A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Alienated and dismayed, prominent doctors of theology fled to Rome to join Urban. Others too were leaving. Students and faculty of Urbanist countries, unable to remain under Clementist obedience, departed for universities in Italy, the Empire, and Oxford. “The sun of knowledge” in France, said a departing master, “has suffered an eclipse.” At this time the decline of the University of Paris as a great cosmopolitan center began.

  In England the schism brought Wyclif to the turning point that led to protestantism. At first he welcomed Urban as a reformer, but as the financial abuses of both Popes grew more flagrant, he came to regard both as Anti-Christs and the schism as the natural end of a corrupted papacy. Since the moment the Church allowed penance to be commuted by money, he believed, nothing but evil had been the result. Despairing of reform from within after the schism, he came in 1379 to a radical conclusion: since the Church was incapable of reforming itself, it must be brought under secular supervision. He now saw the King as God’s Vicar on earth from whom bishops derived their authority and through whom the state, as guardian of the Church, could compel reform. Going beyond the abuses of the Church to attack the theory, Wyclif was now prepared to sweep away the entire ecclesiastical superstructure—papacy, hierarchy, orders. Having rejected the divine authority of the Church, it was now that he came to his rejection of its essence—the power of the sacraments, specifically of the Eucharist.

  In a culminating heresy, he transferred salvation from the agency of the Church to the individual: “For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit.” Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world.

  When he had preached disendowment of the Church’s temporal property, Wyclif had had powerful friends, but when he rejected the sacerdotal system, his patrons, fearing heresy arid the jaws of Hell, withdrew. In 1381 a council of twelve doctors of the University of Oxford was to pronounce eight of his theses unorthodox and fourteen heretical, and to prohibit him from further lecturing or preaching. Though his voice was silenced, his work spread through dissemination of the Bible in English. The entire Scripture of some three quarters of a million words was translated from the Latin by Wyclif and his Lollard disciples in the dangerous business of opening a direct pathway to God, bypassing the priest. In the future fierce reaction after the Peasants’ Revolt, when Lollardy was harried as the brother of subversion, and mere possession of a Bible in English could convict a man of heresy, the making of multiple copies of the manuscript Bible was a labor of risk and courage. In view of 175 copies that still survive and the number that must have been destroyed during the persecution and lost over the centuries, many hundreds must have been laboriously and secretively copied out by hand. Wyclif died in 1384, and the current of protest, as persecution intensified, ran on underground. When Jan Hus was burned at the stake for heresy by the Council of Constance in 1415, Wyclif’s bones were ordered dug up and burned at the same time. Even riddled by the schism, the Church was still in control. The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the façade holds.

  With Europe polarized between two papacies, and the Church politicized by the rivals’ struggle for secular support, it became harder to heal the schism each year that it lasted. All thoughtful men recognized how it was damaging society and tried to find the means of reunification, but in the schism, as in the war, vested hostilities kept the breach open. Ecumenical Council, advocated by the University of Paris and many individuals, was the obvious solution. As a challenge to their supremacy, however, both Popes adamantly rejected it. The hateful rift in Christendom was to last for forty years. According to a popular saying toward the end of the century, no one since the beginning of the schism had entered Paradise.

  * The fourth, the aged Cardinal Tebaldeschi, had died.

  Part Two

  Chapter 17

  Coucy’s Rise

  Now “wholly French” once more, Coucy served as the King’s right arm through the closing efforts of the reign. Though only 41, Charles V felt time pressing. In February 1378 his Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, who was the same age as he, died of childbed fever after the birth of a daughter, Catherine. Three weeks later, the last to survive of her previous five daughters died, leaving of her eight children only two sons and the newborn to outlive her. The King “sorrowed long and marvelously” from his wife’s death “and so did many other good people, for the Queen and he loved each other as much as loyal married people can.” A month later came the death—precipitating the schism—of Pope Gregory XI, with whom Charles had been closely associated, followed in November by the death of his uncle the Emperor and shortly afterward by the passing of his longtime ally King Enrique of Castile. In all these losses Charles cannot but have felt the advancing shadow of his own limited time, and with it an urgency to leave his kingdom whole and at peace before he too departed.

  To that end he must close the three portals of danger represented by the persistent betrayals of Charles of Navarre, by the alliance of the Duke of Brittany with England, and by the continuing war with England itself. Coucy’s strategic territory, his military and diplomatic talents, and that evident dependability which Gregory XI had found notable made him a fulcrum of the King’s effort. His first task was to conduct a campaign to eliminate Charles of Navarre from Normandy once and for all.

  On learning that Navarre had again secretly negotiated to re-open Normandy to the English, Charles V swore to drive his faithless vassal out of every town and castle he held there. Legality was at hand in the person of Navarre’s two sons, in whose name the Navarrese fiefs in Normandy could be taken over. Since their mother, the King’s sister, was dead, Charles V could claim their guardianship by an argument that would admit of no dispute: they were both in his custody at the court of France at the time. Why their father allowed this to happen is unclear, unless he intended it as some devious camouflage of his dealings with England.

  Legal evidence of Navarre’s treason was provided when his chamberlain, Jacques de Rue, arrived in Paris with letters for the two sons. Under interrogation, De Rue testified freely—without torture, as the King took care to have stated in the authorized chronicle—that Charles of Navarre planned to poison the King of France right after Easter through a steward of the royal bakery. Taking advantage of the ensuing disarray and succession of a minor, he would then open hostilities by seizing French strongholds along the Seine while the English landed in Normandy.

  This story was easily believable of a prince who had already attempted the life of his other brother-in-law, the Count of Foix, in a melodrama infused with all the lurid glitter of the 14th century. Foix had married the flirtatious Agnes, Navarre’s sister, but, as a man of “impetuous passions,” had not ceased his gallantries, with the result that Agnes departed in umbrage to take refuge with her brother. The brothers-in-law were already at odds in a quarrel over money. When Agnes’ fifteen-year-old son, Gaston, came to plead with her to return, she refused to go unless the request came from her husband. Charles of Navarre then gave his nephew a bag of powder to take home, telling him that it would cause his father to desire the reconciliation, but that he must keep the agent secret or it would not work. On Gaston’s return to Foix, the bag of powder was discovered by his bastard brother Yvain, and shown to the Count, who fed it to one of his dogs, which promptly expired in painful convulsions.

  Restrained from killing his heir and only legitimate son on the spot, the Count locked him up while all of Gaston’s household who had gone with him to Navarre were examined and fifteen of them executed. Meanwhile Gaston, realizing that his uncle had conspired to have him commit parricide, gave way to despair, refusing all food. On being informed of this situation while he was paring his nails with a knife, the Count of Foix rushed to his son’s cell, seized him by the throat saying, “Ha, traitor, why dost thou not eat?” and accidentally cut him across the jugular with the knife that was still in his hand. The boy turned on his side without a
word and, the wound proving fatal, died the same day. One more mortal sin was added to the already overburdened record of Charles of Navarre.

  Corroboration of Navarre’s “crimes and treasons” against the King of France was supplied when codes to his ciphered correspondence were taken from a second arrested counselor, Pierre du Tertre. All the collected evidence, and signed confessions by the two counselors, were made public in their formal trial, conducted with utmost solemnity before a great assembly of magistrates, clerics, notaries, merchants, and visitors to Paris. Upon sentence of death, both counselors were executed. Their headless bodies were hung on the gibbet and their severed limbs on the four principal gates of Paris. A public record was thus established to justify Charles of Navarre’s Norman subjects in transferring their allegiance to his son.

  The Normandy campaign was already under way. At the first report of Navarre’s treason, the King had assembled an army at Rouen and “sent hastily for the Sire de Coucy and the Sire de Rivière,” whom he put in command under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Burgundy. Fearful of English landings, he instructed them to conquer Navarre’s towns and castles, especially those nearest the coast, as speedily as possible either by force or by negotiation. Bureau de la Rivière, the King’s Chamberlain, with whom Coucy was to be so closely associated in this campaign and afterward, belonged to the group of bourgeois-born councillors derisively called Marmosets by the King’s brothers in reference to the little stone grotesques that peered from the cornices and pillars of churches. He was a courteous and gracious official, highly esteemed by Charles V, who had given him controlling power in the Regency council he had established in case he should die while the Dauphin was still a minor.

  The combination of Coucy and Rivière reflected the combined military and political strategy to be employed. Against walled towns, siege was slow and costly. For rapid conquest everything depended on a negotiated surrender, but this could be achieved only by a credible show of force and in most cases initial combat. To add to the persuasion of force, Charles of Navarre’s two sons were taken along “to show to the whole country that the war was in behalf of these children for their inheritance.”

  Bayeux, “a handsome and strong city” at the base of the Cotentin peninsula where an English landing might be expected (ten miles from a later landing place renamed Omaha Beach), was the first major objective. Bringing up their forces below the walls and exhibiting the young heir of Navarre as the rightful lord, Coucy and Rivière warned the citizens “in impressive language” that if the town were taken by storm “they would all be slaughtered and the place re-peopled by another set of inhabitants.” The problem in each case was that the captains of Navarrese garrisons, who might be charged with treason to their Prince or dishonored if they surrendered without making a defense, had not the same motive to yield as the citizens. And since captains generally shut themselves up in the citadel if besiegers won, thus escaping the slaughter and plunder visited upon the populace, they preferred to risk a siege rather than to surrender.

  At Bayeux, the garrison was overruled. Influenced by the rights of Navarre’s sons and the persuasions of their Bishop, the townspeople asked for a three-day truce to negotiate terms, always an intricate business which had to be put in writing with signed and sealed copies delivered to each side. When this was completed, Coucy and Rivière entered the city to take possession in the name of the King of France. After replacing the magistrates with their own appointees and leaving in place a garrison to prevent rebellion, they moved forward up the peninsula toward the next stronghold. Successive towns and castles, bombarded both “by arms and words,” were taken without much loss of time, although not without active siege measures, mining of walls, and sharp combats with killed and wounded on both sides. In the interests of haste, Coucy and Rivière readily granted favorable terms and allowed determined partisans of Navarre to depart if they chose to go. Working effectively with Rivière, Coucy displayed a capacity he shared with the King for cool pursuit of policy, grafted in Coucy’s case upon a man of action.

  Charles of Navarre himself, under attack in the south by the King of Castile, was not present, and because of contrary winds no more than a few of his English allies arrived. One group succeeded in occupying Cherbourg, but was hemmed in there by a French siege. Elsewhere, Navarrese captains faced a hard choice, because if they chose to resist they could hope for little help, while if they yielded, Normandy would be lost to the King of Navarre. Evreux, the heart of his Norman possessions, manned by his strongest garrison and a loyal population, gave Coucy and Rivière their hardest fight. “Every day they made assault,” and so tightly encircled the town that it was forced to capitulate. The fall of Evreux delighted the King who came to Rouen to greet the victors who “had so well sped.” Only Cherbourg, which the English could supply by sea, withstood prolonged sieges commanded at different times by Du Guesclin and Coucy, and remained in English hands.

  With that exception, by the end of 1378 Charles of Navarre had lost all his estates in Normandy. Walls and fortifications were razed so that his strongholds could not again be held by enemies of France. In the south, the seigneury of Montpellier, his last possession in France, was taken from him by the Duc d’Anjou. Scotched at last after thirtyyears of compulsive plotting, Charles of Navarre was left to live out a destitute and friendless decade in his mountain kingdom so much too narrow for his soul. So might Satan have been penned in a sheepfold.

  Famous knights who were to be Coucy’s companions in future ventures took part in episodes of the Normandy campaign, among them the late Queen’s brother, the good-tempered if unremarkable Louis, Duc de Bourbon; also the energetic new Admiral, Jean de Vienne; and, most notably, one-eyed Olivier de Clisson, who brought a Breton company to Coucy’s aid at the siege of Evreux. Whether at this time or some other, these two disparate personalities joined in the special comradeship of brotherhood-in-arms, a formal arrangement in which the partners drew up terms of mutual aid and equal division of profits and ransoms.

  Clisson came of a turbulent family embattled on both sides in Brittany. His father, discovered in dealings with Edward III, had been beheaded by Philip VI, who had him arrested in the middle of a tournament, thrown in prison, and conducted almost naked to his execution without trial. The victim’s wife was said to have carried her husband’s severed head from Paris to Brittany to display before her seven-year-old son and exact his oath of vengeance and eternal hate for France. Then in an open boat, storm-tossed and starving, they escaped to England, where Edward, who was making every effort to win the loyalty of the Bretons, showered favor and properties on the widow and son.

  Olivier was brought up at the English court along with the young Jean de Montfort, his Duke, whose jealousy and dislike he reciprocated. While he displayed a noble’s haughty manners, reinforced by an inflated opinion of himself, Clisson was called at one time “the churl” for his coarse language. Pursuing his vowed revenge, he fought against the French with incredible ferocity at Reims, Auray, Cocherel, and Najera in Spain. He wielded a two-handled ax with such force that it was said “no one who received his blows ever got up again,” although he failed to avert the enemy ax that cut through his helmet and took out his eye. In the course of the war in Brittany, Montfort enraged Clisson by favoring Sir John Chandos, and when he rewarded Chandos with a town and castle, Clisson denounced the Duke in terrible wrath, assaulted and razed the castle intended for Chandos, and used the stones to reconstruct his own.

  Charles V had returned to him the lands confiscated from his father and wooed him with gifts, even sending him venison “as to a friend.” Whether it was these material persuasions or, as Olivier claimed, the arrogance of the English toward the French that he could no longer suffer, he turned French in 1369 and redirected his ferocity against his former associates. It reached a peak when he learned that his squire, wounded and captured by the English, had been killed as a prisoner on being discovered to belong to Clisson. Olivier swore a great oath ne
ver “by the Mother of God throughout this year, neither in the morning nor in the evening, to give quarter to any Englishman.…” The following day, though lacking siege engines, he attacked an English stronghold with such fury and took it with such slaughter that no more than fifteen defenders were left alive. After locking them up in a tower room, Olivier ordered them released one by one, and as each came through the door he struck off his head with a single blow of a great ax and thus, with fifteen heads rolling at his feet, avenged his squire.

  The cool-headed Coucy and the savage Breton must have found a complement in each other, for these two powerful barons, according to Clisson’s biographer, “remained always in the most perfect harmony.” At this time Coucy had just lost in shocking circumstances his companion from the Swiss campaign, Owen of Wales. While Coucy was in Normandy, Owen was conducting the siege of Mortagne on the coast at the mouth of the Gironde. Arising early on a clear and lovely morning, he sat on a stump in his shirt and cloak, viewing the castle and countryside, as was his habit, while having his hair combed by his Welsh squire, James Lambe. This man had recently been taken into his service as a compatriot who brought him tidings of his native land and told him “how all the country of Wales would gladly have him to be their lord.” Standing behind his master on the still morning before others were abroad, James Lambe plunged a Spanish dagger into Owen’s body, “stabbing him clean through so that he fell down stark dead.”

  The assassin’s hand was certainly hired by the English, possibly to remove a focus of agitation on the Welsh border, or, as contemporaries believed, in reprisal for the miserable death in prison of the Captal de Buch, originally captured by Owen. If so, it was a surprisingly dishonorable blow upon an unarmed man, as recognized by the English captain inside besieged Mortagne to whom Lambe reported his deed. “He shook his head and beheld him right felly and said, ‘Ah, thou has murdered him.… But that this deed is for our profit … we shall have blame thereby rather than praise.’ ” On the French side, Charles V, though terribly angered, did not altogether regret the removal of Owen, a freebooter not guiltless of nefarious deeds of his own. His murder reflected a new kind of animosity growing out of the war. Suborned assassination within the brotherhood of knights was an innovation of the 14th century.