Valentine Visconti
I
Valentine Visconti, greater than Helen as the cause of battles, was born in the Abbey of Pavia, in the year 1366. Her grandfather, Galeazzo Visconti, had left Milan rather suddenly, being ill with gout and “temendo la severità” of one so skilled in the use of succession-powders as Bernabò his brother, co-tyrant with him of Lombardy. He had designed a safe and splendid castle for himself in Pavia. While it was still unfinished Valentine was born in the hospitable old Certosa there.11
Galeazzo Visconti had taken with him from Milan his wife, Blanche of Savoy, his little daughter Iolanthe, and his married son Giangaleazzo, with his wife Isabelle. These last were the parents of Valentine. When she was born her mother was sixteen and her father fifteen years of age.12 At her nativity there were, we are told, incredible rejoicings; for the pride of Galeazzo Visconti was gratified by the birth of a grandchild who was no less the grand-daughter of a King of France.
The mother of Valentine was that little French princess who, six years ago, had been sold into Lombardy to help to raise the golden millions of her father’s ransom. John the Good had received for his daughter the sum of five hundred thousand golden florins, a sort of inverse marriage portion, the price of a royal alliance. But Galeazzo had not paid for barren honour only: Isabelle had brought her husband the county and the title of Vertus in Champagne. Though the little girl had gone weeping into Italy, her tears were soon dried. She had left a devastated and ruined country; she came into a land of sumptuous tyranny, of riches and magnificence. Life was easy at Milan and at Pavia, where Galeazzo was busied with his new university, where Giangaleazzo—a timid, intellectual, orderly creature—spent day after day in his study full of enormous parchment ledgers, directing the staff of secretaries who copied into them his accounts, his memoranda, and duplicates of his correspondence. Priests and friars from the old Certosa, professors of law and learning from the new college, poets also—the English poet, Master Geoffrey Chaucer, and the prince of poets himself, Messer Francesco Petrarca,—learned men like Philippe de Mézières, visitors from so far away as England, France, or Cyprus—these were the guests of the palace. Gradually the stately home echoed with children’s voices. Valentine was born in 1366. One brother grew strong and playful at her side; another died in babyhood. When the third was born, in 1373, Isabelle died, and a few months afterwards her baby followed her.
The immense castle of Pavia was very quiet now. Iolanthe, the girl-widow of the Duke of Clarence, had married, in 1372, the Marquis of Monferrat. There were only the old Visconti and his wife, and the studious young Count of Vertus and his two little children. It was quieter still when, in 1378, Galeazzo Visconti died. He had been a terrible old man: cruel, unscrupulous, scholarly. It was he who obtained from the Emperor, Charles IV., in 1361, the privilege to found the University of Pavia, and he who protected it by an edict threatening with heavy punishments the Milanese who dared to study in another school. And he it was, also, who threw alive into a fiery furnace two priests who came to him on an unwelcome message; and he who, with his brother Bernabò, had poisoned a third brother, co-heir and co-tyrant with them in Lombardy. They had divided his share, Galeazzo taking Piacenza, Pavia, the west to Novara, and as far as Como in the north; while Bernabò possessed the rich province of the east. Both ruled alike in Milan. Both should have been equally powerful. But Galeazzo had left all his share to the sole Count of Vertus, and he, too, had only one son to follow him, whereas the signory of Bernabò was strengthened and divided by eleven turbulent and violent young sons.
Valentine’s father remembered the fate of his uncle. He kept very quiet, surrounded himself with priests and guards, ate of no dish before a score of stewards tasted of it, and dissimulated his ambition. This he did so well that the timid Count of Vertus became a by-word and a laughing-stock in the house of Bernabò. Although the young man had taken care to obtain from the Emperor investitures which conferred upon him absolute authority;13 although by his judicious protection of the people he made himself the desired deliverer of the unhappy Milanese, still Bernabò and his children could not take their kinsman seriously. And the better to lull their suspicions, in 1380 the young Count of Vertus came a-courting to the noisy Castello di Porta Giovio, where Bernabò kept house with such of his nine-and-twenty children as still remained in Milan. It was a great riotous house full of voices, full of splendid young men in armour (Palamedes, Lancilotto, Sagramoro), full of beautiful women and fair young girls with lovely names (Achiletta, Verde, Damigella), and not less radiant for their easy familiarity with evil. One of these dangerous maidens, Caterina, the Count of Vertus took to be his second wife. In the next year, in 1381, on the 4th of October, his boy, Astorre, died.
Valentine was now his only heir, for during the first eight years of their marriage Caterina Visconti had no children. Valentine was fifteen years old, of an age to be dowered and married. Her father, however, kept her at home with him, teaching her many things—too much, some people said, for they thought her as wise as Medea. She could invent posies; she could read not only Italian books, but Latin, French, and German. Into whatever court she might hereafter marry, she would be not only the daughter of the Duke of Milan, but his diplomatic agent. I do not know if she could speak English, but in those years of warfare the English were often at Milan, and Valentine when a little girl had seen (a brilliant, sudden vision) her English uncle of Clarence, who had died so strangely at Alba, and was buried at Pavia. She was a scholarly maiden, possessing of her own no less than eleven books; more than her grandfather, King John, had ever owned in his royal library at Paris. And she could write as well as read—a clear, excellent hand, of which the signature still exists in the Paris archives. Froissart in later days remarked on the frequent letters that she wrote to her father: “Madame Valentine wrote him all she knew.”
I do not know if Valentine was beautiful. A line in “Le Pastouralet” speaks of her as
“Maret, qui le miex dasoit,”
and mentions the courtesy of “la touse mignotte”—the dainty dame. This conveys an impression of nothing more positive than elegance and grace. We can fill up the frame with a couple of portraits which still exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale: small grisaille illuminations adorning a manuscript poem14 in defence of Valentine. There is nothing very distinctive in either portrait—no accent of striking personality or resemblance. They represent the same young and slender woman, rather tall, with a long neck and slim arms, and a bust both full and delicate. The head is small, the hair parted from ear to ear across the middle of the head, the back locks being tied in a Greek knot, the front ones divided again in the middle and looped in pendant braids above the ear. Under this severe coiffure we discern a serious gentle placid face—long narrow eyes, a high forehead, a full mouth with pretty pursed lips; a face too closely following the mediæval ideal for it to impress us very strongly as a likeness. Valentine is clothed in a low-cut, tight gown girdled round the hips, with long, tight sleeves descending to the knuckles of the slim and delicate hands—over this she wears a very ample trained surtout, also low in the neck, falling in rich folds to her feet and buttoned down the front to the hips, where it is sewn together, but split up at the arms in immense wide sleeve-holes, a yard long, revealing the under dress. If the young duchess was not precisely beautiful, yet certainly she was beautifully attired. The catalogue of her gala-dresses is a thing to wonder on: scarlet, and silver, and cloth of gold, and rich embroidery; cloths of peacock-green and mulberry colour; tissues of netted pearls. And she had as many pearls, diamonds, sapphires, and balass-rubies as any princess in a fairy-story. She wore them sewn all over her caps, round her girdles, encircling her young throat, and showered broadcast across the brocades and embroidery of her gowns. With all this, at sixteen, and with the subtle sweetness of the natural Lombard grace, it is not necessary to be beautiful.
II
In 1382 certain guests came to Milan, who marvelled at the magnificence of these Viscontis, who talked much with Valentine’s father, and who spread abroad the tale of his daughter’s wisdom and her splendour. They must also have impressed on the mind of this young girl the strength, the beauty, and the wealth of France. And they must no less have spurred the silent and vigilant ambition of her father; for in the late May of 1382, along the roads of Lombardy, four thousand men rode together to be the guests of Milan. They were all mounted on beautiful chargers caparisoned in silk and precious metals; they were all clad in suits of burnished armour; light aigrettes floated from their helmets. “They seemed the army of Xerxes,” wrote the Monk of St. Denis; “their beasts of burden went slowly under loads of gold and treasure. Those that beheld them, astrologers and prophets, read in the future the records of their fabulous glory.” In truth, they were a host of heroes. Knights like the Count of Savoy and the Count of Polenza went in the ranks. At their head rode a tall, square-shouldered man, with fair locks beginning to grizzle, and a handsome countenance. He was magnificent in his cloak of woven gold and lilies. This was Louis of Anjou, King of Sicily, setting out for Naples to conquer his new kingdom.
A kingdom in Italy! It was the dearest vision of the age. The kingdom of Adria, a dream never realized; the kingdom of Naples, a phantom eluding for two hundred years the eager grasp of France. In the subtle mind of Giangaleazzo Visconti, a third, a vaster kingdom, was already taking shape—a kingdom dead and buried for near five hundred years—the kingdom of Italy!
But to gain Italy it was necessary to be secure in Milan. While his guests rode on triumphantly to famine and disaster, the Count of Vertus elaborated his plan. When the King of Sicily, wrapped in a remnant of homespun daubed with painted yellow lilies, lay dead in his unconquered kingdom, defeated in his grave at Bari, Giangaleazzo Visconti ruled supreme in Lombardy.
He had plotted so well that one sole death secured this change. On the 6th of May, 1385, Giangaleazzo, apparently en route for the shrine of our Lady of Varese, passed by the gates of Milan. His uncle and his cousins went out to meet him, smiling at the immense guard which ever attended the timid Hermit of Pavia. But now Giangaleazzo dropped the mask. In an hour Milan was his, his cousins his prisoners, and his uncle, with his dilettissima amante, fast in the Castle of Trezzo. Giangaleazzo, no less skilled in poisons than his father, had him poisoned there, and buried him in Milan in a sepulchre of splendid marble. But he showed no wanton cruelty. His cousins escaped, destitute indeed, but unharmed. No unnecessary pain attended the murder of the tyrant Bernabò, decently executed by a well-cooked dish of vegetables. Ambition, not revenge, nor the blood-mania of his race, was the master passion of the new Lord of Lombardy. If any questioned his proceedings, he could produce the investiture of Wenzel, granting him absolute authority and final judgment. The children of Bernabò were stupefied and did not rebel; most of the sons went to fight in the ranks of Sir John Hawkwood; and the people of Milan hailed the Count of Vertus as a deliverer. He taxed them heavily, indeed, but without disorder; and his police were so excellent that he used to smile and say, “I am the only robber in my provinces.” Giangaleazzo was now master of a great domain, immensely rich, three-and-thirty. He meant to go far. In 1386 he sent to Pope Urban, demanding the title of King of Italy.
Urban refused, and in future the Ghibelline Count of Vertus addressed his requests to the Emperor, or else to the Anti-Pope at Avignon, who asked nothing better than to make himself a party in Italy. But first of all, Giangaleazzo began to conquer his kingdom. Verona, Padua, Pisa, Siena, Perugia, Assisi, Bologna, Spoleto, fell like ninepins before his gathering force. Florence began to tremble. Foreign countries began to talk of this new conqueror, of his force, his wealth, his one young daughter. Clement the Pope of Avignon, among others, perceived that with Anjou in the south and Visconti in the north, a great Gallic party might be formed in Italy. Clement was at once the creature and the patron of the kings of France. In the winter of 1386-87, while the Milanese messenger still were in the saddle arranging a marriage between Valentine and the Emperor’s brother, suddenly the Governor of Vertus arrived at Pavia. He brought a message from the King of France, the young Charles VI. The King demanded the hand of Valentine for his only brother, Louis.
This was an important step. The two first children of the King of France had died as soon as they were born, and Louis was still the heir to the Crown. Valentine, six years after her father’s second marriage, was still his only child. It was current in France that the Count of Vertus turned to his daughter and said, “When I see you again, fair daughter, I trust you will be Queen of France.”
III
This proposal, which came as a surprise to Europe and almost as an outrage to the Emperor, was no surprise to the Lord of Milan. Months before Giangaleazzo had laid his plans. There exists at Paris in the Archives Nationales (K. 554, No. 7) the summary of a Project of Marriage between Louis and Valentine, dated the 26th of August, 1386.
It is interesting to note that in this early draft there is no thought of any possible French claim to Milan. Valentine is dowered with Asti and its revenue—for which her husband was never to be constrained to pay homage; she was also to bring her husband 450,000 golden florins, and to come to him “bien joyellée et aornée de joyaulx.” And, only after the death of her father, she was to succeed to the county of Vertus in Champagne.
This was a great deal, but this was not enough. There was in France a strong party so hostile to the Lord of Milan, that riches, and mere riches, were not enough to overpower their opposition. Visconti desired above all things a Royal alliance. He saw that the Guelf—the national party—in Italy was strong and was unrepresented. He would be Head of the Guelfs, until he secured something better, and his best title to that Headship was a French alliance. Moreover, self-preservation, no less than ambition, rendered the marriage desirable. Isabel of Bavaria, granddaughter of the murdered Bernabò Visconti, was Queen of France. How could Giangaleazzo suffer that his exiled cousins should possess so tremendous an advantage over him? He may have felt himself insecure in his usurped sovereignty, so long as France was united by blood and interest only to the Disinherited. If Valentine married Louis, Milan was safe from France. So at Christmas, 1386, Giangaleazzo offered the husband of Valentine the county of Vertus, in his lifetime as well as after his death, and included in the marriage contract the astounding clause of the succession of Valentine to Milan.
Even without this, Valentine was a very wealthy heiress; she brought back to France her mother’s dowry, the county of Vertus in Champagne. In addition to this she took into the kingdom 450,000 golden florins, a freight of golden ornaments and jewels, furniture to the amount of 70,000 florins, gold and silver plate, and the county of Asti in Lombardy, with a yearly income of nearly 30,000 golden florins.15
The county of Asti comprised a whole province of towns, villages, and castles. Thirty signories were in its fief; forty-eight villas paid homage to the Count of Asti; Brie and Cherasco, two large towns in Piedmont, belonged directly to him. In the politics of those times few things are more striking than the singular lightmindedness with which a king of France bestows upon a Lombard adventurer a county in the very heart and centre of his own kingdom; or the confidence with which an Italian conqueror hands the key of his position to a wealthy neighbour. The situation of the French at Asti turned out to have the very gravest political consequences. It assured them Savona, Genoa, Pisa for a moment, and a century of wars about the Milanese. For this secure footing in Lombardy gave a point of reality to their vision of an Italian kingdom, and made the subtraction of Italy from the Empire appear not only desirable but possible. On the other hand, it familiarized Italy with the French. Henceforth the Italian princes, in any dispute among themselves, would call in the protection not only of the King of France but of their French neighbour, the powerful Count of Asti.
But at first the Lombards did not like it. “I Lombardi,” says Corio, “furono di mala voglia.” What they really dreaded was the succession of Valentine and her French husband to Milan. This is too complicated and intricate a question to dispose of here. I will only say that the Italians believed that in some fashion Giangaleazzo had secured Milan to his daughter, in case he should have no sons, or (as actually happened) in case all his sons should die childless. But the question of the French claim to Milan deserves a history to itself.
IV
In April, 1387, Valentine of Milan was married by proxy and parole to Louis, Duke of Touraine. The bride was twenty-one, the bridegroom just sixteen; but, as Juvenal des Ursins remarked, “Assez caut, subtil et sage de son aage.” But not until the 3rd of June, 1389, did the Lord of Milan send his married daughter to her home in France.
For in France a powerful faction opposed the marriage. The king was little more than a lad; entirely—or, of late, almost entirely—submissive to his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. When the wise King Charles expired in the autumn of 1380, he left the custody of his two children to this younger brother of his, who in all his battles and adventures had been his right-hand man. But the King left the Regency of the Kingdom to the elder of his brothers, the Duke of Anjou. In every sense the brothers were rivals and antagonists; the interests of Anjou lay to the South, the interests of Burgundy to the North. Anjou was a man of culture, made by nature to be the head of a society of nobles; while Burgundy, the Captain, was the champion of popular rights. In nothing were they at one. When Anjou left the kingdom to conquer Naples, and when the news came to France that he would nevermore return, the supremacy of Burgundy appeared secure. But Anjou had left behind him a successor—not his son, the child-king of Sicily. No, the real successor to his aims and policy was his nephew, the Prince Louis, the younger of the two sons of the dead king.
Little harmony between this lad and his uncle of Burgundy! At ten years old the child fights like a hero at Rosebecque; but the old captain, his tutor, keeps all his smiles for the other nephew, the docile and amiable king. He feels in Louis a spirit of danger, a breath of insubordination. And, in truth, one after the other, the ancient counsellors and servitors of Anjou take shelter in the household of the prince. Burgundy feels that Louis is Anjou Redivivus—he must be kept low. And for this the testament of Charles V. gives ample warrant: for that king, well-named the Wise, feeling that the danger of France lay in the greatness of her princes, had conquered his fatherly heart and decreed that his younger son should have no more than a pension of 12,000 livres a year. But this was not to be. As time went on, and the Regency came to an end, Louis stimulated his placid brother to a sense of independence. And the young king, less Roman than his father, and glad perhaps to feel in the kingdom another power than that of Burgundy, began to enrich his only brother, giving him the counties of Valois and Beaumont, lands in Cotentin, Caen, Champagne, and Brie: then the Duchy of Touraine; the promise of the inheritance of the old Duchess of Orleans; finally, this rich marriage with Valentine Visconti.
Burgundy resisted with might and main. Not only would this marriage make Louis too strong, but of all brides Valentine was the bride least to his mind. For Burgundy had married two of his own children into the House of Bavaria, and had given a Bavarian princess—the vivacious Isabel—as wife to the young king. Now all these Bavarians were the grandchildren of Bernabò, murdered by the father of Valentine. Also the niece of Burgundy, Béatrix d’Armagnac, “la gaie Armagnageoise,” had married in 1382. This Carlo Visconti, Lord of Parma, heir of Bernabò, had been stripped of all his goods by Giangaleazzo and Beatrice, no longer laughing, had returned to eat the bread of exile in her brother’s house. Thus the Queen, and Burgundy, and Armagnac, and Berry (the other brother of the dead king) were bound by every instinct of natural anger and honourable vendetta to look upon Giangaleazzo as the spoiler of their kinsmen—of mother, children, niece, or husband—and in their eyes the riches of Milan were the price of blood. Not one of these but hoped to oust the usurper and restore the rightful line. And so for two years they contrived to defer the marriage.16
Meanwhile the influence of Burgundy weakened, that of Prince Louis increased, with the king. In the autumn of 1388 the disastrous “Voyage d’Allemagne” deeply discredited Burgundy, its author. In their tent at Corenzich, far from Queen and Court, the two brothers held long colloquies. Not in vain did Louis plead for his bride. In the summer of 1389, Philippe de Florigny was sent into Lombardy to bring her home.
Valentine took away with her an escort of knights, a burden of gold and gems, the possession of Asti, and the promise of Milan. She had in her caskets three hundred thousand pearls of price, beside the pearls upon her gala-dresses. Her plate was valued at more than one hundred thousand marks Parisis. Her jewels, ornaments, and tapestries were estimated at nearly seven hundred thousand golden florins.17 Giangaleazzo had found nothing too costly or too radiant for his only daughter. When at last he let her go, he rode with her out of the gates of Pavia, saying never a word of farewell, looking not once into her beloved face, lest he should fall a-weeping. In the saddest hour of her tragic life, Valentine remembered with tears that silent parting.
It was the 17th of August, 1389, according to the dates of the Monk of St. Denis, when Valentine rode into Melun to meet her bridegroom. The King was there as well as all the Court—a Court full of kinsmen for Valentine. The Viscontis counted their alliances with the kings of France back into those mythical ages when Æneas, ancestor of either House, founded the city of Angleria. Valentine found plenty of more recent connections. The King and her husband were both her first cousins, and so was the young King of Sicily; the Dukes of Burgundy and Berry were her uncles. She was also, as I have said, first cousin once removed to the King’s young wife, Isabel of Bavaria. She was cousin also to Madame de Montauban, cousin by marriage to Madame d’Armagnac. But these three kinswomen looked on her with horror, and all her splendour seemed to them unholy spoil fresh from the unclean hands of her father, the triumphant assassin of his kinsmen.
The jealousy and suspicion of the Queen must have been the earliest greeting of Valentine at Melun. Queen Isabel was the idol of the Court. Radiantly beautiful, eighteen years old, she was not satisfied with the devotion of her husband. Charles VI. was a gentle, kind-hearted, stalwart young man, at two-and-twenty already rather bald, clear of eye and cheek, generous, slow-witted, unapt to State and dignity. He was lovable and sweet in temper; “he emitted, like an odoriferous flower, the ingenuity of his perfect character,” writes the anonymous Monk of St. Denis. But at his side, more brilliant and more eloquent than he, rode the first knight of chivalry, the King’s only brother, Louis, Duke of Touraine. This young man was eighteen years old, extremely handsome, so witty and so wise that in the University of Paris there were no doctors who were proof against his bonne memoire et belle loquelle. Often at night, in the Hôtel de Saint Paul at Paris, he and the young Marshal Boucicault would sit into the grey hours of the morning, devising and arguing the nature of the soul, or making rondels, songs, and ballads. Other days and nights were spent in less innocent amusements; for the beautiful Duke of Touraine was so irresistible a lover that popular fancy endowed him with a magic wand and an enchanted ring, making him absolute master of all women. None the less—though in a knight it were more noble to succour than to enslave fair ladies—the Duke was considered (a woman has pronounced it) “the very refuge and retreat of chivalry.” And the charm of his youth and beauty, of his rhetoric and laughter, of his gentle manners and brilliant knightliness, still exhales from the dusty pages of Christine de Pisan and Juvenal des Ursins. These two loved him. But the hostile Monstrelet, the critical Monk of St. Denis, the unenthusiastic Froissart—even these assure us of his enchanting presence.
According to Burcarius the King was handsomer than his young brother; but we must allow for a natural Burgundian hostility to Louis, and a natural Burgundian preference for force and valour, fresh colour, sweet temper, good humour, and all vigorous northern qualities, in preference to the subtler charms of their enemy. The stalwart Fleming thinks the King the finest man at Court, and handsomer than any there, far handsomer than his wife, “jolie et avenante,” indeed, but “basse et brunette”: fatal defects in the eyes of a Fleming! Her indisputable empire over men he ascribes not to her face, but to her lively manners. “Folle et légère,” was she:
“Touse n’y avoit tant jonette
Plaine de sy grant gaiété
Ny de sy grant joliveté
Sy amoureuse, ne sy lie,
Que cette Bergère jolie.”18
As for Louis, the Burgundian has no word in favour of this melancholy free-lover, this Tristifer (for such is the name he goes by among shepherds) who sins with no pleasure in sin; who spends his days in the pursuit of love, yet keeps a heart of iron; whose joys are such as are not to be found in the real world, but the fantastic joys of art, repugnant to the Philistine:
“Tristifer, tristièce portant.
... Et tout fut-il jolis,
Trop sembloit-il mirancolis;
Qui le coer a plus dur que fer.
...... \.
Bien nouvelette chanson
S’en va tout chantant à hault son,
Qu’il avoit, par un soir bruyant
Et bel, rimoié en riant.”
Thus the Burgundian... unaware that this portrait of his enemy is the only one that awakens curiosity and stimulates the fancy. And, by way of adding a blacker touch than all, he tells us that this singing Tristifer is the paramour of the gay Queen Belligère.
I have said that Louis was held to possess an unearthly ring, a magic wand, of desire. For a perfect knight it was said that he had put them to strange uses. He had fascinated with his wand, he had bewitched with the circle of his ring, the young wife of his brother, the beautiful Queen Isabel. And he was the bridegroom of Valentine Visconti. Queen Isabel was at Melun to greet her new kinswoman. We can imagine with what critical eyes she ran her over. Valentine, though not beautiful, was a novel and irradiating vision in her veil of gems. She was wise too; she could talk with her husband over the poems he made, the verses of Lord Salisbury and Maître Eustache Deschamps, the romances of Wenzel of Luxembourg, or of Maître Jean d’Arras, all the literature of the Court. She could argue with him, this subtle Lombard, in the tenuous and fanciful dissertations that he loved. Queen Isabel could not endure to see this stranger, by reason of her splendour and her novelty become the centre of attraction. The marriage festival was scarcely over when Isabel persuaded her husband to ordain a greater festivity for herself. She had been married four years, she was known by sight to every clerk in the Rue St. Denis, yet the King, obedient to her behest, proclaimed the Royal Entry of the Queen into Paris.
V
This Paris that Valentine entered as a stranger was a beautiful city. The streets and bridges had been largely rebuilt by her uncle, Charles the Wise. Between the new Bastille and the river he had raised an immense royal palace, the Hôtel de St. Paul. Close at hand stood the Palais de Tournelles, the great hotel of the King of Sicily, the Hôtel Clisson, and the Hôtel de Behaigne, where the husband of Valentine sometimes lived. A little farther off (in the Rue de Turbigo) the castle of the Duke of Burgundy still rears its out-dated menace. On the left bank of the Seine another group of palaces surrounded Nôtre Dame. At the extremity of the city stood the Louvre. Rebuilt by Charles the Wise, it was endowed by him with a library of nine hundred and ten volumes (chiefly illuminated missals, legends, miracles, and treatises on astrology). There a silver lamp burned always day and night in the service of students, to whom the library was ever open.
Paris was a beautiful city; but it seemed a paradise upon the occasion of the royal entry. The Rue St. Denis was draped from top to bottom in green and crimson silk scattered with stars. Under the gateway angels sang in a starry heaven, and to the sweet sound of instruments little children played a miracle. There were towers and stages raised along the streets, where the legend of Troy-town and other pleasant matters were enacted. There were fountains also, flowing with milk or flowing with claret. Maidens, in rich chaplets of flowers, stood beside them and out of golden cups they gave the passers-by to drink, and sang melodiously the while; up and down this magic city went the citizens’ wives and daughters in long robes of gold and purple. The citizens themselves were clad in green, the royal officers in rose colour. But all these splendours paled and dwindled when the royal procession came in sight. In the middle, in an open litter, sat the Queen, the beautiful, smiling idol of the feast; she was dressed in a gown of silk, sewn over with French lilies worked in gold. Behind her, in painted cars, went the great ladies of the Court. Only the Duchess of Touraine had no litter; Valentine rode on a fair palfrey, marvellously caparisoned; she went on one side of the Queen’s litter among the royal dukes. The people of Paris, says Froissart, were as anxious to see the new Duchess as the Queen, whom indeed they had often seen. For Madame Valentine was immensely rich, the daughter of a great conqueror, and she had only just come out of Lombardy, a mysterious country where wonderful things came to pass. What impression did Valentine make on the people of Paris, pressing and craving to see the foreign duchess?
Which of her gala-dresses did she wear? The scarlet one sewn thick with pearls and diamonds, with a cap of pearls and scarlet for her dusky hair? Or the robe of gold brocade with sleeves and headdress of woven pearls? Or the flashing crown of balasses and sapphires, and the dress of scarlet sewn with jewels and embroidered with pale blue borage flowers? In any of these this splendid Italian stranger must have appeared to the burghers of Paris as a vision of Southern luxury, of mysterious outlandish enchantment. At least it is certain that never after they looked upon her as a mere mortal woman. Just at that season every one was reading the “Mélusine” of Maître Jean d’Arras. Valentine of Milan with her fairy splendours, her subtle wisdom, her Lombard traditions—Valentine, with the Visconti snake on her escutcheon—must have seemed to these Parisians much such another mysterious serpent-woman, another Mélusine. For the Italian character, never fanatic and yet so prone to spiritual passions; seldom bestial, yet so guilty of unnatural vices—Italy has ever been a mystery, a hateful enigma to the practical French; and of all Italians the Lombards, the border people, are most unlike their Gallic neighbours. A century later, when the French poured into Italy, no blazing mountain of Vesuvius, no wonderful Venetian city swimming in the seas, no antique and glorious ruins of Rome, so much astonished the foreign soldiers as the learned and subtle ladies of Lombardy. Those later chroniclers who have been in Italy relate with wonder their fables of ecstatic virgins, and gifted women wiser than their sex; they have seen one Anna, a woman forty years of age, who never eats, drinks, or sleeps, and who bears on her body the mystical wounds of Christ, breaking out and bleeding afresh on every Friday. In Milan, a demoiselle Trivulce, “de son grant jeune aage,“ wrote letters in Latin and was eloquent in oratory; “elle estoit aussi poeticque” (adds the author of La Mer des Chroniques) “et scavoit moult bien disputer avecques clercs et docteurs.” And also she was virtuous, so that her holy life seemed a thing to marvel on. At Venice, Maître Nicole Gilles encountered a certain Virgin Cassandra, the daughter of Angelo Fideli, a maiden expert in the seven liberal arts and in theology, all of which matters she expounded in public lectures. At Quiers, near Asti, a “jeune pucelle,” the daughter of Maître Jehan Solier, received the king with a public and most eloquent oration. Learned and subtle and virtuous as these Lombard ladies were, enthusiastic and spiritual as were many of their countrymen, yet this strange Italy, where the women taught the men, where Jesus Christ in Florence was the official head of the Republic, inspired a secret dread and horror in the French. Like men in an enchanted country, they feared what might lurk behind the shows of things. Above all, the French could never rid themselves of a haunting suspicion of poison—poison and sorcery, underhand and terrible weapons, such as these frank and passionate Gauls associated with the subtlety and wisdom of the people they had conquered. “And yet,” says Commines, “I must here speak somewhat in honour of the Italian nation, because we never found in all this voyage that they did seek to do us harm by poison, and yet, if they had chosen, we could hardly have avoided it.”
This attitude of suspicion towards Italy, of reluctant admiration, characterized the French of 1494. Minus the admiration, it is quite as significant of the French to-day; and in 1387 the same distrust was there, but sharper, more anxious, and the same wonder, but intensified. Valentine the Italian, seemed to these alert, honest, practical Parisians a marvel of strangeness and wisdom; but to them these attributes suggested chiefly a fatal potency for evil.
And, in truth, there was in Italy a wickedness such as for another hundred years should not penetrate into France. The Italians were a nation of secret poisoners; and the French bourgeois vaguely guessed that this splendid young lady was acquainted with a world terribly different from their ingenuous and turbulent Paris. No need for turbulence in Italy. Valentine’s father poisoned the uncle who, for his part, had, poisoned his own brother. And Giangaleazzo, who, as Corio relates, had been nearly poisoned by Antonio della Scala, disposed of that enemy by the self-same means. The Florentines19 (but theirs is the evidence of an enemy) said he paid his official poisoner a hundred florins monthly. These it was murmured were the traditions of the new Duchess.
Thus, after all, Queen Isabel played but the second part in the pageant of her entry. Soon, however, she forgot her jealousy of the Italian—a jealousy which on that holiday kept her sick in her chamber, while Valentine danced with Touraine and the King in the royal ball below. But Valentine was no rival of the beautiful, bright little Queen: she was a persistent, ambitious, and devoted woman, never vain and never timid. From the first she lavished on her boyish husband that passionate devotion of an elder woman which asks no return from the radiant young creature she adores. She did not grudge Louis the love of Isabel, if, indeed, that love was his. A stranger thing happened: Valentine united with her rival to push the fortunes of Touraine. These two women were ever together, ever scheming, and planning the welfare of the unfaithful husband of the one, whom an unbroken tradition has regarded as the criminal lover of the other. An unnatural league; but it served to strengthen Touraine.
For Valentine and Isabel alike had the ear of the King. Charles VI., a little slow, a little dull, neglected in his Court, betrayed by his wife for his more brilliant brother—this gentle, kindly, unimportant creature was irresistibly drawn to his sister-in-law. Of all her royal kinsfolk in France, the King was the only one who from the first had welcomed Valentine. “My dear sister, my beloved sister,” the words were ever on his lips. Valentine, like him, was set aside; like him she suffered. She, too, was patient and gentle; but she was strong, she was prudent. The King of France was a great heavy lad, over-boyish for his years, loving jests and disguises, hating ceremony, and only very dimly feeling the wrongs that perplexed him; he sought from the sweet and quiet Italian her protection no less than her compassion.
In 1390, at Montpellier, the King could not support his absence from her. “I am too far from the Queen and Madame Valentine,” he said to his brother. “Let us ride post haste to Paris.” Unaccompanied and for a wager, they rode all the way, four nights and nearly five days in the saddle.... A little later the physicians said that such violent exercises as this had unsettled the feeble reason of the King.
VI
In 1391, the young Duke of Touraine acquired the succession of the Duchess of Orleans. He was now as rich as he was ambitious. Could the old king, his father, have seen his eminence and his ambition, he would have risen from his grave, and have returned to the salvation of France. But the dust was in his ears and eyes, and it was not to be so.
For some time the King had been ailing with a hot fever. He was, says the Monk of St. Denis, strange, languishing, and bewildered. When, in the summer of 1392, the French invaded Brittany, the Dukes, his uncles, conjured him to remain at home. But Charles was not to be persuaded. He started with them upon the long, fatiguing journey.
On the 5th of August, near the town of Mans, after some hours of riding in armour under a beating sun, the royal party passed the Lepers’-village. A beggar, a leper, dressed in rags, the outcast of the world, the lowest human thing, came out and accosted the young King of France: “Go no farther, noble King, they betray you!” The King was startled, and though the Royal Guards interfered they could not at once shake off the loathsome prophet. Clinging to the King’s bridle, the leper cried again, “Go no farther, noble King, they betray you!”... They betray you! Louis and Isabel, his nearest and dearest, what else did they? The King said nothing.
About an hour afterwards, suddenly, the King set upon his brother, his spear a-tilt, as hunters hunt a stag.... The more distant of the royal party thought the King had spied a hare or a hart in the forest.... Then, as the truth dawned, there was a dreadful scene. Cries, wounds, men falling from their horses, and a fanatic madman who none the less was still a sacred and irresistible presence! The King of France was furiously and murderously mad.
Four men were slain, others saved themselves by simulating death. Orleans fortunately was not hurt at all. For four days the King’s frenzy lasted, with fits of delirium and lapses into death-like exhaustion. The most cruel part of his sickness was the evident anguish of his spirit. “Will no one pluck out of my heart the dagger that my fair brother of Orleans has planted there?” the poor mad youth would cry; and he would mutter to himself, “I must kill him! I must kill him!” It was useless to instruct the people that there is no reason in the sick hatred of a distempered mind. Nor would they find sufficient motive in the rumoured unfaithfulness of Isabel with Louis. They sought a darker, a more subtle explanation, and their suspicions were fostered, for political ends, by the enemies of Orleans—the faction of his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy.
For when the King recovered from his frenzy, his mind remained weak and disabled. It was necessary to hand over to his uncles for a while the direction of affairs. This made the strongest of them, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, more than ever strong; he was in fact, though not in form, the regent. Against his rule one voice was ever raised in protest, the voice of the young ambitious brother of the King.
Louis of Orleans was now twenty-one years of age; through his marriage and the gifts of the King he had become formidably rich; through the weakness of the King he was formidably powerful. He was the nearest to the throne and he desired the regency. But the people suspected Orleans; he had too much to gain by the death or the incapacity of his brother. The people, in their passionate pity for the gentle monarch they adored, began to hate and fear the Queen and Orleans. In later days they did not scruple to declare their misgivings, but at first they dared not directly accuse the Queen, they would not directly accuse the young, beautiful Louis, their pride from his childhood, eloquent, religious, gay, slow to anger. With Juvenal they found him “beau prince et gratieux;” and, like Christine, they accounted him, “en ces jeunes faiz et en toutes choses très-avenant... car il aime les bons... nul fellonie ni cruauté en luy.” But he was young; he had been led away (Juvenal finds the phrase for them) “by the means of those who were near to him.... He had strange youthful follies that I will not declare.... There were those about him, young people, who induced him to do many things he had better have left undone.” This vague and mysterious excuse is the veil of a terrible accusation. The people began to say that the Duke of Orleans was a sorcerer.
The King mad; the King’s brother a wizard! There was a contagion of horror in France. “Many nobles and poor people,” writes the Monk of St. Denis, “began to change and sicken with the same strange malady that had attacked the King.” The fanatic terror of supernatural evil spread and deepened.
Things, at that critical season, fell out unfortunately for Orleans. On the 29th of January, 1393, there was a wedding festival at the Hôtel de St. Paul for one of Queen Isabel’s German maids of honour. The bride was a widow, and thrice a widow; therefore a subject for the grotesque licence of the age. At night, in the great hall among the dancers, suddenly there burst in a company of six satyrs dressed in tight linen vests, with flakes of tow fastened with pitch upon their backs. These hideous merry-makers sprang and danced about the bride, with leaps and gestures, in a sort of diabolic frenzy. Five of them were chained together, the sixth disported loose. The sixth was the King. Stung by some unlucky madcap prompting, Orleans took a flaming torch from its bearer, and held it close to the face of one of the maskers to see who he was. A flake of fire from the torch dropped among the tow and pitch. Up and down the hall, dancing a wilder and more terrible saraband, the flaming satyrs went. Two were burned to ashes, two died of their burns in agony, one saved himself by leaping into a water-butt. The King was rescued by the Duchess of Berri, who wrapped him in her mantle. But the danger and the fearful spectacle had upset his tottering reason. The King was mad again.
The people were furious against Orleans. Had Charles been burned, his brother’s life must have answered for it; for the people loved the King. The party of Burgundy—the popular party—did not hesitate to accuse the unfortunate young Duke of a fiendish plot to murder his brother. It was in vain that Louis raised a magnificent chapel of marble in the Church of the Celestines, to expiate his involuntary guilt. The people murmured that the Duke of Orleans went too often to the Celestines. It was said he went there every day. So much devotion was uncanny in so wild a liver.
Charitable souls like Demoiselle Christine declared in vain—“C’est impossible que son âme et ses mœurs n’en vaillent mieux.” Charitable souls are rare. The mass of the people did not hesitate to say that Louis visited the Celestines the better to conspire with a certain monk there—an old counsellor of his father’s—one Sire Philippe de Mézières. This person was acknowledged to be wise, experienced, able, and a man of science, according to the age. “Cestui vieil solitaire” for forty years had been the counsellor of princes. For thirty years he had been the life and soul of the policy of Cyprus, of Rhodes, of the Christian East. Then disgraced by an ungrateful king—Pierre II. de Lusignan—he took refuge in France, bringing to the service of Charles V. his enthusiasm, his political wisdom, his minute and extensive acquaintance with the Courts of Italy and the East. In 1379 he entered the Convent of the Celestines in Paris; not too secluded to remain the trusted counsellor of Charles V., and in his turn, of his son Louis of Orleans. But though the good Sire was a monk, the crowd doubted of his religion, for it was common rumour that he said there was no truth in sorcery. Let him say it! Sire Philippe de Mézières was none the less no judicious companion for the Duke of Orleans. The Sire had lived too long in Lombardy: “a country,” as Juvenal describes it, “where they practice magic and the casting of spells.”
About the same time a malignant rumour grew in France concerning the father of Valentine. People said the Seigneur of Milan had asked the French Ambassador for news of the King. “He is very well,” replied the Frenchman. Whereupon Visconti grew pale, and staggered. “He is the Devil!” he said, with great admiration; or, according to another version, “Diabolicum recitas et quod est impossibile—You tell me a diabolic thing, and one that is impossible! The King can not be well!“
Now, it was generally known in Italy that the Duke of Milan, like every other successful prince or Signory, was a secret poisoner. But in France a more terrible and a yet more hateful accusation was rumoured against him. The people began to whisper that the Duke of Milan was a wizard.
VII
The King was mad again; he had fallen into the first of innumerable relapses. Henceforth, for thirty years, any moment of too poignant feeling would throw him back in agony and madness. At such times he suffered much. It would happen (says the Monk of St. Denis), that as he sat in his council chamber, receiving his ambassadors and discoursing with sense and clearness, a sudden shudder would pass over him, the actual world would drift into oblivion. Again the forest near Mans, the leper’s warning, would rise on his tormented vision. He would shriek out for help against his enemies, and yet, poor king, be still aware these enemies were phantasms. At such moments he would cry and wail and sob, till all the Court fell a-weeping to hear him. “O not madness. Death, any pain, anything but madness!” and joining his hands he would look eagerly in face after face of his kinsmen. “I pray you, for the love of Christ, if any of you be party to this magic, then let me die at once and end it.” But no prayers avail, and as the fantastic world of lunacy gradually eclipsed the receding truth, the King’s last entreaty showed the unaltered sweetness of his tormented nature. “Keep away all the knives,” he would cry. “I had rather die than hurt any one.” For no lapse of time, no suffering effaced in his gentle character the stamp of that terrible moment of Mans when he had awoken to find his innocent hands stained henceforth for ever with innocent and loyal blood.
While the King wailed in desperate protest against his oncoming madness, all the Court wept with him. But, once that eclipse accomplished, the Court forgot the King. Part of the royal palace of St. Paul’s had been turned into a safe asylum. There the King lived, sometimes for many weeks unwashed, eaten with filth and vermin, suffering no attendant to approach him. He was then a mere wild beast, tormented with canine hunger, fierce, suspicious, and sometimes wild with fear. Then he would pace from end to end of his apartments, fleeing his imaginary pursuers, until he dropt exhausted in senseless lethargy.
But more often, and especially in the first years of his illness, he was not sunk so low as this. He was then an aimless, laughing, boyish imbecile. He was no longer the King even in his own fancy; he had forgotten himself as others had forgotten him. Did he see his own arms or the Queen’s emblazoned anywhere upon the walls, he would smear out that heraldry, laughing the while and dancing in a burlesque, unseemly fashion. “These are not my arms. I am not King Charles. My name is George,” he would cry, “and my arms are a lion pierced with a spear.” The poor King was himself transfixed with that intangible spear his fair brother of Orleans had planted in his heart for ever. But in his madness, his jealousy had undergone a subtle change. Sometimes he could not endure the sight or mention of the Queen and Orleans, but more often he utterly forgot them. Once they brought Isabel into his presence. He shook his head and swore he did not know the lady.
There was in all the world one only creature whose presence shed a little balm and solace on his unhappy lunacy. This was his sister-in-law, Madame Valentine. She was the only person he ever fully recognized. Absent and present he called upon her, “Oh, my dearest sister! Oh, my beloved sister!” and if Valentine left him a single day unvisited, the poor king would wander up and down for hours in aimless regret and complaining.
Valentine was kind and pitiful. Although at this time she was ailing (her second son was born in August, 1393), she did not fear to bring her delicate magnificence into the filth and peril of the mad king’s presence. For hours she would sit with him, playing at cards: those painted Saracen Naibi which Covelluzzo noticed at Viterbo (the first known in Europe) in 1379. Perhaps Valentine had brought them out of Italy; they were the only pastime of the haggard king; and for hours the painted images of Death, Love, Fortune, Madness, and the Angel, would silently fall from the hands of these two unhappy people, keeping each other melancholy company in the dismantled chambers of the barred and altered palace.
Valentine was ill herself; she was a woman; and yet she was not afraid of this tall, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-five, subject to violent mania, who in one fearful paroxysm had slain four men in armour. His attendants dared not come too near. But Valentine seemed to bear a charmed life, she did not even tremble. This unnatural courage of hers, this fascination, this mastery which she exercised upon their king... all this was terribly explicable to the people of Paris.
Who was this lady?—Valentine of Milan. “Now,” says Juvenal, “her father was the Duke of Milan,20 who was a Lombard, and in his country they practise magic and the casting of spells.” “The common people,” says the Monk, “declared the King was bewitched. They accused the Duke of Milan, and in confirmation of this ridiculous proposition they said the Duchess of Orleans was the only person the King recognized or cherished in his sickness. They did not scruple to say she was a witch, though that so generous a lady should commit so great a crime is a fact that never has been proved.” “The King’s physicians, arioles, and charmers,” says Froissart, “affirmed the King was poisoned or bewitched by craft of sorcery; they said they knew it by the spirits that had showed it to them. Of these diviners, arioles, and charmers, certain were burned at Paris and at Avignon. They spake so much, and said the Duchess Valentine of Orleans, daughter to the Duke of Milan, had bewitched the King.”
In those days the accusation of sorcery was terrible and ominous. To bewitch the King was the most damnable of crimes, for witchcraft in itself was treason against God. It was indeed no less than taking out of heaven the tremendous issues of life and death, apportioning them with profane and mortal hands, and breaking the heavenly order of the universe. God was mocked. This side of sorcery excited the horror of theologians, but it was not this that infuriated with helpless terror the shuddering populace. We know how the Polynesian islanders will die to-day of a fatal langour if they believe their enemy has prayed against them. The citizens of Paris in the Middle Ages died as easily. “Throughout the kingdom,” says the Monk of St. Denis, “many nobles and poor people are attacked with the same strange malady as the King’s.” A contagion of fear paralysed the sources of life. “For they can bewitch you,” said, in 1407, Maître Jean Petit, a very learned doctor in theology; “and they can bewitch the King, and make him die in a very subtle manner, quite unapparent, by the casting of a spell.” “A word is enough,” said two Augustine friars who suffered for sorcery in 1397, “a word, a touch; it is no natural malady.” To those who suffered, and saw their near and dear ones suffer of this incurable, inexorable enchantment, there was no death too cruel for the wizard.
The Duke of Milan was a very powerful magician. By spells and sorcery he, the weakest of his clan, had made himself the most astute and potent of all the princes of the West; by spells and sorcery he would make his daughter queen of France. “Il n’y avait qu’une bouche à clore,“ said Jean Petit. Valentine, the people thought, was helping her father, for the Duchess of Orleans was a witch.
The powers of the Prince of the Air were in high places. Valentine was not only protected by Satan—not only served by Hermas and Astramin the two livid demons of Montjoy that obeyed the House of Orleans—she was also sheltered by the effulgence of the throne. Every power, every protection was hers. Hell and earth obeyed her, and heaven smiles upon the sins of princes. Yet with the cruel heroism of pity the people of Paris rose against her, pouring down the streets, reaching out their fanatic hands to tear in pieces no omnipotent demon in a violent aureole of flame, but a pale neglected foreign woman far from home. They determined to save the King, and at last the peril of the duchess grew so great that Marshal Sancerre and many other nobles advised her husband to send her out of Paris. So in great pomp, nowise abashed, but with all the splendour of a royal progress, Valentine left the city. She went to a fair castle of her husband’s near Pontoise, and then to Neufchatel upon the Loire. She went alone, for Orleans was kept by State affairs in Paris. There was a subtle political reason for the irritation of France against the Milanese. In the complex recesses of the human heart an actual terror of supernatural evil, a crusader’s passion to avenge the honour of God, may co-exist with the most sordid calculations of a worldly advantage to be gained. It was not only for the love of God that the Jews and Moors of Spain, the Protestants of Flanders, the monasteries of England, were made to enrich their persecutors. It was not entirely for thirty pieces of silver that Judas delivered a heretic to the secular arm. And it was the easier to condemn the Duke of Milan that he was not only a wizard, but the political rival of France for the rich suzerainty of Genoa.
VIII
The French had counted upon Giangaleazzo Visconti rather as a captain than as a rival. Visconti had looked upon the French as the tools of his ambition, and not as serious competitors. In reality each was in pursuit of the same thing; each desired to be supreme in Italy.
Visconti had easily acquired the direction of his son-in-law’s policy. It is not surprising. A lad of eighteen, poor, kept under, systematically neglected, Orleans before his marriage had known little of power, nothing of supremacy. He was nominally Duke of Touraine; but his estates were administered by the King. Until a few months before his marriage he had not even a house of his own, but lived with his retinue in a corner of his brother’s palace. In February, 1389, he appeared for the first time at the Royal Council. Valentine brought him wealth, consideration, and ambition; for, with the possession of Asti, and under the guidance of his father-in-law, the young Duke began to dream of battles and signiories in Italy.
Visconti was very willing to adopt his daughter’s husband in place of the clever and valiant son he should have had. His own son was a baby at the breast. And Orleans brought him not only a clear young mind, a fresh and eager will and the courage that the great Visconti never had, but also the influence of France. Thus the great Ghibelline saw within his reach the support of the Guelfs. To reconcile all parties for his own interest was ever the aim of this unrivalled statesman, as magically gifted to make peace as to foment a discord. Ghibelline and Guelf, Emperor and King of France, Pope and Antipope, aye, even Orleans and Burgundy, should join hands to fight his battles.
His first move was a whisper of ambition in the ear of his son-in-law. And Louis forgot his love-making and ballad-making, his jousting and feasting, and turned to other thoughts. Asti was his; Asti should be the centre of his operations, and in swiftness and silence a French army gathered in Asti.
In 1389, the very year of Orleans’ marriage, there was peace with England; hence, leisure in Court and camp; hence troops of riders and men-at-arms infesting every countryside, preying on the ruined peasants, and loitering hungry for another war. Nothing easier than to enlist a company! In 1389 Orleans sent to his new county François, Seigneur de Chassenage, as governor with twenty men-at-arms and two chamberlains, each with twenty men-at-arms and thirty archers. Fifty-five other men-at-arms and as many archers were added to these, and formed the nucleus of a rapidly increasing army. By the end of June more men-at-arms and squires joined the service. Enguerrand de Coucy, Lieutenant of the Duke and Captain-General ès parties d’Italie, went to keep his state at Asti in July.21
From this moment, long pages of the manuscript account book of Chassenage are filled with lists of captains, men-at-arms, and archers. Archers under Braguet, archers, under Viezville, a concentration of devoted Orleanists, once Angevines, in Italy. Italian names, also, begin to crop up in the French harvest: Messire Othe Tusque, des parties d’Italie, Messire Jehan Visconti, escuier, Messire Aloyset de Plaisance, also Luquin Rusque, Francesquin Martin demourant à Pavey, Hannibal Lommelin of Genoa and his troop, others from as far as Florence and Venice. Then a great name, commander of many others, a name that means business: Messire Facin Can and his company.
The red towers of Asti—still here and there existing, a bouquet of wine-red stems slenderly streaking the pale and radiant Lombard sky—the red towers of Asti, innumerable then, grew home-like and familiar to many a French lord. No dreary exile this—large houses, wine-red also (“non hanno acqua ma vino per impetrargli,“ laugh the men of Alba), beautiful churches, a rich plain, streaked with the wide Tanaro, and girt with hills. At night, the Alps come out, invisible by day; they appear at sundown even as a rose-red heavenly wall divinely dividing the Lombard country from the unseen land of France.
Yet here are the French and quite at home. Plenty of wine, red and white; beautiful women; plenty of money. Orleans pays fifteen francs a month to every man-at-arms (but a man-at-arms, we must remember, is more than a man, being at least the soldier himself, his page and his varlet), eight francs a month to every archer; two hundred francs a month to Chassenage and the chamberlains; four hundred and fifty to Enguerrand de Coucy. All this serves at least to bring wealth and custom to Puielhez, mine host of the Cross of Asti, who supplies the wine. But for what other purpose does Orleans thus dissipate his new-got treasure? The “Dance of Fools,” sculptured on a wall in the market place, by some gay ironic band not long dead then, looks down with silent bells and silent laughing lips that answer not.
In August, Orleans sends one of his men (Blaru), on a secret embassy to his father-in-law at Milan, another (Craon) to the Antipope Clement.22 They have scarcely gone when he sends another (Garancières) to Pavia. In February of the next year (1390) there is much prate at Court of a voyage to Italy—voyage being then the polite name for an invasion—in order to establish Pope Clement in his see of Rome.
And now, little by little, the great plan disengages itself—audacious, simple, as befits the brain of Visconti. Orleans and Burgundy themselves start for Pavia, and arrive there in March, 1391. Brilliant Visconti, to have persuaded Burgundy that the expansion of Orleans in Italy will leave him free to extend his grasp at home! Great things also, as we know from a passage in Walsingham,23 are vaguely held out to Burgundy. As for Orleans, there are no bounds to his ardour; he defrays the entire expense of the journey, 60,000 francs, lavished magnificently to astound his new ally and his subjects of Asti. The Royal Dukes remain but a week in Lombardy, and then return—recalled by rumours of Armagnac’s disturbance. But the week was long enough.
The first step of the affair was to persuade Giangaleazzo Visconti to give in his adherence to the Antipope Clement. The Lord of Milan was still in name an Urbanite; but he had suffered the Antipope Clement to arrange the marriage of his daughter and to grant the dispensation that made it lawful; and his wife Caterina was a devoted Clementine. Visconti gives it to be understood that he will fight for Clement if it be made worth his while. Meanwhile the king takes fire:—honest, practical, religious, the idea of thus forcibly putting an end to heresy and schism greatly commends itself to him. There were three Royal visits to Avignon that year. The Antipope suggests to Charles VI. an Imperial Crown for a second Charlemagne.24 Froissart hears of the royal intention, “de mener notre Saint Père à Rome,“ and on the 23rd of February, 1391, the King signs a quittance of 2,000 francs, “pour nous aider à abiller et mestre est estat pour aller en la compagnie d’icelui seigneur au voyage qu’il a intencion de faire au païs de Lombardie.”
But nothing can be done without the indispensable Visconti. What is his plan? At first he holds back, loving by nature the attitude of suspense. But in 1392 the moment came to decide. Armagnac at that moment was invading Italy in defence of the rights of his sister Beatrice and the elder branch of Visconti. He suffered defeat, indeed, and death at the hands of Milan, but not before he had inflicted so severe a check upon his victor that Giangaleazzo no longer saw his triumph clear. Nay, unwelcome as the ghost of Banquo at the board of Macbeth, the pale figures of the dead Armagnac, the once laughing Beatrice, the poisoned Bernabò, intrude themselves between him and his end. Do not such sights as these clamour for revenge?—and Armagnac and Beatrice have a living brother; Bernabò Visconti has left a troop of sons. Milan may yet be snatched from his grasp. He is not safe in Lombardy, and he would fain be King of Italy. But how to obtain that crown? Already Armagnac has forced him to restore Padua to the Carraresi. And Florence, the irreconcileable enemy, is grouping round her a league of hostile states. In August, 1392, Florence, Padua, Faenza, Ravenna—a little later the Malatestas and Forli—are united against Visconti. He is not safe in Milan till he wear the crown of Florence too.
Then he sends to the Pope and to the King of France and announces his plan. How did the Lord of Milan hear of the secret Adrian project? Did Anjou, passing through Pavia, drop a word? Did one of the many Angevines sheltered in the house of Orleans, familiar with Asti and Milan, broach the plan? We know not, but this was the scheme of Visconti: Naples for Anjou; Rome for the Frenchman Clement VII.; Adria, that is to say the centre of Italy from Spoleto to Ferrara, and from Massa to Ancona, Adria for Orleans, the North for Visconti. That is to say, Italy for the father of Valentine and his allies.25 As Walsingham tells us Visconti secured for himself the double crown of Tuscany and Lombardy. But in the very moment when the reluctant Pope (less hasty and less egoistic now than at Sperlonga), had promised thus to alienate the Church lands as the price of his restoration, a Divine Hand, as it must have seemed, interposed to save the Church. On the 28th of August, 1394, Pope and Cardinals had approved the Schedule of Orleans. A fortnight later, on the 16th of September, suddenly, Clement VII. died at Avignon.
His successor was less able; and the scheme of Adria was abandoned. Valentine would never reign as Queen of Adria. Yet, as Duchess of Genoa, she would be nearer home. Then in all manner of subtle and secret ways Orleans and Visconti immediately manœuvred to secure the Ligurian province. Armies in the field, diplomats in the Cabinet, worked for one end alone. In November, 1394, Savona had submitted to Orleans. Now Genoa must be gained. The young Duke had already a strong faction in his favour. The Lomellini, Spinole, Flischi, figure in the rolls of Orleans’ army.28 But, at the same time, they were intriguing with an unsuspected enemy.29 In August, 1395, the Doge of Genoa sent to Paris offering to Charles himself the suzerainty of Genoa. There was in France a strong current of popular opinion running in favour of Italian colonization. Why should Orleans have Genoa?—asked the people. Why not the King? Why not all of us? Why not France? The King, as we know, was never a very solid creature. Honest, but feeble, he let himself be dominated by the nearest influence. The Duke of Burgundy was in Paris, and he, it is probable, persuaded Charles26 to abandon his brother and to accept the gift of the Doge. In October, Genoa was united to the Crown of France. In December the King bought from Orleans his rights in Savona and Genoa.27 This was checkmate both to Orleans and Visconti.
Burgundy and the Queen were triumphant. The Queen wrote to the Florentines that affairs were going well, that her enemy and theirs was fallen in disgrace, and on the 29th December the King joined the Florentines against his late ally. For there was now great irritation in France against Visconti, who, furious at the treachery which had outwitted his plans for Genoa, played a double game with France. Signing with one hand a fraternal alliance with King Charles,30 with the other he stirred up the Genoese to rebel against his yoke. But the Genoese suspected his counsels, and revealed the whole intrigue to the Court of Paris. Hence fury among the nobles, an ardent desire to punish the false friend.31 Hence among the populace the best will in the world to believe the Duke of Milan a wizard and his daughter a witch, an infernal spirit bringing death and madness upon the beloved King.
IX
Thus the machinations of Milan served to exasperate the French. And the indignity and insult offered to Valentine were as great a cause of irritation to Visconti. He and his daughter, with their Lombard indifference to superstition, could have nothing but contempt for the panic of the French. “Et l’une des plus dolentes et courroucées qui y fust, c’estoit la Duchesse d’Orleans,“ writes Juvenal des Ursins. Twice or thrice the Duke of Milan sent his ambassadors to the King of France, offering to find a knight to fight at outrance with any man who would accuse Madame Valentine of any treason. So sore and angry were the father and the brother-in-law of Valentine that there was a talk of a Milanese invasion. Great counter preparations were made in France, and the League was signed with the Florentines against Milan. The King, being in good health then, went to Boulogne to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Isabel, a child of seven, with Richard II. of England, a man some years older than himself. Richard was very bitter against Milan. He offered to send an English contingent to the King’s aid, if he invaded Lombardy. He warned the King again and again against the spells and sorceries of Lombardy; and he produced so strong an impression upon the enfeebled mind of Charles, that on the 29th of October, as the two kings were sitting together at dinner, the King of France perceiving among the heralds one with the Serpent of Milan on his shield, had him stripped of his arms, menaced with death, and chased out of the royal presence. The Duke of Milan retaliated with the famous Investiture of 1396, which excludes the children of Valentine of Orleans from the succession to Milan. With things at this pitch of hostility, war seemed imminent, and the route was made out for the invasion of Lombardy. But that war never took place. “And that journey,” says Froissart, “took none effect; for the discomfiture of the battle before Nicopoly in Turkey, and the death and the taking of the Lords of France. And also they saw well that the Duke of Milan was in favour with the Great Turk, Lamorabaquy; wherefore they durst not displease him, so let him alone.” It became immediately necessary to make peace with Milan,32 the one power in Europe that could mediate with Turkey. The ambassadors of the King, Burgundy, Orleans, and the Sultan, caused a continual come-and-go in Milan. Visconti took his position of peace-maker in good part. In March, 1397, he procured a third and less hostile investiture. The talk of magic was hushed for a while, and Valentine returned in peace to Court.
Yet now, perhaps, for the first time the French people, not unjustifiably, might have heaped their odium on Valentine. For her latest historian supports a theory suggested long ago by Froissart.35 While the French were projecting their invasion of Lombardy—while the son of that Burgundy who had advised the King in the affair of Genoa was leading against the Turks a French Crusade which might easily return homewards viâ Lombardy and Milan—Giangaleazzo, furious and humiliated, sought any means of salvation and revenge. He, like many another Italian, was in correspondence with the Turk; and an idea, successfully practised by many another Italian,34 may not unnaturally have suggested itself to him. If France joined the Florentine League then adieu for ever to the hopes of Visconti. And Burgundy, as he knew, was in favour of Florence. And the son of Burgundy was captain of the French army. Small hope here; yet, if the French army could be destroyed in Turkey, Milan would be safe! Then the astute Visconti would smile to think of his daughter in France. Valentine who wrote him everything—also told him doubtless (as the author of Maistre Jehan de Meun tells us33) of the vain young aristocrats, ruined by free living and fine carousing, who were starting on that terrible journey, thinking of nothing more serious than the elegant spectacle of their departure:
“Mais que le partir soit joly
Vous ne regardez point la fin!”
Gay young gallants, unfit for privation, who, when they reach Palestine, will be too weak to strike three strokes with the magnificent swords so much too heavy for their hands.
“Les Sarrazins s’arment légier;
Sy c’est bon courage et fier.”
But the panoply of these splendid youths—these gens de paraige—was for decoration rather than for battle. Valentine, the confidant of her father—who in the long afternoons of exile would turn with the expansion of relief to her one kinsman, her staunch protector—would tell him of the weakness that underlay the glory of this martial going-off. She would write to him the plan of campaign, the route decided on, the means of attack and defence. She would inform him not only of the quality but of the number of the army. And Giangaleazzo was aware that these details transmitted to the Turks would ensure the disaster of the French, and draw away the gathering storm that threatened to break on Milan.
The Duke of Milan was not scrupulous; he was “moult bien” in the friendship of the Turk. The Turk gained a singular acquaintance with the disposition of the French army. No need to dwell here on the terrible disaster of that unforgotten battle: the twelve to twenty thousand dead; the rare fugitives stealing homewards, dukes and barons, in the dress of beggar-men; the harder lot of those taken by the Turks, sold into slavery, or massacred in vengeance for the Faithful slain at Christian hands; of the heartsick waiting of the few—a very few, of the richest and noblest—set aside for ransom. One of these, Jacques de Heilly, was sent by the Sultan on parole to France, to inform the King of the disaster and to bring back the news of their intentions with respect to ransom. He was bidden to pass by Milan36 in order to convey to Giangaleazzo Visconti the salutations of the Sultan. On Christmas night he arrived in Paris; the Court were feasting and dancing. In the prison of the Châtelet, hungry and cold, there were men who spent their Christmas in a dungeon for having spread false news, as it was said, of a great defeat in Turkey. But the tale of D’Heilly told, all that was changed: the prisoners were freed, the Court was in tears. The bells rang in all the churches for the dead. The universal thought was how to redeem the flower of France from a savage captivity. On the 20th of January, 1397, a French embassy was sent to Milan. A few days earlier Jacques de Heilly, laden with propitiatory gifts, had returned to the Sultan. Nothing was spoken of but mediation and reconciliation. And Valentine—so long the innocent scapegoat of her party—was recalled to favour in the very hour when all men might have suspected her as the involuntary origin of misery.
X
Actual war with Milan was averted; but the rumours against the King’s brother continued still in France.
On the 24th of March, 1403, Ives Gilemme, a priest; Demoiselle Marie de Blansy, Perrin Hémery, a locksmith, and Guillaume Floret, a clerk, were publicly burned for sorcery. And still the King was mad. Were those who bewitched him, the head of the State, to keep their immunity? There was such a crime as witchcraft, and people legally suffered for it. The King was bewitched: who was the wizard?
To this incessant question Burgundy ever helped to point the answer. Who was the person who profited most by the sickness of the King?
The Duke of Orleans had become very powerful. In January, 1393, an ordonnance had promised him the Regency in case of the death of the King.37 His prestige, his wealth, his faction increased with every year. This young man who, in 1385, possessed no more than 12,000 livres a year, was Duke of Orleans (1391), Count of Valois and Count of Beaumont (1386), Count of Asti and Count of Vertus (1387), Count of Soissons (1391), Count of Blois (1391), Count of Dreux, Count of Angoulême (1394). In 1394 he was very nearly King of Adria. He was Count of Perigord in 1398. He was Seigneur of Savona (1394), Seigneur of Coucy (1391); he possessed both lands and castles in Hainault, at Pierrefonds, and at Ferté-Millon (1392). The Duchy of Luxembourg (1402), the Duchy of Aquitaine (1407) lay immediately before him.
The princes of Europe appealed to the Duke of Orleans as to an independent sovereign. The Duke of Guelders concluded a separate alliance with him (1401). The King of the Romans offered him for his son the heiress of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland (1397). Henry of Lancaster, an exile in Paris (1399), paid more court to him than to the King of France. And in 1405 the Venetians sent two secret ambassadors to Orleans, who in return despatched a certain Pierre de Scrovignes with private despatches to the Signory of Venice. Since 1401 the Venetians had never sent a message to the King. Burgundy began to fear that Orleans would induce the new Antipope at Avignon to depose Charles VI. in his own favour.
There is, I think, no evidence of such an intention, and yet the suspicions of Burgundy may not impossibly have been correct. In 1400 the Germans deposed their drunken Wenzel, in 1398 the English had deposed their incapable Richard. Why should not France depose a king continually lapsing into madness? In the year 1399 the king had six relapses. Orleans may have been no less ambitious than his sworn friend and brother, Henry of Lancaster, who had so lately conquered for himself the throne of England.
Orleans and Burgundy turn by turn usurped the direction of affairs. Vainly King and Queen and Court attempted to assuage their rivalry. On the 14th of June, 1401, the Queen of France (the King being mad), the King of Sicily, the Dukes of Berri and Bourbon, made a League “pour apaiser les Ducs d’Orlèans et de Bourgogne.”38 In vain. The King himself was powerless, and could only bid his subjects—as in 1405 he bade the Bailly de Caux—to stand aside and take no part nor lot in the discord existing between the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy.39 This impartiality was only apparent. The growing influence of Burgundy was dreaded by Berri and the Queen, no less than by Orleans himself. And in the winter of 1405, these three persons joined themselves together in an “Alliance défensive et réciproque, pour se maintenir au pouvoir.”40 Thus, if Burgundy had the nation on his side, the authority of the Queen, the influence of Valentine (all-powerful with the King), was with Orleans. In 1404 Philip of Burgundy died, and his faction gained new vigour with the accession of his son, a man less temperate, less aristocratic than his father. The blood of his Flemish mother worked in the veins of the young man, restless, violent, demagogic as a burgher of Ghent. The young Duke of Burgundy had no woman to work for him; it was even rumoured that the portrait of his own wife hung in that locked chamber where Orleans kept the pictures of his mistresses. But Jean-sans-Peur did not need any feminine advocate. He was young, he was rich. In 1404 his father’s death bequeathed him Burgundy, next year his mother died and left him Flanders. A small ugly man, alert, blunt, brutal even, serving public interests to reach his own ends, Jean-sans-Peur of Burgundy was the hero of the people. “Brun et barbu et bien aimé,“ writes Burcarius.
Meanwhile the people groaned under the tyranny of Orleans. Jugum intollerabile plebis. And Orleans, sceptical and embittered, had no respect and no pity for the ignorant populace that reviled him, that menaced his virtuous wife, that mocked the death of his little child with cruel and insulting calumnies. The people to him were odious, or, at best, indifferent; a cup to drain, a fruit to squeeze and throw away the rind. In 1403 he laid upon them an impost of three hundred thousand crowns. Out of this he builded for himself two famous castles, Pierrefonds and Ferté-Millon, beautiful as the towers of heaven in a picture by Van Eyck.
In 1407, not content, he levied a new tax. The money thus gained enriched the State far less than him, and great personages accused him and the Queen of leaving no single florin to rattle in the empty treasury. When Orleans suggested the new impost, Jean-sans-Peur opposed him in the royal council: “I ask pity of the poor people. It is tyranny to aggravate their intolerable yoke.” Jean-sans-Peur declared that, in his domains at least, the impost should not be collected; rather would he forfeit the entire amount himself. Struck by this generosity, the young Duke of Brittany volunteered to postpone his wife’s dowry until the treasury was full again.
The tax was levied all the same. It was a war levy, and really necessary. Every man and woman in France was mulcted according to the value of his goods. In this way a vast sum was raised—twenty-seven millions. It was lodged in a tower of the Louvre. One night, when the town was quiet, Orleans, with a band of armed men, entered this tower and carried off at least two-thirds of the treasure.
When the people heard of it—the people who (the Monk assures us) had sold the straw of their beds to pay the levy—they prayed publicly in every town and hamlet: “Jesus Christ in heaven, send thou some one to deliver us from Orleans!”
Orleans smiled no less bitterly than when he had heard the public whisper accuse him of sorcery and devil-worship. He proclaimed that whosoever did not pay the taxes should be cast into prison; to prevent assassination, no man was to carry another knife than he used for his eating; a fourth of the provisions of the royal household was to be supplied daily, without payment, by the people of Paris. These provisions, as the people knew very well, did not go to feed or clothe their beloved King. He, in his palace, was as poor, as suffering as themselves. The Dauphin was no richer: “in penury and want,” says the Monk, “if such words may be used for so great a personage.” The insatiable Orleans, the avid little Queen, grasped and kept everything. “Jesus Christ in heaven,” prayed the people, “send some one to deliver us from the Duke of Orleans.”
Orleans should have listened. The air was full of warnings to tyrants. Richard and Wenzel had fallen miserably. The Duke of Milan had died of the plague; in six months his vast kingdom had fallen into ruins. Tyranny is, so often, a personal accident—a possession, not an inheritance. Was it worth while? The King himself added to the list of these monitions. In August, 1404, he married his eldest son to Burgundy’s daughter, his daughter to the son of Burgundy.
In the year 1405, on Ascension Day, the people found a voice. An Augustine monk, Jacques Legrand, preached then before the Court. The Queen, Valentine, and Orleans were present, but not the King. “O Queen! O Duke!” said the monk, “you are the curse and derision of your people. Do you not believe me? Go into the streets and hear them!
“Tua curia, Domina Venus solium occupans, thy court, O Queen! where Lady Venus fills the throne, thy Court, by day and night, is the scene of debauch and drunkenness. Dissolute dances do honour to the goddess. Frequent bathing enervates your bodies. Fringes to your sleeves, and long sleeves to your garments; yet are ye clothed upon with the sighs and tears of the poorest of your people. Your hearts are corrupt and your minds are all unmoved: Domina Venus solium occupat.”
There was a flutter of indignation in the Court. The monk’s sermon was reported to the King, but to the surprise of all, Charles answered that he was glad of it. On Whit-Sunday Legrand was commanded to preach again, and in the royal presence. The monk repeated his sermon, but with larger reference to a certain noble duke, “once good and dear, but hated now for his oppression and his vice.” The King left his chair and sat down face to face with the monk, listening earnestly, who can tell with what cruel suspicions, what resolutions for inquiry and reform, in his dim and altered mind. When the sermon was over, the King spoke to Legrand for some moments. He thanked him earnestly.
Charles was deeply impressed with the words of the Augustine friar. Struggling against continual relapses, he made a brave effort to do the best he could for his disordered kingdom. When Orleans asked for the government of Normandy, for the first time he was refused. Another day the poor King called the Dauphin to him. “How long, my lad, is it since your mother kissed you?”
“Three months,” the boy replied.
The King was much affected. His children were evidently pinched, neglected, uncared for. He called the boy’s nurse to him, and gave her a gold cup. “Look after my son when I am ill. If God grant me life I will reward you later.”
This was in July, 1405. Burgundy was absent on his own estates. The King wrote to him and implored him to return to Paris.
Orleans and the Queen were at St. Germains. They paid no heed to any warning. On the 13th of July there was a fearful storm; torrents of rain, eddies of wind. The Queen and Orleans were riding in the forest when they were overtaken by the tempest. The Duke took refuge in the Queen’s litter, but the frightened horses nearly drowned them in the Seine. The people declared that it was the judgment of heaven upon tyrants, and Orleans himself appeared impressed. He sent a herald to Paris, and proclaimed that whosoever of his creditors should come on Sunday next to the Hôtel de Behaigne should have his debt discharged in full. On Sunday the halls and anterooms of the ducal palace were crowded with eager burghers. Many, tired and anxious, had travelled from the provinces. The Duke’s stewards laughed in their face and shut the doors. This was the final touch to the exasperation of the people.
All this while Jean-sans-Peur was travelling to Paris. He came at the head of six thousand men-at-arms. The King was mad again, and could not support him; but none the less the Queen and Orleans feared an insurrection in Burgundy’s favour. They decided to flee secretly away into Luxembourg with the royal children. Valentine was with them; and they had got as far as Pouilly when the troops of Burgundy suddenly surrounded the litter of the Dauphin, some hours’ journey to the rear. The boy was delighted; he embraced his father-in-law, and was carried in triumph back to Paris. Isabel, with Valentine and Orleans, fled to the Castle of Melun. Civil war seemed eminent; but when the two armies were actually in the field, peace was arranged, and on the 15th of October the Queen and Orleans re-entered Paris.
Orleans had learned nothing by his lesson. He was more than ever arrogant, more than ever secure in his tyranny. Early in the next year his young son Charles was married to the King’s daughter Isabel, the widowed Queen of England, a girl of sixteen. In the first months of 1407 the King gave his brother the rich duchy of Aquitaine. Orleans began to think again of the governorship of Normandy. He was richer and stronger than the King.
And yet, if Valentine, if Orleans, had really read the future as the people thought they did, or had they even cared to read the present, they might well have paused. In that age the fate of tyrants was not prosperous. The King of England was a leper. The King of France was mad. The little Duke of Milan was mad also, with a furious Italian hemomania. The King of Scotland was a prisoner in the hands of his enemies. There were two Popes, things for scorn and laughter, held in derision of all nations, and a song to the people all day long.
Already, in 1380, Miles de Dormans, Chancellor of France, had declared “A government has no force save in the obedience of the people, for kings only rule by the suffrage of their subjects: Nam et si centies negent, reges regnant suffragio populorum.”
The judgment of heaven, the liberties of man, seemed to conspire alike against the rule of tyrants.
XI
Notwithstanding his deceptions in the affair of Genoa, and in spite of his supremacy in France, Orleans still cherished designs on Lombardy; and perhaps the chief cause why his Italian enterprises are less noticeable in the fifteenth than in the seventeenth century is due, not so much to his engrossment with affairs at home, as to the fact that in Benedict XIII. he found an ally infinitely less subtle and less brilliant than he had known in Clement VII. Benedict was little more than a captive in the hands of Orleans;41 Clement had been an accomplice.
A greater than Clement failed him a little later. In the autumn of 1402, in the very flush and zenith of victory, Giangaleazzo Visconti died. A score of his captains soon were fighting for his kingdom. That vast territory, whose coherence existed only in the brain of one man, fell rapidly into fragments: city after city threw off the unwilling yoke of union, and what had almost begun to be a national Italy reverted in a few weeks to the old conditions of fragmentary independence. His two sons ruled in a narrowed Lombardy, and with no vista, as it seemed, on the ambitions of their father. In the very same year that the great Visconti died, Charles VI. sent to Genoa a small, restless, quixotic man of much ability, who to some extent filled the empty place of the dead Giangaleazzo. But if Marshal Boucicaut had much of the ambition, and all the audacity of the late Duke of Milan, he possessed nothing of his slow wise mind, of the deep and subtle duplicity that Machiavelli may have envied, or of the powers of combination, the cool tenacity to a grand idea, which foreshadowed the genius of another North Italian, Count Cavour. Moreover, while such share as Visconti meant to allow the French in Italy was destined by him for his son-in-law of Orleans, Boucicaut worked for the King. Thus, for the second time in his experience, the Frenchman found his greatest rival in France.
Of the two legitimate sons of the great Duke of Milan—one was a handsome young Nero, blood-mad, inept, given over to passion and cruelty; the other an astute child, timid, unscrupulous, who later should develop a trace of the genius of his father. At first their hold on their inheritance was so slight that Orleans determined on invading Lombardy, whether to defend or to supplant his nephews, who shall say? In October, 1403, he started for Lombardy, accompanied by 13 knights-banneret, 43 knights, 212 squires, 28 archers, 20 crossbow-men, and other soldiers.43 On the way south he passed by Beaucaire, and had an interview with his charge, the Antipope Benedict. He took into his service the famous captain of adventure, Bernardon de Serres. He made friends with another mighty captain—an ancient enemy—the Count of Armagnac.42 Vast and serious appeared his project of invasion, but, on the very verge of the Alps, suddenly, on January, 1404, he abandoned the prosperous enterprise, turned right about, and faced home for Paris.
What is the meaning of this sudden change of course, unexplained, and perhaps inexplicable? What was the object of the Lombard invasion? What was the cause which so unexpectedly suppressed it? Orleans believed himself to have a certain claim on Pisa, bequeathed by the great Visconti to his bastard son Gabriello-Maria. Gabriello Visconti was ill at ease in Pisa. A little later, in 1404, as we know, he offered his unruly city first to France, then to Florence. It is possible—it is even from the nature of things a necessary hypothesis—to suppose that in 1403 Gabriello had come to terms with Orleans, and that the rights on Pisa which Orleans vaunted as his own through Valentine Visconti were supported by some cession of the actual lord, her half-brother. But Orleans was not the only Frenchman capable of adventure and practice in Italy. By the time his army reached the frontier he found himself outwitted by a higher bidder, nearer at hand.
Jehan le Meingre, Marshal Boucicaut, Governor of Genoa, had intrigued with Gabriello and procured the city of Pisa for the King. A few months later, on the 15th of April, 1404,44 a deed was drawn up declaring Pisa henceforth a fief of France.
At the first word of the matter Orleans had turned his back on his contemplated campaign and marched back to Paris, fury in his heart. Probably behind the interference of Boucicaut he divined the inspiration of Burgundy, his enemy;—Burgundy who, as events should prove, had unsuspected designs of his own upon the State of Pisa. Back in wrath marched Orleans: stalked indignant into Paris his men at his heels: found the King in his senses, and docile as was his wont. From him, on the 24th of May, Orleans extracted the deed which we append,45 a deed that repudiates the action of Boucicaut, and transfers all the rights of France in Pisa to Orleans, who henceforth shall meet with neither let nor hindrance in his projects.
The deed was granted in Council, the King being then in his senses, and assisted by Berri, Bourbon, Tancarville, and others. The reader will remark the noteworthy absence of Burgundy. He will remember also that Berry, in 1405, will join Orleans in a defensive league against Jean-sans-Peur. It is possible that Burgundy knew nothing of the deed drawn up behind his back.
But it was too late for Orleans to profit by the King’s good-will. The Florentines were in Pisa, and an invasion against so powerful an enemy could not be undertaken.
For a moment Orleans was obliged to pause in his Italian policy—to pause only, not to abandon it, since in 140648 he still reclaimed authority on Pisa, and in the very year of his death was taking an active part in the affairs of Lombardy.47 That pause was filled in a manner disastrous, fatal, yet natural enough in a man suffocating under a sense of bitter indignation and revolt. Burgundy had interfered with Orleans abroad. Very well; Orleans would interfere with Burgundy at home. Already the first steps were taken. In 1401, Orleans had married his cousin Mary Harcourt to the Duke of Gueldres, the enemy and the neighbour of Burgundy, with whom his rival now concluded an alliance and a league. In 1402, Orleans purchased from the King of the Romans the Duchy of Luxembourg. In 1405,46 he assembled at Melun the entire strength of his faction, sending even to Asti for the Governor and his men. In 1405 also he allied himself with Berri and the Queen against Jean-sans-Peur. With the Court on one hand, and on the other Gueldres, the most reckless captain of his age;—with an army at his heels, and (through the county of Soissons, and down the banks of the Oise and the Marne), an uninterrupted passage through his own possessions into his new Duchy of Luxembourg: Orleans was a deadly enemy to Burgundy. A glance at the map will show the reader how, like a wedge or like a rivet, Luxembourg must split apart or hold together the domains of the Netherlands and the provinces of Franche Comté and Burgundy. In the hands of Orleans, Luxembourg was a wedge; and the domains of Burgundy were no longer a compact and formidable territory, but two principalities with Brussels for the capital of the one, and Dijon for the capital of the other. Should Orleans march an army into Luxembourg, should Gueldres come to his aid with an armed force, the suppression of the Dukedom of Burgundy would fall within the range of practical politics.
Henceforth, between these two princes the struggle for power should take on a new character and become the very struggle for existence. And while the people, abject, all in tears, prayed to Heaven: “Jesu Christ, send thou some man to deliver us from Orleans,” the hero of the people, Jean-sans-Peur the Belovèd, was urged by every motive of self-interest, every instinct of self-preservation, and with the assurance of popular immunity, to interrupt for ever the fatal progress of the tyrant.
XII
One Wednesday evening—it was St. Clement’s day, the 23rd of November, 1407—Orleans was supping with the Queen. Isabel was ill and dispirited. Ten days ago her new-born baby had died at its birth, and she sorrowed for this child and loved it as she had never loved her other children. Isabel was away from her husband in her new Hôtel de Montaigu, near the Porte Barbette. It was here that Orleans came every day to see her, and here they “supped right joyously together,” says the Monk of St. Denis. Orleans had been ill all autumn at his Castle of Beauté, and had only recently come back to Paris. Valentine, with her four children and the Princess Isabel, was still in the country.
As these two persons, both ill, both weary, forgot their troubles for a while in each other’s company, a page came to the door with a feigned message: the King earnestly beseeched his brother to come and see him at the palace of St. Paul. Orleans arose at once and left the Queen. He had at least six hundred men of his own lodged that day in Paris, as Monstrelet informs us. Orleans, however, took none of them with him. He leapt on his mule and rode away with two squires on horseback at his side. Two or three footmen with torches ran after him. No gentleman could go more simply than the King’s brother in his plain suit of black damask, riding with no more than five attendants, quickly and gaily down the frosty street. It was the coldest winter ever known, and muffled in their cloaks the little party rode briskly ahead, looking neither to the right or left. Orleans was singing softly to himself and playing with one of his gloves. He feared no enemies. Last Sunday he had taken the Sacrament with Burgundy, and yesterday they two had dined together.
It was eight o’clock. All was dark and silent in the Rue Vieille du Temple, then an outlying and quiet district. Orleans and his two squires rode along so fast that the runners with the torches were left some way behind. At last they came to a wider place in the street where there was a well. As the three horsemen passed the Hôtel de l’Image de Notre-Dame, seventeen or eighteen men sprang suddenly out of the shadow of the house. One with an axe chopped off the bridle hand of Orleans. The King’s brother gave a cry of surprise and pain. “I am the Duke of Orleans!” “It is he we seek.”
In another moment the Duke was beaten off his mule on to the frozen paving-stones. Seventeen axes were aimed at him; blow after blow fell heavily; his head was cloven, his brains gushed out into the street. His servants had all fled and left him there, save one of his squires who had been his page (a German, says Monstrelet; a Fleming, says the Monk), who, more constant than Orleans’ compatriots, flung himself upon the body of his master, and was pierced and slaughtered there. When both were murdered the assassins dragged the body of Orleans across the street, propped it up against a heap of mud that was standing frozen there, and lighting a torch of straw, they looked to see if he were really dead. A woman, a cobbler’s wife, looking from a garret window, saw it all, and set up a shriek of “Murder, murder!” “Peace, harlot,” cried the armed men in the street, and began to shoot their arrows at the open casement. At that moment a man with a scarlet hood drawn well over his face, came out of the house opposite, and struck the dead body with his club. “Put out the light. He’s dead. Let us go.” The eighteen assassins rode away in great merriment, sowing caltrops after them; but before they left they set fire to the house where, for the last fortnight, Jean-sans-Peur had kept them hidden. The flames of the burning Hôtel de l’Image streamed up through the darkness of the night, awakening the city, and shedding a strange light on the murdered body of Orleans, still propped up in a sitting posture, his wounded head hanging on one side. Just then a nephew of Maréchal de Rieulx, whose great Hôtel stood opposite, a young man, one of Orleans’ squires, rode up as he left his uncle’s house, and saw his master sitting thus dead, the left hand off, the right arm hanging by a thread. A little distance off, on the stones of the street, lay the page, dying in his faithful youth, murmuring still in his German language, “Ach, my master!” At his side, on the ground, was a white hand severed from the wrist. Close by there lay a fallen glove. The young squire gave the alarm and the dead bodies were carried into the Hôtel de Rieulx.
There was wailing and mourning in the house of Orleans, grief and horror in the house of the King. The deed was soon known, though as yet it was only surmised that one Raoul d’Actonville, a dismissed steward, had wreaked in this ghastly fashion his spite against his master. The next day the royal princes, all in black, with a great multitude of the people of Paris, brought the murdered Duke to the church of St. Guillaume, close at hand. He who had ever loved the good through all his wickedness, lay now among the watching friars, who sang psalms and repeated vigils day and night for his soul; there he lay until they took him to be buried in his own chapel of the Celestines, which is called the Blancs-Manteaux to-day. The people followed him with torches, remembering only his gay and gracious qualities, his capricious generosity, his gentle raillery, his rhetoric and eloquence, how he had loved learning, and that he had often lived as a monk for days among the Celestines. All Paris wept, those also who had prayed Jesus Christ in heaven to deliver them from Orleans; even Burgundy went in the funeral procession, all in black, weeping also. But when the funeral was over Jean-sans-Peur took Berri and the King of Sicily aside: “I had it done. I slew him. It was an inspiration of the demon’s.”
XIII
There were two women, who were not at the burial, to whom the death of Orleans came nearer than to any mourner there. When Isabel heard that Orleans was slain she went in terror of her life. Ill as she was, she had herself carried in a litter to St. Paul’s, taking shelter there in the arms of her mad husband, and so soon as she was fit for travel the poor, light, beautiful, little Queen went out of Paris, far away from Burgundy, far, too, from that maimed and slaughtered body lying in the chapel of the Celestines. Terrified, indifferent, she could think of nothing but her own imaginary danger.
The mistress and the wife took the matter in a very different spirit. At first, in her transports of sorrow, Valentine could not act. She tore out her hair and shred her garments; she sobbed so much, that for weeks afterwards her voice was hoarse. But when the first paroxysm was over her strong Italian character centred itself upon one fixed idea—justice, vengeance for her murdered husband. Valentine had no thought of her own safety. She sent her two elder sons and her girl into Blois, and then, with the Princess Isabel and little John, her youngest child, on either hand, the Duchess of Orleans set out from Château-Thierry for Paris.
Travelling was slow that terrible winter. It was not till the 10th of December that Valentine entered the capital. She, her children, her servants, were all dressed very plainly and roughly, and, of course, in black. The King of Sicily and the Duke of Berri came out to meet them. When they reached the palace Valentine threw herself upon her knees before the King, demanding justice. The poor Charles (azzez subtil pour lors) raised her up and kissed her, while they both wept together. He promised strict justice upon Burgundy. Again, ten days later, he declared, “What is done to my only brother is done to me.” Valentine and her children, satisfied of vengeance, retired to their great hotel in the Marais.
The King fell ill again so soon as Valentine had left him. “They say,... but I affirm nothing,” suggests the Monk. Valentine the witch stayed on, however, among the people who had murdered her husband. One thing that we learn of Valentine at this moment shows us how profound, how selfless was her love of Orleans. She sought out his bastard—the little John, afterwards Count of Dunois, the son of Mariette de Canny—and brought him up with her own children. It even seemed as though she loved him more than the others. Glancing from the poetic Charles, the delicate Philip, the child John, to his determined and eager little face, she exclaimed, “None of your brothers is more fit than you to avenge your father. Nature has cheated me of you!”
To avenge your father! This had become the unique preoccupation of Valentine. But that promised vengeance tarried long. On the 8th of March a learned doctor of theology, the chosen advocate of Burgundy, a certain Maître Jean Petit, excused the murder of Orleans before the King. “Il est licite d’occire un Tyran.”
It was not only of tyranny that the Burgundians accused their victim. The tremendous accusation of Jean Petit (which every student of the past has read in Monstrelet) enumerates attempted regicide, and secret poisoning, sorcery, necromancy, charms, incantations. “Sorcery, high treason against God, and regicide, high treason against the King. There is also tyranny,” says Maître Jean Petit. It was of course for this third cause, treason against the people, that Orleans’ murder was condoned in Paris.
For the people never hid their support of Jean-sans-Peur. Those who had wept at the funeral of Orleans were ready now to cry again the cry of Burgundy. The King, whose mind was again overcast, although he was not actually mad, the King himself on the 9th of April, 1408, signed letters patent granting pardon to Jean-sans-Peur. “Our very dear and well-beloved cousin of Burgundy, who for the public good and out of faith and loyalty to us, has caused to be put out of this world our said brother of Orleans.” This was the last insult to his memory. Valentine would not brook it; she rallied to the charge. Though she herself had been seriously implicated in the tissue of villainy which his murderers had woven about the memory of her husband, Valentine had no thoughts to spare for her own safety. All through July and August she kept agitating against Burgundy. Bringing her children with her she sought the King and cried on her knees for justice. Twenty years’ exile for Burgundy! Her two advocates, Sérisi and Cousinet pleaded eloquently for her; refuting the vile accusations of poison and sorcery with a candour, a logic, a fine and modern spirit worthy of the intellect of the dead man they defended. It was all no use. “The Parisians,” says Monstrelet, “loved so well this Duke of Burgundy; because they believed that if he undertook the government, he would put down throughout the kingdom all salt taxes, imposts, dues, and subsidies which were to the prejudice of the people.” Though nearly all the royal Princes were openly on the side of Valentine, the King did not dare avenge his brother. The Court was impotent against the people.
In the early autumn Valentine left Paris. Life was over for her. “Rien ne m’est plus. Plus ne m’est rien,” ran her melancholy motto. Anger and bereavement and hopeless sorrow had worn her to a shadow. She took the little Dunois with her children to the Castle of Blois. There were four of them, Charles, the Poet, who should be the father of King Louis XII.; and little John, the grandfather of Francis I.; Philip, Count of Vertus; and Margaret, in later years the grandmother of Anne of Brittany. These children, three of whom should be the grandparents or great-grandparents of Henri II., Valentine ceaselessly instructed. All her contemporaries bear witness to her untiring vigilance over them. “They are marvellously good, and well-instructed for their years,” says Monstrelet: “Moult notablement conduits et indoctrinés.” But there was one lesson, dearer than the others, that Valentine perpetually taught her sons. “Avenge your father,” she continually cried.
These children, so different in character and destiny, were the dearer to their mother that she felt she had not long to love them. Valentine was dying of a broken heart, “of anger and mourning,” writes Juvenal; “of anger and impotent vengeance,” says Monstrelet. Her eyes were quite dim with useless tears, and still she resented the very grief that drained her life; for she did not want to leave her little children and her unaccomplished task. “It was pitiful,” says Juvenal, “before she died to hearken to her regrets and her complaints, so piteously she regretted her children, and a bastard, called John, whom she could not suffer out of her sight, saying none of her children was fitter to avenge their father.”... “Since the tragic end of her husband,” says the Monk, “this Duchess spent her days in tears, and many say the bitterness of her heart induced that unhealthy languor of which she died.”
This was in November. Upon St. Clement’s day, upon that heart-sickening anniversary of her husband’s murder, Jean-sans-Peur rode into Paris. It was a triumph. As he passed the people, and their little children cried, “Noel, noel au bon Duc.”
It was near a week before the news came down to Blois. When she heard it, Valentine felt that all was over. No vengeance was possible. On the 4th of December the unhappy woman died, with her last breath entreating her little children never to forget their father’s murder. But these children were only children, and they were orphans. The death of Valentine seemed to secure the triumph of her enemy. Jean-sans-Peur did not seek to hide his rejoicing: “Car icelle Duchesse continuoit moult asprement et diligemment sa poursuitte.“ But already Retribution at her grindstone was sharpening the fatal battle-axe of Montereau.
Notes
11. At the same time there dwelt in Milan another little Valentine Visconti, daughter of Bernabò, in after years the widowed Queen of Cyprus, and herself an interesting and pathetic figure.
12. Corio on different pages puts the date of the birth of Giangaleazzo as 1352 and 1343. The first date, 1352, agrees with the account of Galeotto del Caretto and the Deed of Majority in Corio.
13. Tu, spectabilisque Azo, natus tuus... auctoritate, bayliâ, nec non Regiæ Potestatis plenitudine, tam ordinariâ quam absolutâ, &c., Feb., 1380. Luenig. De Ducatu Mediolanense, in the “Codex Italiæ Diplomaticus,” No. xxvii. See also Investiture of Asti, 1383, to Giangaleazzo (vos et heredes vestri) in the Archives Nationales, K. 53, dossier 22.
14. “L’Apparicion de Maistre Jehan de Meun,” Fr. ii., 7203. MSS. Bib. Nat.
15. This was the estimate of Giangaleazzo. The actual revenues proved to be a little less, and an arrangement à l’amiable was made between him and his son-in-law (Arch. Nat., K. 554, dossier 6).
16. See Comte Albert de Circourt, “Le Duc d’Orléans, frère du roi Charles VI.: ses entreprises au dehors du royaume.” Paris: Victor Palmé, 1887.
17. The florin, the Venetian ducat, and the French franc were interchangeable coins worth about nine-and-eightpence of our money. They are the equivalent of our half-sovereign, the French crown that of our half-guinea; the Burgundian noble being, I think, the only coin that reached the value of the modern guinea. See the tables for 1384-1394 in De Wailly.
18. Le Pastoralet. A Burgundian satire, in the form of a Pastoral, written by one Burcarius in the first half of the fifteenth century, and published of late years in the Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove’s collection of Belgian chronicles.
19. Lamansky: “Secrets de l’Etat de Venise,” pp. 157-159. Also “Archivio di Firenze,” Signori Legazione Commissioni, &c. Filza 28, folio 7 t.
20. Giangaleazzo in 1395 obtained the title and investiture of the Duchy of Milan from Wenzel, King of the Romans, for 100,000 florins.
21. Arch. Nat. (K K. 315 fos. 9-52): “Notes à compter faiz à certaines gens d’armes et archiers retenus par Monsieur le Duc à son service avant la venue de M. de Coucy ès parties d’Ytalie.”
22. De Circourt, op. cit., p. 48.
23. Walsingham, “Historia Anglicana,” vol. ii. p. 201.
24. Clairambault. sceaux, vol. cxiii. p. 8821. See De Circourt, op. cit.
25. For all this question of the kingdom of Adria, too vast for this incidental line, see the excellent paper of M. Paul Durrieu in the “Revue des Questions Historiques” for July, 1880; also the scarce volume of Champollion-Figeac, “Louis et Charles, Ducs d’Orléans,” Paris, 1844; and especially the box of Manuscripts in the Paris National Archives labelled Carton J. 495. I may also indicate an interesting passage in Walsingham’s “Historia Anglicana,” vol. ii. p. 201, communicated to me by Comte Albert de Circourt, “Item Dominus Papa significat Regi per prædictum nuncio, qualiter Rex Franciæ et Antipapa pacta inierunt hinc inde: Videlicet quod idem Rex, per fortitudinum Ducum (Burgundiæ et Turoniæ, poni faciat Antipapem in Sedem Petri et Antipapa promisit Regem Imperio coronare, et Duci Burgundiæ) magnalia et investiet Ducem Turoniæ de omnibus terris ecclesiæ in partibus Italiæ, et quendam alium coronare Regem Tusciæ et Lombardiæ, et Ducem Andexaciæ (Andegaviæ) firmare in Regno Siciliæ.” The passage in brackets exists only in the Brit. Mus. MS.
26. “Arch. Nat.,” K K. 315.
27. “Arch. Nat.,” J. 497, No. 15. February, 1392, Lomellini, Flisco, and other nobles of Genoa sign an instrument offering Genoa to the King of France.
28. Paul Durrieu, “Le Royaume d’Adria.” See also an important passage, “Religieux de St. Denis,” t. ii. p. 402.
29. “Arch. Nat.,” K. 54, No. 37. December 12, 1396: “Comme depuis que nostre très-cher et très amé frère le Duc d’Orleans eut, pour les causes et les concideracions qui le meurent, entrepriz d’avoir la Seigneurie des cité, pays et territoire de Gennes. Et tant fait pour venir à son entencion.... Savoir faisons que pour contenter et deffraier nostre dit frère des trés-grans fraiz missions et despenses par luy en plusieurs manières faiz et soustenuz... nous avons avec nostre dit frère traicté et accordé sur de et pour ces choses et leurs dependances la somme de trois cents mile frans d’or pour une foiz.”
30. August 31, 1395. Lünig Codex Italiæ Diplomaticus, i. col. 421.
31. “Religieux de St. Denis,” ii. p. 436, et. seq.
32. “Delaville Le Roulx. La France en Orient,“ vol. i. p. 290-304.
33. Vide “Jean sans Peur, Duc de Bourgogne, Lieutenant et Procureur-général du Diable cès parties d’Occident,” par M. Paul Durrieu, Paris, 1887.
34. For example Carlo Zeno in 1403, Gattilusio in 1399, each of whom informed the Turks concerning the plan of campaign of a Christian enemy.
35. “L’Apparicion de Maistre Jehan de Meun.” Bib. Nat. Fr. 811, No. 7203. This is an illuminated manuscript in defence of Valentine of Orleans, and dedicated to her.
36. “Delaville Le Roulx. La France en Orient,” Paris, 1886, vol. i. p. 291.
37. “Ordonnances des rois de France,” t. vii. p. 535. The Duke of Orleans was never Regent, despite the line of the Monk of St. Denis which assures us that in 1402 the King made his brother Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom. During the frequent relapses of Charles VI. the kingdom was governed by a Council. There was no Regency before the year 1415.
38. Arch. Nat. K. 55, No. 16, June 14, 1401.
39. Arch. Nat. K. 55, No. 39, Aug. 21, 1405.
40. Arch. Nat. K. 55, No. 36, Dec. 1, 1405.
41. “Arch. Nat.” Carton K. 55, No. 10: “Lettres par les-quelles le Roi commect la garde du Pape Bénoist 13 au Duc d’Orléans, au-quel il donne cent hommes de sa garde. No 14 bis: Lettres du Roy Charles VI. déclaratrices que loin de tenir le Pape Bénoist XIII. prisonnier, il l’a pris sur sa sauve garde et que pour plus grande sûreté de sa personne et de ses biens il a établi son frère le Duc d’Orléans pour en avoir garde.”
42. Communicated by Comte Albert de Circourt from transcripts in his possession.
43. See M. Paul Durrieu, “Les Gascons en Italie,” p. 214.
44. Dumont, Corps Diplomatique. II. ccxvii. and ccxxxi.
45. Avd Nat. K. 55, No. 11, bis July 26, 1404. À tous ceulx qui ces présentes lettres verront, Guilles, Seigneur de Tignonville, chevalier, conseiller, chamberlain du Roy nostre seigneur et garde de la prévosté de Paris, Salut! Savoir faisons que nous l’an de grace 1404, ce Mercredi 26 jour du mois de Juillet, vismes une lettre du Roy nostre seigneur scellée de son grant scel sur double couronne, des quelles la teneur s’ensuit:
Charles par la grace de Dieu Roy de France, à tous ceulx qui ces lettres verront, Salut! Savoir faisons que après la supplication et requeste à nous faictes par nostre très-cher et très-amé frère Loys Duc d’Orléans, contenant que comme à cause de nostre très chère et très amée soeur, sa femme, fille du feu nostre oncle le Duc de Milan, plusieurs villes terres et seigneuries situées es parties d’Italie et de Lombardie, entre lesquelles est et doit estre la ville et cité de Pise avec toutes ses appartenances, la seigneurie de laquelle nostre dit frère dit estre et appartenir au dit feu Duc de Milan auparavant qu’il alla de vie à tres-passement appartiennent et doivent appartenir à iceluy nostre très-cher frère. Il nous a exposé et il ait entendu de nouvel que la dicte ville et cité de Pise et aucuns chasteaulx appartenant d’icelle, par certains moyens sont à nous acquis et venues en nostre main. Et ont été bailliz pour nous par nostre très-féal Chevalier Chambellan et conseiller Jehan le Meingre dit Boucicaut, Maréschal de France, et Gouverneur pour nous de nostre cité et seigneurie de Jennes, pour quoy il nous a requis en tout le droit que nous avons et pouvons avoir de la dicte ville et cité de Pise et ès aultres cités et appartenances qui furent au dit Seigneur de Milan, nous veuillons bailler et délaisser. Et tout empeschement mis de par nous en la dicte ville et cité de Pise et ès dictes chateaulx et aultres appartenances d’icelles, veuillons faire oster et cesser, sans y plus procéder, ny faire procéder, en sa préjudice. Nous voulons toujours condescendre au justes requestes de nostre-dit frère, comme raison est. Qui avons baillie et délaissié de une certaine science par ces présentes tout le droit et seigneurie par nous acquis de nouvel et que nous avons et pouvons avoir en dicte ville et cité de Pise et ès aultres chasteaulx et appartenances d’iceulx. Et voulons et ordonnons par ces présentes que l’empeschement mis par et en nostre nom en la dicte ville, cité et Seigneurie de Pise et ès chateaulx et aultres appartenances d’icelles, soit osté. Si donnons en mandement par ces présentes et envoyons très-expressement au dit gouverneur de nostre dicte cité de Jeunes et à tous nos aultres justiciers et conseillers ou à leurs lieutenants et à chaseur d’eulx, si que di luy appendra, que de nostre bailli et délaissements dessus ditz faient, sueffrent et laissent jouer et user paisiblement nostre diet frère. En mectant au délivrement de luy ou à ses ditz gens officiers commis et députés de par lui tous les ditz droit et seigneurie par nous acquis de nouvel ès ditz ville cité et chasteaul dessus ditz. Et en ostant tout l’empeschement qui en iceulx a esté mis de nostre part. En tesmoing de ce nous avons fait mettre à ces lettres nostre scel. Donné a Paris le 24 jour de May l’an de grace mil quatre ans et quatre et le 24 de nostre règne. Aussi signées par le Roy en son rayson. Messigneurs les Ducs de Berry et de Bourbon, le Connestable, le Comte de Tancarville, le grand maistre d’ostel et aultres.
Et nous a ce présent transcript in tesmoing de ce que usismes le scel de la dicte prévosté de Paris l’an et jour dessus promis et dietz. Manessier.
46. A strange document in the Carton K. 55 Arch. Nat., under date July 27, 1406, in the form of a letter from the King in Council (Tancarville “et autres” being present), notifies that that day the King has received conjointly the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans, who have made him their united homage for Pisa. In 1407 the Signory of Florence, having taken Pisa (a French fief), sent to the King, Orleans, and Burgundy to justify their conduct. Orleans seized the Florentine ambassadors and cast them into prison—a high-handed proceeding which he probably considered warranted by his position as suzerain of the captive city. In so doing Orleans probably meant to underline the fact that he, not the King or Burgundy, was lord of Pisa, though all had claims to suzerainty. There is a long correspondence on this subject (Archives of Florence, filza xviii. della Signoria. Cancelleria 27).
47. It is in 1407 that the Italian projects of Orleans appear in vigorous renascence. On the 6th of October he proclaimed himself Protector of his nephews, Giovanni Maria, Duke of Milan, and Filippo Maria, Count of Pavia, “frères de Dame Valentine épouse du Duc” (Arch. Nat. K. 56, No. 16). He made the Governor of Asti their guardian, and appeared to meditate an armed intervention. Was this conduct purely and merely disinterested? Did Orleans in October at Beauté-sur-Marne contemplate a great French protectorate in Lombardy of which he should be the soul and centre? A month later a tragic silence suddenly interrupted any answer to these questions.
48. See “Arch. Nat.” K K. 267 fo. 97. Also the chapter on Bernardon de Serres in M. Paul Durrieu’s valuable work, “Les Gascons en Italie.”