Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1, part 2 and part 3. Read this already? Here’s part 5.
The flayers
As a preface to the outbreak of the Jacquerie, I did my best to sum up the infuriating uselessness of the aristocracy in arms.
How useless they were really is an interesting question. Certainly they were haughty, cruel, greedy and—as vocal devotees of Jesus Christ, who totally endorsed all those qualities—hypocritical. But there are worse things. Consider who might move into a hypothetical power vacuum left by the knights: you might go with the devil you know, if you think the devil you know has a shot at fighting off, say, the Mongols.*
The unfortunate thing about the power vacuum left by the Black Death is that the knights filled it themselves.
The aristocracy of the 14th century wasn’t just guilty of the sins of the rich and powerful and armed in every time and place. Driven in part by the death of so many peasants, which drove up labor costs and made the old manorial way of life too expensive to maintain, a significant chunk of the nobility abandoned any semblance of duty—fealty to monarchs, noblesse oblige towards serfs and tenants, the triflingest Christian scruples—and formed up into bands that murdered and pillaged with near-total impunity.
It’s hard to decide what exactly to call these bands (which obviously included, and were sometimes led by, commoners).
They filled a range of niches in the increasingly Mad Maxian landscape of 14th-century Europe. They could be highwaymen, mercenaries, or something close to normal feudal armies—just stripped of pretense.
This is what makes them so hard to label. There is no bright line between the feudal ideal and banditry, just a wide, depressing spectrum. Here’s a nobleman in a castle with a bunch of armed men on horseback who fight for him and a bunch of poorly treated near-slaves who farm and fish and fix roads and chop wood for him. Is he a Christian knight or an infernal bandit?
Sometimes the question came down to tone and tenure. Had the nobleman just recently moved into this castle, perhaps after dispatching the plague-addled remnant of the old, far grander, household?
Did the nobleman settle for rhythmic, sedate, institutionalized robbery—sorry, taxation—like his father and his father before him, or did he ride out at random intervals and plunder the village like a nouveau riche?
When he rendered service to some more powerful lord, did he loudly reaffirm his dynasty’s age-old loyalty and graciously accept unexpected—why, undeserved—gifts of revenue-generating lands and titles? Or did he draw up a contract in advance: so many ducats to kill so many Guelphs or Ghibellines?
Come to think of it, society seemed to ask its collective self in this era, how different are the brigands and the nobility really, particularly after a few decades of aspiring and falling to each other’s levels?
At times the movement from knight to brigand was pretty much instantaneous: the moment an English prince called an end to a campaign in France, the flower of Albion would look around, shrug and keep pillaging the same villages—now as “free companies” rather than English soldiers.
In one way the companies represented the breakdown of the feudal social contract; in another way they were its distillation: medieval power at its most honest.
Theory aside, the experience of life under the ascendant warlords was probably a good bit worse than it was under the old—by comparison humane—breed of knights. The Jacques rose up, after all, and while peasant revolts were anything but new or rare in this era, the Jacquerie was significant enough to lodge itself in the collective memory: 500 years later, Dickens’ revolutionary sans-culottes Parisians would call each other “Jacques.”
Another, less complimentary, name for the free companies sums up their role in plague-wracked France: les écorcheurs, the flayers.
Tuchman’s haul of écorcheur anecdotes is worth kidnapping and ransoming a marquis’ second son for, but one in particular sums up the nightmare looking-glass medieval society had fallen through. The context is maddeningly complex, the details basically unimportant, and in a way that’s the point.
The Count of Savoy, traditionally allied to the Holy Roman Emperor and now allied to the Pope (who in this period ruled—or tried to rule—Italian lands from exile in Avignon, which is in France now but was part of the Holy Roman Empire then), enlisted the aid of a French lord (and son-in-law of the King of England, who was fighting the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War against France) against a Milanese noble family whose coat of arms was a viper swallowing a man whole and whose leader was married to the Count of Savoy’s sister. In time the boss viper would more or less agree with his brother-in-law and enemy the Count of Savoy to step away from the action, leaving his own brother to fight alone. (Also, one of the main Milanese nobles was married to a daughter of the English-kidnapped King of France, so, .)
The old school nobles in this story treated causes and loyalties so lightly—or perhaps they just failed to disentangle them, which is understandable—that the mercenaries come out looking more rational, even wiser. The English “free company” leader Sir John Hawkwood, living his best blood-soaked expat life in Italy, fought for Team Viper for a spell, fell out with them over pay, and switched to the papally inclined Savoyards and French.
The French lord from the ancient family also took money from the Pope, though no one ever regarded him as a mercenary because of … his vibe?
In the climactic battle of this weird campaign, the Milanese noble’s German-Hungarian mercenaries gave up fighting too early to loot the vicinity, handing the French lord and the English-Italian mercenaries victory.
But the Pope didn’t pay on time, so Hawkwood ravaged the papal countryside for a while, and the French lord and Savoyard Count had to be called back to stop the “forces of the Church”—that is, the rogue mercenaries, who were far from the first to strong-arm the Pope into paying them to leave or paying someone else to chase them off—from terrorizing the Church’s peasants. (In fairness to the French lord, he wasn’t paid on time either, and yet he didn’t loot Church lands.)
The fighting came to an end when resurgent plague ruined everyone’s enthusiasm for whatever it was they were fighting for—which isn’t clear to me at all, with the exception of the mercenaries, who fought for money. Smart.
By now it was the mid-1370s, and the world still hadn’t ended. Worse: it had gone insane.
In the Rhineland, Holland and Flanders, people fell into a “dancing mania.” Much as the flagellants had done, bands of these dancers roamed from town to town, but this time rather than beating themselves and killing Jews they
… danced for hours with leaps and screams, calling on demons by name to cease tormenting them or crying that they saw visions of Christ or the Virgin or the heavens opening. When exhausted they fell to the ground rolling and groaning as if in the grip of agonies.
They wore garlands of flowers in their hair.
Next time, The really big one (part 5): mirages of revolution—why didn’t the plague’s upheavals end in full-blown revolution?
Notes
* Not to say the Mongols were all bad, though they tended to make a brusque first impression. And not to say that Western Europe’s knights ever actually fought the Mongols. And not to say that it would have gone well for them.