A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

The integrity of France had reached its lowest point. If a king had been captured at Poitiers, kingship itself was surrendered at Troyes. France the supreme was reduced to an Anglo-Burgundian condominium. Henry V’s quick five-year campaign alone had not accomplished this: it was the work of a hundred years of disintegrating forces combined with the rise of the Burgundian state and the accident of the King’s long-lived madness. But at this stage in the development of nationalism it was not a conquest that could succeed, no matter how careful the methods of Henry V. If a sense of Frenchness was already too strong to accept the transfers of sovereignty in 1360, it was that much stronger two generations later, as the parties to the Treaty of Troyes were clearly aware. They included a clause forbidding anyone to voice disapproval of the treaty and making such disapproval an act of treason.