Undiscouraged by the equivocal result in Barbary, the French King and Council moved without pause to a more formidable venture: ending the schism by force of arms. The plan for a march on Rome to oust Pope Boniface and install Pope Clement was called the Voie de Fait, or Way of the Deed—that is, of force—as opposed to the Way of Cession, or voluntary mutual abdication of the popes, as advocated by the University. To march through Italy and take Rome by force was no less an undertaking than the invasion of England—so recently proved beyond French powers—but the policy-makers showed no hesitation. The Council took the decision at the end of November within a few days of Coucy’s and Bourbon’s return from Tunisia.
The plan was presented to the King as a prelude to crusade. He could not in good conscience, his ministers told him, take the cross against the Turks until the Church was reunited. “We can envision nothing finer nor more reasonable for you than to go to Rome with the power of men-at-arms and destroy this anti-pope Boniface.… Nothing could better occupy you. We may hope that this anti-pope and his cardinals, when they realize that you are coming against them with a strong army, will surrender to your mercy.” After that grand consummation, the glowing prospect of continuing even to Jerusalem would be at hand.
When could he start? asked the King, immediately afire. He had been brought up under the ardent influence of Mézières, who had filled the court with his propaganda of crusade as France’s destiny and the saving of society. Charles’s advisers told him the campaign could begin at once, and plans were immediately set in motion. All the royal house were to be included; even the Duke of Brittany was invited because “they did not think it prudent to leave him behind.” He predicted unpleasantly that the enterprise would “end in words.”
A huge force of 12,000 lances was agreed upon, with departure set four months hence in March 1391 from a rendezvous at Lyon. The King and his brother were to lead 4,000 lances; Burgundy, Berry, and the Constable each 2,000; Bourbon and Coucy each 1,000; all to receive three months’ pay in advance. The taxes required to raise such an army and maintain it in the field seem to have been lightly considered; financing the venture was as unrealistic as the Way of Force itself. When the Council met to authorize the rates, the usual omen in the form of a fearful storm made them hesitate. Was it God’s signal against imposing new burdens on an already overburdened people?
The voice of the University spoke against the Voie de Fait more explicitly than lightning and thunder. In a stupendous twelve-hour sermon preached before the King and court on January 6, 1391, Jean Gerson, a young scholar already famed as a preacher, expressed the opposition. Twenty-seven years old and two years short of his doctorate in theology, Gerson was a protégé of the Chancellor Pierre d’Ailly, whom he was soon to succeed at the age of 31. As the struggle over the schism intensified, he was to become the foremost advocate of the supremacy of a Church Council over the Pope, and the most memorable French theologian of his age.
Gerson was a man proof against classification or generalization. A mystic in faith, he was rational in practice. As a lover of the golden mean, he distrusted the devotional excesses of other mystics and visionaries. As a churchman, he was both conformist and non-conformist. Humane in ideas, he harshly opposed the early French humanists in the great debate over the Roman de la Rose. Despite his dislike of visionaries, especially female, he was to be, in the last year of his life, one of only two theologians willing to guarantee the authenticity of the voices of Joan of Arc. This was not because he was what moderns would call a liberal, but because he understood the intensity of her religious faith. He was a compendium and a reflector of the ideas and intellectual influences of his age.
In earlier times he would have been a monk, but in the last hundred years the university had taken over from the monastery the main work of transmitting the knowledge of the past and pursuing it in the present. Entering the University of Paris at fourteen, Gerson had found theology and philosophy petrified in the arid syllogisms of the scholastics. In the great age of Aquinas, scholasticism had undertaken to answer all questions of faith by reason and logic, but reason had proved incapable of explaining God and the universe, and the effort faded, leaving only a hard shell of argument by logic, practiced, as Petrarch said in disgust, by “hoary-headed children.” When theybegin to “spew forth syllogisms,” he advised taking flight. Gerson, like others of his troubled time, craved something more meaningful for the soul and found the alternative in mystic faith and direct communion with God.
He believed that society could be regenerated only through a renewal and deepening of faith in which “vain curiosity” had no place. Knowledge of God, he wrote, “is better acquired by penitent feeling than by intellectual investigation.” He took the same view of the supernatural, affirming the existence of demons and reproving those who scoffed for lack of faith and the “infection of reason.” Yet Gerson could not keep reason from breaking in. He scorned magic and astrologers’ superstitions, and recommended careful examination of visions before giving them credence.
He disapproved of the Bible in the vernacular, yet, as a poet, teacher, and orator, he wrote many of his sermons and treatises in French so as to convey his meaning to simple minds and youthful understanding. Medieval educators in general spent much time composing sermons for children. Gerson in particular was concerned with their development, and uncommon in seeing them as persons distinct from adults. In a curriculum for Church schools, he urged the necessity of keeping a vigil lamp lit in the youngest children’s dormitory to serve as a symbol of faith and to give light when “natural necessity” required their rising during the night. Reformation of the Church, he warned, must begin with the right teaching of children, and reform of the colleges begin with reform of elementary schools.
He advised confessors to arouse a sense of guilt in children with regard to their sexual habits so that they might recognize the need for penitence. Masturbation, even without ejaculation, was a sin that “takes away a child’s virginity even more than if at the same age he had gone with a woman.” The absence of a sense of guilt about it in children was a situation that must be changed. They must not hear coarse conversation or be allowed to kiss and fondle each other nor sleep in the same bed with the opposite sex, nor with adults even of the same sex. Gerson had six sisters, all of whom chose to remain unmarried in holy virginity. Some powerful family influence was surely at work here from which this strong personality emerged.
Sex was one factor in Gerson’s violent rejection of Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose. Meung’s celebration of carnal love, his satire of Chastity, his enthronement of Reason, his free-thinking skepticism, his anti-clerical bias were all anathema to Gerson. When Christine de Pisan voiced her attack on Jean de Meung in 1399 in her Epistle to the God of Love, Gerson supported it in a sermon with all the passion of the book-burner. He denounced the Roman de la Rose as pernicious and immoral: it degraded women and made vice attractive. If he had the only copy in existence, he said, and it were worth 1,000 livres, he would not hesitate to consign it to the flames. “Into the fire, good people, into the fire!”
Admirers of Meung sprang to his defense in open letters to Christine and Gerson. The defenders, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier and Pierre Col, were clerics and scholars in the secretarial service of the crown. Together with like-minded academics, they were among those who had chosen another path than Gerson in reaction to the dusty answers of the scholastics. With their faith in human reason and recognition of natural instincts they were acknowledging the lay spirit. In that sense they were humanists, although not concerned with the classical researches of the humanist movement in Florence. What they admired in Meung was his free-ranging thought and bold attack on standard formulas. Among certain learned and enlightened men, Jean de Montreuil asserted, appreciation of the Roman de la Rose was such that they would rather do without their shirts than this book. “The more I study the gravity of the mysteries and the mystery of the gravity of this profound and famous work, the more I am astonished at your disapproval.”
While fervent, this was not very specific. Pierre Col was more courageous, defending the sensuality that so offended Gerson. He asserted that the Song of Solomon celebrated love for the daughter of Pharaoh, not for the Church; that the female vulva represented by the Rose was held to be sacred, according to the Gospel of St. Luke; and that Gerson himself would one day fall in love, as had happened to other theologians.
The debate expanded. Christine replied with Le Dit de la Rose and Gerson with a magisterial essay, Tractatus Contra Romantium de Rosa in which allegorical figures carry their complaints against Jean de Meung before the “sacred court of Christianity” and he is appropriately condemned. Although Gerson had the last word in the controversy, he could not destroy the attraction of the book. It continued to be widely read into the 16th century, surviving even a pious attempt to “moralize” its images, in which the Rose was transformed into an allegory for Jesus.
While Gerson remained within the establishment, the search for faith was drawing others outside in movements away from institutional religion. People were seeking in lay communion a substitute for rituals grown routine and corrupt. Faith was all the more needed when the way seemed lost in a dark wood of alarms and confusions.
The damage done by the schism had deepened. Both the popes were absorbed in extravagant display for the sake of prestige and the search for more and more money to support it. Pope Boniface in Rome took cuts from usury and sold benefices to the point of scandal, sometimes re-selling the same office to a higher bidder and dating the second appointment previous to the first. He sold the right to hold as many as ten or twelve benefices at a time. Clement VII extracted “voluntary” loans and subsidies and piled up ecclesiastical taxes until his bishops in 1392 refused to pay, and pinned their protest to the doors of the papal palace in Avignon. As a dependent of France, he made over tithes on the French clergy to the crown, and in the many disputes arising from this, he took the crown’s part against the clergy. No measures filled his need; he had to borrow from usurers and pawn the sacred treasures. At his death, it was said, the papal tiara itself was on pawn.
Within the Empire the effect of the schism was not greatly divisive because conditions were already so chaotic that they could not have been made much worse. Charles IV had taken the precaution before he died of having his eldest son, Wenceslas, crowned King of Bohemia and nominated Emperor ahead of time, but concord and unity did not come with the title. This was not surprising since Charles had apportioned rule of the imperial territories among Wenceslas’ two brothers, an uncle and a cousin. Their interests were often at odds, the rival houses of Wittelsbach and Hapsburg were hostile, the twenty-odd principalities were insubordinate, the towns, fighting to maintain their privileges, formed leagues against the nobles. Revenues adequate for the exercise of central government could not be collected out of conditions of anarchy, and the authority of the Emperor was too superficial to control the situation.
Wenceslas IV was eighteen when he acceded to the throne in 1378 shortly after accompanying his father on the memorable visit to Paris. Although trained in government by his father, well educated and literate in Latin, French, German, and Czech, he lacked the character to dominate his circumstances. Despite his initial efforts to work out a balance of forces, the incessant warring of groups and classes, of towns versus princes, lesser nobles against the greater, Germans against Czechs, leagues against leagues, created a network of dissension that defied sovereignty—and destroyed the sovereign.
A tragic, ruined figure, Wenceslas emerges from the chronicles a kind of Caliban, half clownish, half vicious, a composite of half-truths and legends reflecting the animosities of his various sets of enemies. Because his reign was the source of the Hussite revolt against the Church and of the rising Czech nationalism hostile to the Germans, Wenceslas suffered posthumously from both clerical and German chroniclers. The unfair advantage of the written word triumphs in the end. But even if exaggerated, the stories about Wenceslas are too much of a kind not to represent some body of truth.
Said by his partisans to be good-looking and well-mannered, he appears more generally as a “wild boar” who went on rampages at night with bad companions, burst into burghers’ houses to rape their wives, shut up his own wife in a whorehouse, roasted a cook who served him a burned meal. According to these versions, he was sired by a cobbler, was born ugly and deformed (causing the death of his mother in giving him birth), soiled the baptismal water at his christening, and stained the altar by sweating profusely at his coronation at the age of two—all omens, although probably ex post facto, of an unholy reign. He was happy only when hunting, spending months at a time in the woods and at hunting lodges to the neglect of government, preferring the company of grooms and hunting companions whom he ennobled, to the anger of the barons. His early efforts to uphold justice and achieve order left him frustrated, he only made enemies by favoring one faction over another, his errors of judgment compounded a sense of inadequacy, he became incapable of pursuing a policy with any consistency, fled from his problems, and found refuge from incapacity in hunting and heavy drinking.
While it was common in Germany for a man in any rank of society to drink himself under the table, Wenceslas became a confirmed alcoholic. He grew increasingly irritable and black-tempered and indolent as a sovereign, stayed in Prague to the neglect of the rest of the Empire, and succumbed to fits of savagery in which he was thought sometimes to have “lost command of his reason.” As if reflecting his master, one of the hounds that followed him everywhere was said to have attacked and killed his first wife, Joanna of Bavaria—although according to other sources she died of the plague and left a sorrowing husband too distressed—or possibly too drunk—to attend the funeral. Evidently not as repellent as he was later made out to be, he married a second Bavarian princess, reputedly very beautiful, who was said to have held him in great affection. Not so the Church, whose priests he pilloried, together with their concubines. His reign saw the notorious pogrom of 1389 when a priest leading a procession through the Jewish quarter of Prague on Easter Sunday was stoned by a Jewish child, causing the townspeople to turn out for the slaughter of 3,000 of the Jewish community. When the survivors sought justice from the King, Wenceslas declared that the Jews deserved their punishment, and fined the survivors, not the perpetrators.
His most famous conflict came with the Church and ended in the canonizing of his victim. Its cause lay in the usual struggle of temporal versus ecclesiastical authority. Enmity reached a peak in 1393 when the Archbishop of Prague ordered his Vicar-General, John of Pomuk, to confirm the election of an abbot chosen by the monks over the candidate preferred by the King. Wenceslas in a fury threw the Archbishop, the Vicar-General, and two other prelates into prison; then, after releasing the Archbishop, tortured the others to extract a confession of the hierarchy’s hostile designs. Maddened by their silence, the King himself reportedly seized a torch to apply to the victims’ feet. Frightened by what he had done, he then offered to spare their lives in return for their promise on oath not to tell of their torture. When John of Pomuk proved too broken and suffering to sign the oath, Wenceslas, in a compulsion to destroy the evidence, had him bound hand and foot and thrown from a bridge into the Moldau to drown. John of Pomuk was subsequently canonized as a martyr and made the patron saint of all bridges.
The King’s troubles mounted through the 1390s. He was drunk a great part of the time but not so incapacitated as to fail to aggrandize his Bohemian possessions at the expense of the great nobles. In consequence, he succeeded in uniting them in antagonism for long enough to enable them finally to depose him as Emperor in 1400, although he remained King of Bohemia.
Wenceslas’ difficulties were not merely personal or temperamental. They were an epitome of his century. He too was lost in the dark wood of his time. Like Jean II of France, he was born to a task of government too heavy for him in an age when too much was going wrong. Like government, the Church in his country was failing in its task and giving rise to the strongest movement for reform in Europe. Taking its doctrine from Wyclif and named for Jan Hus, who was to be burned as a heretic in 1415, the Hussite rising opened the way to the Reformation a hundred years later. It also finished off Wenceslas by inducing an apoplectic fit of which he died in 1419.
In France the feverish atmosphere showed itself in 1389 when an impassioned controversy over the immaculate conception of the Virgin caused Dominican monks to be accused, like the Jews in the plague, of poisoning the rivers if not the wells. It happened that a Dominican, Jean de Montson, had propagated the view that the Virgin was conceived in original sin. He was condemned by the University of Paris, which upheld the opposite, Franciscan, view of her immaculate conception. When Montson appealed to Pope Clement, d’Ailly and Gerson went to Avignon to demand official approval of their opinion. Clement was in a dilemma. Montson’s view was that of previous orthodoxy approved by Thomas Aquinas. If Clement denounced it, his own orthodoxy would be challenged by his rival in Rome. If he upheld it, he would be contradicting the University and arousing popular wrath in France. In the heat of this situation, angry threats pursued the Dominicans. Afraid for his life, Montson went over to Rome, leaving Clement free to declare for Immaculate Conception.
While devotion to the Virgin could still arouse such feeling, disbelief and irreverence were common at the end of the century, if the complaints of clerics and preachers reflect the true case. Scolding the laity was the cleric’s normal occupation, but now the volume was rising. Many folk “believe in naught higher than the roof of their house,” lamented the future saint Bernardino of Siena. His fellow monk Walsingham reported that certain barons of England believe “that there is no God, and deny the sacrament of the altar and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the death of a beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.” Alongside evidence of failing faith may be put the unfailing succession of wills and bequests to shrines, chapels, convents, hermits, and sums for prayers and for pilgrimages by proxy. Few who professed disbelief during life took chances when they neared the end.
The too frequent use of excommunication for failure to take communion or keep feast days, so deplored by Gerson and other reformers, was a measure of the falling off of religious observance. Churches were empty and mass meagerly attended, wrote Nicolas de Clamanges in his great tract De Ruina et Reparatione Ecclesiae (The Ruin and Reform of the Church). The young, according to him, rarely went to church except on feast days and then only to see the painted faces and décolleté gowns of the ladies and the spectacle of their headdresses, “immense towers with horns hung with pearls.” People kept vigils in church not with prayer but with lascivious songs and dances, while the priests shot dice as they watched. Gerson deplored the same laxity: men left church in the midst of services to have a drink and “when they hear the bell announcing consecration, they rush back into the church like bulls.” Card-playing, swearing, and blasphemy, he wrote, occurred during the most sacred festivals, and obscene pictures were hawked in church, corrupting the young. Pilgrimages were the occasion for debauchery, adultery, and profane pleasures.
Irreverence in many cases was the by-product of a religion so much a part of daily life that it was treated with over-familiarity, but the chorus of reproof at the end of the century indicated a growing element of disgust. “Men slept in indifference and closed their eyes to the scandal,” mourned the Monk of St. Denis. “It was a waste of time to talk of ways to reform the Church.”
Indifference, however, like a vacuum in nature, is not a natural condition of human affairs. A new devotional movement arose at this time in the small trading towns of northern Holland, between desolate marshland and moor near the mouth of the Rhine—as if only in a remote corner of strife-torn Europe could fresh piety find a place to sprout. Because the members lived communally, they came to be known by their neighbors as the Brethren of the Common Life, although they referred to themselves simply as “the devout.” Their purpose was to find direct union with God, and through preaching and good works create a devout lay society. They were not extremists like the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit but simply, as they said, “religious men trying to live in the world”—meaning the lay world as distinct from the cloistered.
Gerard Groote, founder of the movement, was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant of Deventer in Holland. Born in the same year as Coucy, he spent a dissolute youth while studying law and theology at the University of Paris, where he dabbled in magic and medicine and made love to women “in every green woods and upon every mountain.” Finding the scholars’ disputations “useless and full of discord,” he left the University to join the secular clergy, and after a career as a worldly pastor in Utrecht and Cologne, experienced a conversion. Giving away his property in Deventer to charity, he went forth to preach a gospel of dedication to God springing from an “inner kernel of devotion,” rather than from baptism and the sacraments.
His zeal, gift of rhetoric, and an impressive personality attracted listeners in crowds that often overflowed the churches. People came to listen from miles away. Wearing an old gray cloak and patched garments, and trundling with him a barrel of books from which to confute critics after a sermon, Groote urged love of neighbors as well as of God, elimination of vice, and obedience to Christ’s commandments. Lamenting the corruption and predicting the impending collapse of the Church, he preached to the clergy in Latin and to the laity in the vernacular. A disciple took down his words and another went ahead to post announcement of a coming sermon on the church doors of the next town. Enthusiasts met in groups to adopt his principles and gradually joined to practice them, living together in houses segregated by sex.
Association was voluntary, without the binding vow essential in the regular Orders, committing members to life apart from the world. Under the rules of Groote’s Devotia Moderna, members were to live in poverty and chastity but, instead of begging like the friars, were to earn their living by teaching children and by two occupations not controlled by the guilds, copying manuscripts and cooking. Work, Groote believed, “was wonderfully necessary to mankind in restoring the mind to purity,” although not so commerce: “Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.” By the time he died of an illness in 1384, his followers’ houses in Holland and the Rhineland numbered well over a hundred, with those for women being three times as many as those for men.
The communities’ emphasis on individual devotion and their very existence without a vow or an official rule were in themselves a criticism of the authorized Orders. Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels. Before he died, Groote was prohibited from preaching by the Bishop of Utrecht. When other churchmen afterward attempted to suppress the movement, his followers made vigorous and successful defense of their principles. At the Council of Constance in 1415, Gerson, though he disliked their doctrines, defended them against charges of heresy. Their communities survived because a climate of sympathy existed in their favor, and not only among the laity. Two years after Groote’s death, the Brethren established their first formal monastery in association with the Augustinian Order, though still without vows. Although the movement remained small and limited, it was soon to produce in The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, the most widely read religious book in Catholicism after the Bible.
In 1380, in the small town of Kempen, south of Deventer, a peasant’s son was born to an evidently literate mother who kept a dame’s school for the younger children of the town. At twelve, Thomas of Kempen—or a Kempis, as he came to be called—entered a school of the Common Life at Deventer, lived and studied with its disciples, and then joined an associated Augustinian monastery, where he remained for the rest of his 91 years. Loving books and quiet corners, he compiled the sayings and sermons of Groote and his disciples into a prolonged rhapsody on the theme that the world is delusion and the Kingdom of God is within; that the inner spiritual life is preparation for life everlasting. What he was saying over and over, through endless variations and admonitions, was that the life of the senses is without value, that the riches, pleasures, and powers of the world—the things most men want and rarely obtain—are no good to them anyway, but are only an obstacle on the way to eternal life; that the way to salvation lies in the abnegation of earthly desires and in the continual struggle against sin in order to make room for love of God; that man is born “with an inclination to evil,” which he must conquer to be saved; that good lies in doing, not knowing—“I would rather feel compunction than know how to define it”; that only the humble in spirit are at peace—“it is much safer to be in subjection than in authority”; that to desire anything is to be “straightway disquieted”; that man is but a pilgrim in life, the world is an exile, home is with God.
Nothing of this was new or remarkable. The Imitation of Christ was what it said it was, an imitation of Christ’s message, a consolation for the humble who are mankind’s majority, a reassurance of the promise that their reward is to come hereafter. For a long time after Thomas’ book appeared, so little was known about its author that Jean Gerson was supposed by some to be the Bacon behind this obscure northern Shakespeare.
In 1391 Gerson’s plea against the Way of Force held the attention of the court from prime to vespers. Remembering how prison had closed over his predecessors, he pursued his argument at some risk, but as a native of Burgundy he had acquired the Duke as a patron, which may have made the sermon possible. He urged the crown to abandon the Voie de Fait with its “doubtful battle and spilling of blood,” recommending rather a resort to augmented prayer and penitential processions. In a discreet rebuke, he deplored the gagging of the University on the subject of a Church Council, “for I have no doubt that if you had been better informed on what your very humble and devout daughter, the University of Paris, wished to say to you on this matter, you would very willingly have heard it, and great good would have come of it.”
Boldly he suggested that the welfare of the papacy was subordinate to that of the Christian community as a whole, and that it would be “intolerable” if the Holy See, instituted for the good of the Church, became the instrument of its grave damage. He called on the memory of St. Louis, Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver, and the Maccabees to inspire Charles VI to remove the stain of the schism, a task Gerson did not hesitate to declare more important than a crusade against Islam. “What is greater than the union of Christendom? Who can better achieve that union than the most Christian King?”
Interference more material than Gerson’s blocked the Voie de Fait for the time being. France could not go to war in Italy without the alliance or, at very least, the benevolent neutrality of Florence and Milan, a prospect distinctly impeded by the fact of their being at war with each other. Each had rival advocates in France. Milan was represented by Valentina Visconti, wife of Louis d’Orléans. Louis dreamed of acquiring the promised Kingdom of Adria, still waiting to be carved out of the Papal States in return for French support. The dream depended on access to the wealth of Milan and on the collaboration of Louis’ father-in-law in the Voie de Fait. Gian Galeazzo’s interests were double-edged. He favored a Kingdom of Adria in friendly—that is, in French—hands, while at the same time he was wary of allowing France to become a power in Italy. He wanted a French alliance against Florence but he did not want to opt openly for Clement or commit himself to the Voie de Fait. While steering through these shoals, he had to frustrate the Florentine league against him, and confound the schemes of Bernabò’s various sons and relations who were bent on his destruction.
News was spreading in Naples that the King of France and the Anti-Pope Clement were coming to Rome with a great army to reunite the Church. Clement himself was so sure of the program that he had ordered portable altars, riding saddles, pack saddles, blankets, and all equipment for a major move. Pope Boniface in great alarm begged the English to divert the French. This was accomplished not by a threat of war but by an offer of peace. English ambassadors came to France in February 1391 bringing an offer to negotiate a definitive treaty. Coucy and Rivière were delegated to confer with the English, to dine them and “keep them company.” As evidence of serious purpose, the ambassadors said that King Richard’s uncles, Lancaster and the bellicose Gloucester, would represent England at the parley. France could not refuse the momentous opportunity even if it meant postponing the Voie de Fait—which, of course, was the English purpose. The parley was set for the end of June and the march on Rome held in abeyance.
When June came, the English, having accomplished their original purpose, hung back from the edge of peace. At their request, the parley was postponed for another nine months until the following March. The truth was that England’s counsels were sharply divided. King Richard and his two elder uncles, Lancaster and York, favored peace, while the relentless Thomas of Gloucester adamantly opposed it. In the generation since his father had fought France with no particular animus, the sense of underlying chivalric comradeship had shriveled. Gloucester, the youngest son, was fixed in his conviction that the French were perfidious and tricky and, by shifty legalities and ambiguous language, had cozened the English out of the gains confirmed in the Treaty of Brétigny. He refused to make peace until theyrendered back “all such cities, towns, lands, and seigneuries” which they had falsely taken, not to mention 1,400,000 francs still owing on King Jean’s ransom.
The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights or wrongs, were “inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.”
At this moment, England’s old ally, the Duke of Brittany, addicted as ever to feuding, suddenly re-opened his quarrel with France. Discarding a vassal’s loyalty, he became more and more contentious and presumptuous, minting money bearing his own image, and assuming other rights of independent sovereignty. The French were anxious to bring him to submission before the date of the parley with the English, knowing that otherwise their uncovered flank would put them at a disadvantage. Coucy, one of the few persons acceptable to the irascible Duke, arranged for him to meet with the King and Council at Tours. Montfort came up the Loire attended by a suite of 1,500 knights and squires, in a convoy of five ships armed with cannon. For three months, from October to December 1391, the effort dragged on. Half slippery, half intransigent, Montfort could not be brought to terms. As a last resort, the King’s daughter Jeanne, barely a year old, was offered in marriage to Montfort’s son as the only means of attaching Brittany. The same solution had notably failed in the recent past to attach Charles of Navarre. With no great grace, after concluding the arrangement, Montfort went home “conserving all his hate.”
While at Tours, Coucy was caught up in an affair that was to have bitter if posthumous irony for himself. It happened that the only son and heir of Count Guy de Blois died, leaving an enormous estate devoid of dynastic heirs. The limitless acquisitiveness of Louis d’Orléans focused at once on the property, which lay between his own domains of Touraine and Orléans. He and the King and Coucy rode over together from nearby Tours to visit the bereaved, and also bankrupt, father. Count Guy was the former fellow hostage in England who, to buy his liberty, had transferred his property of Soissons through King Edward to Coucy. Wild spending had since dissipated his great wealth; overeating and drinking had left him and his wife “overgrown with fatness” so that the Count could no longer mount his horse and had to be carried to the hunt in a litter. Given to fits of rage, he had once, in what appears to have been a 14th century habit, killed a knight with his dagger. Now he was old, sick, and childless, surrounded by swarms of quarreling would-be heirs.
Coucy had much influence with Count Guy, besides holding a lien on his property deriving from money still owed on the Soissons transaction. As “un grand traitteur” (an accomplished negotiator), he was chosen by both parties to evaluate the estate and arrange its sale to Louis d’Orléans. Sale of dynastic property for cash was considered something of a disgrace. If Coucy was reluctant to act in such a matter—and there is no evidence that he was—he was handsomely, almost too handsomely, compensated by Louis for his services. When he succeeded in reducing Blois’ asking price of 200,000 francs for his lands in Hainault by 50,000, or 25 percent, Louis paid him back the difference. At the same time, Louis acquitted Coucy of the debt of 10,000 florins loaned to him for the Tunisian campaign, “in consideration to our said cousin of the many and great services he has rendered to us.” For the entire Blois estate Louis paid 400,000 francs from his wife’s dowry, becoming thereby a territorial proprietor on a level with his uncles.
Froissart, who had been in the service of Guy de Blois before the days of the empty purse, delivered himself of the stern and rather surprising judgment that “The Sire de Coucy was greatly to blame in this matter.” Perhaps he meant that Coucy should not have made money out of a transaction which Froissart considered ignoble. The worshiper of a caste often upholds higher ideals for it than its members. In the ultimate irony, Coucy’s own domain after his death was to follow Blois’ into Orléans’ hands.
Rarely if ever at home, Coucy resumed his duties as Lieutenant-General in Auvergne and Guienne in January 1392, and came north again in March to accompany the King to the great parley at Amiens. In happy omen just before the parley, a son was born to Charles and Isabeau, their fifth child, of whom the two eldest were already dead. Paris celebrated in great emotion as bells pealed and bonfires flamed in the public squares. People filled the churches to thank God for a Dauphin and afterward sang and danced in the streets, where tables loaded with wine and food were set out for them by noble ladies and wealthy bourgeois. The object of their joy was to die at the age of nine, as were four more sons before one of the puny progeny survived to become the feckless Dauphin eventually crowned as Charles VII by Joan of Arc.
Extraordinary measures were taken to ensure that no quarrels arose between French and English retinues to disrupt the parley. The Council ordered French subjects on pain of death to abstain from all insults and provocative remarks or challenges to, or even talk of, combat. No one was to go out at night without a torch; any page or varlet who provoked a quarrel in a tavern was to earn the death penalty. Four companies of 1,000 guards each were to keep watch day and night to prevent assemblies with potential for trouble. If the fire bell rang, they were not to move from their posts but leave it to the regular fire companies to answer the alarm. The English were to be received with “greatest honors,” treated with utmost courtesy, and entertained free of cost. Innkeepers were not to demand money from them but submit their accounts to the royal exchequer for payment.
These precautions expressed the French desire less for peace per se than for a settlement that would open the way to the Voie de Fait and to crusade. On the English side, the Dukes of Lancaster and York showed a similar sentiment, but the absence of Gloucester left an ominous hole. In recognition of Coucy’s influence, the English Dukes had brought his daughter Philippa with them, no doubt hoping thereby to win his support for their terms. Philippa had expressed an ardent desire to see the father she barely knew, and Coucy had much joy in the meeting. His daughter “travelled in good state, but like a widow who had enjoyed little pleasure in her marriage.”
In the presence of Charles seated on his throne, the parley opened at Eastertime in the utmost ceremony and grandeur, as if to support the great burden of its outcome. Lancaster knelt three times on his approach to the throne in the ritual of homage and was welcomed by the King with affectionate words, and by Burgundy and Berry with the kiss of peace. The splendor of the Duke of Burgundy was never more marvelous. He wore black velvet embroidered on the left sleeve with a branch of 22 roses composed of sapphires and rubies surrounded with pearls. On another day he wore a crimson velvet robe embroidered on each side with a bear in silver whose collar, muzzle, and leash sparkled with jewels. The great French lords, including Coucy, each gave a banquet for the English on successive nights at which knightly courtesies were exchanged and old acquaintances renewed.
Not all the precautions, free meals, and luxurious surroundings were enough to gain a peace. The parley lasted two weeks, but both parties knew it was useless. The English demand for more than a million francs in arrears on Jean’s ransom was met by the French claim for an indemnity of three million for war damages on their soil. They went so far as to scale down their demand for the return of Calais to a demand that the city and walls be razed to make the place unusable. The English refused, considering that as long as they held Calais, “they wore the key to France on their belt.” The sovereignty of Aquitaine was disputed as ever. Even when the French finally offered to pay the arrears on Jean’s ransom and guarantee peaceable possession if not sovereignty of Aquitaine, in return for the razing of Calais, the English held back. They were not sure they wanted peace. When Charles urged the cause of the crusade, they said, as so often before, that they had no powers to conclude definitive terms, but would report back to their King. One more of the countless peace parleys came to nothing. Once more the truce was extended for yet another year. How hard it was to end a war.
Whether from disappointment or natural causes, King Charles fell ill in the midst of the parley, suffering from high fever and transports of delirium. Removed from Amiens to the quiet surroundings of the episcopal palace at Beauvais, where he was carefully nursed, he soon recovered, and by June had resumed hunting and his other pleasures. No ill omens were attached to the sudden strange illness, although they might well have been.
32. Papal palace at Avignon as it would have appeared in the 14th century. Engraving by Israel Sylvestre, c. 1650.(illustration credit 23.1)
33. 14TH CENTURY COINS(illustration credit 23.2)
34. A Sienese army of 1363 depicted in the area where Coucy’s campaign took place twenty years later. Fresco by Lippo Vanni, 1373, in the Sala del Mappamondo, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.(illustration credit 23.3)
THE SWISS CAMPAIGN
35. The Gügler enter Switzerland under the flags of Coucy and England.(illustration credit 23.4)
36. The fight at Fraubrunnen showing the flag of Bern (the Bear). Both from the Berner Chronik, c. 1400.(illustration credit 23.5)
37. Sir John Hawkwood.
Fresco by Paolo Uccello in the Cathedral of Florence.(illustration credit 23.6)
38. Pierre de Luxemburg, with a cardinal’s hat on the altar drapery. Portrait, c. 1400.(illustration credit 23.7)
39. Burning of the Jews. From Gilles li Muisis, Antiquitates Flandriae, 14th century.(illustration credit 23.8)
40. A Jew wearing the circular badge. Detail from a 14th century fresco of St. Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, in the Cathedral of Tarragona.(illustration credit 23.9)
41. Christine de Pisan composing her works. From the manuscript of her Oeuvres, vol. Poésies, c. 1405.(illustration credit 23.10)
42. Jean de Berry, statue in the Cathedral of Bourges.(illustration credit 23.11)
43. Philip of Burgundy, statue by Claus Sluter in the Champmol, Dijon.(illustration credit 23.12)
44. Charles V receiving the translation of Aristotle’s Ethics from Nicolas Oresme. From Les éthiques d’Aristote, 1372 version.(illustration credit 23.13)
45. Pope Urban VI. From a relief on the back of his sarcophagus in the Vatican Grotto, Rome, dated 1389.(illustration credit 23.14)
46. Clement VII. Fragment of effigy at Avignon.(illustration credit 23.15)
47. The siege of Mahdia. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 23.16)
48. Louis d’Orléans. Portrait, c. 1420.(illustration credit 23.17)
49. The Visconti device: a viper swallowing a man,(illustration credit 23.18)
50. Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Pen drawing by Antonio Pisanello (1397–1455).(illustration credit 23.19)
51. Froissart offering his Chronicles to Charles VI. From Froissart’s Chronicles, c. 1450.(illustration credit 23.20)
52. Gerson preaching at the Church of St. Bernard in Paris. From Sermons sur la Passion, illustrated by Baudoin de Lannoy, c. 1480.(illustration credit 23.21)
53. Burean de la Rivière, statues from La Grange buttress, Cathedral of Amiens.(illustration credit 23.22)
54. Cardinal Jean de La Grange, statues from La Grange buttress, Cathedral of Amiens.(illustration credit 23.23)
55. Effigy of Guillaume de Harsigny at Laon.(illustration credit 23.24)
56. DANSE MACABRE
Fresco in the Abbey of Chaise-Dien at Riom, 15th century.(illustration credit 23.25)
57. Lamentation of the Virgin with St. John. From the Rohan Hours, c. 1420.(illustration credit 23.26)
58. Massacre of the prisoners at Nicopolis. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 23.27)
59. Posthumous portrait of Coucy commissioned by the Celestin monastery of Villeneuve-les-Soissons two hundred years after his death.(illustration credit 23.28)
60. Ruins of the donjon of Concy, after the German dynamiting of 1917.(illustration credit 23.29)
61. Aerial view of Coucy-le-Château today.(illustration credit 23.30)