admiration which great deeds are sure to call forth in natures capable
of performing them; and that was, that Europe was divided into petty
sovereignties, too weak to maintain their independence without foreign
aid, too proud to submit to another government, and trusting to the
support their money or influence could procure. In all countries,
therefore, there existed bodies of mercenary soldiers--or Free Lances,
as they were called--claiming the dignity and rank of knights and
noblemen, who never knew whether the men they were fighting to-day
might not be their comrades and followers to-morrow. In Italy, always a
country of divisions and enmities, there were armed combatants secured
on either side. Unconnected with the country they defended by any ties
of kindred or allegiance, they found themselves opposed to a body,
perhaps of their countrymen, certainly of their former companions; and,
except so much as was required to earn their pay and preserve their
reputation, they did nothing that might be injurious to their temporary
foes. Battles accordingly were fought where feats of horsemanship
and dexterity at their weapons were shown; where rushes were made
into the vacant space between the armies by contending warriors, and
horse and man acquitted themselves with the acclamations, and almost
with the safety, of a charge in the amphitheatre at Astley's. But no
blood was spilt, no life was taken; and a long summer day has seen a
confused mêlée going on between the hired combatants of two cities or
principalities, without a single casualty more serious than a cavalier
thrown from his horse and unable to rise from the weight and tightness
of his armour. Fights of this kind could scarcely be considered in
earnest, and we are not surprised to find that the burden and heat of
an engagement was thrown upon the light-armed foot: we gather, indeed,
towards the end of Froissart's Chronicles, that while the cavaliers
persisted in endeavouring to distinguish their individual prowess, as
at the battle of Navareta in Spain, and got into confusion in their
eagerness of assault, "the sharpness of the English arrows began to be
felt," and the fate of the battle depended on the unflinching line and
impregnable solidity of the archers and foot-soldiers. These latter
took a deeper interest in the result than the more showy performers,
and were not carried away by the vanities of personal display.
Look at the year 1300, with the jubilee of Boniface going on. Look
at 1400, with the death of Chaucer and Froissart, and the enthroning
of Henry the Fourth, and what an amount of incident, of change and
improvement, has been crowded into the space! The rise of national
literatures, the softening of feudalism, the decline of Church
power,--these--illustrated by Dante and Chaucer, by the alteration
in the art of war, and above all, perhaps, by the translation of the
Bible into the vulgar tongue--were not only the fruits gained for the
present, but the promise of greater things to come. There will be
occasional backslidings after this time, but the onward progress is
steady and irresistible: the regressions are but the reflux waves in
an advancing tide, caused by the very force and vitality of the great
sea beyond. And after this view of some of the main features of the
century, we shall take a very cursory glance at some of the principal
events on which the portraiture is founded.
It is a bad sign of the early part of this period that our great
landmarks are still battles and invasions. [A.D. 1314.] After
Courtrai in 1302, where the nobility rushed blindfold into a natural
ditch, we come upon Bannockburn in 1314, where Edward the Second,
not comprehending the aim of his more politic father,--whose object
was to counterpoise the growing power of the French monarchy by
consolidating his influence at home,--had marched rather to revenge
his outraged dignity than to establish his denied authority, and
was signally defeated by Robert Bruce. Is it not possible that the
stratagem by which the English chivalry suffered so much by means
of the pits dug for their reception in the space in front of the
Scottish lines was borrowed from Courtrai,--art supplying in that dry
plain near Stirling what nature had furnished to the marshy Brabant?
However this may be, the same fatal result ensued. Pennon and standard,
waving plume and flashing sword, disappeared in those yawning gulfs,
and at the present hour very rusty spurs and fragments of broken
helmets are dug from beneath the soil to mark the greatness and the
quality of the slaughter. Meantime, in compact phalanx--protected by
the knights and gentlemen on the flanks, but left to its own free
action--the Scottish array bore on. Strong spear and sharp sword did
the rest, and the English army, shorn of its cavalry, disheartened by
the loss of its leaders, and finally deserted by its pusillanimous
king, retreated in confusion, and all hope of retaining the country
by the right of conquest was forever laid aside. Poor Edward had,
in appalling consciousness of his own imperfections, applied to the
Pope for permission to rub himself with an ointment that would make
him brave. Either the Pope refused his consent or the ointment failed
of its purpose. Nothing could rouse a brave thought in the heart of
the fallen Plantagenet. Sir Giles de Argentine might have been more
effectual than all the unguents in the world. He led the king by the
bridle till he saw him in a place of safety. He then stopped his horse
and said, "It has never been my custom to fly, and here I must take my
fortune." Saying this, he put spurs to his horse, and, crying out, "An
Argentine!" charged the squadron of Edward Bruce, and was borne down by
the force of the Scottish spears. The fugitive king galloped in terror
to the castle of Dunbar, and shipped off by sea to Berwick.
The next battle is so strongly corroborative of the failing supremacy
of heavy armour, and the rising importance of the well-trained
citizens, that it is worth mention, although at first sight it
seems to controvert both these statements; for it was a fight in
which certain courageous burghers were mercilessly exterminated by
gorgeously-caparisoned knights. [A.D. 1328.] The townsmen of Bruges and
Ypres had grown so proud and pugnacious that in 1328 they advanced to
Cassel to do battle with the young King of France, Philip of Valois,
at the head of all his chivalry. There was a vast amount of mutual
contempt in the two armies. The leader of the bold Flemings, who
was known as Little Jack, entered the enemy's camp in disguise, and
found young lords in splendid gowns proceeding from point to point,
gossiping, visiting, and interchanging their invitations. Making his
way back, he ordered a charge at once. The rush was nearly successful,
and was only checked within a few yards of the royal tent. But the
check was tremendous. The bloated burghers, filled with pride and
gorged with wealth, had thought proper to ensconce their unwieldy
persons in cuirasses as brilliant and embarrassing as the armour of the
knights. The knights, however, were on horseback, and the embattled
townsfolk were on foot. Great was the slaughter, useless the attempt
to escape, and thirteen thousand were overborne and smothered. Ten
thousand more were executed by some form of law, and the Bourgeoisie
taught to rely for its safety on its agility and compactness, and not
on "helm or hauberk's twisted mail."
The crop of battles grows rich and plentiful, for Edward the Third and
Philip of Valois are rival kings and warriors, and may be taken as
the representatives of the two states of society which were brought
at this time face to face. For Edward, though as true a knight as
Amadis himself in his own person, in policy was a favourer of the new
ideas. When the war broke out, Philip behaved as if no change had taken
place in the seat of power and the world had still continued divided
between the lords and their armed retainers. He threw himself for
support on the military service of his tenants and the aristocratic
spirit of his nobles. Edward, wiser but less romantic, turned for
assistance to the Commons of England,--bought over their good will and
copious contributions by privileges granted to their trades,--invited
skilled workmen over from Flanders, which, with the freest spirit in
Europe, was under the least improved of the feudal governments,--and
established woollen-works at York, fustian-works at Norwich, serges
at Colchester, and kerseys in Devonshire. Mills were whirling round
in all the counties, and ships coming in untaxed at every harbour.
Fortunately, as is always the case in this country, it was seen that
the success of one class of the people was beneficial to every other
class. The baron got more rent for his land and better cloth for his
apparel by the prosperity of his manufacturing neighbours. Money was
voted readily in support of a king who entered into alliance with their
best customers, the men of Ghent and Bruges; and at the head of all
the levies which the parliament's liberality enabled him to raise were
the knights and gentlemen of England, totally freed now from any bias
towards the French or prejudice against the Saxon; for they spoke the
English tongue, dressed in English broadcloth, sang English ballads,
and astonished the men of Gascony and Guienne with the vehemence of
their unmistakably English oaths. Yet some of them held lands in feudal
subjection to the French king. Flanders itself confessed the same
sovereignty; and men of delicate consciences might feel uneasy if they
lifted the sword against their liege lord. To soothe their scruples,
James Van Arteveldt, the Brewer of Ghent, suggested to Edward the
propriety of his assuming the title of King of France. The rebellious
freeholders would then be in their duty in supporting their liege's
claims. So Edward, founding upon the birth of his mother, the daughter
of the last King, Philip le Bel,--who was excluded by the Salic law, or
at least by French custom, from the throne,--made claim to the crown
of St. Louis, and transmitted the barren title to all his successors
till the reign of George the Fourth. As if in right of his property
on both sides of the Channel, Edward converted it into his exclusive
domain. [A.D. 1340.] He so entirely exterminated the navy of France,
and impressed that chivalrous nation with the danger of the seas by
the victory of Helvoet Sluys, that for several centuries the command
of the strait was left undisputed to England. Philip had endeavoured
to obtain the mastery of it with a fleet of a hundred and fifty ships,
mounted by forty thousand men. The Genoese had furnished an auxiliary
squadron, and also a commander-in-chief, of the name of Barbavara. But
the French admiral was a civilian of the name of Bahuchet, who thought
the safest plan was the best, and kept his whole force huddled up in
the commodious harbour. Edward collected a fleet of scarcely inferior
strength, and fell upon the enemy as they lay within the port. It
was in fact a fight on the land, for they ranged so close that they
almost touched each other, and the gallant Bahuchet preserved himself
from sea-sickness at the expense of all their lives. For the English
archers made an incredible havoc on their crowded decks, and the
pike-men boarded with irresistible power. Twenty thousand were slain
in that fearful _mêlée_; and Edward, to show how sincere he was in
his claim upon the throne of France, hanged the unfortunate Bahuchet
as a traitor. The man deserved his fate as a coward: so we need not
waste much sympathy on the manner of his death. This success with his
ships was soon followed by the better-known victory of Crecy, 1346,
and the capture of Calais. [A.D. 1356.] In ten years afterwards, the
crowning triumph of Poictiers completed the destruction of the military
power of France, by a slaughter nearly as great as that at Sluys and
Crecy. In addition to the loss of lives in these three engagements,
amounting to upwards of ninety thousand men, we are to consider the
impoverishment of the country by the exorbitant ransoms claimed for
the release of prisoners. John, the French king, was valued at three
million crowns of gold,--an immense sum, which it would have exhausted
the kingdom to raise; and, in addition to those destructive fights and
crushing exactions, France was further weakened by the insurrection of
the peasantry and the frightful massacres by which it was put down. If
to these causes of weakness we add the depopulation produced by the
unequalled pestilence, called the Plague of Florence, which spread all
over the world, and in the space of a year carried off nearly a third
of the inhabitants of Europe, we shall be justified in believing that
France was reduced to the lowest condition she has ever reached, and
that only the dotage of Edward, the death of the Black Prince, and
the accession of a king like Richard II., saved that noble country
from being, for a while at least, tributary and subordinate to her
island-conqueror.
FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
Emperors of Germany.
A.D.
1400. RUPERT.
1410. JOSSUS.
1410. SIGISMUND.
_House of Austria._
1438. ALBERT II.
1440. FREDERICK IV.
1493. MAXIMILIAN I.
Kings of England.
A.D.
1399. HENRY IV.
1413. HENRY V.
1422. HENRY VI.
1461. EDWARD IV.
1483. EDWARD V.
1483. RICHARD III.
1485. HENRY VII.
Kings of Scotland.
A.D.
ROBERT III.--(_cont._)
1406. JAMES I.
1437. JAMES II.
1460. JAMES III.
1488. JAMES IV.
Emperors of the East.
A.D.
MANUEL PALÆOLOGUS.--(_cont._)
1425. JOHN PALÆOLOGUS II.
1448. CONSTANTINE XIII., (PALÆOLOGUS.)
1453. Capture of Constantinople by the Turks, and
close of the Eastern Empire.
Sultans of Turkey.
A.D.
1451. MOHAMMED II.
1481. BAJAZET II.
Kings of France.
A.D.
CHARLES VI.--(_cont._)
1422. CHARLES VII.
1461. LOUIS XI.
1483. CHARLES VIII.
1498. LOUIS XII.
Kings of Spain.
A.D.
1479. Union of the Kingdom under FERDINAND and ISABELLA.
1452. INVENTION OF PRINTING.
1455. WARS OF THE ROSES BEGIN.
1483. LUTHER BORN.
1492. DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.
Eminent Men.
JOHN HUSS, (1370-1415,) XIMINES
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM--AGINCOURT--JOAN OF ARC--THE
PRINTING-PRESS--DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.
The whole period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century has
generally been considered so unvarying in its details, one century
so like another, that it has been thought sufficient to class them
all under the general name of the Middle Ages. Old Monteil, indeed,
the author of "The French People of Various Conditions," declines to
individualize any age during that lengthened epoch, for "feudalism,"
he says, "is as little capable of change as the castles with which it
studded the land." But a closer inspection does by no means justify
this declaration. From time to time we have seen what great changes
have taken place. The external walls of the baronial residence may
continue the same, but vast alterations have occurred within. The rooms
have got a more modern air; the moat has begun to be dried up, and
turned into a bowling-green; the tilt-yard is occasionally converted
into a garden; and, in short, in all the civilized countries of Europe
the life of society has accumulated at the heart. Power is diffused
from the courts of kings; and instead of the spirit of independence
and opposition to the royal authority which characterized former
centuries, we find the courtiers' arts more prevalent now than the
pride of local grandeur. The great vassals of the Crown are no longer
the rivals of their nominal superior, but submissively receive his
awards, or endeavour to obtain the sanction of his name to exactions
which they would formerly have practised in their own. Monarchy, in
fact, becomes the spirit of the age, and nobility sinks willingly
into the subordinate rank. This itself was a great blow to the feudal
system, for the essence of that organized society was equality among
its members, united to subordination of conventional rank,--a strange
and beautiful style of feeling between the highest and the lowest
of that manly brotherhood, which made the simple chevalier equal to
the king as touching their common knighthood,--of which we have at
the present time the modernized form in the feeling which makes the
loftiest in the land recognise an equal and a friend in the person
of an untitled gentleman. But this latter was to be the result of
the equalizing effect of education and character. In the fifteenth
century, feudalism, represented by the great proprietors, was about
to expire, as it had already perished in the decay of its armed and
mailed representatives in the field of battle. By no lower hand than
its own could the nobility be overthrown either in France or England.
The accident of a feeble king in both countries was the occasion of
an internecine struggle,--not, as it would have been in the tenth
century, for the possession of the crown, but for the custody of the
wearer of it. The insanity of Charles VI. almost exterminated the
lords of France; the weakness of Henry VI. and the Wars of the Roses
produced the same result in England. It seemed as if in both countries
an epidemic madness had burst out among the nobility, which drove them
to their destruction. Wildly contending with each other, neglecting and
oppressing the common people, the lords and barons were unconscious of
the silent advances of a power which was about to overshadow them all.
And, as if to drive away from them the sympathy which their fathers
had known how to excite among the lower classes by their kindness and
protection, they seemed determined to obliterate every vestige of
respect which might cling to their ancient possessions and historic
names, by the most unheard-of cruelty and falsehood in their treatment
of each other.
The leader of one of the parties which divided France was John, son of
Philip the Hardy, prince of the blood royal and Duke of Burgundy. The
leader of the other party was Louis of Orleans, brother of the demented
king, and the gayest cavalier and most accomplished gentleman of his
time. The Burgundian had many advantages in his contest for the reins
of government. The wealth and population of the Low Countries made him
as powerful as any of the princes of Europe, and he could at all times
secure the alliance of England to the most nefarious of his schemes by
the bribe of a treaty of trade and navigation. He accordingly brought
his great possessions in Flanders to the aid of his French ambition,
and secured the almost equally important assistance of the University
of Paris, by giving in his adhesion to the Pope it had chosen and
denying the authority of the Pope of his rival Orleans. Orleans had
also offended the irritable population of Paris by making his vows,
on some solemn occasion, by the bones of St. Denis which adorned the
shrine of the town called after his name,--whereas it was well known to
every Parisian that the real bones of the patron of France were those
which were so religiously preserved in the treasury of Notre Dame. The
clergy of the two altars took up the quarrel, and as much hostility
was created by the rival relics of St. Denis and Paris as by the rival
pontiffs of Avignon and Rome. Thus the Church, which in earlier times
had been a bond of unity, was one of the chief causes of dissension;
and the result in a few years was seen in the attempt made by France
to shake off, as much as possible, the supremacy of both the divided
Popes, as it managed to shake off entirely the yoke of the divided
nobility.
Quarrels and reconciliations among the princes, feasts and festivals
among the peerage, and the most relentless treatment of the citizens,
were the distinguishing marks of the opening of this century. Isabella
of Bavaria, the shameless wife of the hapless Charles, added a great
feature of infamy to the state of manners at the time, by the openness
of her profligacy, and her neglect of all the duties of wife and queen.
Rioting with the thoughtless Orleans, while her husband was left to the
misery of his situation, unwashed, unshorn, and clothed in rags and
filth, the abandoned woman roused every manly heart in all the land
against the cause she aided. Relying on this national disgust, the wily
Burgundian waited his opportunity, and revenged his private wrongs
by what he afterwards called the patriotic dagger of an assassin.
[A.D. 1407.] On the night of the 23d of December, 1407, the gay and
handsome Louis was lured by a false message from the queen's quarters
to a distant part of the town, and was walking in his satin mantle,
twirling his glove in his hand, and humming the burden of a song, when
he was set on by ten or twelve of the adherents of his enemy, stabbed,
and beaten long after he lay dead on the pavement, and was then left
motionless and uncared-for under the shade of the high house-walls of
the Vieille Rue du Temple.
Public conscience was not very acute at that time; and, although no
man for a moment doubted the hand that had guided the blow, the Duke
of Burgundy was allowed to attend the funeral of his murdered cousin,
and to hold the pall in the procession, and to weep louder than any
as the coffin was lowered into the vault. But the common feelings of
humanity were roused at last. People remembered the handsome, kindly,
merry-hearted Orleans thus suddenly struck low, and the ominous looks
of the Parisians warned the powerful Burgundy that it was time to take
his hypocrisy and his tears out of the sight of honest men. He slipped
out of the city, and betook himself to his Flemish states. But the helm
was now without a steersman; and, while all were looking for a guide
out of the confusion into which the appalling incident had brought the
realm, the guilty duke himself, armed _cap-à-pie_, and surrounded by a
body-guard which silenced all opposition, made his solemn entry into
the town, and fixed on the door of his hotel the emblematic ornament of
two spears, one sharp at the point as if for immediate battle, and one
blunted and guarded as if for a friendly joust. Eloquence is never long
absent when power is in want of an oration. A great meeting was held,
in which, by many brilliant arguments and incontrovertible examples
from holy writ and other histories, John Petit proved, to the entire
satisfaction of everybody who did not wish to be slaughtered on the
spot, that the doing to death of the Duke of Orleans was a good deed,
and that the doer was entitled to the thanks of a grateful country. The
thanks were accordingly given, and the murderer was at the height of
his ambition. As a warning to the worthy citizens of what they had to
expect if they rebelled against his authority, he took the opportunity
of hurrying northward to his states, where the men of Liege were in
revolt, and, having broken their ill-formed squares, committed such
slaughter upon them as only the madness of fear and hatred could have
suggested. Dripping with the blood of twenty-four thousand artisans,
he returned to Paris, where the citizens were hushed into silence,
and perhaps admiration, by the terrors of his appearance. They called
him John the Fearless,--a noble title, most inadequately acquired;
but, in spite of their flattery and their submission, he did not feel
secure without the presence of his faithful subjects. He therefore
summoned his Flemings and Burgundians to share his triumphs, and a
loose was given to all their desires. They pillaged, burned, and
destroyed as if in an enemy's country, encamping outside the walls,
and giving evident indications of an intention to force their way into
the streets. But the sight of gore, though terrifying at first, sets
the tamest of animals wild. The Parisians smelt the bloody odour and
made ready for the fray. The formidable incorporation of the Butchers
rose knife in hand, and at the command of their governor prepared to
preserve the peace of the city. Burgundians and Orleanists were equally
to be feared, and by a curious coincidence both those parties were
at the gate; for the Count of Armagnac, father-in-law of the orphan
Duke of Orleans, had assumed the leadership of the party, and had
come up to Paris at the head of his infuriated Gascons and the men of
Languedoc. North and South were again ranged in hostile ranks, and
inside the walls there was a reign of terror and an amount of misery
never equalled till that second reign of terror which is still the
darkest spot in the memory of old men yet alive. No man could put faith
in his neighbour. The murder of the Duke of Orleans had dissolved all
confidence in the word of princes. One half of France was ready to draw
against the other. Each half was anxious for support, from whatever
quarter it came, and to gain the destruction of their rivals would
sacrifice the interests of the nation.