A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  In France, Jean de Nevers, who had succeeded his father as Duke of Burgundy in 1404, turned assassin, precipitating a train of evils. In 1407 he employed a gang of toughs to murder his rival Louis d’Orléans in the streets of Paris. As Louis was returning to his hotel after dark, he was set upon by hired killers who cut off his left hand holding the reins, dragged him from his mule, hacked him to death with swords, axes, and wooden clubs, and left his body in the gutter while his mounted escort, which never seems to have been much use on these occasions, fled.

  Protected from penalty by his ducal power, John the Fearless publicly defended his act, through a spokesman, as justifiable tyrannicide, charging Louis with vice, corruption, sorcery, and a long list of public and private villainies. Since Louis was associated in the public mind with the extravagance and license of the court and with its endless demand for money, John of Burgundy was able to make himself appear the people’s champion by opposing the government’s latest tax levy. In the void left by a mad King, the Duke filled the people’s craving for a royal friend and protector.

  Mortal hatreds and implacable conflict between Burgundians and Orléanists consumed France for the next thirty years. Regional and political groups formed around the antagonists, brigand companies employed by both sides re-emerged, leaving their smoking tracks of pillage and massacre. Each side raised the Oriflamme against the other, won and lost control of the helpless King and the capital, multiplied taxes. Administrative structures fell into disorder, finance and justice were abused, offices bought and sold, Parlement became a market place of corruption. The realm, declared an Orléanist manifesto, was sunk in crime and sin with God blasphemed everywhere, “even by churchmen and children.”

  The middle class rose in the same effort to oust corrupt officials and establish measures of good government as Etienne Marcel had led more than fifty years before—and with no more success. Impatient for immediate results, a turbulent collection of the butchers, skinners, and tanners of Paris, called Cabochiens after their leader Caboche, broke into fierce revolt, reproducing the revolt of the Maillotins with increased brutality. Inevitably the bourgeois reacted against them and opened the gates to the Orléanist party which suppressed the revolt, restored venal officials, canceled the reforms and persecuted the reformers. John of Burgundy, who had judiciously removed himself during the violence, was declared a rebel and, following the old pattern of Charles of Navarre, entered into alliance with the English.

  Henry IV of England, after continuous struggle against Welsh revolt, baronial antagonists, and a son impatient for the crown, died in 1413, to be succeeded by the said son who at 25 was prepared, with all the sanctimonious energy of a reformed rake, to enter upon a reign of stern virtue and heroic conquest. Relying on the anarchy in France and his arrangements with the Duke of Burgundy, and hoping by military successes to unite the English behind the house of Lancaster, Henry V took up the old war and the threadbare claim to the French crown which had not gained in validity by passing to him through a usurper. On the pretext of various French perfidies, he invaded France in 1415 in Mars’s favorite month of August, announcing that he had come “into his own land, his own country, and his own kingdom.” After the siege and capture of Harfleur in Normandy, he marched north for Calais to return home for the winter. About thirty miles short of his goal, not far from the battlefield of Crécy, he met the French army at Agincourt.

  The Battle of Agincourt has inspired books and studies and aficionados, but it was not decisive in the sense of Crécy, which, by leading to the capture of Calais, transformed Edward Ill’s semi-serious adventure into a hundred years’ war, nor in the sense of Poitiers, which determined the loss of confidence in the noble as knight. Agincourt merely confirmed both these results, especially the second, for not even Nicopolis was so painful a demonstration that valor in combat is not the equivalent of competence in war. The battle was lost by the incompetence of French chivalry, and won more by the action of the English common soldiers than of the mounted knights.

  Although Burgundy and his vassals held aloof, the French army that assembled to confront the invaders outnumbered them by three or four to one, and was as overconfident as ever. The Constable, Charles d’Albret, rejected an offer of 6,000 crossbowmen from the citizen militia of Paris. No change in tactics had been introduced, and the only technological development (except for cannon, which played no role in open battle) was heavier plate armor. Intended to give added protection against arrows, it had the effect of increasing fatigue and reducing mobility and play of the sword arm. The terrible worm in his iron cocoon was less terrible than before, and the cocoon itself sometimes lethal; knights occasionally died of heart failure inside it. Pages had to support their lords on the field lest, should they fall, they be unable to rise again.

  The armies met in a confined space between two clumps of woods. Rain fell throughout the night while they waited to do battle and while the French pages and grooms, walking the horses up and down, churned the ground into a soft mud exactly suited for the slipping and stumbling of steel-clad knights. The French had not attempted to select a battleground where their superiority in numbers could be effectively deployed, with the result that they were drawn up for battle in three rows, one behind the other, with little room for action on the flanks, and forced to follow each other into the valley of mud. With no commander-in-chief able to impose a tactical plan, the nobles vied for the glory of a place in the front line until it was as compacted as the Flemish line at Roosebeke. Archers and crossbowmen were placed behind, where their missiles could not dilute the glory of the clash and were in fact useless.

  The English, though tired, hungry, and dispirited by their numerical inferiority, had two advantages: a King in personal command and a disproportion of about 1,000 knights and squires to 6,000 archers and a few thousand other foot. Their archers were deployed in solid wedges between the men-at-arms and in blocks on the wings. Wearing no armor, they were fully mobile, and in addition to their bows, they carried a variety of axes, hatchets, hammers, and, in some cases, large swords hanging from their belts.

  Under these conditions the outcome was more one-sided than any since the start of the war. In their overcrowding, the dismounted knights of the French front line could barely wield their great weapons and, hampered by the mud, fell into helpless disarray, which, when merging with the advance of the second line and tangled by flight, panic, and riderless horses, quickly became chaos. Grasping the situation, the English archers threw down their bows and rushed in with their axes and other weapons to an orgy of slaughter. Many of the French, impeded by their heavy armor, could not defend themselves, accounting for the several thousands killed and taken prisoner in contrast to a total English loss of 500, including at least one victim of probable heart failure. This was Edward Duke of York, one of Edward Ill’s grandsons, who was 45 and fat and found dead on the battlefield without a wound. On the French side, three dukes, five counts, ninety barons and many others were killed, among them two of Coucy’s family—his grandson Robert de Bar, and his third son-in-law, Philip Count of Nevers who fought in spite of his elder brother, the Duke of Burgundy. The list of prisoners was headed by Charles d’Orléans, the new lord of Coucy, who was to remain a captive for 25 years. Chivalry’s hero, Marshal Boucicaut, too, was captured. Bungled Agincourt was his last combat; he died in England six years later.

  After two years’ pause, Henry V returned for the systematic conquest of territory. Improved technology in the use of gunpowder and artillery now made the difference, costing walled cities their immunity. As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity. In three years, 1417–19, Henry took possession of all Normandy while the French twisted and grappled in internal feuds. Two successive Dauphins died within a year of each other, leaving Charles, a hapless fourteen-year-old whom his mother pronounced illegitimate, as heir to the throne. The Cabochiens rose again in a rampage of savagery and murder. John
the Fearless took control of the King and capital, while the Dauphin escaped below the Loire. Through a France divided against itself, Henry V hammered his advance. In the course of the English siege of Rouen, the defenders, to save food, expelled 12,000 citizens whom the English refused to let through their lines and who remained between the two camps in winter, subsisting on grass and roots or dying of cold and starvation. When the fall of Rouen posed a direct threat to Paris, the French factions were frightened into an attempt to close ranks against the enemy.

  In 1419, after much stalling by the Duke of Burgundy, a meeting was arranged between him and the Dauphin to take place on the bridge at Montereau, about 35 miles southeast of Paris. The parties advanced toward each other filled with suspicion, harsh words were spoken as if the gods of Troy were again whispering evil, hands flew to swords, and as the Dauphin backed away from the scene, his followers fell upon the Duke, plunged their weapons in his body, and “dashed him down stark dead to the ground.” Louis d’Orléans was avenged, but at bitter cost.

  Reconciliation was broken off. Swearing revenge in his turn, Philip of Burgundy, the new Duke, entered into full alliance with Henry V, even recognizing his shopworn claim to the crown of Philip’s own ancestors. Together they drew up the Treaty of Troyes between the King of England and the still living wraith of the King of France. By its terms, signed in 1420, the witless King and his foreign-born Queen, who never felt French, disowned the “so-called Dauphin” and accepted Henry V as successor to the throne of France and husband of their daughter Catherine. During Charles VI’s lifetime Henry was confirmed in possession of Normandy and his other territorial conquests and was to share the government of France with the Duke of Burgundy.

  The integrity of France had reached its lowest point. If a king had been captured at Poitiers, kingship itself was surrendered at Troyes. France the supreme was reduced to an Anglo-Burgundian condominium. Henry V’s quick five-year campaign alone had not accomplished this: it was the work of a hundred years of disintegrating forces combined with the rise of the Burgundian state and the accident of the King’s long-lived madness. But at this stage in the development of nationalism it was not a conquest that could succeed, no matter how careful the methods of Henry V. If a sense of Frenchness was already too strong to accept the transfers of sovereignty in 1360, it was that much stronger two generations later, as the parties to the Treaty of Troyes were clearly aware. They included a clause forbidding anyone to voice disapproval of the treaty and making such disapproval an act of treason.

  There was, however, an occupied France and a free France below the Loire. The wretched Dauphin, with what stamina he possessed, refused to accept the treaty and retreated with his Council to Bourges in Berry, where he maintained a feeble heartbeat of the crown. After making a royal entry into Paris, Henry V returned home, leaving his brother, the Duke of Bedford, as his regent in France. History, or whatever deus ex machina arranges the affairs of men, indulges an occasional taste for irony. Less than two years later Charles VI and Henry V died within a month of each other, the son-in-law first so that he never wore the French crown. The claim passed to his nine-month-old son, and with it, through Catherine of France, the Valois curse. Madness was to overcome Henry VI as a grown man; the Dauphin, subsequently Charles VII, being illegitimate, escaped.

  Once again it was said, “The forests came back with the English,” as war and pestilence emptied the land. In Picardy, the invaders’ perennial pathway, villages were left in blackened ruin, fields were uncultivated, disused roads vanished under brambles and weeds, unpeopled lands lay solitary where no cockcrow was heard. In the outskirts of Abbeville, a starving peasant woman was found who had salted down the bodies of two children she had killed. Destruction spread as the English pursued a serious effort to make good the conquest of France. Only the alliance of Burgundy and the exhaustion of a marauded and trampled country enabled them to take hold. No armed force, wrote Charles d’Orléans’ secretary, could take the castle of Coucy during the wars, but by “interior treason” it was delivered for a time to the enemy and its beautiful chapel windows were “in large part stripped by profane hands.”

  Peasants fled the countryside to take refuge in the towns, where they hoped to find security and where they imagined people led a better life. In urban alleys and hovels they found the unskilled laboring class no better off than themselves. Among the overcrowded and undernourished, epidemics took a greater toll, and a weakened population became more vulnerable to typhus and leprosy as well as plague. Declining trade and manufacture created unemployment and fostered hostility to the refugees. Some returned to the land to try to rebuild their villages and re-cultivate overgrown fields, some to live in the woods by trapping and fishing.

  Statues of St. Roch and other saints invoked against plague and various forms of sudden death multiplied in the churches; the fashion for naked, skeletal effigies spread. Now in the 15th century the cult of death flourished at its most morbid. Artists dwelt on physical rot in ghoulish detail: worms wriggled through every corpse, bloated toads sat on dead eyeballs. A mocking, beckoning, gleeful Death led the parade of the Danse Macabre around innumerable frescoed walls. A literature of dying expressed itself in popular treatises on Ars Moriendi, the Art of Dying, with scenes of the deathbed, doctors and notaries in attendance, hovering families, shrouds and coffins, grave-diggers whose spades uproot the bones of earlier dead, finally the naked corpse awaiting God’s judgment while angels and vicious black devils dispute for his soul.

  The staging of plays and mysteries went to extremes of the horrid, as if people needed ever more excess to experience a thrill of disgust. The rape of virgins was enacted with startling realism; in realistic dummies the body of Christ was viciously cut and hacked by the soldiers, or a child was roasted and eaten by its mother. In a 15th century version of the favorite Nero-Agrippina scene, the mother pleads for mercy, but the Emperor, as he orders her belly sliced open, demands to see “the place where women receive the semen from which they conceive their children.”

  Associated with the cult of death was the expected end of the world. The pessimism of the 14th century grew in the 15th to the belief that man was becoming worse, an indication of the approaching end. As described in one French treatise, a sign of this decline was the congealing of charity in human hearts, indicating that the human soul was aging and that the flame of love which used to warm mankind was sinking low and would soon go out. Plague, violence, and natural catastrophes were further signals.

  With the English occupying the capital, courage had sunk low. Frenchmen did not lack who were ready to accept union under one crown as the only solution to incessant war and economic ruin. In most, however, resistance to the English tyrants and “Goddams,” as they were called, was axiomatic, but it was uncoordinated and leaderless. The Dauphin was weak and spiritless, captive of unscrupulous or passive ministers. Unheralded, the courage came from society’s most unlikely source—a woman of the commoners’ class.

  The phenomenon of Jeanne d’Arc—the voices from God who told her she must expel the English and have the Dauphin crowned King, the quality that dominated those who would normally have despised her, the strength that raised the siege of Orléans and carried the Dauphin to Reims—belongs to no category. Perhaps it can only be explained as the answer called forth by an exigent historic need. The moment required her and she rose. Her strength came from the fact that in her were combined for the first time the old religious faith and the new force of patriotism. God spoke to her through the voices of St. Catherine, St. Michael, and St. Margaret, but what He commanded was not chastity nor humility nor the life of the spirit but political action to rescue her country from foreign tyrants.

  The flight of her meteor lasted only three years. She appeared in 1428, inspired Dunois, bastard son of Louis d’Orléans, and others of the Dauphin’s circle to attack at Orléans, delivered the city in May 1429, and, on the wave of that victory, led Charles to the sacred ceremony of coronation at Reim
s two months later. Captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne in May 1430, she was sold to the English, tried as a heretic by the Church in the service of the English, and burned at the stake at Rouen in May 1431. Her condemnation was essential to the English because she claimed to have been moved by God, and if the claim were not disallowed, God, the arbiter in the affairs of men, would have been shown to have set His face against the English dominion of France. All the intensity and relentlessness of the inquisitors was pitted against her to prove the invalidity of her voices. Before the trial, neither Charles VII, who owed her his crown, nor any of the French made any effort to ransom or save her, possibly from nobility’s embarrassment at having been led to victory by a village girl.

  Jeanne d’Arc’s life and death did not instantly generate a national resistance; nevertheless, the English thereafter were fighting a losing cause, whether they knew it or not. The Burgundians knew it. The installation of Charles as anointed King of France, with a re-inspired army, changed the situation, the more so as the English were distracted by rising frictions under an infant King. Recognizing the implications, the Duke of Burgundy gradually went over to the French, came to terms with Charles VII, and sealed an alliance by the Peace of Arras in 1435. Within a year, by action of an energetic new Constable, Paris was regained for the King, a signal to the realm of re-unification to come. No one could have said that the spark lit by the Maid of Orléans had become a flame, for her significance is better known to history than it was to contemporaries, but renewed hope and energy was in the air. The war did not end, and in fact grew more brutal as the English, out of the obstinacy that overtakes conquerors when the conquered refuse to succumb, persisted in an effort which the Burgundian defection from their cause had made hopeless.

  All this time the dominant intellectual effort of Europe was engaged in continuous, contentious, and intense activity to end the papal schism and bring about reform within the Church. Both aims depended on establishing the supremacy of a Council over the papacy. As long as both popes persistently refused to abdicate, an agreed-upon ending of the schism was impossible, leaving a Council the only alternative. It was equally apparent that no Pope and College of Cardinals would override vested interests to initiate reform from within; therefore, only by establishing the authority of a Council could an instrument of reform be obtained. Serious theologians struggled seriously with these problems in a genuine effort to effect change and find a way to limit and constitutionalize the powers of the papacy. The issues aroused the fiercest philosophical and religious, not to say material, controversies, which were debated through a succession of Councils over a period of forty years. Summoned not from the center of the Church but from the circumference, by universities, sovereigns, and states, the Councils met at Pisa, Constance, and Basle.