Hundred Years War in AP European History

1337-1453: A war over a crown and over land

English kings held Aquitaine in southwestern France as vassals of the French king, and disputes over that land kept causing trouble. In 1337, Philip VI of France confiscated English-held Aquitaine, which helped bring on war that year.

Edward III of England also asserted a claim to the French throne through his mother, Isabella, a French princess. French nobles had backed Philip VI for the crown in 1328, and Edward formally adopted the French royal title in 1340. The dispute turned into more than a century of on-and-off fighting, mostly on French soil.

England won major victories at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), the last one under Henry V. English longbowmen contributed to all three, though French tactics and the reasons for each defeat differed. The 1420 Treaty of Troyes even named Henry V heir to the French throne.

Then France recovered. Joan of Arc helped lift the siege of Orléans in 1429, and Charles VII was crowned at Reims. Burgundian forces captured Joan and transferred her to the English, and she was burned at Rouen in 1431, but the French kept pushing. After the Battle of Castillon in 1453, England held only Calais.

What Charles VII and Louis XI inherited from the war

The fighting is pre-course background. AP Euro opens around 1450, so what you need is the war's aftermath. The war fits Unit 1, Topic 1.5: New Monarchies from 1450 to 1648, which asks why rulers were able to centralize power and what followed from it.

The course says new monarchs grew stronger by monopolizing tax collection, controlling military force, and running justice. The Hundred Years War gave French kings a head start on taxation and military force:

• A royal tax, the taille, became a regular levy that the crown collected without asking the Estates-General for approval each time.
• Charles VII organized permanent royal cavalry companies in the 1440s, an early step toward a standing army paid by the king instead of raised by nobles.
• Armored knights lost much of their battlefield dominance to archers, and later to gunpowder, which weakened the nobles' claim to be the kingdom's defenders.
• Driving out the English gave people a sense of being French, with Joan of Arc as a symbol.

Louis XI (r. 1461-1483) built on this by bringing powerful nobles and their lands under the crown. The Concordat of Bologna (1516), which let Francis I appoint French bishops, continued that same push toward royal control.

England's defeat, the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VII

Losing the war weakened the English monarchy instead of strengthening it. Blame for the defeat fell on Henry VI, and noble factions went to war over the throne in the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485).

That civil war wiped out or ruined many great noble families. When Henry VII took the throne in 1485 and started the Tudor dynasty, he faced a weaker aristocracy and used the Court of Star Chamber to punish nobles who broke royal law. That court is one of the course's examples of monarchical power. So in England, the Hundred Years War leads to centralization only indirectly, through a second war and the Tudors who came after it.

Using the war as context in the DBQ and long essay

A source about Charles VII's royal cavalry companies or the taille is the kind of multiple-choice stimulus where this war shows up, as background to state-building. You'd be asked to identify a cause or result, such as royal control of taxes and armies or the decline of noble military power.

The war is most useful in Question 1 (Document-based) and Question 2 (Long essay) when a prompt asks about the rise of centralized states between 1450 and 1648. A strong contextualization sentence connects the war to the prompt. For example: "By 1453, the Hundred Years War had given the French crown a regular tax and a royal army and had weakened the military role of the nobility, while England's defeat led to the Wars of the Roses, so monarchs like Louis XI and Henry VII could centralize power." Then move to evidence inside the period.

The common mistake is spending a paragraph on Crécy and Agincourt. Narrating battles before 1450 alone will not support a claim about state-building from 1450 to 1648; explain how any earlier event shaped developments in that period. Use the war for setup in one or two sentences and connect it to what happened afterward.

Hundred Years War vs. Thirty Years' War

Both names are lengths of time, so they get swapped. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) was a dynastic and territorial war between England and France with no Protestant-Catholic split. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) began as a religious conflict in the Holy Roman Empire, drew in much of Europe, and ended with the Peace of Westphalia.

A quick check: an English claim to the French crown or Joan of Arc points to the Hundred Years War. Bohemian Protestants, Habsburgs, or Westphalia point to the Thirty Years' War. The religious split during the Hundred Years War came from the Great Schism (1378-1417), when France and England backed rival popes. That was a dispute inside the Catholic Church, separate from the Reformation.