A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [333]
Madness was familiar in the Middle Ages in all its varieties. William of Hainault-Bavaria, a nephew of Queen Philippa of England, “tall, young, strong, dark and lively,” had been a raving maniac confined in a castle for thirty years, most of the time with both hands and feet tied. Sufferers from lesser derangement were generally not confined but moved among their neighbors like the deformed, the spastic, the scrofulous, and other misfits, and joined in the pilgrimages to Rocamadour in search of a cure. Madness as often as not was seen as curable and understood as a natural phenomenon caused by mental or emotional stress. Rest and sleep were prescribed, as well as bleeding, baths, ointments, potions made from metal, and happiness. Equally, it was seen as an affliction by God or the Devil to be treated by exorcism or by shaving a cross in the hair of the victim’s head or tying him to the rood screen in church so that his condition might be improved by hearing mass.
No physician or treatment helped Charles VI in his later seizures. An unkempt, evil-eyed charlatan and pseudo-mystic named Arnaut Guilhem was allowed to treat Charles on his claim of possessing a book given by God to Adam by means of which man could overcome all affliction resulting from original sin. A prototype Rasputin who had gained the confidence of the Queen and courtiers, he insisted that the King’s malady was caused by sorcery, but, failing himself to summon superior forces, was eventually ousted. Other quacks and remedies of all kinds were tried to no avail. Even doctors of the University called for discovery and punishment of the “sorcerers.” On one occasion two Augustinian friars, after gaining no results from magic incantations and a liquid made from powdered pearls, proposed to cut incisions in the King’s head. When this was disallowed, the friars accused the King’s barber and the Duc d’Orléans’ concierge of sorcery and, when they were acquitted, rashly transferred the accusation against Orléans himself. In consequence, the friars were brought to trial and torture, confessed themselves liars, sorcerers, and idolators in league with the Devil, and, on being divested of clerical status, were handed over to the secular arm and executed.
The obsession with sorcery in Charles’s case reflected a rising belief in the occult and demonic. Times of anxiety nourish belief in conspiracies of evil, which in the 14th century were seen as the work of persons or groups with access to diabolical aid. Hence the rising specter of the witch. By the 1390s witchcraft had been officially recognized by the Inquisition as equivalent to heresy. The Church was on the defensive, torn apart by the schism, challenged in authority and doctrine by aggressive movements of dissent, beset by cries for reform. Like the ordinary man, it felt surrounded by malevolent forces, of which sorcerers and witches were seen as the agents carrying out the will of the Evil One. It was during this time, in 1398, that theologians of the University of Paris held the solemn conclave which declared the black arts to be infecting society with renewed vigor.
The poor mad King was a victim of these beliefs. “In the name of Jesus Christ,” he cried, weeping in his agony, “if there is any one of you who is an accomplice in this evil I suffer, I beg him to torture me no longer but let me die!” After this piteous outburst, the government,