In the next fifty years, the forces set in motion during the 14th century played themselves out, some of them in exaggerated form like human failings in old age. After a heavy recurrence in the last year of the old century, the Black Death disappeared, but war and brigandage were renewed, the cult of death grew more extreme, the struggle to end the schism and reform the abuses of the Church more desperate. Depopulation reached its lowest point in a society already weakened both physically and morally.
In France, Jean de Nevers, who had succeeded his father as Duke of Burgundy in 1404, turned assassin, precipitating a train of evils. In 1407 he employed a gang of toughs to murder his rival Louis d’Orléans in the streets of Paris. As Louis was returning to his hotel after dark, he was set upon by hired killers who cut off his left hand holding the reins, dragged him from his mule, hacked him to death with swords, axes, and wooden clubs, and left his body in the gutter while his mounted escort, which never seems to have been much use on these occasions, fled.
Protected from penalty by his ducal power, John the Fearless publicly defended his act, through a spokesman, as justifiable tyrannicide, charging Louis with vice, corruption, sorcery, and a long list of public and private villainies. Since Louis was associated in the public mind with the extravagance and license of the court and with its endless demand for money, John of Burgundy was able to make himself appear the people’s champion by opposing the government’s latest tax levy. In the void left by a mad King, the Duke filled the people’s craving for a royal friend and protector.
Mortal hatreds and implacable conflict between Burgundians and Orléanists consumed France for the next thirty years. Regional and political groups formed around the antagonists, brigand companies employed by both sides re-emerged, leaving their smoking tracks of pillage and massacre. Each side raised the Oriflamme against the other, won and lost control of the helpless King and the capital, multiplied taxes. Administrative structures fell into disorder, finance and justice were abused, offices bought and sold, Parlement became a market place of corruption. The realm, declared an Orléanist manifesto, was sunk in crime and sin with God blasphemed everywhere, “even by churchmen and children.”
The middle class rose in the same effort to oust corrupt officials and establish measures of good government as Etienne Marcel had led more than fifty years before—and with no more success. Impatient for immediate results, a turbulent collection of the butchers, skinners, and tanners of Paris, called Cabochiens after their leader Caboche, broke into fierce revolt, reproducing the revolt of the Maillotins with increased brutality. Inevitably the bourgeois reacted against them and opened the gates to the Orléanist party which suppressed the revolt, restored venal officials, canceled the reforms and persecuted the reformers. John of Burgundy, who had judiciously removed himself during the violence, was declared a rebel and, following the old pattern of Charles of Navarre, entered into alliance with the English.
Henry IV of England, after continuous struggle against Welsh revolt, baronial antagonists, and a son impatient for the crown, died in 1413, to be succeeded by the said son who at 25 was prepared, with all the sanctimonious energy of a reformed rake, to enter upon a reign of stern virtue and heroic conquest. Relying on the anarchy in France and his arrangements with the Duke of Burgundy, and hoping by military successes to unite the English behind the house of Lancaster, Henry V took up the old war and the threadbare claim to the French crown which had not gained in validity by passing to him through a usurper. On the pretext of various French perfidies, he invaded France in 1415 in Mars’s favorite month of August, announcing that he had come “into his own land, his own country, and his own kingdom.” After the siege and capture of Harfleur in Normandy, he marched north for Calais to return home for the winter. About thirty miles short of his goal, not far from the battlefield of Crécy, he met the French army at Agincourt.
The Battle of Agincourt has inspired books and studies and aficionados, but it was not decisive in the sense of Crécy, which, by leading to the capture of Calais, transformed Edward Ill’s semi-serious adventure into a hundred years’ war, nor in the sense of Poitiers, which determined the loss of confidence in the noble as knight. Agincourt merely confirmed both these results, especially the second, for not even Nicopolis was so painful a demonstration that valor in combat is not the equivalent of competence in war. The battle was lost by the incompetence of French chivalry, and won more by the action of the English common soldiers than of the mounted knights.
Although Burgundy and his vassals held aloof, the French army that assembled to confront the invaders outnumbered them by three or four to one, and was as overconfident as ever. The Constable, Charles d’Albret, rejected an offer of 6,000 crossbowmen from the citizen militia of Paris. No change in tactics had been introduced, and the only technological development (except for cannon, which played no role in open battle) was heavier plate armor. Intended to give added protection against arrows, it had the effect of increasing fatigue and reducing mobility and play of the sword arm. The terrible worm in his iron cocoon was less terrible than before, and the cocoon itself sometimes lethal; knights occasionally died of heart failure inside it. Pages had to support their lords on the field lest, should they fall, they be unable to rise again.
The armies met in a confined space between two clumps of woods. Rain fell throughout the night while they waited to do battle and while the French pages and grooms, walking the horses up and down, churned the ground into a soft mud exactly suited for the slipping and stumbling of steel-clad knights. The French had not attempted to select a battleground where their superiority in numbers could be effectively deployed, with the result that they were drawn up for battle in three rows, one behind the other, with little room for action on the flanks, and forced to follow each other into the valley of mud. With no commander-in-chief able to impose a tactical plan, the nobles vied for the glory of a place in the front line until it was as compacted as the Flemish line at Roosebeke. Archers and crossbowmen were placed behind, where their missiles could not dilute the glory of the clash and were in fact useless.
The English, though tired, hungry, and dispirited by their numerical inferiority, had two advantages: a King in personal command and a disproportion of about 1,000 knights and squires to 6,000 archers and a few thousand other foot. Their archers were deployed in solid wedges between the men-at-arms and in blocks on the wings. Wearing no armor, they were fully mobile, and in addition to their bows, they carried a variety of axes, hatchets, hammers, and, in some cases, large swords hanging from their belts.
Under these conditions the outcome was more one-sided than any since the start of the war. In their overcrowding, the dismounted knights of the French front line could barely wield their great weapons and, hampered by the mud, fell into helpless disarray, which, when merging with the advance of the second line and tangled by flight, panic, and riderless horses, quickly became chaos. Grasping the situation, the English archers threw down their bows and rushed in with their axes and other weapons to an orgy of slaughter. Many of the French, impeded by their heavy armor, could not defend themselves, accounting for the several thousands killed and taken prisoner in contrast to a total English loss of 500, including at least one victim of probable heart failure. This was Edward Duke of York, one of Edward Ill’s grandsons, who was 45 and fat and found dead on the battlefield without a wound. On the French side, three dukes, five counts, ninety barons and many others were killed, among them two of Coucy’s family—his grandson Robert de Bar, and his third son-in-law, Philip Count of Nevers who fought in spite of his elder brother, the Duke of Burgundy. The list of prisoners was headed by Charles d’Orléans, the new lord of Coucy, who was to remain a captive for 25 years. Chivalry’s hero, Marshal Boucicaut, too, was captured. Bungled Agincourt was his last combat; he died in England six years later.
After two years’ pause, Henry V returned for the systematic conquest of territory. Improved technology in the use of gunpowder and artillery now made the difference, costing walled cities their immunity. As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity. In three years, 1417–19, Henry took possession of all Normandy while the French twisted and grappled in internal feuds. Two successive Dauphins died within a year of each other, leaving Charles, a hapless fourteen-year-old whom his mother pronounced illegitimate, as heir to the throne. The Cabochiens rose again in a rampage of savagery and murder. John the Fearless took control of the King and capital, while the Dauphin escaped below the Loire. Through a France divided against itself, Henry V hammered his advance. In the course of the English siege of Rouen, the defenders, to save food, expelled 12,000 citizens whom the English refused to let through their lines and who remained between the two camps in winter, subsisting on grass and roots or dying of cold and starvation. When the fall of Rouen posed a direct threat to Paris, the French factions were frightened into an attempt to close ranks against the enemy.
In 1419, after much stalling by the Duke of Burgundy, a meeting was arranged between him and the Dauphin to take place on the bridge at Montereau, about 35 miles southeast of Paris. The parties advanced toward each other filled with suspicion, harsh words were spoken as if the gods of Troy were again whispering evil, hands flew to swords, and as the Dauphin backed away from the scene, his followers fell upon the Duke, plunged their weapons in his body, and “dashed him down stark dead to the ground.” Louis d’Orléans was avenged, but at bitter cost.
Reconciliation was broken off. Swearing revenge in his turn, Philip of Burgundy, the new Duke, entered into full alliance with Henry V, even recognizing his shopworn claim to the crown of Philip’s own ancestors. Together they drew up the Treaty of Troyes between the King of England and the still living wraith of the King of France. By its terms, signed in 1420, the witless King and his foreign-born Queen, who never felt French, disowned the “so-called Dauphin” and accepted Henry V as successor to the throne of France and husband of their daughter Catherine. During Charles VI’s lifetime Henry was confirmed in possession of Normandy and his other territorial conquests and was to share the government of France with the Duke of Burgundy.
The integrity of France had reached its lowest point. If a king had been captured at Poitiers, kingship itself was surrendered at Troyes. France the supreme was reduced to an Anglo-Burgundian condominium. Henry V’s quick five-year campaign alone had not accomplished this: it was the work of a hundred years of disintegrating forces combined with the rise of the Burgundian state and the accident of the King’s long-lived madness. But at this stage in the development of nationalism it was not a conquest that could succeed, no matter how careful the methods of Henry V. If a sense of Frenchness was already too strong to accept the transfers of sovereignty in 1360, it was that much stronger two generations later, as the parties to the Treaty of Troyes were clearly aware. They included a clause forbidding anyone to voice disapproval of the treaty and making such disapproval an act of treason.
There was, however, an occupied France and a free France below the Loire. The wretched Dauphin, with what stamina he possessed, refused to accept the treaty and retreated with his Council to Bourges in Berry, where he maintained a feeble heartbeat of the crown. After making a royal entry into Paris, Henry V returned home, leaving his brother, the Duke of Bedford, as his regent in France. History, or whatever deus ex machina arranges the affairs of men, indulges an occasional taste for irony. Less than two years later Charles VI and Henry V died within a month of each other, the son-in-law first so that he never wore the French crown. The claim passed to his nine-month-old son, and with it, through Catherine of France, the Valois curse. Madness was to overcome Henry VI as a grown man; the Dauphin, subsequently Charles VII, being illegitimate, escaped.
Once again it was said, “The forests came back with the English,” as war and pestilence emptied the land. In Picardy, the invaders’ perennial pathway, villages were left in blackened ruin, fields were uncultivated, disused roads vanished under brambles and weeds, unpeopled lands lay solitary where no cockcrow was heard. In the outskirts of Abbeville, a starving peasant woman was found who had salted down the bodies of two children she had killed. Destruction spread as the English pursued a serious effort to make good the conquest of France. Only the alliance of Burgundy and the exhaustion of a marauded and trampled country enabled them to take hold. No armed force, wrote Charles d’Orléans’ secretary, could take the castle of Coucy during the wars, but by “interior treason” it was delivered for a time to the enemy and its beautiful chapel windows were “in large part stripped by profane hands.”
Peasants fled the countryside to take refuge in the towns, where they hoped to find security and where they imagined people led a better life. In urban alleys and hovels they found the unskilled laboring class no better off than themselves. Among the overcrowded and undernourished, epidemics took a greater toll, and a weakened population became more vulnerable to typhus and leprosy as well as plague. Declining trade and manufacture created unemployment and fostered hostility to the refugees. Some returned to the land to try to rebuild their villages and re-cultivate overgrown fields, some to live in the woods by trapping and fishing.
Statues of St. Roch and other saints invoked against plague and various forms of sudden death multiplied in the churches; the fashion for naked, skeletal effigies spread. Now in the 15th century the cult of death flourished at its most morbid. Artists dwelt on physical rot in ghoulish detail: worms wriggled through every corpse, bloated toads sat on dead eyeballs. A mocking, beckoning, gleeful Death led the parade of the Danse Macabre around innumerable frescoed walls. A literature of dying expressed itself in popular treatises on Ars Moriendi, the Art of Dying, with scenes of the deathbed, doctors and notaries in attendance, hovering families, shrouds and coffins, grave-diggers whose spades uproot the bones of earlier dead, finally the naked corpse awaiting God’s judgment while angels and vicious black devils dispute for his soul.
The staging of plays and mysteries went to extremes of the horrid, as if people needed ever more excess to experience a thrill of disgust. The rape of virgins was enacted with startling realism; in realistic dummies the body of Christ was viciously cut and hacked by the soldiers, or a child was roasted and eaten by its mother. In a 15th century version of the favorite Nero-Agrippina scene, the mother pleads for mercy, but the Emperor, as he orders her belly sliced open, demands to see “the place where women receive the semen from which they conceive their children.”
Associated with the cult of death was the expected end of the world. The pessimism of the 14th century grew in the 15th to the belief that man was becoming worse, an indication of the approaching end. As described in one French treatise, a sign of this decline was the congealing of charity in human hearts, indicating that the human soul was aging and that the flame of love which used to warm mankind was sinking low and would soon go out. Plague, violence, and natural catastrophes were further signals.
With the English occupying the capital, courage had sunk low. Frenchmen did not lack who were ready to accept union under one crown as the only solution to incessant war and economic ruin. In most, however, resistance to the English tyrants and “Goddams,” as they were called, was axiomatic, but it was uncoordinated and leaderless. The Dauphin was weak and spiritless, captive of unscrupulous or passive ministers. Unheralded, the courage came from society’s most unlikely source—a woman of the commoners’ class.
The phenomenon of Jeanne d’Arc—the voices from God who told her she must expel the English and have the Dauphin crowned King, the quality that dominated those who would normally have despised her, the strength that raised the siege of Orléans and carried the Dauphin to Reims—belongs to no category. Perhaps it can only be explained as the answer called forth by an exigent historic need. The moment required her and she rose. Her strength came from the fact that in her were combined for the first time the old religious faith and the new force of patriotism. God spoke to her through the voices of St. Catherine, St. Michael, and St. Margaret, but what He commanded was not chastity nor humility nor the life of the spirit but political action to rescue her country from foreign tyrants.
The flight of her meteor lasted only three years. She appeared in 1428, inspired Dunois, bastard son of Louis d’Orléans, and others of the Dauphin’s circle to attack at Orléans, delivered the city in May 1429, and, on the wave of that victory, led Charles to the sacred ceremony of coronation at Reims two months later. Captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne in May 1430, she was sold to the English, tried as a heretic by the Church in the service of the English, and burned at the stake at Rouen in May 1431. Her condemnation was essential to the English because she claimed to have been moved by God, and if the claim were not disallowed, God, the arbiter in the affairs of men, would have been shown to have set His face against the English dominion of France. All the intensity and relentlessness of the inquisitors was pitted against her to prove the invalidity of her voices. Before the trial, neither Charles VII, who owed her his crown, nor any of the French made any effort to ransom or save her, possibly from nobility’s embarrassment at having been led to victory by a village girl.
Jeanne d’Arc’s life and death did not instantly generate a national resistance; nevertheless, the English thereafter were fighting a losing cause, whether they knew it or not. The Burgundians knew it. The installation of Charles as anointed King of France, with a re-inspired army, changed the situation, the more so as the English were distracted by rising frictions under an infant King. Recognizing the implications, the Duke of Burgundy gradually went over to the French, came to terms with Charles VII, and sealed an alliance by the Peace of Arras in 1435. Within a year, by action of an energetic new Constable, Paris was regained for the King, a signal to the realm of re-unification to come. No one could have said that the spark lit by the Maid of Orléans had become a flame, for her significance is better known to history than it was to contemporaries, but renewed hope and energy was in the air. The war did not end, and in fact grew more brutal as the English, out of the obstinacy that overtakes conquerors when the conquered refuse to succumb, persisted in an effort which the Burgundian defection from their cause had made hopeless.
All this time the dominant intellectual effort of Europe was engaged in continuous, contentious, and intense activity to end the papal schism and bring about reform within the Church. Both aims depended on establishing the supremacy of a Council over the papacy. As long as both popes persistently refused to abdicate, an agreed-upon ending of the schism was impossible, leaving a Council the only alternative. It was equally apparent that no Pope and College of Cardinals would override vested interests to initiate reform from within; therefore, only by establishing the authority of a Council could an instrument of reform be obtained. Serious theologians struggled seriously with these problems in a genuine effort to effect change and find a way to limit and constitutionalize the powers of the papacy. The issues aroused the fiercest philosophical and religious, not to say material, controversies, which were debated through a succession of Councils over a period of forty years. Summoned not from the center of the Church but from the circumference, by universities, sovereigns, and states, the Councils met at Pisa, Constance, and Basle.
At Pisa in 1409 the reform issue, eloquently sponsored by d’Ailly and Gerson, was suppressed while all energies were engaged in deposing both the Avignon and Roman popes and electing a single successor. This individual promptly died, to be replaced by a martial Italian, Baldassare Cossa, more condottiere than cardinal, who took the name of John XXIII. Since his two rival predecessors still clung to their Sees, the schism was now triple. In France’s difficulties, the initiative passed to Emperor Sigismund, who summoned the memorable Council that met at Constance on imperial territory from 1414 to 1418.
With historic consequence for the Church, Constance took upon itself a third issue, the suppression of heresy, meaning all the dissident strains which had risen out of the malaise of the last century. Vitality in religion had passed to the dissidents, mystics, and reformers, and, in a negative sense, to practices of sorcery and witchcraft, although the emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution. Denunciations, trials, and burnings increased, and in its tortures of supposed heretics the Inquisition was as savage and ingenious in cruelty as any infidel Turk or Chinese. Witch-hunting was to reach epidemic proportions in the second half of the century, marked by the famous treatise Malleus Maleficarum of 1487, an encyclopedia for the detection of demonology and its devotees.
Constance was concerned with the more fundamental heresy of Jan Hus, ideologically the successor of Wyclif. Summoned to explain and defend his doctrines at Constance, he was condemned and burned at the stake in 1415. He might well have claimed, anticipating Bishop Latimer, that the flames in which he died lit the candle that would not be put out.
The Council also managed after a series of dramatic struggles with John XXIII, to depose him on charges of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest (of which Gibbon remarks that the “most scandalous” charges were suppressed) and elect Cardinal Colonna of Rome as Martin V. The previous Roman Pope having been induced to resign, and the still obstinate Benedict of Avignon being effectively isolated, the schism was declared closed, although it was to revive briefly over the issue of reform. The greater struggle between Council and papacy for supremacy remained. Under Martin V, the Papal States and their revenues were recovered, and the material, if not spiritual, gain in strength enabled the papacy under Martin’s successor, Eugenius IV, to renew the conciliar contest at the Council of Basle. Like some wrestle of giants, this Council lasted for eighteen years.
Doctrinal controversies raged, groups seceded, rump councils convened, a rival Pope—no less than the reigning Count of Savoy, who could pay his own way—was elected as Felix V. Reforms and restrictions on the papacy were voted by one side and rejected by the other, while states and sovereigns were again divided by power politics. In the end, the reformers were defeated, Felix V resigned, and the Council of Basle was dissolved in 1449. The papacy, firmly Italian once more, acknowledged conciliar supremacy on paper but regained its primacy in fact. Its triumph, celebrated at the Jubilee of 1450, proved a phantom. The papacy was never again to be what it had been before the schism and the Councils. It had lost prestige in the first of these crises, and influence and control over the national churches in the second. In an expression of “Gallican liberties,” a French synod in 1438 adopted reforms independently and restricted papal taxation of the French clergy. Movements and ideas generated by the conciliar struggle were moving ineluctably toward the Protestant secession.
Change in another sphere was registered in the Hussite wars, a movement fired by Czech nationalism and religious zeal to avenge the death of Hus. Its members were largely bourgeois and peasants (with some ambivalent support from the Czech nobility) and in their struggle against the warrior class, it was the bourgeois, not their opponents, who developed a new military tactic. They adopted the device of a “moving fort,” consisting of a square or circle of baggage wagons chained together for defense against the charge of mounted horsemen. Squads armed with pikes, hand-held guns, and flails protected each gap between the wagons, and as success in defense led to the offense, the squads charged through these gaps against the enemy. In 1420 they defeated the forces led by Sigismund in a “crusade” to reestablish orthodoxy and, gaining confidence from the fear they inspired, undertook raids into Hungary, Bavaria, and Prussia as far as the Baltic, raising the prospect of a dominion of heresy. They fired cannon from within the wagon square and were the first force to make hand-held firearms a major weapon. By the end of ten years a third of the Hussite force possessed these weapons.
Being human, they were afflicted with ideological conflict between moderates and radicals which ultimately broke their movement from within. At the Council of Basle, however, they were strong enough to compel the Church for the first time to conclude a treaty of peace with heretics. Like the Swiss, also largely an army of the non-noble class, they had learned to fight effectively because they were not wedded to glory nor bound to the horse.
During the 1420s and ’30s, Henry the Navigator, Prince of Portugal and grandson of John of Gaunt, launched annual voyages into the Atlantic, exploring and claiming the Azores, Madeiras, and Canaries, and venturing down the west coast of Africa until the great western bulge was rounded in 1433 and the coasts of gold and ivory reached for the opening of new trade. Even if Prince Henry’s initial motive was for the greater glory of the Order of Christ, of which he was General, his work and its impulse were modern. He took his place on the bridge between medieval and modern, where the humanists and scientists were crowding.
Change was uneven and erratic. The population of Europe had sunk to its lowest point by about 1440 and was not to rise for another thirty years. Rouen, which had a population of 15,000 before the Black Death, numbered only 6,000 citizens in the mid-15th century. The Cathedral of Schleswig, which made a comparison of its revenues of 1457 with those of 1352, found that rents and measures of barley, rye, and wheat were each down to about one third of what they had been. In many places, elementary schools had disappeared, not to return until modern times. In 1439 the Bourgeois of Paris, who kept a journal in these years, reported grass growing in the streets of the capital, and wolves attacking people in the half-populated suburbs. In the same year the Archbishop of Bordeaux complained that, owing to the curse of the écorcheurs, students could no longer seek the pearl of knowledge at universities, for “many have been taken on the way, imprisoned, stript of their books and goods and sometimes, alas! slain.” The cost of a hundred years of war in aids and subsidies, poll taxes and indirect taxes and devalued currency was incalculable. Yet the forced summoning of so many Estates and parliaments for grant of funds may have strengthened the functioning of representative bodies even while the financial burden caused misery and class antagonism.
Few in the first decade under Charles VII could see signs of progress ahead. Through continual wars, civil and foreign, wrote Thomas Basin, a Norman chronicler of the reign, through the “negligence and idleness” of the King’s officials, the “greed and slackness” of men-at-arms and the lack of military discipline, devastation reigned from Rouen to Paris, from the Loire to the Seine, over the plains of Brie and Champagne, and from the Seine as far as Laon, Amiens, and Abbeville. “And it was feared that the marks of this devastation would long endure and remain visible unless Divine Providence kept better watch over the things of this world.”
Slowly, improbably, the tasks of ruling made a King of Charles VII, and better fortune brought better men into his service. The great bourgeois financier Jacques Coeur supplied a footing of money and credit, and siege artillery perfected by skilled gunners outside the ranks of chivalry broke the English hold on castles and towns with an efficacy unknown in the 14th century. Town after town opened its gates to the King’s forces, the more readily because Charles VII accomplished at last the fundamental military reform that had defeated his grandfather Charles V. In 1444–45 he succeeded in establishing a standing army, incorporating and at the same time eliminating the lawless companies, the greatest scourge of the time. Under the new law, twenty compagnies d’ordonnance of 100 lances each were established, with two archers, a squire, a page, and a valet de guerre for each lancer, making a total of 600 per company. Officered by the most reliable of the mercenary captains, who recruited their own men, the new companies were paid and provisioned by the crown by means of regular annual taxation, and were quartered at strategic points throughout France. By relentless effort, the remaining écorcheurs were disbanded. Among signs of change at mid-century, none was more important than this innovation of the standing army. What it signified was a principle of order where all before—plague, war, and schism–had been agents of disorder.
Recovery was aided by England’s fading will for conquest. Henry VI, as an adult, wanted peace. A feeble, uncertain King, he was the pawn of quarreling cabals among the barons and prelates. His competent uncle, the Duke of Bedford, was dead, leaving no one of outstanding status able to lead or terminate the war. By 1450 the French had recovered all of Normandy; towns surrendered as soon as the artillery train appeared. Even English Aquitaine had dwindled to little more than the environs of Bordeaux.
In 1453 at Castillon, the only remaining English foothold outside Bordeaux, the last battle was fought. Traditional roles were reversed, with foolhardy valor on the English side and bourgeois competence on the French. Castillon having surrendered to the French, Lord John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, set out from Bordeaux to recapture it. According to Basin, he was habitually given to “impetuous daring rather than deliberate assault,” and insisted, against the advice of an experienced lieutenant, on a frontal attack at the head of his mounted men-at-arms. The French, under the guidance of “a certain Jean Bureau, citizen of Paris, a man of small stature but of purpose and daring, particularly skilled and experienced in the use of [artillery],” had defended their camp by a ditch, a wall of earth reinforced by tree trunks, and “machines of war”—culverins, serpentines, arbalests, and various launchers of projectiles. Talbot and his knights threw themselves against these defenses and were repulsed by stones, lead, and missiles of every description. Talbot was killed and his army routed. Bordeaux itself fell soon after. Nothing was left of England’s continental empire except Calais and an empty claim to the French crown.
The longest war was over, though perhaps few were aware of it. After so many truces and renewals, who could have realized that the end had come? Without ceremony or cease-fire, treaty or settlement, the adventure and agony of five generations faded away. National identities were formed by its passage. The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity. The brotherhood of chivalry was severed, just as the internationalism of the universities, under the combined effect of war and schism, could not survive. Between England and France the war left a legacy of mutual antagonism that was to last until necessity required alliance on the eve of 1914.
In the same year as Castillon, madness overtook Henry VI, precipitating the same contest for control of the Englich crown that had so damaged France. Unemployed soldiers and archers returning to England took service with the baronial factions, adding their violence and weapons to the civil Wars of the Roses that now took the place of the war in France. In the same fateful year of 1453 the formidable defenses of Constantinople fell before the siege guns of Mahomet II. The Turks brought a siege train of seventy pieces of artillery headed by a super-bombard hooped with iron, drawn by sixty oxen and capable of launching cannonballs weighing 800 pounds. The fall of Byzantium has supplied a conventional date for the close of the Middle Ages, but an event more pregnant with change took place at the same time.
In 1453–54 the first document printed from movable type was produced by Gutenberg at Mainz, followed in 1456 by the first printed book, the Vulgate Bible. “The Gothic sun,” as Victor Hugo put it with fitting grandiloquence, “set behind the gigantic printing press of Mainz.” The new means of disseminating knowledge and exchange of ideas spread with unmedieval rapidity. Printing presses appeared in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Naples within the next decade, and in Paris, Lyon, Bruges, and Valencia in the 1470s. The first music was printed in 1473. William Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster in 1476 and published that still unsurpassed work of English prose, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in 1484.
With the Tudors on the English throne, a formal settlement between England and France was eventually concluded by the Treaty of Etaples in 1492, a year more significant for other reasons. The energies of Europe that had once found vent in the crusades were now to find it in voyages, discoveries, and settlements in the New World.
The Coucy lineage, after the death of Enguerrand VII, hung by the single thread of Marie’s son Robert de Bar. Philippa died without issue. Isabel, offspring of Coucy’s second marriage, died in 1411, followed or predeceased within six months by her only child, an infant daughter. Perceval, the Bastard of Coucy, left a will in 1437 leaving his seigneurie to the husband of Robert de Bar’s daughter, from which it may be presumed that the only son of Enguerrand VII died without issue. Yet the single thread was to lead to a King. Robert de Bar’s daughter Jeanne married Louis de Luxemburg, Constable of France, and in her turn bore a daughter who married a Bourbon of the branch descended from St. Louis. The grandson of this marriage, Antoine de Bourbon, married Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, and the son of their marriage, with his white plume of Navarre and his famous concession—“Paris is worth a mass”—reached the throne as Henri IV. Courageous, quick-witted, amorous, reasonable, he was the most popular of all French Kings and—perhaps owing to a few genes from Enguerrand VII—a rational man.
The great barony of Coucy, after being united with the royal domain under Louis XII, son of Charles d’Orléans, remained the property of the Orléans branch of the royal house. During the minority of Louis XIV—whose brother Philippe d’Orléans carried the title Sire de Coucy—the formidable castle, originally built to overawe kings, became a focus of the Fronde, the league of nobles opposed to Cardinal Mazarin, the Regent. To destroy a base of his enemies, Mazarin in 1652 blew up parts of the castle, rendering it uninhabitable, though his means were inadequate to bring down the titanic donjon. An earthquake in 1692 shattered more of the castle and left a jagged crack from top to bottom of the donjon, but it still stood, guardian over the empty halls below. One hundred years later the barony’s last seigneur was the Duc d’Orléans, called Philippe Egalité, who, as a member of the National Convention, voted for the death of Louis XVI and was himself a victim of the guillotine a year later. His property, including Coucy, passed to the state.
Meanwhile Enguerrand’s Célestin monastery at Villeneuve de Soissons had been vandalized by the Huguenots, restored and ruined again in the battles of the Fronde, and sold as a private château when the Célestin Order was suppressed in 1781. Sacked during the Revolution, it passed through several hands until purchased by Count Olivier de la Rochefoucauld in 1861. Coucy’s grasp at perpetuity was no more successful than most.
Under Napoleon III, the Commission of Historical Monuments recommended restoration of the castle of Coucy and, short of that, urgent work to prevent deterioration of the keep from the ravages of decay. The choice for restoration lay between Coucy and Pierrefonds, a later and more luxurious castle built in the late 14th century by Louis d’Orléans. Because Coucy would have cost three times as much to restore and Pierrefonds was preferred by the Empress Eugénie as being nearer to Paris, the choice went to the latter. Sadly, the architect Viollet-le-Duc, restorer of the medieval, turned away from the major military structure of the Middle Ages. “Beside this giant, the greatest towers known are but spindles,” he wrote. All he could do was encircle the giant by two belts of iron, repair the roof and major cracks, and install a custodian to prevent further thefts of the castle’s fallen stones.
Silent, deserted, inhabited by owls, the great landmark still inspired awe. Tourists came to gaze, archeologists to study its structure, artists to draw its plans and monuments. Life went on in the village at its base and along the road winding down the hill and through the valley to Soissons. The donjon was impervious to time, to the disorders of man and the disorders of nature, but not to those of the 20th century.
In 1917 Picardy, invaded once more, had been occupied for three years by the German army. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the Sixth Army, urged General Ludendorff, Chief of General Staff, to ensure that the castle of Coucy be spared as a unique architectural treasure of no current military value. Neither side, he pointed out, had attempted to use it for military purposes, and its destruction “would only mean a blow to our own prestige quite uselessly.” Ludendorff did not like appeals to culture. Coucy having been unwisely called to his attention, he decided to make it an example of superior values. Rammed with 28 tons of explosives at his orders, the colossus raised by Enguerrand III in the age of the greatest builders since Greece and Rome was dynamited to the ground.
The outer walls, foundations, underground chambers and tunnels, portions of inner walls and doorways survive over acres of tumbled stones. Above a cracked lintel the unarmored knight still engages a lion in combat. For 700 years the castle had witnessed cycles of human endeavor and failure, order and disorder, greatness and decline. Its ruins remain on the hilltop in Picardy, silent observers as history’s wheel turns.