A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  At Pisa in 1409 the reform issue, eloquently sponsored by d’Ailly and Gerson, was suppressed while all energies were engaged in deposing both the Avignon and Roman popes and electing a single successor. This individual promptly died, to be replaced by a martial Italian, Baldassare Cossa, more condottiere than cardinal, who took the name of John XXIII. Since his two rival predecessors still clung to their Sees, the schism was now triple. In France’s difficulties, the initiative passed to Emperor Sigismund, who summoned the memorable Council that met at Constance on imperial territory from 1414 to 1418.

  With historic consequence for the Church, Constance took upon itself a third issue, the suppression of heresy, meaning all the dissident strains which had risen out of the malaise of the last century. Vitality in religion had passed to the dissidents, mystics, and reformers, and, in a negative sense, to practices of sorcery and witchcraft, although the emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution. Denunciations, trials, and burnings increased, and in its tortures of supposed heretics the Inquisition was as savage and ingenious in cruelty as any infidel Turk or Chinese. Witch-hunting was to reach epidemic proportions in the second half of the century, marked by the famous treatise Malleus Maleficarum of 1487, an encyclopedia for the detection of demonology and its devotees.

  Constance was concerned with the more fundamental heresy of Jan Hus, ideologically the successor of Wyclif. Summoned to explain and defend his doctrines at Constance, he was condemned and burned at the stake in 1415. He might well have claimed, anticipating Bishop Latimer, that the flames in which he died lit the candle that would not be put out.

  The Council also managed after a series of dramatic struggles with John XXIII, to depose him on charges of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest (of which Gibbon remarks that the “most scandalous” charges were suppressed) and elect Cardinal Colonna of Rome as Martin V. The previous Roman Pope having been induced to resign, and the still obstinate Benedict of Avignon being effectively isolated, the schism was declared closed, although it was to revive briefly over the issue of reform. The greater struggle between Council and papacy for supremacy remained. Under Martin V, the Papal States and their revenues were recovered, and the material, if not spiritual, gain in strength enabled the papacy under Martin’s successor, Eugenius IV, to renew the conciliar contest at the Council of Basle. Like some wrestle of giants, this Council lasted for eighteen years.

  Doctrinal controversies raged, groups seceded, rump councils convened, a rival Pope—no less than the reigning Count of Savoy, who could pay his own way—was elected as Felix V. Reforms and restrictions on the papacy were voted by one side and rejected by the other, while states and sovereigns were again divided by power politics. In the end, the reformers were defeated, Felix V resigned, and the Council of Basle was dissolved in 1449. The papacy, firmly Italian once more, acknowledged conciliar supremacy on paper but regained its primacy in fact. Its triumph, celebrated at the Jubilee of 1450, proved a phantom. The papacy was never again to be what it had been before the schism and the Councils. It had lost prestige in the first of these crises, and influence and control over the national churches in the second. In an expression of “Gallican liberties,” a French synod in 1438 adopted reforms independently and restricted papal taxation of the French clergy. Movements and ideas generated by the conciliar struggle were moving ineluctably toward the Protestant secession.

  Change in another sphere was registered in the Hussite wars, a movement fired by Czech nationalism and religious zeal to avenge the death of Hus. Its members were largely bourgeois and peasants (with some ambivalent support from the Czech nobility) and in their struggle against the warrior class, it was the bourgeois, not their opponents, who developed a new military tactic. They adopted the device of a “moving fort,” consisting of a square or circle of baggage wagons chained together for defense against the charge of mounted horsemen. Squads armed with pikes, hand-held guns, and flails protected each gap between the wagons, and as success in defense led to the offense, the squads charged through these gaps against the enemy. In 1420 they defeated the forces led by Sigismund in a “crusade” to reestablish orthodoxy and, gaining confidence from the fear they inspired, undertook raids into Hungary, Bavaria, and Prussia as far as the Baltic, raising the prospect of a dominion of heresy. They fired cannon from within the wagon square and were the first force to make hand-held firearms a major weapon. By the end of ten years a third of the Hussite force possessed these weapons.

  Being human, they were afflicted with ideological conflict between moderates and radicals which ultimately broke their movement from within. At the Council of Basle, however, they were strong enough to compel the Church for the first time to conclude a treaty of peace with heretics. Like the Swiss, also largely an army of the non-noble class, they had learned to fight effectively because they were not wedded to glory nor bound to the horse.

  During the 1420s and ’30s, Henry the Navigator, Prince of Portugal and grandson of John of Gaunt, launched annual voyages into the Atlantic, exploring and claiming the Azores, Madeiras, and Canaries, and venturing down the west coast of Africa until the great western bulge was rounded in 1433 and the coasts of gold and ivory reached for the opening of new trade. Even if Prince Henry’s initial motive was for the greater glory of the Order of Christ, of which he was General, his work and its impulse were modern. He took his place on the bridge between medieval and modern, where the humanists and scientists were crowding.

  Change was uneven and erratic. The population of Europe had sunk to its lowest point by about 1440 and was not to rise for another thirty years. Rouen, which had a population of 15,000 before the Black Death, numbered only 6,000 citizens in the mid-15th century. The Cathedral of Schleswig, which made a comparison of its revenues of 1457 with those of 1352, found that rents and measures of barley, rye, and wheat were each down to about one third of what they had been. In many places, elementary schools had disappeared, not to return until modern times. In 1439 the Bourgeois of Paris, who kept a journal in these years, reported grass growing in the streets of the capital, and wolves attacking people in the half-populated suburbs. In the same year the Archbishop of Bordeaux complained that, owing to the curse of the écorcheurs, students could no longer seek the pearl of knowledge at universities, for “many have been taken on the way, imprisoned, stript of their books and goods and sometimes, alas! slain.” The cost of a hundred years of war in aids and subsidies, poll taxes and indirect taxes and devalued currency was incalculable. Yet the forced summoning of so many Estates and parliaments for grant of funds may have strengthened the functioning of representative bodies even while the financial burden caused misery and class antagonism.

  Few in the first decade under Charles VII could see signs of progress ahead. Through continual wars, civil and foreign, wrote Thomas Basin, a Norman chronicler of the reign, through the “negligence and idleness” of the King’s officials, the “greed and slackness” of men-at-arms and the lack of military discipline, devastation reigned from Rouen to Paris, from the Loire to the Seine, over the plains of Brie and Champagne, and from the Seine as far as Laon, Amiens, and Abbeville. “And it was feared that the marks of this devastation would long endure and remain visible unless Divine Providence kept better watch over the things of this world.”

  Slowly, improbably, the tasks of ruling made a King of Charles VII, and better fortune brought better men into his service. The great bourgeois financier Jacques Coeur supplied a footing of money and credit, and siege artillery perfected by skilled gunners outside the ranks of chivalry broke the English hold on castles and towns with an efficacy unknown in the 14th century. Town after town opened its gates to the King’s forces, the more readily because Charles VII accomplished at last the fundamental military reform that had defeated his grandfather Charles V. In 1444–45 he succeeded in establishing a standing army, incorporating and at the same time elimi
nating the lawless companies, the greatest scourge of the time. Under the new law, twenty compagnies d’ordonnance of 100 lances each were established, with two archers, a squire, a page, and a valet de guerre for each lancer, making a total of 600 per company. Officered by the most reliable of the mercenary captains, who recruited their own men, the new companies were paid and provisioned by the crown by means of regular annual taxation, and were quartered at strategic points throughout France. By relentless effort, the remaining écorcheurs were disbanded. Among signs of change at mid-century, none was more important than this innovation of the standing army. What it signified was a principle of order where all before—plague, war, and schism–had been agents of disorder.

  Recovery was aided by England’s fading will for conquest. Henry VI, as an adult, wanted peace. A feeble, uncertain King, he was the pawn of quarreling cabals among the barons and prelates. His competent uncle, the Duke of Bedford, was dead, leaving no one of outstanding status able to lead or terminate the war. By 1450 the French had recovered all of Normandy; towns surrendered as soon as the artillery train appeared. Even English Aquitaine had dwindled to little more than the environs of Bordeaux.

  In 1453 at Castillon, the only remaining English foothold outside Bordeaux, the last battle was fought. Traditional roles were reversed, with foolhardy valor on the English side and bourgeois competence on the French. Castillon having surrendered to the French, Lord John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, set out from Bordeaux to recapture it. According to Basin, he was habitually given to “impetuous daring rather than deliberate assault,” and insisted, against the advice of an experienced lieutenant, on a frontal attack at the head of his mounted men-at-arms. The French, under the guidance of “a certain Jean Bureau, citizen of Paris, a man of small stature but of purpose and daring, particularly skilled and experienced in the use of [artillery],” had defended their camp by a ditch, a wall of earth reinforced by tree trunks, and “machines of war”—culverins, serpentines, arbalests, and various launchers of projectiles. Talbot and his knights threw themselves against these defenses and were repulsed by stones, lead, and missiles of every description. Talbot was killed and his army routed. Bordeaux itself fell soon after. Nothing was left of England’s continental empire except Calais and an empty claim to the French crown.

  The longest war was over, though perhaps few were aware of it. After so many truces and renewals, who could have realized that the end had come? Without ceremony or cease-fire, treaty or settlement, the adventure and agony of five generations faded away. National identities were formed by its passage. The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity. The brotherhood of chivalry was severed, just as the internationalism of the universities, under the combined effect of war and schism, could not survive. Between England and France the war left a legacy of mutual antagonism that was to last until necessity required alliance on the eve of 1914.

  In the same year as Castillon, madness overtook Henry VI, precipitating the same contest for control of the Englich crown that had so damaged France. Unemployed soldiers and archers returning to England took service with the baronial factions, adding their violence and weapons to the civil Wars of the Roses that now took the place of the war in France. In the same fateful year of 1453 the formidable defenses of Constantinople fell before the siege guns of Mahomet II. The Turks brought a siege train of seventy pieces of artillery headed by a super-bombard hooped with iron, drawn by sixty oxen and capable of launching cannonballs weighing 800 pounds. The fall of Byzantium has supplied a conventional date for the close of the Middle Ages, but an event more pregnant with change took place at the same time.

  In 1453–54 the first document printed from movable type was produced by Gutenberg at Mainz, followed in 1456 by the first printed book, the Vulgate Bible. “The Gothic sun,” as Victor Hugo put it with fitting grandiloquence, “set behind the gigantic printing press of Mainz.” The new means of disseminating knowledge and exchange of ideas spread with unmedieval rapidity. Printing presses appeared in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Naples within the next decade, and in Paris, Lyon, Bruges, and Valencia in the 1470s. The first music was printed in 1473. William Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster in 1476 and published that still unsurpassed work of English prose, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in 1484.

  With the Tudors on the English throne, a formal settlement between England and France was eventually concluded by the Treaty of Etaples in 1492, a year more significant for other reasons. The energies of Europe that had once found vent in the crusades were now to find it in voyages, discoveries, and settlements in the New World.

  The Coucy lineage, after the death of Enguerrand VII, hung by the single thread of Marie’s son Robert de Bar. Philippa died without issue. Isabel, offspring of Coucy’s second marriage, died in 1411, followed or predeceased within six months by her only child, an infant daughter. Perceval, the Bastard of Coucy, left a will in 1437 leaving his seigneurie to the husband of Robert de Bar’s daughter, from which it may be presumed that the only son of Enguerrand VII died without issue. Yet the single thread was to lead to a King. Robert de Bar’s daughter Jeanne married Louis de Luxemburg, Constable of France, and in her turn bore a daughter who married a Bourbon of the branch descended from St. Louis. The grandson of this marriage, Antoine de Bourbon, married Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, and the son of their marriage, with his white plume of Navarre and his famous concession—“Paris is worth a mass”—reached the throne as Henri IV. Courageous, quick-witted, amorous, reasonable, he was the most popular of all French Kings and—perhaps owing to a few genes from Enguerrand VII—a rational man.

  The great barony of Coucy, after being united with the royal domain under Louis XII, son of Charles d’Orléans, remained the property of the Orléans branch of the royal house. During the minority of Louis XIV—whose brother Philippe d’Orléans carried the title Sire de Coucy—the formidable castle, originally built to overawe kings, became a focus of the Fronde, the league of nobles opposed to Cardinal Mazarin, the Regent. To destroy a base of his enemies, Mazarin in 1652 blew up parts of the castle, rendering it uninhabitable, though his means were inadequate to bring down the titanic donjon. An earthquake in 1692 shattered more of the castle and left a jagged crack from top to bottom of the donjon, but it still stood, guardian over the empty halls below. One hundred years later the barony’s last seigneur was the Duc d’Orléans, called Philippe Egalité, who, as a member of the National Convention, voted for the death of Louis XVI and was himself a victim of the guillotine a year later. His property, including Coucy, passed to the state.

  Meanwhile Enguerrand’s Célestin monastery at Villeneuve de Soissons had been vandalized by the Huguenots, restored and ruined again in the battles of the Fronde, and sold as a private château when the Célestin Order was suppressed in 1781. Sacked during the Revolution, it passed through several hands until purchased by Count Olivier de la Rochefoucauld in 1861. Coucy’s grasp at perpetuity was no more successful than most.

  Under Napoleon III, the Commission of Historical Monuments recommended restoration of the castle of Coucy and, short of that, urgent work to prevent deterioration of the keep from the ravages of decay. The choice for restoration lay between Coucy and Pierrefonds, a later and more luxurious castle built in the late 14th century by Louis d’Orléans. Because Coucy would have cost three times as much to restore and Pierrefonds was preferred by the Empress Eugénie as being nearer to Paris, the choice went to the latter. Sadly, the architect Viollet-le-Duc, restorer of the medieval, turned away from the major military structure of the Middle Ages. “Beside this giant, the greatest towers known are but spindles,” he wrote. All he could do was encircle the giant by two belts of iron, repair the roof and major cracks, and install a custodian to prevent further thefts of the castle’s fallen stones.

  Silent, deserted, inhabited by owls, the great landmark still inspired awe. Tourists came to gaze, archeologists to study its structure, artist
s to draw its plans and monuments. Life went on in the village at its base and along the road winding down the hill and through the valley to Soissons. The donjon was impervious to time, to the disorders of man and the disorders of nature, but not to those of the 20th century.

  In 1917 Picardy, invaded once more, had been occupied for three years by the German army. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the Sixth Army, urged General Ludendorff, Chief of General Staff, to ensure that the castle of Coucy be spared as a unique architectural treasure of no current military value. Neither side, he pointed out, had attempted to use it for military purposes, and its destruction “would only mean a blow to our own prestige quite uselessly.” Ludendorff did not like appeals to culture. Coucy having been unwisely called to his attention, he decided to make it an example of superior values. Rammed with 28 tons of explosives at his orders, the colossus raised by Enguerrand III in the age of the greatest builders since Greece and Rome was dynamited to the ground.