A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Though less lethal, the Second Pest carried a more terrible burden than the first in the very fact of its return. Thereafter people lived in fear, repeatedly justified, of another recurrence, just as they lived in fear of the brigands’ return. At any time either the phantom that “rises like black smoke in our midst” or the steel-capped horsemen could appear, with death and ruin at their heels. A sense of overhanging disaster weighed on the second half of the century, expressed in prophecies of doom and apocalypse.

  The most celebrated of these was the “Tribulation” of Jean de la Roquetaillade, a Franciscan friar incarcerated at Avignon because of his preaching against corrupt prelates and princes. Like Jean de Venette, he sympathized with the oppressed against the mighty, lay and clerical. From his cell in 1356, the year of Poitiers, he prophesied that France would be brought low and all Christendom be vexed by troubles: tyranny and robbers would prevail; the lowly would rise against the great, who “shall be cruelly slain by the commons”; many women would be “defiled and widowed” and their “haughtiness and luxury shall wither”; Saracens and Tatars would invade the kingdoms of the Latins; rulers and peoples, outraged by the luxury and pride of the clergy, would combine to strip the Church of its property; nobles and princes would be cast down from their dignities and suffer unbelievable afflictions; Anti-Christ would appear to spread false doctrines; tempests, floods, and plagues would wipe out most of mankind and all hardened sinners, preparing the way for renewal.

  These were the concerns and real currents of the time. Like most medieval doom-sayers, however, Roquetaillade predicted debacle as the prelude to a better world. In his vision, the Church, purified by suffering, chastisement, and true poverty, would be restored, a great reformer would become Pope, the King of France against all custom would be elected Holy Roman Emperor and rule as the holiest monarch since the beginning of time. He and the Pope together would expel the Saracens and Tatars from Europe, convert all Moslems, Jews, and other infidels, destroy heresy, conquer the world for the universal church, and, before they died, establish a reign of peace that would last a thousand years until the Day of Judgment and the End.

  The hostages did not escape the plague. A high-ranking victim was Count Guy de St. Pol, a knight of great virtue, “very devout and merciful to the poor,” who abhorred the lusts and corruptions of the world, fasted unsparingly, and had maintained virginity until agreeing to marriage. The bourgeois hostages of Paris, Rouen, and several other towns were likewise victims. The great Duke of Lancaster, probably the richest man in the kingdom, was not proof; he too died of the plague, leaving his title and vast inheritance to his son-in-law, John of Gaunt, third son of King Edward. How and where the hostages were housed and whether chivalric courtesy allowed them escape to country retreats is not recorded. In 1357, eight years after the first plague, London was reported still one-third empty, but, though uncrowded, its sanitation was still careless enough to elicit repeated ordinances requiring citizens to clean their premises. Though it was against the law to empty chamber pots into the streets, their contents and kitchen garbage were often flung out of windows, more or less aimed at the gutters, which carried a steady current of water. Barns for keeping horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens were located inside the walls as well as outside, causing many complaints about accumulating piles of manure. At about this time London’s aldermen organized a system of hired “rakers” to carry the piles away in dump carts or in dung boats on the Thames.

  For the hostages, prospects were not carefree. Their hope of return depended on regular payments of the King’s ransom, which already lagged. Collection of money was slowed by the plague and was anyway hard to come by in the ashes left by the companies. The case of Buxeaul, a town in Burgundy, was typical of many. According to a royal ordinance of 1361, plague and massacre had reduced its fifty or sixty hearths to ten and these “have been pillaged and ruined by our enemies so that little or nothing remains to them wherefore some of the inhabitants have left the place and are still leaving from day to day”; and because of these things, the survivors if required to pay customary taxes “would have to flee and leave the place and become poor beggars”; therefore it was ordained that the town should pay one tax a year instead of two and be freed of all heriot.

  The desolation of churches sacked by the enemy was a subject of constant appeals to the bishops. Candles cannot be lit at mass because the winds blow through for lack of window glass; collapse threatens without funds for maintenance; roofs leak, rain falls on the altar. Abbots and abbesses wander in search of subsistence; prelates who would have blushed to appear in public without retinues of horsemen and servants “are now under the necessity of going on foot in humiliation followed by a single monk or valet and subsisting on the most frugal diet.” Universities suffered from lack of attendance and fees. Montpellier declared itself “destitute of lecturers and auditors because in the said Studium where formerly a thousand students used to dwell, scarcely 200 are to be found today.”

  To the shocked eyes of Petrarch, sent by Galeazzo Visconti to congratulate King Jean on his liberation, France was “a heap of ruins.” Petrarch was an inveterate complainer who raised every complaint to an extremity, whether it was the iniquity of doctors, the smells of Avignon, or the decadence of the papacy. But even if exaggerated, his account of France as he saw it in January 1361 was tragic enough. “Everywhere was solitude, desolation and misery; fields are deserted, houses ruined and empty except in the walled towns; everywhere you see the fatal footprints of the English and the hateful scars still bleeding from their swords.” In royal Paris, “shamed by devastation up to her very gates … even the Seine flows sadly as if feeling the sorrow of it, and weeps, trembling for the fate of the whole land.”

  Petrarch presented the King with two rings from Galeazzo, one a huge ruby as a gift, one torn from Jean’s hand at Poitiers which Galeazzo had somehow redeemed. Afterward he treated the court to a Latin oration on the Biblical text of Manasseh’s return from Babylon, with felicitous references to the mutability of Fortune as shown by Jean’s marvelous restoration out of captivity. The King and the Prince, Petrarch wrote in the voluminous correspondence of which he carefully kept copies, “fixed their eyes on me” with great interest, and he felt that his discussion of Fortune especially aroused the attention of the Dauphin, “a young man of ardent intelligence.”

  Personal misfortunes, apart from those of his country, had afflicted the Dauphin. In October 1360 his three-year-old daughter, Jeanne, and her infant sister, Bonne, his only children, had died within two weeks of each other, though whether of the plague, like the Queen, is not stated. At the double burial the Dauphin was seen “so sorrowful as never before he had been.” He himself had been afflicted by an illness which caused his hair and nails to fall out and rendered him “dry as a stick.” Gossip attributed it to poison administered by Charles of Navarre, which it may well have been, for the symptoms are those of arsenic poisoning. The King of Navarre had once again turned inimical. In December 1359 when the English were at Reims, perhaps fearing that Edward might indeed gain the crown, he had plotted a coup of his own. Armed men were to enter Paris by several gates, combine forces to seize the Louvre, enter and kill the Dauphin and his Council, then spread through the city, seizing strong points before the Parisians could assemble. His ultimate purpose as usual remains mysterious. Betrayed to the Dauphin, the plot fractured relations between them and left Charles of Navarre prowling in hostility as before.

  Not only payment of the ransom but fulfillment of the territorial terms controlled the hostages’ fate. Too lightly, as the chronicler said, sovereignties had been disposed of at Brétigny, with no account taken of the fact that territories on paper represented people on the ground. Something had happened to these people during two decades of war. The citizens of the seaport of La Rochelle implored the King not to give them up, saying they would rather be taxed up to half their property every year than be turned over to English rule. “We may submit to the English wi
th our lips,” they said, “but with our hearts never.” Weeping, the inhabitants of Cahors lamented that the King had left them orphans. The little town of St. Romain de Tarn refused to admit the English commissioners within its gates, although it reluctantly sent envoys to take the oath of homage next day at a neighboring place.

  For all his countrymen who equated the English with the brigands and hated them helplessly in their hearts, Enguerrand Ringois of Abbeville, the naval commander of the raid on Winchelsea, spoke through his acts. As citizen of a ceded town, he adamantly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England. Persisting against all threats, he was transferred to England, held in a dungeon without recourse to law or friends, and finally taken to the cliffs of Dover, where he was given the choice between taking the oath or death on the wave-washed rocks below. Ringois threw himself into the sea.

  Like Pope Boniface’s claim to total papal supremacy, the terms of Brétigny were obsolete. It was too late to transfer provinces of France like simple fiefs; unnoticed, the inhabitants had come to feel themselves French. Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.

  The fate of the hostages was caught up in it. With the ransom in arrears and trouble arising over the ceded territories, their exile stretched ahead to no visible horizon. They were not being returned in fixed numbers every six months as planned, nor being replaced by substitutes, because few could be found willing to go and Edward made difficulties over the names proposed. In November 1362 the four impatient royal Dukes, who had expected to be released a year earlier, negotiated a treaty of their own with Edward by which they promised to deliver 200,000 florins due on the ransom and certain additional territories belonging to the Duc d’Orléans in return for their freedom and that of six other hostages. They were to stay in Calais on parole until delivery had been fulfilled. Never averse to taking a little extra, Edward was willing to let them go on these terms, but King Jean insistently refused his consent unless his cousin the Comte d’Alençon, the Comte d’Auvergne, and the Sire de Coucy were released in place of three of those named by the “Lilies.” Since Jean’s choices were greater nobles than the other three, Edward in his turn refused consent. Correspondence flowed, the royal Dukes dispatched urgent and angry appeals, finally King Jean, who had by now left his unhappy country for Avignon, lost interest and yielded. Coucy as a result remained in England. More than ever, after the departure of the royal Dukes, he was the object of Edward’s and his daughter’s interest.

  Events took a startling turn when King Jean himself, for whose recovery his country had sacrificed so much, voluntarily returned to captivity in England. The motivations of this curious monarch are not readily understood 600 years later; only the train of circumstance is clear.

  On regaining the throne, King Jean’s first effort to cope with his country’s tormentors proved to be another Poitiers in miniature. To stem the “Great Company” of Tard-Venus who were overrunning central France, he had hired one of their own kind, the “Archpriest,” Arnaut de Cervole, and, in addition, dispatched a small royal army of 200 knights and 400 archers under the Count of Tancarville, lieutenant of the region, and the renowned Jacques de Bourbon, Count de la Marche, a great-grandson of St. Louis, who had saved King Philip’s life at Crécy. Both had been wounded and captured at Poitiers without having their appetite for offensive warfare in the least diminished. On April 6, 1362, against the advice of Arnaut de Cervole, the two valorous knights ordered an attack at Brignais, a height held by the Tard-Venus near Lyon. The brigands let loose an avalanche of stones upon the royal host, cracking helmets and armor, felling horses, and shattering the attack as the English archers had done at Poitiers. Then on foot, with shortened lances, they finished off the business. Jacques de Bourbon and with him his eldest son and his nephew were killed, and the Count of Tancarville and many other rich nobles captured and held for ransom. Otherwise the brigands made no use of their victory other than to continue brigandage. Lyon purchased artillery, strengthened its walls, and maintained guards with lanterns at night; the countryside suffered as before.

  The King’s response to Brignais was to leave for Avignon, where he was to stay for nearly a year. Amid military chaos and every other affliction of his realm, his purpose in going was to resume the crusade that had been broken off twenty years ago by the Anglo-French war. Though he could neither protect his own land, raise his ransom, nor redeem the fifty to sixty hostages who stood for him in exile, he felt concerned to redeem his father’s unfulfilled vow to take the cross. Froissart gives him the realistic motive of intending by the crusade to draw out of his realm the pillaging companies, but adds oddly that he “preserved this purpose and intent to himself.” Perhaps Jean genuinely considered crusade the proper role of the “Most Christian King”; perhaps he saw it compensating for his recent humiliations; perhaps France’s troubles were too much for him and he wanted an excuse to get away.

  The King also had in mind a project of uniting to France the territory of Provence—which included Avignon—by marrying its Countess, Joanna, Queen of Naples, the most complicated heiress of the century. Halfway through an active connubial career, she was at this time twice a widow, once, as widely believed, by her own hand. Since Naples was a fief of the papacy, her marriage had to be approved by the Pope. As a Frenchman, Innocent VI was expected to be amenable.

  Jean’s other project, crusade, was the supreme goal of this earnest and pious Pope who, for its sake, had tried so persistently to make peace between France and England. Worn out by ten years of discord and struggle to curb the worldliness of prelates, and finally by plague and brigands, Innocent died in September 1362, while Jean was on his way to Avignon. His successor, Urban V, though also a French native, saw the absorption of Provence by France as a threat to papal independence and disapproved the marriage. But he preached the crusade, actively supported by the titular King of Jerusalem, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who had arrived in Avignon to promote it.

  The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem by this time was no more than a memory; the last European settlers of Syria had retreated to Cyprus, and Europeans now came only to trade. When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined. Holy war had lost its thrust with the lessening of European unity, with too frequent use of crusade against internal heretics, and lately with loss of population in the plague. The infidel, like the heretic, was still feared by Christianity as a figure of genuine menace. Crusade still had its devout propagandists, but as a common impulse the zeal had faded. For the Church it had become largely a device for raising money; for nobles and kings the tradition survived as part of the chivalric code and had recently received a new impulse from the threat of the Turks on the shores of Europe. The difficulty was that crusade now suffered from the same necessity as the state: no longer composed of self-financed volunteers, it required paid armies and money to pay them.

  The Kings of Cyprus and France spent all winter and spring at Avignon discussing possibilities with the Pope. On Good Friday the crusade was proclaimed. Jean was named Captain-General and took the cross along with the Count of Tancarville and other companions of the recent battering at Brignais. That marked the peak of the enterprise. King Edward, on being visited by the King of Cyprus, excused himself “graciously and right sagely,” and after arousing no greater response at other courts of Europe, the King of Cyprus was forced to let crusade lapse for the present.

  Having failed in his projects at Avignon, Jean was obliged to face the unpleasantness of home. He rode through his distressed realm at a leisurely pace, reaching Paris in July 1363. Here he found that the Regent and Council had disallowed the private treaty between the royal hostages and Edward, on the grounds that it gave too much away. Worse, the Duc d’Anjou had absconded, breaking his parole. Newly married before going as a hostage, he had gone to Boulogne to meet his wife, with whom he was said to be much in love, and refused to return to Calais. Jean considered his son’
s act a “felony” upon the honor of the crown. Combined with arrears in ransom, cancellation of the “hostages’ ” treaty, to which he had assented, and non-fulfillment of other cessions, it brought his own honor into disrepute and left him no way out, so he claimed, but to return to captivity.

  Even for the 14th century, this reasoning, in the face of political realities, seemed extreme. Jean’s Council and the prelates and barons of France “conseled him sore to the contrary” and told him his plan was “a great folly,” but he insisted, saying that if “good faith and honor were to be banished from the rest of the world, they should still be found in the hearts and words of princes.” He departed a week after Christmas, crossing the Channel in midwinter.

  His going was an amazement to his contemporaries. Jean de Venette, who loved neither kings nor nobles, suggested he went back for “causa joci” (reasons of pleasure). Historians have offered him every excuse: that he returned to avert war, or, counting on personal relations, to persuade Edward to reduce the ransom, or persuade him to call off the renewed hostilities of the King of Navarre. If these were his reasons, none was accomplished. If it was honor that took him back, what of kingship? What did he owe to the kingdom that needed its sovereign, to the citizens who were being squeezed of their last penny to pay his ransom, to the memory of Ringois of Abbeville? Who can say what made Jean return? Perhaps it was no medieval reason, but the human tragedy of a man who, knowing himself inadequate for the task he was born to, sought the enforced passivity of prison.

  He arrived in London in January 1364, was greeted with lavish entertainments and processions, fell ill of an “unknown malady” in March, and died in April, aged 45. Edward gave him a magnificent funeral service at St. Paul’s during which 4,000 torches each twelve feet high and 3,000 candles each weighing ten pounds were consumed. Afterward his body was returned to France for burial in the royal basilica of St. Denis. King Jean had found the permanent passivity of the grave.