René followed up this disappointment in Italy by turning to a new field of chivalric endeavour, and he now produced the literary works that are his most lasting legacy. The most famous was also the first: the Treatise on the Form and Devising of a Tournament. This was written around 1451–52, and exists in an absolutely stunning manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale illuminated by Barthélemy van Eyck, who would produce numerous masterpieces as René’s court painter. These are some of the most iconic images of the Middle Ages, showing richly caparisoned knights fighting and lavishly dressed ladies watching them, all in incredible detail. The complete manuscript can be viewed on Mandragore, the Bibliothèque Nationale’s manuscript website.49
René had already held his great tournaments, so he was definitely an authority on the subject, but although René’s events can be called ‘tournaments’ in the sense of great gatherings of knights with formalized combat, the actual form of combat at these events was the joust, which was easier to choreograph. For exactly this reason, the joust was much more common in the 15th century and further evolved into the pas d’armes, a scripted event often based on Arthurian legend, where an elaborate dramatic scene would be enacted that eventually included some kind of combat.
Thus René’s treatise is in a sense a formal exercise, giving directions for a type of event that usually wasn’t held, although René may have needed to codify the rules for tournaments because most people didn’t know them. It is this that makes the treatise such a valuable source, because it provides minute detail about every possible aspect of the tournament: how to announce it, whom to invite, the equipment used by the knights, the preparations required at the venue and how to choose and reward the winner. René also elaborates the social function of the tournament, which was becoming paramount in the 15th century, not least as a consequence of the changes in warfare that we have already seen – the appearance of guns, the reliance on mercenaries and the rise in mortality in warfare. The position of knights in medieval society had changed radically, and the tournament (or joust) had become much more important as a means of asserting their social role than preparing them for battle. But this did not make it a worthless exercise, and it was not the case that nobles pining for a chivalric past were simply recreating it as fantasy.50
Gilles de Rais: The Legend of Bluebeard
One of René’s former comrades from the glory years of Joan of Arc’s campaigns provides a much better example than René of a fantasist wasting his life and property on ostentation, but the truly horrifying conclusion of his story prevents him from being compared directly to René. Gilles de Rais, who had been a Marshal of France and very closely connected to Joan of Arc in the siege of Orleans and Charles VII’s coronation, had retired from military life in the 1430s and devoted himself to pursuits that do not seem so different from those of René. Gilles constructed a Chapel of the Holy Innocents where he personally supervised the decoration and designed robes and other decorative items. He produced a theatrical pageant, Le Mistère du Siège d’Orléans, which was on an astonishing scale and included hundreds of speaking parts and extras with lavish costumes, and was performed in Orleans and elsewhere for huge crowds who were given unlimited hospitality. Gilles essentially bankrupted himself on these projects, and had to sell of most of his property, and this seems to be partially responsible for his later behaviour.
Gilles became involved in the occult, particularly alchemy and the summoning of demons. We have seen that there was quite a bit of this diabolical interest around the Dauphin’s court in the 1420s, but for Gilles we have detailed depositions about exactly what he did. The reason we have these is that Gilles also seems to have been a paedophile and serial killer, and he abused and murdered an unknown number of children, perhaps as many as 200. Gilles confessed in detail to the sexual assaults he performed throughout the late 1430s and how he murdered the children. The killings came to an end in 1440, when a violent dispute with a clergyman led to an ecclesiastical investigation that brought the crimes to light. At his trial, the parents of missing children in the surrounding area and Gilles’ own confederates in the crimes testified against him. Gilles was condemned to death and hanged at Nantes on 26 October 1440.51
Gilles of course is known as ‘Bluebeard’, reputedly because he rode a grey Barbary horse known as a Barbe bleu, which can also be read as ‘Bluebeard’. His story was later adapted by Perrault into the tale of the man who murdered his wives, which strangely is less horrifying than the actual events. Although in many ways Gilles served contemporaries as a standard cautionary tale about extravagance and waste leading to sin, the level of detail in Gilles’s confession provides early information about sexual deviance and the psychology of a murderer. Needless to say, this has no connection to King René, and his chivalric pageants and the types of display he indulged in had a very different purpose.
King René’s Other Literary Works
I think it is easy to see the potential political value of the Order of the Crescent and René’s tournaments and jousts, but it is harder to argue that literary compositions such as his chivalric allegories and romances encouraged people to see him as a political or military leader. Not him, perhaps, but even if René now preferred to be an author, he had not given up Angevin political ambitions: he had simply shifted them onto his son Jean of Calabria. Jean remained extremely active in pursuing the various Angevin claims, and René could assist him by increasing his reputation and network of contacts.
A possible reason for René’s decision to let his son pursue his claims was the death of Isabelle of Lorraine at the age of 44 in February 1453. Isabelle had ruled Naples when René was imprisoned in Burgundy and governed Anjou and Provence when René himself was clinging to power in Naples, and she had been a powerful figure in the mould of Yolanda of Aragon. She and René were clearly close, and on hearing that she was ill he rushed back from Provence to be with her when she died. As he had with his son, René expressed his grief in artistic terms by inventing the device of a bow with a broken string to symbolize his sadness, coupled with the Italian motto Arco per lentare, piaga non sana (‘stilling the bow doesn’t heal the wound’).52
The duchy of Lorraine had belonged to Isabelle, and with her death Jean of Calabria became Duke of Lorraine. This was another reason for the changing of the guard, and René now does seem to have been content for Jean to continue the attempt to take Naples and pursue the other Angevin claims. René also married the twenty-one year-old Jeanne de Laval on 10 September 1454. We will recall that René and Isabelle of Lorraine had been betrothed and married very young, and the marriage had been arranged by Yolanda of Aragon. Although Isabelle and René do seem to have cared for each other, René’s relationship with Jeanne was more tender. After his second marriage, with his acceptance of the futile political situation in Italy and the end of the Hundred Years War, which absolved him from the necessity of further military action, René finally allowed himself to indulge fully in the cultural pursuits that most interested him, and Jeanne participated in these.53 Jeanne and René developed their own device, which would appear on the reverse of the medal René commissioned of Jeanne,54 of two turtledoves wearing necklaces that tie them together. This charming device also appears in Jeanne’s psalter.55
The manuscripts associated with René contain the most striking imagery of the period. Although the images from the Treatise on Tournaments are perhaps the best known today for their realistic depiction of knights, it is the illuminations – also by Barthélemy van Eyck – for René’s chivalric romances that are the most visually stunning. In René’s moral treatise, the Mortification of Vain Pleasure of 1455, in addition to the – very beautiful – portrayals of horses and carriages and knights besieging castles, we have the utterly extraordinary images of three richly dressed queens and a female bishop crucifying a heart and impaling it with a lance. Of course these are allegorical figures, but the images of a heart nailed to the cross are unlike anything else produced in the period.56
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sp; Even more direct in their appeal are van Eyck’s illuminations for René’s romance The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart of 1457. Again, there are representations of knights at pas d’armes that are almost certainly illustrations of the kinds of events René organized in reality, and more prosaically a long interlude where the arms are displayed of great heroes such as Hercules, Aeneas, Julius Caesar and Achilles, as well as the arms of Charles VII, Louis XI (as Dauphin), Louis of Orleans, the Duke de Berry, Philip the Good of Burgundy, Charles of Orleans and King René himself. Yet it seems these scenes are only prosaic to me: the mystical elements of the illuminations have prompted wild speculation by some, and René’s connection with Provence, Jerusalem, chivalric orders and mysticism are an irresistible cocktail for conspiracy theorists seeking to identify custodians of lost knowledge. René is just as much a gift for the fantasy writer as Margaret of Anjou is for the dramatist, and René has been identified as one of the illuminati, or a keeper of lost secrets, explicitly so in Holy Blood, Holy Grail.57 Perhaps this connection is not quite so tenuous as it might seem, considering that Wolfram von Eschenbach, in his seminal 13th-century grail romance Parzifal, stated that Parzifal’s father was the ‘king of Anjou’. Wolfram’s story is wholly fantastic, and despite being the most popular vernacular romance of the time in Germany, there seem to have been no contemporary attempts to connect the 13th century or later Angevins to the grail legend.
Aside from this, René’s story – which involves the figure of Love stealing the narrator’s heart, which is then personified as ‘Heart’, a knight who is led by his squire ‘Desire’ – allows van Eyck to produce images and motifs of incredible originality. Heart’s horse wears a caparison decorated with winged hearts and Heart himself wears a helmet with a winged heart, but at the end of the manuscript these are elaborated into images of various male and female personifications plucking hearts like apples from trees; gathering hearts in nets like birds; snaring hearts with lassoes; catching hearts in cages and pickling hearts in barrels.58 There are simply no other images quite like this in the art of the 15th century. Yet despite these cultural achievements, René had not entirely given up on military exploits.
Jean of Calabria: Naples and Aragon
René was blessed with a long life, which was unfortunate in that he outlived his children, but also meant that he outlived his enemies. When Alfonso of Aragon died in June 1458, there was an opportunity for the Angevins to return to Naples. Alfonso left no legitimate children, and Aragon and Sicily went to his brother Juan, but Alfonso left Naples to his illegitimate son Ferrante I. However, Pope Callixtus III refused to recognize Ferrante as king, and Jean of Calabria, who was in Genoa, was in a strong position to oppose him.
By October 1459 Jean of Calabria had prepared a fleet and attacked Naples, then Puglia. Although he defeated the Aragonese on 7 July 1460 and wanted to press on to Naples, his Italian allies were more concerned with securing their own lands. Worse, the new pope, Pius II, was a determined foe of the Angevins and had formally invested Ferrante with Naples in October 1459 and pulled Francesco Sforza into an alliance against Jean. The Order of the Crescent now came into its own, and Jean admitted twenty-one Neapolitan nobles to the order in 1460 to secure their allegiance. Proof that this was taken seriously came when Pius II specifically attacked the Order, issuing a bull on 9 January 1461 formally dissolving the Crescent and releasing the members from their oaths.59
The conflict sharpened when Genoa expelled the French forces, and René himself brought a fleet to attack the city and support his son. There was confusion in the fleet, and after landing his forces René then sailed away and left them to be slaughtered. At best this revealed René as an inadequate general, but for some it was a stain on his reputation that almost seemed like cowardice. Jean of Calabria remained in the Regno after this reverse but was defeated on 18 August 1462 at the battle of Troia. The Angevins continued to have bad luck, since the death of Charles VII in 1461 deprived René of a constant friend, and Louis XI, whose relationship with his father had been remarkably poor, was disinclined to support friends of the late king. Margaret of Anjou’s troubles in the same year were a further disincentive to Louis, as the Angevins now appeared to be mired in multiple lost causes. By the summer of 1464, Jean of Calabria left Italy, and the defeat of an Angevin fleet on 7 July 1465 at the Battle of Ischia essentially ended any Angevin involvement with Naples.60
These Angevin defeats take a striking place in the artistic and cultural fabric of the city, as Ferrante chose to commemorate his victories in a variety of ways. The most important is the Tavola Strozzi, a panoramic view of Naples that is the oldest depiction of the city and allows us to see the Castel Nuovo and many other buildings in their mid-15th-century detail. More visible are the great bronze doors of the Castel Nuovo, which Ferrante commissioned to complete his father’s triumphal arch, and again imprinted on the surface of the Angevin castle representations of Angevin defeats.61
This reverse still did not end the dreams of the ‘impossible heritage’ and ‘European destiny’ of the Angevins. Although Angevin hopes in Naples had been dashed, there was now an opportunity for belated revenge on Aragon. Alfonso’s bastard son Ferrante might have been secure in Naples, but Alfonso’s successor in Aragon itself, Juan II, became involved in a protracted civil war in which the Catalonian estates rejected his kingship and called in several pretenders to oppose him. After the other candidates died, in 1466 the council sent ambassadors to Angers, where they invited René to become king through his descent from Yolanda of Aragon. René accepted the offer and was now titular king of Aragon on top of all his other titles, and he proceeded to take the arms of Aragon in his coat of arms and use the title ‘King of Aragon’ in future documents. Although René sent Jean of Calabria to conduct the military operations, he seems to have remained closely involved with the expedition and to have been active in diplomacy to help his son. Importantly, Louis XI also backed the adventure. In January 1467 the Angevin supporters invaded Catalonia, and on 31 August Jean of Calabria entered Barcelona.62
The Angevins had gained Louis XI’s support, but this proved a double-edged sword, as they were now involved in royal diplomacy. In 1468 Louis XI recalled Jean to France to negotiate with the Duke of Brittany, and Jean left Ferry de Vaudémont to hold Catalonia. Jean returned in 1469, but by this time Juan II had made alliances with Burgundy and England and prepared his counterstroke. Modern historians don’t take this Catalonian adventure very seriously, since with hindsight the Angevins don’t seem to have had much chance of succeeding, but Jean held Barcelona for three years and there was every indication he might have remained. Unfortunately on 16 December 1470 Jean died suddenly, reputedly from poison, and Ferry of Vaudémont also died around the same time, leaving the Angevins leaderless.63
The Angevins suffered again from their surfeit of territories, since Jean’s legitimate son Nicholas was now Duke of Lorraine, and in the deteriorating situation with Burgundy he could not make an attempt on Catalonia. Jean also had a bastard son, Jean II, who with René’s support went to Barcelona in an attempt to revive the Angevin claim, but he lacked the resources to do anything significant. By early 1472 Juan II had surrounded Barcelona, and when he offered the council reasonable terms they submitted, and Juan made a solemn entry into the city to seal the Aragonese victory.64
Despite his earlier misfortunes, for René the years 1470–72 must have seemed the most painful. He lost his son Jean, his son-in-law Ferry of Vaudémont, Naples was long gone and the three-year Angevin kingship in Barcelona had ended in complete defeat. Little did he know that even worse would follow.
Margaret of Anjou and Louis XI
The Lancastrians in England may also have been all but exterminated by 1465 (although Jasper Tudor was still at large), but Margaret now found an ally in the most unexpected place of all. Edward IV owed his throne to the Earl of Warwick, but once established as king he began to resent his cousin’s influence. Relations between the two men soured over a s
eries of diplomatic disagreements, and by 1467 Warwick had left the court. More importantly, Warwick was an advocate of peace with France and had led negotiations with Louis XI, with whom he was on good terms. Edward IV was determined to form an alliance with the French enemy Burgundy, and Warwick took that as his signal to rebel, since he would have the support of Louis XI. However, Warwick and Margaret had been the bitterest of enemies for fifteen years, and Warwick saw no need for Margaret’s assistance yet.
When Warwick did rebel, in July 1469, he took Edward completely by surprise, and although Edward attempted to raise an army he was defeated and captured. Yet Warwick was in a strange position: he was not claiming the throne for himself, he was not posing as a Lancastrian champion and it was not clear if he was claiming to rule on behalf of Henry VI or Edward IV. When a Lancastrian revolt did break out in the north of England, it was to oppose Warwick just as much as Edward IV, and Warwick had to take the extraordinary step of releasing Edward, because the Yorkist army would only fight behind their own king. The Lancastrians were quickly crushed and Edward IV returned to London and to his throne. He and Warwick attempted to reconcile for the good of the kingdom, but neither trusted the other. Warwick now schemed to put Edward’s brother, George Duke of Clarence, on the throne in his place, but the plot was discovered in 1470, and Warwick and Clarence fled to France as rebels.65
Louis XI justified his nickname of the ‘Spider King’, and drew together the enemies of Edward IV to make them see the logic of working together. Louis convinced Margaret that Warwick was her only hope, and arranged a meeting of the queen and the earl at Angers. Margaret accepted Warwick’s oath of allegiance, though she made him kneel for fifteen minutes for the privilege of her favour. They agreed that Warwick would go to England first and lead a revolt to restore Henry VI to power, then Margaret and her son Edward would return to England and Edward would become regent for his father.66
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 52
