A Distant Mirror (25 page)

In the warfare of the 1340s, Jean had besieged the English at Aiguillon for four months without success, showing himself, according to report, resistant to any advice, obstinate, and “hard to move when he had taken an opinion.” His most notable talent was for satisfying an exceptional avidity for money. He shared the Valois interest in arts and letters at least to the extent of commissioning French translations of the Bible and the Roman historian Livy and carrying books in his baggage when on campaign. As King he had his court painter, Girard d’Orléans, decorate his toilet stools, and he accumulated 239 tapestries made for his own use. His taste for luxury extended to everything but ministers, for he inherited from his father and kept in office a shady group, neither capable nor honest, who were despised by the nobles because they were of common birth and hated by the bourgeois for their avarice and venality. One of them, Simon de Buci, president of Parlement and member of the Secret Council, twice overreached himself in some way that required successive pardons. Robert de Lorris, the King’s chamberlain and Master of Accounts, was restored to office after surviving a charge of treason and another of embezzlement. Jean Poilevain, who was imprisoned for peculation, prudently obtained a letter of pardon before his case was judged. As financiers for the King, men like these were a central source of disaffection with his regime.

Jean’s first notable administrative act was a serious effort toward military coherence. It was becoming evident that the baronial right of independent withdrawal in the field, and independent response to the King’s summons, crippled large military endeavor. Half feudal, half mercenary, not yet national, the ad hoc collection that was the 14th century army was too subject to the private interests of its components to be a reliable instrument. The Royal Ordinance of April 1351 was an attempt to introduce, as far as knightly terms allowed, principles of dependability and command.

By raising rates of pay to meet the inflation caused by the Black Death, the ordinance confirmed the fact that the warrior’s function had become a trade for the poorer knights if not the grand seigneurs. The new rates under the ordinance were fixed at 40 sous (two livres) a day for a banneret, 20 sous for a knight, 10 for a squire, 5 for a valet, 3 for a foot soldier, 2½ for an armor-bearer or other attendant.

More significant was a provision designed to correct a critical fault
on the medieval battlefield: the right of independent withdrawal. The new rule stipulated that every man in the host be subordinate to some captain and required an oath from all of the men “not to leave the company of their captain” without an order—that is, not to withdraw at will. An indication of how fragile was a commander’s reliance on the force he could expect to deploy, the ordinance also required captains of companies to notify the chief of battalion that they would be present at a forthcoming battle.

The ordinance proved ineffective chiefly for lack of dependable revenue to support an organized army. Provisioning added to the cost of wages. While local peasantry, paid or pillaged, usually furnished food and horses’ forage, a major expedition or siege or fleet at sea required organized supply of biscuit, smoked or salted meat and fish, wine, oil, and oats and hay for the horses. Ordinarily knights ate white bread made from wheat, meat in the form of beef, pork, and mutton, and drank wine daily. The common soldier received wine only on feast days or in active combat; otherwise he drank beer, ale, or cider, and ate rye bread, peas, and beans. Fish, cheese, olive oil, occasionally butter, salt, vinegar, onions, and garlic also figured in the rations. Poultry was so widely consumed and easily obtained that it was not recorded. Sugar, honey, mustard, spices, and almonds were kept for the wounded and sick and the privileged. On active duty, soldiers did not fast but were allotted fish as substitute for meat on the twelve “thin” days a month. The more continuous war became, as it did in the 14th century, the more organization and money it required.

The crown grasped for money by every means and favored the least scrupulous, which was debasing the coinage. Less directly obvious than aids and subsidies, it required no summoning of the Estates for consent. Coins called in were re-minted with a lower proportion of gold or silver and re-circulated at the old face value, with the difference being retained by the Treasury. Since the petty coins of daily use were those affected, the system reduced the real wages and purchasing power of the common people while bankers, merchants, and nobles, whose movable wealth was in large gold coins or gold and silver vessels and plate, were less affected. Under Jean II, manipulations were so frequent and erratic that they upset all values and succeeded in damaging and infuriating everyone except the manipulators themselves and those who could profit by holding back their gold. Abbot Gilles li Muisis of Tournai found the mysteries of the coinage even more obscure than the plague and was inspired to a famous verse:

In 1351, the first year of Jean’s reign, the currency suffered eighteen alterations, and seventy in the course of the next decade.

The King’s personal idea for improving the military arm was to found an order of chivalry modeled, like King Edward’s recently founded Order of the Garter, on the Knights of the Round Table. Jean’s
Order of the Star was intended to rival the Garter, revive French prestige, and weld the splintered loyalty of his nobles to the Valois monarchy.

The orders of chivalry, with all their display and ritual and vows, were essentially a way of trying to secure a loyal body of military support on which the sovereign could rely. That was in fact the symbolism of the Garter, a circlet to bind the Knight-Companions mutually, and all of them jointly to the King as head of the Order. First broached with much fanfare in 1344, the Order of the Garter was originally intended to include 300 proved knights, starting with the most worthy of the realm. When formally established five years later, it was reduced to an exclusive circle of 26 with St. George as patron and official robes of blue and gold. Significantly, the statutes provided that no member was to leave the King’s domain without his authority. The wearing of the Garter at the knee was further intended, in the words of the Order’s historian, as a “Caveat and Exhortation that the Knights should not pusillanimously (by running away from Battle) betray the Valour and Renown which is ingrafted in Constancy and Magnanimity.” Even knights of old knew fear and flight.

Since Jean’s object was to be inclusive rather than exclusive, he made the Order of the Star open to 500 members. Established “in honor of God, of our Lady and for the heightening of chivalry and augmenting of honor,” the full Order was to assemble once a year in a ceremonial banquet hung with the blazons of all its members. Companions were to wear a white tunic, a red or white surcoat embroidered with a gold star, a red hat, enameled ring of special design, black hose, and gilded shoes. They were to display a red banner strewn with stars and embroidered with an image of Our Lady.

At the annual banquet each would recite on oath all “the adventures that befell him in the year both shameful and honorable,” and
clerks would take down the recitals in a book. The Order would designate the three princes, three bannerets, and three knights who during the year had done the most in arms of war, “for no deed of arms in peace shall be taken into account.” This meant no deed of private warfare as distinct from a war declared by the sovereign. Equally significant of the King’s intention was the reappearance of the oath not to withdraw, worded more sternly than in the ordinance and more explicitly than in the Order of the Garter. Companions of the Star were required, to swear they would never flee in battle more than four
arpents
(about 600 yards) by their own estimate, “but rather die or be taken prisoner.”

While the purpose behind the orders was practical, the form was already nostalgic. War had changed since the 12th century romances from which men knew the legends of the 6th century Round Table, if it ever existed. The legends had shaped chivalry as the principle of order of the warrior class “without which the world would be a confused thing.” But the quest of the Holy Grail was not an adequate guide to realistic tactics.

Chivalry’s finest military expression in contemporary eyes was the famous Combat of the Thirty in 1351. An action of the perennial conflict in Brittany, it began with a challenge to single combat issued by Robert de Beaumanoir, a noble Breton on the French side, to his opponent Bramborough of the Anglo-Breton party. When their partisans clamored to join, a
combat of thirty on each side was agreed upon. Terms were arranged, the site was chosen, and after participants heard mass and exchanged courtesies, the fight commenced. With swords, bear-spears, daggers, and axes, they fought savagely until four on the French side and two on the English were slain and a recess was called. Bleeding and exhausted, Beaumanoir called for a drink, eliciting the era’s most memorable reply: “Drink thy blood, Beaumanoir, and thy thirst will pass!” Resuming, the combatants fought until the French side prevailed and every one of the survivors on either side was wounded. Bramborough and eight of his party were killed, the rest taken prisoner and held for ransom.

In the wide discussion the affair aroused, “some held it as a very poor thing and others as a very swaggering business,” with the admirers dominating. The combat was celebrated in verse, painting, tapestry, and in a memorial stone erected on the site. More than twenty years later Froissart noticed a scarred survivor at the table of Charles V, where he was honored above all others. He told the ever-inquiring chronicler that he owed his great favor with the King to his having been one of the Thirty. The renown and honor the fight earned reflected
the knight’s nostalgic vision of what battle should be. While he practiced the warfare of havoc and pillage, he clung to the image of himself as Sir Lancelot.

With dazzling munificence, regardless of depleted finances, Jean launched the Order of the Star at an opening ceremony on January 6, 1352. He donated all the robes and staged a magnificent banquet in a hall draped with tapestries and hangings of gold and velvet decorated with stars and fleur-de-lys. Furniture was carved and gilded for the occasion. After a solemn mass, the revels grew so boisterous that a gold chalice was smashed and some rich draperies stolen. While the knights caroused, the English seized the castle of Guînes, whose absent captain was celebrating with his companions of the Star.

To their own undoing, the companions of the Star took seriously the oath not to flee from battle. In 1352, during the war in Brittany, a French force led by Marshal Guy de Nesle was caught in ambush at a place called Mauron by an Anglo-Breton force of about equal numbers. The French could have fled and saved themselves but that they were bound by their oath not to retreat. Though surrounded, they stood and fought until virtually all were killed or captured. So thick lay the dead on the field that the body of Guy de Nesle was not recovered until two days later. Seven French bannerets and 80 or 90 knights lost their lives not counting those captured, leaving so great a hole in the Order of the Star as, “with the great mischiefs and misfortunes that were to follow, caused the ruin of that noble company.”

In France’s misfortunes a young man of twenty, Charles, King of Navarre, grandson of Louis X, saw his opportunity. Whether he really aimed at the French crown, or at revenge for wrongs done him, or at stirring trouble for its own sake like Iago, is a riddle concealed in one of the most complex characters of the 14th century. A small slight youth with glistening eyes and a voluble flow of words, he was volatile, intelligent, charming, violent, cunning as a fox, ambitious as Lucifer, and more truly than Byron “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Seductive and eloquent, he could persuade his peers or sway a mob. He allowed himself the same unbridled acts of passion as Jean and other rulers, but, unlike Jean, he was a plotter, subtle, bold, absolutely without scruple, but so swerving and unfixed of purpose as to undo his own plots. His only constancy was hate. He is known to history as Charles the Bad.

Through his mother, daughter of Louis X, Charles of Navarre was more directly descended from the last Capets than Jean II, but his
parents had renounced any claim to the crown when they acknowledged Philip VI. They had been compensated by the Kingdom of Navarre. The tiny mountain realm in the Pyrenees offered their son too little scope, but as Count of Evreux he held a great fief in Normandy where influence could be exerted. This became his main base of operations.

He was moved to action by jealousy and hatred of Charles d’Espagne, the new Constable, upon whom the King with rash favor had bestowed the county of Angoulème, which belonged to the house of Navarre. After infuriating Charles of Navarre by taking his territory, Jean, in fear of the result, tried to attach him by giving him his eight-year-old daughter, Jeanne, in marriage. Almost immediately he redoubled the first damage by withholding his daughter’s dowry, which did not make a friend of his new son-in-law.

Charles of Navarre struck at the King through Charles d’Espagne. With no taste for half-measures, he simply had him assassinated, not without calculating that many nobles who equally hated the favorite would rally to the man who removed him. He did not kill with his own hands but through a party of henchmen led by his brother, Philip of Navarre, joined by Count Jean d’Harcourt, two Harcourt brothers, and other leading Norman nobles.

Seizing an occasion in January 1354 when the Constable was visiting Normandy, they broke into the room where he was sleeping naked (as was the medieval custom) and, with drawn swords gleaming in the light of their torches, dragged him from his bed. On his knees before Philip with hands clasped, Charles d’Espagne begged for mercy, saying “he would be his serf, he would ransom himself for gold, he would yield the land claimed, he would go overseas and never return.” Count d’Harcourt urged Philip to have pity, but the young man, filled with his brother’s rage and purpose, would not listen. His men fell upon the helpless Constable so “villainously and abominably” that they left his body pierced with eighty wounds. Galloping to where Charles of Navarre was waiting, they cried, “It is done! It is done!”