A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  While being divested of his armor in his scarlet pavilion, the King expressed a wish to see Artevelde dead or alive. For a reward of 100 francs, searchers found his body, which was taken before the victors, who stared at it for a while in silence. The King gave it a little kick, “treating it as a villein.” Then it was taken away and “hanged upon a tree.” Artevelde’s image was subsequently woven into a tapestry depicting the battle, which the Duke of Burgundy commissioned and used as a carpet because he liked to walk on the commoners who had attempted to overthrow the ordained order.

  The sack of Courtrai was merciless, in revenge for defeat in the Battle of the Spurs eighty years before. Citizens fled vainly to cellars and churches to escape the soldiers; they were dragged into the streets and killed. On his knees Louis de Male begged mercy for the town, but was ignored. Every house was ransacked and even nobles of the town and their children carried away for ransom. The Duke of Burgundy, with a Valois eye for the best, dismounted the cathedral clock, finest in Flanders, and transported it by ox wagon to Dijon (where it still is). When the King departed, Courtrai was set on fire at his command, “so that it should be known ever after that the French King had been there.” Clisson, restored to his normal ferocity, was thought to have had a hand in the order.

  The totality of victory had one major exception. Ghent, the main objective, was never taken. At first news of their army’s defeat, the people were stunned and despairing, so that if the French had come to their gates in the several days after the battle “they would have suffered them to enter without resistance.” But medieval war had a tendency to stop short of political objective. Weary of cold and rain, occupied with profit and revenge in the immediate aftermath of Roosebeke, and confident that Ghent would surrender on demand, the French did not go north.

  Peter van den Bossche, despite his wounds, had himself carried to Ghent and re-inspirited the city, insisting the war was not over, that the French would not come in winter, and with new men in a new season “we shall do more than we ever did before,” even without English help. The English, as soon as they heard of the Flemish defeat, broke off negotiations and were “not greatly displeased” by the outcome. Had it gone otherwise, they feared the “great pride of the commoners” would have encouraged a new rising in their own country.

  Afterward, when the French attempted a parley, Ghent, as “hard and proud” as if it had won the victory, refused absolutely to yield to the Count of Flanders but only to the direct suzerainty of the King of France. The Count, and more especially Philip of Burgundy, the heir apparent, rejected that arrangement. By this time at the end of December it was too late to begin a siege. Having restored authority in the rest of Flanders, though they failed to convert it to Pope Clement, the French were ready to go home. They had business to settle with Paris.

  In the first week of January 1383 the royal army halted outside Paris and sent for the Provost and magistrates to assure the capital’s submission. With armed forces at hand, and strengthened by the victory of Roosebeke, the crown had greater authority than in the year before, and was prepared to use it. Breton and Norman companies were deployed in a semi-circle around Paris, champing on the brink of pillage. A huge force of Parisians, in a desperate show of the strength which they had long prepared, marched out armed with crossbows, shields, and mallets and assumed battle formation beyond Montmartre. Warily, the crown sent a delegation including the Constable and Coucy to appraise their strength and ask why they advanced thus combatively. The commoners replied that they wished the King to view their strength, which, being very young, he had never seen. They were sternly ordered to return and lay down their arms if they wished the King to enter Paris. Subdued since the verdict of Roosebeke, their spirit did not match their show; they turned back without resistance. The royal army was nevertheless notified to appear in the guise of war, not peace—that is, in armor—for the entry into Paris.

  Coucy and Marshal Sancerre were sent to open the city by taking down the solid gates from their hinges and removing street chains. The gates were thrown into the streets that the King might ride over them—“to trample the pride of the city,” as the Monk of St. Denis sadly acknowledged. Alarm and anger rose among the citizens, who posted guards at night and said, “There will be no peace yet. The King has destroyed and pillaged the land of Flanders and he will do the same in Paris.” To dampen trouble, heralds proclaimed to the people that no sack nor harm would come to them. On the day of entry, the bourgeois, represented by the Provost of Merchants, the magistrates, and 500 notables, came forward in festival clothes in the ritual plea for pardon. As they knelt, the King and his nobles, Coucy among them, flanked by men-at-arms with lances poised, rode past them through the shorn gates into the city.

  Men-at-arms were immediately posted at all bridges and at squares where the people were accustomed to gather. Houses where soldiers were to lodge were required to keep their doors open. Everyone possessing arms was ordered to bring them in a sack to the Louvre, from where they were removed to Vincennes.

  Arrests began at once, with special attention to the bourgeois notables, in whom the crown recognized its real opponents. Jean de Marès and Nicolas de Flament were among 300 substantial citizens arrested. Two rich merchants, a draper and a goldsmith, were executed at once, and thirteen more within a week. Nicolas de Flament, spared in 1358, went to the block now. All the bourgeois who had served in the city militia during the revolt were summoned one by one before the Council to be sentenced to heavy fines. Free to take revenge, the King’s government continued to impose convictions, fines, and executions for the next six weeks. “They cut off heads,” recorded the Ménagier de Paris, “three and four at a time,” to a total of more than 100, not counting those executed in other rebel towns.

  The seal of conquest was the re-imposition of a sales tax of twelve pence in the livre on all merchandise, plus extra on wine and salt—the same tax that had provoked the revolt of the Maillotins and that the Parisians had been refusing to pay for the past year. A week later, before a full assembly of the governing class of the city, the King’s ordinance was read revoking the privileges and franchises of Paris. The proud rights of self-government and chartered liberties, hard-won by the towns through the High Middle Ages, were being drained off and absorbed by a central government. In Paris the offices of Provost of Merchants and of the magistrates were suppressed and their jurisdictions taken over by the crown. The major trades were deprived of autonomy, as at Rouen, and subjected henceforward to supervisors appointed by the Provost of Paris. The police squads formerly maintained by the Provost of Merchants were abolished and the defense of Paris taken into the hands of the King. Meetings of confréries, as possible breeders of trouble, and all public assemblies except for attendance at church were forbidden. Participants in illicit meetings were to be treated as “rebel and disobedient,” subject to the death penalty and confiscation of property.

  The trial of Jean de Marès followed. He had not left Paris like other notables, the Monk of St. Denis recalled, but for more than a year had contained and moderated the fury of the people and striven to mediate between the court and the city. For that the hatred of the Dukes pursued him. A train of informers was brought forward to support the charge that he had counseled the rebels to take up arms. He was convicted, condemned to death, stripped of gown and hood, and carried in a cart with twelve others to the place of execution at Les Halles. Placed above the others in the cart, “so that he should be viewed by all,” he cried to the crowd collected in the streets, “Where are those who have condemned me? Let them come forward to justify my conviction if they can.” The people sorrowed for him, but none dared to speak.

  Told by the executioner to beg mercy of the King that he might be pardoned for his crimes, Marès replied that he had done nothing for which to beg pardon, “but from God alone I shall beg mercy and ask Him humbly to forgive me my sins.” After words of farewell to the people, who were all in tears, he turned to his death.

 
Not yet done, the crown summoned a mammoth assembly in the courtyard of the Marble Table on March 1, anniversary of the Maillotins’ revolt. One person from every house in Paris was required to attend, without head covering. Charles VI, attended by his uncles and Council, sat on a platform while Pierre d’Orgement as Chancellor read in the King’s name a harsh accusation of all the crimes committed by the people of Paris since the death of Charles V. After speaking of the executions, he cried in a terrible voice, “It is not finished!” The people knew their roles. Wails of fear rose from the crowd. With disordered clothes and hair, the wives of imprisoned men stretched out their arms to the King, imploring mercy in tears. The proud uncles and the King’s younger brother, Louis, knelt to beg for the relief of civil rather than criminal punishment—civil meaning fines. Orgement announced that the King, obeying his natural goodness and the pleas of his kin, consented to a general pardon, revocable if ever the Parisians returned to their evil ways. The convicted would be released from prison and pain of death but not from payment of fines. Some men of ample property were fined amounts equal to all they owned in money, houses, and land, reducing them to ruin.

  Similar punitive measures were taken at Amiens, whose ancient charter was revoked, at Laon, Beauvais, Orléans, and other cities. The immense sums collected in fines amounted to 400,000 francs from Paris and a comparable figure from the provinces. Much of it went to enrich the uncles, to pay the Constable and other royal officials who had received no salaries for the past two years, and to reimburse nobles, including Coucy, for expenses of the Flanders campaign. Coucy received 13,200 francs and a pledge of one third of the aids levied on his domain to cover the expense of fortifying his towns and castles.

  Strangely, in view of his role in removing the gates, Coucy retained a favorable image in Paris. A saying was recorded among the people that “the Sire de Coucy had not feared to remonstrate with the King and tell him that if he destroyed his own country he would be reduced to plying the workman’s spade.” The prophecy picturing the King doing a peasant’s work captured the public mind and was to have a long and curious fife.

  The authority of the lions was regained in full. Paris did not recover a Provost of Merchants for thirty years; Rouen never recovered the liberties it had enjoyed before the Harelle. Where insurgency had won momentary control, it was because of the absence of organized and ready forces of public order. The state had no arrangements for meeting revolution, although, by contrast, the role of suppression was as formalized as a ceremonial rite.

  Except in Ghent, insurgency could not retain a grip because it, too, had no prepared role and its ranks were divided. The poor provided the explosive force, but became the agents of the merchant class, whose interests were not theirs. The towns themselves failed in their aim because they were each other’s enemies. Ghent maintained its struggle for two more years until, on the death of Louis de Male, its liberties were restored by the Duke of Burgundy to consolidate his heritage. Elsewhere, communal liberties and autonomy were lost or reduced. The process that had operated in Etienne Marcel’s revolt continued: to the extent that the towns lost, the monarchy gained, while through financial support the crown increasingly made partners of the nobility.

  After the storm, the lower class was seen as more dangerous, more suspect. It gained recognition as a dynamic rather than passive section of society, by some in fear, by others in sympathy. “Therefore the innocent must die of hunger with whom these great wolves daily fill their maw,” wrote Deschamps. “This grain, this corn, what is it but the blood and bones of the poor folk who have plowed the land? Wherefore their spirit crieth on God for vengeance. Woe to the lords, the councillors and all who steer us thus, and woe to all who are of their party, for no man careth now but to fill his bags.”

  The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.

  * The hotel, called Rieulet or Nieulet in some contemporary manuscripts, was located in the now non-existent Rue St. Jean-en-Grève, which ran from the present Hôtel de Ville to the Rue de Rivoli. The residence was listed as sold to Raoul de Coucy, “conseiller du Roi,” in 1379, probably an error for Enguerrand, who in a charter of 1390 referred to it as “nôtre hostel à Paris.”

  Chapter 19

  The Lure of Italy

  The lure of a foothold in Italy exerted the same pull on the French as a foothold in France exerted on the English. From the time the Duc d’Anjou crossed the Alps in 1382, the Angevin claim to the Kingdom of Naples drew France southward, creating a habit of intervention that was to persist on and off for 500 years. Its pattern was laid at the start, when Anjou’s expedition encountered misfortune almost at once and sent repeatedly throughout the year 1383 for reinforcement under the Sire de Coucy.

  Angevins had ruled the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily since Charles of Anjou, younger brother of St. Louis, had been placed on the throne by papal influence in 1266. Sicily was absorbed by Aragon at the end of the century, but the Angevin dynasty retained the mainland portion, covering the entire lower half of Italy south of Rome, the largest domain on the peninsula.* Flourishing in commerce and culture, it enjoyed the civilized reign of King Robert, the “new Solomon” whose literary approval Petrarch came to seek. Boccaccio followed because he preferred residence in the “happy, peaceful, generous, and magnificent Naples with its one monarch” to his native republican Florence “devoured by innumerable cares.” Robert built his palace, Castel Nuovo, on the water’s edge facing Naples’ incomparable bay, where ships of Genoa, Spain, and Provence came to trade. Nobles and merchants added their palazzos alongside, bringing down Tuscan artists to fill them with frescoes and sculpture. Under just laws and a stable currency, with security of roads, hostels for traveling merchants, festivities, tournaments, music, and poetry, Robert’s reign, which ended in 1343, was said to be “something like Paradise.” Citizens could journey unarmed through Calabria and Apulia “except fora wooden club to defend themselves against dogs.”

  The blight of the 14th century descended after the good King’s death. Robert’s talents petered out in his granddaughter and successor, Joanna, whose four ill-fated efforts to bolster the female succession by marriage brought turmoil culminating in the schism. The conflict of popes made Naples a battlefield. When Joanna opted for Clement and, at his instigation, named Anjou her heir, the furious Urban declared her deposed as a heretic and schismatic and crowned another Angevin descendant, Charles, Duke of Durazzo, as rightful King of Naples. Elevated from an obscure Albanian principality to a great Mediterranean kingdom, this prince took the throne as Charles III.

  A small, fair-haired man said to resemble Robert in courage and geniality as well as love of learning, Charles of Durazzo did not let his good nature inhibit his struggle against Joanna. Within two months he had defeated her forces, established himself in the Castel Nuovo, and imprisoned the Queen in the hope of coercing her to appoint him her heir and thus legitimize his conquest. To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup. When Joanna refused to acknowledge him and Anjou entered Italy on his way to her aid, Charles did not hesitate. He had the Queen strangled in prison and her corpse exposed in the cathedral for six days before burial so that no doubt should be left of her death.

  Anjou came by way of Avignon, where he, in turn, was crowned King of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, including Provence, by Pope Clement, and his rival, Charles of Durazzo, was simultaneously excommunicated. Despite his persuasive arts, Anjou had been unable during the insurrections in France to collect enough funds to take him all the way to Naples and had tried in vain to persuade the Royal Council to finance his venture as a national war. Now, as sovereign of Provence, he minted huge quantities of coin and enriched his troops by allowing them freedom to loot his new subjects on the pretext of punishment for their recent rebelliousness. He collected
additional money and forces from Pope Clement and was joined in his enterprise by that energetic nobleman, Amadeo, the Green Count of Savoy, who contributed 1,100 lances at a cost to Anjou of 20,000 ducats a month.

  Replenished and leading an army of 15,000 “gorged with booty,” Anjou crossed into Lombardy followed by 300 pack mules and unnumbered baggage wagons. The Green Count’s equipment included an enormous green pavilion ornamented with twelve shields bearing the arms of Savoy in red and white, an emerald silk surcoat embroidered with the red-and-white device, twelve saddle-and-bridle sets all in green, and four others ornamented with “Hungarian ribbon knots” for his immediate retinue, and green shoes, hoods, and tunics for his pages. When, before leaving, certain of his barons objected to the venture on various grounds, he silenced them, saying with unhappy clairvoyance, “I will fulfill what I have promised even if it means my death.” Many notable lords joined under his banner “for love of the prowess and largesse they admired in him.”

  In Milan, Visconti wealth supplied the largest portion of Anjou’s funds just as it had a very large portion of his father’s ransom, in exchange for the same kind of goods. Anjou’s seven-year-old son, Louis, was offered in betrothal to Bernabò’s daughter Lucia. For the prospect of a daughter as future Queen of Naples, Bernabò paid 50,000 florins—roughly equivalent to the annual income of about 100 bourgeois families*—plus an additional sum from Gian Galeazzo. Anjou was using every means to collect resources adequate for the fitting display of a king en route to his kingdom.

  In plumed helmets and sumptuous pomp, loaded with gifts and honors, he and Amadeo and their knights left Milan, followed by such numbers of men and wagons as “seemed like an army of Xerxes.” They headed east for the difficult route down the Adriatic coast, because Florence, which opposed both Anjou and Durazzo, did not want the embarrassment—nor the pillaging—of their passage and had raised 6,000 men to block the road through Tuscany. According to the Monk of St. Denis—who, like his fellow monk Walsingham, took a sour view of marauding dukes—Anjou and his nobles flattered themselves that through them the Lilies of France would spread afar “the sweet perfume of glory.” As they rode, they celebrated their enterprise in song and verse and “fabulous recitals” of French valor.