A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  In the wind of national feeling, French nobles were answering the crown, turning back transferred castles, forming small forces of 20, 50, or 100 men-at-arms to recover towns and strongholds in ceded territories. In one such skirmish early in 1370 at Lussac between Poitiers and Limoges, Sir John Chandos, seneschal of the region, with a company of about 300 clashed with a French force at a hump-backed bridge over the river Vienne. Dismounting to fight on foot, he marched to meet his enemies “with his banner before him and his company about him, his coat of arms upon him … and his sword in his hand.” Slipping on the dew-moistened ground of early morning, he fell and was struck by an enemy sword on the side of his blind eye so that he failed to see the blow coming. The sword penetrated between nose and forehead and entered the brain. For some unexplained reason, he had not closed his visor. Stunned to extra ferocity, his men beat off the enemy and, after blows and bloodshed, turned directly to tears with all the facility of medieval emotion. Gathering around the unconscious body of their leader, they “wept piteously … wronge their handes and tare their heeres,” crying, “Ah, Sir John Chandos, flowre of chivalry, unhappily was forged the glaive that thus hath wounded you and brought you in parell of dethe!”

  Chandos died the next day without recovering consciousness, and the English in Guienne said “they had lost all on that side of the sea.” As the architect and tactician of English victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Najera, Chandos was the greatest captain of his side if not of both sides. Although the French rejoiced at the enemy’s loss, there were some “right noble and valiant knights” who thought it a common loss, for an interesting reason. Chandos, they said, was “so sage and so imaginatyve” and so trusted by the King of England that he would have found some means “whereby peace might have ensued between the realms of England and France.” Even knighthood knew the craving for peace.

  A few months later the Black Prince came to his last act of war. Territories were slipping from his hands, gnawed by forces under the Duc d’Anjou, the King’s energetic lieutenant in Languedoc, and by other forces under Du Guesclin. In August 1370 Charles’s policy of piecemeal negotiation with towns and nobles regained Limoges, whose Bishop, although he had taken the oath of fealty to the Black Prince, easily allowed himself to be bought back by the Duc de Berry, lieutenant for the central region. For a price of ten years’ exemption from excise taxes, the magistrates and citizens were glad to go along. Limoges raised the fleur-de-lys over its gates, and after due ceremony Berry departed, leaving a small garrison of 100 lances, too small to avert what was to follow.

  Enraged by the “treason” and vowing to make the city pay dearly for it, the Black Prince determined to make an example that would prevent further defections. Commanding from a litter, he led a strong force, including two of his brothers and the elite of his knights, to assault Limoges. Miners tunneled under the walls, propping them with wooden posts which when fired caused sections of the wall to collapse. Plunging through the gaps, the men-at-arms blocked the city’s exits and proceeded on order to the massacre of the inhabitants regardless of age or sex. Screaming with terror, people fell on their knees before the Prince’s litter to beg for mercy, but “he was so inflamed with ire that he took no heed to them” and they passed under the sword. Despite his order to spare no one, some great personages who could pay ransom were taken prisoner, including the Bishop, upon whom the Prince cast “a fierce and fell look,” swearing to cut off his head. However, by a deal with the Prince’s brother John of Gaunt, the Bishop escaped to Avignon, carrying with him the fearful tale.

  The knights who watched or participated in the slaughter were no different in kind from those who wept so piteously for Chandos, but the obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. Chandos was bewailed because he was one of themselves, whereas the victims of Limoges were outside chivalry. Besides, life was not precious, for what was the body, after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth but a halt on the way to eternal life?

  In customary punishment, Limoges was sacked and burned and its fortifications razed. Though the blood-soaked story, spreading through France, doubtless cowed resistance for the moment, it fostered in the long run the hatred of the English that fifty years later was to bring Joan of Arc to Orléans.

  A hero’s career ended in the vengeful reprisal at Limoges. Too ill to govern, the Prince turned the rule of Aquitaine over to John of Gaunt, and at the same time suffered the death of his eldest son, Edward, aged six. In January 1371 he left Bordeaux never to return. With his wife and second son, Richard, he went home to six more years of the helpless life of an invalid.

  With France now holding the initiative, England’s military strategy was mainly negative. The object of Sir Robert Knollys’ savage raid through northern France in 1370 was to do as much injury as possible in order to damage the French war effort and hold back French forces from Aquitaine. His forces could rob villages and burn ripe wheat in the fields as they marched, but could take no fortified places nor provoke frontal battle. Without prospect of either ransoms or glory, his knights grew disaffected as they neared Paris, yet their threat was sufficiently alarming to cause the appointment of Du Guesclin as Constable in October.

  A record of being four times taken prisoner suggests either a rash or an inept warrior, but Bertrand was not a reckless plunger of the type of Raoul de Coucy. On the contrary, he was cautious and wily, and a believer in wearing down the enemy by deprivation and attrition, which was why Charles chose him. His first act was to conclude a personal pact with a formidable fellow Breton, one-eyed Olivier de Clisson, called “the Butcher” from a habit of cutting off arms and legs in battle. The Breton team and its adherents harassed and pursued Knollys, and when his company was split by the defection of discontented knights, defeated it in combat on the lower Loire. Snapping and biting here and there, or buying off English captains too strongly installed, Du Guesclin’s forces liberated piece by piece the ceded territories.

  Crucial advantage was won at sea in June 1372 by the Castilians’ defeat of an English convoy off La Rochelle. The English ships were bringing men and horses to reinforce Aquitaine and—more critically—£20,000 in soldiers’ pay, said to be enough to support 3,000 combatants for a year. Informed by his spies of the expedition, Charles called upon his alliance with King Enrique. The Castilian galleons of 200 tons propelled by 180 oars manned by free men, not chained criminals, were more maneuverable than the square-rigged English merchantmen, which could not tack but only sail before the wind. The Spaniards were commanded by a professional admiral, Ambrosio Boccanegra, whose father had been admiral for Don Pedro but, with a sharp eye for the Wheel of Fortune, had changed sides at the right moment. The English commander was the Earl of Pembroke, a son-in-law of King Edward, aged 25 with a bad moral reputation and no known naval experience. Sailing into the bay, his ships were rammed by the Castillans, who sprayed the English rigging and decks with oil which they ignited by means of flaming arrows. From high poops or “castles” taller than the enemy’s, they threw stones down upon the English archers. In a two-day battle the English ships were burned, routed, and sunk. Among other losses, the vessel carrying the money was sent to the bottom.

  Loss of the money weakened England’s hold of Aquitaine, which depended on payment of troops. Castilian control of the sea endangered communication with Bordeaux and, worse, opened the way to French raids on English shores. With just that in mind Charles was at this time developing a naval base and shipbuilding yards at Rouen, where the largest ships could ride up the Seine with the tide. Rather than wait to be attacked at home, the aging King Edward, now sixty, swore to go overseas himself “with such puissance that he would abide to give battle to the whole power of France.”

  Assembling another fleet by the usual method of “arresting” merchant ships with their own masters and crews, and taking with him the ailing Black Prince and John of Gaunt, King Edward sailed with a large force at the end of A
ugust 1372, ready to brave the Castilians, only to be defeated by the weather. Contrary winds that prevailed for nine weeks repeatedly turned back the fleet or held it in port until it was too late in the year to go. The King had to give up the attempt at a cost of enormous expenditure in provisions and equipment, in pay and maintenance of mariners and men-at-arms, in cessation of trade and economic loss to the shipowners, and, not least, in growing discontent with the war.

  Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.

  The naval fiasco led indirectly to the tragic fate of England’s third great soldier, the Captal de Buch. While Edward’s fleet floundered offshore, the French were recovering La Rochelle and its hinterland, and in the course of these combats the Captal was taken. He was caught at night by a Franco-Castilian landing party under the command of Owen of Wales, a protégé of France claiming to be the true Prince of Wales. Though the Captal fought mightily by torchlight, he was overpowered. Contrary to chivalric custom, Charles held him in prison in the Temple in Paris without privilege of ransom. The fate of the Captal became the wonder and dismay of knighthood.

  Political purpose was more important to Charles V than the chivalric cult. He had never forgiven the Captal’s defection after the Battle of Cocherel in 1364, when the Captal at first turned French, in response to Charles’s grant of large revenues, and then relapsed. His heart belonged to his companion in arms, the Black Prince, and when war was renewed in 1369, he repudiated his homage to the King of France, gave back the properties, and rejoined the English. Charles was now determined to keep him out of action.

  Although King Edward offered to exchange three or four French prisoners with ransoms worth 100,000 francs, Charles refused absolutely to let the intrepid Gascon be ransomed, even though he had been the rescuer of Charles’s wife and family at Meaux. While the Captal languished, French nobles pleaded with the King not to let a brave knight die in prison, but Charles said he was a strong warrior who, if free to fight again, would recover many places. Therefore he would release him only if he would “turn French,” which the Captal refused to do. On being once more petitioned by a group of which Coucy was this time the spokesman, the King reflected a little and asked what he might do. Coucy replied, “Sir, if you asked him to swear he would never again take up arms against the French, you could release him and it would be to your honor.”

  “We will do it if he will,” said the King, but the gaunt and weakened Captal said “he would never take such an oath if he had to die in prison.” Left to that choice, never again to know his sword, his horse, or his freedom, he succumbed to depression, wanted neither to eat nor drink, gradually sank into coma, and died after four years in prison in 1376.

  Following Edward’s aborted expedition, the English made one more effort. A new army was assembled which probably numbered about 4,000 to 5,000 men despite the chroniclers’ “10,000” and “15,000.” Led by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, without his father or elder brother, both now unfit for war, the army crossed to Calais in July 1373 with the stated purpose of marching to the relief of Aquitaine. It was the longest and strangest march of the war.

  Although supposedly seeking decisive battle, in which the English usually prevailed, Lancaster did not take the direct route southward, where he would have encountered Du Guesclin’s forces on the way. Instead he took the long way around, behind Paris, in a protracted raid of pillage that led down through Champagne and Burgundy, across the central highlands of Auvergne, and eventually, after five months and almost 1,000 miles, to Aquitaine. Probably the intention of the famous, if indirect, offensive was to spread damage like Knollys, with the added purpose of distracting the French from organizing a possible invasion of England. Perhaps Lancaster simply wanted a wider opportunity to find knightly adventure and the plunder necessary to make up the pay which the state could not furnish.

  Covering eight or nine miles a day in the usual three lines of march, the better to live off the country and gather loot, the army inflicted wanton damage in order to provoke, through the complaints of the inhabitants, the combat of French knights. This failed, owing to Charles’s strict prohibition and because the population was encouraged to take refuge inside fortified towns. Lancaster’s march stretched out into the cold and rains of autumn; provisions dwindled, horses starved and died, discomfort grew into hardship and hardship into privation. The Duke of Burgundy’s men, following on the army’s heels, picked off stragglers, local resistance accounted for more losses, in the south Du Guesclin laid ambushes. November was met on the wind-swept shelterless plateau of Auvergne, knights without horses plodded on foot, some discarded rusted armor, some as they entered Aquitaine were seen to beg their bread. Of the wasted army that stumbled into Bordeaux at Christmastime, half the men and almost all the horses had perished.

  Enough were left to hold the old Aquitaine, now reduced to its original boundaries, but not to regain what had been lost. By 1374 the Treaty of Brétigny had been nullified in fact as well as name. Except for Calais, England was left with no more than she had held before Crécy. The English had no way of holding territory without the financial means to maintain an army abroad nor, once war had broken out, could they hold ceded regions whose population had become hostile. Nor could military superiority conquer an opponent who refused decisive battle. In August 1374 King Edward declared his readiness to conclude a truce.

  For both sides the time had come. Charles V, by using his head, and Du Guesclin, by his unorthodox tactics, had combined to forge a strategy based on recognition of the possible—the direct antithesis of combat for honor, chivalry’s central principle. While contemporary chroniclers and propagandists tried to make of Du Guesclin the “Tenth Worthy” and Perfect Knight, and Charles’s biographer Christine de Pisan insisted on eulogizing him for everything but his real contribution, it was in truth the non-chivalric qualities of these two hard-headed characters that brought France back from ruin. Charles had succeeded in his war aim, but at the cost of a ravaged and exhausted country. After some stalling, he agreed to send envoys to a peace parley at Bruges.

  Chapter 13

  Coucy’s War

  No peace treaty was reached at Bruges because the English were determined to retain their former possessions in France under their own sovereignty, while Charles V was equally determined to regain the sovereignty of Guienne yielded at Brétigny. His lawyers argued that the yielding of sovereignty had been invalid because it violated the sacred oath of homage, therefore the Black Prince and the King of England had been guilty of rebellion comparable to that of Lucifer against God. While this satisfied Charles’s life-long care to exhibit a lawful case, it failed to impress the English. To avoid total waste of the parley, which had been conducted at great expense and rival magnificence by the Dukes of Burgundy and Lancaster (Burgundy received 5,000 francs a month in expenses), a one year’s truce beginning in June 1375 was agreed upon, with an undertaking to resume negotiations in November.

  Left unemployed by the truce, the companies in France reverted to plundering the people they had lately liberated. More than a year earlier, in January 1374, the royal government had attempted by a sweeping ordinance to bring the units under control. The ordinance provided for a system of authorized companies at fixed rates of pay under captains appointed by the crown who would be required to forswear pillage and be held responsible, under pain of stated penalties, for the conduct of their men. It was a conscientious effort, but the Free Companies proved too much a part of the military system to be either uprooted or domesticated. Their brigandage continued.

  “Greatly troubled” by this situation, the King took counsel with his advisers on what
he might do. They “bethought them of the Sire de Coucy.” He was to be a new Pied Piper who could lead the brigands out of France in a foreign war—his own.

  Coucy’s case against the Dukes of Austria and his determination to pursue it were well known. He could serve France in this matter, unhindered by his ties to England. The proposal was put to him by Bureau de la Rivière and Jean le Mercier, the King’s Chamberlain and Treasurer, that if he would take into his service the companies of some 25 captains from many parts of France and lead them against the Hapsburg Dukes, the King would provide 60,000 livres toward their pay and the expenses of the compaign. Especially he was to remove the hard-bitten Bretons, followers of Du Guesclin and Clisson, who had been committing terrible ravages since the end of official war.

  Coucy’s experience of mercenaries in Lombardy was enough to teach him the dangers and undependability of such a command, even though it promised him extraordinary aid toward his own purpose. He was now 35, rich enough to loan money in that year to the Duc de Berry but not to finance a campaign against the Hapsburgs out of his own resources. He agreed to undertake the great riddance.

  Among the captains recruited to Coucy’s banner were the Constable’s brother, Olivier du Guesclin, who had been occupying and devastating the lands of the Duc de Berry, and his cousin Sylvestre Budes, chief of a Breton company which had been the bane of the Pope and the scourge of Avignon, where it plundered even the wheat sent by the King to relieve a famine in 1375. In vain the Pope had pleaded, negotiated, paid, excommunicated. He now paid the Bretons 5,000 francs and agreed to revoke the excommunication if they would go with Coucy. “Great terror” spread through Burgundy as they moved northward up the left bank of the Rhône; runners reported their advance, towns and villages sent out heralds to recruit help. Like fierce summer locusts, the Bretons, joined by other companies, swept through Champagne in July, into Lorraine in August, and into Alsace, which was part of the Hapsburg domain within the Empire, in September.