TOO MUCH IS NEVER ENOUGH

Somehow once the idea got around, started circulating,it became an axiom of faith that a prince’s duty is magnificence. The four sons of King John took up their noble burdens with a tasteful zeal.It was buy cheap and sell high, or loot and hoard. They collected pearls and tapestries, illuminated books and lapis lazuli, ermine and statues, and tennis courts and rubies. When they died, exhausted by history’s most extravagant spending sprees, they left behind collections that were in themselves works of art.

When times are prosperous , the artist thrives, living high and heedless. When dark depressions come, he is the first to suffer, while the collector has his day.The collector no doubt desires to forget the encompassing woe in the contemplation of beauty; but he buys cheap, hoards and gloats. His urge is to possess, to secure, to survive the evil days with his collection augmented.

The latter years of the fourteenth century and the early years of the fifteenth were the grimmest period in French history. The Black Death of 1348 and the lesser plagues that followed destroyed at least a third of France’s people. The everlasting war with England, a four hundred year war with long truces, erupted into bloody activity. Plundering raids, official and private, crisscrossed French territory. Taxes and forced levies robbed the poor of their few possessions. The voice of the people was a long cry of pain. While France agonized, the rich collected. The example was set by King John II and his sons. This intensity of activity toward material accumulation seemed to show no level of cognitive-dissonance between their Catholic belief system, the well-being of their subjects, and the desire to live off the backs of these impoverished citizens.

”that a rich man who contrives to live rich cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless he sells all he has, and that it cannot do him any good to keep the commandments while keeping his riches” (Hilary of syracuse in a report he wrote to Augustine in 415, about ‘dangerous ideas’ argued by some local Christians)”

King John succeeded to the French throne in 1350. He was commonly called, and still is, Jean le Bon; but ”le Bon” could be pronounced with a mocking intonation, to suggest that a better epithet would be ”the Stupid. He is generally regarded as slow witted, obstinate, greedy, and capricious in the beheading of his advisors. But he loved pretty things, jewels, goldsmithery, material and furniture. In fourteen years of turmoil and tragedy he managed to buy 235 tapestries. He patronized artists, craftsmen, and men of letters, who naturally termed him ”the Good” without irony.

King John had four sons: Charles, the dauphin, destined for the throne; Louis, Duke of Anjou; John, who was to become Duke of Berry; and Philip, the future Duke of Burgundy.

The nearly permanent war with the English came to a climax in 1356. Edward, the Black Prince, commanded the English. Outnumbered, he took up a strong defensive position near Poitiers. King John and his sons led the French in a gallant but foolish attack. In the hot action King John weilded a mighty battle-axe, but it was time for generalship, not knightly prowess. When fortune frowned, he ordered his four sons to the rear. The elder sons obeyed, some said all too readily, but fourteen-year-old Philip joined his father, warding off attackers. When the two were captured, Philip heard and Englishman sneer at his father; though the boy was wounded, he smote the defender in the face. At Poitiers Philip gained the sobriquet ”le Hardi” , the Bold, which he bore proudly for the rest of his life. But the battle was lost, and John and Philip were hauled off to England.

The royal visitors were royally received. There is a cousinly solidarity among princes, as strong as nationalism, or stronger; perhaps based on a shared precarity of existence and common degree of alertness. The visitors were lodged in comfortable castles and were entertained with hunts, tourney’s, and cock-fights. Dainties were imported for their table , and wines from Languedoc. The prisoners were served by a staff of seventy-one Frenchmen, including an astrologer, a jester, and a ”king of minstrels”. King John sent for his court painter, Girard d’Orleans, and paid him the handsome salary of six shillings a day. It was perhaps in England that Girard painted the famous representation of his master, which is one of the

st French panel portraits known and may be the first realistic portrait of modern times.

France, for some unknown reason, longed to have her monarch back. After four years, the terms were settled. Of these the most onerous was the payment of a gigantic ransom of three million gold crowns. The king was released so that he might raise the ransom, while three of his sons and a band of high nobles submitted to captivity as hostages for him. The king used every device to collect the ransom, grinding most of it out of the wretched poor. Still, in the end, he was a million crowns short. Then his son Louis D’Anjou broke his parole and returned to France. King John was shocked and humiliated by such conduct. He returned voluntarily to London, being a proper gentleman and either the Good or the Stupid, or a bit of both. He was warmly greeted by his English friends and was pleasantly quartered in the Hotel de Savoie. He then solved a good many problems by dying, in April, 1364.

John the Good was succeeded by his son Charles V, ”le Sage” or the Wise, or perhaps better, the Sensible. Froissart calls him harshly wise and cunning. He was delicate, suffering from poor circulation, neuralgia, perhaps ulcers. More diplomat than soldier, he enjoyed calm and peace, church services and conversation. He had thought of entering the priesthood, and was phenomenally chaste, forbidding men,s short jackets and women’s tight dresses on moral grounds. He took his pleasure listening to music and to readings from the Bible and instructive histories. He was curious about science, expecially astrology and medicine, and sometimes invited professors  from the university for an evening of serious talk. He was regarded as a philosopher by the vulgar, not by the philosophers.

Charles accepted withal the principle of ”magnificence” as the duty of a prince. Even in those hardest of hard times the king, emblem and embodiment of his kingdom, was expected to represent its pride through display and generosity. The cheering crowds, mystically bound to their master, felt an emotional sharing in his public splendor and rejoiced in his processions and festivals, though they themselves were due to pay the scot. Pomp and circumstance filled the commoners with religious awe. Charles built fine castles, including the Bastille and a pleasure palace near Paris, sweetly named ”Beaute” . He transformed an embellished Vincennes and the Louvre with sculptures, stained glass windows, wainscotings, tapestries. And he collected.

At his Melun castle alone he possessed twenty-seven crucifixes of gold and twenty-seven of silver, seventy two silver statuettes, sixty three altar dressings, forty-seven royal crowns, seven dozen gold plates, and six dozen gold spoons. Most splendid were his twenty-six nefs, or ships, imposing structures set on the lord’s dining table , containing his cup, spoon, fork, a deposit of spices, and a ”touchpiece” to detect poisons. Some nefs represented castles ; others were adorned with human figures, lions, dolphins, eagles and angels. To the nef every guest and servant bowed, as to a shrine. Among the other items in Charles inventory were silver bells and whistles, toys, mirrors, checkerboards, and cups made of ostrich eggs set in silver.

The unlimited desire of Charles V to hoard art seems a Christian phenomenon that is not found to the same extent in its Eastern and Middle Eastern variations of the faith. ”The pure materialist does not consider anything to be sacred, and indeed denies or does not recognize even the term sacredness itself. He holds nothing to be sacred. He has no religion-based moral guidelines or axioms to limit or direct his critical thinking, because he believes only in material, and in accidental interactions of bits of matter. That’s his religion, or his guiding belief system, which he cannot materially prove to be true, but which he rigidly holds, professes and adheres to – get this – by faith alone.

It’s a rather silly superstition, or superstitious belief, based on nothing material or natural, although devotees claim to believe only in the material and the natural.Nevertheless, it is dangerous, partially because in denying sacredness it denies, among other things, the notion that human life is sacred. Once that ethic is done away with, it clears the ground for the political and legal promotion of everything…”

It is as if medieval  religious belief became rigidly codified as a way to meet God in dialogue; as if the orthodox canon controlled worship as an exclusive and not one of among  a myriad different ways to establish the link with god; outside these narrow parameters, looting, oppression, and killing were perfectly acceptable and could be done with a clear conscience. The codification of faith allowed a segmentation with regard to actions; even love could be codified.