Relative prosperity returned to France. But with the English under control, Charles V also needed to manage his brothers, which he accomplished by granting them appanages and lieutenancies, in return for which they served his interests.65 Tensions threatened while Charles V surrounded himself with devoted and competent counselors, his marmousets. The royal brothers resented this. But the charismatic king intimidated them when necessary, ceding none of his royal authority.66 In this newly peaceful environment, the king devoted time and resources to cultivating a court where intellectual exchange took place and where he could construct and embody his ideal of kingship. Among the more than eleven hundred volumes that he left at his death were many “mirrors for princes,” confirmation of his commitment to justifying himself within a legal framework.67 Further witness to Charles V’s reflection on kingship is the care that he took to explain his understanding of the role of the monarch in the introductions to his royal ordinances. Typical of this approach, he begins an ordinance on care for lepers by avowing that he wishes with all his heart to care for the public good and the good government of his people.68
Still, the theories of kingship laid out in writing would have been accessible to a fraction of his subjects, most grasping kingship only as it was embodied in a specific human being. As Philippe Contamine has emphasized, the Valois made this relationship felt by means of “a political imagery, ephemeral or lasting, public or private, which was above all . . . an imagery of established powers: coins, medals, seals, frescoes, stained glass windows, sculptures [especially funerary], painted ceilings, paintings on wood or, even more, manuscript miniatures.”69 Charles V consciously cultivated his image not only in manuscript illuminations and sculpture but in joyous entries into the towns of his kingdom calculated to magnify his majesty.70 He also cultivated the religious dimension of his kingship, modeling his coronation ceremony on bishops’ ordinations and touching his subjects to cure their scrofula.71 Most interesting for our purposes, he took care to promote visually the principles of succession laid out in his regency ordinances. In the illuminations of the Grandes chroniques, his heir, Charles, is nearly always depicted with his brother, Louis, emphasizing the importance of rank.72 This emphasis is also made explicit in a set of dynastic sculptures decorating a pillar supporting the north tower of the cathedral at Amiens, commissioned by the king’s counselor and president of the Cour des aides, Jean de La Grange (1325–1402), bishop of Amiens from 1373. François Salet has described the ensemble of sculptures as a transcription in stone of the ordinances of 1374—in other words, of the fundamental principles of Charles V’s conception of the monarchy. The sculptures are arranged in three registers. Adorning the highest level of the ensemble are the figures of the Virgin and child and the patron saints of Amiens, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Firmin. The middle register is inhabited by Charles V, the dauphin Charles, and his younger brother, Louis. The occupants of the bottom register are the king’s advisors: Bureau de La Rivière, Jean de Vienne, and Jean de La Grange himself. The king’s brothers do not appear in the schema. On the contrary, the sculptures illustrate the line of succession: after Charles V, the dauphin, and, should something befall the dauphin, the younger son, all of them supported by the king’s advisors. Of course, history proved the sculptures a “costly and useless act of patronage,” writes Salet, for “everyone knows the fate of the ordinances when Charles V died, too early, certainly, in 1380.”73
Christine as Political Observer
Charles V’s final regency plans remain somewhat unclear, as noted above. However, if the wise king did indeed decide to appoint Philip head of a regency council, as Pierre d’Orgemont claims, this information, as we have seen, was contested. As for Christine’s perspective, I argue in what follows that she believed that Charles V had left regency of the kingdom to Louis of Anjou and that Philip of Burgundy was a usurper.
Most of what we know about Christine’s life comes from her autobiographical writings in the Livre de la mutacion de fortune, the Advision, and, to a lesser degree, the Chemin de longue étude. Other works, including her poetry and the Fais et bonnes meurs, add important details. In this section I refer to these works for autobiographical information on the poet’s feelings toward royal power and the Burgundians. Christine suggests that her earliest memories were of Charles V and the French royal court. She recounts in the Advision that Charles V invited her father to Paris to serve as his astrologer and physician, a great honor to the “da Pizzano ‘dynasty’ of notaries,” a noble family that had resided in Bologna from at least 1269. Christine’s paternal grandfather, Benvenuto, and her father, Thomas, were both doctors in the Faculty of Medicine in Bologna. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas di Mondino, also received a doctorate of medicine at Bologna, where he must have met Thomas da Pizzano before moving to Venice. Sometime before 1357, Thomas too moved to Venice and married Thomas di Mondino’s daughter. The couple eventually returned to Bologna and had three children, two boys, Paulus and Aghinulfus, and Christine, born in about 1365.74
Thomas accepted Charles V’s offer. Initially, he went alone, planning to spend only one year in France, but Charles V requested that he summon his family from Bologna. After delaying for three more years, Thomas complied. When the family arrived, writes Christine, “the very good and wise king” received them “with joy.”75 The relationship between Thomas and the king grew still closer over the years, as Suzanne Solente has verified by tracking Thomas’s changing appellations. In 1372 he is referred to as “our astronomer”; later that year he is “our beloved and faithful physician” (nostre amé et feal phisicien), and, in 1380, “our beloved and faithful counselor and physician” (nostre amé et feal conseillier et phisicien).76 Moreover, Autrand suggests that Thomas served Charles V in diplomatic missions.77 Thomas was well compensated for his services. Christine claims that he received one hundred francs a month, plus that much again in books and gifts. In addition to his salary, the king promised to provide for Thomas’s future with a pension of five hundred livres.78
Charles V, gift giver, is inextricably associated in the poet’s writings with harmony, wealth, and joy. The order embodied in the king extended into his kingdom, even into Christine’s own life. As long as the king remained at the summit of the social hierarchy, prosperity was assured. Embracing her own place in the hierarchy, Christine benefited from the good that flowed from Charles V’s kingship. Although she gently mourns Thomas’s inability to manage his money, she fully accepts her father’s authority and celebrates his positive qualities.79 She also describes her marriage to Étienne de Castel, of a noble Picard family, as a happy result of the hierarchical system of reciprocal obligation. Étienne seems to have been a particularly apt choice, probably the son of another close associate of Charles V. Gilles Malet, who created the first inventory of the holdings of the king’s library in 1373 (a second was done in 1380), was the executor of the will of an Étienne de Castel, “armurier, valet de chambre et brodeur” of Charles V.80 In any case, Thomas selected the younger Étienne for his erudition, although a man so esteemed by the king could choose his son-in-law from a large pool of eligible candidates, as Christine explains.81 As a notary for the king, Étienne would have moved in circles associated with early Parisian humanists like Jean