Nevertheless, having been drawn into the adventure almost against his will, he was himself now anxious to pursue it. His honour was at stake and his ambition – if somewhat belatedly – had at last been aroused. His having been received in the Capitol, having slept in the Castle of Saint Angelo and having marched on Rome in company with a cardinal could not all, surely, be allowed to go for nothing. Besides, for a whole month he had never walked out without a guard of honour. Nor was he disposed to listen any longer to the whisperings – ‘Do look, that’s the man who said he was King of France’ – when he went on Sundays to the Duomo, of which the splendid black and white façade had just been completed. Since it had been decided that he was a king, he proposed to continue behaving as such. He wrote, on his own account, to Pope Innocent VI, who had succeeded Pierre Roger in 1352; he wrote to the King of England; he wrote to the King of Navarre; and he wrote to the King of Hungary. He sent them copies of his documents and asked them for their support. And there the matter might have rested, if the King of Hungary, alone of all his relations, had not replied. The King was Queen Clémence’s nephew, and, in his letter to Giannino, he gave him the title of King and congratulated him on his birth.
On October 2nd, 1357, therefore, three years to the day after his first interview with Cola di Rienzi, Giannino, taking with him his documents, together with two hundred and fifty gold crowns and two thousand six hundred ducats sewn into his clothes, left for Buda, accompanied by four equerries who believed in his star, to seek out the distant cousin who had consented to recognize him.
But when Giannino reached Buda two months later, Louis of Hungary was absent: he returned only in March. Giannino had had to wait all winter, spending his ducats. He had met a Sienese there, Francesco del Contado, who had become a bishop.
Eventually his cousin of Hungary returned to his capital, but he gave no audience to Giovanni di Francia. He sent a number of his lords to interview him. At first they declared their conviction of his legitimacy, but within a week they had changed front and asserted the whole story to be nothing but an imposture. Giannino protested; he refused to leave Hungary; and he set up his own Council presided over by the Sienese Bishop. He even managed to recruit from the gullible Hungarian nobles, who were always ready for adventure, fifty-six gentlemen who engaged themselves to support him with a thousand horsemen and four thousand archers. They even carried their misguided generosity so far as to offer to serve him at their own expense until he was in a position to reimburse them.
Nevertheless, to equip themselves and set out, they needed the authorization of the King of Hungary. But the King, though he liked being called ‘the Great’, was far from remarkable for consistency, and he demanded to be allowed to re-examine personally Giannino’s documents. He decided they were genuine and announced that he would help him conquer his throne; yet, a week later, he declared that he had now thought the matter over and proposed to have nothing to do with it.
Nevertheless, on May 15th, 1359, Bishop Francesco del Contado gave the Pretender a letter dated that same day, and sealed with the seal of Hungary, in which Louis the Great, ‘finally enlightened by the sun of truth’, certified that the Lord Giannino di Francia, who had been brought up in the city of Siena, was undoubtedly a scion of the royal family of his ancestors, and the son of King Louis of France and Queen Clémence of Hungary, of happy memory. The letter also confirmed that divine Providence had made good use of the royal wet-nurse by arranging that another child should be substituted for the young Prince, and that this child’s death had saved the Prince’s life, ‘as once the Virgin Mary, when flying into Egypt, had saved the life of her child by pretending that he was dead …’
However, Bishop Francesco advised the Pretender to leave at once, before the King of Hungary could change his mind again, particularly since it was not absolutely sure that the letter had been dictated by him, nor the seal applied to it by his order.
The next day Giannino left Buda, without having had the time to assemble all the troops who had offered for his service, but nevertheless with a fine enough train for a prince who had no lands.
Giovanni di Francia then went to Venice where he had royal robes made for himself, then to Treviso, Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, and finally home to Siena, after a journey lasting sixteen months, to present himself as a candidate at the elections for the Council of the Republic.
But, though his name came third in the ballot, the Council invalidated his election precisely on the grounds that he was the son of Louis X, had been recognized as such by the King of Hungary, and was therefore not a native of the city. His Sienese citizenship was taken from him.
It so happened that the Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom of Naples was passing through Tuscany on his way to Avignon. Giannino hurried off to see him; after all, Naples was the cradle of his mother’s family. The Seneschal prudently advised him to go and see the Pope.
Without an escort now, for the Hungarian nobles had grown weary, he reached the Papal City in the spring of 1360, dressed as a simple pilgrim. Innocent VI obstinately refused to give him audience. The Holy Father was already having quite enough trouble with France without becoming embroiled with Jean I, the Posthumous.
Jean II, the Good, was still a prisoner; and there had been bloody riots in Paris in which the Provost of the merchants, Etienne Marcel, had been assassinated following an attempt to establish a popular régime. There were also risings in the provinces where poverty had led to rebellion on the part of the so-called ‘Jacques’. Everyone seemed to be killing each other, and no one knew who was friend or foe. The Dauphin with the swollen hands, and without troops or money, was fighting against the English, the Navarrese, and even the Parisians, with the help of du Guesclin, the Breton, to whom he had handed the sword he could not wield himself, and he was endeavouring also to raise his father’s ransom.
There was utter confusion and all the factions were equally exhausted; companies, who called themselves soldiers but were in fact merely brigands under the command of adventurers, made the roads unsafe by robbing travellers and making a profession of murder.
Avignon, as a residence for the Pontiff, was becoming as insecure as Rome, even with the Colonna. It was essential to set negotiations on foot as quickly as possible, impose peace on the exhausted combatants, and persuade the King of England to renounce the throne of France, even if it meant his keeping half the country by right of conquest. What on earth could a pilgrim who claimed to be King of France expect one to do about him?
So Giannino wandered about, seeking support and subsidies, trying to interest in his story anyone who would listen to him for an hour at a tavern table between a couple of flagons of wine. He ascribed influence to people who had none, talked to adventurers, down-and-outs, commercial travellers from the big companies, and the leaders of the English bands which had come as far south as Provence and were scouring the countryside. People said he was mad and, indeed, he was becoming so.
One day in January 1361 the notables of Aix had him arrested in that town on a charge of sedition. Since they did not know what to do with him, they handed him over to the Provost of Marseilles, who put him in prison. Eight months later he escaped but was recaptured at once; and since he so insistently claimed kinship with the royal family of Naples, asserting stubbornly that he was the son of Madame Clémence of Hungary, the Provost sent him to Naples.
At this very time the marriage of Queen Jeanne, heiress to Robert the Astrologer, was being negotiated with Jean II’s youngest son. Jean II had scarcely returned from his luxurious captivity, and the peace of Brétigny had scarcely been concluded by the Dauphin, when the King hurried to Avignon where Innocent VI had just died. And King Jean II proposed to the new Pope, Urban V, a most splendid project: the famous crusade which neither his father nor his grandfather had succeeded in getting under way.
In Naples, Jean I, the Posthumous, was imprisoned in Castel Uovo; from the window of his dungeon he could see the Castel Nuovo, the Maschio Angiono, from which
his mother had set out so happily to become Queen of France forty-six years before.
And it was there he died, that same year, having suffered, in the most curiously roundabout way, the fate that had so relentlessly pursued the Accursed Kings.
When Jacques de Molay uttered his anathema from the stake, did he know, through those sciences of divination in which the Templars were adepts, of the future that lay in store for Philip the Fair and all his race? Or did he see a prophetic vision amid the smoke in which he died?
Peoples bear the weight of curses longer than the princes who incur them.
Of Philip the Fair’s male descendants not one had escaped a tragic fate, not one had survived, except King Edward III of England, who never reigned over France.
But the people were to suffer for a long time to come. There were still to be a wise king, a mad king, a weak king, and seventy years of calamity before another pyre, lit at the farther end of the Seine to punish a French girl for having loved her country too well, at last dissipated its smoke, as if in reply to the pyre on the Ile de la Cité, the curse of the Grand Master.
Rome, 1949.
Paris, 1954–60.
Footnotes
The Characters in this Book
fn1. Ages are given as in the year 1328.
fn2. Wrongly called ‘Crouchback’ in The She-Wolf of France.
1. The January Wedding
fn1. The numbers in the text refer to the Historical Notes at the end of the book.
4. The Makeshift King
fn1. The Makeshift King will enter here the day this cock crows.
Historical Notes
1.The Roman Church has never imposed any fixed and uniform legislation on the marriage rite, indeed has tended to be content with confirming peculiar usages.
The diversity of rites and the tolerance of the Church with regard to them are based on the fact that marriage is essentially a contract between individuals and a sacrament in which the contracting parties are ministers towards each other. The presence of a priest, or even a witness, was not required in the primitive Christian Churches.
The blessing became obligatory as a result only of a decree of Charlemagne. Until the reforms made by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, betrothal, by the fact of being a pledge, had almost as much importance as marriage itself.
Every region had its peculiar usage which might vary from diocese to diocese. For instance, the Hereford rite was different from that of York. But in general the exchange of vows which constituted the sacrament proper took place in public outside the church. It was thus that King Edward I married Margaret of France, in September 1299, at the door of Canterbury Cathedral. The modern obligation to keep the doors of the church open during the marriage ceremony, non-observance of which may constitute grounds for annulment, is a survival of this tradition.
The marriage rite of the archdiocese of York had a certain resemblance to that of Reims, in particular the placing of the ring successively on each of the four fingers (as will be seen later in the chapter), but at Reims the rite was accompanied by the following formula:
Par cet anel l’Eglise enjoint
Que nos deux coeurs en ung soient joints
Par vray amour, loyale foy;
Pour tant je te mets en ce doy.
2.Jeanne of Evreux, third wife of Charles IV.
It will be remembered that after the annulling of his marriage to Blanche of Burgundy (see The She-wolf of France) Charles IV had married successively Marie of Luxembourg, who had died in childbirth, and Jeanne of Evreux. Jeanne of Evreux was the niece of Philip the Fair through her father Louis of France, Count of Evreux, and also the niece of Robert of Artois through her mother, Marguerite of Artois, Robert’s sister.
3.The passing of the County of La Marche into the possession of the first Duke of Bourbon was the result of an exchange made at the end of 1327, when Charles IV handed over the fief which had previously been his apanage to Duke Louis I in exchange for the County of Clermont in Beauvais, which he had inherited from his father, Robert of Clermont.
4.During this year 1328 Mahaut of Artois was often ill. Her household accounts show that she was bled two days after this council, on February 6th, 1328, and again on May 9th, September 18th and October 19th.
5.‘A gold hat’ (chapeau d’or): this term was used in the Middle Ages as a synonym for a crown.
6.Pierre Roger, previously Abbé of Fécamp, had been a member of the mission charged with the negotiations between the Court of Paris and the Court of London before the homage at Amiens. He was appointed to the diocese of Arras on December 3rd, 1328, replacing Thierry d’Hirson; then he successively became Archbishop of Sens, Archbishop of Rouen – where, as we shall see later on, he preached Philippe VI’s crusade – and, finally, Pope at the death of Benedict XII in 1342; he reigned under the name of Clement VI.
7.Until the sixteenth century there were no full-length or even half-length mirrors; whether they were intended to hang on the wall, stand on the furniture or be carried in the pocket, they were all small. Mirrors were either of polished metal, as in classical times, or, from the thirteenth century onwards, of glass with a backing of tin-foil attached with transparent glue. Silvering with an amalgam of mercury and tin was not invented till the sixteenth century.
8.The Hôtel de la Malmaison, which was of palatial size, was eventually to become the Amiens Hôtel de Ville.
9.Hortillons: Market-gardeners who practised then, as now, a form of cultivation peculiar to the wide marshy valley of the Somme. These gardens, called hortillannages, are artificially raised with alluvium dredged from the valley and intersected by canals which drain the subsoil. The hortillons move about the canals and bring their produce to the Marché d’Eau in Amiens in long black flat-bottomed boats, which they propel by punting.
The hortillonages cover an area of some seven hundred acres. From the Latin derivation of the word (hortus: a garden) one may infer that these market-gardens date back to the period of Roman colonization.
10.All the members of the Capet royal family were known as ‘Princes à la Fleur de Lis’, because their arms consisted of a semy of France (azure semy de lis or) with a bordure varying with their apanages or fiefs.
11.Guillaume de la Planche, bailiff of Béthune, and later of Calais, was in prison for the over-hasty execution of a certain Tassard le Chien, whom he had condemned to be drawn and hanged on his own authority.
La Divion went to see him in prison and promised that if he gave evidence in accordance with instructions the Count of Artois would save him by persuading Mille de Noyers to intervene on his behalf. Guillaume de la Planche, at the time of the second inquiry, retracted and declared that he had given his evidence ‘under threats and because of his fear of remaining long in prison and dying there, if he refused to obey Monseigneur Robert who was so great and powerful, and so much about the King’.
12.‘Mesquine’ or ‘meschine’ (from the Walloon eskène, or méquène in Hainaut, or again mesquin in Provençal), signifies: weak, poor, wretched or miserable. It was a common epithet applied to women servants.
13.In June 1320, Mahaut commissioned Pierre de Bruxelles, a painter living in Paris, to decorate with frescoes the great gallery of her Castle of Conflans, which lay at the confluence of the Marne and the Seine. The agreement gave precise instructions about the subjects of the frescoes – portraits of Count Robert II and his knights in land and sea battles – the clothes the figures were to wear, the colours, and the quality of the materials to be used.
The paintings were completed on July 26th, 1320.
14.These witches’ practices, whose origins go back to the earliest Middle Ages, were still in use at the time of Charles IX and even under Louis XIV; this magic unguent, consisting of these disgusting ingredients, was in fact made during a black mass celebrated on Madame de Montespan’s stomach.
The prescriptions for love philtres, given further on, are quoted from the miscellanies of the Petit and the Gr
and Albert.
15.We remind the reader that Blanche of Burgundy, after being imprisoned for eleven years at Château Gaillard, was transferred to the Château de Gouray, near Coutances, and ultimately took the veil in the Abbey of Maubuisson, where she died in 1326. Mahaut, her mother, was also to be buried at Maubuisson; her remains were only transferred to Saint-Denis later, where her effigy still is – the only one, so far as we know, to be made from black marble.
16.From Candlemas 1329 till October 23rd, Mahaut seems to have enjoyed excellent health and to have scarcely had need to call in her ordinary doctors. From October 23rd, the date of her interview with Philippe VI at Maubuisson, until November 26th, the eve of her death, the progress of her illness can be traced almost day by day in the payments made by her treasurer to doctors, physicians, barber-surgeons, herbalists, apothecaries and spice-makers for attendance or supplies.
17.The body of Edmund of Kent was buried, on the orders of Edward III, in the Church of the Dominicans in London, for this order was openly hostile to Mortimer’s government.
18.The eldest of the twelve children of Edward III and Philippa of Hainaut was Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, who was known as the Black Prince because of the colour of his armour.
It was he who won the victory of Poitiers against the son of Philippe VI, Jean II, and took him prisoner.
He was a great soldier and spent most of his life on the Continent, being one of the dominant leaders at the beginning of the Hundred Years War. He died in 1376, a year before his father.
19.The keep was an essential feature of Norman castles, and was built round a courtyard open to the sky.
20.The original text of the judgement against Roger Mortimer was drawn up in French.
The Lily and the Lion Page 31
