The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  The festivities lasted ten days, with banquets and jousting in the marketplace on each. Watching it all from the sidelines, Olivier de La Marche must have been well pleased. In the households of the dukes, he had been proud to serve as page, equerry, pantler, master carver, maitre d'hotel, ambassador, warrior, poet, chronicler, and caterer, but he had to know that this was his true moment of glory. At the Feast of the Pheasant, some fourteen years earlier, he had paused briefly to condemn the extravagance of the hospitality. "I considered the whole thing outrageous and without any justification." There was no such outrage now. A wiser and more cynical man, perhaps, schooled in Charles's ruthless version of realpolitik, he knew full well that the expense was entirely justified. "Great and honorable achievements deserve a lasting renown and perpetual remembrance." In the short term, with a royal dynasty to establish, and in the long term, with the eternal splendor of Burgundy to glorify, Olivier had helped to ensure that the hospitality of Charles the Bold would, indeed, be remembered forever. And because Olivier's entire identity was invested in service, Charles's glory was his glory.

  What he could not know was that the wedding would be remembered not as the glorious dawn of a new era, but as a swan song, the spectacular final act of a dying star in supernova. You might even call it the last great hurrah of the Middle Ages themselves. Within nine years - despite maneuvering Louis XI into a brilliant trap that resulted in unprecedented concessions; despite luring Edward IV into an invasion of France; despite putting together a seemingly invincible international alliance Charles had squandered all of Burgundy's strength, talent, and goodwill. In 1476, he was twice decisively defeated by the Swiss, at Grandson and Morat. His mental health deteriorating, he took to drinking and plotting irrational and unrealistic revenge. "His ears were blocked, and his mind disordered," wrote Philippe de Commynes. In 1477, having undertaken an ill-advised siege of Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, he was killed in the press, his naked and mutilated body found in a muddy pond a few days later. The Burgundian state was dismantled and portioned off to France and the Empire. Burgundy was now a mere "province" and would never rise again.

  Olivier stuck it out with Charles to the bitter end, unable to envision any alternative to his increasingly thankless service. He had plenty of opportunity and cause to defect, and several generous offers from Louis, but unlike Commynes - who had crossed over in 1472, to his great moral and financial benefit - he passed them all up. Without Burgundy, he was nothing. True, Charles rewarded his loyalty by appointing him treasurer of Guelders, but this can have been of scant comfort. The nadir of his service must have been when, desperate and irrational, Charles ordered him in 1476 to kidnap Yolande, Louis XI's sister and duchess of Savoy. He carried out his orders, but ambivalently and in great disgust. Kidnapping noble ladies was not in the job description of a faithful knight. Had ever a loyal subject been served up as such a cockentrice? These were his thanks for catering the wedding of the century? He was taken prisoner at Nancy and ransomed for four thousand ecus. Upon his release, he returned to Flanders, where he went into service as premier maitre d'hotel to Mary, Charles's daughter, now married to the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian. He was appointed tutor to their son, Philip the Handsome, and set about writing mediocre poetry (including an allegorical poem in praise of Charles) and a detailed account, commissioned by Edward IV, of the management of Charles the Bold's household. His motto, appended to all his writings, was Tant a souffert La Marche - roughly, "The longsuffering La Marche." In his memoirs, a hundred of the 150 pages that La Marche devotes to the reign of Charles the Bold are spent describing the wedding.

  Hitler, Louis XIV, and Charles the Bold were all perfectly well aware that hospitality in the service of ideology is no hospitality at all. Like poetry, genuine hospitality cannot work unless it is direct and immediate, an unmediated conversation. Otherwise, it becomes something else - propaganda, advertising, sublimated desire. Like poetry, it must be honest, even if it is merely conveying an honest cry for praise, recognition, or comfort. A failure of honesty fatally compromises hospitality and host alike.

  There was surely a moment when Olivier de La Marche felt as if he were the host at Charles's wedding. It is easy to imagine him standing at the sidelines in his black damask and crimson doublet, responding in subdued and false modesty to the compliments, yet sensing himself the dark star around which it all revolved. This, surely, was ample payment for a life of subservience. And just as surely, Charles must have felt - as many men do at their own weddings - that he was a guest, a bystander to his own glory. It is sad - at least, it is sorry - to think of these two deluded men, both spinning away into nothingness in their moment of greatest pride and arrogance. They were both victims of their own dishonesty, cockentrices hybridized by their devotion to an abstraction, and both were destroyed by it. In this, hospitality betrayed is like a wronged goddess and will not rest until she has exacted her revenge.

  CHAPTER VI

  GERMANS!

  A great many things keep happening some of them good, some of them bad. The inhabitants of different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other and kings go on losing their tempers in the most furious way.

  Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks

  When Jesus Christ was still a little boy preaching to the rabbis, the Consul Varus Quintilius left Rome on a quixotic mission. He crossed the empire's northern border and entered the heart of Germany "as though he were going among a people enjoying the blessings of peace," despite all evidence to the contrary. Somehow, the consul had convinced himself that the Germans, "who could not be subdued by the sword, could be soothed by the law." The German prince Arminius destroyed his army and sent his head back to Rome on a platter. It was a pattern with which the Romans were to become increasingly familiar.

  Rome had known nothing about the Germans in the second century B.C. and only gained its first real sense of them in Julius Caesar's northern campaigns late in the first. One hundred years later, the empire was surrounded. Scandinavia was Germanic; the lands of modern Germany swarmed with Franks, Suebi, Chatti, Saxons, and myriad smaller tribes and confederacies; a vast eastward migration swept Germanic Goths, Vandals, Burgun-dians, and Langobards onto the plains of eastern Europe and Scythia, whence they gradually began their westward drive against the far eastern frontiers of the empire.

  The Rhine was the border between Germany and Gaul, as it is today. To the hapless Gauls, softened by generations of wine-drinking, toga-wearing, villa-living, and other Roman necessities, the river offered scant protection from the fieri - the wild animals on the other side. "Little by little they have grown accustomed to defeat," Julius Caesar says of the Gauls, "and after being conquered in many battles they do not even compare themselves in point of valour with the Germans." The Gauls were so terrified by the Germans that they were "unable even to endure their look and the keenness of their eyes." Gaul was like a pampered teenage girl, Rome's beloved eldest, blushing and squirming under the hardened gaze of a merciless Lothario. He would have her, she knew, the moment papa's back was turned.

  These Germans really were different in every way. They were illiterate and proud of it. They worshipped only what they could see: the sun, the moon, water, fire. They hated cities, knew nothing of stonemasonry, and lived in villages of widely scattered huts. Even in the coldest weather, they wore nothing but cloaks or skins fastened with a thorn, training themselves to hardship; only the most distinguished wore underwear. The German prince Ariovistus boasted of his "invincible Germans highly trained in arms, who in a period of fourteen years had never been beneath a roof." They ate boiled meat and curdled milk and drank only beer, fearing that wine would make them "soft and womanish." They slept late and spent their lives hunting, fighting, and getting drunk. "To make day and night run into one in drinking is a reproach to no man," claimed Tacitus. "Brawls are frequent, naturally, among heavy drinkers: they are seldom settled with abuse, more often with wounds and bloodshed." There was no criminal law but that o
f vendetta and wergeld - blood price whereby most any crime, including murder, could be atoned for by paying a fixed number of cattle and sheep, "and the whole family thereby receives satisfaction." At the same time, young men were strongly encouraged to abstain from sex, which was thought to deplete their youthful vigor, and highly admired for their chastity.

  The Germans also enjoyed freedoms that even the most repressed Roman could not help but envy, in a horror-stricken kind of way. Their "freedom of life - for from boyhood up they are not schooled in a sense of duty or discipline, and do nothing whatever against their wish - nurses their strength and makes men of immense bodily stature." They would endure no kings, but ruled themselves by assemblies and elected chieftains and warlords. They owned no land privately, but every year were assigned new plots to cultivate so as to prevent covetousness, avert the rise of economic disparities, and discourage attachment to any particular farmstead, which it was feared would sap the warrior spirit. They bathed in rivers.

  In brief, short of the Huns, the Germans were as unlike Latins as it was possible to be. It was a cultural divide that only the most optimistic among us would claim to be reconciled today.

  The fall of the Roman Empire is too complex and grand a subject to be addressed here. To keep it simple, over the course of several centuries it was gradually overrun, partially by Asians, mostly by Germans. In the year 410, the Visigoth Alaric, having plundered, destroyed, and slaughtered his way through Italy, besieged Rome, driving it to the brink of starvation, but was unable to take it by force. Alaric may have been a pagan barbarian, but he knew his Romans. He chose three hundred of the most attractive teenage boys in his army and gave them to the patricians of Rome as a peace offering. While Alaric made show of lifting the siege, the boys set about making themselves indispensable to their doting new masters. Then one day, when the patricians were relaxing and napping after their lunch - as their descendants continue to do to this day - on a predetermined signal the young Visigoths stole away, converged on the Salarian gate, slew the guards, and opened the city to the invader. Rome, it seems, fell not to the Visigoths but to the seductions of a heavy pranzo. When told of the destruction of Rome, the Emperor Honorius, safe behind the ramparts of Ravenna, was greatly relieved to learn that it was Roma the city, and not his prize rooster Roma, that had died.

  Rome did not officially collapse until 476, but by then its entire western empire was safely in the hands of Germans. The Ostrogoths and Lombards held Italy, the Visigoths Spain, and the Vandals Libya. Gaul was chiefly occupied by Franks in the north, Burgundians in the east, and Goths in the south. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were crushing the Romanized Celts of Britain, many of whom sought refuge in northwestern Gaul, creating Brittany, which was subsequently crushed by the Franks. The process of Christianizing western Europe had to start all over again.

  There is good reason why this age of German ascendancy is known as the Dark Ages. I mentioned that the Germans were illiterate; it took them centuries to begin setting down their own history in writing. In the meantime, literacy was preserved by the few surviving literate Christian clerics, who tended (especially in Gaul) to descend from the conquered peoples and did not always put the gentlest spin on the activities of their overlords. Then, too, because they had no tradition of centralized inherited power, the Germans took far too long to stop squabbling among themselves over what was essentially booty. The few surviving histories of the era are basically nothing more than the annals of centuries of ceaseless warfare, piracy, intrigue, martyrdom, misrule, fratricide, and natural disaster. "To this day," Gregory of Tours wrote in the preface to his History of the Franks, "one is still amazed and astonished at the disasters which befell these people."

  What is astonishing is how long these Germans in Gaul and Britain remained truly German, with all that implies. In Britain, it is true, they wiped out, enslaved, and exiled the native peoples and thus left no indigenous culture into which they might be absorbed. Indeed, they used the same word to indicate "foreign­er" and "slave" - wealh - which came to mean native Briton and eventually evolved into "Welsh." For many centuries they clung to the system of the old country, establishing feuding kingdoms, loosely based on ancient tribal divisions, that endured into the tenth century. By that time they were calling themselves Angelcynn and their language Englisc, but even in the tenth century Athel-stan was still referring to himself as "King of the Anglo-Saxons." Had it not been for the Norman invasion, the English today would be as Germanic as the Austrians or the Dutch.

  In Gaul, the story played out a little differently. There was no question of the Franks' wiping out the natives, who were more docile than the Britons and too useful as chattel. Instead, the Franks superimposed their nobility onto the old Roman villa system of farming estates and acted as a separate society of overlords. Understandably, the modern French pronounce the names of their early Germanic kings - Dagobert, Clovis, Chilperic, Guntram - to make them sound comfortably familiar, cuddly enough for French schoolchildren, but they were as German as they come. Charlemagne was really Karl der Grosse and built his capital in Aachen. Anyone doubting the genuine Germanness of the great French hero need only consider the names of his daughters - Hruodrud, Bertha, Gisela, Theoderada, Hiltrud, Ruodhaid, and Adaltrud. Even his most French-sounding son Louis the Pious was, in reality, named Hludowic. When Charlemagne renamed the months, it was not as Janvier, fevrier, mars, avril, and so on, but as Wintarmanoth, Hornung Lentzinmanoth, and Ostarmanoth. And this was after the Franks had been in Gaul so long - more than five centuries - that some were beginning to call their country Francia. Meanwhile, the debased vernacular Latin of the Gauls was evolving very nicely into Old French, almost entirely unadulterated by German. It is a measure of how aloof the Frankish rulers maintained themselves from their subjects, century after century, that there are barely a thousand words of German origin in modern French.

  How did the Germans spend this lengthy idyll in Gaul, as close to Hitler's dream of pan-European hegemony as they were ever to get? Did they use this time to improve themselves, to evolve as a people, to cultivate the arts and letters, manners and hospitality, to embue themselves with the spirit of their newfound Christianity? Did they exalt the platform of empire to bring peace, prosperity, and a unifying culture to those they had conquered, as the Romans had done? To carry the message of Germanic democracy, freedoms, and civil rights to their benighted provinces? Well, not exactly.

  They pretty much remained just as Caesar, Tacitus, and Velleius Paterculus had described them: illiterate, seminomadic, hard-drinking brawlers with no interest in good food, nice clothes, discipline, or peace and quiet. The Greeks of Byzantium had a saying: "Have the Frank for your friend, but not for your neighbor." They seemed to know what they were talking about.

  As a result of all this, the few remaining records of that period offer precious little documentation for the historian of hospitality. In some ways, this is actually the anti-hospitality chapter, concerned with what the world looks like in the absence of hospitality. There is practically no record of domestic life, domestic architecture, food culture, or the mores of hospitality from the Dark Ages. Domesticity does not seem to have existed as a virtue, at least not among the recorders of history and their circles. This may be due to the fact that, what with marauding German warriors everywhere, the constant threat of famine and plague, the lack of safe sanctuary, even in churches, and the decay of the Roman road system, there was little traveling done and not much use for a culture of hospitality. Gone were the sumptuous villas; gone the well-heeled domestic slaves; gone the ancient vineyards; gone the well-worn trade routes bringing luxury commodities from throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa to elegant centers of commerce and learning; gone the straight paved roads patrolled by officers of the peace; gone the rule of encoded law; long gone any memory of Pax Romana. It may also be that, as Gregory noted, there was so much going on and so few people capable of writing it all down that those who could had to concentrate on affairs of state an
d church. But a careful study of the primary sources inevitably leads one back again and again to another conclusion: they were all too busy drinking and fighting to entertain.

  While it may be true that serving drinks to one's friends is a form of hospitality, the Germanic conquest of Gaul was no cocktail party. What Tacitus had said about the Germans in the first century - "They banish hunger without great preparation or appetizing sauces, but there is not the same temperance in facing thirst" - still held true in the eighth. They really had no interest in food culture. Charlemagne's physician thought him shockingly decadent for preferring roast meat over boiled. Germanic poets and annalists never wrote about food; whenever they did refer to banqueting and the treatment of guests, it was to emphasize the drinking, which was central and symbolic to their civic decision-making process. The historian Hugh Magennis notes that, in Beowulf, warriors sit at an "ale-bench" or a "mead-bench," while Heorot is referred to variously as a "mead-hall," a "beer-hall," and a "wine-hall," but never as a place to eat, despite the fact that plenty of eating must have gone on there. Even in the Anglo-Saxon Bible, the Latin convivium (feast) is usually translated as gebeorscipe - "beer fest"- as in "Queen Esther invited King Xerxes to a beer fest."

  Chieftains owed any power they might have to their ability to attract followers, who were bound to them by a simple quid pro quo: so long as the chieftain could feed them, supply them with weapons, and provide continuous opportunities to freeboot, his "companions" remained prepared to die for him. Neither kinship, family loyalty, nor tribal affiliation played much part in this relationship. A warrior was perfectly lost without a lord, but so long as he was able to find a new one who was willing to assume responsibility for him (and for any debts he might have incurred as a result of having committed crimes, including murder, that were forgivable through the payment of a fine), he was free to go where and with whom he wished. Beowulf himself tersely summarizes the nature of his relationship to his chief: "I repaid him in battle for the treasures which he gave me." It was as simple as that. The poem itself is merely an account of a freelance assignment, a percentage of the profits of which go to the contractor.