July 1st, 1392
King Charles VI is riding at the head of his army
And the leper has been following them for a half hour.
"Turn back noble King" the leper chefs, "You are betrayed!"
Those words, again and again.
As the minutes pass, Charles begins to sweat.
Is he... in danger?
This whole expedition is to punish a man who tried to assassinate his best friend.
He eyes his courtiers.
He feels them watching him, but when he looks they look away.
*Sigh* It is so hot.
A page, drowsy from the long ride, drops a lance.
It clangs when it hits the ground.
"Traitors!" Charles shouts, drawing his blade.
He rushes forward hacking at his retinue.
Stunned and unwilling, to draw swords on their most Christian King,
all the courtiers can do is wrestle him out of the saddle.
But by the time they pin him to the ground, five men are dead.
Charles stops struggling, his eyes roll back in coma.
The courtiers exchange looks.
The king is in the grip of madness
and soon, France will follow him.
Song: Birth of the People
Before the miracles began,
before the Siege of Orléans,
before the Saints appeared to a peasant girl,
France was a country cursed by God
and that began with King Charles the Beloved or as he became known,
Charles The Mad.
because that first psychotic episode would not be the last for the French King.
At times, he was perfectly lucid, able to rule as he used to.
But then, he would slip, failing to recognize friends and family,
not understanding that he was the King of France,
instead insisting he was Saint George.
Or wearing thick clothes with iron bands sewn in because he thought he was made of glass and might shatter if touched.
And on occasion, he would run wild through the halls of his residence.
Court officials had to brick up entrances to keep him inside.
With Charles incapacitated and often confined, rule fell to a Council of Regents overseen by Queen Isabeau.
And this wasn't actually the worst time for France.
There had been a truce in the Hundred Years War and the country was at peace. People were thinking about taxes, not armies.
Because here's the thing: while Charles was unable to rule consistently, he wasn't dead.
The crown hadn't passed to his sons. It was all about the council, and as councils will do, this one split into factions
Particularly as the older generation of council members died leaving their seats to their children. two main groups emerged:
The Armagnac, and the Burgundians, both led by men of the royal bloodline.
The Armagnac were led by the king's younger brother Louis Duke of Orleans
Powerful, rich, and famous for his voracious pursuit of women. He was extremely close to the Queen
Suspiciously close some said, even whispering that her third son
Charles was actually fathered by Louis. Economically
They wanted France to remain the traditional agricultural country that it was. On
the other side were the Burgundians led by the Kings cousin John The Fearless Duke of Burgundy
the Burgundians held large parts of northeast France where there was heavy English influence due to the invasions of the Hundred Years War, and
They were tied economically to Britain via the textile trade. So perhaps not surprisingly
they were
interested in developing France along an English model with strong cities and increased emphasis on pasture land and sheep farming. They also
Supported different popes. Yeah, there are like three popes running around at this time
It's a long story. We won't get into it
but their issues weren't all ideological. Other things that came between them were very, very, personal.
Rumor had it that Louis had tried to seduce John's wife, but the gist of the whole thing
is that a decade into the council's existence these factions were locked in a struggle to control the throne.
Relations between the factions had been curdling for years. When Louis of Orléans leveraging his close relationship with the Queen
Started minimizing Burgundian influence on the council while also buying up land in the Burgundians sphere of influence.
This also meant diverting royal gifts from John, to himself
Until Louis had an annual income five times larger than his rival.
John the fearless responded by adopting populist policies
whipping up the commoners and merchants by promising to abolish taxes that he said 'did nothing but pay for the
extravagant court life.' With tensions escalating the two sides kidnapped members of the royal family
Including the Dauphin, the crown prince back and forth.
Finally, they openly thretened violence.
Everyone needed to cool down, the court decided
So on November 20th, 14:07 the two parties reconciled in a court ceremony
But as they made their vows a hit squad living in a rented house talked through their plans
Sharpened their weapons and bought masks.
Three days later, a shoemaker's wife looks out her window and saw Louie of Orléans
leaving the Queen's residence. A song on his lips. She looked away heard shouts and looked back
She saw Louie pulled from the saddle thrown to his knees surrounded by men with swords and axes.
They struck him, again and again, beating him like a mattress.
Until a man in a red hood told them to scatter
The attack was so brutal that they had to scoop bits of Louie into his coffin.
His severed hand which he'd raised to defend himself, became a symbol of
Burgundian savagery, and John The Fearless owned it
Arguing that he'd ordered the killing for the good of the crown in order to remove an evil and corrupt tyrant.
Who defiled the Queen and plotted to murder the king with necromancy.
Charles reportedly in a bout of mental illness pardoned John and called for a truce.
A year later, the factions were embroiled in a civil war for a decade the fighting would start and stop with truce is called and broken on an
almost annual basis. And this civil conflict reached unheard-of levels of viciousness
Soldiers scoured the country sacking villages and looting everything, even the clothes off of the backs of slaughtered peasants.
Paris changed hands multiple times with poor Queen Isabeau having to hop between
factions in order to protect the inheritance of her _rapidly diminishing_ stock of sons. The Dauphins France
Seemed to be cursed with one dying of disease every few years and then, disaster struck
Seeing his opening Henry the fifth invaded the divided France in 1415 as can be seen in our history of England series
but his campaign quickly bogged down and an Armagnac force caught him as he was trying to March to the safety of an English held
City, the Armagnac had more men and the English were exhausted demoralized and riddled with disease
But there was the mud and the rain of arrows. The French Knights were heavily armored
But their horses were not and by the time the armored Armagnac forces slogged into the battle line
They were so exhausted
They could barely lift their weapons. Men who fell drowned in the sucking earth. The flower of French nobility three Dukes
Six counts and 90 other nobles died in a single day. Many others were captured
but for France the disaster continued. When their Burgundians seeing an opportunity
broke the fragile truce and made a grab for Paris. Instead of uniting the
factions played the blame game. The
Burgundians argued that the Armagnac had lost a crucial battle, and the Armagnac slammed they would have won if the
Burgundians had bothered to show up. The civil war continued and the English advanced with the Burgundians often standing to the side an
English ally in all but name.
Soon there were two Frances with two capitals.
Every level of society from the plowman in the fields to the
Academics in Paris show sides, and as France split the royal family did too
Though Originally in Armagnac queen is Isabeau defected to the Burgundians after her former allies imprisoned her, but her surviving son
Charles the Seventh now Dauphin despite rumours of a legitimacy was literally married to the Armagnac.
His stepmother Yolande of Aragon was a major string puller in the Armagnac faction.
So in Isabeau ceded her powers as regent to John the Fearless and the two combined forces to drive the Armagnac out of Paris.
They were also driving out her son and heir he had to flee amid
the monumental slaughter of the city's fall. The Burgundians held the capital and the king and queen the Armagnac held their heir.
This could not continue. It was decided the Dauphin invited
John, the fearless to peace talks the initial approaches in July of 1419
went well and the two agreed to meet on a bridge that
September in order to hash out a final settlement. In order to end the civil war the confrontation was tense
John knelt the Dauphin rebuffed him then something happened
perhaps John put a hand on his sword as a mark of respect or perhaps the Dauphins Armagnac attendance just claimed he did.
An Armagnac man buried an ax in John's face
the attendance beat him like a mattress and cut off his hand as John's assassins had done to their own Lord a
decade before. The Dauphin claimed that it was not planned, but he had motive had arranged the means and had the opportunity.
Most of France including his own parents believed that their heir to the throne had lured a Duke into peace
negotiations and murdered him.
So the new Duke of Burgundy made his flirtations with the English official, and
Entered an alliance with King Henry, and the French royal family did too.
After all their designated heir was a murderer.
No other issue could inherit the throne but Henry. Henry had a claim. So a year after John slaying the king and queen of France
disinherited their son married the English King to their daughter and
Officially declared Henry and his children the inheritors of the French crown
France was more split than ever
It's throne given over to a foreign occupier
every year the English and their allies pushed further south, and in a small village a girl named Joan began to speak with
saints.