The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (47 page)

Plague justified the rules that kept a
person in her place.

Leo of Rozmital was a Bohemian, and men from
Bohemia were known for their long, long hair; so all across Europe as he travelled he
was very obviously a foreigner, the one you watch, the one you try to impress. In
England ‘the length of our hair was a source of amazement to them,’ he
wrote. ‘They persisted in saying that it was stuck on with tar.’

He set out in 1465 from Pilsen in what is
now the Czech Republic with a mission: to persuade someone to persuade the Pope that his
Catholic sister could marry a Hussite, a heretic who believed in taking wine as well as
bread at communion. He travelled with some forty people, some of them grand, one jester,
one lute-player and a cart for luggage and supplies, across German territory to Flanders
and then by sea to England. It was a remarkable journey: one moment dancing with nuns,
the next out swimming in a ship with horses.

The nuns belonged to ‘a stately
nunnery’ at Neuss on the Rhine and they were ‘the most beautiful nuns I have
ever seen’, Leo wrote. Nunneries often took the unmarried and sometimes the
unmarriageable daughters of noble families and kept them safe but few had the rule of
Neuss: that the women ‘may leave the nunnery to get married’. To improve
their social chances, ‘they receive no-one … who is not of noble
birth’. Leo’s grand companions were made welcome and the mother superior
gave a dance: ‘the nuns were very finely dressed and knew all the best
dances … each one had her own page who waited on and preceded her.’

Even so, Leo rode on to Brussels, to the
great show that was the
Duchy of Burgundy.
Everything was enormous there, everything was magnificent, at least as far as the eye
could see; and the Burgundians were skilled at making sure how far you saw. At dinner,
there were eight dishes at a time. The zoological garden was ‘of vast
proportions’ with ‘all manner of birds and animals which seemed strange to
us’. He saw ‘as fine pictures as can be found anywhere’. The keeper of
the duke’s jewels ‘told us that his lord had so many jewels that he had not
seen them all in many years and indeed did not know where they were’.

This spectacle had turned the flimsy duchy
into the mentor, the coach of a continent: the true inventor of ‘soft’
power. The tactic was necessary. In 1369 the Count of Flanders had married his daughter
Margaret to the Duke of Burgundy, first peer of France from the ruling house of Valois:
the traditional kind of
Realpolitik
that dynasties like to work out in bed. The
wedding feast was in Ghent in Flanders, the wine was a good Beaune from Burgundy. When
everyone sobered up, the prospects were rather meagre since the economy of Flanders
depended largely on trade with the wool merchants of England, and England happened to be
at war with Valois France. The count had his family loyalties, but that did not stop him
making a practical peace with England, and playing the two powers against each other. It
was a game he knew very well, since his Flanders was a patchwork of quarrelsome towns
and an ambitious count had to manage his subjects as much as rule them.

So Count Louis expanded his territory,
marriage by marriage, deal by deal. His daughter Margaret was named heir apparent to
Brabant, next door to Flanders in what is now Belgium and a short way north; a little
later, in 1404, Flanders effectively annexed Brabant, which was in dire need of military
help. In 1428 Philip the Good of Burgundy became lord of Holland and Zeeland to the
north, in what is now the Netherlands. In 1430 he had wonderful luck when the Duke of
Brabant died, so conveniently that many people thought Philip must have murdered him,
and he inherited Brabant. He now had to worry about how to administer all this and make
a state of it. The towns around him remained as obstinate as ever, Burgundy itself and
its wines were becoming just a second thought on the other side of
France, and there was always the possibility of bloody
revolt in the north; and yet Philippe de Commynes, diplomat and sometime historian,
reckoned that the duchy was very like ‘the promised land’.

To succeed the dukes of Burgundy had to be
noticed across Europe, to be able to influence courts on both sides of long wars and to
dazzle their own people. Politics had become what it remains: a show.

Burgundy made itself the fashion all around
Europe. Go to Spain, and Queen Isabella’s tournaments were organized by a
Netherlander, as were her chapel music, her funeral chapel and most of her collection of
pictures. The Sforzas of Milan needed good painters and decided to look beyond the Alps
for them; they sent the painter Zanetto Bugatto to Brussels to study with the master
Rogier van der Weyden because although he could paint, he could not paint in the
Northern, Netherlandish manner. Zanetto was rapidly in trouble, probably for drink; the
Milanese ambassador reported he had been made to promise ‘not to drink wine during
the year’.
¹
Medicis and Sforzas bought Netherlandish pictures and tapestries
for their Northern way of seeing the world. As for wooden altarpieces, those went out to
Poland, Germany, all of Scandinavia, to Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and England; they
were exports so important that guildsmen were allowed to break the general curfew and
work at night if ‘a sale or a contract has been made with a merchant whose ship is
ready to sail’.

The world knew the skyline of Bruges because
it was in the background of the paintings in their churches, halls and mansions. There
is a Netherlandish townscape behind one Madonna by Botticelli. A Leonardo landscape
echoes the famous rocks in Jan van Eyck’s painting of St Francis receiving the
stigmata. Assorted other Italian masters found it useful to adopt van Eyck’s real,
atmospheric landscapes, which stretched to the horizon behind his foreground
figures.
²
Jan van Eyck, like Rubens after him, could be sent on diplomatic
missions because he was a very famous man, and therefore a man that people would want to
know.

Burgundy had the knack of showing people
themselves as they wanted to be seen. The painter Hans Memling made a triptych for Sir
John Donne of Kidwelly and his wife,
gentry in the service of the House of York in England, and he painted his patrons into
the picture as usual. Elizabeth Donne is dressed in purple and ermine, which she
probably never wore, and Memling painted her clothes before he ever saw her because her
face had to be redrawn rather thinner than he first imagined; so status came before the
individual face. She holds a lovely Book of Hours, a fine illuminated manuscript, to
show she knows the fashionable form of piety; psalters were no longer the thing. Donne
himself is shown in a black mantle with fur, hung about with gold chains in the
sun-and-rose pattern of the House of York: we can see he is an intimate of the king. The
Donnes are massed so close to the Virgin Mary at the heart of the picture you could
imagine they were used to dining with her.
³

These things were manufactured – painters
imitating and borrowing and reworking other painters’ work – by industries that
produced the most lovely and vivid things. The gold and silver metalwork from Burgundy
was famous, and so were the tapestries, some on classic themes like the Trojan War; as
had been the music of the
ars nova
, a kind of polyphony which had a special
clarity because it respected the rhythm of the words being sung. Netherlandish teachers
were hired for Italian choir schools. Northern boys were in great demand to sing in
Italian chapels because they were better trained and had more experience; north of the
Alps, they sang much more music at many more services. The papal chapel at Avignon hired
them, and paid them from the Pope’s prebends, his cut of cathedral income in the
North.
⁴

All this was the official, splendid version,
but the court itself could be rough. It was usual to get guests drunk, Leo found. There
was a great bed kept for them in the palace at Breda, and ‘if guests could not
stand they were thrown onto it’. It was also usual for quite grand persons to
wrestle in their tunic and hose, their ‘underclothes’; ‘it is no shame
to wrestle thus clad, even though multitudes of matrons and maidens be
present’.

When it was needed, when it was useful, this
court understood theatre perfectly. Leo saw Charles the Bold, the duke’s son,
return from Paris. The guilds and the councillors greeted him in the streets
of Brussels with lighted candles, ‘an
uninterrupted line of lights through the whole town’, and with ‘stately
tableaux’.
⁵
Often there was a play, a masque, an opera, with the crowds
cheering and also heckling. A century later, when Calvinists ruled Antwerp for a while
after 1577, they went on staging civic processions as a substitute for the religious
ones that they banned. By 1583, these performances of power were so usual they made
nobody suspicious. The corporation of Antwerp footed the bill for the French Duke of
Anjou to make a ‘Joyous Entry’ into the town, a civic and not a courtly
occasion. They paid for a gold canopy to protect the duke, the white horse he rode, his
cap and his robes, and wine for the patricians who carried the canopy; they built an
arch of triumph with torches, flags, inscriptions and coats of arms.
⁶
They also slammed
the gates shut and slaughtered Anjou’s army, and the duke was lucky to escape with
his life; it was all, after all, a show.

It was rather like Burgundy itself, whose
land was largely man-made, dependent on constant work and artifice to keep it from going
under water. Gilles le Bouvier, herald and chronicler, was in Bruges in 1417 with the
new Dauphin of France and he reported that Flanders was ‘a rich land with goods
that come by sea from every Christian nation, heavily peopled and they make much woollen
cloth and they have two very good towns, Ghent and Bruges’. He found the people
honest, but rebellious. But he added: ‘The country itself is a poor
country … because it is all water and sand.’ He saw the dikes along the
coast of Holland and he reckoned ‘if these dikes ever broke, all the land would be
in the sea and drowned for ever and ever’.
⁷

Within that show, the riches were dazzling;
as the Spaniard Pero Tafur found when he visited in the 1430s. ‘I saw there
oranges and lemons from Castille which seemed only just to have been gathered from the
trees,’ he wrote, ‘and wine from Greece as abundant as in that country. I
saw also confections and spices from Alexandria and all the Levant, just as if one were
there; furs from the Black Sea … all Italy with its brocades, silks and
armour. There is no part of the world whose products are not found there of their
best.’ Bruges was ‘one of the greatest markets of the world’, ships
were carried in and out by the tide ‘to save the cost and bother of beasts’
to pull them and
‘they say that at
times the number of ships sailing from the harbour at Bruges exceeds seven hundred a
day’. At the great Antwerp fairs ‘anyone desiring to see all Christendom or
the greater part of it assembled in one place can do so here’.

And yet: ‘there was a great famine in
the year of my visit’.
⁸

Outsiders noticed the huge difference
between the dockside economy and the inland nation. The chronicler Froissart said
Flanders had only cloth to offer in return for the products of seventeen nations (which
rather missed the point of being merchants and living off the market). An English
pamphlet sniffed that Flanders was ‘just a market for other countries’ and
dependent on wool, naturally from England. The duchy had to buy in food and quite often
could not feed itself, even though there was fine and profitable business passing
through its ports: it lived by business.

In Bruges in the thirteenth century there
was wool and cloth that came from England with lead, leather, coal and cheese; fish came
from the north, including the dried salmon the Scots sold alongside their lard; there
were furs from Russia, ermine and sable from Bulgaria, gold from Poland; there was Rhine
wine; there were wood, grains, iron, almonds, goatskins, saffron, rice; there were wax
and anis, copper and figs, cumin and mercury; dates and sugar from the North of Africa,
cotton from Armenia, silk from Tartary.
⁹
Spring fleets brought wine and olive
oil, figs and grapes from Portugal. Making jewels from amber and from jet, some from the
North Sea coast and some from the Baltic, was a speciality. Later the Portuguese
connection brought spices there from the East and the East Indies for buyers from the
European heartlands.

Everything passed through Flanders and
somebody took a cut. Italian bankers set up offices alongside the Hansa Kontor. When
Philip the Good made his triumphal entrance into Bruges in 1440, there were 150 Italian
merchants in the grand parade, 136 Hanseatics, 48 from Castille, men from Scotland,
Catalonia, Portugal.
¹⁰
They rode in their parade clothes
by torchlight: they saw the point of playing their part in the great show of power.