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Charles V (21 January 1338 – 16 September 1380), called the Wise, was King of France from 1364 to his death in 1380 and a member of the House of Valois. His reign marked a high point for France during the Hundred Years' War, with his armies recovering much of the territory ceded to England at the Treaty of Brétigny. Charles was born at the château de Vincennes outside of Paris, France, the son of John II of France and Bonne of Luxembourg. Upon his father's succession to the throne in 1350, Charles became Dauphin of France. He was the first French heir to use the title, which is named for the region of Dauphiné, acquired by Charles' grandfather. The future king was highly intelligent but physically weak, with pale skin and a thin, ill-proportioned body. He made a sharp contrast to his father — who was tall, strong and sandy haired — and gossip at the time suggested he was not John's son. Similar rumors would pursue Charles' grandson, Charles VII.
King
John was a brave warrior but a poor ruler who alienated his nobles
through arbitrary justice and the elevation of associates considered
unworthy. After a three year break, the war resumed in 1355, with
Edward, The Black Prince, leading an English - Gascon army in a violent raid across southwestern France. After checking an English incursion into Normandy, John led an army of about 16,000 south, crossing the Loire in September, 1356, attempting to outflank the Prince's 8,000 soldiers at Poitiers.
Rejecting advice from one captain to surround and starve the Prince — a
tactic Edward feared — John attacked the strong enemy position. In the
subsequent Battle of Maupertuis (Poitiers),
English archery all but annihilated the French cavalry, and John was
captured. Charles led a battalion at Poitiers which withdrew early in
the struggle; whether the order came from John (as he later claimed) or
whether Charles himself ordered the withdrawal is unclear. The
outcome of the battle left many embittered at the nobility, whom
popular opinion accused of betraying the King, but Charles and his
brothers escaped blame, and he was received with honor upon his return
to Paris. The Dauphin summoned the Estates - General in
October to seek money for the defense of the country. Furious at what
they saw as poor management, many of those assembled organized into a
body led by Etienne Marcel,
the Provost of Merchants (a title roughly equivalent to mayor of Paris
today). Marcel demanded the dismissal of seven royal ministers, their
replacement by a Council of 28, made of nobles, clergy and bourgeois,
and the release of Charles II of Navarre,
a leading Norman noble with a claim on the French throne who had been
imprisoned by John for the murder of his constable. The Dauphin refused
the demands, dismissed the Estates - General and left Paris. A
contest of wills followed. In an attempt to raise money, Charles tried
to devalue the currency; Marcel ordered strikes, and the Dauphin was
forced to cancel his plans and recall the Estates in February, 1357.
The Third Estate presented the Dauphin with a Grand Ordinance, a list of 61 articles that would have given the Estates - General the
right to approve all future taxes, assemble at their own volition and
elect a Council of 36 — with 12 members from each Estate — to advise the
king. Charles eventually signed the ordinance, but his dismissed
councillors took news of the document to King John, imprisoned in
Bordeaux. The King renounced the ordinance before being taken to
England by Prince Edward. Charles
made a royal progress through the country that summer, winning support
from the provinces. Marcel, meanwhile, enlisted Charles of Navarre, who
asserted that his claim to the throne was at least as good as that of Edward III's. The Dauphin, re-entering Paris, won the city back. Marcel,
meanwhile, used the murder of a citizen seeking sanctuary to make an
attack close to the Dauphin. Summoning a group of tradesmen, the
Provost marched at the head of an army of 3,000, entered the royal
palace and had the crowd murder two of the Dauphin's marshals before
his eyes. Charles, horrified, momentarily pacified the crowd, but sent
his family away and left the capital as quickly as he could. Marcel's
action destroyed the Third Estate's support among the nobles, and the
Provost's subsequent support for the Jacquerie undermined
his support from the towns; he was murdered by a mob on 31 July 1358.
Charles was able to recover Paris the following month; he later issued
a general amnesty for all, except close associates of Marcel. John's
capture gave the English the edge in peace negotiations. The King
signed a treaty in 1359 that would have ceded most of western France to
England and imposed a ruinous ransom of 4 million ecus on the
country. The Dauphin (backed by his councillors and the Estates
General) rejected the treaty, and King Edward used this as an excuse to
invade France later that year. Edward reached Reims in
December and Paris in March but Charles, trusting on improved municipal
defences, forbade his soldiers from direct confrontation with the
English. Charles relied on improved fortifications made to Paris by
Marcel, and would later rebuild the Left Bank (Rive Gauche) wall and
built a new wall on the Right Bank that extended to a new fortification
called the Bastille. Edward
pillaged and raided the countryside but could not bring the French to a
decisive battle, and eventually agreed to reduce his terms. This
non-confrontational strategy would prove extremely beneficial to France
during Charles' reign. The Treaty of Bretigny, signed on 8 May 1360, ceded a third of western France — mostly in Aquitaine and Gascony — to the English, and lowered the King's ransom to 3 million ecus. Jean was released the following October his second son, Louis I of Anjou, taking his place as a hostage. Though
his father had regained his freedom, Charles suffered a personal
tragedy. His three year old daughter, Joan, and his infant daughter
Bonne died within two weeks of each other; the Dauphin was said at
their double funeral to be "so sorrowful as never before he had been."
Charles himself had been severely ill, with his hair and nails falling
out; some suggest the symptoms are those of arsenic poisoning. John
proved as ineffective at ruling upon his return to France as he had
before his capture. When Louis of Anjou escaped from English custody,
John announced he had no choice but to return to captivity himself — an
action that, despite the cult of chivalry, seemed extreme to 14th century minds. John arrived in London in January 1364, became ill, and died the following April. Charles was crowned King of France in 1364 at the cathedral at Reims,
France. The new king was highly intelligent but close mouthed and
secretive, with sharp eyes, a long nose and a pale, grave manner. He
suffered from gout in the right hand and an abscess in
his left arm, possibly a side effect of an attempted poisoning in 1359.
Doctors were able to treat the wound but told him that if it ever dried
up, he would die within 15 days. "Not surprisingly," said historian Barbara Tuchman, "the King lived under a sense of urgency." His manner may have concealed a more emotional side; his marriage to Joan of Bourbon was
considered very strong, and he made no attempt to hide his grief at her
funeral or those of his children, five of whom predeceased him. His
reign was dominated by the war with the English, and two major
problems: recovering the territories ceded at Bretigny, and ridding the land of the Tard-Venus (French
for "latecomers"), mercenary companies that turned to robbery and
pillage after the treaty was signed. In achieving these aims, Charles
turned to a minor noble from Brittany named Bertrand du Guesclin. Referred to as a "hog in armor," du Guesclin had fought in that province's bitter civil wars, and learned to fight guerrilla warfare. Du Guesclin defeated Charles II of Navarre in
Normandy in 1364 and eliminated the noble's threat to Paris; he was
captured in battle in Brittany the following year but quickly ransomed. To
attempt to rid the land of the Tard-Venus, Charles first hired them for
an attempted crusade into Hungary, but their reputation for brigandage
preceded them, and the citizens of Strasbourg refused to let them cross the Rhine on their journey. Charles next sent the mercenary companies (under the leadership of Du Guesclin) to fight in a civil war in Castile between King Peter the Cruel and his illegitimate half-brother Henry. Peter had English backing, while Henry was supported by the French. Du Guesclin and his men were able to drive Peter out of Castile in 1365, but the Black Prince, now serving as his father's viceroy in southwestern France, took up Peter's cause. At the Battle of Nájera in
April 1367, the English defeated Du Guesclin's army and took the Breton
prisoner a second time. Despite the defeat, the campaign had destroyed
several companies of Tard-Venus and given France a temporary respite
from their depredations. The Black Prince's rule in Gascony became increasingly autocratic, and when Peter defaulted on his debts after Najera, the Prince taxed his subjects in Guyenne to
make up the difference. Nobles from Gascony petitioned Charles for aid,
and when the Black Prince refused to answer a summons to Paris to
answer the charges, Charles judged him disloyal and declared war in May
1369. Legally, Charles had every right to do this — the renunciation of
sovereignty by Charles was never made and therefore Gascony was still
legally land held by the King. Instead
of seeking a major battle, as his predecessors had done, Charles chose
a strategy of attrition, spreading the fighting at every point
possible. The French were aided by the navy of Castile (Du Guesclin had
captured Peter the Cruel by deceit in 1369 and turned him over to
Henry, who promptly killed his brother with a dagger) and by the
declining health of the Black Prince, who had developed dropsy and quickly become an invalid. Where Charles could, he negotiated with towns and cities to bring them back into the French fold. Bertrand du Guesclin, appointed Constable of France in 1370, beat back a major English offensive in northern France with a combination of hit-and-run raids and bribery. The
English were crippled by the loss of major leaders and their own
tendency to raid the countryside instead of embarking on major
offensives. By 1374, Charles had recovered all of France except Calais and Aquitaine,
effectively nullifying the Treaty of Bretigny. Peace, however, remained
elusive; treaty negotiations began in 1374 but were never able to come
up with more than extended truces, owing to Charles' determination to
have the English recognise his sovereignty over their lands. In 1376, Pope Gregory XI, fearing a loss of the Papal States, decided to move his court back to Rome after nearly 70 years in Avignon. Charles, hoping to maintain French influence over the papacy,
tried to persuade Pope Gregory to remain in France, arguing that "Rome
is wherever the Pope happens to be." Gregory refused. The Pope died in
March, 1378. When cardinals gathered to elect a successor, a Roman mob,
concerned that the predominantly French college would elect a French pope who would bring the papacy back to Avignon, surrounded the Vatican and demanded the election of a Roman. On 9 April, the cardinals elected Bartolomeo Prigamo, Archbishop of Bari and a commoner by birth, as Pope Urban VI.
The new pope quickly alienated his cardinals by criticising their
vices, limiting the areas where they could receive income and even
rising to strike one cardinal before a second restrained him. The
French cardinals left Rome that summer and declared Urban's election
invalid because of mob intimidation (a reason that had not been cited
at the time of the election) and elected Cardinal Robert of Geneva as Pope Clement VII that September. The French cardinals quickly moved to get Charles's support. The theology faculty of the University of Paris advised
Charles not to make a hasty decision, but he recognised Clement as Pope
in November and forbade any obedience to Urban. Charles's support
allowed Clement to survive — he would not have been able to maintain his
position without the aid of the King — and led to the Papal Schism,
which would divide Europe for nearly 40 years. Historians have severely
criticised Charles for allowing the division to take place. Charles's
last years were spent in the consolidation of Normandy (and the
neutralisation of Charles of Navarre). Peace negotiations with the
English continued unsuccessfully. The taxes he had levied to support
his wars against the English had caused deep disaffection among the
working classes. The
abscess on the King's left arm dried up in early September 1380, and
Charles prepared to die. On his deathbed, perhaps fearful for his soul,
Charles announced the abolition of the hearth tax,
the foundation of the government's finances. The ordinance would have
been impossible to carry out, but its terms were known, and the
government's refusal to reduce any of the other taxes on the people
sparked the Maillotin revolt in 1381. The King died on 16 September 1380, and was succeeded by his 12 year old son, Charles VI. He is buried in the Basilica of St Denis in St. Denis, France. Charles'
reputation was of great significance for posterity, especially as his
conception of rulership was one which courtiers wished his successors
could follow. Christine de Pisan's biography, commissioned by Philip
the Bold in 1404, is a source of most of the intimate details of the
king's life of which we are aware, but also provides a moral example
for his successors. It draws heavily on the work of Nicole Oresme (who
translated Aristotle's moral works into French) and Giles of Rome.
Philipe de Mezieres in his allegorical Songe du Viel Pelerin attempts
to persuade the dauphin to follow the example of his wise father,
notably in piety, though also to pursue reforming zeal in all policy
considerations. Of
great importance to Charles V's cultural program was his vast library,
housed in his expanded Louvre, and described in great detail by the
19th century French historian Leopold Delisle. Containing over 1,200
volumes it was symbolic of the authority and magnificence of the royal
person, but also of his concern with government for the common good.
Charles was concerned to possess copies of works in French, in order
that his councellors had access to them. Perhaps the most significant
works commissioned for the library were those of Nicole Oresme,
who translated Aristotle's Politics, Ethics and Economics into eloquent
French for the first time (an earlier attempt had been made at the
Politics, but the manuscript is now lost). If the Politics and
Economics served as a manual for government, then the Ethics advised
the king on how to be a good man. Other
important works commissioned for the royal library were the anonymous
legal treatise the Songe du Vergier, greatly inspired by the debates of Philip IV's jurists with Boniface VIII,
the translations of Raol de Presles, which included St. Augustine's
City of God, and the production of the Grandes Chroniques de France
edited in 1377 to emphasise the vassalage of Edward III. Charles'
kingship placed great emphasis on both royal ceremony and scientific
political theory, and to contemporaries and posterity his lifestyle at
once embodied the reflective life advised by Aristotle and the model of
French kingship derived from St Louis, Charlemagne, and Clovis which he
had illustrated in his Coronation Book of 1364, now in the British
Library. Charles
V was also a builder king, and he created or rebuilt several
significant buildings in the late 14th century style including the Bastille, the Louvre, Château de Vincennes, and Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which were widely copied by the nobility of the day. While
he was in many ways a typical medieval king, Charles V has been praised
by historians for his willingness to ignore the chivalric conventions
of the time to achieve his aims, which led to the recovery of the
territories lost at Bretigny. His
successes, however, proved ephemeral. Charles's brothers, who dominated
the regency council that ruled in the king's name until 1388,
quarrelled amongst themselves and divided the government. Charles VI,
meanwhile, preferred tournaments to the duties of kingship, and his
descent into madness in 1392 put his uncles back in power. By 1419, the
country was divided between Armagnac and Burgundian factions and Henry V was
conquering the northern part of France. The hard won victories of
Charles V had been lost through the venality of his successors. |