An Amiable Fool on the Throne
The gamble of hereditary monarchy now replaced a capable ruler with a lovable fool. Charles VI was twelve years old when his father died. His uncles ruled in his name until he was twenty and left him to himself, so that he grew up in vice and revelry without any sense of responsibility. Meanwhile half of Europe was stepping to the threshold of revolution.
A Europe of Popular Revolts
- In 1359 the workers of Bruges, wearing red caps, rushed into the town hall in a short-lived revolution.
- In 1366 the lower classes of Ypres rose up and called the people to a holy war against the rich.
- In 1378 the Ciompi of Florence established a dictatorship of the proletariat.
- In 1379 the peasants and farmers of Languedoc, who were dying of hunger, rose against the nobles and the clergy under a leader who ordered the killing of anyone with soft hands.
- Workers rose in Strasbourg in 1380, in London in 1381, and in Cologne in 1396.
- From 1379 to 1382 a revolutionary government ruled Ghent.
- The rebel workers of Rouen chose a stout cloth merchant as their king, and in Paris the people killed the king's tax collectors with leaden mallets (1382).
The Madness of Charles VI
Charles VI took control of the government in 1388 and for four years reigned and governed so well that the people called him "the Beloved." But in 1392 he went mad. He no longer recognized his wife and, as though she were a stranger, begged her to stop her insistent interference. Before long even the humblest servants paid him no attention. For five months he did not change his clothes, and when they finally decided to bathe him, it took ten people struggling to overcome his reluctance and disgust. For thirty whole years the crown of France sat on the head of a pitiful fool, while the young and vigorous king of England was preparing for a new invasion of France.
Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt
On 11 August 1415 Henry V sailed from England for France with 1,300 ships and 11,000 soldiers. The army landed on the fourteenth near Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine. Harfleur defended itself bravely, but in vain. The English soldiers, elated by victory but suffering from dysentery, hurried toward Calais. At Agincourt, near Crécy, they met the French knights on 25 October.
Mud, Stakes, and Slaughter
The French had learned nothing from the defeats of Crécy and Poitiers and still relied on cavalry. But the mud stopped many of their horses, and the rest that managed to advance met the sharpened stakes that the English had planted at an angle around their archers. The horses took fright, turned back, and charged their own men. The English fell on this disordered army with clubs, axes, and swords and won with an immeasurable advantage. French historians put the English dead in this battle at 1,600, while 11,000 Frenchmen were killed.
The Siege of Rouen and the Treaty of Troyes
In 1417 Henry returned to France and besieged Rouen. The townspeople first ate their provisions and then their horses, dogs, and cats. To save food they drove women, children, and old men out of the city. These tried to find a way through the English lines but failed. Hungry and defenseless between friends and enemies, they perished. In that merciless siege 50,000 French people died. When the city surrendered, Henry stopped his soldiers from massacring the survivors, but he sentenced the city to pay an indemnity of 300,000 crowns and kept the inhabitants imprisoned until the sum was collected.
Surrender at Troyes
In 1419 he set foot in a Paris sunk in corruption, misery, savagery, and class war. France agreed to a treaty even more humiliating than that of 1360. Under the Treaty of Troyes (1420) the French surrendered everything to England, even their honor. Charles VI gave his daughter Catherine to Henry V and promised to leave him the crown of France. He handed the management of French affairs to Henry, and to leave no room for doubt he disowned the dauphin as his son.
Queen Isabeau, who received a yearly pension of 24,000 francs, raised no protest against this crime and immorality. In the courts of that time it was in fact very hard for a woman to identify the father of her child. The heir to the throne, who governed the south of France, refused to accept the treaty and reorganized an army of fighters from Gascony and Armagnac to continue the war. Meanwhile the king of England reigned in the Louvre.
The Deaths of Henry V and Charles VI
Two years later Henry V died of dysentery, as though the germs of dysentery did not accept the Treaty of Troyes. When Charles VI followed him in death in 1422, Henry VI of England put on the crown of France as well. Since he was not yet a year old, the Duke of Bedford governed France in his name. He ruled France with great severity, but with justice, as was expected of an Englishman.
Bedford's Rule and the State of France
He rooted out brigandage by hanging 10,000 robbers in a single year, which shows the condition of France at that time. Soldiers discharged from service made the highways dangerous and even threatened great cities such as Paris and Dijon. In Normandy the misery and ruin caused by war raged like a deadly, hellish storm. Even in Languedoc, which was luckier than other regions, a third of the population had perished.
- Peasants and farmers fled before armies, feudal bands, or gangs of thieves into the towns, or hid in caves, or took sanctuary in churches.
- Many did not return to their small and uncertain holdings but stayed in the city and lived by begging and theft, or died of hunger or plague.
- Churches, fields, and towns were left to themselves and abandoned to ruin.
- In 1422 Paris had 24,000 empty houses, and 80,000 of the city's 300,000 people were begging.
- People ate the meat and entrails of dogs, and the cries of hungry children filled the streets.
Life Amid the Ruins: Morals
In this turmoil morals were what one would expect from such economic collapse and weakness of government. Geoffroy de la Tour Landry wrote two books around 1372 to guide his children through the chaos, but only the part addressed to his daughters survives. It is a gentle work, full of love and a father's anxiety about the virginity of his daughters, since they lived in an age when noble sins led women into degrading and base levity, and the jewel of chastity could be lost in the blink of an eye. Our good knight considers frequent prayers the best resistance to such temptations. The book reflects an age still attached to civic feelings and moral ideas.
The Marshal de Rais
Seventy years later we meet the fearful figure of Marshal de Rais, a rich landowner of Brittany. He used to invite children to his castle on the pretext of teaching them religious songs, then killed them one by one as offerings to the demons from whom he sought black magic power. He killed for pleasure as well, and it was reported that he took cruel enjoyment in the cries of the tortured or dying child singers. His life went on this way for fourteen whole years, until the father of one of the victims dared to accuse him of killing his son. He confessed everything and was hanged in 1440, but only because he had offended the Duke of Brittany, for men of his class were rarely brought to trial, whatever their crimes. Even so, the aristocracy from which he came had also produced famous heroes such as John, king of Bohemia, and Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, whom Froissart loved and admired, and the last flowers of chivalry bloomed in such a swamp.
Corruption in Every Class
Public morals also had a hand in the general disaster. Cruelty, treachery, and corruption afflicted everyone, and all officials, from top to bottom, took bribes. Blasphemy was entirely common, and Jean Charlier de Gerson complained that most holy days were spent in card-playing, gambling, and cursing.
Swindlers, forgers, thieves, vagrants, and beggars blocked the roads by day and gathered at night to spend their takings on debauchery. In Paris they met at a place called the Court of Miracles, so named because all the crippled beggars of the day were healthy and sound there at night.
Sexual License and Its Opposite
The author reports that sexual license was widespread: homosexual acts were abundant, prostitution was general, and adultery nearly universal. A sect called the Adamites favored nudity and practiced it until the Inquisition put them in their place. Obscene pictures found as many buyers as they do today, and according to Gerson they were sold even in churches and on holy days. Poets such as Deschamps wrote love poems for noble ladies. Nicolas de Clamanges, archdeacon of Bayeux, called the monasteries and convents of the region "altars for the rites of Venus."
Having mistresses was considered normal for kings and princes, since the marriages of kings and of many nobles were made for political rivalry, not for love. Noblewomen openly discussed the problems of sexual relations among themselves. Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, set up a brothel in Paris in 1401.
Amid this moral corruption born of money, there still lived virtuous women and honorable men. A small sign of them survives in a strange book called Le Ménagier de Paris, written by an unknown sixty-year-old man in 1393. He believed that when two honorable and chaste people marry, they think of nothing but love for each other. In his view, when they sit side by side they look at no one else, hold each other close, and speak to no one else by word or sign. Their joy, love, and desire are all to give each other pleasure and happiness and to work to each other's liking.
Images of the Century: The Dance of Death
The persecution and expulsion of the Jews (1306, 1384, 1396) and of lepers (1321), the trial and killing of animals accused of harming or mating with human beings, and public hangings that drew huge and eager crowds of spectators are among the pictures that characterize this century well.
The Cemetery of the Innocents
In the cemetery of the church of the Holy Innocents in Paris, the number of new dead who needed burial was so great that bodies were dug up as soon as their flesh was thought to have separated from the bone, and the bones were piled together without distinction in the charnel houses on both sides of the passages. Even so, these same passages were public meeting places. Shops were set up there, and prostitutes looked for customers.
In 1424, after months of work, a painter produced on one wall of the cemetery a picture of the Dance of Death. In it devils whirled and stamped with women, men, and children, hand in hand, and with merry steps led them slowly to their hell. It became a symbolic subject for the art of an age of despair. In 1449 it was staged as a play in Bruges, and Dürer, Holbein, and Bosch depicted it in their works.
The Poetry of Pessimism
The poetry of this period is full of pessimism. Deschamps cursed life from start to finish. In his view the world was an old man, worn out, anxious, greedy, cowardly, and base, and he concluded that everything turns on ugliness. Gerson agreed with him, saying that we live in a world that is old and worn out. The Last Judgment was near. One old woman thought that every pain she felt in her toes meant that another human soul had fallen into hell. Her estimate was fair, since the common belief was that in the last thirty years no one had entered heaven.
Religion in a Defeated Nation
We must now see how religion fared in a defeated nation that was heading toward decline. In the first forty years of the Hundred Years' War the popes, imprisoned in the four walls of Avignon, were protected by and obedient to the French kings. Most of the taxes and revenues that the popes gathered from across Europe poured into the purses of these kings to strengthen their finances in the life-and-death war with Britain. In eleven years (1345 to 1355) the Church advanced 3,392,000 florins ($84,800,000 in the book's conversion) to the crown. The popes tried repeatedly to end the war but failed.
Losses of the Church and Popular Devotion
The Church suffered heavily from this war, which for a whole century caused the devastation and plunder of France. Hundreds of churches and monasteries were lost or destroyed, and the lower clergy played a large part in the corruption of the age. Knights and servants paid no attention to religion except in time of war or at death. The people, while trampling on every religious law, clung fearfully to religion and the Church.
They brought their money and alms to the altars and shrines of the Mother of God and offered them to her for comfort. When they listened to the fiery sermons of Friar Richard or Saint Vincent Ferrer, they all fell into a religious ecstasy. Some homes had small statues of the Virgin, in the hope that when they touched her, her sacred belly would open and the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would hurry to their aid.
Pierre d'Ailly and Jean Gerson
The intellectual leaders of the Church in this period were mostly French. Pierre d'Ailly was not only one of the most reputable scholars of his time but also one of the ablest and most incorruptible leaders of the Church of his day. He was one of the churchmen who healed the schism of the papacy at the Council of Constance. When he was head of the College of Navarre in Paris, one of his students in theology rose to a high position.
Gerson's Piety and Skepticism
This was Jean de Gerson, who visited the mystic Ruysbroeck and was deeply influenced by mysticism and by the new piety of the Brethren of the Common Life. When he became chancellor of the University of Paris in 1395, he resolved to offer this new kind of devotion to the French people, even at a time when the egotism and the pantheism of the mystical school were being criticized. He had six sisters, and under the influence of his reasoned words and way of life, all six remained unmarried and virgin to the end of their lives.
Gerson condemned the superstition of the masses and the tricks performed in the name of astrology, magic, and magical cures. Even so, he admitted that spells and charms might have an effect, since they work on human imagination. He said that our knowledge of the stars is too imperfect to allow us to predict or forecast. We cannot even calculate one solar year exactly, and we cannot determine the true positions of the stars, because their light, on its way to us, passes through different materials and is refracted.
Gerson's Politics and Legacy
Gerson favored a limited democracy and the supremacy of councils in the Church, and beyond that he wanted a strong monarchy for France. The reason for this contradiction in his thought may perhaps be explained by the situation of his country at that time, which needed order more than liberty. He was a great man in his age and in his own way. His virtues, as Goethe said, flowed from his own nature, and his errors were born of his environment and time. He led the reform movement that deposed the rival popes and improved the Church, and he took part in condemning Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague to death.
Fashion and the Houses of the Rich
In the midst of the poverty of the common people, the upper classes adorned themselves and their houses with great splendor. Ordinary people wore plain, close-fitting jackets, blouses, trousers, and boots. The middle classes, despite the law limiting personal spending, imitated kings by wearing long gowns, sometimes purple and sometimes trimmed with fur.
Dress
The nobles wore tight clothes, long stockings, and fine cloaks, with feathered hats that swept the ground when they bowed. Some men fitted the toes of their shoes with "horns," and the author adds a joke about the rare nobility that such men wore on their heads. Noblewomen liked cone-shaped hats as tall as church spires. They made themselves look slim in tight jackets and wide colored trousers, trailed their long fur-edged skirts grandly on the ground, and put their beautiful breasts on display, while hiding their faces behind veils and masks.
The button, which had earlier served only for decoration, was now used for fastening, and we repeat the same style today. Silk, brocade, cloth of gold, gold thread, and jewels for the hair, neck, hands, clothes, and shoes adorned even stout and heavy women and made them glitter. Under this sparkle, almost all upper-class women had gone as far as the figures in Rubens's paintings.
Houses
The houses of the poor stayed as they had been for centuries, except that the use of glass had become general. The villas and town houses, the hôtels, of the wealthy were no longer dark and gloomy towers like those of earlier periods. They were large and well-equipped buildings with spacious courtyards with fountains, wide winding staircases, projecting balconies, and steeply pitched roofs that pierced the sky and shed the snow from their sharp slopes. Inside, besides the great hall and the family's bedrooms, there were servants' rooms, a storeroom, places for the guard and the doorkeeper, a laundry, a wine cellar, and a bakery.
- Some châteaux, such as Pierrefonds (about 1390) and Châteaudun (about 1450), were comparable to the royal palaces of the Loire.
- The best-preserved house of the time is that of the great capitalist of the age, Jacques Cœur, in Bourges. It is as large as a neighborhood and has a tower of carved stone in Gothic style, beautiful inscriptions and stucco, and Renaissance-style windows. Its cost is said to have been the equivalent of $4,000,000 in modern money.
Interiors
The insides of houses were decorated at this time at great cost. There were magnificent fireplaces that warmed at least half of the palace and its occupants, and heavy, thick tables and chairs carved and inlaid with exhausting labor. Cushioned benches stood along walls hung with tapestry, and there were huge clothes racks and cabinets displaying silver and gold vessels and finer crystal, thick carpets, and floors of polished oak or enameled glazed tile.
The large canopied beds had room for master, mistress, and one or two of their children. On these soft beds the men and women of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries slept stark naked, since there were not yet nightshirts to come between their bodies.