A Distant Mirror (100 page)

That was hardly a normal request by one King of another, especially one so lately and still technically his enemy. Richard was only two years away from his grasp at absolute monarchy, the murder of Gloucester, the execution of Arundel, the banishment of Norfolk and Henry of Lancaster, and the series of compulsive provocations which in two more years were to lose him his crown and finally his life. Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

Richard was King in a time of increasing tensions, suppressed but not eased since the Peasants’ Revolt. Lawless bands of marauding knights and archers still spread disorder, heavy taxes were a constant complaint, Lollardy, despite the efforts to stamp it out, flickered everywhere. Its social no less than religious threat united crown and Church against it: the days of John of Gaunt’s alliance with Wyclif were gone, although Lollards appeared in high places. During the Parliament of 1394–95 the movement suddenly surfaced with an inflammatory public statement of twelve “conclusions and truths for the reformation of Holy Church in England.”

Supported by several members of the House of Commons, including the ever troublesome Sir Richard Stury and another knight who were both members of the Privy Council, a petition for the twelve reforms, written in English, was presented as a bill to Parliament. Simultaneously it was pinned in public view on the doors of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. The Twelve Conclusions were a mirror of the late medieval Church as seen by the dissatisfied; by those who wanted to believe and have faith but felt blocked by encrusted materialism and idolatry. They were the conclusions Wyclif had reached one by one, beginning with the two most threatening to Church and priesthood: temporal disendowment and denial of the “supposed miracle” of transubstantiation. Other rituals denounced in the list were vows of chastity, which in priests encouraged vice, and in women, who were “by nature frail and imperfect,” led to many horrible sins; consecration or exorcism of physical objects, which was nothing but “jugglery,” akin to necromancy; and pilgrimages to deaf images of wood and stone, which were a form of idolatry. The Tenth Conclusion was new—a virtual denial of the right to kill. It asserted that manslaughter
in battle or by court of justice for any temporal cause was expressly contrary to the New Testament.

So alarmed were the bishops by the Twelve Conclusions that they summoned Richard home from Ireland, where he then was, to decree new measures of suppression. The King himself, in fury at the heresy,
threatened to kill Sir Richard Stury “by the foulest death that may be” if he ever broke the oath to recant that was forced upon him. The Twelve Conclusions, however, were beyond the sovereign’s power to kill. Lollardy had already found a response in Queen Anne’s Bohemian retinue and through them formed a connection between the ideas of Wyclif and Jan Hus.

Richard’s proposal of marriage, broached before the French Dukes went to Avignon, was not unanimously welcomed. Philippe de Mézières was its ardent advocate in the interests of crusade, as was the Duke of Burgundy in the interests of commerce. But the hostility of half a century was not easily dissipated. Berry and Orléans were both opposed, and when the proposal was debated in the French Council, several members objected on the ground that a marriage without a peace was unnatural. Coucy, if he had not been absent in Italy, might have shared that attitude. An incident of the same year shows him leaning over backward—perhaps because of his special connections—to maintain the formal relationship between enemies, even during a period of truce. Asked by Froissart, who was preparing to visit England, for letters of introduction to Richard and his uncles,
Coucy refused “because he was a Frenchman” to write to the King, although he gave Froissart a letter to his daughter Philippa. If a letter to the King of England was impolitic, marriage to the King of England must indeed have appeared radical.

In the Council, Arnaud de Corbie, the Chancellor, advised acceptance on the ground that the marriage bond would strengthen the English King against the war party in his own country. The interests of peace prevailed. In July, 1,200 French gentlemen escorted a formal English embassy led by Earl Marshal Nottingham to the Council table in Paris. Agreement was reached on a dowry for Isabelle of 800,000 francs but no lands, and on a truce of 28 years. For the first time, a truce was long enough to represent a genuine forswearing of belligerent will—at least on the part of the negotiators. That was the difficulty.

If the French on whose soil the war was fought had, on the whole, had enough, too many English, personified in the Duke of Gloucester, had not. They were galled by a sense of having been bilked out of the
gains confirmed in the Treaty of Brétigny. They ached to get satisfaction and saw the marriage putting it off forever. Footloose knights and yeomen were still attracted by the warring way of life and its loot on the continent. The commons, suffering from disrupted commerce and oppressive taxes, may have wanted peace, but they did not like the French marriage. They feared Richard would give away too much to the French; there were mutterings about Calais, and disappointment if not suspicion at the choice of a child queen and continued uncertainty about an heir.

Because of Gloucester’s influence and popularity with the Londoners, Richard did not dare to conclude the alliance without his concurrence and that of his party. More than a year elapsed in the effort to obtain it. The French sent Robert the Hermit to add the weight of Heaven’s command for peace, and to impress upon the English the Turkish menace which the Hermit knew from his travels in Syria. A visionary, even if he traveled with seven horses at the expense of the French King, was not the best choice to influence Gloucester. When, at the climax of his peroration, the Hermit warned, “Surely, whoever is or will be against the peace shall pay dearly for it be he alive or dead,” Gloucester pulled him up with a sharp, “How do you know that?” Robert could only answer by “divine inspiration,” which left the Duke unimpressed. He remained “hard-hearted against the peace,” and by his words “condemned and despised greatly the Frenchmen.”

Richard worriedly told Count Waleran de St. Pol, who had accompanied the Hermit, that Gloucester was trying to influence the people against a peace, perhaps even to “raise the people against me, which is a great peril.” St. Pol, the hard-headed brother of saintly Pierre de Luxemburg, advised the King to win his uncle with fair words and great gifts until the marriage and peace were concluded. Then he could “take other counsel,” because then he would be strong enough to “oppress all rebels, for the French King if need be shall aid you; of this you may be sure.” The lubricator of politics was the same then as before and since. Richard promised Gloucester £100,000 and an earldom for his son worth £2,000 a year (which he later failed to make good) and, by various persuasions and pressures brought to bear by the Duke of Lancaster, secured a sullen acquiescence.

A proxy marriage and ratification of the truce were celebrated in Paris in March 1396, with Nottingham acting as proxy for the King. Nottingham now had occasion to meet the object of his esteem in entertainment if not in combat, for Coucy was one of those who acted as host to the English ambassadors during their three-week stay in the capital. After endorsement of the marriage contract by the barons of
England, Richard himself went to Calais in August, where in conferences with the Duke of Burgundy he went far to show himself a friend of France. He agreed to support the Way of Cession and persuade the Pope of Rome to resign, and, more realistically, he agreed to yield English footholds in Brittany. He went home again to make known the articles of peace to his countrymen, for he said he “could not firmly conclude a peace without the general consent of the people of England.”

He returned in October for the climactic meeting with the King of France, held with all appropriate magnificence in a field of bright pavilions on the borders of Calais. Between two lines of 400 French knights and 400 English knights “with their swords in their hands,” the two Kings advanced toward each other, each escorted by the uncles of the other. As they met and embraced, all 800 knights knelt, many weeping with emotion. Meetings, banquets, and merriment followed. The seven-year-old bride, swamped in scarlet velvet and emeralds, was handed over and formally married to Richard in November at Calais by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Enguerrand de Coucy was not present at the ceremonies nor to meet his daughter Philippa, who was in the English party, for he had already departed with the chief knights and nobles of the realm on the last crusade of any consequence in the Middle Ages.

The Kings were at peace, but all the old issues—disputed frontiers and territories, homages and reparations, Guienne and Calais—remained unresolved, and Gloucester’s rancor abided. The French found that all the honors and entertainments and gifts of gold and silver they heaped on him in an effort to soften his antagonism went for nothing. He took the gifts and remained cold, hard, and covert in his answers. “We waste our effort on this Duke of Gloucester,” Burgundy said to his council, “for as long as he lives there shall surely be no peace between France and England. He will always find new inventions and accidents to engender hatred and the strife between the realms.” It did not take Gloucester, who would be dead within a year, to find these. Burgundy himself, through the fratricidal strife with Orléans carried on by his son, was as responsible as any. And the unending war had cut a gulf too deep to be easily pasted over. In England, Richard and Lancaster were the only genuine supporters of a pro-French policy, and both were dead three years after the French marriage. Animosity toward France endured. Not quite twenty years after the reconciliation, Henry V was to call to his followers, “Once more unto the breach!”

Chapter 26

F
or fifty years Europeans had heard, more or less inattentively, the distant crash of the Turks’ penetration in the East and the cries of distress marking their relentless advance. The Ottoman Turks were the last and destined to be the most enduring wave of warrior nomads who during the 11th to 13th centuries had swept out of the Asian steppes to overwhelm Asia Minor, as the Goths and Huns before them had overwhelmed Rome. Originally, the Ottomans had settled on the shores of the Black Sea in Anatolia as vassals of the preceding Seljuk Turks and guardians of the Seljuk frontier. When the Seljuk empire crumbled under the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan and his successors, the trained, hard-fighting bands of the border chief Osman (whence the name Ottoman) declared their independence of Seljuk rule in 1300, and rose on the ruins of their predecessors. In 25 years, with all the brutal energy of a people on the way up, they conquered key cities and large tracts of Anatolia and mastered the shores of the thin blue straits separating Asia from Europe.

Across the straits on the European side stood Constantinople, capital of what was left of the Byzantine Empire. This eastern relic of the ancient Roman Empire was now finally disintegrating 800 years after Rome had succumbed to the earlier barbarians. Pushed back into Europe, it was a shrunken remnant of former greatness, its naval and commercial supremacy lost to Genoese and Venetians, its structure weakened by the same processes at work in the West—feudal service inadequately replaced by a money economy, Black Death, economic disruptions, religious dissent, workers’ uprisings, warring peoples. Serbs and Bulgars, developing their own kingdoms, assaulted it on the west and a variety of small powers harassed it in the Aegean. Its provinces were disorganized, its military force dependent on mercenaries, its sovereignty torn apart by ferocious feuds around the throne. These feuds
provided the opening through which the Ottoman Turks entered Europe.

The feuds began with the pretensions of John Cantacuzene, who as chief minister bore the title the “Great Domestic” and served as regent for John V Paleologus, child heir to the throne. In 1341 Cantacuzene declared himself joint—in reality, rival—Emperor as John VI. Through ensuing years of civil war he maintained his hold by purchasing the services of the hardy, disciplined Ottoman forces. When, at Cantacuzene’s invitation, Sultan Orchan crossed the Hellespont in 1345, it was, in Gibbon’s knell, “the last and fatal stroke” in the long fall of the ancient Roman Empire.

Murad I, Orchan’s successor, gained a foothold on the European side with the capture in 1353 of Gallipoli, key to the Hellespont. Exactly 100 years later the Turks were to take Constantinople itself, but Cantacuzene, like other great actors in history, had no vision of the consequences inherent in his acts. Rather, to cement the collaboration with his new allies, he gave his daughter in marriage to Orchan in a Moslem ceremony, bridging the abyss between Christian and infidel without scruple—and without affecting his faith. Some years later, when forced to abdicate, the once “Great Domestic” became a monk and retired to write in cloistered calm a history of the times he had done so much to embroil.

Incurable discord at Constantinople gave the Turks the means to exploit their gateway at Gallipoli. Upon Cantacuzene’s abdication, his former ward, John Paleologus, regained the throne (which accounts for the alarming succession of John VI by John V) only to plunge into a vicious family struggle in which sons and grandson, uncle and nephew over the next 35 years deposed, imprisoned, tortured, and replaced one another in various combinations with Murad I.

While assisting the Paleologi toward their mutual destruction, the Turks, like a hand opening out from the wrist at Gallipoli, expanded through the Byzantine and Bulgarian dominions. In 1365 Murad advanced his capital to Adrianople (Edirne) 120 miles inside Europe. In 1371 he defeated a league of Serbs and Bulgars on the river Maritza in Bulgaria. John V henceforth held part of his empire, and the Bulgar boyars their territories, as vassals of the Sultan. In 1389 a new league of Serbs, Rumanians, and their northern neighbors, the Moldavians, attempted to stem the Turks but were defeated by Murad in the decisive Battle of Kossovo, the grave of Serbian independence. The Serbian Czar and the elite of his nobles were killed and his son forced to accept vassalship to the Sultan. Murad himself was killed after the battle by a dying Serb who, feigning to have a secret to tell the Sultan, stabbed
him in the belly when Mur
ad leaned over to listen to him. However, the Sultan left his successor, Bajazet, the strongest power in the region. In the 35 years since their crossing of the Bosporus, the Turks had overrrun the eastern Balkans up to the Danube and now stood at the borders of Hungary.