A Distant Mirror (89 page)

The King’s troubles mounted through the 1390s. He was drunk a great part of the time but not so incapacitated as to fail to aggrandize his Bohemian possessions at the expense of the great nobles. In consequence, he succeeded in uniting them in antagonism for long enough to enable them finally to depose him as Emperor in 1400, although he remained King of Bohemia.

Wenceslas’ difficulties were not merely personal or temperamental. They were an epitome of his century. He too was lost in the dark wood of his time. Like Jean II of France, he was born to a task of government too heavy for him in an age when too much was going wrong. Like government, the Church in his country was failing in its task and giving rise to the strongest movement for reform in Europe. Taking its doctrine from Wyclif and named for Jan Hus, who was to be burned as a heretic in 1415, the Hussite rising opened the way to the Reformation a hundred years later. It also finished off Wenceslas by inducing an apoplectic fit of which he died in 1419.

In France the feverish atmosphere showed itself in 1389 when an impassioned
controversy over the immaculate conception of the Virgin caused Dominican monks to be accused, like the Jews in the plague, of poisoning the rivers if not the wells. It happened that a Dominican, Jean de Montson, had propagated the view that the Virgin was conceived in original sin. He was condemned by the University of Paris, which upheld the opposite, Franciscan, view of her immaculate conception.
When Montson appealed to Pope Clement, d’Ailly and Gerson went to Avignon to demand official approval of their opinion. Clement was in a dilemma. Montson’s view was that of previous orthodoxy approved by Thomas Aquinas. If Clement denounced it, his own orthodoxy would be challenged by his rival in Rome. If he upheld it, he would be contradicting the University and arousing popular wrath in France. In the heat of this situation, angry threats pursued the Dominicans. Afraid for his life, Montson went over to Rome, leaving Clement free to declare for Immaculate Conception.

While devotion to the Virgin could still arouse such feeling, disbelief and irreverence were common at the end of the century, if the complaints of clerics and preachers reflect the true case. Scolding the laity was the cleric’s normal occupation, but now the volume was rising. Many folk “believe in naught higher than the roof of their house,” lamented the future saint
Bernardino of Siena. His fellow monk Walsingham reported that certain barons of England believe “that there is no God, and deny the sacrament of the altar and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the death of a beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.” Alongside evidence of failing faith may be put the unfailing succession of wills and bequests to shrines, chapels, convents, hermits, and sums for prayers and for pilgrimages by proxy. Few who professed disbelief during life took chances when they neared the end.

The too frequent use of excommunication for failure to take communion or keep feast days, so deplored by Gerson and other reformers, was a measure of the falling off of religious observance. Churches were empty and mass meagerly attended, wrote Nicolas de Clamanges in his great tract
De Ruina et Reparatione Ecclesiae
(The Ruin and Reform of the Church). The young, according to him, rarely went to church except on feast days and then only to see the painted faces and décolleté gowns of the ladies and the spectacle of their headdresses, “immense towers with horns hung with pearls.” People kept vigils in church not with prayer but with lascivious songs and dances, while the priests shot dice as they watched. Gerson deplored the same laxity: men left church in the midst of services to have a drink and “when they hear the bell announcing consecration, they rush back into the church like bulls.” Card-playing, swearing, and blasphemy, he wrote, occurred during the most sacred festivals, and obscene pictures were hawked in church, corrupting the young. Pilgrimages were the occasion for debauchery, adultery, and profane pleasures.

Irreverence in many cases was the by-product of a religion so much a part of daily life that it was treated with over-familiarity, but the
chorus of reproof at the end of the century indicated a growing element of disgust. “Men slept in indifference and closed their eyes to the scandal,” mourned the Monk of St. Denis. “It was a waste of time to talk of ways to reform the Church.”

Indifference, however, like a vacuum in nature, is not a natural condition of human affairs. A new devotional movement arose at this time in the small trading towns of northern Holland, between desolate marshland and moor near the mouth of the Rhine—as if only in a remote corner of strife-torn Europe could fresh piety find a place to sprout. Because the members lived communally, they came to be known by their neighbors as the
Brethren of the Common Life, although they referred to themselves simply as “the devout.” Their purpose was to find direct union with God, and through preaching and good works create a devout lay society. They were not extremists like the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit but simply, as they said, “religious men trying to live in the world”—meaning the lay world as distinct from the cloistered.

Gerard Groote, founder of the movement, was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant of Deventer in Holland. Born in the same year as Coucy, he spent a dissolute youth while studying law and theology at the University of Paris, where he dabbled in magic and medicine and made love to women “in every green woods and upon every mountain.” Finding the scholars’ disputations “useless and full of discord,” he left the University to join the secular clergy, and after a career as a worldly pastor in Utrecht and Cologne, experienced a conversion. Giving away his property in Deventer to charity, he went forth to preach a gospel of dedication to God springing from an “inner kernel of devotion,” rather than from baptism and the sacraments.

His zeal, gift of rhetoric, and an impressive personality attracted listeners in crowds that often overflowed the churches. People came to listen from miles away. Wearing an old gray cloak and patched garments, and trundling with him a barrel of books from which to confute critics after a sermon, Groote urged love of neighbors as well as of God, elimination of vice, and obedience to Christ’s commandments. Lamenting the corruption and predicting the impending collapse of the Church, he preached to the clergy in Latin and to the laity in the vernacular. A disciple took down his words and another went ahead to post announcement of a coming sermon on the church doors of the next town. Enthusiasts met in groups to adopt his principles and gradually joined to practice them, living together in houses segregated by sex.

Association was voluntary, without the binding vow essential in the
regular Orders, committing members to life apart from the world. Under the rules of Groote’s
Devotia Moderna
, members were to live in poverty and chastity but, instead of begging like the friars, were to earn their living by teaching children and by two occupations not controlled by the guilds, copying manuscripts and cooking. Work, Groote believed, “was wonderfully necessary to mankind in restoring the mind to purity,” although not so commerce: “Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.” By the time he died of an illness in 1384, his followers’ houses in Holland and the Rhineland numbered well over a hundred, with those for women being three times as many as those for men.

The communities’ emphasis on individual devotion and their very existence without a vow or an official rule were in themselves a criticism of the authorized Orders. Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels. Before he died, Groote was prohibited from preaching by the Bishop of Utrecht. When other churchmen afterward attempted to suppress the movement, his followers made vigorous and successful defense of their principles. At the Council of Constance in 1415, Gerson, though he disliked their doctrines, defended them against charges of heresy. Their communities survived because a climate of sympathy existed in their favor, and not only among the laity. Two years after Groote’s death, the Brethren established their first formal monastery in association with the Augustinian Order, though still without vows. Although the movement remained small and limited, it was soon to produce in
The Imitation of Christ
by Thomas a Kempis, the most widely read religious book in Catholicism after the Bible.

In 1380, in the small town of Kempen, south of Deventer, a peasant’s son was born to an evidently literate mother who kept a dame’s school for the younger children of the town. At twelve, Thomas of Kempen—or a Kempis, as he came to be called—entered a school of the Common Life at Deventer, lived and studied with its disciples, and then joined an associated Augustinian monastery, where he remained for the rest of his 91 years. Loving books and quiet corners, he compiled the sayings and sermons of Groote and his disciples into a prolonged rhapsody on the theme that the world is delusion and the Kingdom of God is within; that the inner spiritual life is preparation for life everlasting. What he was saying over and over, through endless variations and admonitions, was that the life of the senses is without value, that the riches, pleasures, and powers of the world—the things most men want and rarely obtain—are no good to them anyway, but are only an obstacle on the way to eternal life; that the way to salvation lies in the
abnegation of earthly desires and in the continual struggle against sin in order to make room for love of God; that man is born “with an inclination to evil,” which he must conquer to be saved; that good lies in doing, not knowing—“I would rather feel compunction than know how to define it”; that only the humble in spirit are at peace—“it is much safer to be in subjection than in authority”; that to desire anything is to be “straightway disquieted”; that man is but a pilgrim in life, the world is an exile, home is with God.

Nothing of this was new or remarkable.
The
Imitation of Christ
was what it said it was, an imitation of Christ’s message, a consolation for the humble who are mankind’s majority, a reassurance of the promise that their reward is to come hereafter. For a long time after Thomas’ book appeared, so little was known about its author that Jean Gerson was supposed by some to be the Bacon behind this obscure northern Shakespeare.

In 1391 Gerson’s plea against the Way of Force held the attention of the court from prime to vespers. Remembering how prison had closed over his predecessors, he pursued his argument at some risk, but as a native of Burgundy he had acquired the Duke as a patron, which may have made the sermon possible. He urged the crown to abandon the
Voie de Fait
with its “doubtful battle and spilling of blood,” recommending rather a resort to augmented prayer and penitential processions. In a discreet rebuke, he deplored the gagging of the University on the subject of a Church Council, “for I have no doubt that if you had been better informed on what your very humble and devout daughter, the University of Paris, wished to say to you on this matter, you would very willingly have heard it, and great good would have come of it.”

Boldly he suggested that the welfare of the papacy was subordinate to that of the Christian community as a whole, and that it would be “intolerable” if the Holy See, instituted for the good of the Church, became the instrument of its grave damage. He called on the memory of St. Louis, Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver, and the Maccabees to inspire Charles VI to remove the stain of the schism, a task Gerson did not hesitate to declare more important than a crusade against Islam. “What is greater than the union of Christendom? Who can better achieve that union than the most Christian King?”

Interference more material than Gerson’s blocked the
Voie de Fait
for the time being. France could not go to war in Italy without the alliance or, at very least, the benevolent neutrality of Florence and
Milan, a prospect distinctly impeded by the fact of their being at war with each other. Each had rival advocates in France. Milan was represented by Valentina Visconti, wife of Louis d’Orléans. Louis dreamed of acquiring the promised Kingdom of Adria, still waiting to be carved out of the Papal States in return for French support. The dream depended on access to the wealth of Milan and on the collaboration of Louis’ father-in-law in the
Voie de Fait
. Gian Galeazzo’s interests were double-edged. He favored a Kingdom of Adria in friendly—that is, in French—hands, while at the same time he was wary of allowing France to become a power in Italy. He wanted a French alliance against Florence but he did not want to opt openly for Clement or commit himself to the
Voie de Fait
. While steering through these shoals, he had to frustrate the Florentine league against him, and confound the schemes of Bernabò’s various sons and relations who were bent on his destruction.

News was spreading in Naples that the King of France and the Anti-Pope Clement were coming to Rome with a great army to reunite the Church. Clement himself was so sure of the program that he had ordered portable altars, riding saddles, pack saddles, blankets, and all equipment for a major move. Pope Boniface in great alarm begged the English to divert the French. This was accomplished not by a threat of war but by an offer of peace. English ambassadors came to France in February 1391 bringing an offer to negotiate a definitive treaty. Coucy and Rivière were delegated to confer with the English, to dine them and “keep them company.” As evidence of serious purpose, the ambassadors said that King Richard’s uncles, Lancaster and the bellicose Gloucester, would represent England at the parley. France could not refuse the momentous opportunity even if it meant postponing the
Voie de Fait—
which, of course, was the English purpose. The parley was set for the end of June and the march on Rome held in abeyance.

When June came, the English, having accomplished their original purpose, hung back from the edge of peace. At their request, the parley was postponed for another nine months until the following March. The truth was that England’s counsels were sharply divided. King Richard and his two elder uncles, Lancaster and York, favored peace, while the relentless
Thomas of Gloucester adamantly opposed it. In the generation since his father had fought France with no particular animus, the sense of underlying chivalric comradeship had shriveled. Gloucester, the youngest son, was fixed in his conviction that the French were perfidious and tricky and, by shifty legalities and ambiguous language, had cozened the English out of the gains confirmed in the Treaty of Brétigny. He refused to make peace until they
rendered back “all such cities, towns, lands, and seigneuries” which they had falsely taken, not to mention 1,400,000 francs still owing on King Jean’s ransom.