A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Not only their money but their existence as a virtually autonomous enclave invited destruction. Their sinister reputation, grown from the secrecy of their rituals, supplied the means. In a pounce like a tiger’s leap, Philip seized the Temple in Paris and had every Templar in France arrested on the same night. To justify confiscation of the Order’s property, the main charge was heresy, in proof of which the King’s prosecutors dragged into the light every dark superstition and fearful imagining of sorcery and Devil-worship that lay along the roots of the medieval mind. The Templars were accused by suborned witnesses of bestiality, idol-worship, denial of the sacraments; of selling their souls to the Devil and adoring him in the form of a huge cat; of sodomy with each other and intercourse with demons and succubi; of requiring initiates to deny God, Christ, and the Virgin, to spit three times, urinate, and trample on the cross, and to give the “kiss of shame” to the prior of the Order on the mouth, penis, and buttocks. To strengthen resolution for these various practices, they were said to drink a powder made from the ashes of dead members and their own illegitimate children.

  Elements of witchcraft, magic, and sorcery were taken for granted in medieval life, but Philip’s use of them to prove heresy in the seven-year melodrama of the Templars’ trials gave them fearful currency. Thereafter charges of black arts became a common means to bring down an enemy and a favored method of the Inquisition in its pursuit of heretics, especially those with property worth confiscating. In Toulouse and Carcassonne during the next 35 years the Inquisition prosecuted 1,000 persons on such charges and burned 600. French justice was corrupted and the pattern laid for the fanatic witchcraft persecutions of subsequent centuries.

  Philip bullied the first Avignon Pope, Clement V, into authorizing the trials of the Templars, and with this authority put them to atrocious tortures to extract confessions. Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture. The Templars, many of them old men, were racked, thumbscrewed, starved, hung with weights until joints were dislocated, had teeth and fingernails pulled one by one, bones broken by the wedge, feet held over flames, always with pauses in between and the “question” put again each day until confession was wrung or the victim died. Thirty-six died under the treatment; some committed suicide. Broken by torture, the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and 122 others confessed to spitting on the cross or some other variation of crime put into their mouths by the Inquisitors. “And he would have confessed that he had slain God Himself if they had asked him that,” acknowledged a chronicler.

  The process dragged on through prolonged jockeying over jurisdiction by Pope, King, and Inquisition while the victims, hung with chains and barely fed, were hauled in and out of their dungeons for further trials and humiliations. Sixty-seven who found the courage to recant their confessions were burned alive as relapsed heretics. After futile squirming by Clement V, the Templars’ Order in France and all its branches in England, Scotland, Aragon, Castile, Portugal, Germany, and the Kingdom of Naples were abolished by the Council of Vienne in 1311–12. Officially its property was transferred to the Knights Hospitalers of St. John, but the presence of Philip the Fair sitting at the Pope’s right hand at Vienne indicates that he was not left out of the arrangement. Afterward, indeed, the Knights of St. John paid him an enormous sum as a debt which he claimed from the Templars.

  The end was not yet. In March 1314 the Grand Master, who had been the King’s friend and godfather of his daughter, was conducted with his chief lieutenant to a scaffold erected in the plaza in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris to reaffirm their confessions and be sentenced to life imprisonment by the papal legates. Instead, before the packed assembly of nobles, clergy, and commoners, they proclaimed their own and the Order’s innocence. Despoiled of his final justification, the King ordered both men to be burned at the stake. As the faggots flamed next day, Jacques de Molay again proclaimed his innocence and cried aloud that God would be his avenger. According to the tradition that developed later, he called down a curse upon the King and his descendants to the thirteenth generation, and, in the last words to be heard as he burned to death, summoned Philip and Pope Clement to meet him before God’s judgment seat within a year. Within a month Clement did in fact die, followed seven months later in November by Philip, in the midst of life, aged 46, from uncertain causes some weeks after a horseback accident. The legend of the Templar’s curse developed, as most legends do, to explain strange coincidences after the event. The symptoms reported at Philip’s deathbed have since been judged indicative of a cerebral stroke, but to awed contemporaries the cause was indubitably the Templar’s curse that had floated upward with the smoke from the pyre in the red light of the setting sun.

  As if carrying out the curse on Philip’s posterity, the Capetian dynasty suddenly withered in the strange triplicate destiny of Philip the Fair’s sons. Succeeding each other as Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV, they reigned less than six years apiece and died aged 27, 28, and 33 respectively, each without leaving a male successor despite a total of six wives among them. Jeanne, the four-year-old daughter of the eldest brother, was passed over by her uncle, who had himself crowned as Philip V. After the event he convoked an assembly of notables from the three estates and the University of Paris, which duly approved his right on the principle, formulated for the occasion, that “a woman does not succeed to the throne of France.” Thus was born the momentous Salic “Law” that was to create a permanent bar to the succession of women where none had existed before.

  The death of the last of the three brothers in 1328 left the succession to the crown open, with results that led to the longest war—so far—in Western history. Three claimants were available—a grandson and two nephews of Philip the Fair. The grandson was the sixteen-year-old Edward III of England, son of Philip the Fair’s daughter Isabel, who had married Edward II. She was generally believed to have connived with her lover in the murder of her husband the King, and to exercise a malign influence upon her son. His claim of direct lineage, vigorously put forward, met no welcomers in France not because it derived through a woman but because the woman in question was feared and disliked and in any case no one wanted the King of England on the throne of France.

  The other two claimants, sons respectively of a brother and a half-brother of Philip the Fair, were Philip of Valois and Philip of Evreux. The first, a man of 35, son of an illustrious father, well known to the court and nobles of France, was easily the preferred choice and was confirmed as king by the princes and peers of France without overt opposition. As Philip VI he began the Valois line. Both of his rivals formally accepted the choice, Edward by coming in person to place his hands between those of Philip VI in homage for the Duchy of Guienne. The other Philip was recompensed by the Kingdom of Navarre and marriage to the bypassed Jeanne.

  Though Philip VI maintained court in great state, he had not grown up expecting to be king and lacked something of the regal character. He seemed troubled by some uneasiness about his right to the crown, which was hardly soothed by his contemporaries’ habit of referring to him as le roi trouvé (the found king) as if he had been discovered in the bulrushes. Or perhaps the lurking rights of his female cousins threatened him. He was dominated by his wife, the “bad lame Queen,” Jeanne de Bourgogne, a malicious woman neither loved nor respected although she was a patron of the arts and of all scholars who came to court. Very devout like his great-grandfather St. Louis, though not his equal in intelligence or will, Philip was fascinated by the all-absorbing question of the Beatific Vision: whether the souls of the blessed see the face of God immediately upon entering Heaven or whether they have to wait until the Day of Judgment.

  The question was of real concern because the intercession of the saints on behalf of man was effective only if they had been admitted into the presence of God. Shrines possessing saints’ relics relied for re
venue on popular confidence that a particular saint was in a position to make a personal appeal to the Almighty. Philip VI twice summoned theologians to debate the issue before him and fell into a “mighty choler” when the papal legate to Paris conveyed Pope John XXII’s doubts of the Beatific Vision. “The King reprimanded him sharply and threatened to burn him like an Albigensian unless he retracted, and said further that if the Pope really held such views he would regard him as a heretic.” A worried man, Philip wrote to the Pope that to deny the Beatific Vision was to destroy belief in the intercession of the Virgin and saints. Fortunately for the King’s peace of mind, a papal commission decided after thorough investigation that the souls of the Blessed did indeed come face to face with the Divine Essence.

  Philip’s reign started well and the realm prospered. The effect of famine and epidemics was passing, evil portents were forgotten, perpetually contentious Flanders was brought back under French control by a victorious campaign in Philip’s first year. The crown’s relations with five of the six great fiefs—Flanders, Burgundy, Brittany, and, in the south, Armagnac and Foix—were reasonably firm. Only Guienne (or Aquitaine), which the Kings of England held as a fief of the Kings of France, was a perennial source of conflict. Here the English effort to expand pressed continually against the French effort to re-absorb the fief.

  As the conflict came to a head, it brought about in 1338 a marriage that connected the Coucys with yet another reigning house, the Hapsburgs of Austria. This was the union from which Enguerrand VII was to be born. It was arranged by Philip VI himself, who was seeking allies in the coming struggle with England. In 1337 Philip had declared Guienne confiscated, whereupon Edward III announced himself the rightful King of France and prepared for war. Edward’s renewed claim was not so much the reason for war as an excuse to resolve by war the endless conflict over the sovereignty of Guienne. While English forces landed in Flanders to prepare for the assault, both sides feverishly sought allies in the Low Countries and across the Rhine.

  King Philip was concerned not only to gather allies but to ensure the loyalty of the strategically located barony of Coucy. As a rich prize, he obtained for Enguerrand VI the hand of Catherine of Austria, daughter of Duke Leopold I and granddaughter through her mother of the equally illustrious Amadeus V, Count of Savoy. The house of Savoy were autonomous rulers of a region extending from France to Italy astride the Alps, and themselves the center of a princely web of marriage threads connecting with crowns all over Europe—and beyond. One of Catherine’s seven aunts was the wife of Andronicus III Paleologus, Emperor of Byzantium.

  Marriages were the fabric of international as well as inter-noble relations, the primary source of territory, sovereignty, and alliance, and the major business of medieval diplomacy. The relations of countries and rulers depended not at all on common borders or natural interest but on dynastic connections and fantastic cousinships which could make a prince of Hungary heir to the throne of Naples and an English prince claimant to Castile. At every point of the loom sovereigns were thrusting in their shuttles, carrying the strand of a son or a daughter, and these, whizzing back and forth, wove the artificial fabric that created as many conflicting claims and hostilities as it did bonds. Valois of France, Plantagenets of England, Luxemburgs of Bohemia, Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, Hapsburgs of Austria, Visconti of Milan, the houses of Navarre, Castile, and Aragon, Dukes of Brittany, Counts of Flanders, Hainault, and Savoy were all entwined in a crisscrossing network, in the making of which two things were never considered: the sentiments of the parties to the marriage, and the interest of the populations involved.

  Although the free consent of marriage partners was theoretically required by the Church, and the “I will” considered the doctrinal essence of the marriage contract made before a priest, practical politics overlooked this requirement, sometimes with unhappy results. Emperor Ludwig in betrothing his daughter before she had learned to talk, offered to speak for her and was later considered to have earned the judgment of God when she remained dumb all her life.

  Rulers likewise paid no attention whatever—with predictable results—to the prohibition of consanguinity in marriage, whose risks were well understood and forbidden by the Church within the fourth degree. The prohibition was remembered only when it became desirable to break a betrothal that had become inconvenient or to discard an inconvenient spouse. For a fee or political favor proportionate to the rank of the petitioner, the Church invariably proved agreeable either to setting aside the consanguinity rule to permit a marriage, or recalling it as grounds for divorce.

  To negotiate the financial terms of the Hapsburg-Coucy marriage required two treaties in 1337–38 between the King of France and the Duke of Austria. Duke Leopold gave his daughter a dowry of 40,000 livres, while King Philip assigned to her and her issue an annuity of 2,000 livres from the royal treasury. To Enguerrand VI the King made a gift of 10,000 livres plus promise of another 10,000 to acquit him of debts. Enguerrand in turn promised to settle 6,000 livres upon his wife and, what was of the essence to the King, to lead his vassals in the royal host in defense of the realm against Edward of England.

  At its start, the war hardly boded a dangerous contest, since France was the dominant power of Europe whose military glory in her own eyes, as in others’, far outshone that of England or any other country, and whose population of 21 million was five times England’s of slightly more than 4 million. Nevertheless, possession of Aquitaine and alliance with Flanders gave Edward two footholds at the borders of France, and lent a force of more than mere words to the insolent challenge he addressed to “Philip of Valois who calls himself King of France.” Neither party could know that they were opening a war that would outlast both of them, that would develop a life of its own, defying parleys and truces and treaties designed to stop it, that would drag on into their sons’ lives and the lives of their grandsons and great-grandsons, and great-great-grandsons to the fifth generation, that would bring havoc to both sides and become, as its damage spread through Europe, the final torment of the closing Middle Ages.

  Enguerrand VI had barely time to beget a child before he was summoned to war in 1339. In the north the English were advancing from Flanders and a party of 1,500 men-at-arms besieged the castle of Oisy belonging to the Coucys. So ardent was the defense of Enguerrand’s vassals that the English were forced to withdraw, even though their leader was Sir John Chandos, who was to prove the most notable military figure on the English side. In revenge for his setback, he burned and sacked three other towns and smaller castles within the Coucy domain. Meanwhile Enguerrand VI had joined the King in the defense of Tournai on the Flemish border, and in 1340 while a rather feckless campaign was pursuing its way, his son, the seventh and last Enguerrand, was born.

  * Out of 614 grants of legitimacy in the year 1342–43, 484 were to members of the clergy.

  Chapter 3

  Youth and Chivalry

  Although doubtless precious to his parents as firstborn son and heir of a great dynasty, the infant Enguerrand VII was probably not the adored object of the coddling and tenderness that babies are by nature supposed to inspire. Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern, none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children. Emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature or documentary evidence. The Christ child is of course repeatedly pictured, usually in his mother’s arms, but prior to the mid-14th century he is generally held stiffly, away from her body, by a mother who is aloof even when nursing. Or else the holy infant lies alone on the ground, swaddled or sometimes quite naked and uncovered, while an unsmiling mother gazes at him abstractedly. Her separateness from the child was meant to indicate his divinity. If the ordinary mother felt a warmer, more intimate emotion, it found small expression in medieval art because the attitudes of motherhood were preempted by the Virgin Mary.

  In literature the chief role of children was to die, usually drowned, smothered, or abandoned in a forest on the ord
ers of some king fearing prophecy or mad husband testing a wife’s endurance. Women appear rarely as mothers. They are flirts, bawds, and deceiving wives in the popular tales, saints and martyrs in the drama, unattainable objects of passionate and illicit love in the romances. Occasionally motherhood may break through, as when an English preacher, to point a moral in a sermon, tells how a mother “that hath a childe in wynter when the childes hondes ben cold, the modur taketh hym a stree [straw] or a rusche and byddeth him warme itt, not for love of the stree to hete it … but for to hete the childes honds.” An occasional illustration or carving in stone shows parents teaching a child to walk, a peasant mother combing or delousing her child’s hair with his head in her lap, a more elegant mother of the 14th century knitting a child’s garment on four needles, an acknowledgment from a saint’s life of the “beauty of infancy,” and from the 12th century Ancren Riwle a description of a peasant mother playing hide-and-seek with her child and who, when he cries for her, “leapeth forth lightly with outspread arms and embraceth and kisseth him and wipeth his eyes.” These are isolated mentions which leave the empty spaces between more noticeable.

  Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not?

  Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.