The She Wolf of France (42 page)

11. The Tolomei Company, together with the Buonsignori, one of the most important of the Sienese banks, had been both powerful and famous since the beginning of the thirteenth century. It had the Papacy as principal client; its founder, Tolomeo Tolomei, had taken part in an embassy to Pope Alexander III. Under Alexander IV the Tolomei were the sole bankers to the Holy See. Urban IV excepted them by name from the general excommunication decreed against Siena between 126o, and 1273. It was at about this time (the end of the reign of Saint Louis and the beginning of the reign of Philippe III) that the Tolomei began to appear at the great fairs in Champagne and that Spinello founded the French branch of the company.
There are still a Tolomei Square and Palace in Siena.

12. Charles IV's decree forbidding the export of French currency mus
t certainly have given rise to
trafficking, since another decree, promulgated four months later, forbade the buying of gold and silver at a higher price than that of the currency of the kingdom. A year later, the right of domicile was withdrawn from the Italian merchants, which did not mean that they had to leave France, but simply that they had to purchase once more the authorization to carry on business there.

13. November 19th, 1323. Jean de Cherchemont, Lord of Nemours in Poitou, Canon of Notre Dame in Paris, Treasurer of the Cathedral of Laon, had already been Chance
llor at the end of the reign of
Philippe V. Charles IV had replaced him by Pierre Rodier on his accession. But Charles of Valois, whose favour he had gained, restored him to his position on this date.

The Chancellor, who had the royal seal in his keeping, prepared and drew up Acts and appointments; he combined the functions of Minister of Justice, of Foreign Affairs and of Ecclesiastical Affairs. He sat in the Assembly of Peers and presided by right over all the judicial commissions. On appointment he had to take the following oath:

`You swear to the King our lord that you will serve and counsel him well and loyally to the honour and advantage of his kingdom against all and sundry; that you will preserve his inheritance and the public weal of his said kingdom to the best of your powers, that you will serve no other master or lord but- him, that you will hereinafter take no estates, pensions, profits or gifts, nor other presents, from whatever lord or lady, without the permission and licence of our said Lord the King, and that you will not petition for them nor have them petitioned for by others without licence from him to this end; and if you have received from anyone, man or woman in the past, or still have, pensions, estates, or other presents and gifts, you will
renounce them all
and, similarly, that you will take from no one whomsoever any corrupt gift, and this you swear on God's Holy Gospel, which you are now holding for the purpose.'

14. The arrangement suggested to the Pope, after a royal Council held at Gisors in July 1323, was that the King would receive three hundred thousand livres out of the four hundred thousand required for ancillary expenses. But, it was also specified - and this was where Valois showed his cunning - that if the King of France, for whatever reason, did not lead the expedition, this role would fall by right to Charles of Valois, who would then benefit personally from the subsidy furnished by the Pope.

15. It is generally forgotten that there were two wars of a hundred years between France and England.
The first, which lasted from 1
152 to 1259, was considered terminated by the Treaty of Paris concluded by Saint Louis, and mentioned here. In fact, between 1259 and 1338, the two countries were twice again at war; and each time over the question of Aquitaine, in 1294 and, as will be seen, again in 1324. The second Hundred Years War, which began in 1328, was not, in reality, so much concerned with the quarrel about Aquitaine as with the succession to the throne of France.

16. This is an example of the inordinately complicated state reached at this period by the feudal system, a system which there is a general tendency to look on as extremely simple, and which was so indeed to begin with. It ended, however, by strangling itself with complications born of its own practice. But this is a vice, or rather a fatality, common to all political systems; and they die of it._

It must be realized that the question of Saint-Sardos, and the affair of Aquitaine in general, were no exceptions, and that the same conditions were true of Artois, Flanders, the Welsh Marches, the King doms of Spain, that of Sicily, the German principalities, Hungary and, indeed, of the whole of Europe.

17. These figures have been calculated by historians from fourteenth
-
century documents, and are based on the statistical returns of the number of parishes and the number of fires per parish at an average of four inhabitants a fire. The figures apply to the period round about 1328.

During the course of the second Hundred Years War, fighting, famines and epidemics reduced the total of the population by more than a third; it was only four centuries later that France recovered the level of population and wealth which had been hers under Philip the Fair and his sons. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the average density of the population in five French departments had not yet reached the figures of 1328 once more. Even in our day, some
towns, which were prosperous in the Middle Ages and were ruined by the Hundred Years War, have never recovered their former condition. This is a measure of what the English war cost the nation.

r8. The busines (derived from the buccina
of the Romans)
were
long,
straight, or slightly curved trumpets used for calling armies to battle. The short trumpet, which began to come into use in the thirteenth century, did not supplant the busine until the fourteenth.

i9. A game played with dice
and counters which seems to have been the ancestor of tric-trac and backgammon.

20. The use of bombards in the siege of La Reole in 1324 may surprise the reader, for the traditiona
l date for the first appearance of gun-
powder artillery is the Battle of Crecy in 1346.

In fact, Crecy was the first time the new artillery was employed in open warfare and in a battle of movement. The weapons used were of relatively small calibre; they did little damage and created no very great impression. Some French historians have exaggerated their effect to explain a defeat which was due much more to the impetuous folly of King Philippe VI and his barons than to the employment of new weapons by the enemy.

But the light cannon used at Crecy were but a derivative of the ordnance employed at sieges for twenty years past, concurrently
with
the traditional artillery - one might say even the classical artillery, for it had altered little since Caesar, or indeed since Alexander the Great - which hurled at towns, by a system of levers, balances, counter
-
weights or springs, stone balls or fire-raising materials. The first bombards threw nothing but stone balls similar to those of the balisters,

mangonels and other catapults. It was the method of projection that was new. It seems certain that gunpowder artillery came to birth in Italy, for the metal with which the bombards were hooped was called `Lombard iron'. The Pisans were using these engines in the years with which we are dealing.

Charles of Valois seems in all likelihood to have been the first French commander to use this new artillery, which was still in its very early days. He had ordered it in the month of April 1324 and had made arrangements with the Seneschal of Languedoc for it to be assembled at Castelsarrasin. His son, Philippe VI, would not therefore have been particularly surprised by the much smaller balls fired at him at Crecy.

21. It must be remembered that the
King of France was not at this
period suzerain of Avignon. Philip the
Fair had, indeed, been careful
to surrender his title as co-lord of Avignon to the King of Naples
so as
not to appear, in the eyes of the world, to be hol
ding the Pope in direct
tutelage. But by the garrison established at Villeneuve, and by the mere
geographical position of the Papal establishment, he held the Holy See
and the Church entirely at his mercy.

22. This actually happened in 1330, when the Romans elected the Antipope Nicolas V.

23. The Palace of the Popes, as we know it, is very different from John XXII's castle, of which some small portions are still extant in the area known as `the old Palace'. The huge building which has made Avignon famous is largely the work of the Popes Benedict XXII, Clement VI, Innocent VI and Urban V. John XXII's building was altered and absorbed almost to the extent of disappearing completely amid the new edifice. Nevertheless, John XXII was the real founder of the Palace of the Popes.

24. Ten years later, Jacques Fournier was to become the next Pope, Benedict XII.

25. John XXII had also, a zoo in his palace, which contained among other inmates a lion, two ostriches and a camel.

26. The question certainly required asking, for the princes of the Middle Ages often had six or eight godfathers and godmothers. But, in Canon Law, only those who had actually held the infant at the-font were considered as such. The proceedings for the annulment of the marriage between Charles IV and Blanche of Burgundy, which had never been translated before the study we have had made of the documents, are one of the richest mines of information concerning royal religious ceremonies of the period. The congregation was numerous and very mixed; the lower classes crowded in as if to a play and the officiants were almost suffocated by the crow
d. The throng and the curiosity
were almost as great as at the marriages of film stars today, and reverence was equally absent.

27. Blood-brotherhood by the exchange and mingling of blood, practised since earliest times and in so-called primitive societies, was still in use at the end of the Middle Ages. It existed in Islam; and it was also in use among the nobility of Aquitaine, perhaps owing to a tradition inherited from the Moors. Traces of it can be found in certain dispositions taken at the trials of the Templars. It appears still to exist,, as an act of counter-magic, among certain tribes of gipsies. Blood-brotherhood could seal a pact of friendship or comradeship, as well as a pact of love, whether spiritual or not. The most famous bloodbrotherhoods recorded in the medieval literature of chivalry were those contracted by Count Girart de Roussillon and the daughter of the Emperor of Byzantium (which took place in the presence of their respective spouses), by the Chevalier Gauvain,
by the Countess de Die, and by the celebrated Perceval.

28. This dispensation had been granted him by Clement V in 1313, when Charles of Valois was only forty-three.

29. Wautier, or Wauter, or Vautier, are varying forms of Walter. This is a reference to Walter Stapledon, the Lord Treasurer. The originals of, this and the subsequent letters are in French, as the English royal correspondence of this period usually was, when it was not in Latin.

30. The six temporal peers at this time were the Dukes of Brittany, Burgundy and Aquitaine (the last being, therefore, the young Prince Edward), the Counts of Flanders and Valois, and the Countess of Artois. It may seem surprising that Jean de Marigny, who at the time of Philip the Fair had been Archbishop of Sens, from which depended the diocese of Paris and which was therefore the most important religious appointment in France, should now appear as Bishop of Beauvais. But it must not be thought that he had reverted to an inferior rank in the hierarchy. On the contrary, the bishopric of Beauvais conferred one of the six spiritual peerages, a dignity which was not attached to the archbishopric of Sens.

31. The traditional year began on January 1st, but the administrative year at Easter. This divergence, one may suspect, had for object, in a period when communications were slow, the allowing of time in which to collate all the accounts of the royal officials, and incidentally the dispatch of the various decrees in suspense. The administrative year would then begin when the balance-sheet for the previous period had been, presented to the King.

32. This manner of carrying a child on a journey was not unusual, though, it must have been far from comfortable. The travelling saddles, at the end of the thirteenth and at the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, though they had very high cantles, forming a back for the horseman to lean against, had no pommel and were comparatively flat over the horse's withers.

It was the war saddle which had a high pommel, so that the knight, heavily armoured and liable to have to withstand violent shocks, was, so to speak, wedged between cantle and pommel.

33. This transaction had taken place, in August 1317, between Philippe V and Clemence. The latter possessed in addition, either by gift or legacy from Louis Hutin, the Castles of Corbeil, Fontainebleau, Moret, Flage, Lorrez-le-Bocage,- Grez-en-Gatinais, Nemours, and several estates in Normandy; the houses and Manors of Manneville, Hebicourt, Saint-Denis-de-Fermeil, Wardes, Marigny and Dompierre; and the Forests of Lyons and of Bray.

Clemence did not, h
owever, go to live in the Tem
ple at once; on the advice of the Pope himself, she had to retire to a convent in Aix-enProvence and deposit her jewellery as security till she could pay off the
many debts c
ontracted during a strange fury of spending
that had come over her after she became a widow and her child had Supposedly died. The revenues from all her estates had not sufficed to cover her expenditure.