L'héritier légitime
Paris, the year of the Lord 1277
Back in the years of 1277, there were two big events that preoccupy the French court. The first, and by far the most important, was the outrageous defeat of the French armies by King James of Aragon and his amolgavares troops in the previous year. The punitive invasion aiming the confiscation of Barcelona turned up being a disastrous adventure. Everybody at the court whispered that the entire war was pointless or even disastrous and it was only Philip’s fault. King Charles himself, more or less a marionette in the hands of his uncle, took a defensive stand on the matter, letting Philip to get all the credit. Something needed to be undertake and therefore Philip of Arles summoned the Great Council and the Peers of France in Blois for November 1277. He had changed the strategy and needed the official validation of his choice.
Hopefully, his new idea to offer the county of Barcelona to his younger son and let him to go and conquer it, will be this time beneficial and it will pay off the investment. Of course, that day neither King Philip of Arles nor King Charles of France and England, nor anyone in the world, would know or even imagine how much it will pay off that decision. Prince Henry ascension as king of Aragon and Navarre was a surprise to everybody… or to almost everybody… It seems that it had started to pay off quickly and big time and it was just of the first of the pays off. The Conquest of Valencia was the next step.
King Charles was more worried that he still do not have an heir with Queen Christina of Norway and his only son, Edouard, was acknowledged as a bastard… Rumors of King’s impotence poisoned the court and the nerves of everybody were stretched to maximum. The pressure for both the King and the Queen to conceive an heir was immense and this just aggravate the relations between the two. The Queen had very easily naturalized and was fully accepted at the French Court, grace of her charming personality, becoming surrounded by many admirers. She learned French very quickly, arriving after several years to speak with almost no foreign accent, a feat appreciated by both nobility and the common people. In contrast to the austerity of her husband, the Queen’s court was now bigger and far more pompous than the King’s one. The only thing which was missing was an heir… while the very existence of that bastard was a direct threat to the Queen and to the stability of the realm.
Speaking about him, Edouard was a fine 11 years old boy which grow up in the cazon and austere ambiance of Mont Saint Michel, having hardship to respect the monk’s rules and discipline. The king rarely visited Mont Saint Michel but he kept regularly notices about the status of the education of his son. As an erudite by himself, he put a very high importance on the education and instruction of his… still only son.
While still young, Edouard shows signs of brightness and high character. Maybe too high for the tastes of the monks of the abbey. They regularly complained about his behavior and the continuous braking and bending of rules. But Charles was rather amused by the boy behavior than taking offence. He planned to grant him the newly acquired county of Cornwall as appanage and he wanted to do it when he will turn 12.
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The second great event which monopolized the attention of the French Court was the unusual apparition in Paris of a very colorful and exotic person. Nicolas de Manduel, the man who stirred up an avalanche of discussions and debates about the Extreme Orient, was brought to Paris with charges of heresy and witchcraft, in order to be investigated by a commission from the University. Soon after his arrival, a commission made by scholars from the University started to interrogate him and analyse the charges, under the general supervision of Roger Bacon, the actual rector of the University.
The trial started in the week following the Easter of 1277, after several months of interrogation and analyse. However, Manduel’s charisma and native talent of story-teller captivated the audience, including the scholars and the auditors themselves. The séances quickly turned into great spectacles of oratory made in front of bigger and bigger audiences, ecstatic of the narrated marvels. The hall was so crowded by both students from the University which assisted and regularly citizens than it become more and more difficult to be held. This trial become more famous and caused more interest than even the trial of the Great Master of the Templars, Jacques de Lussignan. Nicolas de Manduel become the star of the city and soon become clear that any unfavorable sentence could easily lead to revolt.
Moreover, Nicolas make friends and allies even among his supposed prosecutors. Roger Bacon himself was personally interested by several aspects of his story, especially the ones related to the medicine and alchemy. They both spent time in private, between the séances, in which Manduel describe him how advanced were the Chinese in the medicine field, sharing to him several notions he picked up.
Even more, his trial get the King attention and in June 1277, King Charles arrived in Paris first time after the Parisian revolt, with clear intention to personally see the Man. Charles even participated to several séances, under cover and disguised, to the exasperation of his guards. Hopefully, nobody knew how he looks and nobody imagined that a King could go in such places.
The charges of heresy and black arts were discarded, but Nicolas de Manduel was forbidden to public anything not previously approved by a commission of the University. His statute inside the Church was also quite debatable. Was he a member of the clergy or not and who had the jurisdiction on him? The commission decided that Nicolas was a monk indeed and he was officially received inside the Cistercian order which occupied a prominent place in France.
Nicolas was secretly brought several times during his trial in front of the King and avidly interrogated. Charles, maybe more than everybody else, was fascinated by his stories, dreaming with open eyes about those distant exotic places. During one of those meetings, Nicolas handed to the King a copy of the first two chapters of his book “Les Merveilles d’Orient”, written in a heavily d’Oc influenced French.
Charles read them in the same night, asking for more next day. But the book was still in progress and only one more chapter could be delivered. Therefore Nicolas received an army of scribes who start recording his words. The book was written in good quality paper, as Paris had become the European centre of paper manufacture. It was written in a very Occitan influenced French instead in Latin.
King Charles IV invited him in his castle at Vincennes to being closer to him and even asked to have built a special gallery that connected the Royal apartments to the pavilion were the Nicolas was hosted. Nicolas de Manduel spent the next year having his time split between discussions with the King, long debates with Roger Bacon and his favorite apprentice, Andrew Delsarte, the one will exceed his master in terms of scientific and philosophic achievements. During this time Bacon had written an addendum to his greatest work “
Opus Maius”, named “
Opus Minor”. This included several chapters dedicated to Medicine and alchemy, but also one of geography and astronomy. It is debatable if his several proposed formulas on how to make gunpowder were the result of this collaboration with Nicolas de Manduel or it was grace of his relationship with William of Rubruck, a Franciscan which visited the Mongol Empire and also spend several years in the Orient. However, the medicinal part was definitely influenced by Chinese ideas and precepts and could be directly linked to Manduel.
The livre “Les Merveilles d’Orient” was also finalized in 1277 but it was considered too controversial and with disrupting potential to be published by the University Commission. Only several copies, cleansed of anything dubious, were allowed and only for a very restraint auditory, including the King, Bacon and several other notable members of the University and clergy.
Fortunately for humankind, an un-cleansed version make his way to the “black market” and soon thousands of copies were made. In only a couple of years the book was wildly written, in secret, in all circles, being them nobility, clergy or the increasing bourgeoisie. Being written in French instead Latin and with a very colorfully language, it was enjoyed by the audience. Being a contraband product it was soon exported everywhere in the Christendom and even translated in other several languages. With such a success, it will be quite obvious to see it being the first printed book in French language, which not only will popularize it even further, but also will make the French even more spoken. The restriction from publish it will be lifted after several decades as it was clearly not only inefficient, but it might even made it more attractive in the first stance. The book was indeed commercialized as the marvelous book fool of secrets which the elites wanted to keep them in secret.
***
In 1278, King Charles IV of France and I of England, Duke of Aquitaine, Brittany and Lotharingia[1], was still without an heir. He recalled his only son Edouard from Mont Saint Michel, after the boy had sneaked out and spend an entire week in Avranche region to the exasperation of the monks which searched for him desperately. Charles brought his son in Vincennes castles and charged Nicolas de Manduel with his education. His presence in Vincennes enraged everybody, starting with Queen Christina and ending with Philip of Arles.
The King found that any prospects of awarding him any county or land will might provoke another regency council therefore he decided to drop it. In December 1278, the Queen announced her pregnancy. While some could point that the child might have being conceived during the Christmas fasting, the pregnancy was so waited that it was the last of the concerns.
With maybe a true heir on the way, the presence of Edouard became unbearable and unsustainable. The Great Council, presided by Philip of Arles, give the King an ultimatum. Edouard must to disappear from the court and embrace the monastic life… In his turn, Charles tried to delay it as much as possible.
On the faithful day of Thursday 11 August 1278, the Queen of France, Christina de Norvège, brought to life a healthy son, named Philip in the memory of his great-grand father. From Rhine to Brest, from Tyne to Montpelier, all the realms rejoiced, the bells of the churches and monasteries announced to all living souls that the throne was secure and the danger of a succession crises was alleviated. Mass were performed everywhere and the Great Council gathered to prepare the baptizing. A special tax (relatively modest) to cover the expenses was imposed in all the lands but nobody complained.
The baptism was performed on Sunday 16 September 1278 in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and in the presence of the entire political crème of the realm, the high clergy of France and England, as well as the Bishops of Liege and Nantes while thousands of Parisians waited outside. The god-father of the prince was, of-course, Philip de France, King of Arles. The boy was dressed in a blue and red cloth made from the best Chinese silk, having fleurs de lys embroidered in gold while the other details were embroidered with silver and diamonds.
With this occasion, the King’s mother, Marie de Brabant, was allowed for the first time to leave his castle of Coudenberg (in Bruxelles) in order to assist the ceremony, but hidden in a special loge in the cathedral. The King refuse to meet or speak with her and she was escorted back to her forced domicile soon after the ceremony. The relation between the King and his mother was… completely unidirectional. Marie write to him every week, while Charles received the letters and do not even opened. Most of them are kept in the National Archives and were opened only in the 19 century. Sadly several were lost but the rest of them are still available. They are proofs of how anxious and unsettled was the soul of the King and how persuasive and manipulative was his mother. Charles had stopped to read her letters after several years on continuous psychical bombardment in this form. As far we know, he had never responded to her. Marie de Brabant will live for several years more, up to 1284, dying in her castle aged 60. Her body was brought to Saint Denis and buried as next to her husband Louis despite neither were King and Queen of France. On her plaque was written:
“Requiescat in pace nostra mater Mathildis, humilis filiam Ecclesiae, Romanorum Imperatricis, in suo iure Ducissam Brabantiae, Ducissam Aquitanie, Britannie et Lotharingiae” [2].
It will be after her death that Charles will fully take control over the Duchy of Brabant and exert a stronger influence over the entire Duchy of Lotharingia. The duchy of Brabant will be dropped from use, being merged into the Lotharingian one which it was overlapping. The castle of Coudenberg where the Duchess lived her second part of her life was an architectonic jewel, becoming the source of inspiration of a new kind of castles which put more emphasis on comfort, utility and artistically beauty than on security and strength of fortifications.
***
While everybody celebrated the baptism of Prince Philip, two persons dressed in black soutanes were heading south, escorted by two dozens of well-armed men...
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Source of the photo:
http://www.artcrimeillustrated.com/2015/05/the-name-of-rose-1986-sean-connery-and.html
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[1] Lower Loraine
[2] approx trad: "
May rest in peace our mother Mathilde, humble daughter of the Church, Empress of the Romans, in her own right Duchess of Brabant , Duchess of Aquitaine, Brittany and Loraine" ( the lower)
[23] Cheers
@galileo-034 !
