Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (25 page)

The mid-fourteenth century was a time of maximum distress across Europe. The Black Death struck in 1348, though it was by no means the last irruption of the bubonic plague. France was about to descend into the bear pit of the Hundred Years War with England, and the Holy Roman Empire was in uproar over the Golden Bull of 1356 and the introduction of a consolidated imperial constitution and electoral procedures. Thanks to the papal schism, there was one pope in Rome, and another in Avignon. Those few parts of the Kingdom of Burgundy which had not been lost were often disputed among neighbours. To cap it all, mind-boggling crises of succession erupted simultaneously in the Kingdom of France, in the Duchy of Burgundy and in the County-Palatine. At this point, faint-hearted readers are advised to take a break.

Studying the Burgundian succession of the 1360s, one can easily develop ‘
Palis-Rondon
’ – as the Japanese call a squint. Three of the main players were Jean II de Valois, king of France, and two of his sons: Charles de Navarre and Philippe le Hardi. One explanation runs as follows:

Charles II of Navarre was a grandson and heir to Margaret of Burgundy, eldest daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy. John II of France was a son and heir to Joan of Burgundy, second daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy. John was first cousin of Philip’s father i.e. a cousin once removed, whereas Charles was the son of a first cousin of Philip’s father i.e. a second cousin himself. Charles’s mother Joan had died already in 1349. John’s practical position was helped by his being the stepfather of the young duke having been married to the widowed Joan of Auvergne…
⁸⁷

This, one suspects, is
not
the way to explain it – even if it’s correct.

Another way is to leave the finer points of the genealogical tangle to the specialists, and to probe the nomenclature and the politics. It would help if it were clarified at the outset that three separate women all used the same style of ‘Margaret of Burgundy’; and that three individual men were all called ‘Philippe de Valois’. One of them, otherwise known as Philippe de Rouvres (1347–61), thoughtlessly started the crisis in 1361 by dying prematurely during a recurrence of the plague and in an unconsummated marriage. Had he lived, he might painlessly have fused his own claims to the duchy and those of his wife to the county-palatine. Instead, all his titles were deemed to have reverted to rival claimants. What is more, the French king, Jean le Bon, decided to ignore the principle of primogeniture and, again for purely political reasons, to earmark the Duchy of Burgundy for his fourth son.

The bold actions of this fourth son, Philippe de Valois, le Hardi (Philip the Bold), who had won his spurs as a teenager at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 against England’s Black Prince, provide the key to all subsequent developments. Despite his modest ranking in the French line of succession, he managed to dominate the long-running Council of Regents that ran France for decades after his father’s death in 1364.
⁸⁸
Also, by marrying the widow of Philippe de Rouvres, Marguerite de Dampierre, heiress to Flanders (where she was known as Marghareta van Male), he rescued a bevy of claims and titles that had earlier been dispersed. Among them was the vital claim to the County-Palatine of Burgundy, which finally reverted to Marguerite in 1384 after the death of her father. The result was a newly reunited Burgundian polity, centred on the union of duchy and county, which came together in the last two decades of Philippe le Hardi’s long life. It does not figure separately on Bryce’s list, but arose from a combination of Nos. X and VII.

To no one’s surprise, the emergence of the duchy-county, which could only have been realized through the simultaneous weakness of France and Germany, caused severe friction. In France, it provoked a fierce and protracted civil war between two court factions, the ‘Burgundians’ and the ‘Armagnacs’, whose intrigues quickly became entangled with the politics of the Hundred Years War. The former favoured good relations both with the successors of Philippe le Hardi and with Burgundy’s English allies. The latter, the French patriots, deplored the activities of their breakaway duchy and its treacherous alliance with the hereditary English enemy. From 1418 to 1436, forces from Burgundy participated in the English occupation of Paris. The imperial Germans, hopelessly divided by their own quarrels, were in no state to intervene until the Habsburg era began in the 1430s. Everyone, except perhaps the clerks of the imperial chancery, forgot that the Kingdom of Burgundy had not officially expired. In the interval, the duke-counts enjoyed a free run.

The astonishing new creation which flourished from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth century is generally and inaccurately called the ‘Duchy of Burgundy’, or sometimes just ‘Valois Burgundy’; it was ruled by a line of French dukes, who briefly threw off the tutelage of Paris in order to create a brilliant, wealthy and cultured civilization of their own.
⁸⁹
Yet the dominant French perspective is not necessarily the best one, and the historical term of the ‘States of Burgundy’ is definitely to be preferred: so, too, for its rulers is the double title of ‘duke-counts’. The success of the enterprise derived from the fact that the French duchy and the imperial county, having been fused at the head in a personal union, were merged into a new entity that was neither French nor German. Philippe le Hardi’s family was only half-French; it was equally half-Flemish, and since Philippe’s Flemish wife, Marguerite de Dampierre, had been born a subject of the emperor, at least partially imperial. Furthermore, behind the extraordinary small empire which the duke-counts assembled, from Boulogne to the Black Forest, lay the romantic idea that they were reassembling the long-lost realm of Lotharingia.

Only four duke-counts of the States of Burgundy reigned in more than a century: Philippe le Hardi/Filips de Stoute (r. 1364–1404), Jean sans Peur/Jan zonder Vrees (r. 1404–19), Philippe le Bon/Filips de Goede (r. 1419–67) and Charles le Téméraire/Karel de Stoute (r. 1467–77). Dutch and Flemish historians have their own nomenclature, of course. When they talk of rulers who were simultaneously duke (
hertog
) and count (
graaf
), they are thinking of Burgundian outsiders who were also counts of Flanders and Artois. The full list of the Burgundian States, however, cannot be limited to two Burgundies, Flanders and Artois. Charles le Téméraire, for instance, held fifteen titles: count of Artois, duke of Limburg, duke of Brabant, duke of Lothier, duke of Burgundy, duke of Luxembourg, count-palatine of Burgundy, margrave of Namur, count of Charolais, count of Zeeland, count of Flanders, count of Zutphen, duke of Guelders, count of Hainault and count of Holland.
⁹⁰

None of the duke-counts were kings. Coronations lay in the gift of the pope, and no pope would have braved the wrath of both the king of France and the German emperor in order to elevate a king of Burgundy. But in the brilliance of their courts, the wealth of their cities and the opulence of their patronage, the Burgundians outshone almost all the crowned heads of their day, and were kings in all but name.
⁹¹

The territorial base of the new political complex differed substantially from that of all previous Burgundies. Although anchored in the duchy and the county, the greater part of the agglomeration lay in the coastal region far to the north, and did
not
include most of historic Burgundy. The personal inheritance of Marguerite de Dampierre, born at Bruges, was considerably larger and wealthier than her husband’s. It stretched all the way from the ex-French counties of Vermandois and Ponthieu to the ex-imperial counties of Holland and Gelderland, and comprised all the great cities of the Low Countries: Amiens, Arras, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and Amsterdam. Several gaps in the patchwork – at Utrecht, Cambrai, Liège and Luxeuil – were filled by dependent bishoprics. One of the fragments of imperial Burgundy that the German emperors hung on to was the county of Neuchâtel (now a canton in north-western Switzerland). This was made possible because the Emperor Rudolf I took Neuchâtel into his personal possession before handing it in fief to one of his supporters. Its proximity to Germany ensured the emperors’ continuing care and attention, and it evaded the clutches both of the Valois duke-counts and of the Swiss Confederation all the way to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
⁹²
From 1707 to 1806, it belonged, eccentrically, to Prussia.

The fifteenth century saw the heyday of medieval cities. They flourished most ostentatiously in two centres, northern Italy and the Low Countries – that is, in the States of Burgundy – and were the true habitat of the Renaissance. Art and learning went hand in hand with commerce:

Bruges, at this time the most international mercantile town in north-west Europe, was undoubtedly [Burgundy’s] beating heart. Hundreds of foreigners had their residence there… At least twelve ‘nations’ of foreign merchants enjoyed… legal protection… Forty or fifty Hansa merchants resided in the city throughout the year. The northern Italians… were even more numerous. There were also… Catalans, Castilians, Portuguese, Basques, Scots, and English.

Bruges was the centre of a complex network… During the six-week-long Whitsun fair… all the foreigners left Bruges… for Antwerp. There they controlled the trade in expensive textiles such as linen and velvet, and… in goods from overseas like spices, wine, oil, tropical fruits, sugar, and furs… Thus, we can imagine Bruges at the top of a pyramid, with… Antwerp in the second place and Ghent and Ypres, regional mercantile centres.

From the thirteenth century on, Italian firms had extended credit to rulers in the Low Countries… Duke Philip the Bold had close connections with Dino Rapondi, a banker from Lucca… Dino settled in Flanders and lent large sums of money to the duke and to the towns… With a bill of exchange for sixty thousand francs, payable in Venice, and a large loan, Dino provided the ransom for John the Fearless when he was captured by the Turks… in 1396.
⁹³

The court of the duke-counts was itinerant. Its home base lay in the ‘Palais des Ducs’ in Dijon, where it wintered, but it would move off every spring for its annual progress; regular destinations included the old comtal residences at Hesdin in Artois and Mechelen near Antwerp. Contemporaries always commented on its splendour and ostentation. ‘Burgundian’ has become a byword for lavish dress, conspicuous consumption and making merry. The processions and pageants and the ‘entries’ of the duke-counts and their guests were consciously undertaken as political spectacles. The Burgundian court felt itself the equal of all its neighbours, bar none: