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By Root 1596 0

’s rhymed epic designed to create a French hero to rival Chandos Herald’s panegyric of the Black Prince. “Wherefore his parents hated him so sore that often in their hearts they wished him dead. Rascal, Fool, or Clown they were wont to call him; so despised was he as an ill-conditioned child that squires and servants made light of him.” The parents were poor nobility. The uncouth son, unspoiled by tournaments, learned to fight in the guerrilla warfare of Brittany in the service of Charles of Blois, becoming skilled in the tactics of ambush and ruse, the use of disguise, spies, secret messengers, smoke clouds to hide movements, bribes of money and wine, torture and killing of prisoners, and surprise attacks launched during the “Truce of God.” He was intrepid as he was unscrupulous, fierce with the sword but ever ready to use stratagem; hard, tricky, and ruthless as any écorcheur.

Born between 1315 and 1320, he did not become a knight until he was over 35 and had won local renown in the defense of Rennes. His bold capture of a fortress from the Navarrese, witnessed by the Regent, began his prominence in the royal service. Though Charles V was not a fighter himself, he had a fighting purpose. Through all the years since the Treaty of Brétigny, his single silent overriding aim was to frustrate the renunciations of territory that would have dismembered the realm. Having no wish to lead a host in battle, he knew he needed a military leader, and found one in this “hog in armor,” the first effective commander comparable to the Black Prince or Sir John Chandos to appear on the French side.

In 1364, the opening year of Charles’s reign, Du Guesclin led the French to victory, then defeat, in two historic battles. In the first at Cocherel in Normandy against the forces of Charles of Navarre, the numbers were small but the outcome was large, for it led to the elimination of Navarre’s chronic threat to Paris. The battle was even more notable for the capture of Navarre’s cousin, the Captal de Buch, whom Charles afterward liberated without asking ransom in the hope of winning over this heart of turbulence to the French side. The second battle five months later, at Auray on the rocky Breton coast, was decisive for the war in Brittany. Charles of Blois, the French candidate for the dukedom, was killed and Du Guesclin taken prisoner. This was the last clash of the rival Dukes of Brittany, leaving the English candidate, Jean de Montfort, in possession, although by the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny the dukedom remained a French fief. The defeat was in fact turned by Charles V into a source of advantage. By means of a huge pension, he persuaded Blois’s widow to yield her claim, thus ending the running war and the bleeding of French strength. Charles V was one who preferred not to fight where he could buy.

Du Guesclin, after being ransomed, did not fall from favor. His rise had been predicted by astrology and the prophecies of Merlin, which may have appealed to Charles, who, for all his astuteness, was a devotee of astrology, as was Du Guesclin. Besides keeping an astrologer at hand on all his campaigns, Bertrand was also married to one, a lady trained in the subject and famed for her occult powers. The King’s interest was more scientific. Like most rulers, he employed a court astrologer who advised on propitious times for action and carried out confidential missions; but going beyond that, Charles commissioned translations of astrological works and founded a college of astrology at the University of Paris which he equipped with library, instruments, and royal scholarships.

In 1365 he summoned to his court Thomas of Pisano, a doctor of astrology from the University of Bologna whose imaginative if somewhat risky talents must have suited the King because he kept him on at a salary of 100 francs a month. It is not impossible that Charles’s perpetual illnesses may have owed something to a medicine containing mercury prepared for him by Thomas, for which the doctor was much blamed. Undeterred, Thomas went on to an experiment “unique and ineffable,