A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Serving as a link between them was a Burgundian protégé, related to both the Duchess of Burgundy and the Duke of Brittany, the same sinister Pierre de Craon who had embezzled the Duc d’Anjou’s funds in the Naples campaign. Since then he had flouted a court order to reimburse Anjou’s widow, and had assassinated a knight of Laon but used his influence to secure a pardon. These derelictions had not prevented his finding favor in the royal circle of pleasure seekers. He evidently possessed the charm of wickedness. However, he angered Louis d’Orléans by informing his wife—apparently from an irresistible impulse to mischief—of an extra-marital passion which Louis had confided to him. Louis had even taken Craon to visit the beautiful, if too virtuous, lady who had resisted an offer of 1,000 gold crowns for her favors. On discovering Craon’s betrayal, Louis in a rage took the tale to the King, who compliantly banished the troublemaker. Craon claimed he was removed because he had tried to make Louis give up engaging in occult practices and consorting with sorcerers.

  Burning with resentment, he took refuge with the Duke of Brittany, who was his cousin. In Craon the Duke found the agent for another attempt to ruin Clisson. Because Clisson was married to a niece of the Duchess d’Anjou, he automatically shared that family’s mortal enmity for Craon. On this basis Craon already suspected, and the Duke of Brittany easily persuaded him, that Clisson’s hand was behind his banishment—which may have been true. Clisson is said to have discovered secret correspondence between Craon and the Dukes. In any event, Craon now “breathed only for vengeance.”

  On the night of June 13, 1392, having returned secretly to Paris, Craon waited in ambush at a street crossing where Clisson would pass on the way to his hôtel. With Craon in the darkness was a party of forty armored followers, enough to ensure overwhelming odds against an opponent in civilian circumstances. When a man really intended the death of a fellow noble, chivalry’s codes were surprisingly non-inhibiting. Rather than challenge his enemy to open combat, Craon preferred to strike in the dark. Judging by his record, he was a man without moral sense, but he was not alone. Montfort too had violated honor, loyalty, and every other principle of chivalry when he had kidnapped Clisson. Clisson himself was no Roland. In the lifetime of these men, under the disruptive effects of plague, brigandage, and schism, normal codes of conduct disintegrated.

  Escorted by eight attendants with torches but unarmed for combat, Clisson was returning on horseback from a party given by the King at St. Pol. He was discussing with his squires a dinner he was to give next day for Coucy, Orléans, and Vienne when suddenly the torchlight fell upon a dark mass of mounted men and on the faint gleam of helmet and cuirass. The assailants charged, extinguishing Clisson’s torches and crying, “A mort! A mort!” Craon’s men did not know whom they were attacking because the identity of the victim had been kept secret. They were appalled to hear their chief shout in his excitement, as with brandished sword he urged them forward, “Clisson, you must die!”

  Clisson cried out to his unknown assailant, “Who are you?”

  “I am Pierre de Craon, your enemy!” replied the leader openly, for he anticipated a corpse and an overturn of government in consequence. His men, stunned to discover themselves engaged in murdering the Constable of France, were hesitant in pressing the attack, “for treason is never bold.” Armed only with a dagger, Clisson desperately defended himself until, struck by many blows, he was unhorsed. He fell into the doorway of a baker’s shop, forcing open the door by the weight of his fall, just as the baker, hearing the racket, appeared in time to pull him into the house. Believing they had killed him, Craon and his party hastened away. The survivors among Clisson’s squires found him in the shop, slashed by sword cuts, bathed in blood, and apparently lifeless. By the time the King, aroused from bed and informed of the awful news, reached the baker’s shop, Clisson had recovered consciousness.

  “How goes it with you, Constable?” pleaded Charles, stricken at the sight.

  “Feebly, Sire.”

  “Who has done this to you?” When Clisson named his assassin, Charles swore that “no deed shall ever be so expiated as this, nor so heavily punished.” He called for surgeons, who, on examining the Constable’s hardened body, survivor of a hundred combats, promised his recovery. Carried to his residence, Clisson was “much cheered” by a visit from Coucy, who as his brother-in-arms was the first to be informed after the King.

  Orders for the capture of Craon failed because the gates of Paris, still stripped of their bars since the insurrection, could not be closed. Learning that, unbelievably, Clisson lived, Craon escaped from the city, galloped as far as Chartres and thence to Brittany. “It is diabolic,” he told the Duke in explaining his failure. “I believe all the devils of Hell, to whom the Constable belongs, guarded and delivered him out of my hands, for he suffered more than sixty blows by swords or knives and I truly believed him dead.”

  King Charles, feeling himself attacked in the person of the state’s chief defender, pursued the assassin with insatiable fury. Two of Craon’s squires and a page were beheaded on capture, as was the steward of his Paris residence for failing to report his return to the capital. A canon of Chartres who had given him shelter was deprived of his benefices and condemned to perpetual abstinence in prison on bread and water. Craon’s properties and revenues were confiscated to the benefit of the Royal Treasury; his residences and castles were ordered razed. The King’s excited state of mind communicated itself, as royal rage will, to his deputies. Admiral de Vienne, charged with making an inventory of Craon’s fortune, reportedly evicted his wife and daughter without possessions or money, in nothing but the clothes they wore—after raping the daughter, according to one report—and helped himself to the rich furnishings and valuables of their residence. Perhaps he felt that Craon’s treason justified this indecency, though his conduct was widely condemned by fellow nobles. Strange excesses flowed from the attempted murder of the Constable, as if Craon’s act had released a contagion of evil.

  Events moved from murder to war when the Duke of Brittany, on being ordered to surrender the culprit, denied all knowledge of him and refused to concern himself in any way. Thus defied, the King called for war on the Duke. Barely recovered from his illness at Amiens, Charles appeared often distraught and disconnected in speech. His physicians advised against a campaign, but, encouraged by his brother, he insisted. Burgundy and Berry, who depended on the Duke of Brittany as their ally in the political struggle, bent every endeavor to prevent it. The heat of family partisanship was added to the conflict by the Duchess of Burgundy, who was Montfort’s niece and therefore took his side and hated Clisson with venomous intensity. Burgundian influence was certainly behind the asylum given to Craon. Berry, for his part, was said to have had prior knowledge of Craon’s assault.

  When it was learned that Clisson’s will, dictated after the attack, left a fortune of 1,700,000 francs, not counting lands, the uncles’ jealous rage at finding themselves outdone in the rewards of avarice knew no bounds. Such a fortune—greater than the King’s, they let it be known—could have come from no honest source. The public was ready enough to believe it, for Rivière and Mercier, too, had amassed fortunes from government service and were generally disliked as both arrogant and venal. All these strifes and rancors festered behind the unstable King as he clamored for war.

  The Council approved the campaign; the uncles, left out of the decision but bound to join the King, were augmented in their hatred of the ministers. “They dreamed of nothing but how to destroy them.” The King, accompanied by Bourbon and Coucy, left Paris on July 1, moving westward by slow stages as knights and their retinues came up to join the march. Charles’s ill health required protracted stops, and further delay was caused by waiting for the uncles. Hoping to forestall the war, they dallied and procrastinated, putting Charles in a frenzy of impatience. Scarcely eating or drinking, he was in Council every day, harping on the insult to him through his Constable, upset at any contradictions, refusing absolutely to be swerved fro
m punishing the Duke of Brittany. Discord, arriving with Burgundy and Berry, spread to the army, where knights disputed the rights and wrongs of the enterprise. In reply to a second demand for Craon’s surrender, Montfort again denied knowing anything about him. Charles, although declared “feverish and unfit to ride” by his physicians, would wait no longer.

  In the heat of mid-August the march began from Le Mans on the borders of Brittany. On a sandy road under blazing sun, the King, wearing a black velvet jacket and a hat of scarlet velvet ornamented with pearls, rode apart from the others to avoid the dust. Two pages rode behind, one carrying his helmet, the other his lance. Ahead rode the two uncles in one group, and Louis d’Orléans with Coucy and Bourbon in another. As the party passed through the forest of Mans, a rough barefoot man in a ragged smock suddenly stepped from behind a tree and seized the King’s bridle, crying in a voice of doom, “Ride no further, noble King! Turn back! You are betrayed!” Charles shrank in alarm. Escorts beat the man’s hand from the bridle but because he appeared no more than a poor madman did not arrest him, not even when he followed the company for half an hour crying betrayal in the King’s ears.

  Emerging from the forest, the riders came out on an open plain at high noon. Men and horses suffered under the sun’s rays. One of the pages, dozing in the saddle, let fall the King’s lance, which struck the steel helmet carried by his companion with a loud clang. The King shuddered, then, suddenly drawing his sword, spurred his horse to a charge with the cry, “Forward against the traitors! They wish to deliver me to the enemy!” Wheeling and charging, he struck at anyone within reach.

  “My God,” cried Burgundy, “the King is out of his mind! Hold him, someone!” No one dared try. Warding off the blows but unable to strike back against the King’s person, they milled around in horror while Charles rushed wildly against this one and that until he was exhausted, panting, and drenched in sweat. Then his chamberlain, Guillaume de Martel, whom he much loved, clasped him from behind while others took his sword and, lifting him from his horse, laid him gently on the ground. He lay motionless and speechless, staring with open eyes, recognizing no one. One or more knights (the number differs in different versions) whom he had killed in his frenzy lay near him in the dust.

  Bold as always, Philip of Burgundy seized authority. “We must return to Mans,” he decided. “This finishes the march on Brittany.” Laid in a passing oxcart, the King of France was carried back while an appalled company, some already thinking furiously of the future, rode alongside. With scarcely a sign of life but his heartbeat, Charles remained in a coma for four days during which he was thought to be on his deathbed. His physicians could offer no hope, and other doctors who were called—Burgundy’s, Orléans’, Bourbon’s—agreed after consultation that their science was powerless.

  As the awful report of the King’s madness spread, rumors of sorcery and poison were on every tongue, and popular emotion so aroused that the sick chamber had to be kept open to the public. All the tears and grief attending a royal demise filled the room and “all good Frenchmen wept as for an only son, for the health of France was tied to that of her King.” Sobbing clergy conducted prayers, bishops led barefoot processions carrying life-size wax figures of the King to the churches, the people heaped their offerings on relics known for healing powers, and prostrated themselves before Christ and the saints to beseech a cure.

  Few believed the affliction had natural causes. Some saw it as Divine anger at the King’s failure to take up arms to end the schism; others, as God’s warning against that very intention; still others, as Divine punishment for heavy taxes. Most believed the cause was sorcery, the more so because a great drought that summer dried up the ponds and rivers so that cattle died of thirst, waterborne transport ceased, and merchants claimed the worst losses in twenty years.

  In a morbid time, belief in conspiracy rose to the surface. Whispers circulated against the Dukes. Why had the “phantom of the forest” not been arrested and interrogated? Had he been planted by the Duke of Brittany or by the uncles to cause the King to turn back? Had the King’s excess of anger caused by the Dukes’ delay brought on his madness? To allay public suspicions, Burgundy held a formal inquiry at which the King’s doctors testified to Charles’s previous illnesses.

  Coucy too had summoned his personal physician, the most venerable and learned in France. He was Guillaume de Harsigny, a native of Laon aged 92, the same age as the century. After earning his degree at the University of Paris, he had traveled widely to enlarge his knowledge, studied under Arab professors at Cairo and Italians at Salerno, and eventually returned loaded with renown to his native Picardy. Nothing in human ills was unknown to him. Under his care—or by natural process coinciding with it—the King’s fever subsided and intervals of reason returned in which the poor young man, not yet 25, recognized with horror what had befallen him. Within a month Charles’s physical recovery had progressed well enough for Harsigny to take him to the castle of Creil high above the river Oise, where he could enjoy “the best air in the region of Paris.” The court overflowed with joy and with praise for the skills of Coucy’s physician.

  The first four days, when Charles had been expected to die, gave the uncles their opportunity against the Marmosets. “Now is the hour,” said Berry, “when I shall pay them back in kind.” On the very day of the King’s attack, someone with quick perception of Fortune’s Wheel warned the Marmosets to be gone. On the next day while still at Le Mans, Berry and Burgundy, claiming authority as the King’s eldest relatives, although in fact Louis was closer to the crown, dismissed the entire Council, disbanded the army, and seized the reins of government. Returning to Paris within two weeks, they convened a subservient Council which duly gave the government to Philip the Bold on the ground that Louis d’Orléans was too young, and deposed the Marmosets by judicial process. Rivière and Mercier, who had been unready to abandon power in time, were arrested and imprisoned, and their lands, houses, furnishings, and fortune confiscated. A more prescient colleague, Jean de Montagu, reputed to be a natural son of Charles V, took himself and his fortune to Avignon the moment he heard of the King’s attack.

  The ease of the overturn is almost baffling. Only the eclipse of the King and Clisson’s wounds made it possible. Without royal authority to support them, Rivière and Mercier had no independent status; no regent had been named for the six-month-old Dauphin; Louis lacked the assurance and decisiveness to act, although he might have taken control if Coucy and Bourbon and the rest of the Council had been prepared to force the issue against the Dukes. Clearly, they were not. They could not be sure of military support because the leading nobles lacked cohesion. In the uncertainty of the King’s condition, no one knew which way power would jump. Above all, the Constable was hors de combat.

  With sure instinct Coucy seems to have made his choice quickly, for on August 25 he accepted a mission along with Burgundy’s chamberlain, Guy de Tremoille, to inform the Duke of Brittany that the war against him was called off. In the fate of Rivière and Mercier he played a darker role. Although he had served closely with Rivière in many joint missions over the past fifteen years, Coucy was one of a group sent to seize his former partner in his castle, to which he had fled before the order for his arrest. Rivière was said to have opened his own door to his captors. Ten years later, after her husband and Coucy were both dead, Rivière’s widow claimed that Coucy had taken coffers containing silver and gold plate and tapestries from the castle, although no such charge was ever made during the lifetime of the principals.

  In the case of Mercier, however, Coucy benefited openly. By way of putting him under obligation, the Dukes gave him Mercier’s principal castle of Nouvion-le-Comte in the diocese of Laon with all its rents and revenues. A ruler’s bestowal upon one noble of the confiscated property of another was a routine means of attaching support. Whether or not Coucy had compunctions about accepting, to have refused would have marked him as an overt opponent of the Dukes.

  In prison, Rivièr
e and Mercier daily expected torture and execution, the normal fate of those who lost power. Rivière remained stoic, but Mercier was reputed to have cried so many tears that he almost lost his eyesight. Every day people came to the Place de Grève expecting to watch the dispatch of the prisoners. “Prudent, cold and far-seeing,” Burgundy did not exact the final penalty. He preferred to be circumspect while there was still a chance of the King recovering sovereignty. Charles, as he improved, pressed for the release of his former councillors, and public opinion, in love and pity for the King, swung in their favor. Now it was remembered that Rivière had always been “gentle, courteous, debonair and patient with poor people.” After eighteen months in prison both were finally released and banished from court, although their property was restored, presumably including Coucy’s temporary acquisition.

  The dismissal of Clisson was to be Burgundy’s triumph. Forcing the issue, Clisson came to see him to inquire as Constable about measures for government of the realm. Philip looked at him malevolently. “Clisson, Clisson,” he said between his teeth, “you need not busy yourself with that; the kingdom will be governed without your office.” Then, unable to conceal the real source of his anger, he demanded “where the Devil” Clisson had amassed so great a fortune, more than his and Berry’s put together. “Get out of my sight,” he exploded, “for were it not for my honor I would put out your other eye!” Clisson rode home reflectively. That night, under cover of darkness, he left his hôtel with two attendants by the back gate and rode to his castle of Montlhéry, just south of Paris, where he could defend himself.

  Raging at his escape, Burgundy again chose Coucy as agent against his own brother-in-arms. Along with Guy de Tremolile, he was named to command a force of 300 lances including many former comrades of the Constable, who were ordered to march by five different roads and not to return without Clisson dead or alive. This does not seem to have been one of Burgundy’s more intelligent moves. Naturally warned by his friends in the party, Clisson escaped to his fortress of Josselin in Brittany, where on his own ground he could withstand attack. But his flight enabled Burgundy to use him as a scapegoat. He was tried in absentia, convicted as a “false and wicked traitor,” deposed as Constable, banished, and fined 100,000 marks. Louis d’Orléans refused to ratify the proceedings, but throughout the overturn he never dared openly challenge his uncles.