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ОглавлениеCHRISTINE AND THE ARMAGNAC-BURGUNDIAN FEUD
The sun had not yet risen on May 29, 1418, when Perrinet Leclerc unlocked the Porte Saint Germain with keys pilfered from his father’s bedside.1 Waiting outside was the Burgundian Jean de Villiers Seigneur de L’Isle-Adam, accompanied by a group of several hundred mounted men armed for battle. They burst through the gate, heading toward Châtelet. When the last had entered, Leclerc relocked the gate and tossed the keys over the wall to prevent the escape of the Armagnacs, who would soon be trying to flee. On reaching Châtelet, the Burgundians were greeted by crowds eager to avenge four years of Armagnac oppression. Hastily convoking, they decided to seize Armagnac leaders in their hotels. The group then continued through the streets shouting, “La paix, la paix, Bourgogne!” and “Vive Bourgogne!” as yet more supporters poured from their houses to join the fray.2 One contingent rode to the Hotel Saint Pol, just inside the city wall on the north bank of the Seine, to lay hold of the mad king, who cheerfully agreed to everything they demanded. Another made for the hotel of Bernard Count of Armagnac, near the Louvre, but Bernard, having been tipped off, was hiding in a nearby home, disguised as a mendicant. Still another galloped toward the Palais des Tournelles, north of the Hotel Saint Pol, in search of the fifteen-year-old dauphin Charles. However, the Armagnac prévôt of Paris, Tanguy du Chastel, alerted by the commotion in the streets, had hurried to rouse the sleeping dauphin. Tanguy used his own robe to clothe the young man and spirited him first to the Bastille and then to Melun.3
Juvénal des Ursins writes of the massacre, “to describe the murders, pillaging, stealing and tyranny carried out in Paris would be a thing too long and pitiful to recite.”4 The Burgundians knew that their opponents would seek revenge. On June 1, Tanguy du Chastel led a small force of Armagnacs back into the city by way of the Porte Saint Antoine. The Burgundians repelled them and then rampaged, hacking Armagnacs to pieces wherever they found them. Burgundians unable to join in the butchery—children, the unarmed—cursed their prostrate enemies. On June 12, crowds broke into prisons, seizing, among others, the Count of Armagnac, denounced by the man in whose house he had been hiding.5 The crowds murdered the count and his friends along with other prisoners, stripping the bodies and exposing them for public display.
The frenzy continued into the following months. The arrival in Paris on July 14 of Jean sans Peur and Queen Isabeau, whom Jean had released from Armagnac imprisonment the preceding November, did not halt the violence. A group led by Capeluche, the executioner of Paris, massacred another set of prisoners on August 21. Jean regained control of the situation only after persuading several thousand rebels to leave the city to fight the Armagnacs in Montlhéry. He then had the city gates barred while he rounded up and executed the instigators of the second prison massacre. Before order was restored, the slaughtered would include, in addition to the Armagnac leaders, the humanists Jean de Montreuil, Gontier Col, and possibly Laurent de Premierfait. The theologian Jean Gerson was fortunate enough to be in Germany at the time, having stayed on after the Council of Constance. Although the Armagnac-Burgundian feud had been under way for nearly two decades at the time of the Paris massacre, according to contemporary chroniclers, this episode surpassed all others in violence.6
I open with this description of violence because the Orleanist-Burgundian feud is the context for Christine de Pizan’s political writing. Recognizing this context has important implications for how we read her corpus. In her study of Joan of Arc, Colette Beaune notes the reluctance of modern historians to recognize the maid as an Armagnac, although she surely was.7 A similar hesitation marks Christine scholarship. The first step in the case that I make through an accumulation of evidence in the course of this study—that Christine, like Joan of Arc, must be seen as an Orleanist or Armagnac sympathizer—is the observation that members of feuding societies tend to be partisan rather than impartial. This point itself, however, requires justification: was the conflict that so preoccupied Christine a feud?8 The phenomenon described by scholars of feuding is compatible with descriptions of the Orleanist-Burgundian conflict in its early days: provocation, response, provocation. Bloodshed follows a long escalation of hostilities (as we see in the assassination of Louis of Orleans and, later, Jean sans Peur). Scholars commonly distinguish feuding, “armed combat within political communities,” from warfare, “armed combat between political communities.”9 A feud displays “clear rules (about who retaliates, when, how, and against whom), governed by norms that limit the class of possible expiators (women and children are usually excluded) and the appropriateness of responses.”10 True, the massacre of 1418 was thought to exceed these limits. However, even it was not spontaneous but tactical, a response to a particularly grievous long-term set of injuries. Michael Sizer has shown that the Burgundians targeted institutions and persons under whom they had suffered massively during Armagnac rule, denuding the bodies of their victims to protest social distinctions, lining up behind Capeluche to reclaim the right to mete out justice, and massacring prisoners because the prisons were insecure, which meant that the Armagnacs held in them posed a genuine threat.11 Moreover, the rampages responded to a specific event: the Count of Armagnac’s rejection of a treaty negotiated between the king’s ambassadors and the Duke of Burgundy in mid-May in La Tombe, north of Paris.12 When ambassadors arrived in Paris with news of peace, the Parisians had danced in the streets, anticipating a life free from the threat of war and Armagnac oppression. But when the Count of Armagnac rejected the treaty, the Burgundian Parisians began to plan their revolt. Although the shouts of “La paix, la paix, Bourgogne” from people in the midst of committing horrific acts may seem “grimly ironic,” Sizer explains, the Burgundian Parisians were indeed seeking peace. It was just that they believed “that the only end to the war was through extermination of the enemy infecting the body politic.”13
To return to historians’ reluctance to see Christine as partisan, feuds polarize populations, although the process can be slowed to some extent by intimate interactions among the members.14 This was true for the Orleanists and the Burgundians, who lived in close proximity. Still, Emily Hutchison has shown in her study of Orleanist and Burgundian emblems that by 1411 everyone had been forced to choose a side: “The symbols used, the violence faced and the implications of being called an ‘Armagnac’ or a ‘Burgundian’ forced ordinary people of the realm to join one faction or the other.”15 As to why nonpartisanship would have been difficult even earlier than 1411, the bone of contention was regency—that is, who would govern for the mad king—and the Orleanists and Burgundians represented the only choices available. Some historians have hypothesized the existence of a neutral “royalist” party. But there was no third claimant for regency apart from a period of a few years, when, as R. C. Famiglietti has shown, the dauphin Louis of Guyenne worked to create his own faction.16 Indeed, Christine threw her weight behind the dauphin when he began to move in this direction. But without a third regency candidate, a neutral royalist party would have been meaningless.17 Timur R. Pollack-Lagushenko has shown that the Orleanist and Burgundian factions were nothing like modern parties with stable membership based on a common ideology.18 Rather, they were groups associated with a leader from whom they expected reciprocation. At different times, a given baron, occupied with his own business, might not be actively engaged in the conflict. Also, even important leaders—the king himself, the queen, the Duke of Berry, the dauphin, the Duke of Anjou, and even Jean of Burgundy’s brothers—switched sides, joining up with a faction when they needed the support of one of the leaders and remaining involved until they had achieved what they wanted.19 This is not the same as neutrality, a principled refusal to support either faction.
True, Christine was different from powerful barons in that she had neither physical force to contribute to the struggle nor personal quarrels to settle. She worked, like other contemporary court writers, to give a form to kingship based on abstract principles in addition to personal devotion.20 It has been suggested that because writers attached to the houses of Orleans and Burgundy manifest the same fundamental preoccupations—financial reform, for example—their writings cannot be viewed as partisan.21 But one’s conception of kingship is closely linked to one’s notion of regency, and in these areas political writings do differ. Like the Burgundians and the university, Christine might have called for rule of the kingdom by a council representing the three estates.22 She did not do this.
In the rest of this chapter, I set the stage for the reexamination of Christine’s work that I present in the chapters that follow. I first consider the different visions of kingship that Christine’s society offered her, including Charles V’s. I then review her comments in the autobiographical sections of her work on Philip of Burgundy’s betrayal of Charles V’s regency ordinances, concluding that these justify reexamining her corpus.
Kingship and Regency in Late Medieval France
Christine’s family ties would have inclined her toward the House of Orleans from the feud’s beginnings. As we will see, her husband, Étienne de Castel, moved in chancery circles, Louis’s ambit. But equally important to the poet would have been Charles V’s vision of kingship, transmitted to her by her father, Thomas de Pizan, an advisor to the king, and reinforced by public readings of open letters and royal ordinances, in conversations held within the complex of buildings that formed the Hotel Saint Pol, and in manuscripts that she read or heard read, including the Grandes chroniques de France, an important source for her.23
Charles V’s regency ordinances betray two interests central to his vision of kingship that Christine will echo: maintaining rank and taking counsel from a group of devoted men of somewhat diverse social backgrounds. As for rank, the earliest of the regency ordinances, dated August 1374, stipulates that the king will be crowned at age fourteen. A set of ordinances dated October of the same year foresee and attempt to prevent a power struggle among the king’s brothers should the succeeding king be younger than fourteen. One ordinance notes tellingly that the task of the king is to administer the public good wisely, especially regarding those things from which the greatest danger might arise in the future. It then awards the king’s eldest brother, Louis of Anjou, gouvernement of the realm during a minority reign. Another ordinance of the same day draws attention to the king’s direct line, mentioning his second son, Louis, by name and specifying that if young Charles dies, Louis will succeed him.24 These regency ordinances thus emphasize rank, with the king’s eldest brother leading the younger brothers, but stressing, too, that the king’s two sons both precede all his brothers. Françoise Autrand describes Charles V’s assiduous maintenance of order, a reaction against his father, King Jean, who had allowed “poor” relations to serve as counselors.25 Bernard Guenée, too, notes that the interest in rank intensified during the reign of Charles V, so that under Charles VI some seventy “cousins” were minutely arranged on the basis of how closely they were related to the reigning king.26
The importance of rank runs through the continuation of the Grandes chroniques devoted to the reign of Charles V.27 Promoting the king against challengers like Charles of Navarre and defending the French position in the war against England, the chronicle records the precedence followed during royal entries and dinners, an attention that Christine will echo in the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V.28 As for its treatment of Charles V’s regency ordinances, the Grandes chroniques reports that the ordinances, proclaimed before the Parlement de Paris with great numbers of notable lords attending, fixed the age of succession at fourteen.29
Christine surely observed that just after Charles V’s death, Philip of Burgundy, the youngest brother of the dead king, demanded that Louis of Anjou be denied regency, that the eleven-year-old king be crowned immediately, and that a council headed by Philip himself rule for the young king.30 Regency by a council was not unprecedented. However, violation of a royal ordinance so publicly recognized required justification. The Grandes chroniques mentions in its final pages that because the uncles disagreed about the ordinances, it was advised that it would be expedient for the king to be crowned immediately.31 Pintoin’s chronicle supplies more detail, relating that Louis of Anjou’s spokesman argued before the Parlement that, following the custom of France enshrined in Charles V’s royal ordinance of 1374, the young king should ascend at fourteen and that until then Louis would not be done out of the regency.32 Philip’s spokesman, Pierre d’Orgemont, chancellor of Charles V, countered that the late king had changed his mind about regency just before his death, deciding that he could best guarantee the peaceful succession of power by having his son crowned co-ruler with him before he died (a habit of the Capetians through Philip Augustus) rather than having him ascend at fourteen. Charles V had revealed this decision secretly to a small group, including Pierre.33 But the king fell terminally ill before he could carry out the plan, and, according to Pierre, simultaneously realized that associating his son as king would violate the ordinance that he had recently passed setting the age of succession at fourteen, that is, the ordinance on which Louis of Anjou based his case. Thus Charles V had asked that this regency ordinance be invalidated and that his son be crowned immediately upon his death and placed in the care of Philip and Duke Louis of Bourbon, brother of the deceased queen. Pierre does not explain why Charles V considered this new regency arrangement more likely to result in a peaceful succession.
The story that Charles V planned to associate his son with him on the throne before his premature death may or may not be true, as Yann Potin has demonstrated. On the one hand, although Pierre was in a position to know, he would have had a motive to lie for Philip—the hope of retaining his office. As it turned out, Pierre was dismissed the day after his appearance before the Parlement, but undoubtedly he had hoped for better.34 Further casting doubt on Pierre’s story of deathbed revision is the treatment of Bureau de La Rivière, Charles V’s chambellan and closest advisor, in whose arms the king had died and whom he had assigned to supervise his brothers after his death. This leads to the second interest manifested in the royal ordinances, the importance of counselors. Although an ordinance awards Louis of Anjou gouvernement, it places him under the surveillance of Bureau de La Rivière. After laying out the sources of income with which Louis will govern the kingdom, the ordinance states that he will turn all that remains over to Bureau de La Rivière. Another ordinance, noted above, awards tutelle, or guardianship, of the dauphin to the queen, Jeanne of Bourbon, assisted by Philip and Louis of Bourbon (the king’s middle brother, Jean of Berry, for reasons unknown, receives no position at all). Again, Charles V places all the guardians under the watch of Bureau de La Rivière, “who completely understands [Charles V’s] will and intention regarding the children mentioned above.” He gives the chambellan veto power over all decisions made by the guardians, commanding that they “do nothing without [Bureau de La Rivière’s] counsel and deliberation.”35 He further lists the members who will serve on the grand council to advise these guardians. The list includes his advisors, known collectively as the “marmousets.”36
It cannot be a coincidence that the king’s chambellan, along with two other men identified by John Bell Henneman as Charles V’s closest advisors, Jean Le Mercier and Jean de Montaigu, both ennobled commoners, vanished after the king’s death, to reappear, along with the larger group of marmousets, only when Charles VI asserted power in 1388.37 A fourth, Olivier de Clisson, remained and was named connétable, backed by Louis of Anjou, as Françoise Lehoux explains.38
On the other hand, with Louis of Anjou set to inherit the provençal and Italian holdings of Jeanne of Naples as of 1379, Charles V may indeed have intended to head off problems that would have arisen from this diversion of attention by consecrating care of the kingdom and the dauphin to Philip in the form of tutelle.39 As we will see, whether tutelle or gouvernement of the realm was more significant varied: possession of the dauphin often carried more weight than administration of the realm. Whatever the truth, even as Pierre elaborated on the king’s last wishes, Philip’s troops swarmed around Paris, and the barons of the realm, apparently fearing violence, opted that Louis of Anjou be stripped of regency. Although unhappy, Louis consented for the good of his nephew.40 On November 30, 1380, the uncles installed what Lehoux calls a “polyarchy,” or ruling council, to govern.41
As noted above, Charles VI asserted his rule in 1388. But Philip seized power again with the onset of Charles VI’s madness in 1392, sending the marmousets fleeing once more.42 During a long lucid period in 1393, Charles VI attempted to dislodge his uncle with an ordinance granting administracion of the kingdom to his brother, who preceded his uncles, as Guenée explains, who could boast that they were son, brother, and uncle of kings of France, but only uncles of the reigning king.43 In another ordinance, Charles VI awarded guardianship to the queen, assisted by the princes of the blood, including Philip and Jean of Berry. The result was conflict. Over the years, Philip protested Louis’s preeminence in the government, citing the duke’s youth. The chronicle of Juvénal des Ursins reports that in 1401 Philip (along with several notable people) was still complaining that it was neither reasonable nor honorable that Louis should be governing, given his age—he was thirty years old at the time.44
The Burgundian power grabs, part of the long history of factionalism and reform in France, were nourished by nostalgia for a golden past of seigneurial liberties.45 The gist of Philip’s claim can be gleaned from later accounts of Burgundian activity. Pierre Cochon’s chronicle, for example, associates Jean of Burgundy’s regency claim with an ancient principle of governance through the three estates.46 University representatives speaking before the king in 1410 also proposed government by the three estates. The king of Navarre, speaking for the Duke of Burgundy, evinced eagerness to adopt such a rule.47
Because I am arguing that Christine’s vision of kingship and regency follows Charles V’s rather than the Burgundians’, it will be useful to consider how the king formed his view. During his reign, Charles V successfully negotiated multiple baronial threats, increasing the prestige of the monarchy by regaining most of the territory lost to the English during the first two Valois reigns and keeping his brothers under control. However, his hold on his own throne and, during his regency, the throne of his imprisoned father, King Jean, was often tenuous. Indeed, when King Jean died in 1364, it was not a given that his son would succeed him.48 The dauphin’s doubt as to his succession is betrayed by his interest in astrology, apparent from 1358 on. One astrological guide written for him in 1361 purported to answer such questions as “whether a kingdom will have a certain man as its leader” and “whether a man will have a kingdom.”49
What Raymond Cazelles referred to as the “crisis of royalty,” brought on by a succession crisis that extended from roughly 1314 to 1364, created in Charles V a lifelong mistrust of ambitious barons, including his own relatives.50 The principal threat throughout his regency and kingship came from “barons from the west,” as they have been designated by Graeme Small and others, strong princes whose territories lay within or adjacent to the French kingdom but who did not recognize the king of France as their superior. Most dangerous was King Edward III of England, who demanded sovereignty over his French territories, and, for many years, Edward III’s sometime ally Charles Le Mauvais, or the Bad, king of Navarre (1332–1387), a pretender to the French throne who controlled large areas of Normandy as well as his own kingdom.
The basis for Edward III’s challenge was the transfer of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s French territories to the English Crown. But, more immediately, the challenges of both Edward III and Charles of Navarre reached back to Philip IV (1268–1314), great-uncle of the wise king. When Philip IV’s first son, Louis X, died in 1316, leaving a four-year-old daughter, Jeanne, his second son, Philip V, assumed regency, initially promising to consider succession when little Jeanne came of age. The promise was forgotten when Philip later negotiated his niece’s renunciation of the throne with her maternal relatives, the dukes of Burgundy. Philip then became King Philip V, basing his claim on feudal law.51 He construed the kingdom as a sort of fief, and feudal law concerning female succession varied, though male preference prevailed. In some cases, only males could inherit; in others, a woman might inherit in the absence of a male heir. However, as Ralph Giesey observes, “political and patriotic pressures ultimately tipped the balance in favor of one and not another rule.”52 The idea that women could not succeed to the throne solved a pressing problem by delaying the succession of an heir who was only a child, and it avoided the succession threat of the heir’s maternal relatives who were hostile to the royal family.53 The same idea was marshalled to solve the next problem of succession, which arose when Philip V died in 1322, leaving only daughters. His brother Charles IV succeeded without challenge.54
But when Charles IV also died without a male heir, Edward III of England, grandson of Philip IV of France, challenged the 1328 succession of Philip VI of Valois. Although Edward III accepted that women could not rule France, he argued that the right to succession could pass through a woman, in this case his mother Isabella, daughter of Philip IV. So viewed, Edward III’s claim was stronger than that of the French claimant, Philip VI, son of Philip IV’s brother, Charles of Valois. An English king on the French throne was unacceptable to Philip VI’s followers, and thus it was decided that succession could not pass through a woman. It seems in any case that Edward III was more interested in forcing the Valois to cede him sovereignty over his territories in France than in assuming the French throne, and that he used the challenge to the throne as a bargaining chip.
As for Charles of Navarre, his claim through his mother, Jeanne, whose father, Louis X, had been Philip IV’s first son, was still greater, if one assumed that succession passed through women. For decades, the king of Navarre menaced Valois kings Jean and Charles V, drawing support from power bases in Normandy, Champagne, and Brie, although his precise goal is not as clear as that of Edward III.55 King Jean married his daughter to the aggressive young man in 1352 in an attempt to manage him, but then failed to pay the dowry and ceded Angoulême to his new connétable, Charles of Spain, without compensating Charles of Navarre for his rights there. Thus in 1354 Charles of Navarre had the connétable murdered, an affront that the king accepted for fear of an alliance between his son-in-law and the English.56 In late 1355, Charles of Navarre seems to have won over the dauphin Charles, persuading him to take part in a mysterious visit to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, uncle of the dauphin. King Jean foiled the visit. Although historians dispute the significance of the incident, some believe that the two Charleses were hatching a plot to replace King Jean with the dauphin.57 The king reconciled with the dauphin, making him Duke of Normandy, but remained suspicious: on April 5, 1356, in a fury, the king had Charles of Navarre arrested in the dauphin’s castle at Rouen and thrown in prison.58 But this was not the end of Charles of Navarre. In September 1356, King Jean was taken prisoner when the English defeated the French at the Battle of Poitiers. The dauphin summoned the Estates General to gain consent for taxes to raise the exorbitant ransom demanded by the English. The consequent loss of prestige, coupled with the new taxes, led to popular revolts in 1357–58; Charles of Navarre, liberated in November, eventually joined up with the prévôt of the merchants of Paris, Étienne Marcel, to take possession of Paris throughout part of 1358. The 1358 peasant uprising known as the Jacquerie, instigated by Marcel, shook the area around Paris, but the dauphin regained control.59 As Autrand observes, the dauphin’s power was contested by well-established members of King Jean’s administration, like Jean de Craon, who proposed “purging” his counselors because the dauphin “has a great and heavy duty to govern given the present state of France, and he is very young,” meaning that he needed to be strictly guided.60 Charles of Navarre continued to agitate, rebelling again in 1364, just before the death of King Jean. As Charles V made his way to his coronation in Rheims, he received word that the royal army under Breton Bertrand du Guesclin had decisively beaten the Navarrese at the Battle of Cocherel.61
The new king embarked on the “gradual re-establishment of royal power which was the salient characteristic” of his reign.62 Charles of Navarre, losing noble support, was less of a threat after 1364; many Breton lords, including Olivier de Clisson, joined Charles V, increasing the king’s influence in Brittany. Although the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360 had brought the return of King Jean and peace, it also had included a significant transfer of lands to the English. Charles V gained most of them back over the course of the decade, aided by the gradual installation of regular taxation for war, a development that made possible a “major French revival” under Charles V, as Henneman writes.63 Regular taxation came to be accepted because of the need for protection against mercenary companies, who, unemployed during lulls in the war, pillaged the countryside. Controlling fortresses throughout the south, they terrorized the surrounding areas. Also, borders of English territories in southern France could not be defended easily, allowing the French to wage a long war of attrition. Furthermore, when taxed by Edward the Black Prince, the English leader in Aquitaine, to support his allies in the War of the Castilian Succession, the Gascons refused and appealed to Charles V for support. Charles V enlisted the legal advice of a series of prominent jurists from Bologna, Montpellier, Orleans, and Toulouse, who assured him of his right to intervene.64 After summoning the Black Prince and receiving no response, Charles V declared war, the final result of which was the Black Prince’s return to England. In the north, French troops under Guesclin, then connétable, successfully held off English offensives.
Relative prosperity returned to France. But with the English under control, Charles V also needed to manage his brothers, which he accomplished by granting them appanages and lieutenancies, in return for which they served his interests.65 Tensions threatened while Charles V surrounded himself with devoted and competent counselors, his marmousets. The royal brothers resented this. But the charismatic king intimidated them when necessary, ceding none of his royal authority.66 In this newly peaceful environment, the king devoted time and resources to cultivating a court where intellectual exchange took place and where he could construct and embody his ideal of kingship. Among the more than eleven hundred volumes that he left at his death were many “mirrors for princes,” confirmation of his commitment to justifying himself within a legal framework.67 Further witness to Charles V’s reflection on kingship is the care that he took to explain his understanding of the role of the monarch in the introductions to his royal ordinances. Typical of this approach, he begins an ordinance on care for lepers by avowing that he wishes with all his heart to care for the public good and the good government of his people.68
Still, the theories of kingship laid out in writing would have been accessible to a fraction of his subjects, most grasping kingship only as it was embodied in a specific human being. As Philippe Contamine has emphasized, the Valois made this relationship felt by means of “a political imagery, ephemeral or lasting, public or private, which was above all . . . an imagery of established powers: coins, medals, seals, frescoes, stained glass windows, sculptures [especially funerary], painted ceilings, paintings on wood or, even more, manuscript miniatures.”69 Charles V consciously cultivated his image not only in manuscript illuminations and sculpture but in joyous entries into the towns of his kingdom calculated to magnify his majesty.70 He also cultivated the religious dimension of his kingship, modeling his coronation ceremony on bishops’ ordinations and touching his subjects to cure their scrofula.71 Most interesting for our purposes, he took care to promote visually the principles of succession laid out in his regency ordinances. In the illuminations of the Grandes chroniques, his heir, Charles, is nearly always depicted with his brother, Louis, emphasizing the importance of rank.72 This emphasis is also made explicit in a set of dynastic sculptures decorating a pillar supporting the north tower of the cathedral at Amiens, commissioned by the king’s counselor and president of the Cour des aides, Jean de La Grange (1325–1402), bishop of Amiens from 1373. François Salet has described the ensemble of sculptures as a transcription in stone of the ordinances of 1374—in other words, of the fundamental principles of Charles V’s conception of the monarchy. The sculptures are arranged in three registers. Adorning the highest level of the ensemble are the figures of the Virgin and child and the patron saints of Amiens, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Firmin. The middle register is inhabited by Charles V, the dauphin Charles, and his younger brother, Louis. The occupants of the bottom register are the king’s advisors: Bureau de La Rivière, Jean de Vienne, and Jean de La Grange himself. The king’s brothers do not appear in the schema. On the contrary, the sculptures illustrate the line of succession: after Charles V, the dauphin, and, should something befall the dauphin, the younger son, all of them supported by the king’s advisors. Of course, history proved the sculptures a “costly and useless act of patronage,” writes Salet, for “everyone knows the fate of the ordinances when Charles V died, too early, certainly, in 1380.”73
Christine as Political Observer
Charles V’s final regency plans remain somewhat unclear, as noted above. However, if the wise king did indeed decide to appoint Philip head of a regency council, as Pierre d’Orgemont claims, this information, as we have seen, was contested. As for Christine’s perspective, I argue in what follows that she believed that Charles V had left regency of the kingdom to Louis of Anjou and that Philip of Burgundy was a usurper.
Most of what we know about Christine’s life comes from her autobiographical writings in the Livre de la mutacion de fortune, the Advision, and, to a lesser degree, the Chemin de longue étude. Other works, including her poetry and the Fais et bonnes meurs, add important details. In this section I refer to these works for autobiographical information on the poet’s feelings toward royal power and the Burgundians. Christine suggests that her earliest memories were of Charles V and the French royal court. She recounts in the Advision that Charles V invited her father to Paris to serve as his astrologer and physician, a great honor to the “da Pizzano ‘dynasty’ of notaries,” a noble family that had resided in Bologna from at least 1269. Christine’s paternal grandfather, Benvenuto, and her father, Thomas, were both doctors in the Faculty of Medicine in Bologna. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas di Mondino, also received a doctorate of medicine at Bologna, where he must have met Thomas da Pizzano before moving to Venice. Sometime before 1357, Thomas too moved to Venice and married Thomas di Mondino’s daughter. The couple eventually returned to Bologna and had three children, two boys, Paulus and Aghinulfus, and Christine, born in about 1365.74
Thomas accepted Charles V’s offer. Initially, he went alone, planning to spend only one year in France, but Charles V requested that he summon his family from Bologna. After delaying for three more years, Thomas complied. When the family arrived, writes Christine, “the very good and wise king” received them “with joy.”75 The relationship between Thomas and the king grew still closer over the years, as Suzanne Solente has verified by tracking Thomas’s changing appellations. In 1372 he is referred to as “our astronomer”; later that year he is “our beloved and faithful physician” (nostre amé et feal phisicien), and, in 1380, “our beloved and faithful counselor and physician” (nostre amé et feal conseillier et phisicien).76 Moreover, Autrand suggests that Thomas served Charles V in diplomatic missions.77 Thomas was well compensated for his services. Christine claims that he received one hundred francs a month, plus that much again in books and gifts. In addition to his salary, the king promised to provide for Thomas’s future with a pension of five hundred livres.78
Charles V, gift giver, is inextricably associated in the poet’s writings with harmony, wealth, and joy. The order embodied in the king extended into his kingdom, even into Christine’s own life. As long as the king remained at the summit of the social hierarchy, prosperity was assured. Embracing her own place in the hierarchy, Christine benefited from the good that flowed from Charles V’s kingship. Although she gently mourns Thomas’s inability to manage his money, she fully accepts her father’s authority and celebrates his positive qualities.79 She also describes her marriage to Étienne de Castel, of a noble Picard family, as a happy result of the hierarchical system of reciprocal obligation. Étienne seems to have been a particularly apt choice, probably the son of another close associate of Charles V. Gilles Malet, who created the first inventory of the holdings of the king’s library in 1373 (a second was done in 1380), was the executor of the will of an Étienne de Castel, “armurier, valet de chambre et brodeur” of Charles V.80 In any case, Thomas selected the younger Étienne for his erudition, although a man so esteemed by the king could choose his son-in-law from a large pool of eligible candidates, as Christine explains.81 As a notary for the king, Étienne would have moved in circles associated with early Parisian humanists like Jean de Montreuil, Pierre and Gontier Col, and others with connections to Louis of Orleans.82
In 1380, the king offered Thomas accommodation in the Tour Barbeau, the equivalent of a few city blocks from the Hotel Saint Pol, just off the Seine, and in the house next to the Tour.83 Although we do not know where Thomas had lodged his family earlier, it is likely that they resided near the Hotel Saint Pol. The complex, bursting with human and animal life, housing roaming lions and other exotic animals, was the space Christine would have associated with the king. In addition, Christine would have been aware of the intellectual activity of which he was the center. She may have known Charles V’s library, the volumes of which resided in the various royal residences, with a special collection of precious volumes imparting the history of the Valois stored in the hold at Vincennes. The principal library, covering three floors of the Falconry Tower in the northwest corner of the Louvre, held a large collection.
The golden period that was the first fifteen years of Christine’s life ended with the king’s death. Philip and Louis of Bourbon, aided by Jean of Berry, took control of the government in the name of the young Charles VI, as we have seen. With their assumption of power, numerous courtiers lost their jobs. Christine observes in the Advision that when powerful men die, “the shake-ups and changes in their courts and territories are great.”84 Among the victims were the marmousets. Christine makes clear her affection for the marmousets in the Fais et bonnes meurs, singling out Jean de Montaigu for praise. She also describes Bureau de La Rivière as “wise, prudent, eloquent, a man with beautiful ways,” and notes that “many others of diverse status were graced by the king for their virtues of chivalry, wisdom, loyalty, intelligence or excellent service.”85
The marmousets were not the only courtiers to lose their jobs. Thomas’s prosperity ended with Charles V’s death. In the Advision, Christine writes that her father’s large pensions dried up, although the princes gouverneurs retained him “for wages sadly decreased and irregularly paid.” Thomas subsequently “fell from power and into illness.”86 The family must have hoped for better: just months before Charles V’s death, the Duke of Burgundy had awarded Thomas a hundred livres tournois “to recognize his services and strengthen bonds with him in the future.”87 Thomas was not completely neglected: in return for the “good and agreeable services” rendered to Charles VI and his father before him, on May 23, 1384, the new king awarded him two hundred francs in gold to help him to “maintain his estate.”88 But Philip seems to have shown no more interest.
With Charles V gone, the interest at court in astrologers, always controversial, seems to have diminished. Thomas in any case was a controversial figure. Philippe de Mézières ridicules him in book 2, chapter 67 of the Songe du vieil pelerin. Lynn Thorndike relates that Thomas had had both good and bad moments in his capacity as an astrological and medical advisor.89 As for his successes, at one point he had soil collected from the “centre and four quarters of France,” placing five lead statues of naked men marked with astrological signs and the names of the king of England face first on the spots from which the soil had been collected, on an astrologically auspicious date. The ritual was completed with a spell intoning that as long as the statues lasted, the English army would be defeated and chased from France.90 The spell seems to have done the trick. On the negative side, Thomas may have been accused of trying to poison the young king and the dukes of Burgundy and Berry. In a long letter of 1385 to the alchemist Bernard de Trèves, Thomas explains that he had prepared a medicine for the royals made of gold and mercury, designed to cure sickness and expel poison.91 However, something had gone amiss; the gift had been confiscated, possibly without the knowledge of the princes, and subjected to an examination that failed to grasp its importance. Thomas requests that Bernard intervene with the princes on his behalf.92 But the bulk of the letter is an alchemical “traité sur la pierre philosophale,” possibly included to boost Thomas’s credibility in light of the medical catastrophe. Bernard appears not to have delivered the help that Thomas solicited, for his long response, covering nearly thirty folios in the same manuscript, makes no mention of the request. Worse, he essentially refutes the efficacy of the method that Thomas outlines in his treatise.93 Christine mentions Bernard with scorn in the Advision.94 It is understandable that the Duke of Burgundy might have lost interest in a doctor he believed had tried to poison him, but this lack of appreciation for her father was another thing for Christine to hold against Philip.
Besides the early animosity that Christine betrays toward Philip as one of the princes gouverneurs, in concluding this case for a reexamination of Christine’s political views, it is also important to address the most tenacious argument in favor of the poet’s devotion to Philip: that after initially courting Louis of Orleans as a protector, the disillusioned Christine transferred her loyalty from Louis to Philip. The story entered Christine scholarship in large part through the 1927 biography and survey of her work by Marie-Josèphe Pinet.95 After Henry IV’s overthrow of Richard II, Christine’s son, Jean de Castel, who in 1399 had been taken into the household of the Earl of Salisbury, was held in England by the new king, Henry IV, who requested that Christine join her son at the royal court.96 Deeming Henry IV a usurper, Christine pretended that she would return to England with her son if he first were allowed to come to France for her. The ruse worked, and Jean, then about sixteen, was allowed to return in 1401 or 1402. However, this meant that he needed a new protector. Pinet’s case that Christine solicited the Duke of Orleans for a paid position for Jean at his court is based on (1) balade 20 of the Autres balades, which she reads as Christine’s initial request; (2) an autobiographical passage in the Advision (ca. 1405) in which the poet complains that although she had asked a great lord to retain her son, the young man was given only a unpaid position at his court; and (3) a further passage in the Advision where she notes that her son was in the household of the Duke of Burgundy.97 Pinet concludes that the lord who failed to come to her aid was Louis and that Christine therefore turned to Philip.
A break with Louis is not borne out in any of Christine’s subsequent works. It is necessary, then, to revisit Pinet’s interpretation. Here, it becomes clear that the assumption that balade 20 represents a request is not certain. It might be read as such, but within a gift-giving society it might equally well be read as a countergift, or thank-you present, for a service rendered, with the poet offering her son’s service in return for an unspecified favor.98 The Advision suggests what this might have been. Immediately following the story, which Pinet cites, of the lord who had failed to offer her son a wage, Christine describes receiving an invitation to live and write at the court of Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, father-in-law of Louis, adding that she, Christine, never sent her volumes to princes herself but that others did so on her behalf.99 Who would have sent her work to Giangaleazzo? In August 1401, the king, then lucid, sent the Maréchal de Boucicaut and Guillaume de Tignonville, chambellan and counselor of the Duke of Orleans, appointed prévôt of Paris the month before, as ambassadors to Giangaleazzo in Milan. They were to offer a royal princess for the Duke of Milan’s son in return for a promise to subtract obedience from the Roman pope.100 Louis, Giangaleazzo’s son-in-law and chief ally in Paris, was behind any French embassy to Milan. Thus it might have been during this trip to Milan that Christine’s work was made known to Giangaleazzo, resulting in an offer of patronage for her and a position for her son. This seems likely, because she presents a trio of writings, beginning in February 1402, to the queen, Tignonville, and Louis. Just after presenting the documents related to the quarrel over the Roman de la rose to the queen, Christine offered Tignonville the gift of a copy of the dossier, and, on February 14, 1402, she dedicated the Dit de la rose to Louis. A place in the Duke of Milan’s household for the young Jean would have been a boon, an apprenticeship in Italian-style Latin and culture to prepare him for a position in the French Royal Chancery or that of Louis of Orleans.101 Such an education would have been necessary: the Royal Chancery was an “essential administrative organ,” engaged not only with the redaction of official documents but also with diplomatic missions.102 Many of its members had university degrees, and, beyond French and Latin, they were required to know “customary and Roman law, in addition to the royal ordinances and the jurisprudence relevant to the kingdom.”103 Louis’s standards, too, were high, his court attracting, in different capacities, the most prominent humanists of the time: Jean de Montreuil, Gontier Col, Ambrogio Migli, Jacques de Nouvion, Guillaume Fillastre, Jean Lebègue, Pierre l’Orfèvre.104 Gilbert Ouy cites a letter from Ambrogio Migli, who began his long career with the House of Orleans as a secretary for Louis while the duke was in Italy. Migli’s job was “to take care to the extent possible that Louis speak ornately, effectively, and honestly in his letters.”105
In this context, balade 20 could be a response to Louis’s securing positions for Christine and her son at the court of Giangaleazzo. Christine describes herself requesting Louis’s help in the Fais et bonnes meurs and being granted what she asked.106 Waiting more than an hour for her turn to speak to the duke, she watched his face with great pleasure as he listened to those asking his aid and then set their affairs in order. Unfortunately, Giangaleazzo died in September 1402, before Christine could depart for Italy; in the Mutacion de fortune, she describes being hit with a serious illness, and this too may have prevented her departure even before the news of Giangaleazzo’s death.107
The final question is what Jean de Castel was doing in the household of the Duke of Burgundy around the time that Christine was writing the Advision. The chronology is hazy, but after Giangaleazzo’s death, Louis was away from Paris for long periods of time; indeed, he was absent from Paris when the Lord of Milan died.108 Given the dukes’ rivalry, Eric Hicks’s hypothesis seems plausible: “The courtly poetess of the Dit de la Rose would be a handsome acquisition for the duke’s collections.”109 Philip may have offered aid along with a commission to write the Fais et bonnes meurs, and Christine, needing to support her son, would have had no reason to refuse.
Conclusion
Christine’s autobiographical writings betray an early resentment of the Duke of Burgundy originating in her father’s ill treatment by the princes gouverneurs after the death of Charles V. This personal response, coupled with her strongly positive view of Charles V, who successfully put down attempts to overthrow him and whose regency ordinances Philip ignored, justifies revisiting the assumption that Christine ever supported the Burgundians. She does not overtly criticize them, which would have been politically suicidal early in her career and literally suicidal under Jean. Some of her references to Philip suggest a positive attitude. She offers him a manuscript of the Mutacion de fortune; she reports with pride that he asked her to compose a biography of his brother, King Charles V; she writes sadly of his death; and she notes that he took her son into his household. And yet the fact that a politically engaged poet dependent on selling her work to a wealthy clientele would write of the Duke of Burgundy in flattering terms requires no explanation. She praises other contemporaries and princes of the blood in terms at least as flattering as those she uses to describe Philip.
Autrand has seen behind the Orleanist-Burgundian conflict a centralizing movement toward statism on the part of the Armagnacs, countered by the Burgundians’ more traditional view. Claude Gauvard makes a similar point in showing how attitudes toward royal pardons conform to two distinct visions of the state: the Armagnacs insisting that people of all levels must be subject to one justice, and the Burgundians guarding the “liberties” accorded to different social groups.110 As I have noted, Charles V visualized his kingship as one of a strong single figure surrounded by devoted counselors, whereas the Burgundians favored rule by the three estates. It is not clear to what degree Christine saw the conflict in terms of a clash between definitions of government. However, her loyalty to Charles V was unshakeable, and we have seen her avowed affection for the most important marmousets, Bureau de La Rivière and Jean de Montaigu, who were persecuted by the Burgundians. Throughout her corpus she expresses her belief in the importance of the king’s council as a set of trusted advisors of diverse social backgrounds. This tradition was continued by Charles VI and Louis, who summoned the marmousets back to power in 1388, not by Philip and his polyarchy.
I have tried to show in this chapter that, a priori, Christine seems more likely to have supported the Orleanist than the Burgundian faction. Her reverence for Charles V and her early reproaches of Philip do not absolutely preclude the possibility that she backed that duke’s claim to regency. However, the question remains to be investigated.
