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May 10 - October 4, 2018
By virtue of its location in the center of Picardy, the domain of Coucy, as the crown acknowledged, was “one of the keys of the kingdom.” Reaching almost to Flanders in the north and to the Channel and borders of Normandy on the west, Picardy was the main avenue of northern France.
On apprehending in his forest three young squires of Laon, equipped with bows and arrows but no hunting dogs for taking important game, Enguerrand IV had them executed by hanging, without trial or process of any kind. Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. He had Enguerrand IV arrested, not by his peers but by sergents of the court, like any criminal, and imprisoned in the Louvre, although, in deference to his rank, not in chains.
“On apprehending in his forest three young squires of Laon, equipped with bows and arrows but no hunting dogs for taking important game, Enguerrand IV had them executed by hanging, without trial or process of any kind. Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. He had Enguerrand IV arrested, not by his peers but by sergents of the court, like any criminal, and imprisoned in the Louvre, although, in deference to his rank, not in chains.”
As a result of Norman conquests and the crusades, French was spoken as a second mother tongue by the noble estate in England, Flanders, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.
“As a result of Norman conquests and the crusades, French was spoken as a second mother tongue by the noble estate in England, Flanders, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. It was used as the language of business by Flemish magnates, by law courts in the remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by scholars and poets of other lands. Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French, St. Francis sang French songs, foreign troubadours modeled their tales of adventure on the French chansons de geste. When a Venetian scholar translated a Latin chronicle of his city into French rather than Italian, he explained his choice on the ground that “the French language is current throughout the world and more delightful to hear and read than any other.””
Acts of man no less than change in the climate marked the 14th century as born to woe. In the first twenty years, four ominous events followed one after another: the assault on the Pope by the King of France; the removal of the Papacy to Avignon; the suppression of the Templars; and the rising of the Pastoureaux.
The indirect consequence of the “Crime of Anagni” was the removal of the papacy to Avignon, and in that “Babylonian Exile” demoralization began.
The move occurred when, under the influence of Philip the Fair, a French Pope was elected as Clement V. He did not go to Rome to take up his See, mainly because he feared Italian reprisals for the French treatment of Boniface, although the Italians said it was because he kept a French mistress, the beautiful Countess of Périgord, daughter of the Count of Foix. In 1309 he settled in Avignon in Provence near the mouth of the Rhône. This was within the French sphere, though technically not in France since Provence was a fief of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.
Priests who could not read or who, from ignorance, stumbled stupidly through the ritual of the Eucharist were another scandal.
Later when ordaining candidates for holy orders, he met the word aenigmate (through a glass darkly) and this time swore in honest outrage, “By St. Louis, that was no courteous man who wrote this word!”
The popes—successors, as Petrarch pointed out, of “the poor fishermen of Galilee”—were now “loaded with gold and clad in purple.”
His successors Benedict XII and Clement VI built in stages the great papal palace at Avignon on a rock overlooking the Rhône, a huge and inharmonious mass of roofs and towers without coherent design.
Though himself something of a lapsed cleric, Petrarch shared the clerical habit of denouncing at double strength whatever was disapproved. Avignon became for him “that disgusting city,” though whether because of worldly corruption or the physical filth and smells of its narrow, overcrowded streets is uncertain.
More accessible than Rome, Avignon attracted visitors from all over Europe, and its flow of money helped to support artists, writers and scholars, masters of law and medicine, minstrels and poets.
Nor could simony stay isolated at the top. When bishops purchased benefices at the price of a year’s income, they passed the cost down, so that corruption spread through the hierarchy from canons and priors to priesthood and cloistered clergy, down to mendicant friars and pardoners.
She frees the prisoner from his dungeon, revives the starving with milk from her own breasts.
The act of faith through prayer was what counted. It was not justice one received from the Church but forgiveness.
What the Church offered was salvation, which could be reached only through the rituals of the established Church and by the permission and aid of its ordained
Salvation’s alternative was Hell and eternal torture, very realistically pictured in the art of the time. In Hell the damned hung by their tongues from trees of fire, the impenitent burned in furnaces, unbelievers smothered in foul-smelling smoke. The wicked fell into the black waters of an abyss and sank to a depth proportionate to their sins: fornicators up to the nostrils, persecutors of their fellow man up to the eyebrows. Some were swallowed by monstrous fish, some gnawed by demons, tormented by serpents, by fire or ice or fruits hanging forever out of reach of
The Fraticelli’s stubborn insistence on the absolute poverty of Christ and his twelve Apostles was acutely inconvenient for the Avignon papacy, which condemned their doctrine as “false and pernicious” heresy in 1315 and, when they refused to desist, excommunicated them and other
Children did, however, have toys: dolls and doll carriages harnessed to mice, wooden knights and weapons, little animals of baked clay, windmills, balls, battledores and shuttlecocks, stilts and seesaws and merry-go-rounds.
Allegiance in the 14th century was still given to a person, not a nation, and the great territorial lords of duchies and counties felt themselves free to make alliances as if almost autonomous. The Harcourts of Normandy and the Duke and other lords of Brittany, for various reasons, did just that.
“The claim to the French crown gave an excuse of legality to any vassal of France whom Edward could recruit as an ally. If he, not Philip, were the rightful King of France, a vassal could transfer his homage on the ground that it had simply been misplaced. Allegiance in the 14th century was still given to a person, not a nation, and the great territorial lords of duchies and counties felt themselves free to make alliances as if almost autonomous. The Harcourts of Normandy and the Duke and other lords of Brittany, for various reasons, did just that. Edward’s claim through his mother gave him the one thing that made his venture feasible—support within France and a friendly beachhead. He never had to fight his way in. In either Normandy or Brittany this situation was to last forty years, and at Calais, captured after the Battle of Crécy, it was to outlast the Middle Ages.”
In July 1346 the King was ready for his renewed attempt. Accompanied by his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, he set sail for Normandy with 4,000 men-at-arms and 10,000 archers plus a number of Irish and Welsh foot soldiers.
“In July 1346 the King was ready for his renewed attempt. Accompanied by his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, he set sail for Normandy with 4,000 men-at-arms and 10,000 archers plus a number of Irish and Welsh foot soldiers. (Another force, sent earlier on the longer voyage to Bordeaux, had already engaged French forces along the frontiers of Guienne.) Guided by Godefrey d’Harcourt, who had been banished from France, the King’s expeditionary force landed on the Cotentin Peninsula, where Harcourt promised rich opportunities for loot in the prosperous unwalled towns of his province. Although Edward “desired nothing so much as deeds of arms,” according to Froissart, he also, in another case of medieval squinting, apparently welcomed Harcourt’s promise that he would meet no resistance because the Duke of Normandy and his knights were fighting the English in Guienne and the people of Normandy were not used to war.”
So fruitful proved Normandy that the English needed to make no further provision for their host, and so unwarlike that the inhabitants fled, leaving their houses “well-stuffed and granges full of corn for they wist not how to save and keep it.…
The sack of Normandy by an army led by the King of England himself was the prototype of all that was to follow.
French chivalry refused to concede a serious role in war to the non-noble, even though the Normans had once captured England by virtue of the archer who shot Harold through his eye.
It has been estimated that some 32,000 combatants, plus the crews of ships and all the service troops needed for the siege, making a total of 60,000 to 80,000 men, were employed in the course of the Crécy-Calais campaign.
Eustache Deschamps was to make his refrain forty years later: “No peace until they give back Calais.” Crécy and Calais ensured that the war would go on—but not yet, for Europe in 1347 stood on the edge of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history.
IN OCTOBER 1347, two months after the fall of Calais, Genoese trading ships put into the harbor of Messina in Sicily with dead and dying men at the oars.
“IN OCTOBER 1347, two months after the fall of Calais, Genoese trading ships put into the harbor of Messina in Sicily with dead and dying men at the oars. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea, where the Genoese maintained a trading post. The diseased sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding. The sick suffered severe pain and died quickly within five days of the first symptoms. As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous fever and spitting of blood appeared instead of the swellings or buboes. These victims coughed and sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or less, sometimes in 24 hours. In both types everything that issued from the body—breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement—smelled foul. Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end “death is seen seated on the face.””
The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection.
“The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection. The presence of both at once cause the high mortality and speed of contagion. So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient. So rapidly did it spread from one to another that to a French physician, Simon de Covino, it seemed as if one sick person “could infect the whole world.” The malignity of the pestilence appeared more terrible because its victims knew no prevention and no remedy.”
Rumors of a terrible plague supposedly arising in China and spreading through Tartary (Central Asia) to India and Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and all of Asia Minor had reached Europe in 1346.
Between June and August it reached Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris, spread to Burgundy and Normandy, and crossed the Channel from Normandy into southern England.
Amid accumulating death and fear of contagion, people died without last rites and were buried without prayers, a prospect that terrified the last hours of the stricken.
In Paris, where the plague lasted through 1349, the reported death rate was 800 a day, in Pisa 500, in Vienna 500 to 600. The total dead in Paris numbered 50,000 or half the population. Florence, weakened by the famine of 1347, lost three to four fifths of its citizens, Venice two thirds, Hamburg and Bremen, though smaller in size, about the same proportion.
In Kilkenny, Ireland, Brother John Clyn of the Friars Minor, another monk left alone among dead men, kept a record of what had happened lest “things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who come after us.”
In Siena, where more than half the inhabitants died of the plague, work was abandoned on the great cathedral, planned to be the largest in the world, and never resumed, owing to loss of workers and master masons and “the melancholy and grief” of the survivors.
the plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other.
When the plague entered northern France in July 1348, it settled first in Normandy and, checked by winter, gave Picardy a deceptive interim until the next summer.
In Picardy in the summer of 1349 the pestilence penetrated the castle of Coucy to kill Enguerrand’s mother, Catherine, and her new husband.
At sunrise on Monday, September 19, in bustle and clamor of arms with trumpets sounding, the French host was drawn up behind the mounted spearhead in the usual three battalions. They were deployed one behind the other, presumably for successive shocks, but precluded by this position from aiding one another on the flank. The nineteen-year-old Dauphin, who had never fought in war before, was nominal commander of the first battalion; Philippe d’Orléans, brother of the King, aged twenty and equally a novice, commanded the second; the King himself, the third. He was accompanied by a personal guard
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The Oriflamme, fork-tongued scarlet banner of the Kings of France, was awarded to Geoffrey de Charny, “the perfect knight,” to carry.
Warned of the assault, the Prince had halted the initial departure, reassembled, and in a fiery oration called upon his knights to fight for their King’s claim to the French crown, for the great honor of victory, for rich spoils and eternal fame. He told them to trust in God and obey commands.
Stumbling and falling, the horses went down under their riders or reared back among those who followed, “making great slaughter upon their own masters.” It was the frenzy of Crécy over again.
Tangled in the confusion of riderless horses and raging combat, many of the battalion fought on savagely, hand to hand, stabbing with shortened lances and hacking with battle-ax and sword.
Instead of coming in with fresh force to give the hard-pressed English no pause, which at this stage might well have turned the tide, Orléans’ battalion, swept up in the retreat, fled without striking a blow, retrieved its waiting horses, and galloped for the city.
Although a battle’s outcome, it was said, could be told by the time the sixth arrow was loosed, now when the English archers had emptied their sheaves the issue wavered.
“Although a battle’s outcome, it was said, could be told by the time the sixth arrow was loosed, now when the English archers had emptied their sheaves the issue wavered. In the pause before the new French assault, the archers had retrieved arrows from the wounds and dead bodies of the fallen; others now hurled stones and fought with knives. Had the third French assault been mounted, it is possible that at this stage, against a battered opponent, it might have prevailed.”
Bleeding from multiple wounds, Geoffrey de Charny was cut down and killed still holding the Oriflamme.
With the loss of the King, the remaining French forces disintegrated, those who could flying for the gates of Poitiers to escape capture.
“With the loss of the King, the remaining French forces disintegrated, those who could flying for the gates of Poitiers to escape capture. English and Gascons of all ranks pursued wildly, greed overmastering exhaustion, and scrambled for prisoners under the very walls of the city. Some of the French turned in flight and captured their pursuers.”
The defeat swept France of its leadership. In addition to the King, the Constable and both Marshals, and the bearer of the Oriflamme, who were either dead or taken, the victors captured one fighting archbishop, 13 counts, 5 viscounts, 21 barons and bannerets, and some 2,000 knights, squires, and men-at-arms of the gentry.
“The defeat swept France of its leadership. In addition to the King, the Constable and both Marshals, and the bearer of the Oriflamme, who were either dead or taken, the victors captured one fighting archbishop, 13 counts, 5 viscounts, 21 barons and bannerets, and some 2,000 knights, squires, and men-at-arms of the gentry. Too many to be taken back, most were released on a pledge to bring their ransoms to Bordeaux before Christmas.”
Peasants of a village in Normandy belonging to the Sire de Ferté-Fresnel, seeing their seigneur come riding through with only a squire and a valet and without his sword, raised the cry, “Here is one of the traitors who fled from the battle!” They rushed upon the three riders, pulled the lord from his horse, and beat him up. He returned a few days later, better armed, to take vengeance, killing one villager in the process.
Separatism in Normandy and Brittany, failure to resist the Black Prince’s raid in Languedoc, and the intrigues and betrayals of Charles of Navarre were aspects of the disunity that lost the Battle of Poitiers.
“Separatism in Normandy and Brittany, failure to resist the Black Prince’s raid in Languedoc, and the intrigues and betrayals of Charles of Navarre were aspects of the disunity that lost the Battle of Poitiers. The right of independent withdrawal, which the Order of the Star and the ordinance of 1351 had tried to suppress, had not been yielded by the nobles in their own minds. The defeat at Poitiers was a pyrrhic triumph of baronial independence.”
Spent by combat and eager to bring his royal prize out of reach of any rescue attempt, the Prince made no further effort toward a juncture with Lancaster, but turned south at once for Bordeaux, dragging added baggage wagons filled with luxurious fittings including furred mantles, jewels, and illuminated books from the French camp.
