War and peace and war, p.28
War and Peace and War, page 28
Until the reign of Philip the Fair, the crown had no difficulty living on its ordinary revenues, and occasionally collecting extraordinary levies (for periods of particularly intense war effort). By the end of the thirteenth century, however, when the ordinary revenues stagnated in real terms, expenses, especially for military operations, soared. To raise his income, Philip began using extraordinary taxes in a regular manner. He also imposed forced loans on the bourgeois and manipulated the currency. In one of the best-known events of his reign, Philip the Fair destroyed and looted the Order of the Templars.
The Templars originated as an order of monastic knights during the crusades. Unlike the Knights of St. John, who were also called the Hospitallers, the Templars were not known for charity and did not support hospitals, but set out to create a wealthy and powerful “transnational corporation.” Profiting from the tax-exempt status that the pope conferred on them during their crusading period, they lent money at lower interest rates than the Italian or Jewish bankers. They also served as bankers for the popes and lent large sums of money to Philip the Fair. On October 13, 1307, Philip ordered all Templars in France arrested and the order’s property seized. The Templars were accused of heresy, sorcery, and sodomy, and were subjected to the most-horrible tortures—racking, thumbscrews, and starvation. Their teeth and fingernails were pulled one by one, bones broken by the wedge, and feet roasted over flames. After 36 died in torture chambers and several by their own hand, the Grand Master Jacques de Molay and 122 other knights confessed to all the crimes. “And he would have confessed that he had slain God himself if they had asked him that,” wrote a chronicler. When Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake, he proclaimed his innocence and called down a terrible curse on the king and his descendants to the thirteenth generation. Within a year, Philip the Fair was dead. All of his 3 male heirs died, one after another, without leaving descendants, during the next 14 years. As one disaster after another fell on France during the fourteenth century, the legend of the Templar’s curse was remembered by people and grew in the retelling.
The methods used by Philip the Fair to fill his treasury, especially the recurrent use of war subsidies, incurred much resentment among the landowning and urban elites. The basic and essentially irresolvable problem was that the state competed with the elites for the shrinking surplus. In the first half of the fourteenth century, the kings began experiencing increasing resistance to taxation. For example, in 1314 Philip the Fair required a war subsidy for a campaign in Flanders. When last-minute negotiations averted the conflict, but the Royal officials nevertheless continued collecting a subsidy, a widespread rebellion erupted.
The lack of consensus on the need for national taxation had a direct effect on the ability of the state to wage the war against the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Philip VI (1328-50) and John II (1350-64) were unable to collect subsidies except in the time of outright conflict, and as a result faced increasing financial distress. As a result, France was always unprepared whenever military operations resumed after a truce. The military disasters of 1346 and 1347 (the defeat at Crécy, the loss of Calais) finally persuaded the Estates General in 1355 to 1356 to authorize necessary taxation, but now their attempts to impose taxes ran into resistance at the local level. In the end, the Estates were unable to produce the money they promised, and royal finances collapsed.
THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL TRENDS OF medieval France suggest the reasons for its fourteenth century collapse. Before examining the actual sequence of events leading to the fall, however, it is necessary to dispel one common myth: that France’s troubles were brought by the persistent conflict with the English, known as the Hundred Years’ War (1338-1453). First, the dates 1338 and 1453 are completely arbitrary. During this period, France and England were not at war continuously. There were several breaks in fighting, the longest of which was during 1389-1411. Before 1338, the French and the English fought a war as recently as in 1324-1327, and before that in 1294-1298. After 1453, there were wars in 1475 and 1489-1492. In fact, almost every generation of the French and the English fought against each other during their “Thousand Year War” between 1066 and 1815. Second, with only one quarter of the French population, England was simply not in the same league as far as military power is concerned. The English won several spectacular battles, but as we will shortly see, they were able to conquer and hold territory only when the French were mired in internecine fighting. As soon as the French got some semblance of internal unity, they immediately reconquered their territory. This happened twice; it was no fluke. Today historians emphasize that the main cause of the protracted warfare during 1338-1453 was not a dynastic conflict between the English and French kings, but rather the struggle between the great territorial magnates of France—the French king; the dukes of Brittany, Burgundy, and Guyenne (the latter was also the king of England); the counts of Flanders and Armagnac; and so on. While the magnates fought at the national level, noble factions slaughtered each other at the regional level, and peasants murdered lords and each other at the local level. As the great French historian Fernand Braudel said once, the Hundred Years’ War should more properly be called the “Hundred Years of Hostility.”
The first phase of the Hundred Years’ War, from the outbreak of hostilities in 1338 to the Peace of Bretigny in 1361, was disastrous for France. There were four major actions, all French debacles—the naval battle of Sluys (1340), the land battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), and the siege and capture of Calais by the English (1347). Contemporaries were astonished by the repeated defeats that mighty France suffered at the hands of relatively puny England. (The fourteenth-century Florentine historian Mateo Villani called Edward III “il piccolo re d’Inghelterra”—the “little king of England.”) The number of troops who fought in the battle of Crécy illustrates this disparity in power—there were 12,000 English facing between 30,000 and 40,000 French. The standard explanation of English victories is their effective use of archers. There is no question that the long-bow is a fearsome weapon, but there was another factor in the French failure—their lack of cohesion, their inability to cooperate.
By the early 1340s, elite overproduction undermined the prosperity and unity of the France’s ruling class. Large numbers of nobles had hardly any more land than a well-to-do peasant; they were what the French historian Marc Bloch called the “seigneurs sans terre”—“lords lackland.” The wages paid to a man at arms varied between 7 sou 6 denier for a squire and 15 sou for a knight banneret. A typical campaign of one to two months could yield 25 to 50 livres, equivalent to an annual income of the lesser nobleman. And there was the prospect of loot and ransoms. When the crown issued summons for the fighting men of France, in preparation for the campaigns against the English, literally tens of thousands of knights responded. “Everything happened”, wrote the medieval military historian Philippe Contamine, “as if the king and his lieutenants ... were surprised, even nonplussed, by the number of men at arms who responded to their order. Perhaps hesitations Philip VI displayed in the course of the military operations may be partially explained by the perplexity, if not confusion, of his entourage, in the presence of the incessant flow of disorganized crowds flocking to join his person.” Whereas before the campaign the royal officers expected to get 10,000 cavalry troops, they would get two or even three times the number. Moreover, the nobles brought with them the enmities and feuds that multiplied over the previous decades, and now divided them. The French army was not a cohesive force, as its behavior on the field of Crécy amply demonstrated. Despite the king’s order not to attack, because the time was late and the forces were not properly arrayed, the vanguard charged the English in their well-defended positions. Later, one part of the French army fought another, when the knights decided to slaughter the Genoese crossbowmen. “Slay these rascals who get in our way,” somebody shouted as the knights cut their way through. Wave after wave of attack was launched from the disorganized French ranks, and the English defeated each one. The day after the battle, several French levies who did not even know that the battle was already lost, marched toward Crécy and were cut down by the English knights. In short, it is hard to avoid the impression that the French army defeated itself, with a very little help from the English.
Although the French hosts were completely ineffective against the English, and lost one battle after another, they nevertheless had to be paid. But the declining royal revenues were increasingly inadequate to cover the spiraling costs of war. Remembering the baronial revolts of 1314-1316, during the 1340s and 1350s the Crown sought the help of the ruling elites (urban patricians and rural nobility) in collecting additional taxes. The disaster of Crécy and the loss of Calais the next year brought home to the nobility the seriousness of the situation, and the Estates General endorsed the royal plan for raising revenues at the end of 1347. The arrival of the Black Death the next year, however, disrupted tax collection, and no significant revenue materialized. Large-scale hostilities resumed in 1355, when Edward III landed in Calais and marched his army into Artois and Picardy. John II the Good chose not to seek battle, but to burn or carry off anything the countryside might offer an invading army. This scorched-earth policy succeeded in driving the English back to the Channel, but at the cost of leaving the local populace to starve. In December 1355, the Estates General met in Paris and authorized taxation for prosecuting war, but the attempts to collect the taxes ran into the resistance of local assemblies. The Estates met again in 1356 and through 1357, but their focus shifted from securing means of fighting the war to a more political agenda.
On September 19, 1356, the French army met near Poitiers the English army led by the Black Prince. The outcome was another disaster for the French. John the Good, 18 counts and viscounts, 21 barons and bannerets, and 2,000 knights and squires were captured. The debacle triggered the collapse of the state that manifested itself as urban revolution, aristocratic rebellion, and peasant uprising, all at once.
The government led by the dauphin (future Charles V) was confronted with two related problems. First, it had to come up with a huge ransom of 3 million livres for John II even though the state was bankrupt, and could not even pay the army. The government had no recourse but to convene the Estates General to make its appeal for money directly to the representatives of the elites. The second problem, however, was that the string of defeats, despite heavy taxation, had completely destroyed the credibility of the government. Additionally, the nobility itself was suffering from collapsing revenues and the need to raise money for their own ransoms. Here is how the contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart describes the mood of the country.
“So all the prelates of the Church, bishops and abbots, all the nobility, lords and kings, the provost of the merchants of Paris and the burgesses, and the councillors of the French towns, met together in Paris to consider how the realm should be governed until their king should be set free. They also wanted to find out what happened to the vast sums which had been raised in the past through tithes, levies on capital, forced loans, coinings of new money and all other extortionate measures by which the population had been tormented and oppressed while the soldiers remained underpaid and the country inadequately protected, but of these matters no one was able to give an account.”
The assembly elected 12 representatives from each of the 3 estates. “It was then decided by common consent that these 36 persons should meet frequently in Paris to discuss the affairs of the realm and put them in order.... As a first measure, the Three Estates stopped the coining of the money then being minted and took possession of the dies. Secondly, they required the dauphin to arrest his father’s chancellor, with Sir Robert de Lorris, Sir Simon de Bucy, Jean Poillevillain and other financial officers and former counselors of the king, in order that they should render a true account of all the funds which had been levied and collected on their advice. When these high officials heard of this, they completely disappeared and were wise to do so. They left the kingdom of France as quickly as they could and went to live in other countries until the situation should have changed. Next they appointed on their own authority officials with the duty of raising and collecting all the levies, taxes, tithes, loans, and other duties payable to the crown and they had new coinage of fine gold minted, called moutons.” By taking over the functions that were always the prerogative of the crown, the Council of Thirty-Six has accomplished what amounts to a coup-d’etat.
The key leader from the third estate to emerge in the revolutionary ferment of 1356-1358 was Etienne Marcel, the provost of merchants (basically, the mayor of Paris). Marcel was a member of the class of urban merchants and businessmen who had achieved great wealth during the previous century and now wanted to translate it into power and status. Several of Marcel’s relatives had already achieved noble rank. A cousin bought a patent of nobility for 500 livres; Marcel’s father-in-law and brother-in-law, starting as wealthy merchants in Rouen, became ennobled in the royal service. The tactics that Marcel used was mobilization of the urban masses of Paris as shock troops in wringing concessions from the dauphin-regent.
The confrontation between Marcel and the dauphin reached the climax in January 1358. The triggering event was, as usual, a spiral of violence and counter-violence. A citizen named Perrin Marc assassinated the dauphin’s treasurer. The murderer was forcibly taken from the sanctuary in a church by the dauphin’s marshall and hung. Etienne Marcel, assembling a crowd of 3,000 armed artisans and tradesmen, wearing the red-and-blue hoods of the popular party, marched to the royal palace. One of the dauphin’s councillors, who had the misfortune of encountering the throng, was recognized and, before he could flee, struck down by so many blows that he expired on the spot. Reaching the palace, the crowd burst into the dauphin’s chamber. As the terrified dauphin cowered in his bed, the provost’s men fell upon his two marshals (including the one who had hung Perrin Marc) and butchered them before his very eyes. The dauphin, “grieving and dumbfounded,” prayed to Marcel that the people of Paris might be his good friends as he was theirs, and accepted from Marcel two lengths of red-and-blue cloth to make hoods for himself and his officers. But the dauphin Charles, despite his sickly and nonmartial appearance, had a core of steel in him and a good head on his shoulders (he was later to be called Charles le Sage—the Wise). As soon as he could, Charles escaped from Paris to a nearby town of Senlis, where he set out to gather the support of the nobles.
While the government was deadlocked between the dauphin’s and Marcel’s factions, all remaining structures of law and order in the countryside disintegrated. “At that time a knight called Sir Regnault de Cervoles, commonly known as the Archpriest,” relates Froissart, “took command of a large company of men at arms assembled from many countries. These found that their pay had ceased with the capture of King John and could see no way of making a living in France. They therefore went toward Provence, where they took a number of fortified towns and castles by assault and plundered the whole country as far as Avignon under the sole leadership of Sir Regnault. Pope Innocent VI and his cardinals who were at Avignon at that date were in such a fear of them that they hardly knew where to turn and kept their household servants armed day and night. After the archpriest and his men had pillaged the whole region, the pope and his college opened negotiations with him. He entered Avignon with most of his followers by friendly agreement, was received with as much respect as if he had been the king of France’s son, and dined several times at the palace with the pope and the cardinals. All his sins were remitted him and when he left he was given 40,000 crowns to distribute among his companions. The company left the district but still remained under the command of the archpriest.”
There were many other routier bands, in addition to the archpriest’s. The area around Paris was devastated by demobilized French men at arms, by the English, and by the partisans of Charles of Navarre, who was freed from Châtelet, where John II had imprisoned him. After paying heavy taxes for many years, and having been forced to pay for ransoms for their masters captured at Poitiers, the harrying by the free companies was the last straw for the peasants of Ile-de-France.
BY THE SUMMER OF 1358, France rode the Wheel of Fortune to the bottom. The king and the flower of the French nobility were captive of the English. The legitimate government, headed by the dauphin-regent, was chased out of the capital by the Parisian mob under the leadership of Etienne Marcel and faced a rebellion of a large segment of the French nobility, led by Charles of Navarre. A peasant revolt was raging in Ile de France, Picardy, and Champagne. And, finally, the country was overrun by numerous companies of unemployed soldiers and impoverished nobles, turned brigands. Although the Black Death, the courage of the English, the bad weather, and various other circumstances were factors in this decline, the critical one, the one that marks all declines and all ascents of the wheel of historical fortune, is cooperation (whether it seems to be failing because of class warfare or regional warfare).
Chapter 9
A New Idea of Renaissance
Why Human Conflict Is Like a Forest Fire and an Epidemic
The nobility and urban elites were shocked by the military and social crises of the 1350s. The violence of the Jacquerie and urban riots terrified them. The Three Estates, or what was left of them, because by 1358 the nobles had largely withdrawn their support, demonstrated its inability to turn things around. The elites began withdrawing their support from various anti-Valois factions and consolidating around the dauphin Charles.
Etienne Marcel turned the nobility against himself when he led Paris mobs in murdering royal marshals and terrorizing the dauphin. Marcel’s populist tactics and his intrigues with the “Jacks” and the English also cost him the support of the urban magnates. Increasingly isolated, the provost attempted to obtain aid from the Flemish towns, but on July 31, 1358, he and several other members of his faction were killed in street fighting with Parisian supporters of the dauphin.
