A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [373]
The crusaders, of whom only Nevers, Boucicaut, Guillaume de Tremoille, and Jacques de la Marche were left among the leaders, along with some seven or eight other lords and knights, re-entered France in February 1398. They were received at the gates of Dijon with acclamation and gifts of silver presented by the municipality. In memory of his own captivity, Nevers liberated from the city prison, “by his own hand,” all whom he found there. Dijon held solemn services for the dead crusaders, but thereafter the welcome was all celebration and joy.
In Paris the King gave his cousin a well-considered gift of 20,000 livres. The towns of Burgundy and Flanders vied for the honor of receiving him. On orders of his father, he made a triumphal progress to exhibit himself to the people whose taxes had bought his return. Minstrels preceded him through the gates, fetes and parades greeted him, more gifts of silver and of wine and fish were presented. Considering all the bereaved families of Burgundy whose sons did not return, the receptions probably represented not so much popular enthusiasm as organized joy, in which the 14th century excelled. Celebration was required for the prestige of the Duke and his heir, and the towns were happy enough to cooperate in expectation of the favors that generally accompanied such joyous occasions. The magistrates of Tournai expected Nevers’ ceremonial entry to be graced by a plenary pardon, in which they were disappointed.
In pomp and minstrelsy, the culminating fiasco of knighthood was interred. After Nicopolis, nothing went right for France for many long years. The presiding values of chivalry did not change, but the system was in its decadence. Froissart found this in England too, where a friend of former times said to him, “Where are the great enterprises and valiant men, the glorious battles and conquests? Where are the knights in England who could do such deeds now?… The times are changed for the worse.… Now felonies and hates are nourished here.”
The celebrations for Nevers could not conceal the defeat, and the moralists found in it reinforcement for pessimism. Mézières immediately composed an Epistre Lamentable et Consolatoire, Deschamps a ballade “For the French Fallen at Nicopolis,” Bonet an allegorical satire in the form of an “Apparition of Master Jean de Meung,” who appears in a dream to reproach the author for not protesting the evils that are destroying France and Christendom. Deschamps states openly that Nicopolis was lost “through pride and folly,” although he lays some blame upon the Hungarians “who fled.” Mézières similarly has hard words for the “schismatics,” who, “for the great hate they bear the Latins,” preferred to be subjects of the Sultan rather than of the King of Hungary. But essentially he sees the defeat as the consequence of the crusaders’ lack of the four moral virtues necessary to any army: order, discipline, obedience, and justice. In the absence of these, God departs from an army, which then becomes easily discomfited, and this accounts for all the discomfitures since Crécy and Poitiers. Mézières’ call for a new crusade aroused no response. The Epistre Lamentable was his last work. Eight years later his scolding and his passion were finally stilled in death. Like any Isaiah, he grew tiresome, but his yearning for goodness in society spoke for all the silent people who yearned for it too but left no record.
Bonet, while including the usual censure of knights for their soft life and love of capons and ducks, white shirts and fine wines, comes to something more basic. The knights leave the peasants behind because they think them “worth nothing,” he writes, although the poor can endure hardship and coarse food, and, if armed, would wage a good fight, like the Portuguese peasants who fought bravely and killed many knights at Aljubarrota. (The reference is to a battle of 1385 in the same year and with similar results as the Swiss Battle of Sempach.)