, golden jackals, and gray wolves. The African golden wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African golden wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula shows admixture with Middle Eastern wolves and dogs.[26] There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves. This indicates the golden jackal ancestry found in North American wolves may have occurred before the divergence of the Eurasian and North American wolves.[27]
+
+The common ancestor of the coyote and the wolf has admixed with a ghost population of an extinct unidentified canid. This canid is genetically close to the dhole and evolved after the divergence of the African hunting dog from the other canid species. The basal position of the coyote compared to the wolf is proposed to be due to the coyote retaining more of the mitochondrial genome of this unidentified canid.[26] Similarly, a museum specimen of a wolf from southern China collected in 1963 showed a genome that was 12–14% admixed from this unknown canid.[28] In North America, most coyotes and wolves show varying degrees of past genetic admixture. The red wolf of the southeastern United States is a hybrid animal with 40%:60% wolf to coyote ancestry. In addition, there was found to be 60%:40% wolf to coyote genetics in Eastern timber wolves, and 75%:25% in the Great Lakes region wolves.[27]
+
+In more recent times, some male Italian wolves originated from dog ancestry, which indicates female wolves will breed with male dogs in the wild.[29] In the Caucasus Mountains, 10% of dogs including livestock guardian dogs, are first generation hybrids.[30] Although mating between golden jackals and wolves has never been observed, evidence of jackal-wolf hybridization was discovered through mitochondrial DNA analysis of jackals living in the Caucasus Mountains[30] and in Bulgaria.[31]
+
+The wolf is the largest member of the Canidae family,[32] and is further distinguished from coyotes and jackals by a broader snout, shorter ears, a shorter torso and a longer tail.[33][32] It is slender and powerfully built with a large, deeply descending rib cage, a sloping back, and a heavily muscled neck.[34] The wolf's legs are moderately longer than those of other canids, which enables the animal to move swiftly, and to overcome the deep snow that covers most of its geographical range in winter.[35] The ears are relatively small and triangular.[34] The wolf's head is large and heavy, with a wide forehead, strong jaws and a long, blunt muzzle.[36] The skull is 230–280 mm (9–11 in) in length and 130–150 mm (5–6 in) in width.[37] The teeth are heavy and large, making them better suited to crushing bone than those of other canids. They are not as specialized as those found in hyenas though.[38][39] Its molars have a flat chewing surface, but not to the same extent as the coyote, whose diet contains more vegetable matter.[40] Females tend to have narrower muzzles and foreheads, thinner necks, slightly shorter legs, and less massive shoulders than males.[41]
+
+Adult wolves measure 105–160 cm (41–63 in) in length and 80–85 cm (31–33 in) at shoulder height.[36] The tail measures 29–50 cm (11–20 in) in length, the ears 90–110 mm (3 1⁄2–4 3⁄8 in) in height, and the hind feet are 220–250 mm (8 5⁄8–9 7⁄8 in).[42] The size and weight of the modern wolf increases proportionally with latitude in accord with Bergmann's rule.[43] The mean body mass of the wolf is 40 kg (88 lb), the smallest specimen recorded at 12 kg (26 lb) and the largest at 79.4 kg (175 lb).[44][36] On average, European wolves weigh 38.5 kg (85 lb), North American wolves 36 kg (79 lb), and Indian and Arabian wolves 25 kg (55 lb).[45] Females in any given wolf population typically weigh 2.3–4.5 kg (5–10 lb) less than males. Wolves weighing over 54 kg (119 lb) are uncommon, though exceptionally large individuals have been recorded in Alaska and Canada.[46] In middle Russia, exceptionally large males are given a maximum weight of 69–79 kg (152–174 lb).[42]
+
+The wolf has very dense and fluffy winter fur, with a short undercoat and long, coarse guard hairs.[36] Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in spring and grow back in autumn.[45] The longest hairs occur on the back, particularly on the front quarters and neck. Especially long hairs grow on the shoulders and almost form a crest on the upper part of the neck. The hairs on the cheeks are elongated and form tufts. The ears are covered in short hairs and project from the fur. Short, elastic and closely adjacent hairs are present on the limbs from the elbows down to the calcaneal tendons.[36] The winter fur is highly resistant to the cold. Wolves in northern climates can rest comfortably in open areas at −40 °C (−40 °F) by placing their muzzles between the rear legs and covering their faces with their tail. Wolf fur provides better insulation than dog fur and does not collect ice when warm breath is condensed against it.[45]
+
+In cold climates, the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin to conserve body heat. The warmth of the foot pads is regulated independently from the rest of the body and is maintained at just above tissue-freezing point where the pads come in contact with ice and snow.[47] In warm climates, the fur is coarser and scarcer than in northern wolves.[36] Female wolves tend to have smoother furred limbs than males and generally develop the smoothest overall coats as they age. Older wolves generally have more white hairs on the tip of the tail, along the nose, and on the forehead. Winter fur is retained longest by lactating females, although with some hair loss around their teats.[41] Hair length on the middle of the back is 60–70 mm (2 3⁄8–2 3⁄4 in), and the guard hairs on the shoulders generally do not exceed 90 mm (3 1⁄2 in), but can reach 110–130 mm (4 3⁄8–5 1⁄8 in).[36]
+
+A wolf's coat colour is determined by its guard hairs. Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black.[48] The coat of the Eurasian wolf is a mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colours with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. The top of the head, forehead, under and between the eyes, and between the eyes and ears is gray with a reddish film. The neck is ochreous. Long, black tips on the hairs along the back form a broad stripe, with black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest and rear of the body. The sides of the body, tail, and outer limbs are a pale dirty ochreous colour, while the inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white. Apart from those wolves which are pure white or black, these tones vary little across geographical areas, although the patterns of these colours vary between individuals.[49]
+
+In North America, the coat colours of wolves follow Gloger's rule, wolves in the Canadian arctic being white and those in southern Canada, the U.S., and Mexico being predominantly gray. In some areas of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, the coat colour is predominantly black, some being blue-gray and some with silver and black.[48] Differences in coat colour between sexes is absent in Eurasia;[50] females tend to have redder tones in North America.[51] Black-coloured wolves in North America acquired their colour from wolf-dog admixture after the first arrival of dogs that accompanied humans across the Bering Strait 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.[52] Research into the inheritance of white colour from dogs into wolves has yet to be undertaken.[53]
+
+Wolves occurred originally across Eurasia and North America. Deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of what it once was. The wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) in much of Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and in Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains.[2] Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.[40]
+
+Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be divided into large size 240–650 kg (530–1,430 lb) and medium size 23–130 kg (51–287 lb), and have a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members.[54][55] The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey,[40] with a pack of 15 able to bring down an adult moose.[56] The variation in diet between wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey.[57]
+
+In North America, the wolf's diet is dominated by wild large hoofed mammals (ungulates) and medium-sized mammals. In Asia and Europe, their diet is dominated by wild medium-sized hoofed mammals and domestic species. The wolf depends on wild species, and if these are not readily available, as in Asia, the wolf is more reliant on domestic species.[57] Across Eurasia, wolves prey mostly on moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar.[58] In North America, important range-wide prey are elk, moose, caribou, white-tailed deer and mule deer.[59] Wolves can digest their meal in a few hours and can feed several times in one day, making quick use of large quantities of meat.[60] A well-fed wolf stores fat under the skin, around the heart, intestines, kidneys, and bone marrow, particularly during the autumn and winter.[61]
+
+Nonetheless, wolves are not fussy eaters. Smaller-sized animals that may supplement their diet include rodents, hares, insectivores and smaller carnivores. They frequently eat waterfowl and their eggs. When such foods are insufficient, they prey on lizards, snakes, frogs, and large insects when available.[62] Wolves in northern Minnesota prey on northern pike in freshwater streams.[63] The diet of coastal wolves in Alaska includes 20% salmon,[64] while those of coastal wolves in British Columbia includes 25% marine sources, and those on the nearby islands 75%.[65]
+
+In Europe, wolves eat apples, pears, figs, melons, berries and cherries. In North America, wolves eat blueberries and raspberries. Wolves also eat grass, which may provide some vitamins.[66] They are known to eat the berries of mountain-ash, lily of the valley, bilberries, cowberries, European black nightshade, grain crops, and the shoots of reeds.[62]
+
+In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion.[62] In Eurasian areas with dense human activity, many wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage.[58] Prey in North America continue to occupy suitable habitats with low human density, the wolves eating livestock and garbage only in dire circumstances.[67] Cannibalism is not uncommon in wolves during harsh winters, when packs often attack weak or injured wolves and may eat the bodies of dead pack members.[62][68][69]
+
+Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur. In North America, incidents of wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them.[70] According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1921, the infamous Custer Wolf relied on coyotes to accompany him and warn him of danger. Though they fed from his kills, he never allowed them to approach him.[71] Interactions have been observed in Eurasia between wolves and golden jackals, the latter's numbers being comparatively small in areas with high wolf densities.[36][70][72] Wolves also kill red, Arctic and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them.[36][73]
+
+Brown bears typically dominate wolf packs in disputes over carcasses, while wolf packs mostly prevail against bears when defending their den sites. Both species kill each other's young. Wolves eat the brown bears they kill, while brown bears seem to eat only young wolves.[74] Wolf interactions with American black bears are much rarer because of differences in habitat preferences. Wolves have been recorded on numerous occasions actively seeking out American black bears in their dens and killing them without eating them. Unlike brown bears, American black bears frequently lose against wolves in disputes over kills.[75] Wolves also dominate and sometimes kill wolverines, and will chase off those that attempt to scavenge from their kills. Wolverines escape from wolves in caves or up trees.[76]
+
+Wolves may interact and compete with felids, such as the Eurasian lynx, which may feed on smaller prey where wolves are present[77] and may be suppressed by large wolf populations.[78] Wolves encounter cougars along portions of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges. Wolves and cougars typically avoid encountering each other by hunting at different elevations for different prey (niche partitioning). In winter, when snow accumulation forces their prey into valleys, interactions between the two species become more likely. Wolves in packs usually dominate cougars and can steal their kills or even kill them,[79] while one-to-one encounters tend to be dominated by the cat. There are several documented cases of cougars killing wolves.[80] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities and disrupting the feline's behaviour.[81] Wolf and Siberian tiger interactions are well-documented in the Russian Far East, where tigers significantly depress wolf numbers, sometimes to the point of localized extinction. Only human depletion of tiger numbers appears to protect wolves from competitive exclusion from them. With perhaps only four proven records of tigers killing wolves, these cases are rare; attacks appear to be competitive rather than predatory in nature.[82][77]
+
+In Israel, Central Asia and India wolves may encounter striped hyenas, usually in disputes over carcasses. Striped hyenas feed extensively on wolf-killed carcasses in areas where the two species interact. One-to-one, hyenas dominate wolves, and may prey on them,[83] but wolf packs can drive off single or outnumbered hyenas.[84][85] There is at least one case in Israel of a hyena associating and cooperating with a wolf pack. It is proposed that the hyena could benefit from the wolves' superior ability to hunt large, agile prey. The wolves could benefit from the hyena's superior sense of smell, to locate and dig out tortoises, to crack open large bones, and to tear open discarded food containers like tin cans.[86]
+
+
+
+The wolf is a social animal.[36] Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one.[87] The wolf's basic social unit is the nuclear family consisting of a mated pair accompanied by their offspring.[36] The average pack size in North America is eight wolves and in Europe 5.5 wolves.[43] The average pack across Eurasia consists of a family of eight wolves (two adults, juveniles, and yearlings),[36] or sometimes two or three such families,[40] with examples of exceptionally large packs consisting of up to 42 wolves being known.[88] Cortisol levels in wolves rise significantly when a pack member dies, indicating the presence of stress.[89] During times of prey abundance caused by calving or migration, different wolf packs may join together temporarily.[36]
+
+Offspring typically stay in the pack for 10–54 months before dispersing.[90] Triggers for dispersal include the onset of sexual maturity and competition within the pack for food.[91] The distance travelled by dispersing wolves varies widely; some stay in the vicinity of the parental group, while other individuals may travel great distances of upwards of 206 km (128 mi), 390 km (240 mi), and 670 km (420 mi) from their natal (birth) packs.[92] A new pack is usually founded by an unrelated dispersing male and female, travelling together in search of an area devoid of other hostile packs.[93] Wolf packs rarely adopt other wolves into their fold and typically kill them. In the rare cases where other wolves are adopted, the adoptee is almost invariably an immature animal of one to three years old, and unlikely to compete for breeding rights with the mated pair. This usually occurs between the months of February and May. Adoptee males may mate with an available pack female and then form their own pack. In some cases, a lone wolf is adopted into a pack to replace a deceased breeder.[88]
+
+Wolves are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive assuring a steady supply of prey. Territory size depends largely on the amount of prey available and the age of the pack's pups. They tend to increase in size in areas with low prey populations,[94] or when the pups reach the age of six months when they have the same nutritional needs as adults.[95] Wolf packs travel constantly in search of prey, covering roughly 9% of their territory per day, on average 25 km/d (16 mi/d). The core of their territory is on average 35 km2 (14 sq mi) where they spend 50% of their time.[94] Prey density tends to be much higher on the territory's periphery. Except out of desperation, wolves tend to avoid hunting on the fringes of their range to avoid fatal confrontations with neighbouring packs.[96] The smallest territory on record was held by a pack of six wolves in northeastern Minnesota, which occupied an estimated 33 km2 (13 sq mi), while the largest was held by an Alaskan pack of ten wolves encompassing 6,272 km2 (2,422 sq mi).[95] Wolf packs are typically settled, and usually leave their accustomed ranges only during severe food shortages.[36]
+
+Wolves advertise their territories to other packs through howling and scent marking. Scent marking involves urine, feces, and anal gland scents. This is more effective at advertising territory than howling and is often used in combination with scratch marks. Wolves increase their rate of scent marking when they encounter the marks of wolves from other packs. Lone wolves will rarely mark, but newly bonded pairs will scent mark the most.[40] These marks are generally left every 240 m (260 yd) throughout the territory on regular travelways and junctions. Such markers can last for two to three weeks,[95] and are typically placed near rocks, boulders, trees, or the skeletons of large animals.[36] Territorial fights are among the principal causes of wolf mortality, one study concluding that 14–65% of wolf deaths in Minnesota and the Denali National Park and Preserve were due to other wolves.[97]
+
+Wolves communicate to anticipate what their pack mates or other wolves might do next.[98] This includes the use of vocalization, body posture, scent, touch, and taste.[99] The phases of the moon have no effect on wolf vocalization, and despite popular belief, wolves do not howl at the moon.[100] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[101] Wolf howls can under certain conditions be heard over areas of up to 130 km2 (50 sq mi).[40] Other vocalizations include growls, barks and whines. Wolves do not bark as loudly or continuously as dogs do in confrontations, rather barking a few times and then retreating from a perceived danger.[102] Aggressive or self-assertive wolves are characterized by their slow and deliberate movements, high body posture and raised hackles, while submissive ones carry their bodies low, flatten their fur, and lower their ears and tail.[103] Raised leg urination is considered to be one of the most important forms of scent communication in the wolf, making up 60–80% of all scent marks observed.[104]
+
+Wolves are monogamous, mated pairs usually remaining together for life. Should one of the pair die, another mate is found quickly.[105] With wolves in the wild, inbreeding does not occur where outbreeding is possible.[106] Wolves become mature at the age of two years and sexually mature from the age of three years.[105] The age of first breeding in wolves depends largely on environmental factors: when food is plentiful, or when wolf populations are heavily managed, wolves can rear pups at younger ages to better exploit abundant resources. Females are capable of producing pups every year, one litter annually being the average.[107] Oestrus and rut begin in the second half of winter and lasts for two weeks.[105]
+
+Dens are usually constructed for pups during the summer period. When building dens, females make use of natural shelters like fissures in rocks, cliffs overhanging riverbanks and holes thickly covered by vegetation. Sometimes, the den is the appropriated burrow of smaller animals such as foxes, badgers or marmots. An appropriated den is often widened and partly remade. On rare occasions, female wolves dig burrows themselves, which are usually small and short with one to three openings. The den is usually constructed not more than 500 m (550 yd) away from a water source. It typically faces southwards where it can be better warmed by sunlight exposure, and the snow can thaw more quickly. Resting places, play areas for the pups, and food remains are commonly found around wolf dens. The odor of urine and rotting food emanating from the denning area often attracts scavenging birds like magpies and ravens. Though they mostly avoid areas within human sight, wolves have been known to nest near domiciles, paved roads and railways.[108] During pregnancy, female wolves remain in a den located away from the peripheral zone of their territories, where violent encounters with other packs are less likely to occur.[109]
+
+The gestation period lasts 62–75 days with pups usually being born in the spring months or early summer in very cold places such as on the tundra. Young females give birth to four to five young, and older females from six to eight young and up to 14. Their mortality rate is 60–80%.[110] Newborn wolf pups look similar to German Shepherd Dog pups.[111] They are born blind and deaf and are covered in short soft grayish-brown fur. They weigh 300–500 g (10 1⁄2–17 3⁄4 oz) at birth and begin to see after nine to 12 days. The milk canines erupt after one month. Pups first leave the den after three weeks. At one-and-a-half months of age, they are agile enough to flee from danger. Mother wolves do not leave the den for the first few weeks, relying on the fathers to provide food for them and their young. Pups begin to eat solid food at the age of three to four weeks. They have a fast growth rate during their first four months of life: during this period, a pup's weight can increase nearly 30 times.[110][112] Wolf pups begin play-fighting at the age of three weeks, though unlike young coyotes and foxes, their bites are gentle and controlled. Actual fights to establish hierarchy usually occur at five to eight weeks of age. This is in contrast to young coyotes and foxes, which may begin fighting even before the onset of play behaviour.[113] By autumn, the pups are mature enough to accompany the adults on hunts for large prey.[109]
+
+Single wolves or mated pairs typically have higher success rates in hunting than do large packs; single wolves have occasionally been observed to kill large prey such as moose, bison and muskoxen unaided.[114][115] This contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.[115] The size of a wolf hunting pack is related to the number of pups that survived the previous winter, adult survival, and the rate of dispersing wolves leaving the pack. The optimal pack size for hunting elk is four wolves, and for bison a large pack size is more successful.[116]
+
+As well as their physical adaptations for hunting hoofed mammals, wolves possess certain behavioural, cognitive, and psychological adaptations to assist with their hunting lifestyle. Wolves are excellent learners that match or outperform domestic dogs. They can use gaze to focus attention on where other wolves are looking. This is important because wolves do not use vocalization when hunting. In laboratory tests, they appear to exhibit insight, foresight, understanding, and the ability to plan. [117] To survive, wolves must be able to solve two problems—finding a prey animal, then confronting it.[117]
+
+Wolves move around their territory when hunting, using the same trails for extended periods. After snowfalls, wolves find their old trails and continue using them. These follow the banks of rivers, the shorelines of lakes, through ravines overgrown with shrubs, through plantations, or roads and human paths.[118] Wolves are nocturnal predators. During the winter, a pack will commence hunting in the twilight of early evening and will hunt all night, traveling tens of kilometres. Sometimes hunting large prey occurs during the day. During the summer, wolves generally tend to hunt individually, ambushing their prey and rarely giving pursuit.[119]
+
+The wolf usually travels at a loping pace, placing one of its paws directly in front of the other. This gait can be maintained for hours at a rate of 8–9 km/h (5.0–5.6 mph).[120] On bare paths, a wolf can quickly achieve speeds of 50–60 km/h (31–37 mph). The wolf has a running gait of 55–70 km/h (34–43 mph), can leap 5 m (16 ft) horizontally in a single bound, and can maintain rapid pursuit for at least 20 minutes.[92] A wolf's foot is large and flexible, which allows it to tread on a wide variety of terrain. A wolf's legs are long compared to their body size allowing them to travel up to 76 km (47 mi) in 12 hours. This adaptation allows wolves to locate prey within hours, but it can take days to find prey that can be killed without great risk. Moose and deer live singly in the summer. Caribou live in herds of thousands which presents dangers for wolves. Elk live in small herds and these are a safer target.[117]
+
+A wolf carries its head at the same level as its back, lifting it only when alert.[36] In one study, wolves detected moose using scent ten times, vision six times, and once by following tracks in the snow. Their vision is as good as a human's, and they can smell prey at least 2.4 km (1 1⁄2 mi) away. One wolf travelled to a herd 103 km (64 mi) away. A human can detect the smell of a forest fire over the same distance from downwind. The wolf's sense of smell is at least comparable to that of the domestic dog, which is at least 10,000 times more sensitive than a human's.[117]
+
+When hunting large gregarious prey, wolves will try to isolate an individual from its group.[121] If successful, a wolf pack can bring down game that will feed it for days, but one error in judgement can lead to serious injury or death. Most large prey have developed defensive adaptations and behaviours. Wolves have been killed while attempting to bring down bison, elk, moose, muskoxen, and even by one of their smallest hoofed prey, the white-tailed deer.[117] Although people often believe that wolves can easily overcome any of their prey, their success rate in hunting hoofed prey is usually low.[122]
+
+Generally, bison, elk, and moose will stand their ground, then the wolves must struggle with them to bring them down. Often caribou and deer will flee, but sometimes deer also make a stand. With smaller prey like beaver, geese, and hares, there is no risk to the wolf.[117] If the targeted animal stands its ground, wolves either ignore it, or try to intimidate it into running.[114] Wolves, or even a wolf on its own, will attempt to frighten a herd into panicking and dispersing.[123]
+
+When wolves encounter prey that flees, they give chase. The speed of sprinting prey is closely related to the speed of their main predators. Wolves can run at 56–64 km/h (35–40 mph) across several kilometres and will often pursue prey for at least 1 km (1⁄2 mi). One wolf chased a caribou for 8 km (5 mi), another chased and tracked a deer for 20 km (12 mi), and one 11-year-old wolf chased and caught an Arctic hare after seven minutes. Most wolf prey will try to run to water, where they will either escape or be better placed to attempt to ward off the wolves.[117]
+
+The wolf must give chase and gain on its fleeing prey, slow it down by biting through thick hair and hide, and then disable it enough to begin feeding.[117] After chasing and then confronting a large prey animal, the wolf makes use of its 6 cm (2 1⁄2 in) fangs and its powerful masseter muscles to deliver a bite force of 28 kg/cm2 (400 lbf/in2), which is capable of breaking open the skulls of many of its prey animals. The wolf leaps at its quarry and tears at it. One wolf was observed being dragged for dozens of metres attached to the hind leg of a moose; another was seen being dragged over a fallen log while attached to a bull elk's nose.[116]
+
+The most common point of wolf attacks on moose is the upper hind legs.[124][125][126] Hind leg wounds are inflicted from the rear, midway up the hock with the canine teeth. These leave gaping skin perforations over 4 cm (1 1⁄2 in) in diameter. Although blood loss, muscle damage, and tendon exposure may occur, there is no evidence of hamstringing. Attacks also occur on the fleshy nose, the back and sides of the neck, the ears, and the perineum.[126] Wolves may wound large prey and then lie around resting for hours before killing it when it is weaker due to blood loss, thereby lessening the risk of injury to themselves.[127]
+
+With medium-sized prey, such as roe deer or sheep, wolves kill by biting the throat, severing nerve tracks and the carotid artery, thus causing the animal to die within a few seconds to a minute. With small, mouselike prey, wolves leap in a high arc and immobilize it with their forepaws.[128] When prey is vulnerable and abundant, wolves may occasionally surplus kill. Such instances are common with domestic animals, but rare with wild prey. In the wild, surplus killing occurs primarily during late winter or spring, when snow is unusually deep (thus impeding the movements of prey)[129] or during the denning period, when den bound wolves require a ready supply of meat.[130] Medium-sized prey are especially vulnerable to surplus killing, as the swift throat-biting method allows wolves to kill one animal quickly and move on to another.[128]
+
+Once prey is brought down, wolves begin to feed excitedly, ripping and tugging at the carcass in all directions, and bolting down large chunks of it.[131] The breeding pair typically monopolizes food to continue producing pups. When food is scarce, this is done at the expense of other family members, especially non-pups.[132] The breeding pair typically eats first. They usually work the hardest at killing prey, and may rest after a long hunt and allow the rest of the family to eat undisturbed. Once the breeding pair has finished eating, the rest of the family tears off pieces of the carcass and transports them to secluded areas where they can eat in peace. Wolves typically commence feeding by consuming the larger internal organs, like the heart, liver, lungs, and stomach lining. The kidneys and spleen are eaten once they are exposed, followed by the muscles.[133] A wolf can eat 15–19% of its body weight in a single feeding.[61]
+
+Viral diseases carried by wolves include: rabies, canine distemper, canine parvovirus, infectious canine hepatitis, papillomatosis, and canine coronavirus.[134] Wolves are a major host for rabies in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and India.[135] In wolves, the incubation period is eight to 21 days, and results in the host becoming agitated, deserting its pack, and travelling up to 80 km (50 mi) a day, thus increasing the risk of infecting other wolves. Infected wolves do not show any fear of humans, most documented wolf attacks on people being attributed to rabid animals. Although canine distemper is lethal in dogs, it has not been recorded to kill wolves, except in Canada and Alaska. The canine parvovirus, which causes death by dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and endotoxic shock or sepsis, is largely survivable in wolves, but can be lethal to pups. Wolves may catch infectious canine hepatitis from dogs, though there are no records of wolves dying from it. Papillomatosis has been recorded only once in wolves, and likely does not cause serious illness or death, though it may alter feeding behaviours. The canine coronavirus has been recorded in Alaskan wolves, infections being most prevalent in winter months.[134]
+
+Bacterial diseases carried by wolves include: brucellosis, Lyme disease, leptospirosis, tularemia, bovine tuberculosis,[136] listeriosis and anthrax.[135] Wolves can catch Brucella suis from wild and domestic reindeer. While adult wolves tend not to show any clinical signs, it can severely weaken the pups of infected females. Although lyme disease can debilitate individual wolves, it does not appear to significantly affect wolf populations. Leptospirosis can be contracted through contact with infected prey or urine, and can cause fever, anorexia, vomiting, anemia, hematuria, icterus, and death. Wolves living near farms are more vulnerable to the disease than those living in the wilderness, probably because of prolonged contact with infected domestic animal waste. Wolves may catch tularemia from lagomorph prey, though its effect on wolves is unknown. Although bovine tuberculosis is not considered a major threat to wolves, it has been recorded to have killed two wolf pups in Canada.[136]
+
+Wolves carry ectoparasites and endoparasites; those in the former Soviet Union have been recorded to carry at least 50 species.[135] Most of these parasites infect wolves without adverse effects, though the effects may become more serious in sick or malnourished specimens.[137] Parasitic infection in wolves is of particular concern to people. Wolves can spread them to dogs, which in turn can carry the parasites to humans. In areas where wolves inhabit pastoral areas, the parasites can be spread to livestock.[135]
+
+Wolves are often infested with a variety of arthropod exoparasites, including fleas, ticks, lice, and mites. The most harmful to wolves, particularly pups, is the mange mite (Sarcoptes scabiei),[137] though they rarely develop full-blown mange, unlike foxes.[36] Lice, such as Trichodectes canis, may cause sickness in wolves, but rarely death. Ticks of the genus Ixodes can infect wolves with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.[137] The tick Dermacentor pictus also infests wolves. Other ectoparasites include chewing lice, sucking lice and the fleas Pulex irritans and Ctenocephalides canis.[36]
+
+Endoparasites known to infect wolves include: protozoans and helminths (flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and thorny-headed worms). Of 30,000 protozoan species, only a few have been recorded to infect wolves: Isospora, Toxoplasma, Sarcocystis, Babesia, and Giardia.[137] Some wolves carry Neospora caninum, which can be spread to cattle and is correlated with bovine miscarriages.[138] Among flukes, the most common in North American wolves is Alaria, which infects small rodents and amphibians that are eaten by wolves. Upon reaching maturity, Alaria migrates to the wolf's intestine, but does little harm. Metorchis conjunctus, which enters wolves through eating fish, infects the wolf's liver or gall bladder, causing liver disease, inflammation of the pancreas, and emaciation. Most other fluke species reside in the wolf's intestine, though Paragonimus westermani lives in the lungs. Tapeworms are commonly found in wolves, as their primary hosts are ungulates, small mammals, and fish, which wolves feed upon. Tapeworms generally cause little harm in wolves, though this depends on the number and size of the parasites, and the sensitivity of the host. Symptoms often include constipation, toxic and allergic reactions, irritation of the intestinal mucosa, and malnutrition. Infections by the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus in ungulate populations tend to increase in areas with high wolf densities, as wolves can shed Echinoccocus eggs in their feces onto grazing areas.[137]
+
+Wolves can carry over 30 roundworm species, though most roundworm infections appear benign, depending on the number of worms and the age of the host. Ancylostoma caninum attaches itself on the intestinal wall to feed on the host's blood, and can cause hyperchromic anemia, emaciation, diarrhea, and possibly death. Toxocara canis, a hookworm known to infect wolf pups in the uterus, can cause intestinal irritation, bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea. Wolves may catch Dioctophyma renale from minks, which infects the kidneys, and can grow to lengths of 100 cm (40 in). D. renale causes the complete destruction of the kidney's functional tissue and can be fatal if both kidneys are infected. Wolves can tolerate low levels of Dirofilaria immitis for many years without showing any ill effects, though high levels can kill wolves through cardiac enlargement and congestive hepatopathy. Wolves probably become infected with Trichinella spiralis by eating infected ungulates. Although T. spiralis is not known to produce clinical signs in wolves, it can cause emaciation, salivation, and crippling muscle pains in dogs. Thorny-headed worms rarely infect wolves, though three species have been identified in Russian wolves: Nicolla skrjabini, Macrocantorhynchus catulinus, and Moniliformis moniliformis.[137]
+
+The global wild wolf population in 2003 was estimated at 300,000.[139] Wolf population declines have been arrested since the 1970s. This has fostered recolonization and reintroduction in parts of its former range as a result of legal protection, changes in land use, and rural human population shifts to cities. Competition with humans for livestock and game species, concerns over the danger posed by wolves to people, and habitat fragmentation pose a continued threat to the wolf. Despite these threats, the IUCN classifies the wolf as Least Concern on its Red List due to its relatively widespread range and stable population. The species is listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in its Appendix II, indicating that it is not threatened with extinction. However, those wolf populations living in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan are listed in its Appendix I, indicating that these may become extinct without restrictions on their trade.[2]
+
+In Canada, 50,000–60,000 wolves live in 80% of their historical range, making Canada an important stronghold for the species.[40] Under Canadian law, First Nations people can hunt wolves without restrictions, but others must acquire licenses for the hunting and trapping seasons. As many as 4,000 wolves may be harvested in Canada each year.[140] The wolf is a protected species in national parks under the Canada National Parks Act.[141] In Alaska, 7,000–11,000 wolves are found on 85% of the state's 1,517,733 km2 (586,000 sq mi). Wolves may be hunted or trapped with a license; around 1,200 wolves are harvested annually.[142]
+
+In the contiguous United States, wolf declines were caused by the expansion of agriculture, the decimation of the wolf's main prey species like the American bison, and extermination campaigns.[40] Wolves were given protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and have since returned to parts of their former range thanks to both natural recolonizations and reintroductions.[143] Wolf populations in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan number over 4,000 as of 2018.[144] Wolves also occupy much of the northern Rocky Mountains region, with at least 1,704 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as of 2015. They have also established populations in Washington and Oregon.[145] In Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated from 1977 to 1980 in capturing all Mexican wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction and established captive breeding programs for reintroduction.[146] As of 2018, there were 230 Mexican wolves living in Mexico, 64 in Arizona, 67 in New Mexico, and 240 in captive breeding programs in both countries.[147]
+
+Europe, excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, has 17,000 wolves in more than 28 countries.[148] In the European Union, the wolf is strictly protected under the 1979 Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Appendix II) and the 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Annex II and IV). There is extensive legal protection in many European countries, although there are national exceptions and enforcement is variable and often non-existent.[2]
+
+Wolves have been persecuted in Europe for centuries, having been exterminated in Great Britain by 1684, in Ireland by 1770, in Central Europe by 1899, in France by the 1930s, and in much of Scandinavia by the early 1970s. They continued to survive in parts of Finland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.[149] Since 1980, European wolves have rebounded and expanded into parts of their former range. The decline of the traditional pastoral and rural economies seems to have ended the need to exterminate the wolf in parts of Europe.[140] As of 2016, estimates of wolf numbers include: 4,000 in the Balkans, 3,460–3,849 in the Carpathian Mountains, 1,700–2,240 in the Baltic states, 1,100–2,400 in the Italian peninsula, and around 2,500 in the northwest Iberian peninsula as of 2007.[148]
+
+In the former Soviet Union, wolf populations have retained much of their historical range despite Soviet-era large scale extermination campaigns. Their numbers range from 1,500 in Georgia, to 20,000 in Kazakhstan and up to 45,000 in Russia.[150] In Russia, the wolf is regarded as a pest because of its attacks on livestock, and wolf management means controlling their numbers by destroying them throughout the year. Russian history over the past century shows that reduced hunting leads to an abundance of wolves.[151] The Russian government has continued to pay bounties for wolves and annual harvests of 20-30% do not appear to significantly affect their numbers.[152]
+
+During the 19th century, wolves were widespread in many parts of the Holy Land east and west of the Jordan River, but decreased considerably in number between 1964 and 1980, largely due to persecution by farmers.[153] In the Middle East, only Israel and Oman give wolves explicit legal protection.[154] Israel has protected its wolves since 1954 and has maintained a moderately sized population of 150 through effective enforcement of conservation policies. These wolves have moved into neighboring countries. Approximately 300–600 wolves inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.[155] The wolf also appears to be widespread in Iran.[156] Turkey has an estimated population of about 7,000 wolves.[157] Outside of Turkey, wolf populations in the Middle East may total 1,000–2,000.[154]
+
+In southern Asia, the northern regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important strongholds for wolves. The wolf has been protected in India since 1972.[158] Hindus traditionally considered the hunting of wolves, even dangerous ones, as taboo, for fear of causing a bad harvest. The Santals considered them fair game, as they did every other forest-dwelling animal.[159] During British rule in India, wolves were not considered game species, and were killed primarily in response to them attacking game herds, livestock, and people.[160] The Indian wolf is distributed across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.[161] As of 2019, it is estimated that there are around 2,000–3,000 Indian wolves in the country.[162] In East Asia, Mongolia's population numbers 10,000–20,000. In China, Heilongjiang has roughly 650 wolves, Xinjiang has 10,000 and Tibet has 2,000.[163] 2017 evidence suggests that wolves range across all of mainland China.[164] Wolves have been historically persecuted in China[165] but have been legally protected since 1998.[166] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed in 1905.[167]
+
+The wolf is a common motif in the mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout its historical range. The Ancient Greeks associated wolves with Apollo, the god of light and order.[168] The Ancient Romans connected the wolf with their god of war and agriculture Mars,[169] and believed their city's founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf.[170] Norse mythology includes the feared giant wolf Fenrir, eldest child of Loki and the giantess Angrboda,[171] and Geri and Freki, Odin's faithful pets.[172] The wolf was held in high esteem by the Dacians, who viewed it as the lord of all animals and as the only effective defender against evil.[173]
+
+In the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first animal brought to Earth. When humans killed it, they were punished with death, destruction and the loss of immortality.[174] For the Pawnee, Sirius is the "wolf star" and its disappearance and reappearance signified the wolf moving to and from the spirit world. Both the Pawnee and Blackfoot call the Milky Way the "wolf trail".[175] The wolf is also an important totem animal for the Tlingit and Tsimshian.[176] In Chinese astronomy, the wolf represents Sirius as the "blue beast" and the star itself is called the "heavenly wolf".[177] In China, the wolf was traditionally associated with greed and cruelty and wolf epithets were used to describe negative behaviours such as cruelty ("wolf's heart"), mistrust ("wolf's look") and lechery ("wolf-sex").[178]
+
+Tengrism places high importance on the wolf, as it is thought that, when howling, it is praying to Tengri, thus making it the only creature other than man to worship a deity.[179] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the wolf is ridden by gods of protection. In Vedic Hinduism, the wolf is a symbol of the night and the daytime quail must escape from its jaws.[178] In Hindu mythology, Krishna, to convince the people of Vraja to migrate to Vṛndāvana, creates hundreds of wolves from his hairs, which frighten the inhabitants of Vraja into making the journey.[180] In Tantric Buddhism, wolves are depicted as inhabitants of graveyards and destroyers of corpses.[178] In Zoroastrianism, the wolf has been demonized as the creation of Ahriman.[181]
+
+The concept of people turning into wolves has been present in many cultures. One Greek myth tells of Lycaon of Arcadia being transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his evil deeds.[182] The legend of the werewolf has been widespread in European folklore and involves people willingly turning into wolves to attack and kill others.[183] The Navajo have traditionally believed that witches would turn into wolves by donning wolf skins and would kill people and raid graveyards.[184] The Dena'ina believed wolves were once men and viewed them as brothers.[168] Similarly, in Turkic mythology wolves were believed to be the ancestors of their people.[185]
+
+Aesop featured wolves in several of his fables, playing on the concerns of Ancient Greece's settled, sheep-herding world. His most famous is the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which is directed at those who knowingly raise false alarms, and from which the idiomatic phrase "to cry wolf" is derived. Some of his other fables concentrate on maintaining the trust between shepherds and guard dogs in their vigilance against wolves, as well as anxieties over the close relationship between wolves and dogs. Although Aesop used wolves to warn, criticize and moralize about human behaviour, his portrayals added to the wolf's image as a deceitful and dangerous animal.[186] The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have used wolves as illustrations of the dangers his followers, whom he represents as sheep, would face should they follow him.(Matthew 7:15, Matthew 10:16 and Acts 20:29).[187] In the Jataka tales the wolf is portrayed as a trickster, including one story in which it makes a hunter stop playing dead by pulling on his club.[188] In another story, the wolf tricks and eats some rats by pretending to be lame but is foiled by the chief rat.[189]
+
+Isengrim the wolf, a character first appearing in the 12th-century Latin poem Ysengrimus, is a major character in the Reynard Cycle, where he stands for the low nobility, whilst his adversary, Reynard the fox, represents the peasant hero. Isengrim is forever the victim of Reynard's wit and cruelty, often dying at the end of each story.[190] The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood", first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, is considered to have further contributed to the wolf's negative reputation in the Western world. The Big Bad Wolf is portrayed as a villain capable of imitating human speech and disguising itself with human clothing. The character has been interpreted as an allegorical sexual predator.[191] Villainous wolf characters also appear in The Three Little Pigs and "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats".[192] The hunting of wolves, and their attacks on humans and livestock, feature prominently in Russian literature, and are included in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev, and others. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chekhov's Peasants both feature scenes in which wolves are hunted with hounds and Borzois.[193] The musical Peter and the Wolf involves a wolf being captured for eating a farm duck, but is spared and sent to a zoo.[194]
+
+Wolves are among the central characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. His portrayal of wolves has been praised posthumously by wolf biologists for his depiction of them: rather than being villainous or gluttonous, as was common in wolf portrayals at the time of the book's publication, they are shown as living in amiable family groups and drawing on the experience of infirm but experienced elder pack members.[195] Farley Mowat's largely fictional 1963 memoir Never Cry Wolf is widely considered to be the most popular book on wolves, having been adapted into a Hollywood film and taught in several schools decades after its publication. Although credited with having changed popular perceptions on wolves by portraying them as loving, cooperative and noble, it has been criticized for its idealization of wolves and its factual inaccuracies.[196][197][198] Lü Jiamin's 2004 semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem uses wolves as symbols of freedom and independence. He associates the Mongolian nomads with wolves and compares the Han Chinese of the present day to sheep, claiming they accept any leadership. As such, the novel has caused controversy with the Chinese Communist Party.[199][200]
+
+The wolf is a frequent charge in English heraldry. It is illustrated as a supporter on the shields of Lord Welby, Rendel, and Viscount Wolseley, and can be found on the coat of arms of Lovett and the vast majority of the Wilsons and Lows. The demi-wolf is a common crest, appearing in the arms and crests of members of many families, including that of the Wolfes, whose crest depicts a demi-wolf holding a crown in its paws, in reference to the assistance the family gave to Charles II during the Battle of Worcester. Wolf heads are common in Scottish heraldry, particularly in the coats of Clan Robertson and Skene. The wolf is the most common animal in Spanish heraldry and is often depicted as carrying a lamb in its mouth, or across its back.[201]
+
+The wolf is featured on the flags of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Pawnee.[202] The Chechen wolf has been a symbol of the Chechen Nation.[203] In modern times, the wolf is widely used as an emblem for military and paramilitary groups. It is the unofficial symbol of the spetsnaz, and serves as the logo of the Turkish Gray Wolves. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Serb paramilitary units adopted the wolf as their symbol, including the White Wolves and the Wolves of Vučjak.[204]
+
+Human presence appears to stress wolves, as seen by increased cortisol levels in instances such as snowmobiling near their territory.[205]
+
+Livestock depredation has been one of the primary reasons for hunting wolves and can pose a severe problem for wolf conservation. As well as causing economic losses, the threat of wolf predation causes great stress on livestock producers, and no foolproof solution of preventing such attacks short of exterminating wolves has been found.[206] Some nations help offset economic losses to wolves through compensation programs or state insurance.[207] Domesticated animals are easy prey for wolves, as they have been bred under constant human protection, and are thus unable to defend themselves very well.[208] Wolves typically resort to attacking livestock when wild prey is depleted. In Eurasia, a large part of the diet of some wolf populations consists of livestock, while such incidents are rare in North America, where healthy populations of wild prey have been largely restored.[206]
+
+The majority of losses occur during the summer grazing period, untended livestock in remote pastures being the most vulnerable to wolf predation.[209] The most frequently targeted livestock species are sheep (Europe), domestic reindeer (northern Scandinavia), goats (India), horses (Mongolia), cattle and turkeys (North America).[206] The number of animals killed in single attacks varies according to species: most attacks on cattle and horses result in one death, while turkeys, sheep and domestic reindeer may be killed in surplus.[210] Wolves mainly attack livestock when the animals are grazing, though they occasionally break into fenced enclosures.[211]
+
+A review of the studies on the competitive effects of dogs on sympatric carnivores did not mention any research on competition between dogs and wolves.[212][213] Competition would favour the wolf, which is known to kill dogs; however wolves usually live in pairs or in small packs in areas with high human persecution, giving them a disadvantage facing large groups of dogs.[213][214]
+
+Wolves kill dogs on occasion, and some wolf populations rely on dogs as an important food source. In Croatia, wolves kill more dogs than sheep, and wolves in Russia appear to limit stray dog populations. Wolves may display unusually bold behaviour when attacking dogs accompanied by people, sometimes ignoring nearby humans. Wolf attacks on dogs may occur both in house yards and in forests. Wolf attacks on hunting dogs are considered a major problem in Scandinavia and Wisconsin.[206][215] The most frequently killed hunting breeds in Scandinavia are Harriers, older animals being most at risk, likely because they are less timid than younger animals, and react to the presence of wolves differently. Large hunting dogs such as Swedish Elkhounds are more likely to survive wolf attacks because of their better ability to defend themselves.[215]
+
+Although the number of dogs killed each year by wolves is relatively low, it induces a fear of wolves' entering villages and farmyards to prey on them. In many cultures, dogs are seen as family members, or at least working team members, and losing one can lead to strong emotional responses such as demanding more liberal hunting regulations.[213]
+
+Dogs that are employed to guard sheep help to mitigate human–wolf conflicts, and are often proposed as one of the non-lethal tools in the conservation of wolves.[213][216] Shepherd dogs are not particularly aggressive, but they can disrupt potential wolf predation by displaying what is to the wolf ambiguous behaviours, such as barking, social greeting, invitation to play or aggression. The historical use of shepherd dogs across Eurasia has been effective against wolf predation,[213][217] especially when confining sheep in the presence of several livestock guardian dogs.[213][218] Shepherd dogs are sometimes killed by wolves.[213]
+
+The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey.[219] How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people.[220] Although wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed.[219]
+
+Predatory attacks may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase.[219] Cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.[36] The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women.[219] Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the summer period in the evening hours, and often within human settlements.[221]
+
+Cases of rabid wolves are low when compared to other species, as wolves do not serve as primary reservoirs of the disease, but can be infected by animals such as dogs, jackals and foxes. Incidents of rabies in wolves are very rare in North America, though numerous in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. Wolves apparently develop the "furious" phase of rabies to a very high degree. This, coupled with their size and strength, makes rabid wolves perhaps the most dangerous of rabid animals.[219] Bites from rabid wolves are 15 times more dangerous than those of rabid dogs.[222] Rabid wolves usually act alone, travelling large distances and often biting large numbers of people and domestic animals. Most rabid wolf attacks occur in the spring and autumn periods. Unlike with predatory attacks, the victims of rabid wolves are not eaten, and the attacks generally occur only on a single day. The victims are chosen at random, though most cases involve adult men. During the fifty years up to 2002, there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, and more than two hundred in southern Asia.[219]
+
+Theodore Roosevelt said wolves are difficult to hunt because of their elusiveness, sharp senses, high endurance, and ability to quickly incapacitate and kill a dog.[223] Historic methods included killing of spring-born litters in their dens, coursing with dogs (usually combinations of sighthounds, Bloodhounds and Fox Terriers), poisoning with strychnine, and trapping.[224][225]
+
+A popular method of wolf hunting in Russia involves trapping a pack within a small area by encircling it with fladry poles carrying a human scent. This method relies heavily on the wolf's fear of human scents, though it can lose its effectiveness when wolves become accustomed to the odor. Some hunters can lure wolves by imitating their calls. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, wolves are traditionally hunted with eagles and falcons, though this practice is declining, as experienced falconers are becoming few in number. Shooting wolves from aircraft is highly effective, due to increased visibility and direct lines of fire.[225] Several types of dog, including the Borzoi and Kyrgyz Tajgan, have been specifically bred for wolf hunting.[213]
+
+Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids are sometimes kept as exotic pets. Although closely related to domestic dogs, wolves do not show the same tractability as dogs in living alongside humans, being generally less responsive to human commands and more likely to act aggressively. A person is more likely to be fatally mauled by a pet wolf or wolf-dog hybrid than by a dog.[226]
+

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+The Baroque (UK: /bəˈrɒk/, US: /bəˈroʊk/; French: [baʁɔk]) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1740s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including the Iberian Peninsula it continued, together with new styles, until the first decade of the 1800s.  It followed Renaissance art and Mannerism and preceded the Rococo (in the past often referred to as "late Baroque") and Neoclassical styles. It was encouraged by the Catholic Church as a means to counter the simplicity and austerity of Protestant architecture, art and music, though Lutheran Baroque art developed in parts of Europe as well.[1]
+
+The Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep colour, grandeur and surprise to achieve a sense of awe. The style began at the start of the 17th century in Rome, then spread rapidly to France, northern Italy, Spain and Portugal, then to Austria, southern Germany and Russia. By the 1730s, it had evolved into an even more flamboyant style, called rocaille or Rococo, which appeared in France and Central Europe until the mid to late 18th century.
+
+In the decorative arts there is an excess of ornamentation. The departure from Renaissance classicism has its own ways in each country. But a general feature is that everywhere the starting point is the ornamental elements introduced by the Renaissance. The classical repertoire is crowded, dense, overlapping, loaded, in order to provoke shock effects. New motifs introduced by Baroque are: the cartouche, trophies and weapons, baskets of fruit or flowers, and others, made in marquetry, stucco, or carved.[2]
+
+The English word baroque comes directly from the  French (as the modern standard English-language spelling might suggest). Some scholars state that the French word originated from the Portuguese term barroco ("a flawed pearl"), pointing to[clarification needed] the Latin verruca,[3] ("wart"), or to a word with the suffix  -ǒccu (common in pre-Roman Iberia).[4][5][6] Other sources suggest a Medieval Latin term used in logic, baroco, as the most likely source.[7]
+
+In the 16th century, the Medieval Latin word baroco moved beyond scholastic logic and came into use to characterise anything that seemed absurdly complex. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) associated the term baroco with "Bizarre and uselessly complicated."[8]  Other early sources associate baroco with magic, complexity, confusion, and excess.[7]
+
+The word baroque was also associated with irregular pearls before the 18th century. The French baroque and Portuguese barroco were terms often associated with jewelry. An example from 1531 uses the term to describe pearls in an inventory of Charles V of France's[clarification needed] treasures.[9] Later, the word appears in a 1694 edition of Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, which describes baroque as "only used for pearls that are imperfectly round."[10] A 1728 Portuguese dictionary similarly describes barroco as relating to a "coarse and uneven pearl".[11]
+
+An alternative derivation of the word baroque points to the name of the Italian painter Federico Barocci (1528–1612).[12]
+
+In the 18th century the term began to be used to describe music, and not in a flattering way.  In an anonymous satirical review of the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in October 1733, which was printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734, the critic wrote that the novelty in this opera was "du barocque", complaining that the music lacked coherent melody, was unsparing with dissonances, constantly changed key and meter, and speedily ran through every compositional device.[13]
+
+In 1762 Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française recorded that the term could figuratively describe something "irregular, bizarre or unequal".[14]
+
+Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician and composer as well as a philosopher,  wrote in 1768 in the Encyclopédie:  "Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited. It appears that term comes from the word 'baroco' used by logicians."[8][15]
+
+In 1788 Quatremère de Quincy defined the term in the Encyclopédie Méthodique as "an architectural style that is highly adorned and tormented".[16]
+
+The French terms style baroque and musique baroque appeared in Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française in 1835.[17] By the mid-19th century, art critics and historians had adopted the term "baroque" as a way to ridicule post-Renaissance art. This was the sense of the word as used in 1855 by the leading art historian Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote that baroque artists "despised and abused detail" because they lacked "respect for tradition".[18]
+
+In 1888 the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin published the first serious academic work on the style, Renaissance und Barock, which described the differences between the painting, sculpture, and architecture of the Renaissance and the Baroque.[19]
+
+The Baroque style of architecture was a result of doctrines adopted by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1545–63, in response to the Protestant Reformation. The first phase of the Counter-Reformation had imposed a severe, academic style on religious architecture, which had appealed to intellectuals but not the mass of churchgoers.  The Council of Trent decided instead to appeal to a more popular audience, and declared that the arts should communicate religious themes with direct and emotional involvement.[21][22] Lutheran Baroque art developed as a confessional marker of identity, in response to the Great Iconoclasm of Calvinists.[23]
+
+Baroque churches were designed with a large central space, where the worshippers could be close to the altar, with a dome or cupola high overhead, allowing light to illuminate the church below. The dome was one of the central symbolic features of Baroque architecture illustrating the union between the heavens and the earth, The inside of the cupola was lavishly decorated with paintings of angels and saints, and with stucco statuettes of angels, giving the impression to those below of looking up at heaven.[24]
+Another feature of Baroque churches are the quadratura; trompe-l'œil paintings on the ceiling in stucco frames, either real or painted, crowded with paintings of saints and angels and connected by architectural details with the balustrades and consoles. Quadratura paintings of Atlantes below the cornices appear to be supporting the ceiling of the church.  Unlike the painted ceilings of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, which combined different scenes, each with its own perspective,  to be looked at one at a time, the Baroque ceiling paintings were carefully created so the viewer on the floor of the church would see the entire ceiling in correct perspective, as if the figures were real.
+
+The interiors of Baroque churches became more and more ornate in the High Baroque,  and focused around the altar, usually placed under the dome.  The most celebrated baroque decorative works of the High Baroque are the Chair of Saint Peter (1647–53) and the Baldachino of St. Peter (1623–34), both by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The Baldequin of St. Peter is an example of the balance of opposites in Baroque art; the gigantic proportions of the piece, with the apparent lightness of the canopy; and the contrast between the solid twisted columns, bronze, gold and marble of the piece with the flowing draperies of the angels on the canopy.[25] The Dresden Frauenkirche serves as a prominent example of Lutheran Baroque art, which was completed in 1743 after being commissioned by the Lutheran city council of Dresden and was "compared by eighteenth-century observers to St Peter’s in Rome".[1]
+
+The twisted column in the interior of churches is one of the signature features of the Baroque. It gives both a sense of motion and also a dramatic new way of reflecting light.
+The cartouche was another characteristic feature of Baroque decoration.  These were large plaques carved of marble or stone, usually oval and with a rounded surface, which carried images or text in gilded letters, and were placed as interior decoration or above the doorways of buildings, delivering messages to those below. They showed a wide variety of invention, and were found in all types of buildings, from cathedrals and palaces to small chapels.[26]
+
+Baroque architects sometimes used forced perspective to create illusions.  For the Palazzo Spada in Rome, Borromini used columns of diminishing size, a narrowing floor and a miniature statue in the garden beyond to create the illusion that a passageway was thirty meters long, when it was actually only seven meters long. A statue at the end of the passage appears to be life-size, though it is only sixty centimeters high. Borromini designed the illusion with the assistance of a mathematician.
+
+The first building in Rome to have a Baroque facade was the Church of the Gesù in 1584; it was plain by later Baroque standards, but marked a break with the traditional Renaissance facades that preceded it. The interior of this church remained very austere until the high Baroque, when it was lavishly ornamented.
+
+In Rome in 1605, Paul V became the first of series of popes who commissioned basilicas and church buildings designed to inspire emotion and awe through a proliferation of forms, and a richness of colours and dramatic effects.[27] Among the most influential monuments of the Early Baroque were the facade of St. Peter's Basilica (1606–1619), and the new nave and loggia which connected the facade to Michelangelo's dome in the earlier church. The new design created a dramatic contrast between the soaring dome and the disproportionately wide facade, and the contrast on the facade itself between the Doric columns and the great mass of the portico.[28]
+
+In the mid to late 17th century the style reached its peak, later termed the High Baroque. Many monumental works were commissioned by Popes Urban VIII and Alexander VII. The sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed a new quadruple colonnade around St. Peter's Square (1656 to 1667). The three galleries of columns in a giant ellipse balance the oversize dome and give the Church and square a unity and the feeling of a giant theatre.[29]
+
+Another major innovator of the Italian High Baroque was Francesco Borromini, whose major work was the Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane or Saint Charles of the Four Fountains (1634–46).  The sense of movement is given not by the decoration, but by the walls themselves, which undulate and by concave and convex elements, including an oval tower and balcony inserted into a concave traverse. The interior was equally revolutionary; the main space of the church was oval, beneath an oval dome.[29]
+
+Painted ceilings, crowded with angels and saints and trompe-l'œil architectural effects, were an important feature of the Italian High Baroque. Major works included The Entry of Saint Ignace into Paradise by Andrea Pozzo (1685–1695) in the Church of Saint Ignatius in Rome, and The triumph of the name of Jesus by Giovanni Battista Gaulli in the Church of the Gesù in Rome (1669–1683), which featured figures spilling out of the picture frame and dramatic oblique lighting and light-dark contrasts.[30]
+The style spread quickly from Rome to other regions of Italy:  It appeared in Venice in the church of Santa Maria della Salute (1631–1687) by Baldassare Longhena, a highly original octagonal form crowned with an enormous cupola.  It appeared also in Turin, notably in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud  (1668–1694) by Guarino Guarini. The style also began to be used in palaces;  Guarini designed the Palazzo Carignano in Turin, while Longhena designed the Ca' Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, (1657), finished by Giorgio Massari with decorated with paintings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.[31]  A series of massive earthquakes in Sicily required the rebuilding of most of them and several were built in the exuberant late Baroque or Rococo style.
+
+Façade of the Church of the Gesù from Rome (1584)
+
+Ceiling of the Church of the Gesù (1674–1679)
+
+The Ca Rezzonico from Venice (1649–1656)
+
+Cartouches decorating courtyard of the Palazzo Spada from Rome, by Francesco Borromini (1632)
+
+Gallery with forced perspective, by Francesco Borromini, which creates the illusion that the corridor is much longer than it really is, in the Palazzo Spada (1632)
+
+The Chair of Saint Peter by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in the St. Peter's Basilica from Rome (1657–1666)
+
+The Catholic Church in Spain, and particularly the Jesuits, were the driving force of Spanish Baroque architecture.  The first major work in the style was the San Isidro Chapel in Madrid, begun in 1643 by Pedro de la Torre.  It contrasted an extreme richness of ornament on the exterior with simplicity in the interior, divided into multiple spaces and using effects of light to create a sense of mystery.[32]  The Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela was modernized with a series of Baroque additions beginning at the end of the 17th century, starting with a highly ornate bell tower (1680), then flanked by two even taller and more ornate towers, called the Obradorio, added between 1738 and 1750 by Fernando de Casas Novoa. Another landmark of the Spanish Baroque is the chapel tower of the Palace of San Telmo in Seville by Leonardo de Figueroa.[33]
+
+Granada had only been liberated from the Moors in the 15th century, and had its own distinct variety of Baroque.  The painter, sculptor and architect Alonso Cano designed the Baroque interior of Granada Cathedral between 1652 and his death in 1657.  It features dramatic contrasts of the massive white columns and gold decor.
+
+The most ornamental and lavishly decorated architecture of the Spanish Baroque is called Churrigueresque style, named after the brothers Churriguera, who worked primarily in Salamanca and Madrid. Their works include the buildings on the city's main square, the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca (1729).[33] This highly ornamental Baroque style was very influential in many churches and cathedrals built by the Spanish in the Americas.
+
+Other notable Spanish baroque architects of the late Baroque include Pedro de Ribera, a pupil of Churriguera, who designed the Royal Hospice of San Fernando in Madrid, and Narciso Tomé, who designed the celebrated El Transparente altarpiece at Toledo Cathedral (1729–32) which gives the illusion, in certain light, of floating upwards.[33]
+
+The architects of the Spanish Baroque had an effect far beyond Spain;  their work was highly influential in the churches built in the Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Philippines. The Church built by the Jesuits for a college in Tepotzotlán, with its ornate Baroque facade and tower, is a good example.[34]
+
+The Granada Cathedral (1652–1657)
+
+Altarpiece of Convento de San Esteban, from Salamanca (1690)
+
+The Plaza Mayor from Salamanca (1729)
+
+Hospice of San Fernando from Madrid (1750)
+
+From 1680 to 1750, many highly ornate cathedrals, abbeys, and pilgrimage churches were built in Central Europe, in Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia and southwestern Poland. Some were in Rococo style, a distinct, more flamboyant and asymmetric style which emerged from the Baroque, then replaced it in Central Europe in the first half of the 18th century, until it was replaced in turn by classicism.[35]
+
+The princes of the multitude of states in that region also chose Baroque or Rococo for their palaces and residences, and often used Italian-trained architects to construct them.[36]  Notable architects included Johann Fischer von Erlach, Lukas von Hildebrandt and Dominikus Zimmermann in Bavaria, Balthasar Neumann in Bruhl, and Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann in Dresden. In Prussia, Frederic II of Prussia was inspired the Grand Trianon of the Palace of Versailles, and used it as the model for his summer residence, Sanssouci, in Potsdam, designed for him by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff (1745–1747). Another work of Baroque palace architecture is the Zwinger in Dresden, the former orangerie of the palace of the Dukes of Saxony in the 18th century.
+
+One of the best examples of a rococo church is the Basilika Vierzehnheiligen, or Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a pilgrimage church located near the town of Bad Staffelstein near Bamberg, in Bavaria, southern Germany. The Basilica was designed by Balthasar Neumann and was constructed between 1743 and 1772, its plan a series of interlocking circles around a central oval with the altar placed in the exact centre of the church. The interior of this church illustrates the summit of Rococo decoration.[37]
+Another notable example of the style is the Pilgrimage Church of Wies (German: Wieskirche). It was designed by the brothers J. B. and Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps, in the municipality of Steingaden in the Weilheim-Schongau district, Bavaria, Germany. Construction took place between 1745 and 1754, and the interior was decorated with frescoes and with stuccowork in the tradition of the Wessobrunner School. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
+
+Another notable example is the St. Nicholas Church (Malá Strana) in Prague (1704–55), built by Christoph Dientzenhofer and his son Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer. Decoration covers all of walls of interior of the church. The altar is placed in the nave beneath the central dome, and surrounded by chapels,  Light comes down from the dome above and from the surrounding chapels. The altar is entirely surrounded by arches, columns, curved balustrades and pilasters of coloured stone, which are richly decorated with statuary, creating a deliberate confusion between the real architecture and the decoration.  The architecture is transformed into a theatre of light, colour and movement.[25]
+
+In Poland, the Italian-inspired Polish Baroque lasted from the early 17th to the mid-18th century and emphasised richness of detail and colour. The first Baroque building in present-day Poland and probably one of the most recognizable is the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Kraków, designed by Giovanni Battista Trevano. Sigismund's Column in Warsaw, erected in 1644, was the world's first secular Baroque monument built in the form of a column.[38] The palatial residence style was exemplified by the Wilanów Palace, constructed between 1677 and 1696.[39] The most renowned Baroque architect active in Poland was Dutchman Tylman van Gameren and his notable works include Warsaw's St. Kazimierz Church and Krasiński Palace, St. Anne's in Kraków and Branicki Palace in Bialystok.[40] However, the most celebrated work of Polish Baroque is the Fara Church in Poznań, with details by Pompeo Ferrari.
+
+The Fara Church from Poznań (Poland) (1651–1701)
+
+Remnant of Zwinger Palace in Dresden (1710–1728)
+
+Ceiling of Ottobeuren Abbey, in Bavaria (1711–1725)
+
+Library of the Clementinum, the Jesuit university from Prague (1722)
+
+Karlskirche (Vienna), by Fischer von Erlach (consecrated 1737)
+
+The Vierzehnheigen Basilica from Bavaria, by Balthasar Neumann (1743–1772)
+
+Sanssouci, in Potsdam, by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff (1745–1747)
+
+The East façade of the Würzburg Residence from Würzburg (Germany)
+
+France largely resisted the ornate Baroque style of Italy, Spain, Vienna and the rest of Europe. The French Baroque style (often termed Grand Classicism or simply Classicism  in France) is closely associated with the works built for Louis XIV and Louis XV; it features more geometric order and measure than Baroque, and less elaborate decoration on the facades and in the interiors.  Louis XIV invited the master of Baroque, Bernini, to submit a design for the new wing of the Louvre, but rejected it in favor of a more classical design by Claude Perrault and Louis Le Vau.[41]
+
+The principal architects of the style included François Mansart (Chateau de Balleroy, 1626–1636), Pierre Le Muet (Church of Val-de-Grace, 1645–1665), Louis Le Vau (Vaux-le-Vicomte, 1657–1661) and especially Jules Hardouin Mansart and Robert de Cotte, whose work included the Galerie des Glaces and the Grand Trianon at Versailles (1687–1688). Mansart was also responsible for the Baroque classicism of the Place Vendôme (1686–1699).[42]
+
+The major royal project of the period was the expansion of Palace of Versailles, begun in 1661 by Le Vau with decoration by the painter Charles Le Brun. The gardens were designed by André Le Nôtre specifically to complement and amplify the architecture. The Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors), the centerpiece of the château, with paintings by Le Brun, was constructed between 1678 and 1686. Mansart completed the Grand Trianon in 1687. The chapel, designed by de Cotte, was finished in 1710. Following the death of Louis XIV, Louis XV added the more intimate Petit Trianon and the highly ornate theatre. The fountains in the gardens were designed to be seen from the interior, and to add to the dramatic effect. The palace was admired and copied by other monarchs of Europe, particularly Peter the Great of Russia, who visited Versailles early in the reign of Louis XV, and built his own version at Peterhof Palace near Saint Petersburg, between 1705 and 1725.[43]
+
+The Church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, the first Paris church with a façade in the new Baroque style (1616–20)
+
+The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte from Maincy (1657–1661)
+
+East facade of the Louvre, by Claude Perrault and Louis Le Vau (1668–1680)
+
+Hall of Mirrors in the Versailles Palace (1678–1686)
+
+The Dôme des Invalides, part of the Les Invalides (Paris)
+
+Place des Victoires (1684–1697), by Jules Hardouin-Mansart
+
+Baroque architecture in Portugal lasted about two centuries (the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century). 
+The reigns of John V and Joseph I had increased imports of gold and diamonds, in a period called Royal Absolutism, which allowed the Portuguese Baroque to flourish.
+
+Baroque architecture in Portugal enjoys a special situation and different timeline from the rest of Europe.
+
+It is conditioned by several political, artistic and economic factors, that originate several phases, and different kinds of outside influences, resulting in a unique blend,[44] often misunderstood by those looking for Italian art, find instead specific forms and character which give it a uniquely Portuguese variety.
+Another key factor is the existence of the Jesuitical architecture, also called "plain style" (Estilo Chão or Estilo Plano)[45] which like the name evokes, is plainer and appears somewhat austere.
+
+The buildings are single-room basilicas, deep main chapel, lateral chapels (with small doors for communication), without interior and exterior decoration, very simple portal and windows. 
+It is a very practical building, allowing it to be built throughout the empire with minor adjustments, and prepared to be decorated later or when economic resources are available.
+
+In fact, the first Portuguese Baroque does not lack in building because "plain style" is easy to be transformed, by means of decoration (painting, tiling, etc.), turning empty areas into pompous, elaborate baroque scenarios. The same could be applied to the exterior. 
+Subsequently, it is easy to adapt the building to the taste of the time and place and add on new features and details. Practical and economical.
+
+With more inhabitants and better economic resources, the north, particularly the areas of Porto and Braga,[46][47][48] witnessed an architectural renewal, visible in the large list of churches, convents and palaces built by the aristocracy.
+
+Porto is the city of Baroque in Portugal. Its historical centre is part of UNESCO World Heritage List.[49]
+
+Many of the Baroque works in the historical area of the city and beyond, belong to Nicolau Nasoni an Italian architect living in Portugal, drawing original buildings with scenographic emplacement such as the church and tower of Clérigos,[50] the logia of the Porto Cathedral, the church of Misericórdia, the Palace of São João Novo,[51] the Palace of Freixo,[52] the Episcopal Palace (Portuguese: Paço Episcopal do Porto)[53] along with many others.
+
+The debut of Russian Baroque, or Petrine Baroque, followed a long visit of Peter the Great to western Europe in 1697–98, where he visited the Chateaux of Fontainebleu and the Versailles as well as other architectural monuments. He decided, on his return to Russia, to construct similar monuments in St. Petersburg, which became the new capital of Russia in 1712. Early major monuments in the Petrine Baroque include the Peter and Paul Cathedral and Menshikov Palace.
+
+During the reign of Empress Anna and Elizaveta Petrovna, Russian architecture was dominated by the luxurious Baroque style of Italian-born Bartolomeo Rastrelli, which developed into Elizabethan Baroque. Rastrelli's signature buildings include the Winter Palace, the Catherine Palace and the Smolny Cathedral. Other distinctive monuments of the Elizabethan Baroque are the bell tower of the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra and the Red Gate.[54]
+
+In Moscow, Naryshkin Baroque became widespread, especially in the architecture of Eastern Orthodox churches in the late 17th century. It was a combination of western European Baroque with traditional Russian folk styles.
+
+Due to the colonization of the Americas by European countries, the Baroque naturally moved to the New World, finding especially favorable ground in the regions dominated by Spain and Portugal, both countries being centralized and irreducibly Catholic monarchies, by extension subject to Rome and adherents of the Baroque Counter-reformist most typical. European artists migrated to America and made school, and along with the widespread penetration of Catholic missionaries, many of whom were skilled artists, created a multiform Baroque often influenced by popular taste. The Criollo and Indidenous craftsmen did much to give this Baroque unique features. The main centres of American Baroque cultivation, that are still standing, are (in this order) Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Cuba, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Puerto Rico.
+
+Of particular note is the so-called "Missionary Baroque", developed in the framework of the Spanish reductions in areas extending from Mexico and southwestern portions of current-day United States to as far south as Argentina and Chile, indigenous settlements organized by Spanish Catholic missionaries in order to convert them to the Christian faith and acculturate them in the Western life, forming a hybrid Baroque influenced by Native culture, where flourished Criollos and many Indian artisans and musicians, even literate, some of great ability and talent of their own. Missionaries' accounts often repeat that Western art, especially music, had a hypnotic impact on foresters, and the images of saints were viewed as having great powers. Many Indians were converted, and a new form of devotion was created, of passionate intensity, laden with mysticism, superstition, and theatricality, which delighted in festive masses, sacred concerts, and mysteries.[56][57]
+
+The Colonial Baroque architecture in the Spanish America is characterized by a profuse decoration (portal of La Profesa Church, Mexico City; facades covered with Puebla-style azulejos, as in the Church of San Francisco Acatepec in San Andrés Cholula and Convent Church of San Francisco of Puebla), which will be exacerbated in the so-called Churrigueresque style (Facade of the Tabernacle of the Mexico City Cathedral, by Lorenzo Rodríguez; Church of San Francisco Javier, Tepotzotlán; Church of Santa Prisca of Taxco). In Peru, the constructions mostly developed in the cities of Lima, Cusco, Arequipa and Trujillo since 1650 show original characteristics that are advanced even to the European Baroque, as in the use of cushioned walls and solomonic columns (Church of la Compañía de Jesús, Cusco; Basilica and Convent of San Francisco, Lima).[58] Other countries include: the Metropolitan Cathedral of Sucre in Bolivia; Cathedral Basilica of Esquipulas in Guatemala; Tegucigalpa Cathedral in Honduras; León Cathedral in Nicaragua; the Church of la Compañía de Jesús in Quito, Ecuador; the Church of San Ignacio in Bogotá, Colombia; the Caracas Cathedral in Venezuela; the Cabildo of Buenos Aires in Argentina; the Church of Santo Domingo in Santiago, Chile; and Havana Cathedral in Cuba. It is also worth remembering the quality of the churches of the Spanish Jesuit Missions in Bolivia, Spanish Jesuit missions in Paraguay, the Spanish missions in Mexico and the Spanish Franciscan missions in California.[59]
+
+In Brazil, as in the metropolis, Portugal, the architecture has a certain Italian influence, usually of a Borrominesque type, as can be seen in the Co-Cathedral of Recife (1784) and Church of Nossa Senhora da Glória do Outeiro in Rio de Janeiro (1739). In the region of Minas Gerais, highlighted the work of Aleijadinho, author of a group of churches that stand out for their curved planimetry, facades with concave-convex dynamic effects and a plastic treatment of all architectural elements (Church of São Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto, 1765–1788).
+
+The Church of San Francisco Acatepec from Mexico
+
+The Chihuahua Cathedral from Mexico (1725–1792[60])
+
+The León Cathedral from Nicaragua (1747–1814), an UNESCO World Heritage Site
+
+The Minor Basilica of San Francisco de Asís from Havana (Cuba) (1548–1738[61])
+
+The Church of Rosário dos Pretos from Ouro Preto (Brazil) (1762–1799[62])
+
+The Church of San Agustín from Quito (Ecuador) (1606–1617[63])
+
+The Palacio de Torre Tagle from Lima (Peru) (1715–1735[64]), Balconies of Lima
+
+The Santo Domingo Church from Santiago (Chile) (1747–1808[65])
+
+In the Portuguese colonies of India (Goa, Daman and Diu) an architectural style of Baroque forms mixed with Hindu elements flourished, such as the Goa Cathedral and the Basilica of Bom Jesus of Goa, which houses the tomb of St. Francis Xavier. The set of churches and convents of Goa was declared a World Heritage Site in 1986.
+
+In the Philippines, that was part of the Spanish Empire for a long time, a large number of Baroque constructions are preserved, including the Baroque Churches of the Philippines that four of these, and the Baroque and Neoclassical city of Vigan, are both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It was also very remarkable the Walled City of Manila (Intramuros). Other city with notable preserved Spanish-era Baroque is Tayabas.
+
+Baroque painters worked deliberately to set themselves apart from the painters of the Renaissance and the Mannerism period after it. In their palette, they used intense and warm colours, and particularly made use of the primary colours red, blue and yellow, frequently putting all three in close proximity.[66] They avoided the even lighting of Renaissance painting and used strong contrasts of light and darkness on certain parts of the picture to direct attention to the central actions or figures. In their composition, they avoided the tranquil scenes of Renaissance paintings, and chose the moments of the greatest movement and drama.  Unlike the tranquil faces of Renaissance paintings, the faces in Baroque paintings clearly expressed their emotions. They often used asymmetry, with action occurring away from the centre of the picture, and created axes that were neither vertical nor horizontal, but slanting to the left or right, giving a sense of instability and movement. They enhanced this impression of movement by having the costumes of the personages blown by the wind, or moved by their own gestures. The overall impressions were movement, emotion and drama.[67] Another essential element of baroque painting was allegory; every painting told a story and had a message, often encrypted in symbols and allegorical characters, which an educated viewer was expected to know and read.[68]
+
+Early evidence of Italian Baroque ideas in painting occurred in Bologna, where Annibale Carracci, Agostino Carracci and Ludovico Carracci sought to return the visual arts to the ordered Classicism of the Renaissance. Their art, however, also incorporated ideas central the Counter-Reformation; these included intense emotion and religious imagery that appealed more to the heart than to the intellect.[69]
+
+Another influential painter of the Baroque era was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. His realistic approach to the human figure, painted directly from life and dramatically spotlit against a dark background, shocked his contemporaries and opened a new chapter in the history of painting. Other major painters associated closely with the Baroque style include Artemisia Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Domenichino, Andrea Pozzo, and Paolo de Matteis in Italy; Francisco de Zurbarán and Diego Velázquez in Spain; Adam Elsheimer in Germany; and Nicolas Poussin and Georges de La Tour in France (though Poussin spent most of his working life in Italy).  Poussin and La Tour adopted a "classical" Baroque style with less focus on emotion and greater attention to the line of the figures in the painting than to colour.
+
+Peter Paul Rubens was the most important painter of the Flemish Baroque style.  Rubens' highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasised movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation. Rubens specialized in making altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.
+
+One important domain of Baroque painting was Quadratura, or paintings in trompe-l'oeil, which literally "fooled the eye".  These were usually painted on the stucco of ceilings or upper walls and balustrades, and gave the impression to those on the ground looking up were that they were seeing the heavens populated with crowds of angels, saints and other heavenly figures, set against painted skies and imaginary architecture.[35]
+
+In Italy, artists often collaborated with architects on interior decoration; Pietro da Cortona was one of the painters of the 17th century who employed this illusionist way of painting. Among his most important commissions were the frescoes he painted for the Palace of the Barberini family (1633–39), to glorify the reign of Pope Urban VIII.  Pietro da Cortona's compositions were the largest decorative frescoes executed in Rome since the work of Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel.[70]
+
+François Boucher was an important figure in the more delicate French Rococo style, which appeared during the late Baroque period.  He designed tapestries, carpets and theatre decoration as well as painting.  His work was extremely popular with Madame Pompadour, the Mistress of King Louis XV. His paintings featured mythological romantic, and mildly erotic themes.[71]
+
+Triumph of Bacchus and Adriane (part of The Loves of the Gods); by Annibale Carracci; circa 1597–1600; fresco; length (gallery): 20.2 m; Palazzo Farnese (Rome)[72]
+
+The Calling of St Matthew; by Caravaggio; 1599–1600; oil on canvas; 3.2 x 3.4 m; Church of St. Louis of the French (Rome)
+
+The Four Continents; by Peter Paul Rubens; circa 1615; oil on canvas; 209 x 284 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna, Austria)
+
+The Rape of the Sabine Women; by Nicolas Poussin; 1634–1635; oil on canvas; 154.6 x 209.9 cm; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
+
+Charles I at the Hunt; by Anthony van Dyck; circa 1635; oil on canvas; 2.66 x 2.07 m; Louvre[73]
+
+The Night Watch; by Rembrandt; 1642; oil on canvas; 363 × 437 cm; Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
+
+The Art of Painting; by Johannes Vermeer; 1666–1668; oil on canvas; 1.3 x 1.1 m; Kunsthistorisches Museum
+
+The Portrait of Louis XIV; by Hyacinthe Rigaud; 1701; oil on canvas; 277 × 194 cm; Louvre
+
+In the Spanish Americas, the first influences were from Sevillan Tenebrism, mainly from Zurbarán —some of whose works are still preserved in Mexico and Peru— as can be seen in the work of the Mexicans José Juárez and Sebastián López de Arteaga, and the Bolivian Melchor Pérez de Holguín. The Cusco School of painting arose after the arrival of the Italian painter Bernardo Bitti in 1583, who introduced Mannerism in the Americas. It highlighted the work of Luis de Riaño, disciple of the Italian Angelino Medoro, author of the murals of the Church of San Pedro of Andahuaylillas. It also highlighted the Indian (Quechua) painters Diego Quispe Tito and Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao, as well as Marcos Zapata, author of the fifty large canvases that cover the high arches of the Cathedral of Cusco. In Ecuador, the Quito School was formed, mainly represented by the mestizo Miguel de Santiago and the criollo Nicolás Javier de Goríbar.
+
+In the 18th century sculptural altarpieces began to be replaced by paintings, developing notably the Baroque painting in the Americas. Similarly, the demand for civil works, mainly portraits of the aristocratic classes and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, grew. The main influence was the Murillesque, and in some cases – as in the criollo Cristóbal de Villalpando – that of Valdés Leal. The painting of this era has a more sentimental tone, with sweet and softer shapes. It highlight Gregorio Vásquez de Arce in Colombia, and Juan Rodríguez Juárez and Miguel Cabrera in Mexico.
+
+The dominant figure in baroque sculpture was Gian Lorenzo Bernini.  Under the patronage of Pope Urban VIII, he made a remarkable series of monumental statues of saints and figures whose faces and gestures vividly expressed their emotions, as well as portrait busts of exceptional realism, and highly decorative works for the Vatican, including the imposing Chair of St. Peter beneath the dome in St. Peter's Basilica.  In addition, he designed fountains with monumental groups of sculpture to decorate the major squares of Rome.[74]
+
+Baroque sculpture was inspired by ancient Roman statuary, particularly by the famous statue of Laocoön from the First Century A.D., which was on display in the gallery of the Vatican.  When he visited Paris in 1665, Bernini addressed the students at the Academy of painting and sculpture. He advised the students to work from classical models, rather than from nature.  He told the students, "When I had trouble with my first statue, i consulted the Antinous like an oracle."[75]
+
+Notable late French baroque sculptors included Étienne Maurice Falconet and Jean Baptiste Pigalle.  Pigalle was commissioned by Frederick the Great to make statues for Frederick's own version of Versailles at Sanssouci in Potsdam, Germany. Falconet also received an important foreign commission, creating the famous statue of Peter the Great on horseback found in St. Petersburg.
+
+In Spain, the sculptor Francisco Salzillo worked exclusively on religious themes, using polychromed wood. Some of the finest baroque sculptural craftsmanship was found in the gilded stucco altars of churches of the Spanish colonies of the New World, made by local craftsmen; examples include the Rosary Chapel of the Church of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca (Mexico), 1724–1731.
+
+Apollo and Daphne; by Gian Lorenzo Bernini; 1622–1625; marble; height: 2.43 m; Louvre
+
+Caryatides on the Pavillon de l'Horloge (Louvre Palace), by Jacques Sarazin, 1639–1640
+
+Saint Veronica; by Francesco Mochi; 1629–1639; Carrara marble; height: 5 m; St. Peter's Basilica (Vatican City)
+
+Bust of Andries de Graeff; by Artus Quellinus the Elder; 1661; marble; height: 76 cm, width: 76 cm, thickness: 36 cm; Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
+
+The Fountain of Saturn; by François Girardon; 1672–1677; gilded lead; Palace of Versailles (France)
+
+The King's Fame Riding Pegasus; by Antoine Coysevox; 1701–1702; Carrara marble; height: 3.15 m, width: 2.91 m, depth: 1.28 m; Louvre
+
+The Death of Adonis; by Giuseppe Mazzuoli; 1710s; marble; height: 193 cm; Hermitage Museum (Saint Petersburg, Russia)
+
+Mercury putting on his running shoes; by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle; 1753; lead; 187 × 108 × 106 cm; Louvre
+
+The main motifs used are: horns of plenty, festoons, baby angels, lion heads holding a metal ring in their mouths, female faces surrounded by garlands, oval cartouches, acanthus leaves, classical columns, caryatids, pediments and other elements of Classical architecture sculpted on some parts of pieces of furniture,[76] baskets with fruits or flowers, shells, armour and trophies, heads of Apollo or Bacchus, and C-shaped volutes.[77]
+
+During the first period of the reign of Louis XIV, furniture followed the previous style of Louis XIII, and was massive, and profusely decorated with sculpture and gilding. After 1680, thanks in large part to the furniture designer André Charles Boulle, a more original and delicate style appeared, sometimes known as Boulle work. It was based on the inlay of ebony and other rare woods, a technique first used in Florence in the 15th century, which was refined and developed by Boulle and others working for Louis XIV.  Furniture was inlaid with plaques of ebony, copper, and exotic woods of different colors.[78]
+
+New and often enduring types of furniture appeared;  the commode, with two to four drawers, replaced the old coffre, or chest. The canapé, or sofa, appeared, in the form of a combination of two or three armchairs. New kinds of armchairs appeared, including the fauteuil en confessionale or "Confessional armchair", which had padded cushions ions on either side of the back of the chair.  The console table also made its first appearance; it was designed to be placed against a wall. Another new type of furniture was the table à gibier, a marble-topped table for holding dishes. Early varieties of the desk appeared; the Mazarin desk had a central section set back, placed between two columns of drawers, with four feet on each column.[79]
+
+Cupboard with scenes from the life of Christ; 1620–1640; veneer, oak and walnut wood, pearwood and ebony, steel and brass; National Museum in Warsaw (Poland)
+
+Cupboard with hunting scenes; 1620–1640; veneer, oak and walnut wood, birch, rosewood, and many other types of wood, and steel; 174 × 148 × 63 cm; National Museum in Warsaw
+
+Dutch wardrobe; 1625–1650; oak with ebony and rosewood veneers; overall: 244.5 x 224.3 x 85.2 cm; Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio, US)
+
+Small desk with folding top (bureau brisé); circa 1685; oak, pine, walnut veneered with ebony, rosewood, and marquetry of tortoiseshell and engraved brass, gilt bronze and steel; 77 x 106 x 59.4 cm; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
+
+French pier table; 1685–1690; carved, gessoed, and gilded wood, with a marble top; 83.6 × 128.6 × 71.6 cm; Art Institute of Chicago (US)[80]
+
+Console table depicting Chronos, or the father time; 1695; painted and gilded wood, with marble at its top; overall: 95.3 x 107.3 x 62.9 cm; Cleveland Museum of Art
+
+Commode; by André Charles Boulle; circa 1710–1720; ebony, gilt-bronze mounts and other materials; 87.6 × 128.3 × 62.9 cm; Metropolitan Museum of Art
+
+German slant-front desk; by Heinrich Ludwig Rohde or Ferdinand Plitzner; circa 1715–1725; marquetry with maple, amaranth, mahogany, and walnut on spruce and oak; 90 × 84 × 44.5 cm; from Mainz (Germany); Art Institute of Chicago[81]
+
+The term Baroque is also used to designate the style of music composed during a period that overlaps with that of Baroque art. The first uses of the term 'baroque' for music were criticisms.  In an anonymous, satirical review of the première in October 1733 of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734, the critic implied that the novelty of this opera was "du barocque," complaining that the music lacked coherent melody, was filled with unremitting dissonances, constantly changed key and meter, and speedily ran through every compositional device.[82] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician and noted composer as well as philosopher, made a very similar observation in 1768 in the famous Encylopedié of Denis Diderot:   "Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited. It appears that term comes from the word 'baroco' used by logicians."[15]
+
+Common use of the term for the music of the period began only in 1919, by Curt Sachs,[83] and it was not until 1940 that it was first used in English in an article published by Manfred Bukofzer.[82]
+
+The baroque was a period of musical experimentation and innovation. New forms were invented, including the concerto and sinfonia. Opera was born in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri's mostly lost Dafne, produced in Florence in 1598) and soon spread through the rest of Europe:   Louis XIV created the first Royal Academy of Music,  In 1669, the poet Pierre Perrin opened an academy of opera in Paris, the first opera theatre in France open to the public, and premiered Pomone, the first grand opera in French, with music by Robert Cambert, with five acts, elaborate stage machinery, and a ballet.[84] Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century.
+
+The classical ballet also originated in the Baroque era. The style of court dance was brought to France by Marie de Medici, and in the beginning the members of the court themselves were the dancers. Louis XIV himself performed in public in several ballets. In March 1662, the Académie Royale de Danse, was founded by the King.  It was the first professional dance school and company,  and set the standards and vocabulary for ballet throughout Europe during the period.[84]
+
+Several new instruments, including the piano, were introduced during this period. The invention of the piano is credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731) of Padua, Italy, who was employed by Ferdinando de' Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, as the Keeper of the Instruments.[85][86] Cristofori named the instrument un cimbalo di cipresso di piano e forte ("a keyboard of cypress with soft and loud"), abbreviated over time as pianoforte, fortepiano, and later, simply, piano.[87]
+
+The Baroque period was a golden age for theatre in France and Spain;  playwrights included Corneille, Racine and Moliere in France; and Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca Spain.
+
+During the Baroque period, the art and style of the theatre evolved rapidly, alongside the development of opera and of ballet.  The design of newer and larger theatres, the invention the use of more elaborate machinery, the wider use of the proscenium arch, which framed the stage and hid the machinery from the audience, encouraged more scenic effects and spectacle.[88]
+
+The Baroque had a Catholic and conservative character in Spain, following an Italian literary model during the Renaissance.[89] The Hispanic Baroque theatre aimed for a public content with an ideal reality that manifested fundamental three sentiments: Catholic religion, monarchist and national pride and honour originating from the chivalric, knightly world.[90]
+
+Two periods are known in the Baroque Spanish theatre, with the division occurring in 1630. The first period is represented chiefly by Lope de Vega, but also by Tirso de Molina, Gaspar Aguilar, Guillén de Castro, Antonio Mira de Amescua, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Diego Jiménez de Enciso, Luis Belmonte Bermúdez, Felipe Godínez, Luis Quiñones de Benavente or Juan Pérez de Montalbán. The second period is represented by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and fellow dramatists Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón, Jerónimo de Cáncer, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Matos Fragoso, Antonio Coello y Ochoa, Agustín Moreto, and Francisco Bances Candamo.[91] These classifications are loose because each author had his own way and could occasionally adhere himself to the formula established by Lope. It may even be that Lope's "manner" was more liberal and structured than Calderón's.[92]
+
+Lope de Vega introduced through his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609) the new comedy. He established a new dramatic formula that broke the three Aristotle unities of the Italian school of poetry (action, time and place) and a fourth unity of Aristotle which is about style, mixing of tragic and comic elements showing different types of verses and stanzas upon what is represented.[93] Although Lope has a great knowledge of the plastic arts, he did not use it during the major part of his career nor in theatre or scenography. The Lope's comedy granted a second role to the visual aspects of the theatrical representation.[94]
+
+Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega, and Calderón were the most important play writers in Golden Era Spain. Their works, known for their subtle intelligence and profound comprehension of a person's humanity, could be considered a bridge between Lope's primitive comedy and the more elaborate comedy of Calderón. Tirso de Molina is best known for two works, The Convicted Suspicions and The Trickster of Seville, one of the first versions of the Don Juan myth.[95]
+
+Upon his arrival to Madrid, Cosimo Lotti brought to the Spanish court the most advanced theatrical techniques of Europe. His techniques and mechanic knowledge were applied in palace exhibitions called "Fiestas" and in lavish exhibitions of rivers or artificial fountains called "Naumaquias". He was in charge of styling the Gardens of Buen Retiro, of Zarzuela and of Aranjuez and the construction of the theatrical building of Coliseo del Buen Retiro.[96] Lope's formulas begin with a verse that it unbefitting of the palace theatre foundation and the birth of new concepts that begun the careers of some play writers like Calderón de la Barca. Marking the principal innovations of the New Lopesian Comedy, Calderón's style marked many differences, with a great deal of constructive care and attention to his internal structure. Calderón's work is in formal perfection and a very lyric and symbolic language. Liberty, vitality and openness of Lope gave a step to Calderón's intellectual reflection and formal precision. In his comedy it reflected his ideological and doctrine intentions in above the passion and the action, the work of Autos sacramentales achieved high ranks.[97] The genre of Comedia is political, multi-artistic and in a sense hybrid. The poetic text interweaved with Medias and resources originating from architecture, music and painting freeing the deception that is in the Lopesian comedy was made up from the lack of scenery and engaging the dialogue of action.[98]
+
+The best known German playwright was Andreas Gryphius, who used the Jesuit model of the Dutch Joost van den Vondel and Pierre Corneille. There was also Johannes Velten who combined the traditions of the English comedians and the commedia del'arte  with the classic theatre of Corneille and Molière. His touring company was perhaps the most significant and important of the 17th century.
+
+Following the evolution marked from Spain, at the end of the 16th century, the companies of comedians, essentially transhumant, began to professionalize. With professionalization came regulation and censorship: as in Europe, the theatre oscillated between tolerance and even government protection and rejection (with exceptions) or persecution by the Church. The theatre was useful to the authorities as an instrument to disseminate the desired behavior and models, respect for the social order and the monarchy, school of religious dogma.[99]
+
+The corrales were administered for the benefit of hospitals that shared the benefits of the representations. The itinerant companies (or "of the league"), who carried the theatre in improvised open-air stages by the regions that did not have fixed locals, required a viceregal license to work, whose price or pinción was destined to alms and works pious.[99] For companies that worked stably in the capitals and major cities, one of their main sources of income was participation in the festivities of the Corpus Christi, which provided them with not only economic benefits, but also recognition and social prestige. The representations in the viceregal palace and the mansions of the aristocracy, where they represented both the comedies of their repertoire and special productions with great lighting effects, scenery and stage, were also an important source of well-paid and prestigious work.[99]
+
+Born in the Viceroyalty of New Spain[100] but later settled in Spain, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón is the most prominent figure in the Baroque theatre of New Spain. Despite his accommodation to Lope de Vega's new comedy, his "marked secularism", his discretion and restraint, and a keen capacity for "psychological penetration" as distinctive features of Alarcón against his Spanish contemporaries have been noted. Noteworthy among his works La verdad sospechosa, a comedy of characters that reflected his constant moralizing purpose.[99] The dramatic production of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz places her as the second figure of the Spanish-American Baroque theatre. It is worth mentioning among her works the auto sacramental El divino Narciso and the comedy Los empeños de una casa.
+
+The Baroque garden, also known as the  jardin à la française  or French formal garden, first appeared in Rome in the 16th century, and then most famously in France in the 17th century in the gardens of Vaux le Vicomte and the Palace of Versailles. Baroque gardens were built by Kings and princes in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Poland, Italy and Russia until the mid-18th century, when they began to be remade into by the more natural English landscape garden.
+
+The purpose of the baroque garden was to illustrate the power of man over nature, and the glory of its builder,  Baroque gardens were laid out in geometric patterns, like the rooms of a house. They were usually best seen from the outside and looking down, either from a chateau or terrace. The elements of a baroque garden included parterres of flower beds or low hedges trimmed into ornate Baroque designs,  and straight lanes and alleys of gravel which divided and crisscrossed the garden.  Terraces, ramps, staircases and cascades were placed where there were differences of elevation, and provided viewing points.  Circular or rectangular ponds or basins of water were the settings for fountains and statues. Bosquets or carefully trimmed groves or lines of identical trees, gave the appearance of walls of greenery and were backdrops for statues.  On the edges, the gardens usually had pavilions, orangeries and other structures where visitors could take shelter from the sun or rain.[101]
+
+Baroque gardens required enormous numbers of gardeners, continual trimming, and abundant water.  In the later part of the Baroque period, the formal elements began to be replaced with more natural features, including winding paths, groves of varied trees left to grow untrimmed;  rustic architecture and picturesque structures, such as Roman temples or Chinese pagodas, as well as "secret gardens" on the edges of the main garden, filled with greenery, where visitors could read or have quiet conversations. By the mid-18th century most of the Baroque gardens were partially or entirely transformed into variations of the English landscape garden.[101]
+
+Besides Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, Celebrated baroque gardens still retaining much of their original appearance include the Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples; Nymphenburg Palace and Augustusburg and Falkenlust Palaces, Brühl in Germany; Het Loo Palace in the Netherlands; the Belvedere Palace in Vienna; the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso in Spain;  and Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.[101]
+
+Garden of Vaux-le-Vicomte (France) seen from the Chateau (1656–1661)
+
+View of the garden facade of Palace of Versailles in 1680s
+
+Plan of the Tuileries Garden (France), designed by André Le Nôtre (about 1671)
+
+Restored parterres of the Belvedere Palace (Vienna, Austria) today
+
+The following are characteristics that Rococo has and Baroque has not:[clarification needed]
+
+Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, contributed to the decline of the baroque and rococo style.  In 1750 she sent her nephew, Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, on a two-year mission to study artistic and archeological developments in Italy.  He was accompanied by several artists, including the engraver Nicolas Cochin and the architect Soufflot.  They returned to Paris with a passion for classical art. Vandiéres became the Marquis of Marigny, and was named Royal Director of buildings in 1754. He turned official French architecture toward the neoclassical. Cochin became an important art critic;  he denounced the petit style of Boucher, and called for a grand style with a new emphasis on antiquity and nobility in the academies of painting of architecture.[104]
+
+The pioneer German art historian and archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann also condemned the baroque style, and praised the superior values of classical art and architecture. By the 19th century, Baroque was a target for ridicule and criticism. The neoclassical critic Francesco Milizia wrote: "Borrominini in architecture, Bernini in sculpture, Pietro da Cortona in painting...are a plague on good taste, which infected a large number of artists."[105] In the 19th century, criticism went even further; the British critic John Ruskin declared that baroque sculpture was not only bad, but also morally corrupt.[105]
+
+The Swiss-born art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) started the rehabilitation of the word Baroque in his Renaissance und Barock (1888); Wölfflin identified the Baroque as "movement imported into mass", an art antithetic to Renaissance art. He did not make the distinctions between Mannerism and Baroque that modern writers do, and he ignored the later phase, the academic Baroque that lasted into the 18th century. Baroque art and architecture became fashionable between the two World Wars, and has largely remained in critical favor.  The term "Baroque" may still be used, usually pejoratively, describing works of art, craft, or design that are thought to have excessive ornamentation or complexity of line.
+
+The end of the 19th century was a golden age for revival styles, including Baroque Revival or Neo-Baroque.
+
+In addition to its practical (protective) function, the face also has aesthetic and architectural purposes.  It mirrors the predominant styles of a certain era. Ornaments are the most common "ornaments" of buildings.[106] The ornaments used in 17th-18th century architecture are reused at Baroque Revival buildings, including: horns of plenty, festoons, baby angels, female or male mascarons, oval cartouches, acanthus leaves, classical columns, caryatids, pediments and other elements of Greco-Roman architecture. Most Baroque revival buildings have mansard roofs, usually blue or sometimes black, with oval or dormer windows. Some of the houses is this style have cartouche-shaped oculus windows, usually with a mascaron at their top or bottom. In France and Romania, many of the entrances have awnings (French: Marquise; Romanian: marchiză), made of glass and metal, usually in a seashell-shape. In these two counties, especially in Romania, Neo-Baroque was sometimes combined with Art Nouveau. Beaux-Arts buildings from the late 1890s and early 1900s are very good examples of Baroque Revival architecture. The most famous Neo-Baroque building in Paris are: the Pavillon de Flore (part of the Palais du Louvre), the Palais Garnier, the Petit Palais, and the Grand Palais. Important architects of this style include Charles Garnier (1825–1898), Ferdinand Fellner (1847–1917), Hermann Helmer (1849–1919), and Ion D. Berindey (1871–1928).
+
+In decorative arts, Baroque Revival is usually known as the Napoleon III style or Second Empire style. Objects in this style was very appreciated in late 1890s and early 1900s Romania, many of them being brought from France or Austria. One of the main influence was the Louis XVI style, or French neoclassicism, which was preferred by the Empress Eugénie. Her rooms at the Tuileries Palace and other Places were decorated in this style. Other influences include French Renaissance and the Henry II style, which were popular influences on chests and cabinets, buffets and credences, which were massive and built like small cathedrals, decorated with columns, pediments, cartouches, mascarons, and carved angels and chimeras. They were usually constructed of walnut or oak, or sometimes of poirier stained to resemble ebony.[107]
+
+Tête-à-tête, an example of Second Empire furniture; 1850–1860; rosewood, ash, pine and walnut; 113 x 132.1 x 109.2 cm; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
+
+Young Ladies Beside the Seine; by Gustave Courbet; 1856; oil on canvas; 174 x 206 cm; Petit Palais (Paris)
+
+The Birth of Venus; by Alexandre Cabanel; 1863; oil on canvas; 130 x 225 cm; Musée d'Orsay (Paris)
+
+The Palais Garnier from Paris, by Charles Garnier
+
+Window with a pair of putti above it, in Wuppertal (Germany)
+
+Entrance of the House of scientists (Lviv, Ukraine)
+
+Staircase in the House of scientists from Lviv
+
+The Cantacuzino Palace on Victory Avenue from Bucharest (Romania), by Ion D. Berindey (1898–1900)[108]

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+
+The Louvre (English: /ˈluːv(rə)/ LOOV(-rə)[3]), or the Louvre Museum (French: Musée du Louvre [myze dy luvʁ] (listen)), is the world's  largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris, France. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement (district or ward). Approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 72,735 square meters (782,910 square feet).[4] In 2019, the Louvre received 9.6 million visitors, making it the most visited museum in the world.[2][5]
+
+The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built as the Louvre castle in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French Kings.[6] The building was extended many times to form the present Louvre Palace. In 1682, Louis XIV chose the Palace of Versailles for his household, leaving the Louvre primarily as a place to display the royal collection, including, from 1692, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.[7] In 1692, the building was occupied by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in 1699 held the first of a series of salons. The Académie remained at the Louvre for 100 years.[8] During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces.
+
+The museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed in 1796 until 1801. The collection was increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon, but after Napoleon's abdication, many works seized by his armies were returned to their original owners. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces. Holdings have grown steadily through donations and bequests since the Third Republic. The collection is divided among eight curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; Decorative Arts; Paintings; Prints and Drawings.
+
+The Louvre Palace, which houses the museum, was begun as a fortress by Philip II in the 12th century to protect the city from English soldiers which were in Normandy. Remnants of this castle are still visible in the crypt.[9] Whether this was the first building on that spot is not known; it is possible that Philip modified an existing tower.[10] According to the authoritative Grand Larousse encyclopédique, the name derives from an association with wolf hunting den (via Latin: lupus, lower Empire: lupara).[10][11] In the 7th century, St. Fare, an abbess in Meaux, left part of her "Villa called Luvra situated in the region of Paris" to a monastery,[12] this territory probably did not correspond exactly to the modern site, however.
+
+The Louvre Palace was altered frequently throughout the Middle Ages. In the 14th century, Charles V converted the building into a residence and in 1546, Francis I renovated the site in French Renaissance style.[13] Francis acquired what would become the nucleus of the Louvre's holdings, his acquisitions including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.[14] After Louis XIV chose Versailles as his residence in 1682, constructions slowed; however, the move permitted the Louvre to be used as a residence for artists, under Royal patronage.[13][15][16] Four generations of Boulle were granted Royal patronage and resided in the Louvre in the following order: Pierre Boulle, Jean Boulle, Andre-Charles Boulle and his four sons (Jean-Philippe,[17] Pierre-Benoît (c. 1683–1741), Charles-André (1685–1749) and Charles-Joseph (1688–1754)), after him. André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732[18]) is the most famous French cabinetmaker and the preeminent artist in the field of marquetry,[19][20] also known as "Inlay".[21]  Boulle was "the most remarkable of all French cabinetmakers".[22] He was commended to Louis XIV of France, the "Sun King", by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) as being "the most skilled craftsman in his profession".  Before the fire of 1720 destroyed them, André-Charles Boulle held priceless works of art in the Louvre, including forty-eight drawings by Raphael'.[23]
+
+By the mid-18th century there were an increasing number of proposals to create a public gallery, with the art critic La Font de Saint-Yenne publishing, in 1747, a call for a display of the royal collection. On 14 October 1750, Louis XV agreed and sanctioned a display of 96 pieces from the royal collection, mounted in the Galerie royale de peinture of the Luxembourg Palace. A hall was opened by Le Normant de Tournehem and the Marquis de Marigny for public viewing of the Tableaux du Roy on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and contained Andrea del Sarto's Charity and works by Raphael; Titian; Veronese; Rembrandt; Poussin or Van Dyck, until its closing in 1780 as a result of the gift of the palace to the Count of Provence (the future king, Louis XVIII) by the king in 1778.[24] Under Louis XVI, the royal museum idea became policy.[25] The comte d'Angiviller broadened the collection and in 1776 proposed conversion of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre – which contained maps – into the "French Museum". Many proposals were offered for the Louvre's renovation into a museum; however, none was agreed on. Hence the museum remained incomplete until the French Revolution.[24]
+
+During the French Revolution the Louvre was transformed into a public museum. In May 1791, the Assembly declared that the Louvre would be "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts".[24] On 10 August 1792, Louis XVI was imprisoned and the royal collection in the Louvre became national property. Because of fear of vandalism or theft, on 19 August, the National Assembly pronounced the museum's preparation as urgent. In October, a committee to "preserve the national memory" began assembling the collection for display.[26]
+
+The museum opened on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the monarchy's demise. The public was given free accessibility on three days per week, which was "perceived as a major accomplishment and was generally appreciated".[28] The collection showcased 537 paintings and 184 objects of art. Three quarters were derived from the royal collections, the remainder from confiscated émigrés and Church property (biens nationaux).[29][30] To expand and organize the collection, the Republic dedicated 100,000 livres per year.[24] In 1794, France's revolutionary armies began bringing pieces from Northern Europe, augmented after the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) by works from the Vatican, such as Laocoön and His Sons and the Apollo Belvedere, to establish the Louvre as a museum and as a "sign of popular sovereignty".[29][31]
+
+The early days were hectic; privileged artists continued to live in residence, and the unlabelled paintings hung "frame to frame from floor to ceiling".[29] The structure itself closed in May 1796 due to structural deficiencies. It reopened on 14 July 1801, arranged chronologically and with new lighting and columns.[29]
+
+Under Napoleon I, a northern wing paralleling the Grande Galerie was begun, and the collection grew through successful military campaigns.[32] Following the Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, Napoléon appointed the museum's first director, Dominique Vivant Denon. In tribute, the museum was renamed the "Musée Napoléon" in 1803, and acquisitions were made of Spanish, Austrian, Dutch, and Italian works, either as spoils or through treaties such as the Treaty of Tolentino.[33] At the end of Napoleon's First Italian Campaign in 1797, the Treaty of Campo Formio was signed with Count Philipp von Cobenzl of the Austrian Monarchy. This treaty not only marked the completion of Napoleon's conquest of Italy, but also the end of the first phases of the French Revolutionary Wars. Under this treaty, Italian cities were required to contribute pieces of art and patrimony to take part in Napoleon's "parades of booty" through Paris before being put into the Louvre Museum.[34] One of the most famous pieces taken under this program was the Horses of Saint Mark. The four antique bronze horses, which had adorned the basilica of San Marco in Venice after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, were brought to Paris to reside atop Napoleon's Arc du Carrousel in Paris in 1797.[34]
+
+Several churches and palaces, including Saint Mark's Basilica, were looted by the French, which outraged the Italians and their artistic and cultural sensibilities.[35] In 1797, the Treaty of Tolentino was signed by Napoleon, and two statues, the Nile and Tiber, were taken to Paris. These statues had previously been in the Vatican, and both were housed in the Louvre until 1815. After the defeat of Napoleon, the Nile was returned to Italy.[36] However, the Tiber remained in the Louvre Museum and can be seen in the collections today.
+
+The Italian Peninsula was not the only region from which Napoleon took art. Under the Directory government of the 1790s, Napoleon (then a General) led an expedition to Egypt. The campaign was an expansionist effort on the part of the government, but the Directory had another goal to make Paris the center of art, science, and culture.[37] The Directory wanted France to assume responsibility for liberating the works of art they deemed in danger in order to protect and nationalize the heritage and culture of their subjects.[38] As a result, there were teams of artists and scientists who accompanied the armies into battle equipped with lists of paintings, sculptures, and other pieces of patrimony that would be collected, crated, and shipped back to France.[39]
+
+Dominique Vivant Denon was Napoleon's art advisor, and accompanied him on the expedition to Egypt. Through his initiative, the Valley of the Kings in Egypt was discovered and studied extensively.[40] As a result, he was later installed by Napoleon as the director of Musée Napoléon, formerly the Louvre, cementing the status of the museum as a center for global patrimony and storehouse for cultural heritage.[41]
+
+One of the most important discoveries made during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt was the Rosetta Stone. It was discovered in 1799, and eventually led to the ability to decipher ancient hieroglyphs. Although the Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French, it actually never made it to the Louvre Museum. It was seized by British Forces following the defeat of Napoleon in Egypt and the subsequent signing of the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801.[42] It is now on display at the British Museum.[43]
+
+After the French defeat at Waterloo, the works' former owners sought their return. The Louvre's administrators were loath to comply and hid many works in their private collections. In response, foreign states sent emissaries to London to seek help, and many pieces were returned, even some that had been restored by the Louvre.[33][44] In 1815 Louis XVIII finally concluded agreements with the Austrian government[45][46] for the keeping of pieces such as Veronese's Wedding at Cana which was exchanged for a large Le Brun or the repurchase of the Albani collection.
+
+During the Restoration (1814–1830), Louis XVIII and Charles X between them added 135 pieces at a cost of 720,000 francs and created the department of Egyptian antiquities curated by Champollion, increased by more than 7,000 works with the acquisition of antiquities in the Edme-Antoine Durand, the Egyptian collection of Henry Salt or the second collection former by Bernardino Drovetti. This was less than the amount given for rehabilitation of Versailles, and the Louvre suffered relative to the rest of Paris. After the creation of the French Second Republic in 1848, the new government allocated two million francs for repair work and ordered the completion of the Galerie d'Apollon, the Salon Carré, and the Grande Galérie.[47] In 1861, Napoleon III bought 11,835 artworks including 641 paintings, Greek gold and other antiquities of the Campana collection. Between  1852 and 1870, under Napoleon III, the museum added 20,000 new pieces to its collections, and the Pavillon de Flore and the Grande Galérie were remodelled under architects Louis Visconti and Hector Lefuel.[47]
+
+The Louvre was damaged during the suppression of the Paris Commune.  On 23 May 1871, as the French Army advanced into Paris, a force of Communards led by Jules Bergeret set fire to the adjoining Tuileries Palace. The fire burned for forty-eight hours, entirely destroying the interior of the palace and spreading to the museum next to it.  The library of the museum and some of the adjoining halls were destroyed, but the museum was saved by the efforts of Paris firemen and museum employees.[48]
+
+During the Third Republic (1870–1940) the Louvre acquired new pieces mainly via donations and gifts. The Société des Amis du Louvre (established in 1897) donated the Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, and in 1863 an expedition uncovered the sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Aegean Sea. This piece, though heavily damaged, has been prominently displayed since 1884.[50] The 583-item Collection La Caze donated in 1869, included works by Chardin; Fragonard; Rembrandt – such as Bathsheba at Her Bath – and Gilles by Watteau.[50]
+
+Museum expansion slowed after World War I, and the collection did not acquire many significant new works; exceptions were Georges de La Tour's Saint Thomas and Baron Edmond de Rothschild's (1845–1934) 1935 donation of 4,000 prints, 3,000 drawings, and 500 illustrated books.[30]
+At the beginning of World War II the museum removed most of the art and hid valuable pieces. When Germany occupied the Sudetenland, many important artworks such as the Mona Lisa were temporarily moved to the Château de Chambord. When war was formally declared a year later, most of the museum's paintings were sent there as well. Select sculptures such as Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo were sent to the Château de Valençay.[51] On 27 August 1939, after two days of packing, truck convoys began to leave Paris. By 28 December, the museum was cleared of most works, except those that were too heavy and "unimportant paintings [that] were left in the basement".[52] In early 1945, after the liberation of France, art began returning to the Louvre.[53]
+
+By 1874, the Louvre Palace had achieved its present form of an almost rectangular structure with the Sully Wing to the east containing the Cour Carrée (Square Court) and the oldest parts of the Louvre; and two wings which wrap the Cour Napoléon, the Richelieu Wing to the north and the Denon Wing, which borders the Seine to the south.[54] In 1983, French President François Mitterrand proposed, as one of his Grands Projets, the Grand Louvre plan to renovate the building and relocate the Finance Ministry, allowing displays throughout the building. Architect I. M. Pei was awarded the project and proposed a glass pyramid to stand over a new entrance in the main court, the Cour Napoléon.[55] The pyramid and its underground lobby were inaugurated on 15 October 1988 and the Louvre Pyramid was completed in 1989. The second phase of the Grand Louvre plan, the Pyramide Inversée (Inverted Pyramid), was completed in 1993. As of 2002, attendance had doubled since completion.[56]
+
+The Napoleon Courtyard and Ieoh Ming Pei's pyramid in its center, at dusk.
+
+The Louvre Palace and the pyramid (by day)
+
+The Musée du Louvre contains more than 380,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments with more than 60,600 square metres (652,000 sq ft) dedicated to the permanent collection.[1] The Louvre exhibits sculptures, objets d'art, paintings, drawings, and archaeological finds.[30] It is the world's most visited museum, averaging 15,000 visitors per day, 65 percent of whom are foreign tourists.[56][57]
+
+After architects Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti had won an international competition to create its new galleries for Islamic art, the new 3,000 sq m[58] pavilion eventually opened in 2012, consisting of ground- and lower-ground-level interior spaces topped by a golden, undulating roof (fashioned from almost 9,000 steel tubes that form an interior web) that seems to float within the neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the middle of the Louvre's south wing.[59] The galleries, which the museum had initially hoped to open by 2009, represent the first major architectural intervention at the Louvre since the addition of I.M. Pei's glass pyramid in 1989.[60]
+
+On 5 February 2015, about one hundred archaeologists, protesting against commercial private involvement to protect France's heritage, blocked Louvre's ticket desks to facilitate free access to the museum.[61] At least one announcement reading "Free entrance offered by the archeologists" has been attached to the ticket desk and a number of people visited the museum free of charge.[61]
+
+The Louvre is owned by the French government; however, since the 1990s it has become more independent.[57][62][63][64] Since 2003, the museum has been required to generate funds for projects.[63] By 2006, government funds had dipped from 75 percent of the total budget to 62 percent. Every year, the Louvre now raises as much as it gets from the state, about €122 million. The government pays for operating costs (salaries, safety and maintenance), while the rest – new wings, refurbishments, acquisitions – is up to the museum to finance.[65] A further €3 million to €5 million a year is raised by the Louvre from exhibitions that it curates for other museums, while the host museum keeps the ticket money.[65] As the Louvre became a point of interest in the book The Da Vinci Code and the 2006 film based on the book, the museum earned $2.5 million by allowing filming in its galleries.[66][67] In 2008, the French government provided $180 million of the Louvre's yearly $350 million budget; the remainder came from private contributions and ticket sales.[62]
+
+The Louvre employs a staff of 2,000 led by Director Jean-Luc Martinez,[68] who reports to the French Ministry of Culture and Communications. Martinez replaced Henri Loyrette in April 2013. Under Loyrette, who replaced Pierre Rosenberg in 2001, the Louvre has undergone policy changes that allow it to lend and borrow more works than before.[57][63] In 2006, it loaned 1,300 works, which enabled it to borrow more foreign works. From 2006 to 2009, the Louvre lent artwork to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and received a $6.9 million payment to be used for renovations.[63]
+
+In 2012, the Louvre and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced a five-year collaboration on exhibitions, publications, art conservation and educational programming.[69] The €98.5 million expansion of the Islamic Art galleries in 2012 received state funding of €31 million, as well as €17 million from the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation founded by the eponymous Saudi prince. The republic of Azerbaijan, the Emir of Kuwait, the Sultan of Oman and King Mohammed VI of Morocco donated in total €26 million. In addition, the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is supposed to provide €400 million over the course of 30 years for its use of the museum's brand.[58] Loyrette has tried to improve weak parts of the collection through income generated from loans of art and by guaranteeing that "20% of admissions receipts will be taken annually for acquisitions".[63] He has more administrative independence for the museum and achieved 90 percent of galleries to be open daily, as opposed to 80 percent previously. He oversaw the creation of extended hours and free admission on Friday nights and an increase in the acquisition budget to $36 million from $4.5 million.[62][63]
+
+On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci's death, the Louvre held the largest ever single exhibit of his work, from 24 October  2019 to 24 February  2020. The event included over a hundred items: paintings, drawings and notebooks. A full 11 of the fewer than 20 paintings that Da Vinci completed in his lifetime were displayed. Five of them are owned by the Louvre, but the Mona Lisa was not included because it is in such great demand among visitors to the Louvre museum; the work remained on display in its gallery. Salvator Mundi was also not included since the Saudi owner did not agree to move the work from its hiding place. Vitruvian Man, however, was on display, after a successful legal battle with its owner, the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice.[70][71]
+
+In 2004, French officials decided to build a satellite museum on the site of an abandoned coal pit in the former mining town of Lens to relieve the crowded Paris Louvre, increase total museum visits, and improve the industrial north's economy.[72] Six cities were considered for the project: Amiens, Arras, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Calais, Lens, and Valenciennes. In 2004, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin chose Lens to be the site of the new building, the Louvre-Lens. Japanese architects SANAA were selected to design the Lens project in 2005. Museum officials predicted that the new building, capable of receiving about 600 works of art, would attract up to 500,000 visitors a year when it opened in 2012.[72]
+
+On 8 November 2017, a direct extension of the Louvre, Louvre Abu Dhabi, opened its doors to the public in the city of Abu Dhabi. A 30-year agreement, signed by French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and Sheik Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, established the museum on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi in exchange for €832,000,000 (US$1.3 billion). The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and the engineering firm of Buro Happold, occupy 24,000 square metres (260,000 sq ft) and is covered by an iconic metallic roof designed to cast rays of light mimicking sunlight passing through date palm fronds in an oasis. France agreed to rotate between 200 and 300 artworks during a 10-year period; to provide management expertise; and to provide four temporary exhibitions a year for 15 years. The art will come from multiple museums, including the Louvre, the Georges Pompidou Centre, the Musée d'Orsay, Versailles, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Rodin, and the Musée du quai Branly.[73]
+
+In March 2018 an exhibition of dozens of artworks and relics belonging to France's Louvre Museum was opened to visitors in Tehran, as a result of an agreement between Iranian and French presidents in 2016. In the Louvre, two departments were allocated to the antiquities of the Iranian civilization, and the managers of the two departments visited Tehran. Relics belonging to Ancient Egypt, Rome and Mesopotamia as well as French royal items were showcased at the Tehran exhibition.
+
+Iran's National Museum building was designed and constructed by French architect André Godard.[74] Following its time in Tehran, the exhibition is set to be held in the Khorasan Grand Museum in Mashhad, northeastern Iran in June 2018.[75]
+
+In 2009, Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand approved a plan that would have created a storage facility 30 km (19 mi) northwest of Paris to hold objects from the Louvre and two other national museums in Paris's flood zone, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Musée d'Orsay; the plan was later scrapped. In 2013, his successor Aurélie Filippetti announced that the Louvre would move more than 250,000 works of art[76] held in a 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft) basement storage area in Liévin; the cost of the project, estimated at €60 million, will be split between the region (49%) and the Louvre (51%).[77] The Louvre will be the sole owner and manager of the store.[76] In July 2015, a team led by British firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners was selected to design the complex, which will have light-filled work spaces under one vast, green roof.[76]
+
+The Louvre is involved in controversies that surround cultural property seized under Napoleon I, as well as during World War II by the Nazis. During Nazi occupation, thousands of artworks were stolen. But after the war, 61,233 articles of more than 150,000 seized artworks returned to France and were assigned to the Louvre's Office des Biens Privés. In 1949, it entrusted 2,130 unclaimed pieces (including 1,001 paintings) to the Direction des Musées de France in order to keep them under appropriate conditions of conservation until their restitution and meanwhile classified them as MNRs (Musées Nationaux Recuperation or, in English, the National Museums of Recovered Artwork). Some 10% to 35% of the pieces are believed to come from Jewish spoliations[78] and until the identification of their rightful owners, which declined at the end of the 1960s, they are registered indefinitely on separate inventories from the museum's collections.
+
+They were exhibited in 1946 and shown all together to the public during four years (1950–1954) in order to allow rightful claimants to identify their properties, then stored or displayed, according to their interest, in several French museums including the Louvre. From 1951 to 1965, about 37 pieces were restituted. Since November 1996, the partly illustrated catalogue of 1947–1949 has been accessible online and completed. In 1997, Prime Minister Alain Juppé initiated the Mattéoli Commission, headed by Jean Mattéoli, to investigate the matter and according to the government, the Louvre is in charge of 678 pieces of artwork still unclaimed by their rightful owners.[79] During the late 1990s, the comparison of the American war archives, which had not been done before, with the French and German ones as well as two court cases which finally settled some of the heirs' rights (Gentili di Giuseppe and Rosenberg families) allowed more accurate investigations. Since 1996, the restitutions, according sometimes to less formal criteria, concerned 47 more pieces (26 paintings, with 6 from the Louvre including a then displayed Tiepolo), until the last claims of French owners and their heirs ended again in 2006.
+
+According to Serge Klarsfeld, since the now complete and constant publicity which the artworks got in 1996, the majority of the French Jewish community is nevertheless in favour of the return to the normal French civil rule of prescription acquisitive of any unclaimed good after another long period of time and consequently to their ultimate integration into the common French heritage instead of their transfer to foreign institutions like during World War II.
+
+Napoleon's campaigns acquired Italian pieces by treaties, as war reparations, and Northern European pieces as spoils as well as some antiquities excavated in Egypt, though the vast majority of the latter were seized as war reparations by the British army and are now part of collections of the British Museum. On the other hand, the Dendera zodiac is, like the Rosetta Stone, claimed by Egypt even though it was acquired in 1821, before the Egyptian Anti-export legislation of 1835. The Louvre administration has thus argued in favor of retaining this item despite requests by Egypt for its return. The museum participates too in arbitration sessions held via UNESCO's Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to Its Countries of Origin.[80] The museum consequently returned in 2009 five Egyptian fragments of frescoes (30 cm x 15 cm each) whose existence of the tomb of origin had only been brought to the authorities attention in 2008, eight to five years after their good-faith acquisition by the museum from two private collections and after the necessary respect of the procedure of déclassement from French public collections before the Commission scientifique nationale des collections des musées de France.[81]
+
+The Musée du Louvre contains more than 380,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments.[1]
+
+The department, comprising over 50,000 pieces,[82] includes artifacts from the Nile civilizations which date from 4,000 BC to the 4th century AD.[83] The collection, among the world's largest, overviews Egyptian life spanning Ancient Egypt, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, Coptic art, and the Roman, Ptolemaic, and Byzantine periods.[83]
+
+The department's origins lie in the royal collection, but it was augmented by Napoleon's 1798 expeditionary trip with Dominique Vivant, the future director of the Louvre.[82] After Jean-François Champollion translated the Rosetta Stone, Charles X decreed that an Egyptian Antiquities department be created. Champollion advised the purchase of three collections, formed by Edmé-Antoine Durand, Henry Salt and Bernardino Drovet; these additions added 7,000 works. Growth continued via acquisitions by Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Mariette, after excavations at Memphis, sent back crates of archaeological finds including The Seated Scribe.[82][85]
+
+Guarded by the Large Sphinx (c. 2000 BC), the collection is housed in more than 20 rooms. Holdings include art, papyrus scrolls, mummies, tools, clothing, jewelry, games, musical instruments, and weapons.[82][83] Pieces from the ancient period include the Gebel el-Arak Knife from 3400 BC, The Seated Scribe, and the Head of King Djedefre. Middle Kingdom art, "known for its gold work and statues", moved from realism to idealization; this is exemplified by the schist statue of Amenemhatankh and the wooden Offering Bearer. The New Kingdom and Coptic Egyptian sections are deep, but the statue of the goddess Nephthys and the limestone depiction of the goddess Hathor demonstrate New Kingdom sentiment and wealth.[83][85]
+
+Near Eastern antiquities, the second newest department, dates from 1881 and presents an overview of early Near Eastern civilization and "first settlements", before the arrival of Islam. The department is divided into three geographic areas: the Levant, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Persia (Iran). The collection's development corresponds to archaeological work such as Paul-Émile Botta's 1843 expedition to Khorsabad and the discovery of Sargon II's palace.[83][86] These finds formed the basis of the Assyrian museum, the precursor to today's department.[83]
+
+The museum contains exhibits from Sumer and the city of Akkad, with monuments such as the Prince of Lagash's Stele of the Vultures from 2450 BC and the stele erected by Naram-Sin, King of Akkad, to celebrate a victory over barbarians in the Zagros Mountains. The 2.25-metre (7.38 ft) Code of Hammurabi, discovered in 1901, displays Babylonian Laws prominently, so that no man could plead their ignorance. The 18th-century BC mural of the Investiture of Zimrilim and the 25th-century BC Statue of Ebih-Il found in the ancient city-state of Mari are also on display at the museum.
+
+The Persian portion of Louvre contains work from the archaic period, like the Funerary Head and the Persian Archers of Darius I.[83][87] This section also contains rare objects from Persepolis which were also lent to the British Museum for its Ancient Persia exhibition in 2005.[88]
+
+The Greek, Etruscan, and Roman department displays pieces from the Mediterranean Basin dating from the Neolithic to the 6th century.[89] The collection spans from the Cycladic period to the decline of the Roman Empire. This department is one of the museum's oldest; it began with appropriated royal art, some of which was acquired under Francis I.[83][90] Initially, the collection focused on marble sculptures, such as the Venus de Milo. Works such as the Apollo Belvedere arrived during the Napoleonic Wars, but these pieces were returned after Napoleon I's fall in 1815. In the 19th century, the Louvre acquired works including vases from the Durand collection, bronzes such as the Borghese Vase from the Bibliothèque nationale.[84][89]
+
+The archaic is demonstrated by jewellery and pieces such as the limestone Lady of Auxerre, from 640 BC; and the cylindrical Hera of Samos, c. 570–560 BC.[83][91] After the 4th century BC, focus on the human form increased, exemplified by the Borghese Gladiator. The Louvre holds masterpieces from the Hellenistic era, including The Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BC) and the Venus de Milo, symbolic of classical art.[90] The long Galerie Campana displays an outstanding collection of more than one thousand Greek potteries. In the galleries paralleling the Seine, much of the museum's Roman sculpture is displayed.[89] The Roman portraiture is representative of that genre; examples include the portraits of Agrippa and Annius Verus; among the bronzes is the Greek Apollo of Piombino.
+
+The Islamic art collection, the museum's newest, spans "thirteen centuries and three continents".[92] These exhibits, comprising ceramics, glass, metalware, wood, ivory, carpet, textiles, and miniatures, include more than 5,000 works and 1,000 shards.[93] Originally part of the decorative arts department, the holdings became separate in 2003. Among the works are the Pyxide d'al-Mughira, a 10th century ivory box from Andalusia; the Baptistery of Saint-Louis, an engraved brass basin from the 13th or 14th century Mamluk period; and the 10th century Shroud of Saint-Josse from Iran.[86][92] The collection contains three pages of the Shahnameh, an epic book of poems by Ferdowsi in Persian, and a Syrian metalwork named the Barberini Vase.[93] In September 2019, a new and improved Islamic art department was opened by Princess Lamia bint Majed Al-Saud. The new department exhibits 3,000 pieces were collected from Spain to India via the Arabian peninsula dating from the 7th to the 19th centuries.[94]
+
+The sculpture department comprises work created before 1850 that does not belong in the Etruscan, Greek, and Roman department.[95] The Louvre has been a repository of sculpted material since its time as a palace; however, only ancient architecture was displayed until 1824, except for Michelangelo's Dying Slave and Rebellious Slave.[96] Initially the collection included only 100 pieces, the rest of the royal sculpture collection being at Versailles. It remained small until 1847, when Léon Laborde was given control of the department. Laborde developed the medieval section and purchased the first such statues and sculptures in the collection, King Childebert and stanga door, respectively.[96] The collection was part of the Department of Antiquities but was given autonomy in 1871 under Louis Courajod, a director who organized a wider representation of French works.[95][96] In 1986, all post-1850 works were relocated to the new Musée d'Orsay. The Grand Louvre project separated the department into two exhibition spaces; the French collection is displayed in the Richelieu wing, and foreign works in the Denon wing.[95]
+
+The collection's overview of French sculpture contains Romanesque works such as the 11th-century Daniel in the Lions' Den and the 12th-century Virgin of Auvergne. In the 16th century, Renaissance influence caused French sculpture to become more restrained, as seen in Jean Goujon's bas-reliefs, and Germain Pilon's Descent from the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. The 17th and 18th centuries are represented by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's 1640–1 Bust of Cardinal Richelieu, Étienne Maurice Falconet's Woman Bathing and Amour menaçant, and François Anguier's obelisks. Neoclassical works includes Antonio Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss (1787).[96] The 18th and 19th centuries are represented by the French sculptor Alfred Barye.
+
+The Objets d'art collection spans the time from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century. The department began as a subset of the sculpture department, based on royal property and the transfer of work from the Basilique Saint-Denis, the burial ground of French monarchs that held the Coronation Sword of the Kings of France.[97][98] Among the budding collection's most prized works were pietre dure vases and bronzes. The Durand collection's 1825 acquisition added "ceramics, enamels, and stained glass", and 800 pieces were given by Pierre Révoil. The onset of Romanticism rekindled interest in Renaissance and Medieval artwork, and the Sauvageot donation expanded the department with 1,500 middle-age and faïence works. In 1862, the Campana collection added gold jewelry and maiolicas, mainly from the 15th and 16th centuries.[98][99]
+
+The works are displayed on the Richelieu Wing's first floor and in the Apollo Gallery, named by the painter Charles Le Brun, who was commissioned by Louis XIV (the Sun King) to decorate the space in a solar theme. The medieval collection contains the coronation crown of Louis XIV, Charles V's sceptre, and the 12th century porphyry vase.[100] The Renaissance art holdings include Giambologna's bronze Nessus and Deianira and the tapestry Maximillian's Hunt.[97] From later periods, highlights include Madame de Pompadour's Sèvres vase collection and Napoleon III's apartments.[97]
+
+In September 2000, the Louvre Museum dedicated the Gilbert Chagoury and Rose-Marie Chagoury Gallery to display tapestries donated by the Chagourys, including a 16th-century six-part tapestry suite, sewn with gold and silver threads representing sea divinities, which was commissioned in Paris for Colbert de Seignelay, Secretary of State for the Navy.
+
+The painting collection has more than 7,500 works[101] from the 13th century to 1848 and is managed by 12 curators who oversee the collection's display. Nearly two-thirds are by French artists, and more than 1,200 are Northern European. The Italian paintings compose most of the remnants of Francis I and Louis XIV's collections, others are unreturned artwork from the Napoleon era, and some were bought.[102][103] The collection began with Francis, who acquired works from Italian masters such as Raphael and Michelangelo[104] and brought Leonardo da Vinci to his court.[14][105] After the French Revolution, the Royal Collection formed the nucleus of the Louvre. When the d'Orsay train station was converted into the Musée d'Orsay in 1986, the collection was split, and pieces completed after the 1848 Revolution were moved to the new museum. French and Northern European works are in the Richelieu wing and Cour Carrée; Spanish and Italian paintings are on the first floor of the Denon wing.[103]
+
+Exemplifying the French School are the early Avignon Pietà of Enguerrand Quarton; the anonymous painting of King Jean le Bon (c. 1360), possibly the oldest independent portrait in Western painting to survive from the postclassical era;[106] Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV; Jacques-Louis David's The Coronation of Napoleon; Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa; and Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. Nicolas Poussin, the Le Nain brothers, Philippe de Champaigne, Le Brun, La Tour, Watteau, Fragonard, Ingres, Corot, and Delacroix are well represented.[107]
+
+Northern European works include Johannes Vermeer's The Lacemaker and The Astronomer; Caspar David Friedrich's The Tree of Crows; Rembrandt's The Supper at Emmaus, Bathsheba at Her Bath, and The Slaughtered Ox.
+
+The Italian holdings are notable, particularly the Renaissance collection. The works include Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini's Calvarys, which reflect realism and detail "meant to depict the significant events of a greater spiritual world".[108] The High Renaissance collection includes Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Virgin and Child with St. Anne, St. John the Baptist, and Madonna of the Rocks. Caravaggio is represented by The Fortune Teller and Death of the Virgin. From 16th century Venice, the Louvre displays Titian's Le Concert Champetre, The Entombment and The Crowning with Thorns.[109][110]
+
+The La Caze Collection, a bequest to the Musée du Louvre in 1869 by Louis La Caze, was the largest contribution of a person in the history of the Louvre. La Caze gave 584 paintings of his personal collection to the museum. The bequest included Antoine Watteau's Commedia dell'arte player of Pierrot ("Gilles"). In 2007, this bequest was the topic of the exhibition "1869: Watteau, Chardin... entrent au Louvre. La collection La Caze".[111]
+
+Some of the best known paintings of the museum have been digitized by the French Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France.[112]
+
+The prints and drawings department encompasses works on paper.[113] The origins of the collection were the 8,600 works in the Royal Collection (Cabinet du Roi), which were increased via state appropriation, purchases such as the 1,200 works from Fillipo Baldinucci's collection in 1806, and donations.[84][114] The department opened on 5 August 1797, with 415 pieces displayed in the Galerie d'Apollon. The collection is organized into three sections: the core Cabinet du Roi, 14,000 royal copper printing-plates, and the donations of Edmond de Rothschild, which include 40,000 prints, 3,000 drawings, and 5,000 illustrated books. The holdings are displayed in the Pavillon de Flore; due to the fragility of the paper medium, only a portion are displayed at one time.[113]
+
+The museum lies in the center of Paris on the Right Bank, in the 1st arrondissement. It was home to the former Tuileries Palace, which closed off the western end of the Louvre entrance courtyard, but was heavily damaged by fire during the Paris Commune of 1871 and later demolished. The adjacent Tuileries Gardens, created in 1564 by Catherine de' Medici, was designed in 1664 by André Le Nôtre. The gardens house the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, a contemporary art exhibition space which was used to store confiscated Jewish cultural property during the 1940 to 1944 German occupation of France.[115] Parallel to the Jeu de Paume is the Orangerie, home to the famous Water Lilies paintings by Claude Monet.
+
+The Louvre is slightly askew of the Historic Axis (Axe historique), a roughly eight-kilometre (five-mile) architectural line bisecting the city. It begins on the east in the Louvre courtyard and runs west along the Champs-Élysées. In 1871, the burning of the Tuileries Palace by the Paris Commune revealed that the Louvre was slightly askew of the Axe despite past appearances to the contrary.[116] The Louvre can be reached by the Palais Royal – Musée du Louvre Métro or the Louvre-Rivoli stations.[117]
+
+The Louvre has three entrances: the main entrance at the pyramid, an entrance from the Carrousel du Louvre underground shopping mall, and an entrance at the Porte des Lions (near the western end of the Denon wing).
+
+Under the main entrance to the museum is the Carrousel du Louvre, a shopping mall operated by Unibail-Rodamco. Among other stores, it has the first Apple Store in France, and a McDonald's restaurant, the presence of which has created controversy.[118]
+
+The use of cameras and video recorders is permitted inside, but flash photography is forbidden.
+
+Statue, plaster and reed, Ain Ghazal, Jordan, 6050–7050 BC
+
+Cycladic, a votive head, 2700–2300 BC
+
+Egyptian, stele, Priest burning incense before Ra-Horakhty-Atum, c. 900 BC
+
+The Osorkon Bust, inscribed with both Egyptian hieroglyphics and Phoenician script, 900 BC
+
+Ancient Persia, the Ibex Rhyton, 600–300 BC
+
+Ancient Greek, Athens, The Rampin Rider,
+
+Etruscan amphora, Diomedes and Polyxena, c. 540–530 BC
+
+Hellenic Near East, The Eros Medallion, c. 250–200 BC
+
+Fayum Egyptian, Fayum mummy portrait
+
+Roman, portrait of Marcus Agrippa, 25 BC
+
+Frankish, ivory, Christ between two apostles, 5th century
+
+Islamic art from Iraq, terracotta cup, 9th century
+
+Romanesque art from Maastricht, Reliquary, 11th century
+
+Romanesque architecture from France, St Michael and the Devil, 12th century
+
+Italian Renaissance painting, St Francis receiving the stigmata, Giotto, c.  1300
+
+Early Netherlandish painting, The Annunciation, Rogier van der Weyden, 1435
+
+Gothic art from France, The Pieta of Villeneuve les Avignon, Enguerrand Quarton, 1460
+
+Italian Renaissance painting, Portrait of an old man and his grandson, Ghirlandaio, 1488
+
+Flemish painting, The Money Changer and His Wife, Quentin Massys, 1514
+
+Italian Renaissance painting, Baltasar de Castiglione, Raphael, c. 1515
+
+Italian Renaissance sculpture, Dying Slave, Michelangelo, 1513–1516
+
+Venetian Mannerist painting, The Crucifixion, Paolo Veronese, c. 1550
+
+Italian Baroque painting, The Fortune Teller, Caravaggio, c. 1600
+
+English painting, Charles I at the Hunt, van Dyck, 1635
+
+Dutch Baroque, The Lacemaker, Vermeer, 1664
+
+Spanish painting, Infanta María Margarita, Velázquez, 1655
+
+French Classicism, The Shepherds of Arcadia, Poussin, c. 1640
+
+French Rococo, Diana bathing, Boucher, 1742
+
+French Classical painting, The Bather, Ingres, 1808
+
+French Romantic art, Liberty Leading the People, Delacroix, 1830
+
+André-Charles Boulle Cabinet sur piètement, 1690–1710
+
+André-Charles Boulle Cabinet sur piètement
+
+André-Charles Boulle
+
+André-Charles Boulle, 1700–1720
+
+André-Charles Boulle
+
+André-Charles Boulle 1714–1719
+

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+Thebes (Ancient Greek: Θῆβαι, Thēbai), known to the ancient Egyptians as Waset, was an ancient Egyptian city located along the Nile about 800 kilometers (500 mi) south of the Mediterranean. Its ruins lie within the modern Egyptian city of Luxor. Thebes was the main city of the fourth Upper Egyptian nome (Sceptre nome) and was the capital of Egypt for long periods during the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom eras. It was close to Nubia and the Eastern Desert, with its valuable mineral resources and trade routes. It was a cult center and the most venerated city during many periods of ancient Egyptian history. The site of Thebes includes areas on both the eastern bank of the Nile, where the temples of Karnak and Luxor stand and where the city proper was situated; and the western bank, where a necropolis of large private and royal cemeteries and funerary complexes can be found.
+
+The Egyptian name for Thebes was wꜣs.t, "City of the wꜣs", the sceptre of the pharaohs, a long staff with an animal's head and a forked base. From the end of the New Kingdom, Thebes was known in Egyptian as niwt-'imn, the "City of Amun", the chief of the Theban Triad of deities whose other members were Mut and Khonsu. This name of Thebes appears in the Bible as the "Nōʼ ʼĀmôn" (נא אמון) in the Book of Nahum[4] and also as "No" (נא) mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel[5] and Jeremiah.[6][7]
+
+Thebes is the latinised form of Ancient Greek: Θῆβαι, the hellenized form of Demotic Egyptian tꜣ jpt ("the temple"), referring to jpt-swt; the temple is now known by its Arabic name, Karnak ("fortified village"), on the northeast bank of the city. As early as Homer's Iliad,[8] the Greeks distinguished the Egyptian Thebes as "Thebes of the Hundred Gates" (Θῆβαι ἑκατόμπυλοι, Thēbai hekatómpyloi) or "Hundred-Gated Thebes", as opposed to the "Thebes of the Seven Gates" (Θῆβαι ἑπτάπυλοι, Thēbai heptápyloi) in Boeotia, Greece.[n 1]
+
+In the interpretatio graeca, Amun was rendered as Zeus Ammon. The name was therefore translated into Greek as Diospolis, "City of Zeus". To distinguish it from the numerous other cities by this name, it was known as the "Great Diospolis" (Διόσπολις Μεγάλη, Diospolis Megálē; Latin: Diospolis Magna). The Greek names came into wider use after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, when the country came to be ruled by the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty.
+
+Thebes was located along the banks of the Nile River in the middle part of Upper Egypt about 800 km south of the Delta. It was built largely on the alluvial plains of the Nile Valley which follows a great bend of the Nile. As a natural consequence, the city was laid in a northeast-southwest axis parallel to the contemporary river channel. Thebes had an area of 93 km2 (36 sq mi) which included parts of the Theban Hills in the west that culminates at the sacred 420-meter (1,378-foot) al-Qurn. In the east lies the mountainous Eastern Desert with its wadis draining into the valley. Significant among these wadis is Wadi Hammamat near Thebes. It was used as an overland trade route going to the Red Sea coast.
+
+Nearby towns in the fourth Upper Egyptian nome were Per-Hathor, Madu, Djerty, Iuny, Sumenu and Imiotru.[10]
+
+According to George Modelski, Thebes had about 40,000 inhabitants in 2000 BC (compared to 60,000 in Memphis, the largest city in the world at the time). By 1800 BC, the population of Memphis was down to about 30,000, making Thebes the largest city in Egypt at the time.[11] Historian Ian Morris has estimated that by 1500 BC, Thebes may have grown to be the largest city in the world, with a population of about 75,000, a position which it held until about 900 BC, when it was surpassed by Nimrud (among others).[12]
+
+The archaeological remains of Thebes offer a striking testimony to Egyptian civilization at its height.  The Greek poet Homer extolled the wealth of Thebes in the Iliad, Book 9 (c. 8th Century BC): "... in Egyptian Thebes the heaps of precious ingots gleam, the hundred-gated Thebes."[13][14]
+
+More than sixty annual festivals were celebrated in Thebes. The major festivals among these, according to the Edfu Geographical Text, were: the Beautiful Feast of Opet, the Khoiak (Festival), Festival of I Shemu, and Festival of II Shemu. Another popular festivity was the halloween-like Beautiful Festival of the Valley.[citation needed]
+
+Thebes was inhabited from around 3200 BC.[15] It was the eponymous capital of Waset, the fourth Upper Egyptian nome. At this time it was still a small trading post, while Memphis served as the royal residence of the Old Kingdom pharaohs. Although no buildings survive in Thebes older than portions of the Karnak temple complex that may date from the Middle Kingdom, the lower part of a statue of Pharaoh Nyuserre of the 5th Dynasty has been found in Karnak. Another statue which was dedicated by the 12th Dynasty king Senusret may have been usurped and re-used, since the statue bears a cartouche of Nyuserre on its belt. Since seven rulers of the 4th to 6th Dynasties appear on the Karnak king list, perhaps at the least there was a temple in the Theban area which dated to the Old Kingdom.
+
+By 2160 BC, a new line of pharaohs (the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties) consolidated control over Lower Egypt and northern parts of Upper Egypt from their capital in Herakleopolis Magna. A rival line (the Eleventh Dynasty), based at Thebes, ruled the remaining part of Upper Egypt. The Theban rulers were apparently descendants of the prince of Thebes, Intef the Elder. His probable grandson Intef I was the first of the family to claim in life a partial pharaonic titulary, though his power did not extend much further than the general Theban region.
+
+Finally by c. 2050 BC, Intef III's son Mentuhotep II (meaning "Montu is satisfied"), took the Herakleopolitans by force and reunited Egypt once again under one ruler, thereby starting the period now known as the Middle Kingdom. Mentuhotep II ruled for 51 years and built the first mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, which most likely served as the inspiration for the later and larger temple built next to it by Hatshepsut in the 18th Dynasty. After these events, the 11th Dynasty was short-lived, as less than twenty years had elapsed between the death of Mentuhotep II and that of Mentuhotep IV, in mysterious circumstances.
+
+During the 12th Dynasty, Amenemhat I moved the seat of power North to Itjtawy. Thebes continued to thrive as a religious center as the local god Amun was becoming increasingly prominent throughout Egypt. The oldest remains of a temple dedicated to Amun date to the reign of Senusret I.[16] Thebes was already, in the Middle Kingdom, a town of considerable size. Excavations around the Karnak temple show that the Middle Kingdom town had a layout with a grid pattern. The city was at least one kilometer long and 50 hectares in area. Remains of two palatial buildings were also detected.[17]
+
+Starting in the later part of the 12th Dynasty, a group of Canaanite people began settling in the eastern Nile Delta. They eventually founded the 14th Dynasty at Avaris in c. 1805 BC or c. 1710 BC. By doing so, the Asiatics established hegemony over the majority of the Delta region, subtracting these territories from the influence of the 13th Dynasty that had meanwhile succeeded the 12th.[18]
+
+A second wave of Asiatics called Hyksos (from Heqa-khasut, "rulers of foreign lands" as Egyptians called their leaders) immigrated into Egypt and overran the Canaanite center of power at Avaris, starting the 15th Dynasty there. The Hyksos kings gained the upper hand over Lower Egypt early into the Second Intermediate Period (1657-1549 BC).[19] When the Hyksos took Memphis during or shortly after Merneferre Ay's reign (c. 1700 BC), the rulers of the 13th Dynasty fled south to Thebes, which was restored as capital.[20]
+
+Theban princes (now known as the 16th Dynasty) stood firmly over their immediate region as the Hyksos advanced from the Delta southwards to Middle Egypt. The Thebans resisted the Hyksos' further advance by making an agreement for a peaceful concurrent rule between them. The Hyksos were able to sail upstream past Thebes to trade with the Nubians and the Thebans brought their herds to the Delta without adversaries. The status quo continued until Hyksos ruler Apophis (15th Dynasty) insulted Seqenenre Tao (17th Dynasty) of Thebes. Soon the armies of Thebes marched on the Hyksos-ruled lands. Tao died in battle and his son Kamose took charge of the campaign. After Kamose's death, his brother Ahmose I continued until he captured Avaris, the Hyksos capital. Ahmose I drove the Hyksos out of Egypt and the Levant and reclaimed the lands formerly ruled by them.[21]
+
+Ahmose I founded a new age for a unified Egypt with Thebes as its capital. The city remained as capital during most of the 18th Dynasty (New Kingdom). It also became the center for a newly established professional civil service, where there was a greater demand for scribes and the literate as the royal archives began to fill with accounts and reports.[22] At the city the favored few of 
+Nubia were reeducated with Egyptian culture, to serve as administrators of the colony.[23]
+
+With Egypt stabilized again, religion and religious centers flourished and none more so than Thebes. For instance, Amenhotep III, poured much of his vast wealth from foreign tribute into the temples of Amun.[24] The Theban god Amun became a principal state deity and every building project sought to outdo the last in proclaiming the glory of Amun and the pharaohs themselves.[25] Thutmose I (reigned 1506-1493 BC) began the first great expansion of the Karnak temple. After this, colossal enlargements of the temple became the norm throughout the New Kingdom.
+
+Queen Hatshepsut (reigned 1479-1458 BC) helped the Theban economy flourish by renewing trade networks, primarily the Red Sea trade between Thebes' Red Sea port of Al-Qusayr, Elat and the land of Punt. Her successor Thutmose III brought to Thebes a great deal of his war booty that originated from as far away as Mittani. The 18th Dynasty reached its peak during his great-grandson Amenhotep III's reign (1388–1350 BC). Aside from embellishing the temples of Amun, Amenhotep increased construction in Thebes to unprecedented levels. On the west bank, he built the enormous mortuary temple and the equally massive Malkata palace-city which fronted a 364-hectare artificial lake. In the city proper he built the Luxor temple and the Avenue of the Sphinxes leading to Karnak.
+
+For a brief period in the reign of Amenhotep III's son Akhenaten (1351–1334 BC), Thebes fell on hard times; the city was abandoned by the court, and the worship of Amun was proscribed. The capital was moved to the new city of Akhetaten (Amarna in modern Egypt), midway between Thebes and Memphis. After his death, his son Tutankhamun returned the capital to Memphis,[26] but renewed building projects at Thebes produced even more glorious temples and shrines.[24]
+
+With the 19th Dynasty the seat of government moved to the Delta. Thebes maintained its revenues and prestige through the reigns of Seti I (1290–1279 BC) and Ramesses II (1279–1213 BC), who still resided for part of every year in Thebes.[24] Ramesses II carried out extensive building projects in the city, such as statues and obelisks, the third enclosure wall of Karnak temple, additions to the Luxor temple, and the Ramesseum, his grand mortuary temple. The constructions were bankrolled by the large granaries (built around the Ramesseum) which concentrated the taxes collected from Upper Egypt;[27] and by the gold from expeditions[28] to Nubia and the Eastern Desert. During Ramesses' long 66-year reign, Egypt and Thebes reached an overwhelming state of prosperity which equaled or even surpassed the earlier peak under Amenhotep III.[citation needed]
+
+The city continued to be well kept in the early 20th Dynasty. The Great Harris Papyrus states that Ramesses III (reigned 1187–56) donated 86,486 slaves and vast estates to the temples of Amun. Ramesses III received tributes from all subject peoples including the Sea Peoples and Meshwesh Libyans. However, the whole of Egypt was experiencing financial problems, exemplified in the events at Thebes' village of Deir el-Medina. In the 25th year of his reign, workers in Deir el-Medina began striking for pay and there arose a general unrest of all social classes. Subsequently, an unsuccessful harem revolt led to the executions of many conspirators, including Theban officials and women.[29]
+
+Under the later Ramessids, Thebes began to decline as the government fell into grave economic difficulties. During the reign of Ramesses IX (1129–1111 BC), about 1114 BC, a series of investigations into the plundering of royal tombs in the necropolis of western Thebes uncovered proof of corruption in high places, following an accusation made by the mayor of the east bank against his colleague on the west. The plundered royal mummies were moved from place to place and at last deposited by the priests of Amun in a tomb-shaft in Deir el-Bahri and in the tomb of Amenhotep II. (The finding of these two hiding places in 1881 and 1898, respectively, was one of the great events of modern archaeological discovery.) Such maladministration in Thebes led to unrest.[24]
+
+Control of local affairs tended to come more and more into the hands of the High Priests of Amun, so that during the Third Intermediate Period, the High Priest of Amun exerted absolute power over the South, a counterbalance to the 21st and 22nd Dynasty kings who ruled from the Delta. Intermarriage and adoption strengthened the ties between them, daughters of the Tanite kings being installed as God’s Wife of Amun at Thebes, where they wielded greater power. Theban political influence receded only in the Late Period.[30]
+
+By around 750 BC, the Kushites (Nubians) were growing their influence over Thebes and Upper Egypt. Kush, the former colony of Egypt became an empire in itself. In 721 BC, King Shabaka of the Kushites defeated the combined forces of Osorkon IV (22nd Dynasty), Peftjauawybast (23rd Dynasty) Bakenranef (24th Dynasty) and reunified Egypt yet again. His reign saw a significant amount of building work undertaken throughout Egypt, especially at the city of Thebes, which he made the capital of his kingdom. In Karnak he erected a pink granite statue of himself wearing the Pschent (the double crown of Egypt). Taharqa accomplished many notable projects at Thebes (i.e. the Kiosk in Karnak) and Nubia before the Assyrians started to wage war against Egypt.
+
+In 667 BC, attacked by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal's army, Taharqa abandoned Lower Egypt and fled to Thebes. After his death three years later his nephew (or cousin) Tantamani seized Thebes, invaded Lower Egypt and laid siege to Memphis, but abandoned his attempts to conquer the country in 663 BC and retreated southwards.[31] The Assyrians pursued him and took Thebes, whose name was added to a long list of cities plundered and destroyed by the Assyrians, as Ashurbanipal wrote:
+
+This city, the whole of it, I conquered it with the help of Ashur and Ishtar. Silver, gold, precious stones, all the wealth of the palace, rich cloth, precious linen, great horses, supervising men and women, two obelisks of splendid electrum, weighing 2,500 talents, the doors of temples I tore from their bases and carried them off to Assyria. With this weighty booty I left Thebes. Against Egypt and Kush I have lifted my spear and shown my power. With full hands I have returned to Nineveh, in good health.[32]
+
+Thebes never regained its former political significance, but it remained an important religious centre. Assyrians installed Psamtik I (664-610 BC), who ascended to Thebes in 656 BC and brought about the adoption of his own daughter, Nitocris I, as heiress to God's Wife of Amun there. In 525 BC, Persian Cambyses II invaded Egypt and became pharaoh, subordinating the kingdom as a satrapy to the greater Achaemenid Empire.[33]
+
+The good relationship of the Thebans with the central power in the North ended when the native Egyptian pharaohs were finally replaced by Greeks, led by Alexander the Great. He visited Thebes during a celebration of the Opet Festival. In spite of his welcoming visit, Thebes became a center for dissent. Towards the end of the third century BC, Hugronaphor (Horwennefer), possibly of Nubian origin, led a revolt against the Ptolemies in Upper Egypt. His successor, Ankhmakis, held large parts of Upper Egypt until 185 BC. This revolt was supported by the Theban priesthood. After the suppression of the revolt in 185 BC, Ptolemy V, in need of the support of the priesthood, forgave them.
+
+Half a century later the Thebans rose again, elevating a certain Harsiesi to the throne in 132 BC. Harsiesi, having helped himself to the funds of the royal bank at Thebes, fled the following year. In 91 BC, another revolt broke out. In the following years, Thebes was subdued, and the city turned into rubble.[34]
+
+During the Roman occupation (30 BC-349 AD), the remaining communities clustered around the pylon of the Luxor temple. Thebes became part of the Roman province of Thebais, which later split into Thebais Superior, centered at the city, and Thebais Inferior, centered at Ptolemais Hermiou. A Roman legion was headquartered in Luxor temple at the time of Roman campaigns in Nubia.[35] Building did not come to an abrupt stop, but the city continued to decline. In the first century AD, Strabo described Thebes as having been relegated to a mere village.[24]
+
+Eastern Thebes:
+
+Western Thebes:
+
+In 1979, the ruins of ancient Thebes were classified by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage site. The two great temples—Luxor Temple and Karnak—and the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens are among the great achievements of ancient Egypt.
+
+From 25 October 2018 to 27 January 2019, the Museum of Grenoble organizes with the support of the Louvre and the British Museum, a three-month exhibition on the city of Thebes and the role of women in the city at that time.[36]
+
+Thebes, Greece – the namesake
+

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+Coordinates: 8°50′18″S 13°14′04″E / 8.83833°S 13.23444°E / -8.83833; 13.23444
+
+Luanda (/luˈændə, -ˈɑːn-/),[3] is the capital and largest city in Angola. It is Angola's primary port, and its major industrial, cultural and urban centre. Located on Angola's northern Atlantic coast, Luanda is Angola's administrative centre, its chief seaport, and also the capital of the Luanda Province. Luanda and its metropolitan area is the most populous Portuguese-speaking capital city in the world, with over 8 million inhabitants in 2019 (a third of Angola's population).
+
+Among the oldest colonial cities of Africa, it was founded in January 1576 as São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda by Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais. The city served as the centre of the slave trade to Brazil before its prohibition. At the start of the Angolan Civil War in 1975, most of the white Portuguese left as refugees,[4] principally for Portugal. Luanda's population increased greatly from refugees fleeing the war, but its infrastructure was inadequate to handle the increase. This also caused the exacerbation of slums, or musseques, around Luanda. The city is undergoing a major reconstruction,[5] with many large developments taking place that will alter its cityscape significantly.
+
+The industries present in the city include the processing of agricultural products, beverage production, textile, cement, newly car assembly plants, construction materials, plastics, metallurgy, cigarettes and shoes. The city is also notable as an economic centre for oil,[6][7] and a refinery is located in the city. Luanda has been considered one of the most expensive cities in the world for expatriates.[8][9] The inhabitants of Luanda are mostly members of the ethnic group of the Ambundu, but in recent times there has been an increase of the number of the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu. There exists a European population, consisting mainly of Portuguese. Luanda was the main host city for the matches of the 2010 African Cup of Nations.
+
+Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda on 25 January 1576 as "São Paulo da Assumpção de Loanda", with one hundred families of settlers and four hundred soldiers. In 1618, the Portuguese built the fortress called Fortaleza São Pedro da Barra, and they subsequently built two more: Fortaleza de São Miguel (1634) and Forte de São Francisco do Penedo (1765-6). Of these, the Fortaleza de São Miguel is the best preserved.[10]
+
+Luanda was Portugal's bridgehead from 1627, except during the Dutch rule of Luanda, from 1640 to 1648, as Fort Aardenburgh. The city served as the centre of slave trade to Brazil from circa 1550 to 1836.[11] The slave trade was conducted mostly with the Portuguese colony of Brazil; Brazilian ships were the most numerous in the port of Luanda. This slave trade also involved local merchants and warriors who profited from the trade.[12] During this period, no large scale territorial conquest was intended by the Portuguese; only a few minor settlements were established in the immediate hinterland of Luanda, some on the last stretch of the Kwanza River.
+
+In the 17th century, the Imbangala became the main rivals of the Mbundu in supplying slaves to the Luanda market. In the 1750s, between 5,000 and 10,000 slaves were annually sold.[13] By this time, Angola, a Portuguese colony, was in fact like a colony of Brazil, paradoxically another Portuguese colony. A strong degree of Brazilian influence was noted in Luanda until the Independence of Brazil in 1822.
+
+In the 19th century, still under Portuguese rule, Luanda experienced a major economic revolution. The slave trade was abolished in 1836, and in 1844, Angola's ports were opened to foreign shipping. By 1850, Luanda was one of the greatest and most developed Portuguese cities in the vast Portuguese Empire outside Continental Portugal, full of trading companies, exporting (together with Benguela) palm and peanut oil, wax, copal, timber, ivory, cotton, coffee, and cocoa, among many other products. Maize, tobacco, dried meat, and cassava flour are also produced locally. The Angolan bourgeoisie was born by this time.[14]
+
+In 1889, Governor Brito Capelo opened the gates of an aqueduct which supplied the city with water, a formerly scarce resource, laying the foundation for major growth.
+
+Throughout Portugal's dictatorship, known as the Estado Novo, Luanda grew from a town of 61,208 with 14.6% of those inhabitants being white in 1940, to a wealthy cosmopolitan major city of 475,328 in 1970 with 124,814 Europeans (26.3%) and around 50,000 mixed race inhabitants.[15][16]
+
+Like most of Portuguese Angola, the cosmopolitan[17] city of Luanda was not affected by the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974); economic growth and development in the entire region reached record highs during this period. In 1972, a report called Luanda the "Paris of Africa".
+
+By the time of Angolan independence in 1975, Luanda was a modern city. The majority of its population was African, but it was dominated by a strong minority of white Portuguese origin.[citation needed]
+
+After the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon on April 25, 1974, with the advent of independence and the start of the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), most of the white Portuguese Luandans left as refugees,[4] principally for Portugal, with many travelling overland to South Africa. There was an immediate crisis, however, as the local African population lacked the skills and knowledge needed to run the city and maintain its well-developed infrastructure.
+
+The large numbers of skilled technicians among the force of Cuban soldiers sent in to support the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government in the Angolan Civil War were able to make a valuable contribution to restoring and maintaining basic services in the city.
+
+In the following years, however, slums called musseques — which had existed for decades —  began to grow out of proportion and stretched several kilometres beyond Luanda's former city limits as a result of the decades-long civil war, and because of the rise of deep social inequalities due to large-scale migration of civil war refugees from other Angolan regions. For decades, Luanda's facilities were not adequately expanded to handle this huge increase in the city's population.
+
+After 2002, with the end of the civil war and high economic growth rates fuelled by the wealth provided by the increasing oil and diamond production, major reconstruction started.[18]
+
+Luanda has also become one of the world's most expensive cities.[19]
+
+The central government supposedly allocates funds to all regions of the country, but the capital region receives the bulk of these funds. Since the end of the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), stability has been widespread in the country, and major reconstruction has been going on since 2002 in those parts of the country that were damaged during the civil war.
+
+Luanda has been of major concern because its population had multiplied and had far outgrown the capacity of the city, especially because much of its infrastructure (water, electricity, roads etc.) had become obsolete and degraded.
+
+Luanda has been undergoing major road reconstruction in the 21st century, and new highways are planned to improve connections to Cacuaco, Viana, Samba, and the new airport.[20]
+
+Major social housing is also being constructed to house those who reside in slums, which dominate the landscape of Luanda. A large Chinese firm has been given a contract to construct the majority of replacement housing in Luanda.[21] The Angolan minister of health recently stated poverty in Angola will be overcome by an increase in jobs and the housing of every citizen.[22]
+
+Luanda is divided into two parts, the Baixa de Luanda (lower Luanda, the old city) and the Cidade Alta (upper city or the new part). The Baixa de Luanda is situated next to the port, and has narrow streets and old colonial buildings.[23] However, new constructions have by now covered large areas beyond these traditional limits, and a number of previously independent nuclei — like Viana — were incorporated into the city.
+
+Until 2011, the former Luanda Province comprised what now forms five municipalities. In 2011 the Province was enlarged by the addition of two additional municipalities transferred from Bengo Province, namely Icolo e Bengo, and Quiçama. Excluding these additions, the five municipalities comprise Greater Luanda:
+
+Two new municipalities have been created within Greater Luanda since 2017: Talatona and Kilamba-Kiaxi
+
+The city of Luanda is divided in six urban districts: Ingombota, Angola Quiluanje, Maianga, Rangel, Samba and Sambizanga.
+
+In Samba and Sambizanga, more high-rise developments are to be built. The capital Luanda is growing constantly - and in addition, increasingly beyond the official city limits and even provincial boundaries.
+
+Luanda is the seat of a Roman Catholic archbishop. It is also the location of most of Angola's educational institutions, including the private Catholic University of Angola and the public University of Agostinho Neto. It is also the home of the colonial Governor's Palace and the Estádio da Cidadela (the "Citadel Stadium"), Angola's main stadium, with a total seating capacity of 60,000.[24]
+
+Luanda has a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen climate classification: BSh). The climate is warm to hot but surprisingly dry, owing to the cool Benguela Current, which prevents moisture from easily condensing into rain. Frequent fog prevents temperatures from falling at night even during the completely dry months from May to October. Luanda has an annual rainfall of 405 millimetres (15.9 in), but the variability is among the highest in the world, with a co-efficient of variation above 40 percent.[25] Observed records since 1858 range from 55 millimetres (2.2 in) in 1958 to 851 millimetres (33.5 in) in 1916. The short rainy season in March and April depends on a northerly counter current bringing moisture to the city: it has been shown clearly that weakness in the Benguela Current can increase rainfall about sixfold compared with years when that current is strong.[26]
+
+The inhabitants of Luanda are primarily members of African ethnic groups, mainly Ambundu, Ovimbundu, and Bakongo. The official and the most widely used language is Portuguese, although several Bantu languages are also used, chiefly Kimbundu, Umbundu, and Kikongo.
+
+The population of Luanda has grown dramatically in recent years, due in large part to war-time migration to the city, which is safe compared to the rest of the country.[30]  Luanda, however, in 2006 saw an increase in violent crime, particularly in the shanty towns that surround the colonial urban core.[31]
+
+There is a sizable minority population of European origin, especially Portuguese (about 260,000), as well as Brazilians. In recent years, mainly since the mid-2000s, immigration from Portugal has increased due to greater opportunities present in Angola's booming economy.[32][33] There is a sprinkling of immigrants from other African countries as well, including a small expatriate South African community. A small number of people of Luanda are of mixed race — European/Portuguese and native African. Over the last decades, a significant Chinese community has formed, as has a much smaller Vietnamese community.
+
+Among the places of worship, they are predominantly Christian churches and temples:[34]
+
+As the economic and political center of Angola, Luanda is similarly the epicenter of Angolan culture. The city is home to numerous cultural institutions, including the Sindika Dokolo Foundation.
+
+The city hosts the annual Luanda International Jazz Festival, since 2009.
+
+The city is home to numerous museums, including:
+
+Other monuments in the city include:
+
+Around one-third of Angolans live in Luanda, 53% of whom live in poverty. Living conditions in Luanda are poor for most of the people, with essential services such as safe drinking water and electricity still in short supply, and severe shortcomings in traffic conditions.[35] On the other hand, luxury constructions for the benefit of the wealthy minority are booming.
+
+Luanda is one of the world's most expensive cities for resident foreigners.[36]
+
+New import tariffs imposed in March 2014 made Luanda even more expensive. As an example, a half-litre tub of vanilla ice-cream at the supermarket was reported to cost US$31. The higher import tariffs applied to hundreds of items, from garlic to cars. The stated aim was to try to diversify the heavily oil-dependent economy and nurture farming and industry, sectors which have remained weak. These tariffs have caused much hardship in a country where the average salary was US$260 per month in 2010, the latest year for which data was available. However, the average salary in the booming oil industry was over 20 times higher at US$5,400 per month.[37]
+
+Manufacturing includes processed foods, beverages, textiles, cement and other building materials, plastic products, metalware, cigarettes, and shoes/clothes. Petroleum (found in nearby off-shore deposits) is refined in the city, although this facility was repeatedly damaged during the Angolan Civil War of 1975–2002. Luanda has an excellent natural harbour; the chief exports are coffee, cotton, sugar, diamonds, iron, and salt.
+
+The city also has a thriving building industry, an effect of the nationwide economic boom experienced since 2002, when political stability returned with the end of the civil war. Economic growth is largely supported by oil extraction activities, although great diversification is taking place. Large investment (domestic and international), along with strong economic growth, has dramatically increased construction of all economic sectors in the city of Luanda.[38] In 2007, the first modern shopping mall in Angola was established in the city at Belas Shopping mall.[39]
+
+Luanda is the starting point of the Luanda railway that goes due east to Malanje. The civil war left the railway non-functional, but the railway has been restored up to Dondo and Malanje.[40]
+
+The main airport of Luanda is Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, which is the largest in the country. A new international airport, Angola International Airport is under construction southeast of the city, a few kilometres from Viana, which was expected to be opened in 2011.[41] However, as the Angolan government did not continue to make the payments due to the Chinese enterprise in charge of the construction, the firm suspended its work in 2010.
+
+The Port of Luanda serves as the largest port of Angola and is one of the busiest ports in Africa.[42]. Major expansion of this port is also taking place.[43] In 2014, a new port is being developed at Dande, about 30 km to the north.
+
+Luanda's roads are in a poor state of repair, but are undergoing an extensive reconstruction process by the government in order to relieve traffic congestion in the city. Major road repairs can be found taking place in nearly every neighbourhood, including a major 6-lane highway connected Luanda to Viana.[45]
+
+Public transit is provided by the suburban services of the Luanda Railway, by the public company TCUL, and by a large fleet of privately owned collective taxis as white-blue painted minibuses called Candongueiro. Candongueiros are usually Toyota Hiace vans, that are built to carry 12 people, although the candongueiros usually carry at least 15 people. They charge from 100 to 200 kwanzas per trip. They are known to disobey traffic rules, for example not stopping at signs and driving over pavements and aisles.
+
+In 2019, the Luanda Light Rail network with an estimated cost of US $3 billion was announced to begin construction in 2020.[46]
+
+International schools:
+
+Universities:
+
+In 2013 Luanda together with Namibe, today's Moçâmedes, hosted the 2013 FIRS Men's Roller Hockey World Cup, the first time that a World Cup of roller hockey was held in Africa. The city is home to the Desportivo do Bengo football club.
+
+Luanda is twinned with:

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+Lucerne (/luːˈsɜːrn/ loo-SURN, French: [lysɛʁn]; German: Luzern [luˈtsɛrn] (listen); Lucerne German: Lozärn; Italian: Lucerna [luˈtʃɛrna]; Romansh: Lucerna [luˈtsɛrnɐ] (listen)) is a city in central Switzerland, in the German-speaking portion of the country. Lucerne is the capital of the canton of Lucerne and part of the district of the same name. With a population of approximately 82,000 people,[3] Lucerne is the most populous town in Central Switzerland, and a nexus of economics, transportation, culture, and media in the region. The city's urban area consists of 19 municipalities and towns with an overall population of about 220,000 people.[4]
+
+Owing to its location on the shores of Lake Lucerne (German: Vierwaldstättersee) and its outflow, the river Reuss, within sight of the mounts Pilatus and Rigi in the Swiss Alps, Lucerne has long been a destination for tourists. One of the city's famous landmarks is the Chapel Bridge (German: Kapellbrücke), a wooden bridge first erected in the 14th century.
+
+The official language of Lucerne is (the Swiss variety of Standard) German, but the main spoken language is the local variant of the Alemannic Swiss German dialect.
+
+After the fall of the Roman Empire beginning in the 6th century, Germanic Alemannic peoples increased their influence on this area of present-day Switzerland.
+
+Around 750 the Benedictine Monastery of St. Leodegar was founded, which was later acquired by Murbach Abbey in Alsace in the middle of the 9th century, and by this time the area had become known as Luciaria.[5]
+
+The origin of the name is uncertain, it is possibly derived from the Latin name of the pike, lucius, thus designating a pike fishing spot in the river Reuss. Derivation from the theonym Lugus has been suggested but is phonetically implausible. In any case, the name was associated by popular etymology with Latin lucerna "lantern" from an early time.[6]
+
+In 1178 Lucerne acquired its independence from the jurisdiction of Murbach Abbey, and the founding of the city proper probably occurred that same year. The city gained importance as a strategically located gateway for the growing commerce from the Gotthard trade route.
+
+By 1290, Lucerne had become a self-sufficient city of reasonable size with about 3000 inhabitants. About this time King Rudolph I von Habsburg gained authority over the Monastery of St. Leodegar and its lands, including Lucerne. The populace was not content with the increasing Habsburg influence, and Lucerne allied with neighboring towns to seek independence from their rule. Along with Lucerne, the three other forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden formed the "eternal" Swiss Confederacy, known as the Eidgenossenschaft, on November 7, 1332.
+
+Later the cities of Zürich, Zug and Bern joined the alliance. With the help of these additions, the rule of Austria over the area came to an end. The issue was settled by Lucerne's victory over the Habsburgs in the Battle of Sempach in 1386. For Lucerne this victory ignited an era of expansion. The city shortly granted many rights to itself, rights which had been withheld by the Habsburgs until then. By this time the borders of Lucerne were approximately those of today.
+
+In 1415 Lucerne gained Reichsfreiheit from Emperor Sigismund and became a strong member of the Swiss confederacy. The city developed its infrastructure, raised taxes, and appointed its own local officials. The city's population of 3000 dropped about 40% due to the Black Plague and several wars around 1350.
+
+In 1419 town records show the first witch trial against a male person.
+
+Among the growing towns of the confederacy, Lucerne was especially popular in attracting new residents. Remaining predominantly Catholic, Lucerne hosted its own annual passion play from 1453 to 1616, a two-day-long play of 12 hours performance per day.[7] As the confederacy broke up during the Reformation, after 1520, most nearby cities became Protestant, but Lucerne remained Catholic. After the victory of the Catholics over the Protestants in the Battle at Kappel in 1531, the Catholic towns dominated the confederacy. It was during this period that Jesuits first came to Lucerne in 1567, with their arrival given considerable backing by Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan.[8] The region, though, was destined to be dominated by Protestant cities such as Zürich, Bern and Basel, which defeated the Catholic forces in the 1712 Toggenburg War. The former prominent position of Lucerne in the confederacy was lost forever. In the 16th and 17th centuries, wars and epidemics became steadily less frequent and as a result the population of the country increased strongly.
+
+Lucerne was besieged by a peasant army and quickly signed a peace treaty with the rebels in the Swiss peasant war of 1653.
+
+In 1798, nine years after the beginning of the French Revolution, the French army marched into Switzerland. The old confederacy collapsed and the government became democratic. The industrial revolution hit Lucerne rather late, and by 1860 only 1.7% of the population worked in industry, which was about a quarter of the national average at that time. Agriculture, which employed about 40% of the workers, was the main form of economic output in the canton. Nevertheless, industry was attracted to the city from areas around Lucerne. From 1850 to 1913, the population quadrupled and the flow of settlers increased. In 1856 trains first linked the city to Olten and Basel, then Zug and Zürich in 1864 and finally to the south in 1897.
+
+The 1804 play William Tell by Friedrich Schiller did much to establish the reputation of Lucerne and its environs.[9] Schiller himself had not been to Lucerne, but was inspired to write the play by his wife Lotte and his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had both personally visited the city and its surrounding canton. Goethe had lodged in the Hirschenplatz on his route to Italy in 1779.[10]
+
+It was during the latter part of the 19th century that Lucerne became a popular destination for artists, royalty and others to escape to. The German composer Richard Wagner established a residence at Tribschen in 1866 from which he lived and worked.[11] The city was then boosted by a visit by Queen Victoria to the city in 1868, during which she went sightseeing at the Kapellbrücke and Lion Monument and relished speaking with local people in her native German.[12] The American writer Mark Twain further popularised the city and its environs in his travel writings after visiting twice, in 1878 and 1897.[13] In 1892 Swiss poet and future Nobel Prize laureate Carl Spitteler also established himself in Lucerne, living there until his death in 1924.[14]
+
+Lucerne's status as a fashionable destination led to it becoming one of the first centres of modern-style tourism.[15] Some of the city's most recognisable buildings are hotels from this period, such as the Schweizerhof Hotel (1845), Grand Hotel National (1870), and Château Gütsch (1879).[16][17] It was at the National that Swiss hotelier César Ritz would establish himself as manager between 1878 and 1888.
+
+In August 1993, the Kapellbrücke in the centre of the city suffered from a great fire which destroyed two thirds of its interior paintings.[18] The bridge was subsequently reconstructed and reopened to the public in April 1994, after a total of CHF 3.4 million was spent on its repair.[19]
+
+On June 17, 2007, voters of the city of Lucerne and the adjacent town of Littau agreed to a merger in a simultaneous referendum. This took effect on January 1, 2010.[20] The new city, still called Lucerne, has a population of around 80,000 people, making it the seventh-largest city in Switzerland. The results of this referendum are expected to pave the way for negotiations with other nearby cities and towns in an effort to create a unified city-region, based on the results of a study.[21]
+
+Lucerne is located at the outfall of Lake Lucerne into the river Reuss, which flows from south-east to north-west. The city occupies both banks of the river and the lowest reach of the lake, with the city centre straddling the river immediately downstream of the outfall. The city's suburbs climb the hills to the north-east and south-west, and stretch out along the river and lake banks, whilst the recently added area of Littau is to the north-west.[22]
+
+Besides this contiguous city area, the municipality also includes an exclave on the south shore of Lake Lucerne some 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) away, comprising the northern slopes of the Bürgenstock. This section of the municipality is entirely surrounded by the lake and by land of the canton of Nidwalden. It does not contain any significant settlements, but the summit of the Bürgenstock is the highest point of the municipality.[22]
+
+The municipality has an area of 29.1 square kilometers (11.2 sq mi). Of this area and as of 2009[update], 28.0% is used for agricultural purposes, while 22.3% is forested. Of the rest of the land, 47.6% is settled (buildings or roads) and the remainder (2.1%) is non-productive (rivers, glaciers or mountains).[23]
+
+Between 1961 and 1990 Lucerne had an average of 138.1 days of rain per year and on average received 1,171 mm (46.1 in) of precipitation. The wettest month was June during which time Lucerne received an average of 153 mm (6.0 in) of rainfall. During this month there was rainfall for an average of 14.2 days. The driest month of the year was February with an average of 61 mm (2.4 in) of precipitation over 10.2 days.[24] Climate in this area has mild differences between highs and lows, and there is adequate rainfall year-round. The Köppen Climate Classification subtype for this climate is "Cfb" (Marine West Coast Climate/Oceanic climate).[25]
+
+The City Council (Stadtrat) constitutes the executive government of the city of Lucerne and operates as a collegiate authority. It is composed of five councilors (German: Stadtrat/-rätin), each presiding over a directorate (Direktion) comprising several departments and bureaus. The president of the executive department acts as mayor (Stadtpräsident). In the mandate period (Legislatur) September 2016 – August 2020 the City Council is presided by Stadtpräsident Beat Züsli. Departmental tasks, coordination measures and implementation of laws decreed by the Grand City Council are carried by the City Council. The regular election of the City Council by any inhabitant valid to vote is held every four years. Any resident of Lucerne allowed to vote can be elected as a member of the City Council. The delegates are selected by means of a system of Majorz. The mayor is elected as such as well by public election while the heads of the other directorates are assigned by the collegiate.[27]
+
+As of September 2016[update], Luzern's City Council is made up of one representative of the SP (Social Democratic Party, who is also the mayor), and one each of CVP (Christian Democratic Party), GPS (Green Party), FDP (FDP.The Liberals), and glp (Green Liberal Party). The last regular election was held on 1 May/5 June 2016.[27]
+
+Toni Göpfert (FDP) is Town Chronicler (Stadtschreiber) since 1990.
+
+The Grosse Stadtrat of Luzern for the mandate period of 2016-2020
+
+The Grand City Council (Grosser Stadtrat) holds legislative power. It is made up of 48 members, with elections held every four years. The Grand City Council decrees regulations and by-laws that are executed by the City Council and the administration. The delegates are selected by means of a system of proportional representation.
+
+The sessions of the Grand City Council are public. Unlike members of the City Council, members of the Grand City Council are not politicians by profession, and they are paid a fee based on their attendance. Any resident of Luzern allowed to vote can be elected as a member of the Grand City Council. The parliament holds its meetings in the Rathaus (Town Hall) am Kornmarkt.[28]
+
+The last regular election of the Grand City Council was held on 1 May 2016 for the mandate period (German: Legislatur) from September 2016 to August 2020. Currently the Grand City Council consist of 13 members of the Social Democratic Party (SP/PS) and one of its junior section, the JUSO, 9 The Liberals (FDP/PLR), 7 Christian Democratic People's Party (CVP/PDC), 7 Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC), 6 Green Party (GPS/PES) and one of its junior section, the jg of Luzern, and 4 Green Liberal Party (GLP/PVL).[28]
+
+In the 2019 federal election for the Swiss National Council the most popular party was the PS which received 25.0% (-0.7) of the vote. The next five most popular parties were the Green Party (20.8%, +7.4), the SVP (15.0%, -4.6), the CVP (14.1%, 0), FDP (13.0%, -2.5), the glp (10.5%, +1.8).[29] In the federal election a total of 25,836 votes were cast, and the voter turnout was 49.5%.[30]
+
+In the 2015 election for the Swiss National Council the most popular party was the SP which received 25.8% of the vote. The next five most popular parties were the SVP (19.5%), the FDP (15.4%), the CVP (14.1%), the GPS (13.3%), and the GLP (8.9%). In the federal election, a total of 26,521 voters were cast, and the voter turnout was 49.48%.[31]
+
+Lucerne is twinned with the following towns:[32]
+
+Lucerne has a population (as of 31 December 2018) of 81,691.[36] As of 2013[update], 19,264 or 25.0% of the population was made up of foreign nationals, of which 19.9% are from Europe, 2.8% from Asia, 1.2% from Africa and 1.0% from America.[35] Over the last 10 years the population has grown at a rate of 1.2%. Most of the population (as of 2010[update]) speak German (87%), with Italian, as well as Serbo-Croatian and English with 5% being second most common languages, followed by French and Albanian with 3%, and Portuguese and Spanish with 2% each.[37]
+
+The age distribution in Lucerne is (as of 2013[update]); 12,916 people or 15.7% of the population is 0–19 years old. 26,381 people or 33.8% are 20–39 years old, and 25,863 people or 32.1% are 40–64 years old. The senior population distribution is 10,530 people or 13.1% are 65–79 years old, 4,208 or 5.2% are 80–89 years old and 900 people or 1.1% of the population are 90+ years old.[38]
+
+In Lucerne about 73.6% of the population (between age 25–64) have completed either non-mandatory upper secondary education or additional higher education (either university or a Fachhochschule).
+
+As of 2000[update] there are 30,586 households, of which 15,452 households (or about 50.5%) contain only a single individual. 853 or about 2.8% are large households, with at least five members.[39] As of 2000[update] there were 5,707 inhabited buildings in the municipality, of which 4,050 were built only as housing, and 1,657 were mixed use buildings. There were 1,152 single family homes, 348 double family homes, and 2,550 multi-family homes in the municipality. Most homes were either two (787) or three (1,468) story structures. There were only 74 single story buildings and 1,721 four or more story buildings.[39]
+
+The historical population of Lucerne is given in the following table:
+
+The city grew up around Sankt Leodegar Abbey, founded in AD 840, and remained strongly Roman Catholic into the 21st century. By 1850, 96.9% of the population was Catholic, in 1900 it was 81.9% and in 1950 it was still 72.3%. In the 2000 census[update] the religious membership of Lucerne was: 35,682 (60%) Roman Catholic, 9,227 (15.5%) Protestant, with an additional 1,979 (3.33%) who were of some other Christian denominations; 1,824 individuals (3.07% of the population) Muslim; 196 individuals (0.33% of the population) Jewish. Of the remainder, 1,073 (1.8%) individuals were another religion; 6,310 (10.61%) stated they do not belong to any organized religion; and 3,205 (5.39%) did not answer the question.[39]
+
+As of  2012[update], there were a total of 77,641 people employed in the municipality. Of these, a total of 166 people worked in 53 businesses in the primary economic sector. The secondary sector employed 7,326 workers in 666 separate businesses. Finally, the tertiary sector provided 70,149 jobs in 6,929 businesses. In 2013 a total of 11.0% of the population received social assistance.[40] As of 2000[update] 51.7% of the population of the municipality were employed in some capacity. At the same time, women made up 47.9% of the workforce.[39]
+
+Lucerne is home to a number of major Swiss companies, including Schindler Group, Chronoswiss, Emmi, EF Education First and the Luzerner Kantonalbank. Suva, one of Switzerland's oldest accident insurance companies, is also based in Lucerne, as is the University of Lucerne, the youngest of Switzerland's traditional universities.
+
+Thanks to its continuous tax-cutting policies, Lucerne has become Switzerland's most business-friendly canton. As of 2012[update] Lucerne offers Switzerland's lowest corporate tax rate at cantonal level.[41]
+
+Furthermore, Lucerne also offers very moderate personal income tax rates. In a recent published study of BAK Basel Economics taxation index 2012, Lucerne made it to the 4th place with an only marginally 2% higher tax rate compared to the top canton in this comparison.[42]
+
+Since the city straddles the Reuss where it drains the lake, it has a number of bridges. The most famous is the Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke), a 204 m (669 ft) long wooden covered bridge originally built in 1333, the oldest covered bridge in Europe, although much of it had to be replaced after a fire on 18 August 1993, allegedly caused by a discarded cigarette. Partway across, the bridge runs by the octagonal Water Tower (Wasserturm), a fortification from the 13th century. Inside the bridge are a series of paintings from the 17th century depicting events from Lucerne's history. The Bridge with its Tower is the city's most famous landmark.
+
+Downriver, between the Kasernenplatz and the Mühlenplatz, the Spreuer Bridge (Spreuerbrücke or Mühlenbrücke, Mill Bridge) zigzags across the Reuss. Constructed in 1408, it features a series of medieval-style 17th century plague paintings by Kaspar Meglinger (de) titled Dance of Death (Totentanzzyklus). The bridge has a small chapel in the middle that was added in 1568.
+
+Old Town Lucerne is mainly located just north of the Reuss, and still has several fine half-timber structures with painted fronts. Remnants of the old town walls exist on the hill above Lucerne, complete with eight tall watch towers. An additional gated tower sits at the base of the hill on the banks of the Reuss.
+
+The twin needle towers of the Church of St. Leodegar, which was named after the city's patron saint, sit on a small hill just above the lake front. Originally built in 735, the present structure was erected in 1633 in the late Renaissance style. However, the towers are surviving remnants of an earlier structure. The interior is richly decorated. The church is popularly called the Hofkirche (in German) and is known locally as the Hofchile (in Swiss-German).
+
+Bertel Thorvaldsen's famous carving of a dying lion (the Lion Monument, or Löwendenkmal) is found in a small park just off the Löwenplatz. The carving commemorates the hundreds of Swiss Guards of who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution, when an armed mob stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris.
+
+The Swiss Museum of Transport is a large and comprehensive museum exhibiting all forms of transport, including locomotives, automobiles, ships, and aircraft. It is to be found beside the lake in the northern-eastern section of the city.
+
+The Culture and Convention Center (KKL) beside the lake in the center of the city was designed by Jean Nouvel. The center has one of the world's leading concert halls, with acoustics by Russell Johnson.
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+The Richard Wagner Museum is found on the lake at Tribschen and is dedicated to the composer Richard Wagner.[43] Wagner lived in Lucerne from 1866 to 1872 and his former villa now hosts the museum dedicated to him.[11]
+
+Since plans for the new culture and convention centre arose in the late 1980s, Lucerne has found a balance between the so-called established culture and alternative culture. A consensus was reached that culminated in a culture compromise (Kulturkompromiss). The established culture comprises the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre (KKL), the city theater (Luzerner Theater) and, in a broader sense, smaller establishments such as the Kleintheater, founded by comedian Emil Steinberger, a Lucerne native, or Stadtkeller, a music restaurant in the city's old town. KKL houses a concert hall as well as the Museum of Art Lucerne (Kunstmuseum Luzern).
+
+Alternative culture took place mostly on the premises of a former tube factory, which became known as Boa. Other localities for alternative culture have since emerged in the same inner city area as Boa. Initially, Boa staged various plays, but concerts became more and more common; this new use of the building clashed with the development of apartment buildings on nearby lots of land. Due to possible noise pollution, Boa was closed and a replacement in a less heavily inhabited area is currently under construction. Critics claimed though that the new establishment would not meet the requirements for an alternative culture.
+
+Südpol is a center for performing arts in Lucerne presenting music-, dance- and theatre-events. The house at the foot of Pilatus opened in November 2008.
+
+Lucerne is home to the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, a category A symphonic orchestra, and to the 21st Century Symphony Orchestra, and they both hold most of their performances in the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre.
+
+Lucerne is also home to Keramikkonzerte, a series of classical chamber music concerts held throughout each year,[44] as well as Zaubersee, a festival dedicated to Russian classical music.[45]
+
+Every year, towards the end of winter, Fasnacht (Carnival) breaks out in the streets, alleyways and squares of the old town. This is a glittering outdoor party, where chaos and merriness reign and nothing is as it normally is. Strange characters in fantastic masks and costumes make their way through the alleyways, while Guggenmusiken (carnival bands) blow their instruments in joyful cacophony and thousands of bizarrely clad people sing and dance away the winter. The Lucerner Fasnacht, based on religious, Catholic backgrounds, starts every year on the Thursday before Aschermittwoch (Ash Wednesday) with a big bang at 5am called Morgenwacht (Morning Watch). There are big parades in the afternoon on Schmotzige Donnerstag (literally: Lardy Thursday)[46] and the following Monday, called Güdismontag (literally: Paunch Monday), which attract tens of thousands of people. Lucerne's Carnival ends with a crowning finish on Güdisdienstag (literally: Paunch Tuesday) evening with the Monstercorso, a tremendous parade of Guggenmusiken, lights and lanterns with even a larger audience. Rather recently a fourth Fasnacht day has been introduced on the Saturday between the others Fasnacht days, the Rüüdige Samstag while mainly several indoor balls take place. From dusk till dawn on the evenings of Schmotzige Donnerstag, Güdismontag, and after the Monstercorso many bands wander through the historical part of the city playing typical Fasnacht tunes. Until midnight, the historical part of the city usually is packed with people participating. A large part of the audience are also dressed up in costumes, even a majority in the evenings.
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+The city hosts various renowned festivals throughout the year. The Lucerne Festival for classical music takes place in the summer. Its orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, is hand-picked from some of the finest instrumentalists in the world. In June yearly the pop music festival B-Sides takes place in Lucerne. It focuses on international acts in alternative music, indie rock, experimental rock and other cutting edge and left field artistic musical genres. In July, the Blue Balls Festival brings jazz, blues and punk music to the lake promenade and halls of the Culture and Convention Center. The Lucerne Blues Festival is another musical festival which usually takes place in November. Since spring 2004, Lucerne has hosted the Festival Rose d'Or for television entertainment. And in April, the well-established comics festival Fumetto attracts an international audience.
+
+Being the cultural center of a rather rural region, Lucerne regularly holds different folklore festivals, such as Lucerne Cheese Festival, held annually. In 2004, Lucerne was the focus of Swiss Wrestling fans when it had hosted the Swiss Wrestling and Alpine festival (Eidgenössisches Schwing- und Älplerfest), which takes place every three years in a different location. A national music festival (Eidgenössiches Musikfest) attracted marching bands from all parts of Switzerland in 2006. In summer 2008, the yodelling festival (Eidgenössisches Jodlerfest) had a similar impact.
+
+The 2021 Winter Universiade will be hosted by Lucerne.
+
+Lucerne boasts a developed and well-run transport network, with the main operator, Verkehrsbetriebe Luzern (VBL), running both the trolleybuses in Lucerne and a motor buses network in the city and to neighboring municipalities. Other operators, such as PostAuto Schweiz and Auto AG Rothenburg, provide bus services to other towns and villages.
+
+Lucerne railway station is one of Switzerland's principal stations, and is well-connected to the rest of Switzerland via railway services operated by Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) and the Zentralbahn (zb). There are 40 trains per day between Lucerne and Zurich, with an average travel time of 48 minutes.[47] Zurich Airport can be reached in just over an hour.[48]
+
+Two other railway stations are located within the city boundaries, with Lucerne Allmend/Messe railway station close to the Swissporarena in the south of the city, and the Lucerne Verkehrshaus railway station adjacent to the Swiss Museum of Transport in the east.
+
+Lucerne's city transit system is fully integrated into the coherent and integrated fare network system called passepartout encompassing all kind of public transport in the cantons of Lucerne, Obwalden, and Nidwalden.
+
+There are several football clubs throughout the city. The most successful one is FC Luzern which plays in Switzerland's premier league (Swiss Super League). The club plays its home matches at the new Swissporarena, with a capacity of 16,800.
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+The city's main hockey team is the HC Luzern which plays in the Swiss Second League, the fourth tier of Swiss hockey. They play their home games in the 5,000-seat Swiss Life Arena.
+
+In the past, Lucerne also produced national successes in men's handball and women's volleyball and softball.
+
+Having a long tradition of equestrian sports, Lucerne has co-hosted CSIO Switzerland, an international equestrian show jumping event, until it left entirely for St. Gallen in 2006. Since then, the Lucerne Equestrian Masters replaced it. There is also an annual horse racing event, usually taking place in August.
+
+Lucerne annually hosts the final leg of the Rowing World Cup on Rotsee Lake. Numerous World Rowing Championships have been held in Lucerne including the inaugural World Championships of 1962 and then the regattas of 1974, 1982 and 2001
+
+Lucerne hosts the annual Spitzen Leichtathletik Luzern Track and field meeting, which attracts world class athletes such as Yohan Blake and Valerie Adams.
+
+The city also provides facilities for ice-hockey, figure-skating, golf, swimming, basketball, rugby, skateboarding, climbing and more.
+
+Lucerne hosted FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour event Lucerne Open 2015 and FIVB Beach Volleyball U21 World Championship in 2016.
+
+Jesuit Church
+
+Lucerne's famous Lion Monument commemorates the Swiss Guards of Louis XVI who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution
+
+The crowded Rathausquai
+
+Yodelling festival 2008
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+The Suva head office, set on a hill overlooking the centre of Lucerne
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+Lucerne's town hall has been home to the city's government for centuries