The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  For nearly fourteen years, pro-Ming and Ming-phobic factions struggled in the Goryeo government. Yi In-im himself fell in the conflict. The general Yi Seong-gye, hero of the fight against Japanese piracy, gained a following as a pro-Ming leader. Like the dead Gongmin, he believed it was more politic to pacify the Ming than to annoy them.

  In the summer of 1388, the conflict came to a point when the Ming Hongwu Emperor made a demand for the return of the northern lands once held by the Yuan. Under the influence of his anti-Ming advisors, King Wu ordered General Yi Seong-gye to lead an attack on the nearest Ming territory. Yi Seong-gye protested. This, he said, was a very bad idea, and he sent the young king a letter explaining exactly why.

  First, it is not profitable for a small kingdom to attack a bigger kingdom.

  Second, it is not appropriate to mobilize large troops in summer.

  Third, there is the possibility of Japanese pirates invading the southern parts if large troops are concentrated in the northern parts.

  Fourth, bows cannot be used due to the melting of the bowstrings in summer when it is rainy and sweltering much, and soldiers suffer from many diseases.6

  King Wu refused to listen. Exasperated, Yi Seong-gye marched his army straight into the capital city and arrested both the young king and his anti-Ming advisors. The coup was a relatively peaceful one; Wu was treated kindly, but he was firmly deposed.7

  At first, Yi Seong-gye and his allies chose a new king to serve as their puppet; but in April of 1392, Yi Seong-gye crowned himself ruler of Goryeo. He renamed himself Taejo and declared the following year, 1393, to be the first year of a new era. He also renamed the country: from now on it would be Joseon, the name he also gave to his new dynasty.

  It was a relatively peaceful transition. In an effort to keep bloodshed to a minimum, the new emperor Taejo ordered that all government officials be removed from their posts, deprived of their titles, and put under house arrest; then he appointed a new administration. He announced the construction of a new capital city: the city of Hanyang, which was renamed Hanseong, and known widely simply as the seoul, a common noun meaning “capital.” A massive building project, recruiting almost twenty thousand laborers, began, and a massive new royal wall was built around the city during the cold season, when the laborers were not needed on their own farms. The city had four gates: Great East, Great South, Great West, and Sukjeongmun the north gate, barred so that it could not be used except for ritual purposes.

  And Taejo continued to pacify the Ming. Joseon, he believed, was “a small nation serving a greater nation,” and there was both honor and virtue in acting with proper submission. Despite his years of army service, King Taejo was a diplomat through and through. When the Ming emperor sent a demand for tribute to be paid every three years, Taejo sent a counterproposal: he would send it three times per year instead. Somewhat startled, the Hongwu Emperor agreed.8

  He was not excessively concerned with his own dignity, merely with the survival of his country and the stability of his own throne. And in this, he triumphed. “He achieved a prosperous era,” the poet and courtier Jeong Do-jeon wrote, in praise of his reign, “. . . as the King enjoys longevity / all the people are rejoiced.”

  In 1395, Taejo commissioned the carving of a star map: a representation of the sky with 1,467 stars, the Milky Way, and almost three hundred constellations.* Based on a rubbing of a first-century star map, long lost, the new star map included a new element: representations of the relative brightness of each star, with dim stars carved smaller, brighter ones larger. The map itself reflects a first-century sky, but the carving of the stars was based entirely on observation of the sky: it was a complicated and detailed undertaking, the kind of thing that is sponsored by a monarch who has chosen not to fight, in favor of looking outward instead.9

  MEANWHILE, the young Ashikaga shogun Yoshimitsu had been slowly earning greater and greater respect at the Kyoto court; this respect was demonstrated by the raft of ceremonial titles he was awarded, one by one. By the age of twenty-one, he held every title that his father and grandfather had claimed; by 1380, aged twenty-three, he had become the Minister of the Left, the second-highest position at court.10

  Increasingly, he took to himself the rituals and symbols of sovereignty. He even called himself “King of Japan” in his dealings with the Ming emperor; the Ming disliked dealing with subordinates, and without the royal title Yoshimitsu would have been unable to exchange embassies and treaties with the Hongwu Emperor and his successors.

  80.1 Joseon and Japan

  Meanwhile, the southern court at Yoshino was fading. The southern emperor, Go-Daigo’s grandson Go-Kameyama, was in possession of the sacred regalia of the Japanese emperors, but he could boast little else. In 1392, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu managed to negotiate a compromise: if Go-Kameyama would travel to Kyoto with the sacred regalia and hand it over to the northern emperor (an act that would ritually legitimize the Kyoto emperor’s rule), the shogun would see that Go-Kameyama was awarded the title of Cloistered Emperor. He also promised that the next ruling emperor would come from the junior line, and that rule would alternate between the senior and the junior branches of the family.11

  This was exactly the same compromise that had failed sixty years before. But Go-Kameyama chose to be an optimist. He journeyed to Kyoto and surrendered the regalia.

  In recognition, Yoshimitsu sponsored a three-day sacred festival in Kyoto. Nightly dances dedicated to the gods (kagura) celebrated the spiritual triumph of reunification, the joy of the end of the Nambokucho era, the conclusion of the age of the “Southern and Northern Court.”12

  But the compromise, which theoretically brought the struggle between north and south to an end, had done nothing to bring the fractured military zones back under central rule. It had done nothing to corral the independent-minded warlords out in the provinces. The victory dances were empty: ritual with no reality behind them.

  * * *

  *The Korean name of the map is “Cheonsang yeolcha bunya jido.”

  Chapter Eighty-One

  The House of Visconti and the Papal States

  Between 1368 and 1390,

  the pope tries to return to Rome,

  the Viscontis fight to claim the north of Italy,

  and the papacy divides

  POPE URBAN V had returned to Rome, but a single year in the Eternal City had given him a deep appreciation for Avignon.

  Italy was seething. South of the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples was friendly to the pope, but torn by palace intrigues and an ongoing feud with Sicily. The Papal States themselves had been without a head for sixty-five years, ever since the papacy had removed itself to Avignon; the cities within the Papal States were ruling themselves. Control of Rome itself had seesawed violently between Senate and various competing aristocratic families. In the north, the Lombard cities had reverted to their old independent ways, with little interference from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Charles was far more interested in Germany than in the old regnum Italicum of the empire; when he had gone to Rome for his own coronation, he had arrived in the morning, been crowned, and then left without even spending the night in the city.1

  In this vacuum, the House of Visconti had expanded.

  The Visconti family had begun its rise to power in Milan seven decades before, when the Archbishop of Milan, Ottone Visconti, had maneuvered his nephew Matteo into Milan’s secular government as Captain of the People, leader and spokesman for the merchants and craftsmen. Thirty years later, the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV had appointed Matteo’s grandson Perpetual Lord of Milan, and since then, the House of Visconti had dominated Milan’s politics.2

  Milan had also spread its reach outward, claiming to rule the nearby cities of Pavia and Genoa (among others). In 1356, the two brothers Giovanni and Bernabò Visconti had divided the Milanese territory between them; Giovanni was ruling from Milan, Bernabò from the city of Bologna, which he had seized from the Papal States.

  Bernabò was a fearsome
opponent: a notorious libertine, father of seventeen legitimate and some twenty illegitimate children; an enthusiastic hunter who kept five thousand hunting dogs; a cruel and capricious ruler who had once ordered a deer poacher thrown into his dog kennel to be eaten, and who had executed a young man for confessing that he had “dreamed” of killing one of his master’s game boars. Urban V had excommunicated the Visconti tyrant for his trespass into the Papal States, sending two papal legates with a bull of excommunication to Bologna to confront Bernabò in person. Bernabò had listened, and then had forced the legates to eat the bull—parchment, silk ribbons, lead seals and all. Urban protested; Bernabò retorted, “I would have you know that I am pope, emperor and king in my own domains. God Himself cannot do here what is contrary to my will.”3

  That level of defiance was a little over Urban V’s head, and so he appealed to emperor Charles IV, hoping that Charles would provide him with the actual force necessary to drive the man out.

  Charles IV agreed, entering Italy in May of 1368 and marching on Milan. Although he was not popular in Italy, he could easily have mustered the other northern Italian cities against the Viscontis; Florence, Padua, and Mantua were all worried about the growing Visconti power. Instead, the emperor allowed the Visconti brothers to buy him off with a good-sized tribute. He then tried to base himself in Lucca, but the people of Lucca, indignant over his pacification of the Visconti tyrants, refused to welcome him.4

  Charles IV gave up and went home. Without his support, Urban V lost heart; he was overwhelmed and powerless in Italy, and he began to think longingly of Avignon.

  The cardinals knew of his wish to go home; so did most of Rome. The Franciscan nun Birgitta of Vadstena, well known for her mystical revelations, visited the papal court and told the pope that she had received a direct word from the Mother of God. “I led Pope Urban by my prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit from Avignon to Rome . . . ,” she declared, speaking in Mary’s voice. “What did he do to me? He turns his back on me. . . . An evil spirit has brought him to this by deceiving him. He is weary of his divine work and wants his own physical comfort.” If Urban V returned to Avignon, Birgitta prophesied, he would die within the year.5

  But Urban was sixty years old, tired and fed up, and perhaps death within the year already seemed likely. He returned to Avignon in September, and died in November after a brief and sudden illness.

  His successor was Gregory XI, nephew of Urban’s predecessor Clement VI. Gregory XI was forty-two years old, energetic and politically savvy. He knew that the papacy was in danger of losing the Papal States unless it returned to Rome, but he was aware that he was no more capable of dealing with the Visconti than Urban had been. So, from Avignon, he worked to unify a league of Lombard cities against the Visconti.

  This went horribly, disastrously wrong. Gregory XI had hoped that Florence would join the anti-Visconti league, but the papal legate he sent to finalize the alliance swapped sides and took up with the Viscontis. The Florentines, already suspicious of the pope’s motivations, rallied Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Papal States. Almost immediately, the conflict mutated into Italians against French, the defense of the homeland against a foreign pope; in ten days, eighty cities and towns joined this antipapal alliance.6

  81.1 War in Italy

  The nasty, complicated, bloody war that followed saw multiple switchings of sides, including that of the English mercenary John Hawkwood, who fought in turn for Florence, Milan, and Gregory XI; he was in the pope’s pay, though, when he led his men in a sack of the Italian city of Faenza that ended in massacre of the civilians, rape of every woman under the age of sixty, and wholesale looting. A Sienese chronicle says that Hawkwood himself killed at least one young woman, and that a priest with the expedition stood at the gates of Faenza, calling out to the rape victims to submit because “this is good for the army.” A year later, a similar scene unfolded at Cesena, where the pope’s legate Robert of Geneva led an attack in which at least four thousand unarmed citizens were killed: “women, old and young, and sick, and children, and pregnant women, were cut to pieces at the point of a dagger.” Robert himself was heard to shout out, during the attack, “I will have more blood! kill all!—blood, blood!”7

  By 1377, both Gregory XI and the antipapal league were sickened by the war, ready to negotiate a peace. On August 21, they agreed to a cease-fire; Gregory XI was still in the middle of messy negotiations with Florence on the one hand and Bernabò Visconti on the other when he died, in March of 1378.

  He had come to Rome for the negotiations and drew his last breath there, which finally gave the Roman cardinals the chance to elect an Italian pope. Shouting down their French colleagues, they elevated the Italian-born Bartolomeo Prignano as Pope Urban VI. But the French cardinals, indignant over the new pope’s first months in office (he refused to even visit Avignon, and he was appalled by the luxury in which the cardinals lived; one of his first acts was to decree that they could have only one course at dinner), soon revolted. They left Rome en masse, reassembled at Fonti, declared Urban VI deposed, and elected an antipope: Robert of Geneva, leader of the massacre at Cesena.8

  He took the papal name Clement VII and went back to Avignon. The exile of the papacy to France had now developed into something even more disruptive: a dual papacy, one at Rome and one at Avignon, a schism that would last for decades. “King Charles of France acknowledged Clement to be the true Pope,” says Jean Froissart, “as did also the King of Spain, the Earl of Savoy, the Duke of Milan, the Queen of Naples, and the whole of Scotland; but Germany declared itself in favor of Urban, and also Lord Lewis of Flanders. . . . Thus was the Christian world divided, and churches set at variance.”9

  Back in Rome, Urban VI (“of a choleric and obstinate disposition,” Froissart says, “and very haughty in the execution of his office”) was not covering himself with glory. He deposed all of the cardinals who had taken part in the election of Clement VII (the “antipope,” according to the Romans) and then quarreled with their replacements. Accusing them of conspiracy, he ordered them tortured and executed; some he had sewn into sacks and drowned.10

  He was too occupied with his cardinals to pay much attention to the Italian cities, and warfare blazed out across the north again.

  With both pope and German king occupied by their own troubles, the Italian cities ramped up their quarrels with one another. Genoa and Venice, always rivals, restarted their own series of battles; and in 1380, the Venetians destroyed most of the Genoese fleet in a sea battle at Chioggia, a blow from which Genoa never fully recovered. In Milan, Bernabò Visconti’s nephew, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, plotted the overthrow of his uncle; in 1385, he launched an armed raid that took both Bernabò and his two sons prisoner, and declared himself Lord of Milan. When he offered the Milanese drastic tax cuts in return for their support, they acclaimed him at once and forgot about Bernabò. The notorious tyrant died seven months later, still under guard, after eating a big meal sent to him by his nephew.11

  Gian Galeazzo then went on a kingdom-building spree, capturing Verona in 1387 and Padua in 1388. Venice and Florence remained free of his reach, but a reappearance of the plague in 1390 weakened both cities. They could not mount any sustained attack on the new Lord of the Realm of Milan. And one after another, Bologna, Assisi, Perugia, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca came under his control.12

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Bad Beginnings

  Between 1369 and 1381,

  the kings of France and England come of age,

  and the common people revolt

  THE ENGLISH AND THE FRENCH were still fighting.

  In the summer of 1369, Charles V of France was assembling ships and men for an invasion of England. Edward III responded with immediate force. His chief general, his oldest son Edward the Black Prince, was suffering from chronic dysentery and was unable to ride (or even walk for long), so Edward III sent his third son John of Gaunt with four thousand men over to raid and plunder the land around Calais.

 
; Charles delayed his invasion. Instead, he turned his army, commanded by his younger brother the Duke of Burgundy, to meet the English raiders. A series of battles along the northeastern coast began.

  At first, the fighting was inconclusive. The Black Prince arrived, carried on a litter, to help his brother; not long after his arrival, he discovered that the English-held town of Limoges had surrendered, at the request of the French, without a fight. He was, says Froissart, “much vexed” and insisted on laying siege to retake it.

  English sappers, tunneling under the walls, brought a large chunk of the defenses down without too much trouble. But the Black Prince had worked himself up into a towering fury at the town’s inhabitants, who had been so quick to open the gates to the French. “It was a melancholy business,” writes Froissart. “All ranks, ages, and sexes cast themselves on their knees before the prince for mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge, that he listened to none of them: all were put to the sword wherever they could be found.”1

  The Black Prince had been afflicted with spells of irrational rage and frightening hallucinations along with his dysentery symptoms, suggesting that he may have been suffering from porphyria.* Whatever the cause of his viciousness, three thousand defenseless civilians died at Limoges. Charles V, hearing the news, was “sadly grieved” and equally angry. Taking measure of the popular indignation against the English, he appointed the professional soldier Bertrand du Guesclin to be the new chief commander of the French offensive, with the title Constable of France: a position generally awarded to a nobleman rather than to a common-born soldier.2