The History of the Renaissance World (85 page)

The compromise, signed at Bretigny on May 8, 1360, allowed John to return home. He entered Paris, after four years of imprisonment, to the sentimental relief of his people. This brought Charles of Navarre’s hopes to a sharp end; seeing his supporters melt away, he retreated to Navarre.
¹⁴

But the return of John II was not joyful. His second wife had died just before his arrival home. Paris was shabby and divided against itself. The countryside was infested with bandits. The treasury was empty, with three million crowns left to be found. The Dauphin Charles had lost his two daughters to illness within weeks of each other, and himself was suffering from a mysterious sickness that was causing his hair to fall out and his fingernails to shed.

John II was completely unable to talk the Estates-General into raising taxes for the payment of the ransom, and young Louis of Anjou, seeing no end to his captivity, escaped from Calais and made his way home. So in January of 1364, John himself announced that he would journey back to England to renegotiate the terms. He left the Dauphin Charles as regent in Paris; to his favorite son, the youngest, Philip the Bold, he gave Burgundy along with the title Duke of Burgundy. Louis of Anjou got nothing.

Edward welcomed the king of France in style and put him up at the Savoy Palace in London, the home of Prince John of Gaunt. But deliberations, says the contemporary
Chronicle of Canterbury
, “were delayed from day to day; and meanwhile the king of France remained at the Savoy without any final decision.” Early in March, John came down with a severe and obscure ailment. On April 8, three months after his returned to London, he died at the Savoy Palace. He was forty-five years old.
¹⁵

At this, Charles of Navarre “had hope,” says Froissart. He sent a Navarrese army, under joint Navarrese and English command, into Normandy; Charles’s biographer, the extraordinary Christine de Pisan, says that “three thousand men-at-arms” also began a march towards the Seine, intending to intercept Charles on the way to his coronation and prevent it. But the French royal army, pressing rapidly forward, met the invaders near the village of Cocherel, north of Paris. “There was much hacking and cutting with lances and battle-axes,” remarks Froissart, “. . . [and] of the Navarrois but few escaped being slain or taken.” Three days later, the Dauphin was crowned King Charles V of France.
¹⁶

The Battle of Cocherel ended Charles of Navarre’s last serious attempt to claim the French throne; he would agitate for the next twenty years, doing an ill turn to the French throne whenever he could, but he would never again rule any country other than Navarre. In 1387, he would come to a particularly nasty end; accidentally set on fire while wrapped in a brandy-soaked sheet to treat a skin condition, he would linger for fifteen excruciatingly painful days before finally dying in agony.
¹⁷

The Treaty of Bretigny, which had allowed John of France a last visit home, had guaranteed that neither Edward III of England nor the Black Prince would launch another challenge. England and France were, theoretically, at peace.
*
But the peace, fatally fragile, soon crumbled. The fighting restarted on the Spanish peninsula.

Pedro of Castile, inheriting the throne after his father’s untimely death of plague, had spent the first fifteen years of his reign in a territorial war with Pedro of Aragon. He was, says Froissart, “a cruel man . . . of such a horrid disposition, that all persons feared and suspected him.” He was, in fact, no worse than his brother kings in England and France; but fifteen years of war had not increased his popularity with his own people, any more than it had made John II more beloved by the French.
¹⁸

Right after Charles V’s coronation, Pedro of Castile’s illegitimate half brother, Enrique of Trastámara, challenged his rule, and “the kings of France and Aragon undertook to place him on the throne.” This was a reasonable enough decision on the part of Charles V of France; an alliance with Aragon, plus a Castilian king who owed his throne to France, would certainly provide a useful wall against further armies marching in from Navarre. A joint French-Aragonese army assembled and invaded Castile. Pedro summoned his barons and knights, but they too were war-weary and thinned by plague, and “scarcely any came.”

Pedro was forced to flee from his country into Gascony, where he asked for an audience with Edward the Black Prince and (says the
Canterbury Chronicle
) “begged him most urgently to give him military assistance.” As justification, he pointed out that he and the Black Prince were blood kin. The Black Prince’s great-grandmother, wife of Edward I, was Eleanor of Castile, Pedro’s great-great-great-aunt, which made the two men cousins, three times removed.
¹⁹

Most European royal families were at least cousins three times removed, but the Black Prince immediately agreed. The alliance would, after all, bring him face-to-face with the French again, and without breaching the Treaty of Bretigny.

In 1367, Pedro the Cruel marched back into Castile, accompanied by the Black Prince and an English army. The English-Castilian army defeated the French-Castilian army thoroughly at the border town of Navarette, and Enrique (in turn) fled from Castile, back to France. Charles V sent more reinforcements, and at the second encounter between the brothers, at the Battle of Campo de Montiel, the French-Castilian contingent won out. Pedro the Cruel was taken captive; Froissart says that when Enrique of Trastámara visited him in the tent where he was being held prisoner, “an angry altercation ensued, and the two brothers fought till King Enrique drew his poniard and plunged it into Don Pedro’s body.”
²⁰

Enrique was then crowned king of Castile. He owed his throne to the French; his coronation was a French victory over the English; and, emboldened by the triumph, Charles V declared that, since some of the terms of the Treaty of Bretigny had not yet been
fulfilled
by the English, the peace between the two countries was at an end. In the summer of 1369, he began to prepare an invasion force of ships and soldiers: “And the whole kingdom of England were much rejoiced at it,” Froissart concludes, “for they were quite prepared to give the French a good reception whenever they should land.” The will to war had outlived four kings, two treaties, and the bubonic plague; no matter how weary and impoverished both countries were, they would continue to fight.
²¹

*
Contemporary accounts merely note that he “departed this life,” but this is most likely a polite circumlocation for the Black Death—an undignified end for a monarch.

*
The Dauphin took his title from the province of Dauphiné, which was his particular possession. Charles was the first heir to the French throne to hold this designation; after his accession, he decreed that all future heirs to the crown would receive it.

*
Currency comparisons are always difficult. In the United States, in 2012, David of Scotland was worth the combined yearly income of the Kardashian family; John of France’s 500 million, in 2012 U.S. dollars, would pay the full four-year tuition for nearly three thousand Harvard undergrads, or (alternatively) buy one-fourth of the Dodgers baseball team, including the stadium.

*
The treaty also set up an installment plan for the payment of the still-pending ransom debt; it is not clear how much of the money was actually paid out over the next decades.

Chapter Seventy-Four

White Lotus, Red Turban

Between 1351 and 1382,
the Yuan dynasty collapses,
and the Ming take charge

W
HILE THE PLAGUE
across the Oxus had plenty of chroniclers, the plague in China went almost unrecorded. The only pointers we have to its severity are numerical: between the beginning and the end of the fourteenth century, the population of China dropped by
forty million people
.

Not all of this can be chalked up to bubonic plague. The century had begun with Mongol invasions; the establishment of the Yuan had happened at the cost of millions of lives. Like the rest of the world, China had seen severe weather patterns. Heat and drought, rain and mold, floods and windstorms, all had played a part in famine, failed crops, deaths from starvation. Plague had merely added itself to the catastrophes.

Misery had lent itself to the renewed spread of an old form of Buddhism: Amitabha, or Pure Land Buddhism, which promised rebirth into an undefiled and perfect world, the Western Paradise, for all who believed in the Buddha.
*
In the twelfth century, a charismatic Pure Land monk named Mao Ziyuan had preached that the Western Paradise could be experienced on earth, mystically: in the mind of the believer who was willing to meditate unceasingly on the name of the Buddha, concentrating all thought and will on the Pure Land. His followers took the name White Lotus Society. By the fourteenth century, the mystical White Lotus Society had flowered and divided into energetic subsects all over Yuan China. And it had developed a more immediate and less mystical hope: that a Prince of Light, a manifestation of the Buddha, would appear in the present and bring the Pure Land on earth. These White Lotus worshippers, looking forward to immediate deliverance, often adopted red turbans as a sign of their unity.
¹

The unhappy, unwieldy empire was still ruled by Kublai Khan’s great-great-great-grandson Toghon Temur, the “Emperor Huizong.” Toghon Temur was now thirty-one, a veteran of eighteen years of passive governing; his chancellor, the soldier-historian Toghto, was in charge of the country.

In 1351, Toghto was directing a massive repair project in the center of the empire. The Yellow river’s outlet to the sea frequently shifted—the land near the coast was flat, and silt buildup constantly pushed the river’s course back and forth—but the gargantuan flooding of the last years had now moved it far to the north, above the Shangdong Peninsula. The flooding had also blocked the Grand Canal. It had become impossible to transport grain from the rich farmland around the Yangtze to the southern capital, Kublai Khan’s perfectly square city of Dadu, except by sea.

Taking advantage of the city’s helplessness, a pirate named Fang Guozhen had assembled a fleet of outlaws and pranced along the coast, robbing coastal cities and intercepting grain ships to Dadu at will. The Yuan navy was unable to either capture or drive him off. But moving the Yellow river back to its old bed would make it possible to clean out and unblock the Grand Canal. Then the grain shipments from south to north could resume, protected by the shore from Fang Guozhen and his bandits.
²

Such a project needed many hands, and so Toghto recruited
corvée
labor—workers drawn from the peasant and farmer classes, required to work unpaid at the Yellow river site for a certain number of months per year. Corvée labor was horrendously unpopular; while the workers were digging up silt, their fields at home were going untended, and they would return to a reduced harvest and the same tax burdens as before. Yet Toghto imposed it on almost two hundred thousand Chinese residents of the central Yuan empire.
³

The backbreaking, heartbreaking work was the match that lit the stacked dry bonfire of Yuan China’s discontent.

One of the workmen press-ganged into the Yellow river project was a White Lotus follower named Han Shantong. Midway through the labor, he announced that he had uncovered, in the silt of the Yellow river, a one-eyed statue prophesying the arrival of the Prince of Light. Other White Lotus believers flocked to him, donning the red turbans as their mark. With their support Han Shantong proclaimed himself the rightful ruler of China, descendant of the last Northern Song emperor, sent to oust the oppressive and foreign Yuan powers.
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His little rebellion was immediately squashed into the mud by Toghto, who dispatched Yuan soldiers to arrest him. Han Shantong was promptly executed; his followers scattered, and his son Han Lin’er, whom he had declared his crown prince and heir apparent, disappeared into hiding. But Han Shantong had been merely the bellwether. Red Turban rebellions began to pop up all over the Yuan realm, fueled by wretched living conditions, fury at Yuan demands, and messianic hopes. After Han Shantong, at least five men proclaimed themselves the new emperor of China, and six or seven war leaders without imperial titles added themselves to the mix.
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