V. THE MAD KING: 1380–1422
The gamble of hereditary monarchy now replaced a competent ruler with a lovable idiot. Charles VI was twelve when his father died; his uncles acted as regents till he was twenty, and allowed him to grow up in irresponsible debauchery while half of Europe marched to the brink of revolution. In 1359 the workingmen of Bruges, wearing red hats, stormed the historic hôtel de ville in transient revolt. In 1366 the lower classes of Ypres rose in rebellion, preaching a holy war against the rich. In 1378 the Ciompi established in Florence the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1379 the starving peasants of Languedoc—south-central France—began six years of guerrilla warfare against nobles and priests under a leader who gave orders to “kill all who have soft hands.”27 Workers revolted in Strasbourg in 1380, in London in 1381, in Cologne in 1396. From 1379 to 1382 a revolutionary government ruled Ghent. In Rouen a stout draper was crowned king by an uprising of town laborers; and in Paris the people killed with leaden mallets the tax collectors of the King (1382).
Charles VI took the reins of government in 1388, and for four years reigned so well that he won the name of Bien-Aimé, Well-Beloved. But in 1392 he went insane. He could no longer recognize his wife, and begged the strange woman to cease her importunities. Soon only the humblest servants paid any attention to him. For five months he had no change of clothes, and when at last it was decided to bathe him a dozen men were needed to overcome his reluctance.28 For thirty years the French crown was worn by a pitiful imbecile, while a virile young king prepared to renew the English attack upon France.
On August 11, 1415, Henry V sailed from England with 1,300 vessels and 11,000 men. On the fourteenth they landed near Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine. Harfleur resisted gallantly and in vain. Jubilant with victory and hurried by dysentery, the English marched toward Calais. The chivalry of France met them at Agincourt, close to Crécy (October 25). The French, having learned nothing from Crécy and Poitiers, still relied on cavalry. Many of their horses were immobilized by mud; those that advanced met the sharp stakes that the English had planted at an angle in the ground around their bowmen. The discouraged horses turned and charged their own army; the English fell upon this chaotic mass with maces, hatchets, and swords; their King Hal led them valiantly, too excited for fear; and their victory was overwhelming. French historians estimate the English loss at 1,600, the French loss at 10,000.
Henry returned to France in 1417, and besieged Rouen. The citizens ate up their food supply, then their horses, their dogs, their cats. To save food, women, children, and old men were thrust forth beyond the city walls; they sought passage through the English lines, were refused, remained foodless and shelterless between their relatives and their enemies, and starved to death; 50,000 French died of starvation in that merciless siege. When the town surrendered, Henry restrained his army from massacring the survivors, but he levied upon them a fine of 300,000 crowns, and kept them in prison till the total was paid. In 1419 he advanced upon a Paris in which nothing remained but corruption, destitution, brutality, and class war. Outdoing the humiliation of 1360, France, by the Treaty of Troyes (1420), surrendered everything, even honor. Charles VI gave his daughter Katherine to Henry V in marriage, promised to bequeath to him the French throne, turned over to him the governance of France, and, to clear up any ambiguity, disowned the Dauphin as his son. Queen Isabelle, for an annuity of 24,000 francs, made no defense against this charge of adultery; and, indeed, in the royal courts of that age it was not easy for a woman to know who was the father of her child. The Dauphin, holding south France, repudiated the treaty, and organized his Gascon and Armagnac bands to carry on the war. But the King of England reigned in the Louvre.
Two years later Henry V died of dysentery; the germs had not signed the treaty. When Charles VI followed him (1422), Henry VI of England was crowned King of France; but as he was not yet a year old, the Duke of Bedford ruled as his regent. The Duke governed severely, but as justly as any Englishman could govern France. He suppressed brigandage by hanging 10,000 bandits in a year; judge therefrom the condition of the land.
Demobilized soldiers —écorcheurs (skinners), coquillards (shellmen)—made the highways perilous, and terrorized even large cities like Paris and Dijon. Over Normandy the ravage of war had passed back and forth like an infernal, murderous tide; even in luckier Languedoc a third of the population had disappeared.29 Peasants fled to the cities, or hid in caves, or fortified themselves in churches, as armies or feudal factions or robber bands approached. Many peasants never returned to their precarious holdings, but lived by beggary or thievery, or died of starvation or plague. Churches, farms, whole towns, were abandoned and left to decay. In Paris in 1422 there were 24,000 empty houses, 80,000 beggars,30 in a population of some 300,000.31 People ate the flesh and entrails of dogs. The cries of hungry children haunted the streets.
VI. LIFE AMONG THE RUINS
Morals were such as any country might expect from so long and tragic a disablement of economy and government. Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, about 1372, wrote two books to guide his children in the chaos; only that which he addressed to his daughters survives. It is a gentle and tender volume warm with parental love, and disturbed by solicitude for a virginity especially unstable in a time when many women came through generous sins to ungenerous contumely. Against such temptations, the good knight thought, the best protection was frequent prayer.32 The book reflects an age still clinging to civilized sentiments and moral sense. Seventy years later we come to the gruesome figure of the Maréchal de Rais or Retz, a great and wealthy lord of Brittany. It was his custom to invite children into his castle on pretense of training them for the chapel choir; one by one he killed them and offered them in sacrifice to demons of whom he begged magic powers. But also he killed for pleasure and (we are told) laughed at the cries of his tortured or dying choristers. For fourteen years he followed this routine, until at last the father of a victim dared to indict him; he confessed all these details and was hanged (1440), but only because he had offended the Duke of Brittany; men of his rank could seldom be brought to justice whatever their crimes.33 Yet the aristocracy to which he belonged produced heroes in abundance, like King John of Bohemia, or the Gaston Phoebus de Foix so loved and lauded by Froissart. The final flowers of chivalry blossomed in this mire.
The morality of the people shared in the common debacle. Cruelty, treachery, and corruption were endemic. Commoner and governor were alike open to bribes. Profanity flourished; Chancellor Gerson complained that the most sacred festivals were passed in card-playing,* gambling, and blasphemy.35 Sharpers, forgers, thieves, vagabonds, and beggars clogged the streets by day, and gathered at night to enjoy their gleanings, at Paris, in the Cours des Miracles, so called because the mendicants who had posed as cripples during the day appeared there marvelously sound in every limb.36
Sodomy was frequent, prostitution was general, adultery was almost universal.37 A sect of “Adamites” in the fourteenth century advocated nudism, and practiced it in public till the Inquisition suppressed them.38 Obscene pictures were as widely marketed as now; according to Gerson they were sold even in churches and on holy days.39 Poets like Deschamps wrote erotic ballads for noble dames.40 Nicolas de Clémanges, Archdeacon of Bayeux, described the convents of his district as “sanctuaries devoted to the cult of Venus.”41 It was taken as a matter of course that kings and princes should have mistresses, since royal—and many noble—marriages were political matches involving, it was held, no due of love. Highborn ladies continued to hold formal discussions on the casuistry of sexual relations. Philip the Bold of Burgundy established a “court of love” in Paris in 1401.42 Amid or beneath this moneyed laxity there were presumably some virtuous women and honest men; we catch a fleeting glimpse of them in a strange book written about 1393 by an anonymous sexagenarian known as the Ménagier, or householder, of Paris:
I believe that when two good and honorable people are wed, all loves are put off .... save only the love of each for
the other. And meseems that when they are in each other’s presence they look upon each other more than upon the others; they clasp and hold each other; and they do not willingly speak and make signs save to each other.... And all their special pleasure, their chief desire and perfect joy, is to do pleasure or obedience one to the other.43
Persecutions of Jews (1306, 1384, 1396) and lepers (1321), trials and executions of animals for injuring or copulating with human beings,44 public hangings that drew immense crowds of eager spectators, entered into the picture of the age. In the cemetery of the Church of the Innocents at Paris so many newly dead sought admission that bodies were exhumed as soon as the flesh might be expected to have fallen from the bones; the bones were indiscriminately piled in charnel houses alongside the cloisters; nevertheless, these cloisters were a popular rendezvous; shops were set up there, and prostitutes invited patronage.45 On a wall of the cemetery an artist labored for months in 1424 to paint a Dance of Death, in which demons, pirouetting with men, women, and children, led them step by merry step to hell. This became a symbolic theme of a desperate age; a play presented it at Bruges in 1449; Dürer, Holbein, and Bosch would illustrate it in their art. Pessimism wrote half the poetry of the period. Deschamps reviled life in almost all its parts; the world seemed to him like a weak, timorous, covetous old man, confused and decayed; “all goes badly,” he concluded. Gerson agreed with him: “We lived in the senility of the world,” and the Last Judgment was near. An old woman thought that every twitch of pain in her toes announced another soul heaved into hell. Her estimate was moderate; according to popular belief no one had entered paradise in the past thirty years.46
What did religion do in this collapse of an assaulted nation? In the first four decades of the Hundred Years’ War the popes, immured at Avignon, received the protection and commands of the French kings. Much of the revenues drawn from Europe by the popes of that captivity went to those kings to finance the struggle of life and death against Britain; in eleven years (1345–55) the Church advanced 3,392,000 florins ($84,800,000?) to the monarchy.47 The popes tried again and again to end the war, but failed. The Church suffered grievously from the century-long devastation of France; hundreds of churches and monasteries were abandoned or destroyed; and the lower clergy shared in the demoralization of the age. Knights and footmen ignored religion until the hour of battle or death, and must have felt some qualms of creed at the maddening indifference of the skies. The people, while breaking all the commandments, clung fearfully to the Church and the faith; they brought their pennies and their griefs to the comforting shrines of the Mother of God; they rose en masse to religious ecstasy at the earnest preaching of Friar Richard or St. Vincent Ferrer. Some houses had statuettes of the Virgin so contrived that a touch would open her abdomen and reveal the Trinity.48
The intellectual leaders of the Church in this period were mostly Frenchmen. Pierre d’Ailly was not only one of the most suggestive scientists of the time; he was among the ablest and most incorruptible leaders of the Church; and he was one of the ecclesiastical statesmen who, at the Council of Constance, healed the schism in the papacy. As director of the College of Navarre in Paris he had among his pupils a youth who became the outstanding theologian of his generation. Jean de Gerson visited the Lowlands, and was much impressed by the mysticism of Ruysbroeck and the moderna devotio of the Brethren of the Common Life. When he became chancellor of the University of Paris (1395) he sought to introduce this form of piety into France, even while censuring the egoism and pantheism of the mystic school. His six sisters were overcome by his arguments and example, and we are told that they remained virgins to the end of their lives. Gerson condemned the superstitions of the populace, and the quackeries of astrology, magic, and medicine; but he admitted that charms may have efficacy by working upon the imagination. Our knowledge of the stars, he thought, is too imperfect to allow specific predictions; we cannot even reckon a solar year precisely; we cannot tell the true positions of the stars because their light is refracted, as it passes down to us, through a variety of mediums. Gerson advocated a limited democracy, and the supremacy of the councils, in the Church, but favored a strong monarchy in France; perhaps his inconsistency was justified by the condition of his country, which needed order more than liberty. He was a great man in his fashion and generation; his virtues, as Goethe would have said, were his own attainment, while his delusions were infections from the age. He led the movement to depose rival popes and reform the Church; and he shared in sending John Huss and Jerome of Prague to the stake.
Amid the destitution of their people the upper classes glorified their persons and adorned their homes. Common men wore simple jerkins, blouses, culottes or trousers, and high boots; the middle classes, imitating the kings despite sumptuary laws, wore long robes, perhaps dyed in scarlet or edged with fur; noble lords wore doublets and long hose, handsome capes, and feathered hats that swept the earth in courtly bows. Some men wore horns on the toes of their shoes, to correspond with less visible emblems on their heads. Highborn ladies affected conical hats like church steeples, straitened themselves in tight jackets and colorful pantaloons, trailed furry skirts over the floor majestically, and graciously displayed their bosoms while enhancing their faces with veils. Buttons were coming into fashion for fastenings,49 having before been merely ornaments; we are reversing that movement now. Silks, cloth of gold, brocade, lace, jewelry in the hair, on neck and hands and dress and shoes, made even stout women sparkle; and under this protective brilliance nearly all upper-class women developed a Rubensian amplitude.
The homes of the poor remained as in former centuries, except that glass windows were now general. But the villas and town houses (hotels) of the rich were no longer gloomy donjons; they were commodious and well-furnished mansions, with spacious fountained courts, broad winding stairs, overhanging balconies, and sharply sloping roofs that cut the sky and sloughed the snow; they were equipped with servants’ rooms, storerooms, guard room, porter’s room, linen room, laundry, wine cellar, and bakery, in addition to the great hall and bedrooms of the master’s family. Some châteaux, like those of Pierrefonds (c. 1390) and Châteaudun (c. 1450), already presaged the regal castles of the Loire. Better preserved than any palace of the time is the house of the great capitalist Jacques CŒur at Bourges, a full block long, with Gothic tower of carved stone, ornate cornices and reliefs, and Renaissance windows, the whole costing, we are told, some $4,000,000 in the money of today.50 Interiors were now sumptuously furnished: magnificent fireplaces, which could warm at least one side of a room and its occupants; sturdy chairs and tables indefatigably carved; cushioned benches along tapestried walls; gigantic dressers and cupboards displaying gold and silver plate, and far lovelier glass; thick carpets, and floors of polished oak or enameled tiles; and high canopied beds vast enough to hold the lord, his lady, and a child or two. On these recumbent thrones the men and women of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries slept naked;51 nightgowns were not yet an indispensable impediment.
VII. LETTERS
Among the ruins men and women continued to write books. The Postillae perpetuae (1322–31) of Nicholas of Lyra were major contributions to the textual understanding of the Bible, and prepared the way for Erasmus’ New Testament and Luther’s German translation. The fiction of the period favored light erotic tales like the Cent nouvelles nouvelles—one hundred novel novels—of Antoine de la Salle, or romances of chivalry like Flore et Blanchefleur. Almost as fictitious was the book of a Liége physician, Jehan à la Barbe, who called himself Sir John Mandeville, and published (c. 1370) an account of his alleged travels in Egypt, Asia, Russia, and Poland. John claimed to have visited all the places named in the Gospels: “the house where the sweet Virgin went to school,” the spot where “the water was warmed with which Our Lord washed the feet of the Apostles,” the church in which Mary “hid herself to draw milk from her worthy breasts; in this same church is a marble column against which she leaned, and which is still moist from her milk; and wh
erever her worthy milk fell the earth is still soft and white.”52 John of the Beard is at his best in describing China, where his eloquence was least cramped by erudition. Now and then he verges on science, as when he tells how a “man traveled ever eastward until he came to his own country again,” like Jules Verne’s M. Passepartout. He drank twice at the Fountain of Youth, but returned to Europe crippled with arthritis, which perhaps he had caught by never leaving Liége. These Travels, translated into a hundred languages, became one of the literary sensations of the later Middle Ages.
By far the most brilliant production of French literature in the fourteenth century was the Chronicles of Jean Froissart. Born at Valenciennes in 1338, he lapsed into poetry at an early age; and at twenty-four he crossed to London to lay his verses at the feet of Edward Ill’s wife, Philippa of Hainaut. He became her secretary, met English aristocrats, and admired them too frankly to be impartial in his history. Lust for travel soon uprooted him, and drew him to Scotland, Bordeaux, Savoy, and Italy. Returning to Hainaut, he became a priest and canon of Chimay. Now he decided to rewrite his book in prose, and to extend it at both ends. He traveled again in England and France, sedulously gathering material. Back in Chimay he dedicated himself to finishing “this noble and pleasant history .... which will be much in request when I am gone... to encourage all valorous hearts, and to show them honorable examples.”53 No romance could be more fascinating; he who begins these 1,200 ample pages with intent to leap from peak to peak will find the valleys inviting too, and will move gladly and leisurely to the end. This priest, like Julius II, loved nothing so much as war. He was allured by action, gallantry, aristocracy; commoners enter his pages only as victims of lordly strife. He did not inquire into motives; he relied too trustfully on embellished or prejudiced accounts; he made no pretense of adding philosophy to narrative. He was only a chronicler, but of all chroniclers the best.