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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  The mysterious momentum of the French army had faded. By early September, Charles VII had decided to retreat across the Loire for the winter. By spring of 1430, he was still sitting, apathetically, at the northern city of Sully.

  93.1 The Dauphin against the English

  Hoping to recapture the old momentum, Jeanne d’Arc left him and went, with two thousand loyal soldiers, to the city of Compiègne. Compiègne had remained loyal to Charles VII, defying the English; she hoped to use the city as a base for a surprise attack on English troops nearby. Instead, she marched out from its gates and was almost at once driven backwards by the Duke of Burgundy’s men. “During that time,” one of the soldiers who was present later wrote, “the captain [of Compiègne], seeing the great multitude of Burgundians and Englishmen ready to get on the bridge . . . raised the drawbridge of the city and closed the gate. So the Maid was shut outside, and only a few of her men were with her.”11

  Later accounts, including Holinshed’s, suggest that the governor of Compiègne was in the pay of the English and that Jeanne had been set up. However it happened, she was forced to surrender, and was taken captive to the Duke of Burgundy’s camp at Marigny. To the English and Burgundians, she was the power that had resurrected Charles VII’s army from the dead; she had to be not just removed from the war but also discredited. So she was treated not as a prisoner of war but as a heretic, accused of “many crimes, sorceries, idolatry, intercourse with demons, and other matters relative to faith and against faith.”12

  Charles VII made no effort to ransom her. No contemporary writer makes any mention of his thoughts on the subject; there is nothing but silence. Perhaps he was playing out one of those deep long-term strategies that occasionally surfaced during his reign; or perhaps his coronation had been the only goal all along; or, possibly, he was suffering from a spell of the pathological apathy that occasionally seized him. There is no way to know for sure. But after long and miserable imprisonment, Jeanne was finally put on trial for heresy at Rouen, in Normandy (safely English territory), on February 21, 1431.

  By then, Charles was clearly determined to keep far, far away from the taint of witchcraft. But despite the theoretically theological tone of the trial, it was perfectly clear that Jeanne’s condemnation was demanded by military expediency. She was kept in a military prison, given no lawyer for her defense, and denied the company of other women; all of these were blatant violations of Church laws protecting women accused of heresy.13

  It was a confusion of procedure caused in large part by Jeanne’s own insistence that God was speaking to her directly, independent of any Church voice or setting (the same heresy that had plagued the institutional church for centuries now), and that He did not approve of the Treaty of Troyes (which had given Henry V the right to claim the crown of France). “Asked whether God hates the English,” the Latin transcript of her trial tells us, “she said she knows nothing about the love or hate that God has for the English, nor what he will do with their souls; but she knows for certain they will be driven from France, except those who stay and die, and that God will grant the French victory over the English.”14

  Her prosecutor was Pierre Cauchon, a Paris-trained canon lawyer who was also the Bishop of Beauvais. For three months, she was bombarded with seventy different accusations. The assembled court—131 lawyers, priests, and scholars—decided that twelve of them could be proven. Meanwhile, Jeanne (exhausted, abandoned, poorly fed) sank into an illness that reduced her almost to coma. On Thursday, May 24, she allowed her hand to be guided into marking a cross at the bottom of the accusations: an acknowledgment of guilt, which sentenced her to lifelong imprisonment.

  But over the weekend, a spark of resistance flared back up in the battered recesses of her soul. Visited by her judges, early next week, she renounced her confession.

  At once, she was condemned as an unrepentant heretic and sentenced to death by burning. The French court had been prepared (and perhaps hoping) for this eventuality all along: the punishment was carried out with immediate efficiency. On May 30, 1431, she was led out to the square of Rouen, where eight hundred armed men had assembled to supervise the execution. It was a hasty execution; the priest assigned to hear her last confession at the stake later wrote that the captain of the troops tried to hurry him through the confession so that he could dismiss his men for dinner.

  And impatiently, without any form, or indication or judgment, they sent her to the fire, saying to the master of the work: “Do your job.” And so she was brought and attached to the stake, continuing to praise God and the saints while lamenting devoutly; the last word she cried in a high voice as she died was: “Jesus!”15

  JEANNE’S EXECUTION WAS, on the surface, a victory for the English.

  It backfired. The sight of Jeanne dying with the name of Christ on her lips had not gone over well with the population of Rouen, and she was more and more widely spoken of as a martyr. The executioner himself later went to a priest, begging for absolution; he was damned, he said, because he had burned a holy woman. Rumors began to circulate that her heart had survived the flames, a miracle in the ashes.16

  After the burning at Rouen, the regent Duke of Bedford arranged to bring young Henry VI, now ten years old, to Paris to be crowned at Notre Dame. But the ceremony was greeted with sullen silence, and the people of Paris were so hostile to the young English king that he left after just weeks and went to Normandy instead.

  The English position in France was further complicated by a falling-out between the English regent and his longtime ally, the Duke of Burgundy. With the resurgence of Charles VII’s power, the Duke of Burgundy had been contemplating how he could be reconciled to his king. When his sister, the Duke of Bedford’s wife, died in 1432 and Bedford quickly remarried, the two men were pushed even further apart. “The English became very suspicious of the Burgundians,” Monstrelet says, “and guarded as much against them as they had done before against the French . . . and they no longer had confidence in each other.”17

  The English had been pushed hard back on their heels, and in the late summer of 1435, Henry VI’s London council agreed to send ambassadors to Arras to meet with two cardinals sent from Rome to help establish a peace between the warring kings. The Duke of Burgundy was also in attendance, as were representatives from a number of French countries; Charles VII sent diplomats of his own. The Duke of Bedford remained away; and it soon became clear that the only useful negotiations were going on between the Duke of Burgundy and Charles VII’s men. The English were “not well pleased . . . for they suspected some treaties were in agitation that would not be for the advantage of their country.” In addition to secret meetings between the French parties, the English ambassadors were continually faced with the French demand that King Henry give up the claim to be king of France, in exchange for sovereignty over certain French territories. By early September, they were fed up. They abandoned the talks and returned to England.18

  Just a few days later, the Duke of Bedford, who had been lying ill at Rouen, died. The Duke of Burgundy now concluded that any obligation to the English was at an end. On September 21, he agreed to sign the Treaty of Arras; this did nothing to bring the war with the English to an end, but it reunified the Burgundian party to the crown, bringing an end to the split that had allowed the English to make a play for France in the first place.

  Paris itself resisted a little longer; there were die-hard Burgundians in the city who were still unwilling to follow their duke into the French king’s fold; and there was still an English force holding the Bastille. Finally, early in 1436, a French royal army under the command of the Constable of France broke through the gates, surrounded the Bastille, and forced the remaining holdouts to surrender.

  Charles VII himself entered the city on November 12, 1437. He had not been in his own capital city for nineteen years, and the date was carefully chosen; it was the first Sunday in Advent, the beginning of the season of the Messiah’s arrival, a day when kings marched into their own cities
in triumph.

  France was hardly in a state of victory, though. The devastation of the civil war lingered. Charles VII’s previous royalist soldiers formed robber bands called écorcheurs (the “skinners,” or “flayers”) and stormed the countryside; it took the Constable a long time to bring them under control.

  Charles VII created an additional disturbance by reorganizing the army. With the cooperation of the Estates-General at Orleans, he decreed that from now on, a permanent, government-controlled army would defend France. All officers were under the direction of the king, and no French duke could have soldiers of his own without the permission of the king. It was the end of private armies, a strike against one of the most treasured privileges of the French aristocracy.

  Some of the dukes resisted. They joined forces with the écorcheurs and tried to mount an armed rebellion. But the government army, under the direction of the Constable of France, squelched the resistance before it could flower: the first demonstration of the new French military might.20

  By this point, the English had lost almost all their French territories. In 1444, young Henry VI—now twenty–three and in control of his own government—agreed to a temporary cease-fire; he also consented to marry Charles VII’s niece Margaret, a wedding that took place in 1445.

  But the union did not save the last English territories. In June of 1449, Charles VII abruptly accused the English of failing to abide by the terms of the cease-fire, and of attempting to incite the French Duke of Brittany, Charles’s nephew, to rebellion against the crown of France. In a series of campaigns between July 31, 1449, and August 22, 1451, the French army reconquered almost every fortress, town, and strategic position in both Normandy and Gascony, the latter English-held for the last three hundred years. Henry VI promised to send reinforcements, but he was preoccupied with domestic matters (a series of court intrigues and plots against him) and never managed to get the ships launched. Finally, the only English territory remaining in France was now a tiny strip encompassing Calais and Guînes. “Thus were the Englishmen clearly displaced,” Holinshed mourns, “and lost the possession of all the countries, towns, castles, and places within the realm of France . . . continually losing and nothing gaining.”21

  Not all of Normandy was pleased with Charles VII’s rule, especially since he now imposed new taxes to pay for all the fighting. In October of 1452, citizens of Bordeaux (“already wearied of the French servitude”) allowed an English army of five thousand to land there under the command of John Talbot, son of the Earl of Shrewsbury. The French army arrived with cannon—the first time it had made use of cannon in a siege—and cut the English invaders to ribbons. Talbot died in the fighting, along with over a thousand of his men; the rest of the English fled. It was the dying gasp of the Hundred Years’ War.22

  CHARLES VII HIMSELF was showing odd signs of debility: an illness that eventually made his hands too shaky to sign official papers. This illness, referred to only obliquely by his courtiers, began sometime late in 1453. He was forced to wear dressings on one leg to absorb a constant discharge of pus; he ordered special stockings for his bad foot, and his meals were carefully ground up because of a badly ulcerated mouth. He may have been suffering from syphilis; he may have inherited some chronic genetic disorder from his mad father.

  His sister’s son was suffering as well. In August of the same year, Henry VI had suddenly lost his wits. “He fell by a sudden and accidental fright into such a weak state of health that, for a whole year and a half, he had neither natural sense nor reason capable of carrying on the government,” says the contemporary Giles Chronicle; and another account adds that the king of England “suddenly was taken and smitten with a frenzy.” It was the same symptom that had first struck his grandfather Charles VI in the summer of 1392; and it soon became clear that Henry had inherited the madness of the French royal family. He did not regain awareness for over a year. Even when he again recognized his wife and children, he remained unbalanced: hearing voices, falling into catatonia, seeing visions, retreating into an imaginary world. The illness would haunt the royal family for generations. This, it turned out, was the longest-lasting prize that Henry V had won for the English at Agincourt.23

  * * *

  *Only a few details of Jeanne d’Arc’s brief and extraordinary life can be covered here. The classic works by Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc: Her Story, trans. Jeremy deQuesnay Adams (St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witnesses trans. Edward Hyams (Macdonald, 1964); and The Retrial of Joan of Arc, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), provide many more details, along with contemporary accounts and a full examination of the charges against her. A detailed and somewhat sympathetic look at Charles VII’s actions can be found in Malcolm G. A. Vale, Charles VII (University of California Press, 1974).

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  The Fall

  Between 1430 and 1453,

  the Turks triumph,

  the Crusades die,

  and Constantinople surrenders

  THE FIERCE YOUNG OTTOMAN SULTAN MURAD II had grown into a fierce mature ruler. He had laid siege to Constantinople twice, both times withdrawing only after the payment of tribute and the surrender of yet more Byzantine lands. He had ruthlessly wiped out budding revolts in Wallachia and Serbia, both now under his control; after capturing the massive Hungarian fortress of Golubac, on the Danube river, he had forced the Hungarians to make it over to him permanently; in 1430 he seized Thessalonica; he had begun to invade the Venetian-held lands on the Adriatic Sea; and in 1431, his troops had knocked down the Hexamillion Wall, built by Manuel to block just such an extension of Turkish power.1

  In Rome, the cardinals and pope talked hopefully of another crusade, this one perhaps involving the Hungarians, the Polish armies, the Venetians; the Duke of Burgundy had expressed interest; the Serbs might be persuaded to join in.

  But such a crusade resisted full organization. Talk went on, while the only resistance to Murad was mounted by Hungary.

  THE KING OF HUNGARY, Albert II, had succeeded his father-in-law Sigismund in 1438 on the thrones of both Hungary and Germany.

  He took the Hungarian capital city of Alba Regia for his home, and at first directed his energies against the Bohemians, who were refusing to recognize his kingship. The Castilian traveler Pero Tafur, visiting his headquarters during the first Christmas of his reign, found him at the Bohemian border city of Breslau with “a great army”; he was impressed by Albert II’s courtesy (“honest in his bearing . . . an open and vigorous knight”), and even more astounded by the cold winter. “So cold is the city that [the king] and his courtiers go about in the streets seated in wooden vehicles like threshing machines,” he marveled. “No one with any money rides on horseback for fear of falling, for the streets are like glass owing to the continual frosts. . . . It was so cold that my teeth almost fell out of my mouth.”2

  94.1 The Wars of Murad II

  The Bohemians were not easily reduced, however, and in 1439 Albert II decided to turn southward against the Turkish front in Serbia. After an undistinguished campaign in which nothing particular happened, he was journeying back towards Vienna when he grew ill; he died at the Hungarian city of Neszmély on October 27, not quite finishing out two years as king of Hungary. He had never actually managed to be crowned king of Germany, and died as king-elect.

  His venture against the Turks had produced one unexpected effect. In order to prevent Hungary and Poland from unifying against him, Murad II had sent an ambassador to the king of Poland, Wladyslaw III, with an offer. The Turks would help the king’s younger brother, Casimir, take complete control of Bohemia, removing it completely from the control of either Germany or Hungary and instead making it a subject kingdom of Poland—as long as Poland promised not to help the Hungarians attack the Turkish front.3

  Wladyslaw III, only fifteen years old, was still under the guidance of his advisors. He accepted the treaty, but the Turkish ambassadors had not yet even left Krakow when news of Alber
t’s death arrived, along with an offer from the Hungarian nobles to recognize Wladyslaw as king of Hungary in his place. The German electors had settled on Frederick of Hapsburg, Albert’s first cousin: “Not so noble a man” as Albert, says Pero Tafur, but “exceedingly wealthy . . . [and] he knows well how to keep what he has.” But the Hungarians had concluded that separating their own realm from Germany, and from its Bohemian troubles, was a better route.4

  Wladyslaw III accepted the Hungarian crown, which annoyed Murad II. When his messengers returned to his capital city of Edirne and told him that Poland and Hungary were now under a single ruler, he declared the treaty with Hungary void and began to gather his forces for an attack. Meanwhile, Albert II’s widow gave birth to a posthumous son, four months after Albert’s death. A minority of the Hungarian nobles lobbied for retracting the offer to Wladyslaw in favor of the infant. Fighting broke out, and Murad II must have believed that the divisions in Hungary would make the country vulnerable. In 1440, he advanced forward to Belgrade, the gateway into Hungary, and laid siege to it.5

  To his shock, the siege failed. Belgrade, built between two rivers, was further protected by a double wall and five forts, and its harbor was shut off with a chain that ran between two strong towers. The Turkish army was equipped with stone throwers and cannon, but after several months of bashing at the walls without effect, Murad II ordered a secret tunnel built under the walls, beginning the construction a good distance away and behind a high hill to conceal it. Belgrade’s defenders discovered the tunnel, booby-trapped it with gunpowder, and waited until it was filled with advancing Turkish foot soldiers; then they set off the explosion, killing every last man in the tunnel. Murad retreated. In all, he had lost nearly fifteen thousand men at the siege.6