Further proof of trust and affection toward Louis can be seen in Charles VI’s commissions to the Parisian goldsmith Hermann Ruissel in the years before the onset of his madness. In seventeen of his thirty-two total commissions from Ruissel, the king included a request for his brother for the same item.42 Had the double requests begun only after the king’s insanity, it would be difficult to attribute the impetus with certainty to the king, but the fact that such commissions were already common indicates that Charles VI instigated the gift giving himself.
The Calamity
All was disrupted in August 1392 by Charles VI’s insanity, an affliction from which the king would suffer for the rest of his life. The initial episode occurred en route to Brittany, toward which he was leading an army to avenge Clisson, at that point the victim of a failed murder attempt at the hands of Pierre de Craon, exiled from court a year earlier by Louis of Orleans.43 Craon had fled to Brittany, where he was protected by the duchy’s leader, Jean. After the initial incident, Louis and the uncles gathered in Creil with the raving Charles VI, who recovered his senses within a few days, raising hope that the incident would be isolated.44 Still, Philip seized the opportunity to reestablish himself as the head of the government with the assistance of the Duke of Berry, wreaking vengeance on the marmousets, who again fled for their lives, as we have seen, and attempting to distance Louis from power.45
Louis could no longer be pushed aside. Although it is true, as Michael Nordberg writes, that Philip did not interfere with Louis’s plans for Italy, even working with him, accusations surfaced in 1393 that Louis was bewitching the unfortunate king, which suggests trouble.46 Given the suddenness and severity of the episodes, suspicions of sorcery were inevitable. Although Pintoin reports explanations ranging from an excess of black bile brought on by anger to divine displeasure over French sinfulness, most of the nobility and the masses believed the king to be the victim of a spell.47
As we saw in chapter 1, in January 1393, the king promulgated an ordinance naming Louis regent in the case of his death. Although he would plunge into another seven-month stretch of madness later that year, the king had made a relatively full recovery, suggesting that the ordinance reflects his own will.48 It is not clear when the king ceased to be functional; surely, after a certain point he was never capable of reasoning, although ordinances continued to be promulgated in his name. The regency ordinance in any case reflects Charles VI’s fear that he would die early, but it also indicates his desire to clarify the regency situation.49 Around the same time, Pintoin describes an official attempt to cure the king through witchcraft in 1393: anguished counselors brought a charlatan magician named Arnaud Guillaume to court. Arnaud assured the queen and the nobility of the kingdom that the king was being bewitched by “certain” actors. Earlier in the passage, Pintoin indicates that Louis’s wife was a prime suspect. According to Pintoin, the king preferred Valentina to everyone, even the queen. Valentina went to see him daily, Pintoin remarks.50 Froissart, who in contrast to Pintoin is not sympathetic toward Valentina, assumes that she was bewitching the king with spells because she coveted the throne for her husband.51
Although Froissart and Pintoin depict Valentina as the target, I would suggest that these chronicles in fact preserve traces of Philip’s accusations of Louis, with Valentina functioning as a double for Louis. It was a common practice to attack a powerful lord through his wife, one that reappears in chronicles over the years.52 As we will see in more detail in chapter 6, Jean Petit’s justification, in 1408, of Louis’s assassination on the order of Jean of Burgundy accuses Louis and Giangaleazzo Visconti of conspiring to kill the king. Petit also accuses Louis of trying to poison the dauphin, an attempted crime attributed to Valentina by other sources.53 This interchangeability of husband and wife suggests that although both were accused by the Burgundians, Louis was the real target.
The next incident of witchcraft recorded by chroniclers also includes Valentina, and it occurs just as French relations with Valentina’s father, Giangaleazzo Visconti, break down completely, and the French enter into an alliance with his rival, Florence. The chronicles record Valentina’s fleeing from court under the pressure of vicious slander. Pintoin writes that in addition to the king, many others throughout the kingdom began to suffer from the same disease, blaming magical spells. At court, too, both men and women circulated gossip about the Duchess of Orleans. Finally, the Duke of Orleans was persuaded to send his wife from court to avoid scandal, ushering Valentina from Paris in a magnificent cortège to another of their properties.54 With Louis trying to create a kingdom in Italy with the help of Giangaleazzo, attacking Valentina would have been a means of getting at both men. Froissart reports that Giangaleazzo, apprised of his daughter’s danger, sent messengers to the king and his Royal Council to plead on her behalf. However, the king answered very curtly, Froissart reports.55 He had withdrawn his favor from the Visconti.
The next episode of witchcraft Pintoin recounts depicts the conflict between the dukes in 1398. Pintoin explains that Louis of Sancerre, then connétable of France, sent two Augustinians to cure the king with magic. Most interesting about this episode is that Pintoin explains that the pair frequented the Duke of Burgundy, whom they informed that the king was certainly the victim of some outside black magic. But, unable to restore the king’s health, they fingered the Duke of Orleans. This accusation provoked a brutal reaction: degradation from their offices and decapitation. While Pintoin does not say so explicitly, he makes it clear that the Augustinians were in the pay of Philip of Burgundy.56 The chronicle of Juvénal des Ursins gives a somewhat different story, describing the arrest of the Augustinians as one more blow in a cycle of attack and counterattack between the uncle and nephew, and adding that the attacks were motivated by the jealousy between the two dukes.57
A solemn determinatio published by the university on September 19, 1398, condemning twenty-eight articles related to magic, seems related to the dukes’ war of words.58 All magic is blameworthy, according to the determinatio, even when practiced with good intentions. But as much as it tries to halt the use of magic to cure the king, the document seeks to dampen the ducal dispute by stressing the gravity of the charges of witchcraft. Some sermons of Jean Gerson, chancellor of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, are further evidence of the anxiety that the ducal rivalry was causing during the 1390s. In his sermons, Gerson tries to control the dispute by asking his listeners to be less sensitive to the culture of médisance (slander) that marked the court. Secret slander and deceitful flattery posed a genuine danger, he warns in several sermons preached before the Duke of Burgundy, whose chaplain he became in April 1393. In a sermon on the feast of Saint Anthony in 1393, Gerson laments defamation, attempting to arouse shame in those guilty of it and righteous anger in the innocent.