Why did it take so long for France to conquer Brittany? (Short Animated Documentary)

The small Duchy of Brittany sat on the north-west frontier of France for over six centuries. Despite France being much larger and much more powerful, its king never managed to conquer the Bretons and instead had to wait to marry into its ruling family. So why not? Why didn't France conquer Brittany in such a long period of time. To find out watch this short and simple animated history documentary.

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[jonbaxter]

If Elder Scrolls taught me anything, the Bretons were hard to defeat because they kept spamming magic and France was doing a melee-only run.

[iattacku]

I think this video does a good job in showing how decentralized the Middle Ages were. Kings rarely if ever had true absolute power.

[nv]

"Opted to spend some time in the afterlife" the monotony of telling history is how often saying someone died, his ability to keep it always clever is one of my favorite things about the channel

[RmsOceanic]

We all know the real reason Brittany wasn't subdued earlier was a small village near the coast, existing all the way back to when it was known as Armorica, whose inhabitants fought off any incursion to their lands with amazing strength, almost like they had a magic potion.

[MatheusLB]

"This time, they DID have children"

Her face...

[gudmundursteinar]

I want to add the argument that Brittany is not on what might be described as any natural supply route from Paris. France is the three/four rivers. Seine, Loire, Rhone and nr 4 the Garonne. From Paris you can dominate the Seine, Loire and Rhone by river boat and a short land crossing Paris-Orleans and Rheims-Dijon. Getting to Brittany (or Gascony) is hard. You need to go to Le Havre, get on a large ship, sail into the atlantic ocean and not have any beef with english, basque, irish, dutch or any other pirates in the region. That's why it took so long, They couldn't run the place so letting somebody friendly run it was the only real option. When land communications improved the french eventually were able to run the region themselves. However, as late as the Napoleonic Era Brest found itself being isolated from the rest of france by the royal navy because the roads were so bad. It wasn't until railroads connected brittany to the rest of france that it could be ruled as anything other than an autonomous region.

[mrterp]

I heard they had really sharp weapons—nobody wanted to mess with Brittany’s spears

[HeisenbergFam]

The real reason is Brittany simply said "no" whenever France thought about conquering it aggresively

[emsouemsou]

For a few hundred years the French kings watched the "Leave Brittany alone" video and thought the guy kind of had a point

[GerardM]

As an archaeologist who works on the Early Middle Ages in Brittany, this video came close to what my dreams look like. Thank you for this!

[itzadam]

Video idea as a loyal Patreon supporter: Why did Finland 🇫🇮 gain autonomy in the Russian Empire?

[williambrennan]

Technically Brittany was held in personal union under the French king, but was not actually part of the Kingdom of France, until the Revolution. This had some practical effects, like exemption of Brittany from certain taxes, which allowed its economy to grow both directly and through being a tax haven.

EDIT: See below. Feudalism was complicated.

[Mister-Red]

In French, the word that they use to refer to Brittany is the same word they use for Britain thus I taught that land was called Britain

[calmkat]

One thing that comes to mind is the fact that Brittany being independent means just one more possible front of attack. Then I realized I was forgetting we're talking about Feudalism, where that kind of thinking was not really a factor due to small vassals (marches) bordering other countries being responsible, and usually able, to defend themselves, one of the only innovations of that system.

[xenotypos]

It's also important to emphacize that during all this time, it was still formally part of the kingdom of France, with varying degrees of autonomy depending on the period. It's important, because as opposed to what that blue map suggests, most of France's duchies and counties had a large autonomy during most of the middle ages. Maybe it was more pronounced in Britanny, but fondamentally the situation wasn't that unique. Normandy, Aquitaine, and other territories were also very free, France was a somewhat loose confederation in which the royal dynasty spent most of the middle ages centralizing power. Something that will be completely achieved in the early Renaissance.

[magnushultgrenhtc]

Her look at 2:44 is truly the realisation that life is not what she had hoped.

[crazeelazee]

So basically Brittany was too unimportant to bother while also being too important to anger them.

[allanlank]

Jacques Cartier, who explored Canada for the king of France, was born in an independent Brittany.
Many of the settlers to New France were from Brittany and have given Canada a Celtic base along with settlers from the British Isles.

[TheStickman]

I actually wondered this quite a lot, and before actually doing research on it for a recent video I made I used to watch those timeline videos showing the rulers of countries, and I saw that despite France absolutely ballooning in size they didn't conquer Brittany for almost 900 years or so...not even Charlemagne annexed it, he settled with it as a vassal.

Its an amazing thing really, shows that you don't really have to be big and strong to really survive, especially when you realize that Brittany technically lasted longer than the western Roman empire and even the Roman Republic

[TheOGDisco]

Because James Bissounette refused to let France conquer it.