died as if struck down by lightning, and his eldest son, Louis X, having been murdered after eighteen months on the throne, Philippe V, his second son, seemed destined for a long reign. But now six years had gone by, and Philippe V had died in his turn before attaining the age of thirty.
Let us look for a moment at his reign which, compared with the tragedies and disasters that were to follow, seems something of a respite from calamity. If you glance casually through a history of the period, it may seem a colourless reign, possibly because your hand comes away from the page unstained with blood. And yet, if we look deeper, we shall see of what a great king’s days consist if Fate is against him.
For Philippe V, the Long, had been a great king. By a mixture of force and cunning, of legality and crime, he had seized the crown, when it was at auction to the ambitious, while still a young man. An imprisoned conclave, a royal palace taken by assault, an invented law of succession, a provincial revolt put down in a ten days’ campaign, a great lord cast into prison and a royal child murdered in its cradle – or so at least it was supposed – had all been stages on his rapid path to the throne.
On that January morning in 1317, when, as the bells rang out in the heavens, the second son of the Iron King had come out of Rheims Cathedral, he had reason to believe that he had triumphed, and was now free to pursue his father’s grand policies, which he had so much admired. His family had all had to bow to his will. The barons were checkmated; Parliament had submitted to his ascendancy, and the middle classes had acclaimed him, delighted to have a strong Prince again; his wife had been washed clean of the stain of the Tour de Nesle; his succession seemed assured by the son who had recently been born to him; and, finally, coronation had endued him with intangible majesty. There seemed to be nothing lacking to Philippe V’s enjoyment of the relative happiness of kings, not least the wisdom to desire peace and recognize its worth.
Three weeks later his son died. It was his only male child, and Queen Jeanne, barren from henceforth, would give him no more.
At the beginning of summer the country was ravaged by famine and the towns were strewn with corpses.
And then, soon afterwards, a wave of madness broke over the whole of France.
Driven by blind and vaguely mystical impulses, primitive dreams of sanctity and adventure, by their condition of poverty and by a sudden frenzy for destruction, country boys and girls, sheep-, cow- and swineherds, young artisans, young spinners and weavers, nearly all of them between fifteen and twenty, abruptly left their families and villages, and formed barefoot, errant bands, provided with neither food nor money. Some wild idea of a crusade was the pretext for the exodus.
Indeed, madness had been born amid the wreckage of the Temple. Many of the ex-Templars had gone half-crazy through imprisonment, persecution, torture, disavowals torn from them by hot irons, and by the spectacle of their brothers delivered to the flames. A longing for vengeance, nostalgia for lost power, and the possession and knowledge of certain magic practices learnt in the East had turned them into fanatics, who were all the more dangerous because they disguised themselves in a cleric’s humble robe or in a workman’s smock. They had re-formed themselves into a secret society; and they obeyed the mysteriously transmitted orders of a clandestine Grand Master, who had replaced the Grand Master burnt at the stake.
It was these men who had suddenly transformed themselves one winter into village preachers and, like the Pied Piper of the Rhine legends, had led away the youth of France: to the Holy Land, they said. But their real goal was to wreck the kingdom and ruin the papacy.
And Pope and King were equally powerless in the face of these visionary hordes travelling the roads, these human rivers swelling at every cross-roads as if the lands of Flanders, Normandy, Brittany and Poitou were bewitched.
In their thousands, their twenty thousands, their hundred thousands, the pastoureaux were marching towards mysterious goals. Unfrocked priests, apostate monks, brigands, thieves, beggars and whores, all joined their bands. At the head of these columns a cross was carried, while the girls and boys indulged in the utmost licence, committed the worst excesses. A hundred thousand ragged marchers, entering a town to beg, soon pillaged it. And felony, which was at first merely an accessory to theft, soon became the satisfaction of a vice.
The pastoureaux ravaged France for a whole year and, indeed, with a certain method in their madness. They spared neither churches nor monasteries. Paris, aghast, saw an army of plunderers invade its streets, and King Philippe V spoke pacifically to them from a window of his palace. They urged the King to place himself at their head. They took the Châtelet by assault, attacked the Provost, and pillaged the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then new orders, mysterious as those assembling them, directed them on to the roads to the south. The people of Paris were still trembling with fear when the pastoureaux were already flooding into Orléans. The Holy Land was far away; Bourges, Limoges, Saintes, the Périgord and the Bordelais, Gascony and Agenais had to suffer their fury.
Pope John XXII grew alarmed as the flood approached Avignon and he threatened these false crusaders with excommunication. But they had need of victims, and they found the Jews. From then on, the urban populations applauded the massacres and fraternized with the pastoureaux. Amid the ghettoes of Lectoure, Auvillar, Castelsarrasin, Albi, Auch and Toulouse were to be seen here a hundred and fifteen corpses, and there a hundred and fifty-two. There was not a city in Languedoc that did not suffer this expiatory butchery. The Jews of Verdun-sur-Garonne used their children as missiles, and then cut each others’ throats so as not to fall into the hands of the lunatics.
Then the Pope ordered his bishops and the King his seneschals to protect the Jews, whose commerce was important to them. The Count of Foix, going to the help of the Seneschal of Carcassonne, had to fight a pitched battle with the pastoureaux and drove them back into the marches of Aigues-Mortes, where they died in their thousands, stabbed, bludgeoned, engulfed or drowned. The land of France was quaffing its own blood, devouring its own youth. In the end, the clergy and the officers of the crown joined in hunting down the survivors. The gates of the towns were closed to them; they were denied food and lodging; they were pursued into the passes of the Cévennes. Those captured were hanged in groups of twenty or thirty to the branches of trees. For most of the next two years there were still some bands wandering about; and they ranged as far as Italy before they finally disappeared.
France, the body corporate of France, was sick. Hardly had the pastoureaux fever abated, than lepers appeared.
Who could tell whether these tragic people, their flesh corroded, their faces death-masks, their hands stumps, who could tell whether these pariahs, restricted to lazar-houses or infected, pestilential villages, where they procreated among themselves, and whence they were forbidden to emerge without a clapper in their hands, were in truth responsible for polluting the waters of France? For in the summer of 1321 the springs, brooks, wells and fountains were in many places poisoned. And during that year the people of France panted thirstily beside their generous rivers, or drank only with fear in their hearts, expecting death at every sip. And had the Temple anything to do with that strange poison – compounded of human blood, urine, magic herbs, adders’ heads, powdered toads’ legs, desecrated hosts and the pubic hair of whores – which it was asserted had been introduced into the water supply? Had the Temple incited this accursed race to rebellion, inspiring it, as some lepers admitted under torture, to will the death of all Christians or infect them with leprosy?
It began in Poitou, where King Philippe V was staying; and soon spread over the whole kingdom. The inhabitants of town and countryside attacked the leper colonies and exterminated the members of the diseased race who had suddenly become public enemies. Pregnant women were alone spared, but only till their child was born. Then they were burnt. The royal judges endued these hecatombs with legality, and the nobility supplied men-at-arms. Then the public turned against the Jews once again, accusing them of being involved in a huge, if vague, conspiracy, inspired, so it was
