by Simon Winder
CHAPTER FOUR
The fearless and the good » Prayer nuts » A word of advice from Mehmet the Conqueror » Poor local decision-making » The bold and the Swiss
The fearless and the good
In many ways the Burgundian state as it developed was like a vast strangler-fig around the borders of France, from the English Channel to the Alps, both crushing France and living off it, using the haziness of Lotharingia to intersperse itself in spaces in between. Both Philip and his son John the Fearless were deeply involved in the unfolding horrors of French politics and clearly saw themselves as French princes trying to intervene to bring stability to Paris in a kingdom ravaged both by the English and, unfortunately, by their own ruthlessness. Enormous sums from the French treasury wound up in Burgundy and the Dukes’ personal gain was just one element in the epic looting of what had once been Europe’s best-run state.1
John the Fearless was famous when young for his involvement in the catastrophic 1396 crusade – a parody of earlier such expeditions, which had themselves often not been wildly successful, particularly not in the Balkans. As mentioned earlier, one of John the Fearless’s distant predecessors as Count of Flanders, Baldwin IX, had been a leader of the Fourth Crusade back in 1204, was crowned Latin Emperor in Constantinople in a vast ceremony at the Hagia Sophia and in the following year wound up being used by the Bulgarian king as a novelty skull drinking vessel. In any event, following alarming Ottoman gains across south-eastern Europe, it was in the grand tradition of Baldwin IX that a large but distinctly B-team of crusaders marched east to take on the armies of Beyazid the Thunderbolt. The accounts of what happened are frustratingly unclear, presumably because the chroniclers wanted to move on and write about something more uplifting. The crusade seems to have been frivolously managed, with a chaos of different contingents and no clear leadership. At the epochal Battle of Nicopolis, Beyazid (who had enjoyably boasted that he would in due time ‘feed his horses on the altar of St Peter’s’) slaughtered them. The French chronicler Froissart said that the disaster could only be compared to the defeat in The Song of Roland. John was captured and obliged to cool his heels in Gallipoli while his father raised the vast ransom of two hundred thousand ducats from his different, presumably unimpressed territories. He also gave Beyazid toadying presents, such as twelve magnificent white chargers with grooms in matching livery. (How did those grooms live out their lives? One of many mysteries.)
John spent the rest of his violent existence entangled both in the affairs of his sprawling inheritance and those of France, whose unhappy but long-lived king Charles VI claimed his name was really George, howled like a wolf and believed himself to be made of glass. France in this period became close to total incoherence as it was torn apart not just by English freebooters but by battles between John’s supporters (the Burgundians) and those of the King’s uncle, Louis of Bourbon (the Armagnacs). John hired the men who successfully assassinated Louis on the streets of Paris in 1407, an almost unprecedented collapse in standards. The final wrecking ball was the arrival of Henry V, who in part won the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 because John held back his own troops and it was the Armagnacs who were massacred there (although one of John’s brothers was also killed). The French Dauphin later organized John’s own famous assassination on the Bridge at Montereau, at a meeting disguised as a mere diplomatic exchange of cordialities. It was this sequence of events that made Burgundy a separate state rather than merely a piggy-bank for a French prince. The killing of John the Fearless caused his son and inheritor Philip the Good to recoil completely from France and to ally Burgundy with England. It was not possible to forgive anyone (including the king) who had connived in the murder, particularly the young Dauphin, who became king as Charles VII in 1422 after his miserable howling father at last died. Unlike his father and grandfather, Philip the Good hardly visited Paris, instead shifting during his long reign between his courts at Bruges, Lille, Dijon, Hesdin, The Hague and – most importantly – Brussels, the capital of Brabant, which he had inherited in 1430.
The longer Philip reigned the more concrete Burgundy became as its own realm. I think he was called ‘the Good’ because he did a good job, not because he was particularly good in a moral sense. He was involved in ferocious wars and seems in many ways just as mean and sardonic as his father and indeed his son (the future Charles the Bold). He scooped up a number of further territories. Most unchivalric was probably buying the ancient Marquisate of Namur. This was in the hands of another branch of the Dampierre family, whose extinction had handed Flanders to Philip’s grandfather. As the ruler of Namur had no descendants he offered simply to sell the place in return for cash payments to fund his extravagant lifestyle until his death, which happened several extremely enjoyable years later. A lot more serious and consequential was Philip’s long war with the remarkable Jacqueline of Holland.
In 1417 Count William, ruler of Holland, Zeeland and Hainaut, died of a dog bite. Both John the Fearless and Philip the Good were long and deeply involved in the affairs of these lands. John was married to Count William’s sister Margaret; William was married to John’s sister, also called Margaret, unhelpfully. The most significant battle of John’s reign had been on behalf of her and William’s younger brother, John (also unhelpful) of Bavaria, who was Prince-Bishop of Liège (a large separate ecclesiastical territory which cut across the southern Netherlands) and which resulted in the crushing of his rebellious subjects at the Battle of Othée – the secular ring-leaders being executed, the religious ring-leaders drowned, as it was forbidden to spill the blood of churchmen. The uneasy relations between these different siblings could have broken in a number of ways, but were dominated by Margaret’s having a son (Philip the Good) and William only having a daughter, Jacqueline. After William’s unlucky encounter with a frothing pet, John of Bavaria dumped being in holy orders, took over as count and quickly married to see if he could come up with an heir himself, but in the event had no children.
Jacqueline of Holland married John IV, the ruler of Brabant, in 1418. Brabant had been the possession of John the Fearless’s brother Anthony, who had been killed at Agincourt, and was now inherited by his son John IV, who was unfortunately only fifteen years old and, from the one surviving drawing of him, a total weed. John IV was meant to protect Jacqueline’s inheritance but was incapable of doing so. Jacqueline soon lost patience with him and fled with her mother to Brussels, then London and then decided to marry Henry V’s younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, having found a helpful, if generally disregarded, anti-Pope short of cash to annul her earlier marriage. None of this reflects well on anyone. John of Bavaria, realizing the game was up and his throwing in the priesthood and marrying had just wasted everyone’s time, made Philip the Good his heir. He was shortly thereafter assassinated in The Hague with a poisoned prayer book (yes, really – nothing can beat the fifteenth century). Duke Humphrey and Jacqueline hunkered down in Mons but then, in a scene almost too stupid to be written down, Humphrey fled back to England with one of Jacqueline’s ladies-in-waiting under his arm. Jacqueline was put under house arrest in Ghent but, disguising herself as a man, fled to Antwerp and then rallied support in Gouda.
A long, brutal war followed in 1425–8, devastating much of the northern Netherlands, between her own supporters and those of Philip the Good. Individual towns fought on either side, with places such as Rotterdam and Leiden pro-Philip. Eventually Jacqueline retired to private life, keeping her titles but agreeing at the crucial and far-reaching Reconciliation of Delft that Philip could administer the territories and inherit if she had no children. The real Pope then intervened in 1428 to say that Jacqueline’s first marriage was still legitimate – but the sorry John IV had died the year before and the main impact this had was to allow Humphrey to marry the lady-in-waiting (who proved to be a sorceress). Jacqueline also remarried, but died still with no heir aged thirty-five having had a quite extraordinarily eventful, concentrated and interesting life.
I apol
ogize for this blur of names and events (which could be presented in theatrical farce form, along the lines of Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife or Not Now, Darling), but this sequence, created by the gyrating vagaries of individual lusts, greeds and miscalculations, was carving out future nations. A series of territories which had previously been simply north-westerly elements in the Empire had been wrenched away. Numerous protests by the impotent Emperor Sigismund were ignored by all parties. By the time of Philip’s death in 1467 he had torn lands from France (principally Burgundy, Flanders, Artois, Boulogne, Vermandois, Ponthieu and Picardy) and from the Empire (Zeeland, Brabant, Holland, Hainaut, Namur, Limburg, Luxembourg – another coup which I, alas, just cannot also cope with here, but it’s really interesting: look it up!2 – and the Franche-Comté).
Another great shift was happening further south. This is not the place to get too involved in the Lotharingian vagaries of the Duchy of Bar, but it was split in two parts by the River Meuse – one owning allegiance to France (the enjoyably named ‘Barrois mouvant’) and the other in the Empire (the ‘Barrois non mouvant’). Its relevance here is that in 1412, just a few yards into the French part of Bar, Joan of Arc was born: a woman who would, in an extraordinarily short time, transform the uncrowned Charles VII of France’s position. Inspired by a series of visions Joan, in ways now hard to understand, inspired the French army and ruined the Anglo-Burgundian plans to partition France. Taking part in Charles’s triumphant coronation she was then captured by Burgundians and handed over to the English who burned her as a witch in 1431, aged nineteen. Like Jacqueline of Holland (who died later in the decade), in the end we know frustratingly little about her. These figures are all in different ways ciphers, living just before the great French writer Philippe de Commynes arrives on the scene to revolutionize the vividness and psychological complexity of the next generation of political actors.
It seems clear from surviving chronicles that Philip the Good and his son Charles the Bold had no real sense of just how unforgiving their enemies the King of France and the Emperor were. They were surrounded by a great, ever-accumulating cloud of animosity which would only in the end be dispelled by the destruction of their dynasty. Philip the Good schemed and flattered to create a series of dynastic delayed-action bombs – arrangements by which, once specific individuals had died, he or his successors would inherit territories which, strictly speaking, were not theirs to own. Now safely back in his reviving capital of Paris, Charles VII, having been given a hard push by Joan of Arc, would take a long view but, with a confidence equal to Philip, was sure he would in the end expel all the outsiders who still squatted in his territories. His son Louis XI, one of the greatest of all French kings, would exercise a malicious cunning in a different league to Philip and Charles. The other bad news for the Burgundians was the new Emperor Frederick III, head of the Habsburg family. He was a figure of sometimes almost dormouse-like inanition, but nonetheless inherited a far more powerful personal base than his helpless predecessor Sigismund. His family links and possessions across the southern Empire and outside it made him hugely more powerful, and he too was looking with cold disfavour on the Burgundians.
The tragedy that now unfolded was not really to do with Charles the Bold, who fully inherited the Burgundian lands in 1467, but with the degree to which he and his predecessors’ actions had devastated the autonomy of their northern holdings. John the Fearless’s crushing of Liège, repeated Burgundian, French and English ravaging of Flanders and the ending or expulsion of the old regional dynasties meant that those actually living in Ghent or Antwerp, Leiden or Mons, Luxembourg or Maastricht had lost any semblance of control over their lives. The proud civic worlds of the cloth towns and the same period’s frenzy of great city building (such as the town halls of Arras, Leuven and Brussels) would do nothing for people whose fate now entirely rested on the remorseless Charles the Bold’s staying alive. But Charles the Bold only had one child, and she was a daughter. It was a shame that Jacqueline of Holland did not live long enough to enjoy the situation.
Prayer nuts
Spiritually I have always been a bit confused. Both my parents were Catholic and I was raised as Catholic. But from an early age I was sent away to very Protestant schools. I cannot swear that I noticed the difference for a long time, but it gradually and dumbly occurred to me that these were two faiths with very different flavours. This quirk in my religious background has pursued me as an adult and inflected my attitude towards history, culture and writing in curious ways. Much of this book is, at the hidden wiring level, about this topic – for the obvious reason that since the Reformation the story of Lotharingia has been its crazy-paving of faith. My own sympathies veer around pathetically, depending on where I am. If I walk into some vast Reformed hall-church in Gelderland, with the only decoration provided by the shapes of the lettering in the prayer book, I recoil as a Catholic: oh, the arrogance of man, the cul-de-sac of mere words, arid and cheerless. If I walk into some baroque Catholic church in the Rhineland, an explosion of whipped-cream stucco, paintings of tortured saints, sobbing Marys, I recoil as a Protestant: emotionalism gone mad, the empty bluster of a picture-book religion, oh but this is practically Filipino. Of course, both these responses are infantile, curiously unmediated and not malicious as such. But through an accident of upbringing I find myself equally drawn to and equally repulsed by the great schism that has for five hundred years torn this part of Europe apart – I am as moved by an old Bible in German as by a really splashy Rubens. In the astonishing encounter at Worms between the young Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther I am paralysed by indecision as to which side’s colours to wear. The iconoclasm that burns through the Netherlands in the 1560s is at one level a cultural and spiritual catastrophe, at another a welcome bit of tidying.
I am not going to say for a moment that my mental struggles offer me any serious insight into the religious battles that have at irregular intervals ravaged this landscape, but I can at least say that I am oddly inoculated. I am entranced and revolted by both sides and there is no subtext to this book which views the triumph of one or the other as being sought-after, more natural or more progressive. If anything, this is probably an anti-Weber book in that it is Lotharingia that is the home to the great experimental laboratory that disproves any specific link between Protestantism and capitalism: the whole place ends up bristling with purely Catholic smokestacks and industry. And, of course, the chaos of different islands of religious practice is in itself central to the idea that there is a natural and welcome fracturing here which has had a profound effect on Europe’s history.
Criss-crossing between different parts of the Low Countries and around the Rhineland it would be hard not to notice that this is a scarred religious landscape – that before the much later overlays of ideological and physical damage there was an era in which the physical nature of the entire townscape, once dominated by religious buildings, was in contention. Coming from England, where many great churches remain but their paintings and fittings were for the most part burnt or melted down during the Reformation, it is hard not to revel in the rich, beautiful chaos of the Continent. Only a few minutes on a train can take you from the whitewashed austerity of Dordrecht to the almost campy excesses of Antwerp. Only a bleak and uninvolving bus journey separates the old Calvinist powerhouse of Heidelberg from the ancient Catholic powerhouse of Speyer.
Being batted back and forth by different religious practices is a stimulating business. Their different geographical areas are a side effect of the most bitter fighting, provoked substantially (but not totally) by the highest stakes: the means of securing the afterlife. The line that can be traced through the region just north of Belgium is either (from a Catholic point of view) the tragic high-water mark in the extirpation of heresy, struggled over for generations before being abandoned for shameful reasons of realpolitik, or (from a Protestant Dutch point of view) the point at which the oozing lava of Rome was, through the triumphant struggle of generations, stopped and the
Reformed Church survived.
The formal origins of the Reformation lie further to the east, with Luther’s grandstanding. But the continuity of Catholicism has meant that countless treasures have been cherished which would have elsewhere been burned. During an outbreak of iconoclasm in Ghent, the bonfires of paintings, altars, hangings, sculptures, indeed decorations of any kind, were so huge that they could be seen ten miles away. Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Sacred Lamb was only saved because it was taken apart and hoisted up into the tower. In the face of a second outburst of iconoclasm, the picture had its own armed guard. A very large part of all Western Europe’s artistic endeavour throughout its history was destroyed in the space of days.
Areas of the Netherlands which were later forcibly re-Catholicized by the Spanish provided an amazing boon for artists such as Rubens, who had to start again in creating fresh decorations, and this vast repopulation with imagery must have had a profound impact on the economy of the Spanish Netherlands. Some other places were sheltered from having to do this and maintained continuity, even if they lost all kinds of treasures to warfare. We know, for example, almost nothing about the painters of the Cologne school. Various disasters over the centuries have shaken any names loose from their works and there is therefore a frustrating (in art historical terms) lack of narrative or drama – they’ve no Vasari. The one exception is Stefan Lochner, and we can only link him to specific pictures because of a single mention in Dürer’s diary, where he pays a fee for Lochner’s triptych in the cathedral to be opened so he can look at it. This one flimsy comment allows an individual to step forward. There is one painting by Lochner which I can never shake off – the Madonna in a Rose Bower, painted in the 1440s. It is a tiny panel that uses such dense, rich colour and such meticulous miniaturization that it makes merely human eyes smart – it seems designed for creatures with different optics. Jesus looks a bit like a plastic doll with moveable limbs, but otherwise everything from Mary’s face and crown to the fruit and musical instruments of her angel attendants is a form of perfection – a kind of art that can go no further.
