A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Once again the Constable’s sword was offered to Coucy, whom Burgundy was clearly anxious to have in his camp. If the post had not appealed to him in the last days of Charles V, it had even less attraction now, nor did he wish to become the beneficiary of his friend’s fall. He “refused positively” to accept it, “even if it meant that he should be forced to leave France.” The implied risk did not materialize. Finding Coucy adamant, the uncles gave the post to the young Comte d’Eu, reportedly so that he might become wealthy enough to marry Berry’s daughter.

  Under the care of Coucy’s physician, the King seemed restored to sanity by the end of September. Escorted by Coucy, he made a pilgrimage of thanks to Notre Dame de Liesse, a little church near Laon commemorating the miracle of three crusaders from Picardy who, while captives of the Saracens, had converted the daughter of the Sultan to Christianity and given her a statue of the Virgin, upon which they were promptly transported by air, along with the princess, to their native land. Charles returned via Coucy-le-Château, where in company with the Duke of Burgundy he dined on October 4, and still escorted by Coucy worshiped at St. Denis on his way back to Paris. Under the new regime, Coucy remained a leading member of the Council, dividing his time between attendance at its sessions and his functions as Lieutenant-General of Auvergne.

  To the distress of the court, the wise and ancient Harsigny, refusing all pleas and offers of riches to remain, insisted on returning to the quiet of his home at Laon. He was awarded 2,000 gold crowns and the privilege of using four horses from the royal stables free of charge whenever he might wish to revisit the court. He never did. Several months later he died, leaving a historic effigy.

  Harsigny’s tomb was the first of its kind in the cult of death that was a legacy of the 14th century. His marble image does not show him in the pride of life at 33, as was customary in the hope of resurrection, when the chosen were expected to rise at the same age as Jesus Christ. Rather, following his specific instructions, the effigy is the visible image of the corpse inside the coffin. The recumbent body is shown exactly as it was in death, naked, in the extreme thinness of very old age with wrinkled skin stretched over the bones, hands crossed over the genitals, no drapery or covering of any kind, a stark confession of the nothingness of mortal life.

  Before leaving his royal patient, Harsigny had advised against burdening him with the responsibilities of state. “I give him back to you in good health,” he had said, “but be careful not to worry or irritate him. His mind is not yet strong; little by little it will improve. Burden him with work as little as you can; pleasure and forgetfulness will be better for him than anything else.” This advice perfectly suited the Dukes. Sovereign in name only, Charles returned to Paris to dally with the ladies in the gardens of St. Pol and enjoy the amusements and festivities organized every night by his wife and brother. In relief from madness, frivolity abounded and the uncles did not interfere, “for so long as the Queen and the Duc d’Orléans danced, they were not dangerous nor even annoying.”

  Court purveyors and moneylenders throve, mystery plays and magicians filled every hour, sorcerers and impostors found unlimited credulity, fashions went to extremes especially in hairdressing. Young men curled their locks and trimmed their beards in two points, while the elaborate braided shells worn by the ladies over their ears grew so fantastic and enormous that they had to turn sideways when passing through a doorway. Queen Isabeau and her sister-in-law Valentina vied with each other in novelties and opulence; dresses were loaded with jewels, fringes, and fantastical emblems. In the taverns people murmured against the extravagance and license. They loved the crowned youth, who for his affability and openhandedness and easy conversation with all ranks, was called Charles le Bien-aimé (the Well-beloved), but they deplored the “foreigners” from Bavaria and Italy and blamed the uncles for allowing dissipations unbecoming to the King of France.

  Thrust to the head of the court as young boys not yet in their teens, Charles and Louis had none of their father’s care for the dignity of the crown; they had neither discipline nor sense of decorum. Deprived of major responsibility, they made up for it in play, and adults’ play requires constant new excesses to be entertaining.

  On the night when these culminated in horror, Coucy was not present because he was in Savoy, using his negotiating talents to settle a tremendous family quarrel which had split the ruling house and all related noble families and created a crisis of hostility that threatened to block passage for the march on Rome. The issue, involving ducal families, dower rights, and of course property, derived from the fact that the Red Count, Amadeus VII, who had recently died at the age of 31, had left the guardianship of his son to his mother, a sister of the Duc de Bourbon, instead of to his wife, a daughter of the Duc de Berry. It was to take three months before Coucy and Guy de Tremoille succeeded in negotiating a treaty that brought the overblown fracas to an end and left the rival Countesses in “peaceable accord with their subjects.”

  On the Tuesday before Candlemas Day (January 28, 1393), four days after Coucy had left Paris, the Queen gave a masquerade to celebrate the wedding of a favorite lady-in-waiting who, twice widowed, was now being married for the third time. A woman’s re-marriage, according to certain traditions, was considered an occasion for mockery and often celebrated by a charivari for the newlyweds with all sorts of license, disguises, disorders, and loud blaring of discordant music and clanging of cymbals outside the bridal chamber. Although this was a usage “contrary to all decency,” says the censorious Monk of St. Denis, King Charles had let himself be persuaded by dissolute friends to join in such a charade.

  Six young men including the King and Yvain, bastard son of the Count of Foix, disguised themselves as “wood savages,” in costumes of linen cloth sewn onto their bodies and soaked in resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, “so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot.” Face masks entirely concealed their identity. Aware of the risk they ran in torch-filled halls, they forbade anyone carrying a torch to enter during the dance. Plainly, an element of Russian roulette was involved, the tempting of death that has repeatedly been the excitement of highborn and decadent youth. Certain ways of behavior vary little across the centuries. Plainly, too, there was an element of cruelty in involving as one of the actors a man thinly separated from madness.

  The deviser of the affair, “cruelest and most insolent of men,” was one Huguet de Guisay, favored in the royal circle for his outrageous schemes. He was a man of “wicked life” who “corrupted and schooled youth in debaucheries,” and held commoners and the poor in hatred and contempt. He called them dogs, and with blows of sword and whip took pleasure in forcing them to imitate barking. If a servant displeased him, he would force the man to lie on the ground and, standing on his back, would kick him with spurs, crying, “Bark, dog!” in response to his cries of pain.

  In their Dance of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles was teasing and gesticulating before the fifteen-year-old Duchesse de Berry when Louis d’Orléans and Philippe de Bar, arriving from dissipations elsewhere, entered the hall accompanied by torches despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or deliberately courting danger—accounts of the episode differ—Louis held up a torch over the capering monsters. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, first one dancer was afire, then another. The Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted. The Duchesse de Berry, who had recognized the King, threw her skirt over him to protect him from the sparks, thus saving his life. The room filled with the guests’ sobs and cries of horror and the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stifle the flames and tear the costumes from the writhing victims were badly burned. Except for the King, only the Sire de Nantouillet, who flung himself into a large wine-cooler filled with water, escaped. The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the s
pot, Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suffering. Huguet de Guisay lived for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his coffin was carried through the streets, the common people greeted it with cries of “Bark, dog!”

  This ghastly affair, coming so soon after the King’s madness, was like an exclamation point to the malign succession of events that had tormented the century. Charles’s narrow escape threw Paris into a “great commotion,” and anger swept the citizens at the appalling frivolity which had so casually endangered the life and honor of the King. Had he died, they said, the people would have massacred the uncles and all the court; “not one of them would have escaped death, nor any knight found in Paris.” Alarmed at these dangerous sentiments with their echo of the Maillotins’ rebellion barely ten years past, the uncles prevailed on the King to ride in solemn procession to Notre Dame to appease the people. Behind Charles on horseback, his uncles and brother followed barefoot as penitents. As the involuntary agent of the tragedy, Louis was widely reproached for his dissolute habits. In expiation he built a chapel for the Célestins with marvelous stained glass and rich altar furnishings and an endowment for perpetual prayers. He paid for it with revenues given him by the King from Craon’s confiscated property, leaving it a question as to whose soul was absolved.

  The fatal masquerade came to be called the Bal des Ardents—Dance of the Burning Ones—but it could as well have been called the Danse Macabre, after a new kind of processional play on the theme of death that had lately come into vogue. Of uncertain origin and meaning, the name Macabre first appeared in writing in a poem of 1376 by Anjou’s chancellor, Jean le Fèvre, containing the line, “Je fis de Macabré le danse (I do the Danse Macabre). It may have derived from an older Danse Machabreus, meaning “of the Maccabees,” or from similarity to the Hebrew word for grave-diggers and the fact that Jews worked as grave-diggers in medieval France. The dance itself probably developed under the influence of recurring plague, as a street performance to illustrate sermons on the submission of all alike to Death the Leveler. In murals illustrating the dance at the Church of the Innocents in Paris, fifteen pairs of figures, clerical and lay, from pope and emperor down the scale to monk and peasant, friar and child, make up the procession.

  “Advance, see yourselves in us,” they say in the accompanying verses, “dead, naked, rotten and stinking. So will you be.… To live without thinking of this risks damnation.… Power, honor, riches are naught; at the hour of death only good works count.… Everyone should think at least once a day of his loathsome end,” to remind him to do good deeds and go to mass if he wishes to be redeemed and escape “the dreadful pain of hell without end which is unspeakable.”

  Each figure speaks his piece: the constable knows that Death carries off the bravest, even Charlemagne; the knight, once loved by the ladies, knows that he will make them dance no more; the plump abbot, that “the fattest rots first”; the astrologer, that his knowledge cannot save him; the peasant who has lived all his days in care and toil and often wished for death, now when the hour has come would much rather be digging in the vineyards “even in rain and wind.” The point is made over and over, that here is you and you and you. The cadaverous figure who leads the procession is not Death but the Dead One. “It is yourself,” says the inscription under the murals of the dance at La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne.

  The cult of death was to reach its height in the 15th century, but its source was in the 14th. When death was to be met any day around any corner, it might have been expected to become banal; instead it exerted a ghoulish fascination. Emphasis was on worms and putrefaction and gruesome physical details. Where formerly the dominant idea of death was the spiritual journey of the soul, now the rotting of the body seemed more significant. Effigies of earlier centuries were serene, with hands joined in prayer and eyes open, anticipating eternal life. Now, following Harsigny’s example, great prelates often had themselves shown as cadavers in realistic detail. To accomplish this, death masks and molds of bodily parts were made of wax, incidentally promoting portraiture and a new recognition of individual traits. The message of the effigies was that of the Danse Macabre. Over the scrawny, undraped corpse of Cardinal Jean de La Grange, who was to die in Avignon in 1402, the inscription asks observers, “So, miserable one, what cause for pride?”

  The cult of the lugubrious in coming decades made the cemetery of the Innocents at Paris, with the Danse Macabre painted on its walls, the most desirable burial place and popular meeting place in Paris. Charnel houses built into the 48 arches of the cloister were donated by rich bourgeois and nobles—among them Boucicaut and Berry—to hold their remains. Because twenty parishes had the right of burial at the Innocents, the old dead had to be continually disinterred and their tombstones sold to make room for the new. Skulls and bones piled up under the cloister arches were an attraction for the curious, and bleak proof of ultimate leveling. Shops of all kinds found room in and around the cloister; prostitutes solicited there, alchemists found a market place, gallants made it a rendezvous, dogs wandered in and out. Parisians came to tour the charnel houses, watch burials and disinterments, gaze at the murals, and read the verses. They listened to daylong sermons and shuddered as the Dead One blowing his horn entered from the Rue St. Denis leading his procession of awful dancers.

  Art followed the lugubrious. The crown of thorns, rarely pictured before, became a realistic instrument of pain drawing blood in the paintings of the second half of the century. The Virgin acquired seven sorrows, ranging from the flight into Egypt to the Pietà—the limp dead body of her son lying across her knees. Claus Sluter, sculptor to the Duke of Burgundy, made the first known Pietà in France in 1390 for the convent of Champmol at Dijon. At the same time, the playful smiling faces of the so-called Beautiful Madonnas with their gentle draperies and happy infants appear amid the gloom. Secular painting is gay and exquisite; Death never disturbs those lyrical picnics beneath enchanted towers.

  The Black Death returned for the fourth time in 1388–90. Earlier recurrences had affected chiefly children who had not acquired immunity, but in the fourth round a new adult generation fell under the swift contagion. By this time Europe’s population was reduced to between 40 and 50 percent of what it had been when the century opened, and it was to fall even lower by mid-15th century. People of the time rarely mention this startling diminution of their world, although it was certainly visible to them in reduced trade, in narrowed areas of cultivation, in abbeys and churches abandoned or unable to maintain services for lack of revenue, in urban districts destroyed in war and left unrepaired after sixty years.

  On the other hand, it may be that when people were fewer they ate better, and proportionately more money circulated. Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence of growing business exists alongside that of lowered trade. An Italian merchant who died in 1410 left 100,000 documents of correspondence with agents in Italy, France, Spain, England, and Tunisia. The merchant class had more money at its command than before, and its expenditures encouraged arts, comforts, and technological advance. The 14th century was not arid. The tapestry workshops of Arras, Brussels, and the famous Nicolas Bataille of Paris produced wonders which robbed stained glass of its primacy in decorative art. Mariners’ maps reached new efficiency, allowing sea monsters to disappear from the lower corner in favor of accurate coastlines and navigational aids. Bourgeois money created a new audience for writers and poets and encouraged literature through the buying of books. Several thousand scribes were employed turning out copies to meet the demand of the 25 booksellers and stationarii of Paris. The flamboyant in architecture, with its lavish multitude of attenuated pinnacles, canopied niches, and lacy buttresses, expressed not only a technical exuberance but a denial, even a defiance, of decline. How to reconcile with pessimism the Milan Cathedral, that fantastic mountain of filigree in stone begun in the last quarter of the century?

  Psychological effec
ts are clearer than the physical. Never was so much written about the miseria of human life, and the sense of dwindling numbers, even if unmentioned, promoted pessimism about human fate. “What schal befalle hiereafter, God wot,” wrote John Gower in England in 1393,

  —for now upon this tyde

  men se the world on every syde

  In sondry wyse so dyversed

  That it welnyh stant all reversed.

  For men of affairs no less than poets, the insecurity of the time allowed little confidence in the future. The letters of Francesco Datini, merchant of Prato, show him living in daily dread of war, pestilence, famine, and insurrection, believing neither in the stability of government nor in the honesty of colleagues. “The earth and the sea are full of robbers,” he wrote to one of his partners, “and the great part of mankind is evilly disposed.”

  Gerson believed he lived in the senility of the world when society, like some delirious old man, suffered from fantasies and illusions. He, like others, felt the time was at hand for the coming of Anti-Christ and the end of the world—to be followed by a better one. In popular expectation, Apocalypse would bring the return of a great emperor—a second Charlemagne, a third Frederick, an imperial messiah—who, coupled with an angelic pope, would reform the Church, renew society, and save Christendom. Churchmen and moralists in apocalyptic mood stressed more than ever the vanity of worldly things—though without visibly diminishing anyone’s desire for, and pride in, possessions.