THREE
Good King Louis, you held the land under yoke
To the profit of barons and of the little folk . . .
To whom may poor men cry now in their woe
Since the good king is dead who loved them so?
—Unknown contemporary poet
IN PARIS a powerful new body had been founded, and had grown up over the years from Suger to Philippe-Auguste, which was to become a significant force in the land, along with the monarchy, the nobility and the Church. Better known later as the Sorbonne, the University of Paris in the centuries ahead would be a source of immense kudos for France—but also a source of controversy and, indeed, tumult. From the earliest days, its students had keenly and liberally involved themselves in city life, outside the walls of academe. In the south transept of Notre-Dame, for instance, a series of reliefs show scenes from student life, as well as a medieval seminar in progress (although listening closely, the participants appear to be taking no notes!). They also show students revenging themselves on a harlot outside Notre-Dame. She is strung up on a “bishop’s ladder,” while her tormentors hurl mud and filth at her; two law enforcement officers stand by watching.
In 1200, the new century began with a first major bagarre between town and gown in Paris, grave enough for the King, Philippe-Auguste, himself to get involved. An account given by the English chronicler Roger of Howden 1 describes how a band of German students became involved in a pre-Lenten tavern brawl in which they wrecked the place and severely beat the owner. In a punitive raid, the royal prévôt of Paris attacked the Germans’ hostel with urban militia, during the course of which some Parisian students from the university were killed.
Outraged by this incident, and joining the students to demand redress, their professors suspended teaching and threatened to leave Paris in a body. Here, as in later centuries, the most potent weapon in the armoury of both students and masters was “a cessation of lectures.” It caused Philippe-Auguste to fear that the students might boycott his city; in addition, while his dispute with the Pope was still running, he was keen to win over Paris churchmen (under whose aegis the university existed) for their support in the royal cause. In July 1200, Philippe-Auguste issued a charter, the university’s first. If a townsman saw any layman assaulting a student in Paris, except in self-defence, he was required to arrest the offender, hand him over to royal justice, and give evidence against him. Particular care was to be exercised to avoid physical injury to members of the university unless they resisted arrest. All complaints of violence were to be investigated by inquest. Both the prévôt and the people of Paris were required to observe these measures under oath.
Here was a remarkable display of liberalism for such an authoritarian ruler, and especially when recalling his treatment of the Jewish minority. The statute gave to the university vital concessions and privileges that it would strive to safeguard over the ages.
To quote the weighty and considered judgement of Hastings Rashdall, the English authority on medieval universities:
It is hardly too much to say that the descendants of Hugh Capet eventually succeeded in making themselves the real masters of France, just because, when their power was at its lowest, they were still masters of Paris. The political position of Paris gave the university its place in the political and ecclesiastical world which no other university has ever occupied.
In common with later rulers of France, even fearless Philippe-Auguste seems to have been daunted by the Paris students. Constituting a substantial segment of the city’s population by the end of the century, these scholars enjoyed the same set of privileges that the ecclesiastical courts had formulated to protect the clergy. The first was termed the privilegium canonis, under which the clergy were considered sacred personages. Any violence against them was therefore sacrilege and punishable by immediate excommunication, for which absolution could be obtained only by arduous penance. Under the second, the privilegium fori, the clergy were exempt from the secular courts and subject exclusively to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Since clerics enjoyed the privilegium canonis, the Church courts were restricted to spiritual sanctions. The privilegium fori posed evident problems for the secular authorities, since murder, rape, robbery and other of the most heinous crimes committed by the clergy went unpunished. At Paris, because of the concentration of scholars, the problem of repressing clerical crime was more acute than elsewhere, such as in England. Philippe-Auguste himself was reported to have observed gloomily that clerics exhibited greater rashness than knights, for whereas knights fought only in armour, clerics and students sprang into the fray brandishing knives, without helmets to protect their clean-shaven pates. Youthful students, as well as their masters and mentors, became renowned for their brawling and rioting, as well as for committing more heinous crimes, such as fornication, abduction of married women, robbery and even murder.
By 1223, there was such animosity that the Paris citizenry fought a pitched battle against the students during which 320 were killed, their bodies thrown into the Seine.
Shortly after the death of Philippe-Auguste, under the reign of his saintly grandson, Louis IX, the university reaped more of the whirlwind already sown. During the carnival of 1228–29, students entered a tavern in the suburb of Bourg Saint-Marcel, where “by chance they found good and sweet wine.” A row began with the landlord; the disputants rapidly proceeded to blows, and “the pulling of ears and tearing of hair.” The innkeeper called in his neighbours, who fiercely beat off the students; but the next day they returned with reinforcements, armed with swords and sticks. They attacked the host and set the taps running. Then, “filled with insolence and wine,” they “sallied forth into the streets to amuse themselves at the expense of peaceable citizens and women alike.” The tables were turned once more when “the savage police of a savage city”2 killed several innocent students. The masters once more suspended their lectures, while the episode aroused strong feelings against the university—the murder of a number of students by a brutal soldiery being “welcomed by their official superiors as tending to the humiliation of the upstart university.”
There followed the dissolution of the university for six years—with the consequences Philippe-Auguste had so greatly feared: the great mass of masters and scholars left Paris, many of them accepting the pressing invitation of Henry III of England, to reinforce the rising universities of Oxford and Cambridge. About the only power retained by the English universities was that of excommunicating “vagabond, truant and incorrigible scholars.”
DESPITE THIS TURBULENT EARLY HISTORY of dissolution and scandal, the institution of the university had grown in size and repute since 1180, the year Philippe-Auguste was crowned, when the Collège des Dix-Huit was formed by the heirs of Abelard’s handful of students— its first hall of residence opened by an Englishman called Josse. Through its distinction, the Paris of Philippe-Auguste established herself as the recognised intellectual centre of Europe; even his holy adversary, Pope Innocent III, was educated there and subsequently lent it his powerful support; after him there followed three of the nephews of Pope Alexander IV. In 1210, the royal chronicler, Guillaume le Bretonne, lauded how letters flourished in Paris. Never before at any time, or in any part of the world, whether in Athens or Egypt, had there been such a multitude of students. The reason for this must be sought not only in the beauty of Paris itself, but also in the special privileges which King Philippe and his father before him had conferred upon the students.3
In 1257, under St. Louis’ confessor, Robert de Sorbon, the University of Paris gained its definitive name of the “Sorbonne.” It started then as a small college with accommodation limited to only seven priests, with originally sixteen students of theology, four from each European nation, swiftly increased to thirty-six. Theology and the arts were its main disciplines; later a medical school would be added beneath its umbrella. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Sorbonne had attained the constitutional form that would carry it through the rest of the Middle Ages; by the year 1400, forty colleges would exist, while three centuries later the number would have grown to sixty-five, though most would disappear under the present Sorbonne. As of 1231, Pope Gregory IX could praise Paris as “the town of books”; Robert de Sorbon would start off the university library with a bequest of his own personal library of sixty-seven volumes; thirty years later the collection numbered 1017 titles, all painstakingly written on parchment, often exquisitely illuminated. Of these only four were in French, the remainder still in Latin.
By the fourteenth century, interest in Abelard’s dialectics had begun to decline within the university, replaced by a trend towards the pragmatic; in the words of Robert de Sorbon, “is not the labourer mad who is forever sharpening his plough without ever ploughing the field?”4 Bankrupted during the Hundred Years’ War, the Sorbonne’s pristine quality waned. It was to become “an annexe of Oxford” after taking sides with the English against the King of France and Joan of Arc— honour was restored as, in 1437, the university submitted to Charles VII. In 1470, the first printing press to reach Paris from Germany was set up in the Sorbonne. Under the influence of the great printer Robert Estienne (1503–59), the Sorbonne once more regained its position of eminence in Europe, but with the Wars of Religion, Estienne (a supporter of the Reformation) was proscribed for “blasphemy, sedition, and the selling of prohibited books,” and he migrated—with his precious press—to Geneva, where he died.
During these retrograde days, the medical fraternity also suffered. Under the aegis of the Church, doctors had to undertake on oath not to practise surgery which cut the skin; that was left to the barbers— regardless of the requirements of the patient. In 1442, they were even summoned to refrain, on oath, from prescribing all digestive, laxative or soothing remedies; they revolted, and by the end of the fifteenth century the quarrel between medical progress and religious doctrine had become acute. To bring air into the ailing university, and impressed by the intellectual and artistic achievements he had seen in Italy, François I in 1529 founded the Collège de France, right next door to the Sorbonne. Known at first as the Collège des Trois Langues, as Hebrew and Greek were taught there as well as Latin, it adopted the revolutionary procedure of giving lectures in French.
In 1624, Cardinal Richelieu, elected Grand Master of the Sorbonne, commissioned Lemercier to reconstruct its derelict building, taking upon himself the restoration of its former glories. It would revive only to be suppressed by the revolution in 1792, remaining empty until 1806 when Napoleon enters the story. Nevertheless, its massive quarters still sitting astride the hump of the Mont de Sainte-Geneviève, for 850 years the Sorbonne has survived as the sanctuary of French intelligence; as John Russell notes, there is no institution in England that quite corresponds to it: “It is as if Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester Grammar School, the London School of Economics, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs were all bundled into an area less than a mile square.”
THE STUDENTS OF MEDIEVAL PARIS, aged between fifteen and thirty, had a pitiably hard life. Often their backs bore the signs of heavy beating, inflicted by less amiable masters. Bitterly cold in winter, with only one much-patched garment to their name, they would lodge in a poor house with an old woman who cooks only vegetables and never prepares a sheep except on feast days. A dirty fellow waits on the table and just such a person buys the wine in the city . . . After the meal, a student sits on a rickety chair and uses a light, doubtless a candle, which goes out continually and disturbs the ideas.5
He “sits all night long and learns the seven liberal arts. Often he falls asleep at his work and is troubled by bad dreams.” The next day’s lectures would begin again at 5 a.m. Receiving no stipend, he would often have to pay extortionate rents for these meagre lodgings himself—as well as his master’s wages; receiving no regular salaries, each had the right to teach for whatever fees he could extract from other students. When an English student, Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds, was studying in Paris, he recalled how he had been subsidised by a chaplain back home, who merchandised holy water for this purpose.
Official, ecclesiastical entertainments were few, and simple; in December and January, as well as at Easter time, there were the Ludi Theatrales, plays which were put on at a monastery. Otherwise, in a world adorned by those perennial students, François Villon and François Rabelais, they would amuse themselves with such harmless pursuits as stealing shop signs and placing fried turds in the hoods of graduates. Pranks like this, however, could of course escalate into more serious outbreaks of violence. As a warning, pour épater les étudiants, in the middle of the Latin Quarter a gibbet was set up in the Place Maubert, the grim focus of a squalid area stigmatised by the philosopher Erasmus as “a cesspit.” But even public executions, in heartless medieval Paris, could be a major source of entertainment.
THOUGH THE STUDENTS were clearly at the lower end of the social spectrum, life for the remainder of the populace of Paris during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was no sinecure either, in a brutally competitive, bustling city. We know something about it from the jottings of a young English schoolmaster, Alexander Neckam, who in his early twenties went to teach in Paris around 1177. The London he left behind, he recorded, was a city much afflicted by drunkenness and fire; Paris measured up better in these respects. Reaching Montmartre, Neckam noted how it seemed to rise in three tiers of vineyards out of open fields, with the ruins of an old temple near the top. From Montmartre there was a unique view of Paris, of “a turreted city surrounded by great walls.”6 In another view of Paris, dating from 1210, members of a travelling Chanson de Geste group saw an “admirable city with many a church, many high church towers, and abbeys of great nobility. They saw the Seine, with deep fords and the mills, of which there were many; they saw the ships which bring wheat, wine, salt and great wealth.” 7
The river would have been in a state of constant movement and hubbub, with ships plodding up heavy with stone from Normandy, meeting barges coming down from Burgundy laden with wine and grain. There was a rumble of mill wheels everywhere; water mills for grinding grain run by the power of the life-giving Seine, as the windmill had not yet been invented. There were even mills mounted on floating hulls which could be shifted to allow traffic to pass under the bridges. Neckam found quarters off the Seine on the Rue de la Boucherie, where the waters of the Bièvre stream, not yet become a sewer, ran clear and pleasant through unpolluted fields. But the water of the Seine gave dysentery to all who were not natives of Paris.
Neckam’s house would almost certainly have been of timber construction, and if his walls had any drapes at all, they would have been crude fabrics dyed a solid colour. His bed was put together at night fall, then dismantled in the morning; clothing and books were kept in chests ranged round the wall, and candles were the only source of light for study. If it was a more affluent Parisian household, there might be biblical scenes in coloured worsted around the walls, and a raised floor, or dais, at the fireplace end, where those of the higher rank sat and ate; but Neckam as a poor clerk would not have been permitted to sit at the fire, “nor sit at a table, but rather eat on his lap, with the household dogs flocking around to take the bread from his hand.” For food, if he was lucky, on special days he would have been treated to roast pork; but mostly the fare would have been vegetables—beans, beets and peas. There was honey for sweetening. To drink there was cider, beer and unfermented wine, from the slopes of Montmartre. By the fireplace was to be found a disgusting and evil-smelling garde-robe pit, into which all kitchen waste (and probably human waste, too) was thrown.
In Paris, chronically overcrowded within its protective walls, personal sanitation was ever a problem—worse than in London. When space permitted, the garde-robe pit would be dug outside the house, and a shed and a wooden platform placed over it. Otherwise, contributing to the endemic lack of hygiene in medieval Paris, there was always difficulty in locating a latrine—hence known as the longaigne, or “far-off place.” In the Life of St. Gregory, the latrine is spoken of as a “retiring place where tablets can be read without interruption.” It was the custom for kitchen pots and washbasins as well as chamber pots to be emptied by pitching the contents from the window. Hence the reason why the better-off Parisian rode through the streets on horseback, while others wore heavy shoes, with high, thick soles, plus a chape as a protection from ordure thrown from above. Most of the houses had a perron (a word used today for a railway platform) in the form of a large block of stone raised above the vile mud to serve as a doorstep, where the lady of the house would sit and gossip and watch the va-et-vient.
Compared with the terrible fourteenth century that lay ahead, and even the days of Louis XIV, life for peasants and city-dwellers alike was tolerable. Social degree showed itself to a large extent in apparel. In bed at night, all wore nothing. By day, a baron could be spotted in cold weather by his fur-lined pellice. Men of all ranks wore braies, the full, pleated breeches favoured by the Gauls, while the affluent also wore long stockings, or chauces, often in brilliant colours and of rich materials like silk or cotton (imported from Africa, and therefore of even greater rarity). Above would be worn a pleated cote or bliaut doublet with full but short sleeves, revealing the tight-fitting chainse shirt (handsomely embroidered in the case of the wealthy). Instead of braies women of the time—those who could afford it—wore a long linen chainse trailing to the ground. According to the early thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, it was important to have a good tailor:
You should give your garment to someone who knows how to cut [taillier], who can place the stitches properly and make the sleeves fit. Shoes and boots you should have fresh and new, and see that they fit so close that the low-class fellows will argue how you got into them—and how you will get out.8
Elegant women wore clothes of brilliant hue—possibly a purple mantle fastened by a gold pin at the breast.
To palliate the hardship of medieval life, for rich man or poor, music and verse were of the highest priority. The principal instrument of the visiting jongleur would be a viele—a flat-bottomed fiddle, slightly triangular, with three strings, tuned in fourths or fifths. The bow, concave, was a little awkward to handle. Then there was the gigue, a tenor viele and ancestor of the viola da gamba; it seems to have been set on the left knee, played like a cello. There were the rote, a zitherlike instrument with five strings; the mandore, a kind of mandolin, played on the lap; a monicorde ororganistrum, played by two people, a long guitar-shaped instrument with a single string; the horn, on which, with no valves, they could only blow fundamental notes; and, of course, a rustic form of cornemuse,bagpipe. Finally there was the organ—played by two men, with two to four men at the bellows.
The much-loved, heroic Chanson de Roland could take as long as five hours to perform. With his wide knowledge of Jerusalem, of Arabs and Babylonians, drawn from the Crusades, and his tales of heroes who would give up all for the Faith, the well-travelledjongleur was much sought-after. Though the chansons de geste, like “Roland” with their attachment to chivalry that was heroic to the point of suicide, were to lead France to defeat at Crécy in the next century, they kindled for the first time a patriotic feeling of intense love for la douce France— principally identified with the immediately surrounding Île de France.
Out of these chansons grew another form of literature of great importance, centred around women and dealing with courtly love. In this early development of feminism in France, the Crusades—where, because of lengthy absence by the lord, the “lady” gained more power— played a significant role. Here Eleanor of Aquitaine was perhaps a role-model, as well as importing to rude Paris the “courtly” manners of the south. “Great ladies,” says André Maurois, “had a lover when at the same time they had a husband; here were the beginnings of a long tradition.”9 Whereas in the more northerly clime of England the courtly lover of Malory and the Round Table tended to platonic adoration from afar, the Parisian woman already expected—and received—more earthy devotion. Nevertheless, as Maurois points out, such chansons and poems like the Roman de la Rose contribute to a “discipline of customs and manners which was a great step forward to civilisation.” With it came the ascendant influence of the city woman, and hence the importance attached to love—as well as its close concomitant, satire.
BUT AT THE FEAST the spectre was never absent—even before the horrendous Black Death which wiped out a third of the population of France in the fourteenth century. Infant mortality was inordinate; if a man survived childhood, he could expect to live into his thirties; if he survived his thirties, the late fifties was the best he could expect. (Women such as Eleanor and Héloïse were notable exceptions.) If he reached a height of 5 foot 10 inches he would be considered a giant. Apart from war, apoplexy and heart problems like angina carried off most; the Paris drains helped with an occasional epidemic of cholera. Good teeth and sweet breath were greatly prized, but extremely rare; right up to and beyond Napoleonic times a healthy set of teeth seldom lasted into three decades.
Repairs to an ailing physique were, to say the least, primitive and rudimentary; any deep wound, such as made by an arrow, would be kept open with paraffin while (with good luck) the poison drained out. Otherwise, physicians attempted to cure illness by keeping the “humours” balanced, using herbal remedies such as wild spikenard, which gently brings forth, through the upper orifice, the disturbed content of the “father of the family” by which I mean stomach. Colewort and ragwort excite love, but the marvellous frigidity of psyllium seeds offers a remedy for that affliction. Myrtle too is a friend of temperance . . . 10
When available—which was infrequently—rough toilet soap would be used for the application of an enema; and there was always the physician’s centuries-old remedy of bleeding. By contemporary standards, Paris hospitals—in the shape of the Hôtel Dieu (founded in AD 660, next to Notre-Dame, as a hospital for the poor, and open to all regardless of sex, race, creed, age or nationality)—had the remarkably low mortality rate of only one in five patients, even though at times it housed up to six in a bed.
When the Reaper called, the corpse would be handed over to a religious order and sewn up in a deerskin. That of a prominent person, lay or clerical, would be laid to rest in a stone sarcophagus sealed with lead. There was no embalming; after a few years, bones would be lifted out of a grave and stacked with others in an ossuary, making further use of limited space.
IN 1216, Philippe-Auguste’s old foe across the Channel, the hapless John “Lackland,” died and was replaced by a child-king, Henry III. Philippe-Auguste’s heir, Prince Louis, had already been elected king by a junta of disaffected English barons. Now, however, a new wave of national resurgence carried the demoralised English with it, and Louis was swept out of the country after a crushing naval defeat off Calais in August 1217, in a first display of British ascendancy at sea. Philippe-Auguste and his son now turned their eyes towards south-west France, where the last years of his reign were marred by a campaign of appalling savagery against fellow Christians: the “Albigensian Crusade.” The actual heresy, labelled Manichaeism, of the unfortunate Albigensians, or “Cathars,” was obscured by the propaganda of Pope Innocent III: they were charged with enormous outrages such as institutionalised sodomy. Over the distance of time the religious differences seem little greater than those of contemporary Northern Ireland may appear to future historians, but the tolerance that had enveloped Abelard’s twelfth century was fast evaporating. Whole areas of Languedoc were laid waste by the ruthless Simon de Montfort in an orgy of “ethnic cleansing.” Whipped on by the papal legate, Arnaud Amalric, with the alleged exhortation of “Kill them all. God will recognise his own,” the brutal massacre of the inhabitants of Béziers, where 7000 men, women and children were herded into the Église de la Madeleine alone and slaughtered, is remembered to this day. The war in Languedoc was to drag on wretchedly for decades.
In September 1222, at one of the lowest points of the Albigensian affair, Philippe-Auguste went down with a fever, which he could not shake off. In July 1223, heading for a conference in Paris to discuss the latest papal agenda for a crusade, his illness worsened. On the 11th he was duly bled; the following day he insisted that he was to die in Paris. He was never to reach it, but passed on a request to his heir to “offer justice to his people, and above all to protect the poor and humble from the insolence of the proud [orgueilleux].”11 With Philippe-Auguste’s death France mourned a great ruler, the virtual founder of the nation.
LOUIS VIII, nicknamed “the Lion” (1223–26), kept on his father’s ministers, like Guérin the hero of Bouvines, and maintained all his policies; thus Louis the Lion’s short reign was but a continuation of Philippe’s. At his death—the year before Genghis Khan’s—his son, Louis IX (1226–70), was only twelve years old. So authority remained vested in his mother, Blanche of Castile, the regent.
Louis IX—Saint Louis, as he was canonised in 1297—was to consolidate much of the work of Philippe-Auguste. He took over the reins aged twenty-one, and for seven centuries God-fearing French mothers have held him up to their children as an example, the model king who, in the words of Maurice Druon, “was so careful to say his prayers, the good son who, even when he came of age and became glorious and all powerful, invited his mother to preside over his councils and made her sit beside him to receive ambassadors.”12
In fact, Louis seems to have been a strange, complex man, terrified by his dominant mother, Blanche. Her threats of the Devil drove him into living by day in a hair-shirt—a garment he would hand round to his family and friends as the best possible present he could give them. At night, he would perform fifty genuflections, reciting as many Ave Marias before going to bed. His passion was for crusading—the hobby of the age for the remission of sins and acquisition of limitless loot—but he also brought to the Capetian dynasty a morality which would, alas, die with him.
In geopolitical terms, he routed Henry III’s English at Saintes in 1242, the unfortunate Albigensians were finished off in 1244, and Languedoc became assimilated into France. Through his marriage in 1234 to Margaret of Provence, France acquired a claim to one of the richest and largest of his neighbours to the south, and by the Treaty of Paris of 1259 Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou were attached definitively to the French crown. These gains bestowed on Louis considerable prestige throughout Europe.
Louis was very tall, thin and finely chiselled, his figure described as being “bowed by fasting and mortification.” He wore the humblest of apparels—but white peacock feathers in his hat. Some of Saint Louis’ earthy contemporaries were not impressed by his excessive piety—which extended to washing the feet of his nobles, and which seemed inappropriate to a king—and on occasion they jeered at him as being a “king of priests” rather than of France. Inflexible in his beliefs, he installed the Inquisition in France, with all the misery which that was to bring. He loved God and France in the abstract, but not Frenchmen in the particular. He was chillingly formal, never addressing anyone as tu—which is said to have contributed to the increased use of the formal address, vous, in French society down the years. Though remote and harsh with his entourage, he abhorred the spilling of blood; yet was proud of slaughtering infidels on a crusade. His reactions were unpredictable, and often irrational; it was one of his dreams to convert Islam to Christianity.
In 1248, in thanksgiving for recovery from a serious illness, Louis embarked on the Seventh Crusade—against the wishes of the Pope and the judgement of his counsellors. In a remarkable display of the solidity now of the French monarchy, he also took with him Queen Margaret and two of his brothers, leaving his mother, Blanche of Castile, once more in charge. The aim of the Crusade this time was to liberate the Holy Land from the Sultan of Egypt, but—as usual—things went wrong and by 1250 Louis, stricken with typhus, was a prisoner of the Sultan at El Mansura after a massacre of his forces. While Louis was a prisoner, Margaret gave birth to a son. Before the delivery, she made an octogenarian attendant swear that, if the Saracens arrived, he would behead her rather than let her fall into their hands; the old man replied, “Madam, I was intending to!” 13 The Queen was saved by the Genoese, but at a considerable financial cost. With great difficulty the King raised his own heavy ransom with recourse to the affluent Knights Templar. At first, though, they refused; one of the King’s first acts on being freed was to impose public penance on them. He then opened negotiations with the Muslims for the delivery of Jerusalem—which might well have succeeded, but for news of the death of his mother.
Louis hastened home to find a sea of internal troubles arisen in his absence, including a bizarre peasant revolt known as the Pastoureaux. Their origins obscure, they wandered in bedraggled bands from village to village in the northern provinces, finally descending on Paris as a horde incremented by thieves, vagabonds, gypsies and tarts. Estimated at 60,000 strong, they killed several priests and indulged in various acts of apostasy. Eventually their assaults extended to the propertied nobility—and the Jews. On the King’s return, the Pastoureaux were mercilessly hunted down as far away as Aigues Mortes, at the mouth of the Rhône—and left behind no legacy.
Reinstated in Paris, Louis was the first to realise that the complex organism that his grandfather had created could not be administered like private family property. Under him, the various organs of state began to specialise with the Grand Conseil, in charge of political matters, the Chambre des Comptes and the Parlement. (The last filled the role of the supreme court of appeal in the kingdom.) Saint Louis outlawed private wars, such as hitherto had plagued the poor, respecting feudal legitimacy but attacking its abuses, pitying the poor and the weak—at least in principle. To his heir, he instructed: “If a poor man has a quarrel with a rich man, support the poor rather than the rich—at least until the truth can be ascertained.”14
He created the National Archives (the first records of which had been destroyed at the lost battle of Fréteval), in which were preserved all royal acts, treaties, title deeds and judgements. It also first housed the priceless collection of illuminated manuscripts, such as those of Denis the Areopagite, which show in marvellous detail life in medieval Paris, eventually to find their way into the Bibliothèque Nationale. Louis also founded Paris’ first hospital for the blind, the Vingt-Quinze, which could offer shelter to 300 people, and a home for prostitutes—the Filles-Dieu. He organised for food to be dispatched to any part of the country that was famine-stricken. The burden of taxation was alleviated (perhaps one good reason for Louis’ beatification), a new middle class came into being in Paris and, by the end of his reign, the country as a whole had never known such material prosperity.
In 1259, Louis signed a conclusive peace, the Treaty of Paris, with Henry III, designed to bring to a definitive end the age-old struggle with England. National-minded Frenchmen found it hard to comprehend why Louis gave so much away to the defeated, in the shape of territories like Gascony and Guienne in the south-west. “For we have two sisters to wife,” he explained, “and our children are first cousins, wherefore it is surely fitting that peace be between us.” By this largesse he reckoned that Henry would “entre en mon hommage.” It did not, in retrospect, prevent the (second) Hundred Years’ War; nevertheless, by standards of the day, it was an act of astonishing, modern-minded moderation, and gave the King a reputation as a mediator to whom all Europe would resort in his lifetime—including even Henry III when in dispute with his own barons. “Never had a united Christendom come closer to realisation,” comments André Maurois.
THE PIETY OF SAINT LOUIS, rigidly inflexible as it was, was to bequeath to France one of its greatest jewels, the Île de la Cité’s Sainte-Chapelle (without the Crusades and all their attendant evils and brutality it would almost certainly never have been built). In 1239, Louis acquired the purported “Crown of Thorns” from the Emperor of Constantinople (Baudouin II). To house it, three years later Louis began building the Sainte-Chapelle, completed in the record time of six years.
Against the counsel of the Pope and his own family, in the high summer of 1270, Louis rashly set off from Aigues Mortes on a new crusade, the eighth. In Tunisia, his army was decimated by sun and plague at Carthage, and Louis, aged only fifty-six, succumbed—his arms crossed like a true crusader. There was widespread mourning across France. For the next two centuries the landed gentry clamoured for a return to “the good customs of Saint Louis.” Louis’ rule of moral standards was to lead the kingdom definitively towards an absolute monarchy, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses, a form of rule that would remain alien to the English. In his memory, the poets wrote—with perhaps just a hint of ambivalence:
Good King Louis, you held the land under yoke
To the profit of barons and of the little folk . . .
To whom may poor men cry now in their woe
Since the good king is dead who loved them so?15
By the end of his reign, medieval France had created an image for herself which carried inestimable weight in the Christian world, and a civilisation that was identifiably her own.
LOUIS’ HEIR, Philippe III—otherwise known as “the Bold”—ruled by contrast for only fifteen years (1270–85). He spent most of his years away from the capital, campaigning—notably in the disastrous war with Aragon. When at home, he suffered from succeeding under the vast shadow of his father, and proved a spiritless ruler, who left little imprint. His greatest, dynastic, success was to marry his second son to Joan of Navarre, the independent kingdom down on the Pyrenees. It was Navarre which, several centuries later, was to provide France with perhaps the greatest of all her kings—Henri IV. Philippe’s first son died, possibly of poisoning; so, in 1285, his second son succeeded him, as Philippe IV.
MYSTERY AND CONTROVERSY surround Philippe IV (1285–1314), except that he was swiftly to prove one of France’s most unpleasant, indeed disastrous kings. His reign and its catastrophic consequences provided the rich tissue for a great series of novels evocative of Shakespeare’s history plays, Les Rois Maudits, by Maurice Druon. Under Philippe a new depth of savagery manifested itself in public life, a dark retreat from the enlightenment of Suger and Philippe-Auguste, his great-great-grandfather. Called “le Bel” on account of his blond, fair, but icy good looks, few reliable personal descriptions of Philippe IV survive.16 Guillaume de Nogaret, one of his chief counsellors, who owed both his swift ascent and his miserable demise to Philippe, obsequiously describes him as having been:
Before, during and after his marriage, chaste, humble, modest of countenance and of speech, never put in a rage; he hated no one; he envied no one; he loved the whole world. Full of grace and charity, pious, merciful . . . fair of face and charming in aspect, agreeable to all, even to his enemies when they are in his presence, God granted manifest miracles to the sick through the medium of his hands.17
This may be treated with appropriate scepticism—except perhaps for the piety; like his saintly grandfather, Philippe wore a hair-shirt much of his life. But it was a remorseless kind of piety, and under Philippe le Bel—fair of face, but most unfair by character—the Inquisition that Saint Louis had introduced into France was exploited to horrifying ends. Other, discreetly anonymous, contemporary sources describe Philippe as having been lazy, and blindly led by those bad counsellors who had gained his confidence. Perhaps more fittingly, he was also nicknamed the “Iron King.”
Philippe further cemented the fundamental institutions of France, and extended its territories, but all his revisions of the body politic only increased the power of the throne, heading France closer towards absolute monarchy and away from the democratic trends slowly taking root across the Channel. In Paris, in contrast to England where the Lords and the Commons were willing to sit together in legislation, the three Estates remained separate, making impossible any joint, national representation—a failing that would plague democracy in France right through to the revolution of 1789.
Systematically, Philippe applied himself to the destruction of all external, and internal, rivalry. To achieve all this he brought in hardfaced, wily lawyers from the provinces. The periodic “Consultations” held by him tended only to confirm acts and legislation already promulgated. A contemporary miniature of about 1322 portrays a saintly looking Philippe, clad from head to foot in a robe of fleur-de-lys, presiding over a Paris Parlement with bishops gossiping to his left, laity on the right; though, revealingly, it looks suspiciously as if one of the laity is handing into the King’s outstretched hand a severed head.
Following Philippe le Bel would come le déluge; the Capetian line ends, the Valois begins. With it would follow all the misery of the Hundred Years’ War as a direct consequence of his thirty-year reign. It all began with Philippe’s wildly extravagant plans, in 1298, to sumptuously rebuild the Palais de la Cité to be “the most beautiful that anyone in France ever saw.” It would house all the functions of administration, treasury and justice of the kingdom, with even the sinister vaults of the Conciergerie beneath being of great beauty.
In the Great Hall of the Palais, divided by two massive naves under whose columns statues of past kings surveyed the scene, his Parlements and Consultations would convene. Skins of slaughtered animals were hung from the ceiling, and extravagant meals served on a vast marble-topped table—which also sometimes served as a stage for morality plays. One of the biggest in the contemporary world, Philippe’s sombre chamber, with its Salle des Pas Perdus above, still survives today, close to his grandfather’s ethereal Sainte-Chapelle. Even closer was one the four great defensive towers which was known as Tour Bonbec, or “Blabbing Tower,” so called because it was there that torture loosened prisoners’ tongues.
PHILIPPE LE BEL was never to complete his awe-inspiring Palais-Royal—or enjoy it. Deservedly he became known as France’s most spendthrift king. France stumbled under the burden of Philippe’s taxes; whereas Philippe-Auguste had raised heavy taxes for its greater glory, Philippe le Bel despoiled it. He introduced rampant inflation by adulterating the currency, shamelessly reducing its weight in gold at the Mint—the first French king to do so. Private counterfeiters were subject to the hideous penalty of being boiled alive—but, as counterfeitersupreme, the King of course remained untouchable. Riots against inflation by the impoverished commerçants of Paris in 1307 were ruthlessly crushed, with twenty-eight offenders publicly hanged on the eve of Epiphany from elms at the four entries to the city. Such was the grip of the “Iron King” that there would be no wider revolt.
None of this was enough to stem the outflow from the royal exchequer. In succession he turned his eyes towards the money-lenders—the Lombards, who had settled from their native northern Italy and made themselves extremely wealthy (and, consequently, unpopular) not least in funding the Crown. He also targeted the Jews. After their expulsion by Philippe-Auguste, Jewish communities had gradually trickled back to re-establish themselves in France, flourishing particularly in the south. Saint Louis hated the Jews as “enemies of Christ” and had talked of a new pogrom, but had done nothing about it.13
In 1288, three years after Philippe IV’s accession, thirteen Jews of both sexes were burned at the stake in Troyes—a foretaste of what was to follow. Beginning in the summer of 1306, all Jews were condemned as usurers (though, like other Christian monarchs, Philippe had been a principal beneficiary of their usury). Declared the King: “Every Jew must leave my land, taking none of his possessions with him; or, let him choose a new god for himself, and we will become One People.”18 By 1322, there were virtually no Jews left in France. As one contemporary Christian novelist, Geoffroi, admitted, the Jewish exodus greatly impoverished the country at large, while their wealth escaped the clutches of the King.
PHILIPPE LE BEL now turned his avaricious gaze in a direction where none of his forebears had dared: the vast funds of papal wealth. Since 1294, the fiercely ambitious Pope Boniface VIII had pursued a policy of worldly intervention in the affairs of states. In his view, every human being was subject to the Pope. For the centenary of 1300, Boniface threw a gigantic party, drawing some two million pilgrims to Italy. Those from Flanders flattered him by declaring him to be the “universal judge of matters spiritual and temporal” and “heir to the rights on earth of Christ.” Boniface appeared clad in the insignia of the Roman Empire, and exclaiming, “I am Caesar!”
In fact, he was heralding a century of near catastrophic turmoil for the Papacy. Boniface’s ambitions brought him at once into conflict with Philippe who, ignoring the financial crisis, nourished grandiose schemes for a new Christian empire stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean (run from Paris) into which the papal state would be assimilated. Philippe undermined the Pope by imposing his own tax on the clergy. Boniface riposted by preparing a bull excommunicating Philippe, a formidable document that could have resulted in the complete dismemberment of France.
Before Boniface’s Unum Sanctum bull, the ultimate blow in his propaganda war against Philippe, could be applied, French forces invaded the papal palace at Anagni in 1303. They mobbed the pontiff in a scene of unprecedented violence with a view to forcing his abdication. Boniface declared he would rather die: “Here is my neck, here is my head!” But he never recovered, dying a month later. All Europe was shocked by this affront; Dante, though he hated Boniface, regarded it as a recrucifixion of Christ.
Confronted simultaneously with serious military defeat at Courtrai in Flanders at the hands of Edward I, “the Iron King” refused to back down. He banned the export of all currency to the Vatican, which drained its resources, leading to a battle of attrition that was to last the best part of two decades. It was a battle he was to win. Boniface’s elderly successor, Benedict XI, survived only nine months; poison in a dish of fresh figs was suggested. There now followed one of the most grotesque and comic—if it were not so humiliating—episodes in all the history of the Popes. It came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Popes, at Avignon. For eleven months the Conclave sat in deadlock, divided between pro- and anti-French factions and constantly harassed by Philippe. Finally, a split in the anti-French front enabled Philippe to triumph with the election of Bernard le Got, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, as Clement V. Trained as a lawyer, not even a cardinal, Clement was a shameless nepotist who made cardinals of five members of his family, and was easily manipulated by Philippe. Using the chaos in Italy as an excuse, he agreed to be crowned in Lyons and to settle in the bishop’s palace in Avignon, transforming it into the magnificent Popes’ Palace and beginning the seventy-year exile, presaging the Great Schism, that was an unmitigated disaster for the Church. Never again was the Papacy to know the power of an Innocent III, or a Boniface, and a French king was the cause.
THE ELECTION of a malleable French pontiff opened the door to Philippe’s most fateful act—the dissolution of the Knights Templar. Here Philippe found his ultimate hope of solvency. In Paris the Knights Templar resided in the Temple, a vast donjon flanked by four towers just outside the city walls.19 The order had been founded after the First Crusade under the edict of Louis the Young, with the noble function of defending the Holy Land as “poor chevaliers of Christ.” They and their rival military order, the Hospitallers, left magnificent castles across the Levant, and became recognised all over Europe by their robes of white with a red cross on the front. In 1128, the Templars had acquired a rule, supposedly dictated by the ascetic Saint Bernard himself, of dedicated austerity as monk-soldiers. But over the next two centuries loot derived from the Crusades, coupled with skilful husbandry, had enabled the Templars to amass immense riches—to become almost a sovereign power in their own right.
During the thirteenth century, they had become de facto bankers to the Capetian crown (Philippe-Auguste actually deposited his Treasury in the Temple), but Philippe remembered how they had incurred Saint Louis’ displeasure when they had refused to raise funds to ransom him from Egypt. Now they lived in a splendour rivalling that of the Palais-Royal. The Templars’ reputation for avidity and for the simpler vices of the flesh was widespread. (For centuries after their demise the expression “Boire comme un templier” was common currency in France, while the old German wordTempelhaus became synonymous with a house of ill repute.) Efforts at reform had been made, but the secrecy with which the Templars surrounded their activities was their worst enemy. Exploiting their unpopularity among the public, in October 1307, Philippe declared war on the Templars, based on trumped-up charges of heresy, necromancy and sodomy—like the Albigensian “Cathars” before them. In the preamble to his proclamation, Philippe spoke of “a bitter thing, a deplorable thing, a thing terrible to think about, terrible to hear, detestable, execrable, abominable, inhuman, which had already echoed in our ears, not without making us shudder with a violent horror. An immense pain developed in us. . . .”20 The Templars were accused of “sacrificing to idols, . . . infecting the purity of the air” and of “torturing Christ a second time.”
With a nod from an acquiescent Pope Clement, the Inquisition (which Saint Louis in his excess of piety had inflicted on France) now moved swiftly. In a well-orchestrated night-time raid, the Templars were arrested and their property declared forfeit. One after the other they appeared before inquisitors, counsellors of the King, and torturers, in the cellars of their own fortress and in the presence of a vast crowd of eager spectators. The tortures were so appalling that one Templar saw twenty-five frères die “under the question.” Public burning at the stake, the modern form of pre-Christian human sacrifice from which the early Church had freed itself, was now the favoured ritual of the Inquisition. In one deplorable episode, 138 Templars were burned at the stake. As the flames rose, most of them retracted the “confessions” they had made under torture. “They suffered with a fortitude,” wrote a contemporary chronicler, “that put their souls in great peril of damnation, for it induced ignorant people to consider them innocent.”21
By 1314, the Grand-Master of the order himself, Jacques de Molay, refusing to answer charges, had been tortured and in prison for seven years, together with his chief assistant, Geoffroy de Charnay. In March they were brought out on to the parvis Notre-Dame to hear their sentence, anticipating life imprisonment, which had been promised them several times. But Pope Clement had abandoned them. The Templar leaders vigorously declared their innocence, protesting: “the Order is pure; it is saintly; the accusations are absurd, the confessions lie. . . .”22 With the mob stirring against them, Philippe, enraged at their protestations of innocence, ordered them to be immolated that same evening on a special scaffold set up on the Île des Juifs. As the flames licked around him, Jacques de Molay is reputed to have uttered a terrible curse:
Pope Clement, iniquitous judge and cruel executioner, I adjure you to appear in forty days’ time before God’s tribunal. And you, King of France, will not live to see the end of this year, and Heaven’s retribution will strike down your accomplices and destroy your posterity.
Within forty days, Pope Clement V fell ill of an agonisingly painful disease and died on 20 April; Chancellor de Nogaret died of mysterious causes a short while later; Philippe le Bel died after a hunting accident that same year, on 29 November, aged only forty-six. Over the next few years, his three sons would equally be struck down, bringing to an end the Capetian dynasty.
The “Iron King” died a well-hated man; it may well be that Louis IX would have obtained the same effects without causing the same degree of suffering.
Under Philippe, Paris had become a harsh place of brutal punishments. Human ingenuity had introduced refinements virtually unknown in the twelfth century and the days of Philippe-Auguste, of which burning at the stake was by no means the most unpleasant. There were the rack and the wheel, hanging-and-drawing, quartering, boiling alive, and the gibbet at Montfaucon at the entrance of Paris, where malefactors died by slow strangulation, their swinging bodies left to rot as a warning to passers-by.
THAT SAME ANNUS HORRIBILIS of 1314, before Philippe le Bel reaped his just rewards, the royal family was rocked by a searing scandal, followed by retribution that indicated just how far since the days of Philippe-Auguste public life and social mores had become debased, the worst appetites for cruelty nourished.
On the left bank, just opposite the Louvre, stood the medieval Hôtel de Nesle. Originally a defence tower erected by the provost of Paris under Philippe-Auguste, it had grown to be a sumptuous palace after Philippe le Bel converted it into apartments for his sons and their families—not unlike present-day Kensington Palace. The three princes, all future kings as a consequence of the curse that Philippe brought down on the family—Louis X (“the Quarrelsome”), Philippe V (“the Tall”) and Charles IV (“the Simple”)—lived there with their wives, respectively Marguerite (a granddaughter of Saint Louis on her mother’s side), and her cousins Jeanne and Blanche. Two were in their twenties, Blanche was a mere eighteen. The course of history following the Iron King’s death proved their princes to be somewhat sub-standard, while the three wives were normal lustyParisiennes. Jeanne was later proclaimed innocent, but Marguerite and Blanche used the old medieval tower as a place of assignation for their lovers, two dashing brothers, Philippe and Gautier d’Aulnay, who were their gentlemen-in-waiting. The two courtiers would sneak into the tower by dark of night, via a boat landing them up the Seine on the Quai de Conti. Unfortunately for the adulterous princesses, they were betrayed by their sister-in-law, Isabella—the bitter and frustrated wife of Edward II of England, a dedicated homosexual. One day she noticed the courtier-lovers carrying two purses that she had given the princesses as gifts. Spies were set to check on their nocturnal movements, then—well named the “She-Wolf of France”—she grassed on them. (The “She-Wolf of France” was also to provide one of the prime causes for the Hundred Years’ War, in consequence of the territorial claims to France which she passed on to her son, Edward III—the marriage being yet another misjudgement to be laid at the door of her father, Philippe.)
It was an unimaginable scandal—a granddaughter of Saint Louis, no less! Fearful of bastardy introducing a taint into the Capetian line (which, through the Templars’ curse was to be doomed anyway), the King was merciless. All five were arrested, and Princesses Marguerite and Blanche found guilty of adultery. Put to hideous torture, the d’Aulnays admitted that their liaisons had been going on for three years. They were skinned alive in front of an enthusiastic crowd, castrated and then disembowelled, decapitated and their trunks hung by the armpits on a gibbet to be devoured by birds of prey. The crowd cheered itself hoarse as the bourreau held aloft the severed genitals of the lovers. All who had abetted the lovers were drowned or secretly dispatched. Of the guilty princesses, Marguerite and Blanche were forced to witness the execution of their lovers. Their heads shaven like collabos after the Liberation of 1944, they were then condemned to solitary confinement for many months in miserable, icy conditions in Richard Coeur de Lion’s old fortress of Château Gaillard. When Louis X decided he wanted to remarry, rather than spend time seeking an annulment, he had Marguerite suffocated between two mattresses. Blanche, divorced by her husband, was permitted to take the veil in the convent of Maubuisson, where she lived until her death in 1326. Mysteriously, while in Château Gaillard—incorrigible to the end—she gave birth to a child, whether by her husband, Charles, or a gaoler was never clear.
The innocent Jeanne, who remained highly suspect of participating in the tower orgies, was spirited out of Paris until the scandal died down, then reunited to a forgiving husband, King Philippe V. Rather insensitively, it would seem, he gave her the Hôtel de Nesle as her residence, where—for all the sinister ghosts that must have haunted it—she lived for ten years, seven of them as a merry widow, until she died there in 1329. Legends continued to surround the tower and its orgies, to which writers through the ages from François Villon (Ballade des dames du temps jadis, 1461) to Pierre Brantôme in the sixteenth century to Dumas père as late as 1832 would add their own contributions. The stories persisted that Jeanne, watching from her window in the 90-foot tower, would send for likely passing students and, having exhausted their virility, would have them tied in sacks and thrown from the top of the tower to drown in the Seine below. Central to the theme was Jean Buridan (the philosopher whose famous ass, unable to choose between water on one side and hay on the other, died of malnutrition).14 After three days of ravenous sex, so the story goes, the wicked Queen had Buridan bundled off from the top of the tower, like his predecessors. But the wily professor had arranged with his loyal students to have a barge filled with hay moored underneath, while they dropped a large stone in the water to sound like a corpse.
Buridan survived to become an illustrious rector of the Sorbonne, outliving Queen Jeanne by thirty years; while the names of the three princesses of the Hôtel de Nesle remained almost as well known to Parisian étudiants through the ages as Héloïse and Abelard. After Jeanne’s death, the ill-starred palace was sold to the university for the benefit of the students whom, allegedly, she had been so disposed towards, and good at disposing of. In later years, the dissolute Italian friend of François I, Benvenuto Cellini, appropriately used it as his Paris residence. François’ son, Henri II, sold it to make way for the Mint. Eventually Mazarin acquired the site, ironically, for Richelieu’s erudite Institut de France and the Académie Française itself.
And so the new century began, opening for France on a setting as brutal and ominously menacing as the previous one, under Philippe-Auguste, had begun brightly and full of hope. At the time of Philippe le Bel, France was the most populous and powerful country in Europe, counting 22 million to England’s 2 million, while Paris—now bulging out beyond Philippe-Auguste’s city wall—numbered 300,000 to London’s 40,000. After the famines, wars, plague and weakness at the top which were to succeed him, it would take four centuries for France to recover that level of population. Meanwhile, as the fruits of the reigns of Philippe-Auguste and Saint Louis were scattered to the winds, across the Channel in the domain of her natural rival, under Edward III’s strong rule and fifty years of domestic peace, England was being dragged out of the Middle Ages. There chivalry and literature, Chaucer and Wycliffe, were being encouraged; French was finally being replaced by English as the language of government, and Parliament consolidated as the only maker of laws. France’s natural enemy was vigorous, and expansive. The road was leading towards the Hundred Years’ War—on the worst of terms for France. 23