A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Through his mother, daughter of Louis X, Charles of Navarre was more directly descended from the last Capets than Jean II, but his parents had renounced any claim to the crown when they acknowledged Philip VI. They had been compensated by the Kingdom of Navarre. The tiny mountain realm in the Pyrenees offered their son too little scope, but as Count of Evreux he held a great fief in Normandy where influence could be exerted. This became his main base of operations.

  He was moved to action by jealousy and hatred of Charles d’Espagne, the new Constable, upon whom the King with rash favor had bestowed the county of Angoulème, which belonged to the house of Navarre. After infuriating Charles of Navarre by taking his territory, Jean, in fear of the result, tried to attach him by giving him his eight-year-old daughter, Jeanne, in marriage. Almost immediately he redoubled the first damage by withholding his daughter’s dowry, which did not make a friend of his new son-in-law.

  Charles of Navarre struck at the King through Charles d’Espagne. With no taste for half-measures, he simply had him assassinated, not without calculating that many nobles who equally hated the favorite would rally to the man who removed him. He did not kill with his own hands but through a party of henchmen led by his brother, Philip of Navarre, joined by Count Jean d’Harcourt, two Harcourt brothers, and other leading Norman nobles.

  Seizing an occasion in January 1354 when the Constable was visiting Normandy, they broke into the room where he was sleeping naked (as was the medieval custom) and, with drawn swords gleaming in the light of their torches, dragged him from his bed. On his knees before Philip with hands clasped, Charles d’Espagne begged for mercy, saying “he would be his serf, he would ransom himself for gold, he would yield the land claimed, he would go overseas and never return.” Count d’Harcourt urged Philip to have pity, but the young man, filled with his brother’s rage and purpose, would not listen. His men fell upon the helpless Constable so “villainously and abominably” that they left his body pierced with eighty wounds. Galloping to where Charles of Navarre was waiting, they cried, “It is done! It is done!”

  “What is done?” he asked for the record, and they answered, “The Constable is dead.”

  The audacity of the blow, as close to the King’s person as it was possible to come, brought Charles of Navarre instantly to the forefront as a political factor. The King at once declared his Norman properties confiscated, but this would have to be made good by force.

  Charles’s contemporaries generally ascribed his act to hatred and revenge, but was it passion or calculation? While total absence of inhibition was characteristic of persons born to rule, bizarre bursts of violence were becoming more frequent in these years, perhaps as a legacy of the Black Death and a sense of the insecurity of life. In 1354 one of the periodic town-gown riots at Oxford exploded in such fury, with the use of Swords, daggers, and even bows and arrows, that it ended in a massacre of students and the closing of the university until the King took measures to protect its liberties. In Italy in 1358 when Francesco Ordelaffi, tyrant of Forlì, known for a fearsome subitezza or quick temper, persisted in a last-ditch defense of his city against the papal forces, his son Ludovico dared to plead with him to yield rather than continue in war against the Church. “You are either a bastard or a changeling!” roared the infuriated father and, as his son turned away, drew a dagger and “stabbed him in the back so that he died before midnight.” In a similar fit of ungovernable rage, the Count of Foix, who was married to a sister of Charles of Navarre, killed his only legitimate son.

  The age had long been accustomed to physical violence. In the 10th century a “Truce of God” had been formulated to meet the craving for some relief from perpetual combat. During the truce, fighting was to be suspended on saints’ days, Sundays, and Easter, and all non-combatants—clerks, peasants, merchants, artisans, and even animals—were to be left unharmed by men of the sword, and all religious and public buildings safeguarded. That was the theory. In practice, like other precepts of the Church, the Truce was a sieve that failed to contain human behavior.

  In England coroners’ rolls showed manslaughter far ahead of accident as cause of death, and more often than not the offender escaped punishment by obtaining benefit of clergy through bribes or the right connections. If life was filled with bodily harm, literature reflected it. One of La Tour Landry’s cautionary tales for his daughters tells of a lady who ran off with a monk and, upon being found in bed with him by her brothers, they “took a knife and cut away the monk’s stones and threw them in the lady’s face and made her eat them and afterwards tied both monk and lady in a sack with heavy rocks and cast them into a river and drowned them.” Another tale is of a husband who fetched his wife back from her parents’ house, where she had fled after a marital quarrel. While lodged overnight in a town on the way home, the lady was attacked by a “great number of young people wild and infect with lechery” who “ravished her villainously,” causing her to die of shame and sorrow. The husband cut her body into twelve pieces, each of which he sent with a letter to certain of her friends that they might be made ashamed of her running away from her husband and also be moved to take vengeance on her ravishers. The friends at once assembled with all their retainers and descended upon the town where the rape had occurred and slew all its inhabitants.

  Violence was official as well as individual. Torture was authorized by the Church and regularly used to uncover heresy by the Inquisition. The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life passersby saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls. In every church they saw pictures of saints undergoing varieties of atrocious martyrdom—by arrows, spears, fire, cut-off breasts—usually dripping blood. The Crucifixion with its nails, spears, thorns, whips, and more dripping blood was inescapable. Blood and cruelty were ubiquitous in Christian art, indeed essential to it, for Christ became Redeemer, and the saints sanctified, only through suffering violence at the hands of their fellow man.

  In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it. The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered. It may be that the untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.

  Charles of Navarre by his outrageous act became the attraction for a growing group of nobles of northern France who were ready for a movement of protest against the Valois crown. The old condition of stress between barony and monarchy had been freshened by Philip’s and Jean’s violent reprisals against nobles whom they suspected of treachery, and by the military humiliations since Crécy. Landowners, hurt by the flight of labor and reduced revenue from their estates, tended to blame many of their troubles on the crown. They resented the financial pressures of the King and his despised ministers, and pressed for reform and more local autonomy. From his base in Normandy, Charles could become the focus of an adversary group, and he proclaimed that intention like a cock crowing.

  “God knows it was I who with the help of God had Charles d’Espagne killed,” he announced in a letter to Pope Innocent VI. He described his murder of the Constable as a righteous response to affronts and offenses, and expressed his devotion to the Holy See and his solicitude for the Pope’s health. Charles was now prepared to offer himself as an agent of Engl
and in return for English aid to maintain his Norman possessions, and to this end he wanted to use the Pope as intermediary. In a letter to King Edward he wrote that by means of his castle and men in Normandy, he could do such harm to Jean II “as he shall never recover from,” and he asked that English forces in Brittany be sent to his support.

  Throughout that year, 1354, the future course of the century swayed between pressures for peace and others for continuing the war. Pope Innocent VI, who was aged and sickly, was trying urgently to bring about a settlement because he heard the sound of the infidel pounding at the gates. In 1353 the Turks had seized Gallipoli, key of the Hellespont, and thereby entered Europe. Christian energies must be united against them, which would be impossible if France and England renewed their war.

  Pressed by the Pope and by their empty treasuries, Edward and Jean had entered negotiations for a permanent peace which neither really wanted. Edward had used up his credit with the English people for a war that neither fighting nor diplomacy could bring to an end. The English Third Estate was finding that the costs outweighed the spoils. In 1352 Parliament limited the King’s powers of conscription. In April 1354 when the House of Commons was asked by the Lord Chamberlain, “Do you desire a treaty of perpetual peace if it can be had?” members unanimously cried, “Aye! Aye!”

  On his side, Jean was trapped by fear of an arrangement between Charles of Navarre and England. Medieval intelligence channels rattled with the tale of his son-in-law’s conspiracies. And while Charles was hostile, the King’s ability to raise troops and taxes from Normandy was curtailed. Forced by humiliating necessity, he had to swallow his fury, cancel his confiscation of Charles’s Norman fiefs, pardon him for the murder of Charles d’Espagne, and invite him to Paris for a ceremony of reconciliation. Charles came because all his life he could never resist another option, and perhaps because at 22 he was not as sure of himself as his acts proclaimed. With oaths and embraces and elaborate formulas, the pretense was carried out in March 1354 amid feelings between the two principals that need only be imagined.

  The year teetered on the edge of peace. The war was almost settled by a treaty overwhelmingly to the advantage of England, but at the last minute France stiffened and refused. All that came of three years’ parleys and the Pope’s zeal for peace was an extension of the truce for one year while sparring was resumed. Once again Charles of Navarre treated with Edward and promised to meet the English at Cherbourg for a joint campaign.* Pope Innocent’s hopes crashed in the collapse of the peace treaty. When he reproached the King of England for conspiring with Charles of Navarre against the King of France, Edward lied as easily as rulers of later times. “Speaking truly and swearing faithfully by the heart of God,” he denied the charge in writing “on the word of a King” although the text of the correspondence exists.

  In haste to renew the war, he proclaimed French perfidy and the righteousness of his cause in letters to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York which were read by heralds to the public. Sermons preached from the pulpit spread his tale of grievances. Edward understood public relations. By one device or another, funds were raised, consents wrung from Parliament, and fleets, men, and provisions assembled during the spring and summer of 1355. When on Midsummer’s Day the truce expired without renewal, two expeditionary forces were ready to sail, one under the Black Prince for Bordeaux, one under the Duke of Lancaster for Normandy, where it was intended to link up with Charles of Navarre.

  With fair winds speeding his several-score ships, Prince Edward reached Bordeaux in three or four days. He brought with him 1,000 knights, squires, and other men-at-arms, 2,000 archers, and a large number of Welsh foot soldiers. Now 24, strongly built, with a full mustache, the heir of King Edward was a hard and haughty prince who was to gain immortal renown as “the Flower of Chivalry.” The reputation was helped by his having the good fortune to die before he was tarnished by the responsibilities of the throne. The French saw him as “cruel in manner” and as “the proudest man ever born of woman.”

  The object of the Prince’s raid, extending 250 miles east to Narbonne and back to Bordeaux in October-November 1355, was not conquest but havoc, plus plunder. Never had the “famous, beautiful and rich” land of Armagnac known such destruction as was visited upon it in these two months. The havoc was not purposeless but intended, like military terrorism in any age, to punish or deter people from siding with the enemy. By sliding back into French allegiance, the inhabitants of Guienne were considered to be rebels against the King of England whom it was the Prince’s duty to chastise. Such policy was bound to provoke hostility in and around the territory England wanted to hold, but the Prince, who was neither more nor less imaginative than most commanders, did not look into the future. With the addition of Gascon allies, he had collected a large force of about 9,000, consisting of 1,500 lances (three men—a knight and two attendants—to a lance), 2,000 archers, and 3,000 foot. He intended to demonstrate English might, convince local lords where their interest lay, and cut the French war potential by damaging a region which furnished the French King with rich revenues. Plunder would play its part both as profit and pay.

  “Harrying and wasting the country,” as the Prince wrote in matter-of-fact description to the Bishop of Winchester, “we burned Plaisance and other fine towns and all the lands around.” After loading loot into the baggage wagons, rounding up cattle, slaughtering pigs and chickens, the company proceeded to the business of laying waste: burning granaries and mills, barns and haystacks, smashing wine vats, cutting down vines and fruit trees, wrecking bridges, and moving on. Bypassing Toulouse, they stormed and burned Mont Giscar, where many men, women, and children hitherto ignorant of war were maltreated and slain. The raiding party plundered Carcassonne for three days without attacking the citadel, “and the whole of the third day we remained for burning of the said city.” The process was repeated at Narbonne. Strangely, the French offered no organized resistance, despite the presence of Marshal Jean de Clermont alongside the Count of Armagnac, the King’s lieutenant in Languedoc. Beyond bringing people inside the city walls where possible, Armagnac failed to come out against the English except for an inconclusive skirmish on their way back.

  His failure was probably owed to fear of a pounce at his back by his opulent neighbor and mortal enemy, Gaston, Count of Foix. The autonomies and rivalries of the great southern lords led to as unquiet relations with the King as with each other. Called “Gaston Phoebus” for his beauty and red-gold hair, Foix had ignored the summons of Philip VI for defense of the realm in the year of Crécy. He subsequently served as Lieutenant of Languedoc, but on becoming involved in a feud with King Jean had been imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months. Back in his domain in 1355, he entered into a deal of some kind with the Black Prince which spared his lands during the raid while he remained neutral. The virtual autonomy of such great lords drained away much of the strength of France.

  The Prince’s company returned to winter quarters at Bordeaux loaded down with carpets, draperies, jewels, and other spoils if not with glory. Where was prowess, where was valor, where the skills and feats of combat that were the warrior’s pride? Robbing and slaying unarmed civilians called for no courage or strength of arms and hardly for the knightly virtues of the Round Table and the Garter. The Prince himself; his principal Gascon ally, the Captal* de Buch; his closest companion and adviser, Sir John Chandos; the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury, and at least three others of the company were charter members of the Order of the Garter, supposedly exemplars of magnanimity. Whether, when they lay down to sleep after a day’s carnage, they felt any discrepancy between the ideal and the practice, no one knows. They left no such indication. To signify his right to punish, the Prince twice rejected a good price offered by towns to buy immunity from sack. His letters express only a sense of satisfied accomplishment. His raid had enriched his company, reduced French revenues, and proved to any wavering Gascons that service under his banner was rewarding. Yet even Froissart, the uncritical cel
ebrator of knighthood, was moved to write, “It was an occasion for pity.…” As the war dragged on, the habituating of armed men to cruelty and destruction as accepted practice poisoned the 14th century.

  Held up by contrary winds and by Charles of Navarre’s sudden defection, the English force destined for Normandy did not sail until the end of October, already late for a campaign in the north. Its commander, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, called the “Father of Soldiers,” was England’s most distinguished warrior, who had not missed a battle in his 45 years. He was a veteran of the Scottish wars, of Sluys, of Calais and all the campaigns in France, and when his country was quiescent he rode forth in knightly tradition to carry his sword elsewhere. He had joined the King of Castile in a crusade against the Moors of Algeciras and journeyed to Prussia to join the Teutonic Knights in one of their annual “crusades” to extend Christianity over the lands of Lithuanian heathen.

  Inheritor of enormous lands and fortune, Lancaster was in 1351 created the first English Duke outside the royal family, and subsequently built the palace of the Savoy as his residence in London. In 1352, while the truce still held between England and France, he was the star of a remarkable event in Paris. On returning from a season in Prussia, he had quarreled with Duke Otto of Brunswick and accepted his challenge to combat, which was arranged under French auspices. Given a safe-conduct, escorted by a noble company to Paris, magnificently entertained by King Jean, the Duke of Lancaster rode into the lists before a splendid audience of French nobility, but his mere reputation proved too much for his opponent. Otto of Brunswick trembled so violently on his war-horse that he could not put on his helmet or wield his spear and had to be removed by his friends and retract his challenge. The King covered the embarrassment to chivalry by a handsome banquet, at which he reconciled the two principals and offered Lancaster rich presents in farewell. Refusing them, the Duke accepted only a thorn from the Saviour’s crown, which on returning home he donated to a collegiate church he had founded at Leicester.