by Simon Winder
The bold and the Swiss
There is a notorious region of Mexico which is rife with quicksand. These terrible dry bogs come and go depending on weather and temperature and can open up at your feet at any time. Apparently quicksand is so awful because it is the way that you instinctively flounder in it that creates the vacuum which drags you under. The only way to survive is to stay quite still and treat it like water: you naturally float in it and can move towards the edge by doing a very slow and shallow breast stroke. The problem is that almost nobody has the courage to start to swim – most Mexicans victims know the importance of staying still, but having created that equilibrium simply cannot bring themselves to take an action which, if misjudged, would, with the slightest flicker of panic, drag them down to an appalling death. As a result the surface of this grim, flat region is dotted with the skulls of unfortunates who ended their lives in a state of total stasis, the skulls still topped by sun-bleached sombreros.
No, well, I don’t believe it either. But I was told this story so many years ago that I no longer remember who to blame. And it has always struck me as an extremely good historical metaphor. Whenever we are looking at events from the past so many instances come up of actions which to us seem merely a mad lunge, but the alternative would be a form of stasis which simply has no place in human history. There is something about leadership and about the relations of nations that impels action, sometimes harmless, sometimes catastrophic. There are almost no instances of a positive immobilism by any ruler. This book is scattered with figures who instead of carefully following coherent policies end up floundering and being destroyed. There is clearly some deep human requirement not to end up as a floating skull in a sombrero.
The late fifteenth century is a particularly fruitful period for seemingly pointless military activism. It is such a relief to get to the sixteenth century, when grand-scale realpolitik, social discord and religious hatreds clear the air – at last people are being killed for a purpose. By contrast it is difficult not to feel that earlier wars are sometimes simply too frivolous to invite analysis. A fine example is provided by the tiny, painfully awkward King of France Charles VIII, who ruled in the 1480s and 1490s. He seems to have been universally disliked, with something about his manner that failed to appear kingly or plausible. On a whim he decided to invade Italy, to make himself King of Naples. Putting together a huge, technologically sophisticated army he proceeded to hammer his way down the peninsula, destroying a sequence of great Renaissance towns with his new artillery, wrecking one of the most prosperous and impressive areas of Europe and initiating a new, horrible era in Italian history that went on for generations.
Having spent a few weeks in Naples, Charles then fought his way back up to France, seemingly not having thought through that Naples’ southern location meant that he was entirely reliant on the continuing goodwill, which was not forthcoming, of the towns he had smashed or threatened on the way down. In a further entirely arbitrary twist, back in France, aged only twenty-seven, he smacked his head on a lintel and died. Given how small he was, this suggests that a secret cabal of courtiers had, while he was in Italy, working with fanatical yet discreet carpenters, carefully lowered the height of all the palace doors in the hope this might happen. Or, more plausibly, someone helped his head connect with the lintel. In any event it is impossible to read about Charles VIII and not be amazed by the sheer pointlessness of it all – all those thousands of deaths. Two side effects were that both Parmesan cheese and syphilis were spread across Europe by Charles’s returning veterans and in addition the dazzling culture of the Renaissance was squarely implanted in France, inaugurating a new era. But a counter-argument to the last point might be that a similar, but less Triumph-of-Death effect could have been achieved by just sending a polite letter to Leonardo da Vinci asking for a few tips.
The other giant instance of the era’s military futility springs from the generation before, with the careering shambles of Charles the Bold. In English he is called ‘the Bold’ just as his great-grandfather was called Philip the Bold. But in French they are different words – ‘Téméraire’ for Charles and ‘Hardi’ for Philip, the former with a reckless, dashing edge and the latter with a sense of boldness allied to strategic vision. In his nearly ten years as Duke of Burgundy Charles frittered his inheritance on incoherent and poorly thought-through warmongering. In Lotharingian terms you can see him stepping over a number of boundaries. He unknowingly walked into the infra-red alarm system that separated his territories’ French and French-Fleming systems from the squarely German world that lay to its east. What he saw as a rounding off or filling in of his inheritance (which was, as a quick glance at a map would show, a crazy-paving of bits) was seen by others as a mortal threat. Rhinelanders, Swiss and Lorrainers all had reasons to want him dead.
Charles never gave any evidence of being aware of the vast scale of forces accumulating against him. He sneered at the Swiss as mere ‘bestial people’ and saw all his enemies as just a sequence of military roadblocks to be readily cleared. He also seems to have imagined that he had a best friend in the convulsively tortuous French King Louis XI – little Charles VIII’s father – who in practice dreamt of little else except his destruction. The seeming inertia of the long-serving Emperor Frederick III also masked his determination to destroy Charles. At the long, futile Burgundian Siege of the Rhineland fortress of Neuss, Charles discussed with Frederick the possibility of marrying his only child, Mary of Burgundy, to Frederick’s eldest son, Maximilian. This conversation, which appeared to strengthen Charles and which also involved Frederick taking seriously Charles’s plan to be made King of Burgundy, in the end transferred almost everything that Charles and his ancestors had worked for into the Habsburg pocket.
It is hard to exaggerate the mayhem Charles initiated. During the Siege of Neuss, other Rhineland cities understandably began to panic. We have remarkable detail about Strasbourg’s actions in the winter of 1475. Worrying that when Charles had finished with Neuss, he would come for Strasbourg, that city’s authorities destroyed five monastery complexes and six hundred and twenty houses to create a belt of empty, defendable ground outside the walls, diverted the course of the Rhine to ring the city and bought enough corn to feed the inhabitants for ten years and three years’ worth of salt and wine. There cannot have been a mercenary in the whole of the Western world who wasn’t cheerily cleaning his crossbow, selling himself to the highest bidder and thinking about settling down after the current business was over. Worried rumours reached Bern that Charles planned to kill everyone in the entire city and reduce it to meadowland, with a stone plaque saying, ‘Here once there was a town called Bern.’
The ins and outs of Charles the Bold’s campaigns are enjoyable, but they are in the end just the actions of Aesop’s frog puffing himself up until he explodes. He seemed quite oblivious to Louis’s implacable campaign to reunite the bits of France alienated during past humiliations, to the recovery under the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire and to Swiss alarm in the face of his encroachments in the far south of Germany. Charles went from being within an inch of becoming King of Burgundy in 1473 to being a naked corpse in the snow, gnawed at by wild animals, at the beginning of 1477.
The much rebuilt Grandson Castle in the far west of Switzerland (just opposite a restaurant offering ‘medieval specialities’) was where implacable forces began to press in on Charles. The castle itself is a treat – not just featuring a studded and iron-barred toilet door and a comically perfunctory fake torture chamber, but also an eighteenth-century statue of Baby Jesus made from painted lime-wood that at some point has had an apple nailed to its head to convert it into William Tell’s brave little son Walter. The Swiss castle garrison surrendered to Charles but were then massacred in grotesque ways in the same manner as Dinant earlier in the hope that this would terrify the Swiss into submission. Instead the outrage became a defining feature of Swiss nationalism.
Three huge blows now destroyed Charles’s army, all th
anks to the formidable ‘Great League of Upper Germany’. His wealth and reputation and the resources of his many lands made him formidable but at battles outside Grandson (the Swiss urged on by the blaring horns of the men of Uri), by the lake at Murten and outside Nancy, all these were whittled away. Murten was just a slaughter and Charles’s army was never the same. Immense piles of booty filled Swiss dairy towns with jewels, gold and tapestries. As the Dukes did not have a real capital they were obliged to carry much of their most glamorous stuff with them, which presupposed they would not have to flee a battlefield. The silk battle flags have long rotted away but used to be the pride of Bern Cathedral. Basle still has some of its ‘Burgundy Booty’ – indeed its great city museum’s origins lie in its display – such as two huge cannon made in Mechelen and Mons, and a jerkin reinforced with pieces of steel to deflect dagger blows once owned by Charles. This last is the most extraordinary object – a rare piece of clothing surviving for over half a millennium to mock the bad fortune of its one-time wearer. Lucerne once had a special room of which a drawing survives from 1513 with a tantalizing glimpse of robes, a portable altar, a sword, a glamorous chair, some banners, a goblet. Much of what was grabbed simply disappeared into the pockets of nimble-fingered pikemen. Charles’s great yellow diamond called ‘The Florentine’3 was passed down the centuries from hand to hand across Europe, handled by popes, dukes and Habsburgs, vanishing for ever after the First World War.
Having lost much of his artillery, much of his prestige and many of his best men, Charles tried to stop up yet another hole in his collapsing patrimony by besieging Nancy, from which his men had been expelled by forces loyal to the Duke of Lorraine from whom he had taken it. The conditions were horrific, with snow ‘half a lance deep’, and some four hundred Burgundians frozen to death just on Christmas Eve. One miffed knight said that someone should use a bombard to fire Charles himself over the walls of Nancy, and with a dash of the debonair charm that won him so many friends, Charles had the knight hanged. Lorraine was the territory Charles needed to join together what he and his predecessors had called ‘our lands round here’ (the north) and ‘our lands over there’ (the south). In a driving snowstorm a joint Lorrainer–Swiss relief force destroyed Charles’s army and killed Charles.
There is a highly unhistorical but richly enjoyable painting of the battle by the young Eugène Delacroix in the Museum of Fine Arts in Nancy. It was commissioned by Charles X in 1828 shortly before his own regime collapsed, although – being an old stager on revolutionary matters – he knew, unlike the earlier Charles, how to flee. This spectacular panorama takes full advantage of battle conditions to show a sort of sandwich of yellow-white clouds above and dirty white snow below with the filling provided by a mass of struggling men and a despairing, wild-eyed Charles the Bold staring up at the swaggering, brilliantly armoured young Duke of Lorraine preparing to destroy the dynasty.
During the night soldiers fleeing from the battle reached Metz and, standing on the frozen moat, pleaded with the city watch to let them in. When they explained what had happened the watch simply refused to believe them and thought they were vagabonds trying to trick them into giving them somewhere to sleep for the night. When at last the gates were opened many of the survivors died of frostbite, shock and exposure in the Metz hospitals over the next day or two. The news gradually spread across Europe that Europe’s most powerful, haughty and glamorous ruler was dead and that a nineteen-year-old girl was the new ruler of Burgundy.
CHAPTER FIVE
The great inheritance » Mary the Rich and the future of the world » New management at Hawk Castle » ‘Beware, beware, God sees!’ » Uses for paper
The great inheritance
It is striking how much of France’s history is not involved with its sea coasts. During various points in the Hundred Years War, France had hardly any access to the Atlantic, with every harbour in English, Breton or Burgundian hands. It was only in the sixteenth century that the great port of Le Havre was founded and it was reckoned that Louis XIV in his entire, interminable reign only ever actually saw the sea himself on three occasions, all his bewigged adventures being played out in purely inland locations. A general theory could be proposed that the sea coasts were simply not vital organs of the French state and that it was a naturally inland power. In the centuries-long struggles between France and England, England won the immediate issue of the security of the English Channel because it was life-and-death for that country, whereas for France the Channel was always something of an optional extra. A matching general theory would be that English armies whenever they were marching inland through France always suffered from a lack of belief back in London and felt less and less convinced by their role with every step they took. Temporary triumphs always seemed to end in a fiasco for the English, even if it might take a few years for the French state to rally itself to throw them out. The two periods of most thrilling possibility, after Crécy and after Agincourt, proved in the end equally ephemeral. Indeed, one of the reasons Agincourt still has such resonance in the memory of the English was that so many years went by with no comparable victory (nearly three centuries, with the Battle of Blenheim). For the English armies there always seems to be another round of rousing speeches and cheers at Calais followed a few months later by everyone dying of starvation, plague or wounds.
In the later fifteenth century a period of extraordinary fluidity and action was played out in the French, Flemish and English Channel ports. Rather like Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays there is simply too much of a crush of people rushing on and off stage in a blur of wimples, tabards and plate armour for it to be particularly involving. One of the reasons that Philippe de Commynes’ memoirs are so entertaining is that he looks back on his lifetime and shrugs his shoulders in disbelief – the hand of God seems by miles the best answer to every outcome, as one year’s proud horseman becomes next year’s trampled corpse. Calais is particularly busy (‘Say, shipmate, bain’t that Margaret of Anjou again?’) with a version of the Wars of the Roses which is rather like being confined backstage as everyone jostles and gets ready for their turn in the main story. At one point a nerve-racked Edward IV landed in Calais with his younger brother (the future Richard III) with no cash or further prospects and was forced to pay the ship’s captain with his fur-lined coat before heading off to shiver in The Hague as Charles the Bold’s indigent guest (‘never such a beggarly company’, Commynes sniffs). But then Charles packed Edward off to Zeeland, hired him an Easterling escort fleet and he headed back to England and triumphed.
The greatest drama lay entirely in the mind of Louis XI. This extraordinary man, encircled by belligerent opportunists on every side, ended up dishing them all. He is not a figure who has any resonance in the English-speaking world, but is much relished in France as a figure of succulent pantomime horror. In Paris the incomparable waxworks at the Musée Grévin enshrine this very beautifully – with one of its oldest tableaux showing a macabre Louis XI in his tights and furs mocking the despairing Cardinal de la Balue in the hideous crate-like iron cage where he was confined for eleven years. This scene is apparently a little bit untrue, but it has filled generations of Parisian schoolchildren with the right general idea about Louis. More broadly these waxworks have given my own family permanent happiness with photos we have had on a wall for many years of our young sons in cafe conversation with a wax Jean-Paul Sartre and an even waxier Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Louis had an extraordinary ability to frighten people, but also to know when simply to wait – for years if necessary. Each concession he made, surrendering the Somme towns and Amiens to Charles the Bold for example, he viewed as a temporary expedient. His greatest asset was to stay alive, steering France for twenty-two years until its situation was completely transformed. He was someone who loved special prison cages, but also misdirection, secret letters, dropped hints, embassies with false instructions. Commynes was intimate with him and was astounded above all by the sheer, needless complexity of his master’s
proliferating schemes.
One of Louis’s key enemies was his own younger brother, Charles. He was the heir to the throne and in various twists and turns gained tremendous territories, becoming Duke of Berry, Guyenne and Normandy. In conjunction with the Burgundians and Bretons he thought he was running rings around Louis, but was not. Chatting with Commynes one day Charles joked about how ‘Instead of the one King there is, I would like there to be six’, the credo of all those who relished French disunity. Charles lost his role as heir in 1470 when Louis had a son (the future Charles VIII) and then died in 1472, probably of venereal disease, aged twenty-five, and his three duchies reverted to Louis. The uneasy but real alliance between Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold resulted in 1475 in an enormous English army arriving at Calais, planning to crush Louis for good. This was the result of Edward’s rather drunk/tearful, we’re-putting-together-the-old-band wish to reignite the Henry V St Crispin’s Day magic. It all ended in shameful farce as Louis, instead of obligingly marching out to battle as part of an Agincourt Re-enactment Society, simply offered Edward and his key entourage a huge sum of money to go away. The negotiations outside Amiens were carried out between Edward and Louis on a fun-sounding specially built bridge, with the two halves separated by a lattice (and without a little door of the kind that had resulted in John the Fearless being hacked to death under similar circumstances – everyone was very alert to that story). Charles the Bold had misunderstood the situation and remained distant from Edward’s army, never imagining such a treacherous deal could be done. Edward demanded to be made the next King of France (‘as usual’ says Commynes), but then settled for cash. The busy sailors of the Calais squadron must have allowed themselves some small expressions of irritation as the low-self-esteem but very rich army commanders slunk back on board.
