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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  But the Cortes refused to honor Henry’s promise. Ferdinand remained in miserable captivity in Fez, chained in a cell at night and forced to do backbreaking work with other prisoners during the day.

  Edward died eleven months later—of plague, according to some accounts; of a deep despair and guilt over his brother’s fate, according to others. His six-year-old son Afonso became king of Portugal, with Edward’s widow Eleanor and his brother Peter of Coimbra as uneasily cooperating co-regents.

  Henry, back in Ceuta, was powerless to negotiate Ferdinand’s release; and in 1443, the youngest Portuguese prince died in captivity. By then, Henry’s expeditions had resumed. He had settled Portuguese families on the Azores, the cluster of islands west of Portugal. And his men had finally come face-to-face with the inhabitants of the African coast: “black Moors,” whom they had immediately taken prisoner. The captives, brought back to Portugal, were sold as slaves in Lisbon and went for a startling good price. “When people saw the wealth which the ships had brought back, acquired in so short a time and seemingly with such ease,” says Zurara, “some asked themselves in what manner they too could acquire a share of these profits.”10

  Now Henry had no shortage of captains willing to sail south past Cape Bojador: “some to serve, others to gain honor, and others with the hope of profit.” His brother Peter of Coimbra, regent for the young King, granted Henry the exclusive right to control all trade that went out south of the cape, and Henry offered yearly rewards to expeditions that pushed into unknown territory. Captain after captain sailed down the western coastline, searching for new inlets, new rivers, and more slaves. Kidnapping and exploration went hand in hand; Portuguese ships would anchor off a new stretch of coast, the men would go ashore, and if they found villagers, they would capture them and bring their prisoners back on board. If not, they would sail farther south, making a note of what they saw. The chronicler Zurara describes one such voyage; a party of Portuguese sailors, landing on a new stretch of coast,

  saw some Guinean [West African] women who seemed to be collecting shellfish on the shore of a little inlet. They seized one of the women who must have been about thirty years old, with her son who was two, and also a young girl of fourteen. . . . The strength of the woman was astonishing because the three men who seized her had great trouble getting her into the boat. So one of our men, seeing the slow progress they were making . . . had the idea of taking her child and carrying him to the boat, so that her maternal love made her follow him. . . . From this place they continued for a certain time until they found a river up which they could venture in their boat. In the houses they found there, they captured a woman and, after they brought her to the caravel, they returned once more to the river.11

  The human traffic had trickled back into Portugal a little at a time, but in 1444 Henry sponsored a spectacular mass arrival of slaves into the Portuguese city of Lagos, a public-relations event headed by the sea captain Lançarote de Freitas. Six ships, one of them piloted by Gil Eannes, sailed past Cape Blanc and went ashore hunting for slaves. Charging into the West African forests with the battle cry “Santiago, São Jorge, and Portugal!” (“Saint James, Saint George, and Portugal!”), they captured at least 250 slaves and killed many more.12

  They sailed into Lagos on August 8 and unloaded the crowd of slaves in the city’s marketplace; Henry himself was waiting there on horseback, ready to receive one-fifth of the slaves as his personal tribute, and perhaps also measuring the success of his dramatic staging. The chronicler Zurara was there as well, watching with his own eyes. “Very early in the morning, by reason of the heat,” he writes, “the mariners began to bring-to their vessels, and, as they had been commanded, to draw forth the captives.”

  Placed together on that plain, it was a marvellous sight to behold, for amongst them there were some of a reasonable degree of whiteness, handsome and well-made; others less white, resembling leopards in their colour; other as black as Ethiopians. . . . [S]ome had sunken cheeks, and their faces bathed in tears, looking at each other; others were groaning very dolorously, looking at the heights of the heavens, fixing their eyes upon them, crying out loudly . . . others struck their faces with their hands, throwing themselves on the earth. . . . [Now] came those who had the charge of the distribution, and they began to put them apart one from the other . . . to part children and parents, husbands and wives, and brethren from each other. . . . [T]he mothers enclosed their children in their arms and threw themselves with them on the ground, receiving wounds with little pity for their own flesh so that their children might not be torn from them! And so, with labour and difficulty, they concluded the partition.13

  Zurara, moved by the suffering of the captives, comforted himself by reflecting that they were still better off than before, when they had lived in “damnation of souls . . . like animals.” Now, he concludes, they are “dressed . . . fed . . . loved and turned with good will to the path of the Faith.” Their captivity had brought them into a Christian land where they would hear the Gospel; this was all to the good.14

  BY 1452, the trade in slaves and other African goods had grown so fast (“yearly 3,500 slaves and more,” the geographer Duarte Pacheco Pereira wrote, some decades later, “many tusks of elephant ivory, gold, fine cotton cloth and much other merchandise”) that the king of Portugal decided to protect his country’s interests in Africa by appealing to the pope.15

  Young Afonso V had finally come of age four years before, forcing his uncle and regent Peter of Coimbra to give up control of the government; when Peter tried to fight back, Afonso’s troops defeated him in a pitched battle at the river Alfarrobeira, during which Peter was struck through the heart with an arrow.16

  Now in control of his own throne, Afonso V confirmed his uncle Henry’s right to administer the slave trade. He then appealed to Rome to recognize the throne of Portugal as conducting, in Africa, a crusade: a holy war against the enemies of the Church, an assault on the powers of darkness.

  Eugene IV had died in 1447; the Italian Nicholas V now sat on the papal throne. After brief consideration, he agreed to Afonso’s request. On June 18, 1452, he issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, giving Afonso “full and free power, through the Apostolic authority . . . to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and . . . to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”17

  In perpetuam servitutem: the bull had placed the papal seal of approval on the enslavement of the African captives. In all likelihood, Nicholas V was thinking more about the Turks than about the West Africans, since the bull simply gave Afonso the right to search out and enslave all pagans and seize their land. But three years later, when he confirmed the bull once more in the charter Romanus Pontifex, he took the further step of outlining the geographical areas in which Afonso could seize and enslave. Because the kings of Portugal had spent so much “labor, danger and expense” in sending “swift ships” to Africa, and because this had “caused to be preached to them the unknown but most sacred name of Christ,” and because this had “gained for Christ” the souls of so many, the entire Portuguese enterprise was now protected by the Church. Only the Portuguese could sail to West Africa, preach the gospel, and bring Africans back to Europe.

  Fearing lest strangers induced by covetousness should sail to those parts, and desiring to usurp to themselves the perfection, fruit, and praise of this work . . . or should teach those infidels the art of navigation, whereby they would become more powerful and obstinate enemies to the king . . . and the prosecution of this enterprise would . . . perhaps entirely fail [with] great reproach to all Christianity; to prevent this and to conserve their right and possession . . . none, unless with [Portuguese] sailors and ships . . . and with an express license previously obtained from the said king . . . should presume to sail to the said provinces or to trade in their ports or to fish in the sea. . . . [T]hese islands, lands, harbors, and seas . . . do of right belong and pertain to the said
King Alfonso and his successors . . . in order that [they] may be able the more zealously to pursue . . . this most pious and noble work . . . the salvation of souls.18

  The conquest of the West Africans had been transferred into the realm of the holy; their enslavement had become their salvation; and their sale baptized as a righteous duty. It was the most devastating expansion yet of the ideal of crusade.

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  The Loss of France

  Between 1422 and 1453,

  Jeanne d’Arc helps the king of France

  regain his throne and dies for it,

  the French are victorious in the Hundred Years’ War,

  and both rival kings lose their wits

  HENRY V HAD TAKEN FRANCE; but except for the city of Paris and the lands immediately around it, his claim was a paper one. He had the support of the Duke of Burgundy; but the anti-Burgundian party, the Armagnacs, had allied themselves behind the young disinherited Dauphin. Charles VII had handed over the Dauphin’s right to inherit; but the old king was still alive, and Henry V spent the years after the Battle of Agincourt fighting against the Dauphin’s supporters. By 1422, says Walsingham’s Chronica, “a great part” of his army, “weakened through fighting and lack of food . . . went back to England, with very little intention of returning to France again.”1

  Henry remained, but all of his adult life had been spent at war, and the dysentery that stalked every army had become chronic in him. He died suddenly on August 30, 1422, just short of ten years on the throne, just four miles away from Paris.

  Back in England, his nine-month-old son was proclaimed Henry VI, “king of England and France,” ruler of England and heir to the throne in Paris. Two months later, the mad Charles VI also died. He was fifty-four; he had spent the last thirty years wrestling with his illness, submitting himself to regular bloodlettings, praying for days on end and making pilgrimages to sacred sites, trying every magical cure that was brought to him. He had been “confined to his bed by illness” for some time, says the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet; and at the time of his death, almost no one was with him. His funeral was magnificent, but “none of the princes of the royal blood of France attended the funeral . . . a melancholy consideration, when it was remembered what great power and prosperity the king had enjoyed during the early part of his reign.”2

  But he had long been irrelevant to the country’s fortunes, and even now was important only in his absence. It was unclear who would succeed him: the infant Henry VI, whose claim was supported by the Burgundians and the English, or the Dauphin Charles, whose claim was supported by the Armagnac party. The Dauphin was the youngest child of the dead king; his four older brothers had all been Dauphin before him, all of them dying before their father. He was the last surviving son. In 1422, he was nineteen years old. He had been acting for Charles VI since the age of fourteen, presiding over councils, signing royal orders, and generally exercising the power of a much older man. But his natural competency had been too often frustrated at too young an age. His father had given his title away; he found himself constantly blocked by the English-loyal Parisians; and he was now prone to sink rapidly into a despairing apathy when thwarted. And at all times he kept his own counsel: “Willingly,” wrote his chronicler Chastellain, “would he surround himself with wise and bold men, and let himself be led by them. But, unbeknown to them, he would all the while be planning something new.”3

  Both of the candidates were hailed king simultaneously: the baby Henry in Paris, Charles VII in the chapel of Mehun, near Bourges. The English Duke of Bedford was also installed in Paris as Henry VI’s regent. Now civil war began in earnest, with the English Duke of Bedford and the French Duke of Burgundy fighting together to expand their power from Paris and the Loire valley south, and Charles VII and the Armagnacs based at Bourges and fortified by soldiers from rebellious Scotland and French-loyal Castile. “The war began with light skirmishes,” writes the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed, “but after it grew into main battles.”4

  The first six years of the civil war saw victory after victory for young Henry’s claim. Baby Henry’s regent, the Duke of Bedford, married the Duke of Burgundy’s sister, making the French-English alliance that much stronger; Charles VII’s army was badly damaged by a horrible loss in July 1423, with three thousand Scottish troops lost and an equal number of French killed or captured. The towns of Coucy, Meulan, Rambouillet, Meung, and Compiègne fell as the English alliance pushed north and south; fortress after fortress surrendered. “The Dauphin was sore appalled,” says Holinshed, “for he was driven out of all the counties that appertained to the crown of France.” He set up his court at Poitiers, and from there did his best to play king. But already he was withdrawing, walling himself away from his supporters, shutting himself into inner rooms alone.5

  In October of 1428, the Duke of Bedford laid siege to Orleans. The city held out until the late winter of 1429, but as the citizens began to starve, they sent an embassy offering to surrender to the Duke of Burgundy. The French cause was desperate; should Orleans fall, the rest of the south would follow and Charles VII would have to leave his country, perhaps for Castile. “The English continued their siege,” says Monstrelet, “and king Charles was in very great distress; for the major part of his princes and nobles, perceiving that his affairs were miserably bad, and everything going wrong, had quite abandoned him.”6

  He was hovering at Chinon, without a plan and daring to approach no closer, when help arrived in the odd form of Jeanne d’Arc: the seventeen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do farmer, a girl who “dressed like a man,” had worked as a chambermaid, and “had shown much courage in riding horses to water, and in other feats unusual for young girls.”7

  Since her early teenaged years in the northeastern village of Domrémy, Jeanne d’Arc had seen visions and heard voices. Her parents had tried to marry her off to a suitable young man; she had refused. It was her mission, she told them, to rescue France from the English, to see the Dauphin crowned as the one rightful king of the French people. In March of 1429, she arrived at Chinon to explain her mission to the would-be king.*

  Charles agreed to see her; he had, after all, spent his youth watching his father receive magicians and soothsayers who promised miraculous cures. Eyewitnesses later said that Jeanne d’Arc immediately went to the Dauphin, who was wearing no identifying royal robes and standing with a group of his counselors, indistinguishable from them. This alone would not have swayed Charles into listening to her, but (as she later testified at her trial, her words recorded by her confessor Friar Jean Pasquerel), the message she gave him was impossible to ignore.

  When [the king] saw her, he asked Joan her name and she answered: “Gentle dauphin, I am Joan the Maid, and the King of Heaven commands that through me you be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims as a lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is king of France.” And after further questions asked by the king, Joan said to him anew: “I say to you, on behalf of the Lord, that you are the true heir of France, and a king’s son, and He has sent me to you to lead you to Reims, so that you can receive your coronation and consecration if you wish it.” This being understood, the king said to his courtiers that Joan had told him a certain secret that no one knew or could know except God: and that is why he had great confidence in her.8

  He was still young himself, only twenty-six; he must often have felt that his right to rule was indeed a secret, unknown even to the father who had given his crown away.

  Jeanne d’Arc’s appeal to the rest of his army is harder to understand. But she was not the first charismatic young leader to whip an army into enthusiasm; she was just the first seventeen-year-old girl to manage that feat, and the phenomenon cannot be completely explained in the absence of what must have been a magnetic and hypnotizing personal presence. “Great numbers of those who heard her had great faith in what she said,” Monstrelet writes, “and believed her inspired, as she declared herself to be.”9

  Jeanne remai
ned at Chinon with the king until April, planning the assault on the besiegers of Orleans. On April 27, she sent the Duke of Bedford a message (which he ignored) ordering him to surrender all of his properties and leave France. Then she began to travel towards Orleans at the head of the Dauphin’s army. Two days later, she crossed the Loire.

  Her energy and conviction had managed to transmit itself to the knights and captains who had been stalled behind the Dauphin’s withdrawn generalship; and in three quick assaults on the Burgundian-English camps, the royalist army forced the besiegers to break camp and retreat by the end of the first week of May. It was the initial victory in a string of triumphs. Like a football team that has suddenly regained its confidence, the Dauphin’s army followed the “Maid of Orleans” into battle after battle—and fought brilliantly. The English and Burgundian forces fell back and back. The English-held Tournelles surrendered on May 8; Jargeau in June; Troyes and Reims in July; St. Denis in August. With Reims finally back in his hands, the Dauphin mounted an elaborate coronation ceremony in the ancient cathedral, following the tradition established by the Frankish king Clovis centuries before.

  Crowned and anointed, Charles now seemed to lose his will to tap into Jeanne d’Arc’s electrical presence. The final step in establishing his lordship over France would be the routing of the English from Paris; but Charles was not enthusiastic about the attack, and Jeanne herself had underestimated the English strength in Paris. She had thought that the people would come over to the side of the rightfully crowned king of France, but there were too many Burgundians and English in the city. After a few initial assaults in late August, she led a major attack against Paris’s walls on September 8, 1429. But, sensing division in their leadership, the French army faltered. Jeanne herself was badly injured, taking a serious arrow wound to the thigh. The royalist army finally retreated. Something had shifted; Jeanne’s injury had turned the angel of the Lord into a vulnerable woman.10