Europe: A History (86 page)

Italy evaded all foreign tutelage. In the fifteenth century Italy boiled with great prosperity, great turbulence, and immense cultural energy. It saw the zenith of the city-states, the city despots, the
condottieri
, and the early Renaissance (see Chapter VII). Unending municipal conflicts destroyed the oligarchic communes, giving the opening for local tyrants. Milan under twelve Viscontis (from 1277 to 1447) and five Sforzas (from 1450 to 1535) or Florence under Cosimo and Lorenzo dei Medici (from 1434 to 1494) saw no incompatibility between low politics and high art. Venice rose to the peak of its power and wealth, winning extensive possessions on the mainland, including Padua. Naples was cast into the outer darkness of civil strife. But Rome, in the hands of ambitious and cultured popes such as the Florentine Nicholas V (1447–55), re-emerged into the sunlight. Italy was free to enjoy its own strife and splendours until the reappearance of the French in 1494.

The ‘Hundred Years War’, whose conventional dates run from 1337 to 1453, was not a formal or continuous war between France and England. It is a historians’ label, first used in 1823, for a long period of troubles, ‘le temps des malheurs’, which were constantly used by the English as an occasion for raids, jaunts, and military expeditions. (It is sometimes called the
Second
Hundred Years War—in succession to the earlier Anglo-French conflict of 1152–1259.) It was, above all, an orgy of what later generations were to judge most despicable about ‘medievalism’—endless killings, witless superstition, faithless chivalry, and countless particular interests pursued without regard to the common weal. The scene is strewn with colourful figures. There were great knights such as the Breton Bertrand Duguesclin (
c
.1320–80), Constable of France, or his adversary Edward of Woodstock (1330–76), Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, ‘the Black Prince’. There were treacherous barons such as Charles le Mauvais of Navarre, rowdy
adventurers such as Sir John Fastolf, and any number of unscrupulous prelates like Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who would formulate a theological justification of murder or an ecclesiastical show trial to order. Few emerge with much credit. Fittingly enough, the most influential personage of the war was Bishop Cauchon’s chief victim Jeanne d’Arc, a blameless peasant girl who had heard mystical voices, who rode to battle in full armour, and who was burned at the stake on false charges of heresy and witchcraft. By that time, in 1430, every memory of the origins of the troubles had been lost. Well might Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465), princely poet and 35 years an English prisoner, lament for his native land:

Paix est tresor qu’on ne peut trop loer
Je hé guerre, point ne la doy prisier;
Destourbe m’a long temps, soit tort ou droit,
De voir France que mon cœur amer doit.
²³

(Peace is a treasure which cannot be praised too much. /I hate war: one should not hold it in high regard. /I have long been troubled, whether rightly or wrongly, / To see France, that my heart should love.)

France’s troubles were rooted partly in the dynastic problems of the House of Valois, partly in the waywardness of the great fiefs—notably Flanders, Brittany, Guyenne (Aquitaine), and Burgundy—and partly in the volatility of Paris. England’s interest lay in the Plantagenets’ continuing claims to the French throne; in their territorial possessions—notably in Guyenne; in commercial links with Flanders; and, above all, in the conviction of four or five generations of Englishmen that fame and fortune awaited them across the Channel. Potentially, France was always the stronger contestant; but English dominance at sea kept the island safe from all but France’s Scots allies; whilst the technical superiority of the English armies repeatedly postponed a clear decision. As a result, virtually all the fighting took place on French soil; and the English were free to keep on trying their luck and their manhood. Even in the 1450s, after a century of adventuring, it is doubtful whether the English would have stayed away if they had not been caught by a great civil war of their own.

Given the vast panorama, one should stress that six major royal expeditions from England, which start with Edward III’s landing at Antwerp in July 1338, and end with the death of Henry V at Vincennes in August 1422, are somehow less typical than the smaller but more frequent provincial campaigns, and the rovings of independent war parties. The glorious English victories in the set battles at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), or Agincourt (1415), though sensational, were less illustrative of the whole than the interminable skirmishes and castle-storming of the lesser actions. And they must be set against the shameful massacre of the citizens of Limoges by the Black Prince in 1370, or the wanton
chevauchée
from Calais to Bordeaux by his brother John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in 1373. They were certainly less decisive than the naval battle off L’Écluse (Sluys), where 20,000 Frenchmen perished in 1340. The short-lived royal armies probably caused less devastation than the freelance war parties, the
Grandes Compagnies
of the nobles,
or the murderous banditry of the
routiers
and
écorcheurs
. The major diplomatic events, such as the Peace of Brétigny (1360) or the Congress of Arras (1435), were no more productive than the innumerable minor pacts and broken truces.

The miseries of France form an essential backdrop to the main military and diplomatic events. The plague of 1347–9, which forced the third truce, was an important factor. So, too, were the
jacquerie
of 1358; the exploits of Étienne Marcel, draper of Paris, who took control of the Estates-General; the revolt in 1382 of the
maillotins
, who literally hammered the king’s tax-collectors to death; the butchers’ mob of Jean Caboche, or the warring factions of the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. Ferocious murders were commonplace: Marcel, who had murdered the royal marshals in their master’s presence in the Louvre, was himself murdered. Louis d’Orléans, founder of the Armagnacs, was murdered in 1407, as was the Constable of Armagnac and their chief rival, the ex-crusader Jean Sans Peur of Burgundy, on the bridge at Montereau. The unhappy house of Valois sat uneasily on the throne. With the exception of Charles V le Sage (r. 1364–80), a capable despot, they knew little repose. Jean le Bon (r. 1350–64), captured at Poitiers, died in English captivity. Charles VI (r. 1380–1422) passed thirty years in insanity. Charles VII (r. 1422–61), after years as Dauphin and as the hapless ‘King of Bourges’, survived decades in the shadow of Armagnacs and Burgundians before emerging as ‘the Well-Served’ at the head of France’s resurgent administration,
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The crux of the conflict was reached in the 1420s, a decade which started with the English rampant and ended with the French resurgent. After Agincourt, the young Henry V was busy organizing a new Anglo-French kingdom. By the Treaty of Troyes (1420) he controlled virtually all of France north of the Loire; and as son-in-law of the French King he was formally recognized as heir apparent to the Valois. After his sudden death at Vincennes his infant son, Henry VI, was proclaimed King under the regency of John, Duke of Bedford. Paris remained in Anglo-Burgundian hands from 1418 to 1436, with an English garrison in the Bastille. In 1428 Bedford laid siege to Orléans, the last royal-Armagnac stronghold in the north, and Valois fortunes were depressed to the point of despair. Yet no one had reckoned with that peasant girl, Jeanne d’Arc,
la Pucelle
, the maiden cavalier, who shamed the hesitant Dauphin into action. On 8 May 1429 she charged across the bridge and broke the Siege of Orléans. She then led her reluctant monarch across Anglo-Burgundian territory to his coronation at Reims. By the time of her death in 1431, tied to an English stake in the market square at Rouen, the English tide was ebbing fast,
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Thereafter, the tempo of the conflict gradually declined. Once the Congress of Arras in 1435 had weaned Burgundy from the English alliance, it was unlikely that England’s fortunes would revive. The
Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie
of 1439 at last gave the French kingdom a powerful standing army of cavalry and archers. The suppression of the
Praguerie
revolt ended Armagnac and aristocratic resistance. The last actions took place in 1449–53. When the Earl of Shrewsbury was defeated by artillery fire at Castillon in July 1453, and the gates of Bordeaux
thrown open to French rule, Calais alone remained in English hands. In 1475, in a sort of coda, an English army landed in France expecting the support of the Burgundians; but it was bought off for a pension of 50,000 crowns per annum, 75,000 crowns down payment, and the promise of the Dauphin’s marriage to Edward IV’s daughter.

For France, the Hundred Years War was a sobering experience. The population had fallen by perhaps 50 per cent. National regeneration began from the lowest possible point. Under Louis XI (r. 1461–83), the ‘universal spider’ and master of diplomacy, it proceeded apace, notably by his removal of the Burgundian menace.

For England, the era of the Hundred Years War was crucial in the formation of a national community. At the outset, Plantagenet England was a dynastic realm which in cultural as well as political terms was little more than an outpost of French civilization. By the end, shorn of its Continental possessions, Lancastrian England was an island kingdom, secure in its separateness, confident in its newfound Englishness. The Anglo-Norman establishment had been thoroughly anglicized. With Geoffrey Chaucer (
c
.1340–1400) English literature began its long career. Under Richard II (r. 1377–99) and the three Lancastrians—Henry IV (r. 1399–1413), Henry V (r. 1413–22), and Henry VI (r. 1422–61)—the wars in France provided a safety valve for energies left over from the violent struggles of monarchy and barons. Richard II was forced to abdicate, and later murdered at Pontefract. Henry IV, the usurper son of John of Gaunt, seized the throne with the aid of a false genealogy. Henry V was cut short in his endeavour to conquer France. Henry VI, another infant king, was eventually deposed. But underneath the blood-soaked surface of the political stage a firm sense of patriotism and national pride was building. No doubt it was anachronistic for William Shakespeare, writing 200 years later, to put England’s finest patriotic eulogy into the mouth of John of Gaunt, who spent so much time and energy fighting over the spoils of France. But he was expressing a sentiment that grew from the conflicts of that earlier age:

This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,