by Simon Winder
It was the continuing emergency that exhausted all possible help. The figures are all extremely vague but a chronicler in Gelderland called 1315 the year of ‘the great death’. A surviving record from Ypres shows that between May and October 1316, in a population of some twenty-five thousand, three thousand died. In Bruges that summer between a hundred and sixteen and a hundred and fifty-six corpses a week were being collected from streets and houses. These towns would have been overwhelmed at this point by refugees, so it is not known whether these were locals or incomers. As all the herds had died, everyone moved on to eating their way through the semi-wild pig population, which had disappeared by 1316. In any event the saltpans, which were needed to preserve food, meat and fish, stopped working as the atmosphere was too wet for the salt to dry – salt prices also shot up. People fled to the east, resettling in the comparatively underpopulated Habsburg and Polish lands (these ‘Germans’ were in their origin as much Flemish/Dutch as German).
In Flanders somewhere between a tenth and a third of all homesteads were by now abandoned, and monasteries and convents stood empty. Everything that could be eaten had been eaten. Apparently there was no birdsong in northern Europe for several years. It was impossible to plan except for the immediate panic and even quite robust creatures such as geese were eaten rather than kept for their eggs (to the despair of gozzards – at last a context in which this rare and wonderful word can be used). Cities with great financial resources and access to the sea such as Bruges were able to source and pay for grain from south-west France, but further inland it remained catastrophic until, after a last brutally cold winter in 1317/18, things began to recover.
Famine was very rare in Western Europe. A later chronicler in Louvain was able to state clearly (so etched were they in people’s minds) that there had been famine in 1146, 1197, 1316 and 1530. There were aftershocks (an Aachen chronicler talks of ‘tempests, hailstorms and epidemics’ as the flavour of 1322) but recovery seems to have been speedy before the second and completely overwhelming disaster of what came to be called the Black Death. A terrible cocktail of fatal illnesses, this plague was first mentioned in 1333 in China, and reached Sicily in 1346 and France and Germany in 1348. A reasonable estimate is that it killed 45–50 per cent of all Europeans, probably in greater numbers in the Mediterranean than further north. There was of course no understanding of how it killed or why.
Aside from God’s anger, it was ascribed to the fatal conjunction of three planets. More isolated villages, such as in Switzerland, or more thinly settled parts of the Low Countries, could either get off scot-free or be completely emptied. It seems that some two-thirds of Jewish communities were destroyed. In the summer of 1349 the plague reached Tournai, promptly killing the bishop, followed by a few weeks’ lull before it went berserk, killing some 30 per cent of the population. The town council tried to clean up the town morally, with bans on swearing, gambling, working on Sunday, cohabitation – ‘everyone from day to day waited on the will of the Lord’. No money was to be spent on mourning dress, no bells were to be rung. In a weird detail, the town’s famous dice-manufacturers despaired of custom and instead started carving objects which could be used as aids to prayer.
The social structure seems to have broken down completely. Romani, lepers, pilgrims, foreigners were killed on sight. In 1349 some two thousand Jews were killed in Strasbourg with other massacres later in the summer in Mainz and Cologne. Processions of flagellants were formed and great services held in churches at which, presumably, innumerable parishioners were unwittingly infected. Gradually the plague disappeared. Nobody really knows why, although one plausible idea is that the rats which carried it were themselves all killed by it. Each subsequent outbreak (often devastating locally, but not with the same universal horror as the first) seems to have been from a fresh introduction of rats from Asia. The result was enormously worse even than that of the two world wars of the twentieth century – indeed there is no other yardstick available within Europe for such a catastrophe. The Black Death emptied parts of Europe which did not recover for centuries. Some forty thousand German settlements were still empty a hundred years later.
Just to finish this extremely downbeat section it is important to mention the two St Elizabeth Day floods. The Netherlands has been shaped both by floods and by the attempts to thwart future floods. This creates a landscape in many areas which to me, with no previous experience of it, seems thoroughly frightening. Seeing fields so smooth and flat that they appear like the green or brown (depending on season) surface of a liquid and knowing that these fields are below sea-level is something hard not to be freaked out by. One of the drawbacks of going to one of my favourite places in the world, the mouth of the Scheldt, is – when not rhapsodically hopping about staring at the vast ships – the need to see the little town of Breskens, which is hunkered down in the shadow of a vast dike, with the threat of the North Sea hanging over its head like a migraine. The dike obviously works, but I suppose I would just think about living somewhere else.
The scale of the floods that have repeatedly devastated the Netherlands and the massive systems of counterattacks which have channelled and held back sea water and river water form one of the great epics in European history. The Zuiderzee itself is the result of several medieval cataclysms scooping out vast areas of land – indeed Amsterdam exists as a great port because the sea had chewed away to create its site. In the fourteenth century the floods had no upside though and were entirely destructive – in 1375, 1404 and 1421 (the last two oddly both happening on 19 November – hence they are both named after that day’s saint, St Elizabeth of Hungary). In a way that must have only made sense through invoking God’s judgement they lashed at Flanders, Zeeland and Holland, ignoring some villages and sweeping away others. The second flood was so severe that the islands that had been in the mouth of the Scheldt (left over from Doggerland) were wrenched into the North Sea and disappeared for ever. Duke John the Fearless ordered a dike built running south from the Scheldt estuary and parts of it are still there (the Duke John Dike) albeit much cut into and/or upgraded. Nobody really knows how many people were killed – tens of thousands across the three floods without a doubt. The last major Dutch disaster, the floods that hit Zeeland in 1953 and which took advantage of the damage to and neglect of sea defences during the Second World War to kill over fifteen hundred Zeelanders, shows how high the stakes have always been. In a sense, the emphasis that much of the rest of Western Europe gives to fortresses, city walls and so on is merely a pale shadow of the staggering scale of an entire coast fortified against sea water. An almost infinite elaboration of sluices and dikes further and further inland also keeps under control the mouths of Europe’s main river systems, which anciently would have whipped around in their courses like snakes held by the tail. I remember being far inland in Zutphen and moaning about how boring the river IJssel looks there, just an overbig gutter, but its boredom is to a very good purpose.
The bold and the mad
Many years ago a selection of family members and I found ourselves in the Burgundian town of Beaune. We had spent an afternoon at the Hospices de Beaune – an astoundingly beautiful fifteenth-century complex endowed by Duke Philip the Good’s chancellor, Nicolas Rolin, and his wife Guigone de Salins. Our baby became oddly feverish that evening and we had to go to Beaune general hospital. Once it was clear we were English the hospital staff enjoyed themselves pretending not to understand anything we said, although my sister has a degree in French and had a chunk of her adult life in France. I still remember the odd mixture of anxiety over the purple-faced baby and farce over the mime-artist gestures of the staff (gurns, gawps, slow nods, raised palms) as they picked through the tattered fragments of the language of Racine falling from my sister’s lips. Somewhat guiltily though, I remember being furious that it was 1994. We could have had an ill baby at any time between 1443 and 1980 and we would have rushed him to the magical Hospices de Beaune, turning left by Rogier van der Weyden’s great Last Ju
dgement, passed the door where wimpled nuns were grinding possets and boiling unguents, and into the lovely main hall, with its tiles marked with the marriage motto of the Rolins, ‘You alone’. It seemed frustrating to be temporally so near and yet so far – an institution that had lasted many centuries had shut just too early and now we were stuck in this brightly hygienic modern room, as the conversation made its inevitable way round to the beloved French subject of rectal suppositories.
The Hospices are a surprise as so much of the legacy of the Burgundian state has been destroyed. The Emperor Charles V, when he inherited many of the dukes’ lands in the sixteenth century, not only had their favourite palace at Hesdin destroyed completely, but moved the entire town several miles away. One of the odder things that can be done in Brussels is to go down into the cellars below the current Royal Palace where the shattered remnants of the old Coudenberg Palace, completely burned down in 1731, have recently been excavated. Duke Philip the Good’s Aula Magna, the great banqueting hall which was once the most glamorous building in Europe, is still down there – but reduced to a section of floor-tiling that must have fallen through into the cellars as the whole thing collapsed. Some of the great artworks associated with their reigns still exist, some weapons and some of the much rebuilt civic structures (the town halls of Louvain, Brussels, Middelburg), but their domineering presence has been successfully erased both by their Habsburg successors and wave upon wave of violence and bad luck. And yet their actions accidentally made so much of Europe’s future. We still live in a world shaped by their greed, good luck and reckless ambition.
The four dukes – Philip the Bold, John the Fearless, Philip the Good, Charles the Bold – ruled for a little over a century, 1363 to 1477. In many ways they lived in a fool’s paradise as their success relied on the weakness of their opposition. An opposition nadir was probably reached in 1398 when Philip the Good was at a meeting in Rheims between Wenzel, the King of the Germans, and Charles VI, King of France, at which Wenzel (whose authority in any event scarcely reached beyond the chair he was sitting on) was drunk and Charles collapsed into another bout of insanity. The dukes’ lands insinuated themselves along the length of Lotharingia, stuck together from long strands of territory slipped between the rule of France or of Germany. But in practice they all had fairly clear obediences to one side or the other, and these were only temporarily on hold. The dukes’ best strategy could only be to further encourage their rivals in their pursuit of alcoholism or lunacy. The devastation of France by England was also a huge help. When both monarchies recovered, under the Habsburgs in the east and Charles VII and Louis XI in the west, and once the English were kicked out, the dukes’ fun was up.
Philip the Bold, the first in the line, was in many ways just a normal French prince, the son of King John II. The superhuman power and grandeur of the French monarchs is easy to state, but hard to believe. They were sanctioned by God and sat at the heart of a vast, intricate web of relationships, secular and religious, that regulated the entire kingdom. The Capetian dynasty, which had reigned since 987, had a single core competence: an ability to have at least one son who lived to adulthood. This gave them an astonishing cumulative heft: they were not ex-Viking pirates like the Norman chancers in London; nor were they mere embarrassing elected officials like the King of the Germans or the Pope. Once Philip II Augustus had crushed all his English, Norman, Flemish and German rivals at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, he and his descendants switched from being Kings of the Franks (which sounded a bit olden times and tribal) to being Kings of France. How this ‘France’ should be territorially defined became the issue that has dominated Western European history ever since – perhaps only ending with the Saarland being returned to West Germany in 1957 and Algerian independence in 1962.
The power and prestige of the French monarchy allowed the individual sitting on the throne to be far less important than the role. But after an extraordinary run of son-following-son the Capetian generational engine sputtered when Louis X only managed a son born after his own death in 1316, John I, who then himself died aged five days old. This stalled the succession in the previous generation – with Louis’s brother taking over as Philip V and having no sons and, in a final throw, his brother then ruled as the also sonless Charles IV. This set of very short reigns (four kings covering less than fourteen years), aside from really cracking through the sacred oil thoughtfully supplied by the Holy Ghost, had a disastrous result. Using plausible arguments on both sides, the next king could either be Philip VI, the closest but not very close male, or it could be the son of the last three kings’ sister, Isabella. This, highly unfortunately, was not only a King of England but specifically the teenaged psycho Edward III. This argument over rival legitimacies would be picked up again whenever either side was in the right mood, resulting in the Hundred Years War, a ruined France and in the end with England expelled. The claim that the English king was actually also the French king was only given up in 1802, helpfully.
The opening naval battle of Sluis in 1340, in what is now Zeelandic Flanders, was confusingly held in a great bay which is now solid farmland. It is a uniquely peculiar feeling to bowl along in a bus through field after field trying to imagine where hundreds of castled ships full of crossbowmen once slogged it out. The English victory was so total that it removed any chance of France invading England, with some sixteen thousand or more French sailors and soldiers killed and 190 out of 213 ships destroyed or captured. In manoeuvring around the Somme in 1346 (weirdly echoed in the comparably shattering Battle of Agincourt in 1415) the English and French armies faced each other at Crécy and the latter was destroyed. The Count of Flanders was killed, as was the Duke of Lorraine. Calais fell and became an English base for over two centuries.
Philip the Bold enters the story in 1356, with the matchingly disastrous Battle of Poitiers. In a fresh low, King John II of France was captured at the battle, along with his fourteen-year-old son, Philip. He then accompanied his father as a hostage to London, where he spent the time playing chess with the Black Prince. On his return, after the ruinous Treaty of Brétigny handed the whole of south-west France permanently and completely to England, Philip was made Duke of Burgundy, a large, rich territory based around Dijon. The rest of Philip’s life was spent battling with the grim situation of France, ravaged by armed gangs and plague, and with a frightening lack of central authority of which he took full advantage. He was never much of a war leader. Amid serio-comic scenes he was in 1369 put in charge of invading England, gathering a substantial army and arranging for a huge pre-fabricated wooden castle to be made in Normandy (its walls miles long, it was implausibly claimed), but one luckless ship filled with castle was captured by the English in the Channel and the gigantic kit was useless with bits missing. In London, suburbs were being pulled down to give clear fields of fire and a state of emergency was declared. However, the weeks went by. Shivering in the cold and rain at Sluis, facing an ever more stormy and wintry Channel, Philip abandoned the invasion, putting the French on the defensive again for years to come.
Very few people have now heard of Sluis. I grew up in Kent and it is strange to be in what is now a Dutch town which feels so Kentish – the same sort of meandering High Street with people buying little bits of stuff at all hours of the day, stretches of willowed water with ducks, enthusiasm for eating cake. But what is now an inland market town was once the heavily fortified approach to the river which made Bruges one of the world’s greatest ports. Now, this seems like a mere crazy assertion as the whole place is so overwhelmingly dozy, with the river’s silting up turning it into a literal backwater. Together with Ghent and Ypres, Bruges made Flanders one of the most dynamic parts of Europe. Philip the Bold’s great decision was to take advantage of the surprise death of Philip of Rouvres, whose widow Margaret of Flanders, still aged only twelve, would ultimately be heir to Flanders, the County of Burgundy (the Franche-Comté as it will be called from now on), Artois, Nevers and Rethel. As Flanders was part of France, the
newly released King John II duly arranged for Philip’s marriage to Margaret, beating Edward III’s bid to fix her up with one of his own sons, following some dirty work with the Pope.
This was an era of ferocious fighting in Flanders, focused on revolutionary forces in Ghent, which aimed to make itself a city state of a kind familiar across much of Europe (for example among the members of the Hanseatic League – or ‘Easterlings’ as French chroniclers attractively call them). It was the bad luck of Ghent that it fell geographically just inside France, whereas if it had been the other side of the Scheldt it would have been in the Empire and could have done pretty much what it liked, becoming a Flemish Hamburg. Instead Philip the Bold and his father-in-law Louis of Mâle were able to call on the French army, which chewed through the region, taking Ypres and Poperinghe and threatening Bruges. During fighting in the Waasland, some fleeing Ghent troops were able to escape by using their pikes to vault dikes. As its allies disappeared Ghent had little choice but to fight the sort of pitched battle for which city militia are poorly equipped. Its leaders announced: ‘Even if everyone in Flanders was executed, our dried bones would carry on the struggle’. Fighting in thick fog, their army was annihilated at the Battle of West Roosebeke, just north of Passchendaele. Ghent was supported by the English, whose king, wearing his claiming-to-be-King-of-France crown, used this as an opportunity to assert his authority. In 1383 an English army from Calais took Dunkirk and then set about besieging Ypres. The siege was one of the era’s great disasters – it was unsuccessful but so ravaged Ypres and its surroundings that they never recovered: from being a major city like Ghent or Bruges, Ypres slumped down to being the mere market town it has been ever since. The English were eventually forced to withdraw because of the usual great leveller and destroyer of plans, the uncontrollable horrors of dysentery. They retreated to Cassel, then to the coast in a wilderness of recrimination and anger. As one rueful English chronicler wrote: ‘God struck us in our bottoms’.
