The Maid and the Queen by Nancy Goldstone Read Free Book Online Page A

of having to beg his ransom from everybody and anybody.”
    This issue of ransom was central to fifteenth-century warfare. The expenses associated with raising and maintaining armies were prohibitive, and a favorite way to recoup costs was to capture a royal antagonist and hold him hostage for a crippling sum. As usual, Marie had seen clearly to the core of this issue: with so much money at stake, not even the closest of friends or allies could be relied on for funds; only members of the immediate family would care enough to bankrupt themselves to ransom a loved one. Her son’s royal rank ensured that this threat of capture and ransom would dog him whenever he undertook to assert his rights to southern Italy, and she was warning him, and by implication Yolande, of the need to be prepared for this eventuality. This last admonition on the part of her mother-in-law was one that would resonate with Yolande of Aragon.
    Marie died peacefully in June 1404. It was well for Yolande that she had had the benefit of this remarkable woman’s counsel. For not even Marie of Blois could have anticipated the terrible darkness, the pernicious violence, the wanton destruction and bloodshed that would overtake the once-mighty kingdom of France in the coming decades. A storm of epic proportions was brewing, brought about in equal parts by insanity, ambition, and greed, and this tempest would rage until Joan of Arc, an obscure peasant girl of extra ordinary courage, suddenly stepped out of the shadows to quell it.
    * Charles V, king of France, had three brothers—Louis I, duke of Anjou; Jean, duke of Berry; and Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy—and three sisters—Joan, queen of Navarre; Marie, duchess of Bar; and Isabelle, duchess of Milan.
    * In France, this title was always referred to as simply “King of Sicily”—the rest was understood.
    * Three years later, when his French bride was still only nine, an heirless Richard would be summarily deposed by his cousin Henry IV. He should have married Yolande.
    * In Anjou they used the French calendar, which began the New Year at Easter. In Provence they used the Italian calendar, which started the New Year on January 1.

C HAPTER 3
    The Mad King
of
France

    ISTORY IS COMMONLY depicted as a tangled skein of cause and effect, design and fate, so interwoven as to make it impossible to isolate any one factor as key to the progression of human affairs. But this was not the case in France during the first two decades of the fifteenth century, where almost every disturbance in the political arena can be traced back to one fundamental determinant: the insanity of Charles VI. Here was a madness so pervasive, so destabilizing, that it afflicted not only a king but a kingdom.
    Possibly the most poignant aspect of the whole predicament was the potential Charles VI exhibited at the start of his reign. He inherited his throne in 1380 when he was just eleven and his younger brother, Louis, later duke of Orléans, eight. The old king, Charles V, had managed to recover most of the territory lost to England during the first half of the Hundred Years War and so was able to leave his eldest son a relatively strong and peaceful kingdom. The specter of conquest by England, which had haunted France in the middle of the century, faded, and in the boy king’s youthful energy there was every hope for the future.
    Charles VI was a charming scamp, high-spirited, fun-loving, and sociable. Christine de Pizan, who knew him, described Charles as a tall, well-built young man, attractive even with his prominent nose. (Both Charles and his younger brother Louis, duke of Orléans, inherited their father’s distinctive proboscis.) Unlike Charles V, who had been sickly, preferring booksand scholars to physical activity, Charles VI was an athlete who loved nothing better than a good joust, a trait that augured well for his ability to protect his kingdom in times of strife. His personality too differed markedly from Charles V’s