Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Switzerland, which by now had absorbed large parts of the old ‘Upper Burgundy’, proved to be the nemesis of the ‘Burgundian States’. In three successive battles, Charles was successively humiliated, outmanoeuvred and obliterated. At Grandson in the Vaud (2 March 1476), where he had slaughtered the local garrison, he abandoned a vast booty, including his solid silver bath. At the lake of Morat (Murten) in the canton of Berne (22 June 1476), his army was routed, and many of his troops drowned. Finally, at the winter siege of Nancy (5 January 1477), he met his death. The chronicler Philippe de Commynes recorded what he had heard:

  The duke’s… few troops, in bad shape, were immediately… either killed or [put to] flight… The Duke of Burgundy perished on the field… The manner of it was recounted to me by [prisoners] who saw him hurled to the ground… He was set upon by a crowd of soldiers, who killed him and despoiled his body without recognizing him. This battle was fought on… the eve of Epiphany. [Two days later], the duke’s naked corpse, frozen into the ice of a pond, was identified: the head had been split to the chin by a Swiss halberd, the body many times pierced by Swiss pikes.112

  Commynes, who had once served Charles le Téméraire, was harsh in his judgement. ‘Half of Europe’, he commented, ‘would not have satisfied him.’113

  The ‘Booty of Burgundy’ is a phrase most usually applied to the vast pile of treasure which was captured by the Swiss at Grandson and which has been appearing on the European art market ever since,114 but it could equally be applied to the fate of the ‘States of Burgundy’ as a whole. Within a few years, the possessions of the duke-counts had been dispersed. The duchy, swiftly occupied by French forces, reverted to France. The County-Palatine, the ‘Franche-Comté’, with some delay, reverted to the Empire. The link between the duchy and the Low Countries was severed.

  The late duke-count’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Mary of Burgundy (1457–82), was now wooed by more suitors than the years of her life. Since her duchy had been seized by the French, she fell back on her subjects in the Low Countries. Yet they, too, were simmering with resentment. They stopped her from choosing a husband until she granted them a ‘Great Privilege’ abolishing all her father’s recent impositions. Mary was then free to make her choice, which fell on Maximilian von Habsburg, son of the Holy Roman Emperor. The marriage was consecrated at Ghent on 19 August in the year that had started with the Battle of Nancy. It was one of the great matrimonial milestones of European history. Within five years, Mary was dead, killed by a fall from her horse,115 yet in the brief interval, she had given birth to three children who would ensure the political legacy of her marriage. Her widowed husband succeeded to the Empire; her son Philip IV was to marry the queen of Aragon and Castile, and her grandson, Charles of Ghent, Kezer Karel, better known as the Emperor Charles V, was to scoop the largest portfolio of titles and dominions ever bequeathed to a European monarch.116

  From the geographical standpoint, the principal result of the settlement of 1477 must be found in the permanent separation of the duchy from the rest of the ‘Burgundian Inheritance’. The duchy returned to the Kingdom of France, where as ‘Bourgogne’ it became one of the provinces of the ancien régime. The rest passed to the Habsburgs, who complicated matters by adopting the title of ‘duke of Burgundy’ without inheriting the duchy. In this way, the hereditary title of dukes of Burgundy, which all Habsburg emperors used from 1477 to 1795, was associated with a very different territory from that underlying the title of ‘kings of Burgundy’ which earlier emperors had once used.

  The County-Palatine followed a somewhat variant course. In 1477 it was seized by France, but only sixteen years later was restored to the Empire by the Treaty of Senlis as the price of peace and added to the Habsburgs’ ‘Burgundian Inheritance’. Its status was confirmed in 1512, at the time that the titular Duke Charles II (not yet the Emperor Charles V) was still considering the creation of a new administrative unit, the Burgundischer Reichskreis or ‘Imperial Burgundian Circle’.117 There were a dozen such circles within the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Burgundian Circle, formalized in 1548, is No. IX on Bryce’s list.

  Nonetheless, since the Peace of Senlis did not hold, chronic war between France and the Empire became one of the most persistent fixtures of modern European history. In the process, the territory of the ‘Burgundian Circle’ was gradually whittled down, exactly as the former Kingdom of Burgundy had been. In 1512, the Circle comprised twenty distinct territorial units. Over the years, it shrank and shrivelled. In 1555 a large part was transferred to the rule of Madrid as the Spanish Netherlands, but within twenty-five years half of these Spanish-ruled provinces broke free to launch themselves as the Dutch Republic. By the time the residue was returned by Spain to Austria in 1715, only eight of the original twenty units survived as the ‘Austrian Netherlands’.118 (The Duchy of Lorraine, incidentally, where Charles le Téméraire had died, was not incorporated into the Imperial Circle. It remained technically independent, and its last duke, le bon roi Stanislas (r. 1735–66), was an unemployed Polish monarch, whose daughter happened to be the queen of France.119)

  The trajectory of the County-Palatine of Burgundy, the ‘Franche-Comté’, was also somewhat eccentric. Most of it was handed over to Spanish rule in 1555 with the rest of the Circle. Yet the county’s capital, Besanz/Besançon, remained a Reichsstadt within the Empire until 1651. Only then was it restored, for just one generation, as the capital of ‘El Contado Franco’, before being ceded to France with the rest of the county at the Treaty of Nijmegen of 1678, thus breaking the Empire’s final link with its former Kingdom of Burgundy.120

  The provinces of Bourgogne and of Franche-Comté stood side by side within the Kingdom of France from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution. The former, administered from Dijon, was officially inhabited by bourguignons and bourguignonnes; the latter, administered from Besançon, by comtois and comtoises. In 1791 both were abolished, and each was replaced by republican départements with names of no historical significance. Everything associated with the ancien régime was despised. The French were deliberately cut off from their provincial identities and taught to forget the Kingdom of France, let alone the many kingdoms of Burgundy.121

  The modern French state is famed for the centralized character of its administration. Over the last 200 years many things have changed. The revolutionary Republic was replaced by the Empire: the Empire by a restored kingdom, by a Second Republic, by a Second Empire, and by the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics. For much of this time, one thing has not changed: Paris has proposed, and the rest of France has disposed.

  In the second half of the twentieth century, however, practice was modified. A measure of decentralization was introduced in 1956 for the limited purposes of state-planning and in 1982 for the establishment of regional councils. Since then, France has been divided into twenty-two regions, which are broadly comparable in size and shape to the thirty-four pre-revolutionary provinces. One region is called Bourgogne. Its immediate neighbour is called Franche-Comté.122 However, France’s regions do not operate in the same way as the devolved countries of the United Kingdom, or the cantons of Switzerland. The powers of France’s central government have not been curbed, only mildly clipped; and the appeal to historical formations has been very limited. The post-war bureaucrats who invented the regions do not appear to remember anything further back than the ancien régime. They ignored the Burgundian associations of Franche-Comté, and awarded the Burgundian name exclusively to the former duchy. There is no recognition that the region which they designated as ‘Rhône-Alpes’ is sitting on as strong a Burgundian claim as anywhere else.123

  Nonetheless, historical memory is remarkably persistent. It may be inaccurate, confused and distorted, but it doesn’t disappear easily. One hundred and eleven years passed between the abolition of Merovingian Burgundy and the founding of the Carolingian duchy; 162 years passed between the abolition of the royal French province of ‘Bourgogne’ and its
revival as a region. Clearly, these spans are not long enough for the collective psyche to forget completely. In modern times, memories of fifteenth-century ‘Burgundy’ appear to have eclipsed all others, perhaps as a result of its artistic splendour. Yet one must never say ‘never’. The day may yet dawn when the citizens of Geneva, Basle, Grenoble, Arles, Lyon, Dijon and Besançon will unfurl their banner and sing their anthem: ‘Burgundia has not perished yet, so long as we still live!’ And they might invite a representative or a delegation from Bornholm to join in the celebrations.

  Bryce’s Note A ‘On the Burgundies’ contained ten items, and it mentioned a possible eleventh. It did not concern itself with the provinces of the ancien régime, and for obvious reasons could not have included the present-day regions. Even so, Bryce’s tally of ten or eleven ‘Burgundies’ is manifestly too short. According to definitions, there have been five, six or seven kingdoms, two duchies, one or two provinces, one county-palatine, one landgravate, one ‘United States’, one Imperial Circle, and at least one region. This brings the aggregate to a minimum of thirteen and a maximum of sixteen. At the beginning of the twenty-first century a running total of fifteen Burgundies is absolutely defensible. One is reminded of the Latin motto of Philip the Good, ‘Non Aliud’ – best translated as ‘Enough, but not too much’.124

  By way of recapitulation, therefore, it may be appropriate to present a summary of Note A (Revised):

  1. 410–36 The first Burgundian kingdom of Gundahar (Bryce’s I).

  2. 451–534 The second Burgundian kingdom, founded by Gundioc.

  3. c. 590–734 The third (Frankish) kingdom of Burgundy (Bryce’s II).

  4. 843–1384 The French Duchy of Burgundy (Bryce’s X).

  5. 879–933 The Kingdom of Lower Burgundy (Bryce’s III).

  6. 888–933 The Kingdom of Upper Burgundy (Bryce’s IV).

  7. 933–1032 The united Kingdom of the Two Burgundies (Arelate) (Bryce’s V).

  8. c. 1000–1678 The County-Palatine of Burgundy (Franche-Comté) (Bryce’s VII).

  9. 1032–? The imperial Kingdom of Burgundy.

  10. 1127–1218 The imperial Duchy of Lesser Burgundy (Bryce’s VI).

  11. 1127+ The imperial Landgravate of Burgundy (Bryce’s VIII).

  12. 1384–1477 The united ‘States of Burgundy’.

  13. 1477–1791 The French province of Burgundy (Bourgogne).

  14. 1548–1795 The Imperial Burgundian Circle (Bryce’s IX).

  15. 1982+ The contemporary French region of Bourgogne.

  III

  Most people looking for information these days reach for their computer and the Internet. They bring up a search engine like Webcrawler, Yahoo, Google or Baidu, type in a keyword, click once, and are instantaneously rewarded with uncountable numbers of ‘hits’. Traditionalists believe that new technology often produces poor results.

  In the case of ‘Burgundy’, one click on Google (in February 2009) brought up 23,900,000 entries. The list was augmented by an option to have the keyword or keywords defined. One click on the ‘Definition’ offered by ‘answers.com’ yielded the following:

  Burgundy A historical region and former province of Eastern France. The area was first organised into a kingdom by the Burgundii, a Germanic people, in the 5th century. At the height of its later power in the 14th and 15th centuries, [it] controlled vast territories in present-day Netherlands, Belgium and north-eastern France. It was incorporated into the French crown lands by Louis XI in 1477.125

  No one wants to be needlessly pedantic, but seekers after precision should be warned: every single sentence of the above definition contains false or misleading assertions. The first area once organized into a kingdom by the Burgundii, for example, is not in eastern France.

  However, one should not judge the authors of ‘answers.com’ too harshly. If fifteen Burgundies is taken as a full score, they manage three out of fifteen, or 20 per cent, which if one explores further, by no means puts them at the bottom of the class. What is more, their faulty information derives from verifiable sources. The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, cited by ‘answers.com’, defines Burgundy as ‘historical and governmental region, France’. The Columbia Encyclopedia goes for ‘historic region, E. France’. An entry from the online Wikipedia goes for ‘a region historically situated in modern-day France and Switzerland… and in the 4th century assigned by the Romans to… the Burgundians, who settled there in their own kingdom’.126

  The discrepancies in these definitions are easily spotted. But it is distressing to see that their common characteristic lies in their immobility: they are all trying to tie the concept of Burgundy to a single locality. None grasps the key feature, namely that Burgundy was a movable feast.

  The Google list on ‘Burgundy’ is presented in two forms. The full list, containing over 23 million entries, is impractically long. The shortened list contains 535 entries ranked by the frequency of their consultation. Here, the common characteristics are a persistent focus on the present, and again a rigid determination to locate Burgundy exclusively in France.

  A new search can be conducted using two key words: ‘Burgundy’ plus ‘History’. The resultant crop of websites looks promising. They include ‘History of Burgundy’, ‘Burgundy – History’, ‘The Burgundians’, and many more. On examination, however, the drawbacks become obvious. The text of ‘The Burgundians’ stops abruptly after the second kingdom, because its remit stops in the sixth century (score 2 : 15). The home page of the ‘History of Burgundy’ offers four sub-sections, the third of which is headed ‘The Glorious Age… 1364–1477’. The purpose is to sell ‘the Glorious Duchy’ and nothing else. ‘Burgundy – History’ reveals shameless prejudices. ‘From the 10th century onward,’ it opines, ‘Burgundy meant a duchy belonging to the royal family of the Capetians.’ If that were to be believed, the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy never even existed (score 1: 15).127

  And so one could continue, using different keywords and different linguistic preferences. The same stunted concepts recur time and time again. A French site located via ‘Bourgogne’ distinguishes the early Kingdom of Bourgondie (the Burgundians) from ‘the later [Frankish] Kingdom of Bourgogne’, and is exceptional for mentioning the Kingdom of the Two Burgundies (score 4 : 15).

  Students are frequently warned against pulling information off the Internet. Wikipedia, the self-authored, online encyclopedia, is especially suspect. ‘How can anything be verified?’ one hears. ‘People can write whatever comes into their head.’ Such fears are clearly not baseless. Yet they are widely accompanied by the assumption that the old-fashioned printed works of reference, ‘the recognized authorities’, are ipso facto more reliable. The test of this comes, therefore, when Internet sites are compared to some of the more traditional, academic products.

  Burgundy, for certain, is a complex word. It carries a mass of diverse connotations. In English, for example, it has two main meanings: a place and a product. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the place is defined as ‘1. a Kingdom, and later a duchy of the Western Empire, subsequently giving its name to a province of France’. The product is ‘2. ellipt. wine made in Burgundy’. Of course, one cannot expect the English to be particularly knowledgeable on continental matters, and it is not a complete surprise if the SOED’s entry contains flaws. What is surprising is that a mistake in word order muddies the issue unnecessarily. If the entry had read: ‘Burgundy: 1. a Kingdom of the western Roman Empire, and later a duchy…’, it would have been accurate, though incomplete. As it stands, it is both inaccurate and incomplete. And as for the wine, connoisseurs would be appalled by the implication that any old plonk from the region would qualify for the ‘Appellation d’Origine Controˆlée’, the ‘Registered Name of Origin’ (score 1 : 15).128

  The full OED repeats the above definitions, while adding others:

  • ‘shade of red of the colour of Burgundy wine’

  • ‘sort of head-dress for women = BOURGOIGNE (obsolete)’

  �
�� ‘Burgundy hay: applied by British writers to the Lucerne plant, Medicago sativa, but in French originally to Sainfoin, Onobrychis sativa (the two were formerly confused)’

  • ‘Burgundy mixture, a preparation of soda and copper sulphate used for spraying potato-tops’

  Under ‘Burgundian’, after ‘belonging to Burgundy’ (adj.) and ‘an inhabitant of Burgundy’ (subst.), the OED opts eccentrically for ‘one of the Teutonic nations of the Burgunds…’ and ‘2. (in form of Burgonian) A kind of ship… built in the Burgundian dominions, which in the 15th c. included the Netherlands’. The ‘Teutonic nation of Burgunds’ is conceptually mangled, but at least the geography is not Francocentric.129

  Webster’s American Dictionary is minimalist. It offers ‘a region in France’; ‘a blended red wine produced elsewhere (as California)’; and ‘a reddish purple color’. This suggests, eccentrically, that Californian burgundy is the real thing, while burgundy from Burgundy may not be.

  Given the prevailing pro-French bias, one expects the French to be better informed. Littré is one of the older dictionaries: ‘BOURGOGNE, s.m vin de Bourgogne, E de Burgundi, nom d’un peuple germain; s.f nom vulgaire du sainfoin.’ The definitions are sparse: a wine, a state, a people and a sort of hay, as in the OED. But there follow the headdress, the province and, unusually, ‘a breakaway fragment of pack-ice’: ‘nom donné par les marins aux morceaux de glace détachée de la banquise’. No one else has spotted the ice-floes.

  Robert comes next, and again the haul is disappointing. Burgundy, as in Littré, is nothing more than a province (score 1 : 15). And, despite the list of grand crus, there is no sign of the AOC.

  So one turns to Imbs, and his Trésor de la langue française (‘Treasury of the French Language’). This is no more fruitful. Burgundy is still a mere province (score 1 : 15). But separate words are given for the Burgundians of old (Burgondes) and the Burgundians of today (Bourguignons). Nonetheless, one must conclude: dictionary definitions are very inadequate, particularly on historical matters.