The Poisoned Crown

by Maurice Druon

  Marie, wife of Sancho of Aragon, King of Majorca.

  Beatrix, who married first Azzon, Marquis of Este, then Bertrand de Baux.

  Blanche, who married Jaime II of Aragon.

  Marguerite, who was the first wife of Charles of Valois, and died in 1299.

  Eleanor, wife of Fredric of Aragon.

  The eldest, Charles Martel, married to Clémence of Hapsburg, and for whom Queen Marie had claimed the inheritance of the throne of Hungary, died in 1295 (fourteen years before his father) leaving a son, Charobert, who became King of Hungary, and two daughters, Beatrice, who married the heir to Viennois, and Clémence, who became Queen of France and who appears in this book.

  The second son of Charles II, Saint Louis of Anjou, born at Nocera in February 1275, renounced all his rights of succession in order to enter the Church. Designated Bishop of Toulouse, he died at the Château of Brignoles, in Provence, on August 19th, 1298, at the age of twenty-three. He was canonized upon the Thursday after Easter 1317 by Pope John XXII, ex-Cardinal Duèze and the candidate of the Anjou, who had been elected in the preceding summer. The canonization therefore must quite certainly have taken place during the year with which we are dealing. The body of Saint Louis of Anjou was exhumed in November 1319 and transferred to the monastery of the Cordeliers of Marseilles, which was an Angevin town.

  Upon the death of Charles II in 1309, the crown of Naples passed, not to the senior line, who seemed sufficiently endowed with the throne of Hungary, but to the third son of Charles the Lame, Robert.

  The latter was present in Marseilles in November 1319, when the remains of Saint Louis of Anjou were transferred to the monastery of the Cordeliers in that town. King Robert, however, took the head of his brother to Naples as a souvenir. Forty years later Pope Urban V sent an arm to Montpellier and, finally King Alphonso V of Aragon when he took Marseilles in 1433, exported what remained of the bones to Valence.

  2. In the Middle Ages, the Mass celebrated on shipboard, at the foot of the mainmast, was a special one, called ‘aride’ because it lacked both the consecration and communion of a priest. This peculiar liturgical form was probably due to fear of seasickness.

  3. ‘Marc’: a measure of weight equivalent to eight ounces.

  4. The organization and interior economy of the hospitals run by the religious orders in the Middle Ages were based upon the statutes of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris.

  The hospital was ordinarily under the control of one or two ‘Provisors’, who were chosen from the canons of the Cathedral of the town. The personnel of the order was recruited from volunteers, after an exacting examination by the Provisors. At the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris the personnel consisted of four priests, four clerks, thirty brothers, and twenty-five sisters. Husbands and wives were not accepted as volunteers. The brothers wore the same tonsure as the Templars; the sisters had their hair cut like nuns.

  The rule imposed upon the hospital personnel was severe. Both brothers and sisters had to take a vow of chastity and renounce all their goods. No brother might communicate with a sister without the permission of the ‘Master’ or the ‘Mistress’ designated by the Provisors to be in charge of the personnel. The sisters were forbidden to wash either the heads or the feet of the brothers, these services being rendered only to the bedridden patients. Corporal punishment could be administered to the brothers by the Master and to the sisters by the Mistress. No brother could go out alone into the town, nor with a companion who was not designated by the Master; this rule applied equally to the sisters. The personnel of the hospital was not allowed to receive visitors. Both brothers and sisters might partake of only two meals per day, but must offer the patients food whenever they needed it. The brothers must sleep alone, dressed in a woollen tunic and drawers; this equally applied to the sisters. If a brother or a sister, when they came to die, was found to be in possession of no matter what object which had not been shown to the Master or the Mistress while they were alive, no religious service was to be said for them, and they were to be buried as if they had been excommunicated.

  Entry into the hospital was forbidden to anyone who had with them either a dog or a bird.

  Every sick person coming to the hospital was first examined by the ‘Surgeon of the Door’ who wrote their names in a register. Then a label was attached to the patient’s arm upon which was written his name and the date of his arrival. He then had to receive Communion; after which he was put to bed and treated ‘as if he were master of the house’.

  The hospital had always to be provided with several furred dressing-gowns and several pairs of shoes, also lined with fur, for the ‘warming’ of the patients.

  There were night and day nurses for serious cases. After recovery, for fear of a relapse, the patient remained seven whole days in hospital.

  The physicians, who were called ‘mires’, wore, as did the surgeons, a distinctive dress.

  The hospital received not only people suffering from temporary diseases, but also the infirm.

  The Countess Mahaut of Artois, who appears so frequently in our story, founded, at the hospital of Arras, ten beds furnished with mattresses, pillows, sheets, and blankets, for ten poor incurables. In the inventory of the hospital are to be found listed a number of great basins of wood to be used as baths, and pans ‘to be placed under the poor people in their beds’, numerous bowls, shaving dishes, etc. The Countess of Artois also founded the hospital at Hesdin, and her Chancellor, Thierry d’Hirson, the hospital of Gasnay.

  The medicines were prepared in the hospital dispensary according to the instructions of the ‘mires’ and the surgeons.

  5. Jacques Duèze, born in 1244, at Cahors, as was Clement V to whose entourage he belonged, was appointed Bishop of Fréjus in 1299, Bishop of Avignon in 1309 and, finally, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto in 1312; but Clement V kept him at his side in the capacity of Cardinal of the Curia. He played an important part in the Council of Vienne, summoned in 1311 to deal with the case of the Knights Templar. As secretary of the Council, Duèze advised the suppression of the order in his report, and this was the decision Philip the Fair desired; nevertheless, he brought upon himself the enmity of the King by opposing the posthumous condemnation of Pope Boniface VIII as a heretic, and in refusing to be a party to the profanation of his ashes.

  At the death of Clement V at Carpentras in April 1314 (a month after the curse was pronounced), Duèze immediately put forward his candidature to the pontifical throne. He was strongly supported by the Court of Naples, but had against him the Italian cardinals and some of the French cardinals.

  The Commission headed by Bertrand de Got and Guillaume de Budos, nephews of Pope Clement, and dispatched, about July 1314, by the Court of France with a strong escort of Gascon soldiers to prevent the election of Duèze, could not have turned out more badly: riots, brawls, incendiarism, and pillage, affrays between the Gascon soldiery and the Cardinal’s people, indeed siege was laid to the monastery in which the Conclave was meeting; the members of the Sacred College had ultimately to flee through a window and took refuge in the countryside. They dispersed, some to Avignon, some to Orange, some to Vienne, and some to Lyons, forming that strange mobile Conclave which lasted two years before agreeing upon the name of Jacques Duèze.

  In the next volume will be related the part that the Count of Poitiers played in this election and the means, somewhat violent indeed, which he used to compel the Cardinals to make a choice.

  6. In the first days of July 1315, Louis X issued two Orders in Council concerning the Lombards. The first stipulated that the Italian aliens were to pay a penny (sou) in the pound (livre) upon their merchandise, with the condition that they should be exempted from service with the army, all courier service and all military taxes. This amounted to an exceptional tax of five per cent.

  The second Order in Council, dated July 9th, instituted general rules concerning the residence and business of Italian merchants. Every transaction in gold or silver, whether by cash or bill, every sale, every purchase, every
exchange in general trading, was subject to a tax varying between a penny and fourpence in the pound in accordance with the district and whether the transaction were made in the open market or not. The Italians were no longer permitted to have fixed residence except in the towns of Paris, Saint-Omer, Nîmes, and La Rochelle. It appears that this last regulation was never seriously applied, but the taxes must have been substantially profitable, either to the towns or the Treasury. Agents, appointed by the Royal administration, were charged with the supervision of the Lombards’ commercial activities.

  7. Charles of Valois had married as his third wife Mahaut de Châtillon, a close relation of the Constable of France.

  8. A variety of evidence makes one suppose that the Order of the Knights Templar survived in secrecy and dispersion till the eighteenth century. It appears from all available evidence that the Templars, in the years that immediately followed the liquidation of the Order, were seeking for some means of reforming secretly. Jean de Longwy, the nephew of Jacques de Molay, who had sworn to avenge the memory of his uncle upon the lands of the Count of Burgundy (that is to say Philippe of Poitiers), is reasonably considered to have been the head of this organization.

  9. The term ‘bachelor’ was not employed in university circles in the Middle Ages; the word had a military significance and meant a young man of good family who, not yet having acquired either the age or the means of raising his own ‘banner’, aspired to become a knight. He was a sort of orderly officer, who formed part, with a rank superior to that of a squire, of the staff of a commander of a ‘banner’.

  10. The legend by which the Capet family were descendants of a rich Paris butcher was spread across France by the troubadour song concerning Hugues Capet, a pamphlet composed at the beginning of the fourteenth century and quickly forgotten, save for Dante and later François Villon. As a matter of fact, Hugues Capet was descended from the house of the Dukes of France.

  Dante accuses Hugues Capet of having deposed the legitimate heir and imprisoned him in a monastery. This is a confusion between the end of the Merovingians and the end of the Carolingians; it was in fact the last king of the first dynasty, Chilperic III, who was shut up in a monastery. The last legitimate descendant of Charlemagne, at the death of Louis V, the Sluggard, was Duke Charles of Lorraine, who wished to claim the throne from Hugues Capet; but it was not in a monastery that the Duke of Lorraine met his end, but in a prison into which he had been thrown by his rival.

  When, in the sixteenth century, Francis I had the ‘Divine Comedy’ read to him upon the advice of his sister, and heard the passage concerning the Capets, he interrupted the reader, crying: ‘Oh, the wicked poet who traduces my House!’ and refused to listen to any more.

  11. Charles of Valois had been sent into Tuscany to ‘pacify’ Florence, which at that time was torn by the dissensions between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. In fact, having entered the town on November 1st, 1301, Charles of Valois surrendered it to the vengeance of the partisans of the Pope. Pillage and massacre continued for five days on end. They were followed by the decrees of banishment. Dante, a notorious Ghibelline and the inspirer of the resistance, had been a member, the preceding summer, of the Seigneurial Council; then, having been sent as Ambassador to Rome, he had been held there as a hostage. He was condemned by a Florentine Tribunal, on January 27, 1302, to two years’ exile and five thousand pounds fine, on the false accusation of political deviation in the execution of his duties. On March 10th a new case was brought against him and he was this time condemned to be burnt alive. Luckily for him he was not in Florence nor in Rome from which he had managed to escape; but he was never to see his fatherland again. One can well understand that he preserved towards Charles of Valois and, by extension, all the French princes, a stubborn hostility. Moreover, it may be noted that there was a singular resemblance between the case brought against Dante and that brought against Enguerrand de Marigny on the instigation of Charles of Valois, thirteen years later. In the false accusations concerning financial dealings, two separate prosecutions and convictions for a multiplicity of crimes, the same type of proceedings can be discovered, and in them the hand of Charles of Valois may be recognized.

  12. It is to be remembered (see The Iron King) that Jeanne of Burgundy, Countess of Poitiers, had not been convicted of adultery, but merely of complicity in the adultery of her cousin Marguerite and of her sister Blanche. While the two last had been imprisoned in Château-Gaillard, Jeanne of Poitiers had been placed in the Château of Dourdan for an indeterminate period and was subjected to far less severe conditions. In modern terms, one might say that she had been shown the consideration of a political prisoner whereas Marguerite and Blanche had been subjected to a criminal’s treatment.

  13. Born in 1118 in the village of Epinoy, which was then in the Diocese of Tournai, and later in the Diocese of Arras, Saint Druon was born by a Caesarean operation which was performed upon his mother who was already dead. From his earliest years he showed a singular disposition for piety, and the children of his own age used him cruelly by making him a butt and taunting him with being his mother’s murderer. Believing himself to blame, he abandoned himself to every possible penitential practice, hoping thereby to expiate his involuntary crime. At seventeen he gave away the considerable possessions he had inherited, and engaged himself as a shepherd to a widow named Elisabeth Lehaire, in the village of Sebourg, in the County of Hainault, eight miles from Valenciennes. He loved animals so much and looked after them so well that all the inhabitants of the village asked him to mind their sheep as well as those of the widow Lehaire. It was at this time that the angels began to look after his flock while he himself was at Mass.

  Then he made a pilgrimage to Rome, enjoyed the process, and thereafter made it nine times on foot. But he had to give up travelling since he suffered from ‘a rupture of the intestines’, an illness which he bore, so it appears, for forty years, firmly refusing all treatment. In spite of the disgusting stench which emanated from him, his virtues attracted a very large number of penitents from the surrounding district. He demanded that a lodging should be built for him against the church of Sebourg in such a position that he might be able to see the tabernacle, and he vowed that he would not issue forth from it till the end of his days. He faithfully carried out this vow, even upon the day that the church caught fire as did his hut; and since the fire spared him it was clear to all that he was indeed a saint.

  He died on April 16th, 1189. For many miles around the populace gathered in tears to kiss his feet and carry away some portion of his ragged clothing. His family, the lords of Epinoy, wished to remove his body to his natal village, but the wagon upon which the corpse had been placed came to a standstill upon leaving Sebourg, and all the horses that were brought to add strength to the team were incapable of advancing it by a single yard. The Saint’s corpse was therefore necessarily left where he had died, and his relations had to be content with building a chapel at Carvin-Epinoy, where he is still honoured.

  He was much revered in Artois, in Cambraisis, and in Hainault, where several sanctuaries were dedicated to him; his celebrity was greatly increased by the cure of the Count of Hainault and Holland, who was suffering horribly from gravel and who, having hardly knelt before the tomb of Saint Druon in order to recite a prayer, ejected three stones each the size of a nut.

  Saint Druon, by reason of the circumstances of his life, is particularly invoked for ruptures, hernias, and ‘for the happy deliverance of expectant mothers’; he is also frequently invoked to preserve livestock from epidemics.

  14. This son of Mahaut’s, who was called Robert like his cousin, played only a very secondary role in history, since he died before he reached the age of eighteen, in 1317. First buried at the Cordeliers of Paris, his body was later transported to Saint-Denis where his tomb is still to be seen. This honour, paid to someone who died so young, and who was not particularly well known, can only have been due to a decision of his brother-in-law, King Philippe V.

 
; 15. The exact date of Louis X’s second marriage is controversial. Some historians have maintained that it was August 3rd, others the 13th, or even the 19th. The same is true of the date of the coronation, which varies in different authorities between the 19th, 21st, and August 24th. The collection of the Orders in Council of the Kings of France, which was not printed till the eighteenth century, and in which the chronology is far from certain, would tend to establish the fact that the King was at Rheims on August 3rd, at Soissons on the 6th and 7th, and at Arras on the 18th. However, given that Louis X received the Oriflamme at Saint-Denis on July 24th, it would appear impossible, however short his expedition in Flanders, that he should have had time to return from the Muddy Army and reach the district of Champagne before August 10th.

  The chronicals of the period, however, assert that the marriage was celebrated at Saint-Lye, a little village some five miles to the north of Troyes, where a tower of the old castle still stands. The marriage took place in the greatest haste and in the greatest simplicity, because the Treasury was empty and the King was in a hurry to go to Rheims to be crowned. Here we have used the date of August 13th, given by Father Anselm, as the most likely, for, the Coronation having always to take place either on a Sunday or on some great religious feast day, we believe that Louis X was crowned either on August 15th or on Sunday 18th; it is also known that the rejoicings lasted several days, which may easily enough explain the discrepancies in the dates given.

  16. There still exist a great number of inventories dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century. The one Mahaut of Artois had made, with the most minute description of her possessions and their value, after the sacking of her castle of Hesdin, for which she demanded compensation, is still preserved.

  17. Clémence of Hungary’s fortune, in land and in jewels, consisting largely of the gifts of Louis X, was enormous. During their marriage, whose short duration will become evident, Clémence of Hungary received no less than forty castles, among which were numbered some of the most important of the royal residences.