A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Weakened in health and even more in resources, the crusaders made no haste to regain France, or even Venice. To travel in indigence was unthinkable for a Prince of Burgundy. He and his companions stopped off at Mitylene, Rhodes, and other islands to rest and recover and borrow money wherever they could. The lady of Mitylene gave them all new shirts, gowns, and apparel of fine damask, “every man according to his degree.” The Knights of Rhodes entertained them for a month. In Venice, which they did not reach until October, the financial transactions involving all parties connected with the crusade were intricate and tremendous. Through loans and guarantees, enough was collected to make up the ransom but not enough to go home in style.

  Repayment of debts amounting to 100,000 ducats which they had incurred for living and traveling expenses since their release, together with the cost of the journey home in appropriate splendor, required nearly again as much as the ransom. The Duke and Duchess of Burgundy did not wish their son to travel through Europe and make his appearance in France looking like a fugitive. The Duke scraped every resource, to the point of reducing the pay and pensions of Burgundian officials, to supply his son with a magnificent retinue and provide gifts for all concerned. Dino Rapondi came to Venice with an order on the Duke’s treasury for 150,000 francs and spent the winter arranging transfers of funds, of which repayment to the merchants of the Archipelago came last. Three years later the Seigneur of Mitylene was still owed the entire sum he had loaned, and a three-cornered transaction among Burgundy, Sigismund, and the Republic of Venice was not settled for twenty-seven years. These difficulties did not inhibit the Duke’s style of living. In 1399 he bought from Dino Rapondi two illuminated books for 6,500 francs and, in the next year, two more for 9,000 and 7,500 apiece.

  An outbreak of plague in Venice while the crusaders were there caused them to remove to Treviso on the mainland, but took nevertheless the life of one more—Henri de Bar. If the epidemic was the Black Death, it had come full circle in Coucy’s family, taking first his mother and now his son-in-law. It was a sad death so close to home, and in leaving Marie, who was the primary heir, both fatherless and a widow, it was to have a sad effect on the Coucy domain, so long coveted by the royal house.

  The crusaders, of whom only Nevers, Boucicaut, Guillaume de Tremoille, and Jacques de la Marche were left among the leaders, along with some seven or eight other lords and knights, re-entered France in February 1398. They were received at the gates of Dijon with acclamation and gifts of silver presented by the municipality. In memory of his own captivity, Nevers liberated from the city prison, “by his own hand,” all whom he found there. Dijon held solemn services for the dead crusaders, but thereafter the welcome was all celebration and joy.

  In Paris the King gave his cousin a well-considered gift of 20,000 livres. The towns of Burgundy and Flanders vied for the honor of receiving him. On orders of his father, he made a triumphal progress to exhibit himself to the people whose taxes had bought his return. Minstrels preceded him through the gates, fetes and parades greeted him, more gifts of silver and of wine and fish were presented. Considering all the bereaved families of Burgundy whose sons did not return, the receptions probably represented not so much popular enthusiasm as organized joy, in which the 14th century excelled. Celebration was required for the prestige of the Duke and his heir, and the towns were happy enough to cooperate in expectation of the favors that generally accompanied such joyous occasions. The magistrates of Tournai expected Nevers’ ceremonial entry to be graced by a plenary pardon, in which they were disappointed.

  In pomp and minstrelsy, the culminating fiasco of knighthood was interred. After Nicopolis, nothing went right for France for many long years. The presiding values of chivalry did not change, but the system was in its decadence. Froissart found this in England too, where a friend of former times said to him, “Where are the great enterprises and valiant men, the glorious battles and conquests? Where are the knights in England who could do such deeds now?… The times are changed for the worse.… Now felonies and hates are nourished here.”

  The celebrations for Nevers could not conceal the defeat, and the moralists found in it reinforcement for pessimism. Mézières immediately composed an Epistre Lamentable et Consolatoire, Deschamps a ballade “For the French Fallen at Nicopolis,” Bonet an allegorical satire in the form of an “Apparition of Master Jean de Meung,” who appears in a dream to reproach the author for not protesting the evils that are destroying France and Christendom. Deschamps states openly that Nicopolis was lost “through pride and folly,” although he lays some blame upon the Hungarians “who fled.” Mézières similarly has hard words for the “schismatics,” who, “for the great hate they bear the Latins,” preferred to be subjects of the Sultan rather than of the King of Hungary. But essentially he sees the defeat as the consequence of the crusaders’ lack of the four moral virtues necessary to any army: order, discipline, obedience, and justice. In the absence of these, God departs from an army, which then becomes easily discomfited, and this accounts for all the discomfitures since Crécy and Poitiers. Mézières’ call for a new crusade aroused no response. The Epistre Lamentable was his last work. Eight years later his scolding and his passion were finally stilled in death. Like any Isaiah, he grew tiresome, but his yearning for goodness in society spoke for all the silent people who yearned for it too but left no record.

  Bonet, while including the usual censure of knights for their soft life and love of capons and ducks, white shirts and fine wines, comes to something more basic. The knights leave the peasants behind because they think them “worth nothing,” he writes, although the poor can endure hardship and coarse food, and, if armed, would wage a good fight, like the Portuguese peasants who fought bravely and killed many knights at Aljubarrota. (The reference is to a battle of 1385 in the same year and with similar results as the Swiss Battle of Sempach.) While Bonet and others had often in the past condemned the warrior for robbery and cruelty toward peasants, they were now ready to condemn chivalry’s fundamental assumption that military capacity resided in none but the mounted knight. The chronicler of the Quatre Valois, writing at about this time, pointed out that the common soldier had been decisive in certain combats “and for this, poor men should not be held without honor nor in vile esteem.” He cited a battle of the King of Cyprus against the Saracens in 1367, in which the day was saved by action of the sailors who remained to guard the ships, and this was by the will of Christ, who did not wish Christian chivalry to perish at the hands of the infidels, and moreover “wished to give an example to nobles.… For our Lord Jesus Christ wants no grandiloquence or vanity. He wishes victory to be gained by the common people so that the great should not take vainglory.”

  Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.

  The Turkish victory had no immediate effect in Europe because Bajazet had to turn east against the rise of a fierce enemy in Asia. The rapid conquests of Tamerlane at the head of a revived Mongol-Turkic horde were comparable, in Gibbon’s large words, “to the primitive convulsions of nature which agitated and altered the surface of the globe.” Overrunning Anatolia, leaving a trail of ruined cities and pyramids of skulls, Tamerlane met and defeated the Ottoman army at Angora (Ankara) in 1402 and captured the Sultan alive. Kept in a wagon fitted with iron bars, Bajazet was dragged along on the Mongol path of conquest until he died of misery and shame—as if history had deliberately arranged a symmetrical retribution.

  Absorbed in its own factions and schisms, Europe failed to seize the occasion to break the Ottoman hold on the Balkans. Except for a brave but minor expedition led by Boucicaut—the last trickle of the crusades—Constantinople could obtain no more help from the West; Sigismund was embroiled with the Germans and Bohemia; France and England were each torn by domestic confli
ct. Bajazet’s son held his own against Tamerlane, the Mongol eruption subsided, Bajazet’s grandson advanced again in Europe, and in 1453 his great-grandson Mohammed II conquered Constantinople.

  At Coucy, rival ambitions swirled around the great barony with its castles of grandeur, its 150 towns and villages, its famous forests, its “many fine ponds, many good vassals,… much great nobility and inestimable revenues.” Marie de Bar, Coucy’s eldest daughter, and the Dame de Coucy, his widow, entered into a prolonged contest over the inheritance, Marie claiming the whole and the Dame de Coucy claiming half. Neither ceding, they lived in hostility, each in a separate castle of the domain with her captains and entourage of relatives, each pursuing lawsuits. At the same time the Célestins of Ste. Trinité brought a lawsuit against the widow, claiming that she had failed to carry out Coucy’s last bequests to their monastery.

  Meanwhile, Queen Isabeau, still concerned primarily with her parental family, was trying to promote a marriage between her father, Stephen of Bavaria, then in Paris as ambassador of the Empire, and the Dame de Coucy. This raised the prospect of the strategic domain passing into foreign hands, for it was feared that Marie might be pressured into allowing the house of Bavaria to take possession by purchase or otherwise. To frustrate this design, Louis d’Orléans pressured Marie (by “threats and menaces,” according to one source) into selling the barony to him, disregarding the widow’s claims on the ground that the barony was indivisible. Whether his motive was primarily the interests of France or his personal aggrandizement vis-à-vis the Duke of Burgundy is an open question. In any event, he acquired one of the greatest properties of northern France, which gave him a wedge between his uncle’s two territories of Burgundy and Flanders. To confirm the patriotic motive, Marie was persuaded to state in the deed of sale, concluded November 15, 1400, that she “cannot put or transfer [the property] more securely for the good of the Kingdom of France than in the person of Monseigneur the Duc d’Orléans.”

  The purchase price was 400,000 livres, of which Louis paid only 60,000 down. Marie retained the usufruct of the domain and the use of the castles of La Fère and Du Châtelet for her residence, but legal disputes continued after the sale. By some means or other she was compelled to acquit Louis of 200,000 livres, or half the price, while the balance of 140,000 on the other half remained unpaid. No less than eleven lawsuits were brought by Marie against Orléans in an attempt to recover, before she died suddenly after a wedding feast in 1405, not without “a suspicion of poison.” Her son Robert de Bar continued the litigation, both as plaintiff against Orléans and as defendant against the Dame de Coucy, who had not, after all, married Stephen of Bavaria and was still maintaining her dower rights in the courts. In 1408, after the death of Louis d’Orléans, Parlement allowed the widow’s claim, but this lapsed a few years later when her daughter Isabel, who had married the brother of Jean de Nevers, died without an heir. Meanwhile Charles d’Orléans, Louis’ son, remained in possession, and when Charles’s son became King as Louis XII, the barony of Coucy passed, where it had long been desired, to the crown.

  The tormented century sank to a close in keeping with its character. In March 1398 the Emperor Wenceslas and the King of France met at Reims in a renewed effort to end the schism of which they represented opposite sides. Charles VI had been persuaded that he would never recover from his affliction until the Church was re-united. To unseat Benedict, the University of Paris had proposed that France withdraw obedience, but before adopting this radical measure, one more attempt to obtain mutual abdication by the popes was to be tried. The assent of the Empire to exert pressure on Boniface was required, and this was the purpose of the assembly at Reims. Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles’s mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk. The Emperor entered the negotiations in a stupor which he maintained by steady consumption while vaguely agreeing to anything that was proposed. When reason entirely deserted Charles, the assembly dispersed.

  Persuasions and threats of force were brought to bear on both popes, and resisted. France resorted to withdrawal of obedience and even to a siege of the papal palace with Pope Benedict inside, but neither of these measures succeeded in effectively deposing him, and the first caused so much trouble that it had to be rescinded. Richard II, intent on friendship with France, agreed to demand the abdication of Boniface, which only succeeded in violently antagonizing the English, already disaffected by the King’s misgovernment. The citizens of London, partisans of Gloucester, would now call the King nothing but Richard of Bordeaux (his birthplace) and were greatly excited against him, saying, “His heart is so French that he cannot hide it, but a day will come to pay for all.”

  Then happened in England those “great and horrible” events, the like of which, Froissart felt, had not been seen in all the history he had recorded. Convinced of plots against him, Richard removed Gloucester to Calais, where he was strangled with a towel, executed Arundel, banished Warwick and the Percys, and so aroused the fears and hates of his subjects that in 1399 his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke was able to depose him without a sword being raised in the rightful King’s defense. Compelled publicly to resign the crown, Richard was transferred from the Tower to a more secluded prison, where, within a year, he died of purposeful neglect, or worse. The prop of peaceful relations with France was removed. Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) talked boldly of abrogating the truce, but usurpation breeds rebellion and he was too occupied in maintaining his throne to look for trouble abroad.

  With these events, Froissart lost heart. If the sale of Guy de Blois’ property had damaged his ideals, the deposition of the King of England shocked him profoundly, not for any love of Richard II, but because the act was subversive of the whole order that sustained his world. The sixty-odd years of his—and Coucy’s—lifetime, which had seemed to him a pageant of unending interest and excitement, were closing in shadow. He glimpsed hollowness and could not continue; his history breaks off as the century ends.

  If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

  Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry’s military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept, like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for a remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came.

  The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence
could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.

  Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the Church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year that Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

  Epilogue

  In the next fifty years, the forces set in motion during the 14th century played themselves out, some of them in exaggerated form like human failings in old age. After a heavy recurrence in the last year of the old century, the Black Death disappeared, but war and brigandage were renewed, the cult of death grew more extreme, the struggle to end the schism and reform the abuses of the Church more desperate. Depopulation reached its lowest point in a society already weakened both physically and morally.