Two books have recently read recently filled in gaps in my knowledge of the Hundred Years’ War. What I had known before had been only the outline from the English perspective – Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt; then all gains lost to Joan of Arc and the chaos of the War of the Roses.
Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, is – more focused than the title perhaps implies – a history of France in the second half of the 14th century, loosely organized around a biography of Duke Enguerrand VII of Coucy, the preeminent French noble of the era not directly in the royal line.
When I say, “a history of France”, the confounding factor is feudal marriages and holdings. The French crown properly controlled only the central third of the country we call France. The West apart from the Loire itself was held by – or at least owed allegiance to – England; the Dukes of Burgundy held their territory virtually independently; and in the southeast, the Pope in Avignon, whatever support he owed or received from France’s kings and their prestige, had been resident long enough to add as much Papal color as French to Provence, which bordered Italy anyway.
Reciprocally, French nobles held – or at least claimed – titles to land across Europe, not only in England (where castles and their estates would end up forfeited, confiscated, or (for the very lucky) sold as the war dragged on), but in Italy (where their claimed titles seem to have sometimes been alluded to on state occasions but no Frenchman actually ruled or succeeded in claiming rule by force), and in central Europe (which had begun already to ignore all French claims and repulsed the occasional expeditionary force).
However, while France was not a nation, it had a recognized culture – French knights were the greatest, French poetry the wittiest, the University of Paris was (outside Italy) recognized as the wisest – in Europe.
A Distant Mirror opens with a brief sketch of the Coucy dynasty, and another of the French monarchy in the first half of the 14th century, by way of context. Enguerrand VII’s boyhood would be shadowed by the opening of the Hundred Years’ War and the defeat at Crécy, and then the Black Death. By the second full-scale English invasion, he was old enough to fight and rule – and, following Poitiers and the “Jacquerie” (a French Peasants’ Revolt), when France sued for a truce he would go to England as a hostage. Times being what they were, he wound up marrying an English princess.
Enguerrand VII would spend the rest of his life busy with one thing or another, as Charles V and Charles VI struggled to suppress English-sponsored mercenaries and (unsponsored) bandits; curtail the influence of the “royal dukes”; suppress further discontent, riots, and insurrection by both bourgeoise and the lower classes (rarely acting together, their greatest weakness) as well as Flemish independence movements (sometimes subtly or unsubtly provoked by England); and of course rebuild his own duchy which, open to Normandy, had not unnaturally been raided and fought through by every English army.
In his spare time, he would lead military expeditions across Europe and beyond: a disorganized attempt to enforce his own claims in Switzerland; various futile attempts to secure one or another of the Italian city-states for one French duke or another; and an attempt – apart from the facade of crusade and the nobility of its leadership, openly mercenary – to suppress Mahdia in Tunisia for the Genoese, which fell to pieces on arrival, as the Tunisian Sultan avoided open battle and Genoa had failed to inform the French of the fortifications they would face or even provide siege weapons.
The French nobility and knighthood, despite their individual reputations won in tournaments and individual skill in battle, were plagued by an inability to grasp or accept the principle of unified command. Coucy won significant credit in these campaigns largely by giving advice which, ignored, led to losses; he was considered indispensable to the relief campaign that would set off across Europe and eventually meet the Turks at Nicopolis, but the chivalry of Europe could not be persuaded to accept a unified command; the impetuous French refused to wait for an organized battle plan and charged and lost again, although the losses they inflicted unsupported suggest the battle could have been won – and Bazajet did, in fact, turn back. Enguerrand VII was captured and would die in prison.
Alongside this biographical narrative, Tuchman gives fairly detailed accounts of many aspects of medieval life – particularly focusing on the court and church. She has in some sense collated a great number of the chroniclers of the era, although she distrusts many of their numbers. She gives a vivid overview of life in the 14th century: its grandeur and tragedy. I am not convinced of the wisdom of trying to combine a general history with a biography: it flows naturally enough as you read, and it would be hard to manage the scheme of balancing biography with general history any better, once she decided to do so. It makes an absolute muddle if the goal is to try to keep events in order; but you gain both a feel for an era as a whole, and the feel of connection to an actual person.
Norma Goodrich’s Charles, Duke of Orleans: Poet and Prince picks up just before A Distant Mirror leaves off. While this is a more straightforward biography, Charles was the preeminent French noble of his era, so we get the rest of the French history of the Hundred Years’ War, although rather less about the lower classes than Tuchman provides.
Charles inherited his duchy and a feud with the Duke of Burgundy at thirteen when Burgundy had his father killed. Within a few years he was ruling the duchy himself. At Agincourt – where the French still had not mastered unified command, and repeated previous disasters – he was captured, and would spend the next twenty-five years in England, charming everyone, plotting with the Scots, and directing his proxies in France as best he could. Often allowed diplomatic visitors, his ransom was set impossibly high – one couldn’t, of course, simply refuse to ransom a royal duke, but even as a young man he seems to have been recognized as one of the best minds in the French nobility, and therefore dangerous to let loose.
In England if not before, he began writing seriously – mainly poetry. Henry V knew he was getting unauthorized communication out somehow and moved him around periodically but doesn’t seem to have ever gotten hold of the mail itself. Goodrich suggests that Charles’s private poems may in fact also have been sent back to France with more formal correspondence and been one sort of code – there are significant differences between the French originals and the English “translations” Charles himself made.
During his imprisonment, the English were pursuing their campaign in France. The oddest thing in all this reading was realizing the role what we might call “legal fiction” played in medieval diplomacy. Edward III claimed the French crown – but doesn’t seem to have meant it as much more than a bargaining counter. Charles of Orléans and John of Burgundy made several formal reconciliations, in about the strongest possible terms if taken literally, but nobody seems to have been surprised that their feud went on. But Henry V seems to have taken a different tack – he really did mean to conquer France. He demanded a marriage with the French princess Catharine, evidently to unify the dynasties; although he died and it is doubtful the war party in England had any real inclination to do so for the infant Henry VI, the campaign of subjugation continued.
As the English neared Orléans, Charles, in prison, managed one of the most astonishing pieces of diplomacy on record. The new Duke of Burgundy had inherited the feud with Charles, and in the tortured logic of the time was campaigning with the English more or less as a result – although other intrigues abounded. Orléans should, by all military logic, have quickly fallen and with it the last major stronghold of the Daupin’s party. Charles therefore ceded regency of his duchy to the Duke of Burgundy, with charges to keep it safe and undamaged. Legal fictions once again – but Burgundy’s army, constrained by feudal obligation or bafflement, withdrew. Philip of Burgundy appears to have tried his own version of Charles’s tactic, arguing that if he had charge of Orléans, it was “captured” already and there was no need to pursue the campaign. The English were not impressed – but were forced to march against the city themselves in order to subdue it.
What the French might have done in the normal way of war, given this reprieve, is hard to tell; but in the interval Joan of Arc appeared and persuaded the Dauphin’s advisors to relieve Orléans. After this the French campaign to reconquer northern France proceeded steadily, despite Joan’s capture by the English and execution. Henry VI, lacking his father’s ambition, would eventually allow Charles of Orléans his ransom, reduced to manageable terms. Charles – married very young and widowed even before Agincourt – married again to help settle matters with the Burgundians. Charles acted as negotiator in finally settling peace with England – though the English negotiator, the Duke of Suffolk, despite the obvious need for peace, a protest that he should not as a friend of Charles be appointed at all, and a preemptive pardon for having to conclude unfavorable terms, was declared a traitor by the war party and executed on his return – one of a crowd of rash decisions leading up to the impending civil war in England.
The onset of that war would give France needed time to settle its own political affairs. Ironically, the fact that so many French noblemen had intrigued with the English over the years, meant that the crown was the only source of authority most Frenchmen trusted, even apart from the dignity conveyed by Joan of Arc’s role in Charles VII’s coronation. Any questions, not that the French had them, were swept away when Joan was cleared by a Papal inquiry after the French finally retook Rouen. Charles VII’s prestige was such that he was even able to raise the first national standing army in Europe perhaps since Rome fell. Goodrich notes that although in the short term the French crown escaped most of the limitations the English surrounded their monarch with, the eventual results of this unchecked power were disastrous.
In the short term, though, trade and farms recovered, and a rash of universities were founded – as the dukes looked to other avenues than war to raise prestige. Charles of Orléans was able to largely retire to managing his estates and writing poetry. Between his own prestige and friends’ efforts, disagreements with the new king, Louis XI, were kept from breaking out in open feud.
Goodrich’s prose is, unfortunately, somewhat uneven in tone as she relates all this. She periodically breaks out in exclamation points, as well as speculative descriptions of emotions the reader can’t help suspect reflect her own reactions – particularly to scenery – rather than any knowledge of the subject. On the other hand, she relies even more than Tuchman on the chroniclers: in fact for the history of Joan of Arc she merely quotes a chronicle at length. Her book is more worth reading for its subject than its own excellencies.
Romance of Victory 