Étienne de Vesc

Étienne de Vesc (ca 1445 – 6 October 1501), was a courtier of Louis XI of France and a formative influence on Charles VIII, whom he strongly encouraged in the French adventure into Italy in the First Italian War (1494–95).

Étienne de Vesc's forebears originated in Provence, appearing since the eleventh century, as modest seigneurs of Comps, Dieulefit, Béconne, Montjoux and Espeluche, with some experience in the Crusades; the chronicler Philippe de Commines, an enemy of Vesc, belittled his background. He spent his youth in the Dauphiné, not part of France until 1486, finishing a courtly training in the household of the Dauphin at Plessis-les-Tours, where he served as valet de chambre from the age of seventeen, about 1462. In 1470, Louis XI, looking for persons who would prove affidés et sûrs made Vesc the governor of the household at Amboise of Charles, the future Charles VIII, who remained attached to Vesc and to the château d'Amboise the rest of his life. The education he provided his young charge was largely derived from fanciful romans courtois the romances of chivalry; his services to the King included some embassies, as far away as Spain. In 1475 he took a wife, from a rich family of bourgheois background, whose late father had been an avocat au parlement de Paris and whose mother had remarried into a family of goldsmiths.

His devoted attendance during a long illness of the young prince and other services were well rewarded by Louis, and he took part in the dauphin's wedding, July 1483. After his attendance at the king's deathbed later that year, Vesc was a member of the council of regency. Among his duties was an embassy to Avignon to diplomatically check the ambitions of the Cardinal Legate Giulio Della Rovere, nephew of the late Pope Sixtus IV.

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