A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Court life can produce ennui and disgust even in a Queen. In nostalgia for the bucolic, 400 years before Marie Antoinette, Isabeau built a Hotel des Bergères (House of the Shepherds) at her property of St. Ouen, complete with gardens and fields, barn, stable, sheepfold, and dovecote, where she played at farming and took care of chickens and livestock. The King, as time went on, was rumored to be neglected to the point of penury, living unclean and even hungry in apartments where the paper windowpanes were torn and pigeons entered to leave their droppings. During one return of sanity he arrested the Queen’s chamberlain and current paramour, had him imprisoned in chains, questioned under torture, and afterward secretly drowned in the Seine.

  In the political struggle Isabeau attached herself where power lay. When Louis d’Orléans was named Regent, she joined him against Burgundy and was generally supposed to have become his mistress. When he was assassinated by Burgundy’s son and successor, John the Fearless, she changed sides and moved into the camp and bed of Louis’ murderer. In the vacuum created by a living but helpless King, France floundered, and the Queen, lacking any capacity to cope, became the tool of the ruthless forces—Burgundy and England—which moved into the vacuum. Hard-pressed in Paris, separated geographically and politically from the Dauphin, unable to mobilize support, she finally agreed to the infamous treaty which named the King of England heir to the throne of France in place of her own son. In the end, obese and depraved, she outlived her husband by fifteen years and was eventually to find an all too imaginative biographer in the Marquis de Sade.

  Looking back from a perspective of some 200 years, the Duc de Sully, Henri IV’s chief minister, characterized the reign of Charles VI as “pregnant with sinister events … the grave of good laws and good morals in France.”

  Chapter 25

  Lost Opportunity

  While the peace parley was meeting at Leulinghen in May-June 1393, Coucy was conferring with Pope Clement in Avignon, where he had gone after settling the Savoyard quarrel. His mission was the start of a major thrust over the next two years to install Clement in Rome and the French in the Papal States, transformed into a Kingdom of Adria. Both efforts turned upon the cooperation of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, whose concern in the venture was not so much the fate of the papacy as the expansion of Milan. Although personally religious, he seems to have had no strong feelings about one Pope or another, nor about the schism except to use it in his own interests. His object was to break the power of Florence and Bologna by drawing France into Italy in alliance with Milan.

  Introspective, intelligent, rich, and melancholy, Gian Galeazzo was the master of realpolitik in Italy. His grasp had reached across the north, absorbing Verona, Padua, Mantua, and Ferrara, and probed down into Tuscany and the Papal States. He may have been aiming at a Kingdom of Lombardy, perhaps even of a united Italy, or he may have been playing the game for power’s sake. In the politics of the schism, he ran a tortuous course between his Milanese subjects, who were loyal to the Roman Pope, and partnership with France, which meant opting for Clement. How he intended to sail through these straits was not clear. It was he, however, who had revived the idea that France should resume pursuit of the Kingdom of Adria, with his son-in-law Louis of Orléans as beneficiary. This scheme—which was now the object of Coucy’s mission—had been argued with fervor and finesse by Visconti’s seventy-year-old ambassador in Paris, Niccolo Spinelli, one of the ablest diplomats of the day. The Papal States, Spinelli argued, had earned nothing but hatred for the Holy See. In the thousand years since they had been given to the papacy, the most violent wars had been waged on their account, “yet the priests neither possess them in peace nor ever will be able to possess them.” It would be better that they should renounce temporal lordship entirely “as a burden not only for themselves but for all Christians, especially Italians.”

  The French needed no persuasion to assume the burden, but they wanted the kingdom officially bestowed on Louis as a papal fief before they attempted its physical conquest. The Pope, however, wanted to have the Papal States in hand before he gave them away. Coucy, as the supreme persuader and the Frenchman best acquainted with the labyrinth of Italian politics, was charged with the task of convincing Clement to make the commitment in advance of conquest. He was accompanied on the mission by the Bishop of Noyon, a fellow member of the Royal Council known for his oratorical talants, and by the King’s secretary, Jean de Sains, to keep the record. In “eloquent discourse,” Coucy and the Bishop told the Pope that, failing a miracle, only the intervention of France could end the schism; alone Clement could do nothing. By enfeoffing Louis with the Kingdom of Adria, the Pope would regain a firm annual income from the patrimony, which had never been under papal control since the removal to Avignon. The King of France, the envoys said, recommended his brother as the person best fitted to undertake the conquest because “he is young and can work hard” and will have the aid of the Lord of Milan.

  Clement balked on the grounds that he did not want to be known as the “liquidator of the papal heritage.” That had not bothered him ten years before when he had given the Bull of Enfeoffment to the Duc d’Anjou, but he was no longer so sure of French capacity. Three French cardinals were called in for advice, including Jean de La Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, he who had once frightened Charles VI by his supposed intercourse with a familiar demon. He wanted some hard answers: how much money, how many men would France commit to the campaign, and how long would they be maintained in Italy? He wanted a promise of 2,000 men-at-arms led by substantial captains and nobles and supported by 600,000 francs a year for three years. The embarrassed envoys could not reply; their instructions of no less than seventeen “items” had contained nothing about military specifics. Cardinal de La Grange suggested smoothly that the Duc d’Orléans might begin his campaign and be enfeoffed with what he conquered as he progressed. Although they stayed for six weeks, Coucy and the Bishop could obtain no more than Clement’s promise to send his own envoys to Paris for further discussion.

  In France, the failure to conclude peace and the renewal of the King’s madness—intensifying, the struggle between Burgundy and Orléans—weakened the impetus for the Way of Force. The French were not prepared to move into Italy until they had settled with England. Indeed, when the English got wind of French plans, they conveyed a warning that they would break the truce if France took up arms against the Roman Pope. Mistrusting Gloucester’s war party, the French sent heralds through the realm to order strengthening of defenses and repair of crumbling walls. In a renewed effort to train archers, an ordinance was issued prohibiting games. Tennis, which the common people were adopting in imitation of the nobles, and soules, a form of field hockey popular with the bourgeois and seldom played without broken bones, as well as dice and cards, were banned in the hope of encouraging practice in archery and the crossbow. This was the same effort Charles V had made in 1368 and it shows that the rulers were acutely conscious of the failure of French archery.

  Skills were not lacking; the trouble was that French tactics did not allow archery an essential place. Combined action of archers and knights was not adopted; crossbow companies were hired and barely used. The reason was clearly a mixture of contempt for the commoner and fear for chivalry’s primacy in battle. By 1393 the added fear of insurrection caused the new ordinance to have a short life. After a period during which practice with the bow and crossbow became very popular, the nobles insisted that the ban on games be revoked, fearing that the common people would gain too effective a weapon against the noble estate. They were caught in that common irony of human endeavor when one self-interest cancels out another.

  Conflicting pressures were rising around the Voie de Fait. The Florentines sent an imposing mission of sixteen envoys to Paris to plead against a French alliance with Gian Galeazzo. They found an ally in the Duke of Burgundy, who, because of his Flemish subjects, had never been a strong partisan of Clement and was certainly not prepared to help him to Rome if it meant advancing Louis to be
King of Adria as well as Regent. The Duke in turn found an ally—although he despised her—in Queen Isabeau, who would have supped with the Devil to harm Gian Galeazzo.

  Publicly, the strongest influence against the Voie de Fait was that of the University, stronghold of the intellectual clerical establishment. Clerics of the University had never been happy with the Babylon of Avignon. Its consequences in simony and corruption and increasing materialism, in loss of prestige, in rise of protest and movements of dissent among Lollards and mystics, in nationalism stimulated by the French attempt to dominate the papacy and sharpened by rival states taking opposite sides in the sehism, had brought the Church to low esteem. Historically, the breaking-up of the old unity of the Faith and the rise of nationalism were advanced, but not caused, by the schism. On the river of history, universality lay behind and break-up ahead, but men see what is immediately at hand and what they saw at the close of the 14th century was the schism’s damage to society and a desperate need to re-unite the Church.

  The faculty of theology was now openly advocating the Way of Cession despite the edict banning discussion of the subject. Gerson, in oral defense of his thesis on “Spiritual Jurisdiction” for a degree in theology in 1392, provided the doctrinal basis for mutual abdication of the popes. “If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished,” he argued, and boldly asserted that to retain authority in such case was mortal sin. Further, anyone who did not actively aid in ending the schism was morally guilty of prolonging it. This was a pointed reference to clerics willing enough to live with two papacies because of the increased number of benefices the situation provided. Gerson’s public statement in Paris was a signal of the growing pressure, emphasized by Chancellor d’Ailly’s presence in the chair. It attested also to Burgundy’s protection, without which Gerson could never have dared to be so forthright.

  In opposition, the drive for Italy was suddenly galvanized by a new offer made to Louis d’Orléans. He was asked to accept the sovereignty of Genoa, where domestic strife had reached that baleful point at which the foreigner is invited in. Whether the scheme was inspired by Gian Galeazzo, who wanted Genoa as a port for Milan, is unknown, but he clearly favored it in the belief that under his son-in-law’s sovereignty, Genoa would be at his disposal. For Louis it was an extraordinary stroke of fortune, a foothold in the sun more achievable than his cousin Anjou’s still unrealized claim to Naples, and a major step on the way to Adria.

  His first act was to send Coucy again to Avignon accompanied by his personal representative, Jean de Trie, in addition to the Bishop of Noyon and the King’s secretary as before. They were to ask again for the enfeoffment of Adria while postponing its conquest and the march on Rome for three or four years. The delay was intended to give Louis time to succeed in Genoa. Again the cardinals bargained closely—for money, for troops, for signed commitments by Charles and his brother, and other conditions which virtually precluded the Way of Force. But Clement at long last may have recognized that he was only precluding what had never been feasible. After many delays and excuses, which kept Coucy and his colleagues in Avignon for three months, they succeeded in obtaining the document of enfeoffment, to be confirmed as a Bull only when the King of France and his brother had approved the conditions. The envoys left Avignon on September 3, 1394. Two weeks later their entire effort was revealed as vain when they heard the stunning news that Clement was dead.

  The schism which had raised Clement to the papacy was his executioner, by the hand of the University of Paris. Since January, when King Charles had recovered his reason, the University had been pressing hard for an audience to present its views. So far, the Duc de Berry, as Clement’s warmest partisan, had blocked any such hearing, answering the University’s appeals with violent reproaches and threats to “put to death and throw into the river the principal promoters of this affair.” These vigorous sentiments were induced by “rich presents” received from Clement, who, having learned of the University’s intentions, sent Cardinal de Luna to Paris to exert the financial persuasion that Berry best understood. At some point Burgundy must have offered his brother cogent argument to the contrary, for, in a surprising reversal, Berry suddenly replied to petitioners, “If you find a remedy acceptable to the Council, we will adopt it that very hour.”

  Cession, as enunciated by Gerson, was already the University’s remedy. To give it as much public weight as possible, the faculty organized a popular referendum, with a ballot box placed in the cloister of St. Mathurin in which people were to drop their votes for a solution. From 10,000 votes counted by 54 masters of the different faculties, three solutions emerged, not including the Way of Force. Referendums do not commonly endorse an unwanted result. The Three Ways now proposed were, first, mutual abdication; second, if both popes continued obdurate, arbitration by a selected group; third, a General Council of the Church. The last was considered least desirable because a General Council was believed certain to divide into existing factions from which the schism would emerge as alive as ever.

  Destined to dominate the opening decades of the next century, recourse to a Council was already a lengthening shadow. Both popes naturally detested it because it detracted from their authority. The theory of conciliar supremacy held that supreme authority in the Church lay in the General Council, from which the Pope derived his powers. “Some perverse men,” raged Clement’s rival, Boniface IX, “trusting in the arm of the flesh against the Lord, call for a Council. O damned and damnable impiety!”

  Nevertheless, as hope of joint abdication faded, theologians on both sides increasingly discussed a Council and debated its problems. Who would convoke it? What was its legitimacy if convoked by temporal rulers? Did it have authority over the person of a Pope? If summoned by one pontificate in the present impasse, would its decisions be accepted by the other? How might both popes and both hierarchies ever be persuaded to act in concert? On June 30, 1394, a French royal audience heard the forbidden subject relentlessly exposed.

  Arranged by Philip of Burgundy to present the University’s findings from the referendum, the audience was held in great solemnity. The King was on his throne, with the royal Dukes and principal prelates, nobles, and ministers in attendance. The argument for cession in the form of a 23-page letter to the King was read by the Rector of the University, Nicolas de Clamanges, a friend of Gerson and d’Ailly. One of the humanists within the University, he was considered the finest Latin stylist in France and an orator unmatched for his “Ciceronian eloquence.”

  Clerical polemic in the Middle Ages was not cool. In a tirade of invective hurled at both popes, Clamanges piled up passion and hyperbole in his depiction of the suffering of the Church and the urgent and immediate need for a cure. Whichever of the two popes refused to accept one of the Three Ways, he proclaimed, should be treated as a “hardened schismatic and consequently a heretic”; a ravisher, not a pastor, of his flock; a “devouring wolf,” not a shepherd, who should be driven from the fold of Christendom. If in their overconfidence the popes postponed any longer the offered remedy, they “will repent too late of having neglected reform … the harm will be incurable.… The world, for so long unhappy, is now on a dangerous slope toward evil.”

  “Do you think,” he cried, in the eternal voice of protest, “that people will suffer forever your bad government? Who do you think can endure, among so many other abuses, your mercenary appointments, your multiple sale of benefices, your elevation of men without honesty or virtue to the most eminent positions?” Every day prelates are appointed who “know nothing of saintliness, nothing of honesty.” Exposed to their extortions, “the priesthood has become a misery reduced to profaning its calling … by selling relics and crosses and chalices and putting at auction the mystic rites of the sacrament.” Some churches hold no services at all. If the early Church fathers returned to earth, “they would find no vestige of their piety, no remnant of their devotion, no shadow of the Church they knew.”

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sp; He spoke of Christianity as a laughingstock among the infidels, who hope that “our Church thus divided against herself will destroy herself by her own hands.” He pointed to the rise of heretics, whose poison “like gangrene makes progress every day.” He predicted that worse would come as internal strife within the Catholic Faith promoted dissension and disrespect. He raised all the arguments against a General Council and deflated each, quoting the Old Testament—Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job—to establish its authority. “Has there ever been, will there ever be,” he thundered, “a more urgent necessity for a Council than at this moment when the whole Church is convulsed in its discipline, its morals, its laws, its institutions, its traditions and oldest practices, spiritual as well as temporal—at this moment when it is menaced by frightful and irreparable ruin?”

  Turning to the King, he did not hesitate to refer to Charles’s personal tragedy, saying that if God had answered prayers to restore the King, it must be that he might awake to the interests of his people and of Holy Church, to eradicate “this horrible schism” and the miseria in its train. In the name of the University, he exhorted Charles to take the lead at once in working for a remedy if he did not wish to lose his title as Most Christian King.

  Ignorant of Latin, the language of the oration, Charles listened graciously without understanding a word. Afterward a translation was ordered for the Royal Council, whose lay members, too, evidently knew no Latin. Clamanges’ impassioned plea was ignored. Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate, and the politics that the court was currently engaged in was the effort, promoted by Louis and resisted by Burgundy, to establish Louis in Italy. The University was ordered by the King—or in his name—to abstain from further agitation. Its reply was to suspend courses in what amounted to a strike by the faculty, a method used successfully against a tax levy in 1392 although at the cost of many foreign students leaving Paris.