Isabellan anecdotes and their sources
As a quick google search reveals, in the popular imagination, Isabeau of Bavaria remains mired in unflattering legend. Moreover, her black legend continues to crop up occasionally in broader histories of her period, with references to her imagined infidelities, her greed, and her general incompetence remaining fixtures.
The transmission of Isabeau’s black legend to the present is complex. During her lifetime, with the exception of a handful of entries for a single year, 1405, composed under the influence of the queen’s Burgundian enemies, chronicles report positively on her political activity.[147] [148] Michel Pintoin, author of the Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, relates for example in an entry of 1408 that Isabeau met with the Royal Council, which, frightened by Jean of Burgundy’s recent successes, decided that it was in the best interests of the kingdom that Isabeau continue to serve as regent. The queen’s lawyer, Pintoin reports, compared Isabeau to Queen Blanche of Castile, who had prudently ruled the kingdom with her son, the future St. Louis. In an entry of 1412, Pintoin reports that “the entire people again received the entering venerable queen and acclaimed her with such exuberant joy, such royal laud, it was as if they were receiving a king returning to the realm from triumphing over enemies.”[149] As we saw in the previous chapter, royal ordinances demonstrate great trust in her, assigning her from 1393 on to various positions: mediator between the feuding factions vying for control over the mad king, head of a college of guardians for the young heir to the throne, overseer of the kingdom’s finances. Even her role in the now infamous Treaty of Troyes of 1420 making Henry V the king’s legal heir in place of her own son, future Charles VII of France, attracted little comment during her lifetime. But some years after the Treaty of Troyes a rumor began that Isabeau Charles VII was not his father’s son, and, increasingly remote from the feud that had dominated the early years of the fifteenth century and guided by stereotypes of feminine fickleness, historians of the following centuries began to condemn her as manipulating the dukes for her own gain.[150] Her reputation deteriorated further when she became associated with the Cour amoureuse, the Court of Love, whose charter was discovered in the early eighteenth century.[151] These different threads were gathered together by champion of the Revolution Louise de Keralio in her diatribe against the queens of France.[152] Keralio makes the Germanspeaking Isabeau into a prototype of Marie-Antoinette—like Antoinette, Isabeau was “greedy, incapable of moderation in her desires, tormented by the desire to rule”—which was then taken up by nineteenth-century historians, many of whom were themselves rabidly anti-German for long-standing political reasons, and woven into narratives of national identity throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.[153] Although nineteenth-century French historians deserve immense credit for professionalization of the discipline and for sifting, transcribing, and piecing together the thousands of primary source documents that formed the basis for much of what we know today about the French Middle Ages, they often approached the women in their sources impressionistically, as potential love interests. For example, Adolphe Mathurin de Lescure, politician, historian and winner of multiple prizes from the Academie franςaise for his works, seems to have preferred brunettes to blondes. After a long rhapsody about the dark-haired Countess of Chateaubriant, he writes about King Franpois I’s extremely influential mistress, the Duchess of Etampes, that “after seeing the Duchess of Etampes, we can say without hesitation: here is a woman with whom it will be easy to be straightforward (“juste”) and whom we will not flatter. Auguste Vallet de Viriville, chartiste and professor at the Ecole des Chartes, whose archival work on Charles VII in particular has been appreciated for generations, writes of Agnes Sorel, mistress of the king, like a love-struck suitor. In the midst of the terrible moral disorder of Charles VII’s reign, Vallet de Viriville writes of Agnes that the most serious historian and the monuments most worthy of credence show her to have been sweet, pious, charitable, visiting the poor, soothing quarrels. A stranger to politics and nonetheless enjoying an immense, absolute influence over the king, she never participated in court affairs in the restless and misguided way that characterized the more or less hidden power of later favorites-en-titre, and wielded only a noble and generous influence through her good deeds.[155] She must be acknowledged as the last personification of the lady fair, he concludes, the inspiring lover of the Middle Ages, the ideal woman who could not exist in the world.[156] [157] Valentina Visconti, Isabeau’s French-Italian cousin and sister-in-law has also been an object of desire for French historians; Alfred Coville, inveterate critic of Isabeau, as we saw in the previous chapter, remarks that “the figure of Valentina Visconti is too often deformed by a delayed romanticism.”11Emile Collas pronounces her “one of the most seductive figures in our history.”[158] She was not a perfect beauty, but this only made her the more attractive: In fact, Valentina’s face is more adorably delicate, more pleasing, her bearing and attitude more charming than absolutely regular and classically beautiful. Add to this attractive face a cultivated spirit, the taste for art and literature that her education at her father’s refined court had given her, an appreciation, at once innate and developed by circumstance, for all things elegant, which, already familiar in Italy were beginning to spread throughout France... To the charms of Valentina’s face and mind add the qualities of heart that her contemporaries recognized in her.[159] Collas, moonstruck over Valentina, deplores the German Isabeau. Describing Valentina and Isabeau’s entry into Paris on 22 August 1389 for Isabeau’s coronation, he contrasts the uncorrupted Italian duchess with the debauched Teutonic queen: Together, these two young women introduced themselves to the Parisians, one of them, Valentina, leaving our history with the purest and most delicate of souvenirs, that of her conjugal love, the seduction of her intelligence, her courage in adversity, while the other, Isabeau, forgetting or scorning her queenly, womanly, and maternal duties, completely in the thrall of her low passions, betrayed and delivered her husband, her son and her people to the enemy. This one, the Bavarian, is the shame of the reign of Charles VI. The other, Italian and French, is its grace and honor.[160] Physically, Isabeau was not exactly repulsive, chartiste Marcel Thibault avers, but, in his mind, her features are not those associated with femininity. He does not specify from which images he derives his detailed view, but she has a “raised forehead, large eyes in a wide face with strong features; prominent nose with wide nostrils; large mouth with curved, expressive lips, round, fleshy chin; very dark hair....” True, she is not completely without charm, he continues, citing an extremely unflattering poem propagated by her enemies, the Burgundians: Isabeau did not have a pretty figure, nor regular features; still, she made up for her “low stature” in other ways: her face possessed a great “jolivite,” that is, it was vivacious and agreeable; her olive coloring and “her ugly skin,” seemed strange or foreign (“etranges”); she radiated a piquant charm...[161] But she simply did not conform to the ideal of the sparkling, witty conversationalist so prized in Thibault’s upper middle-class fin-de-siecle French society. Moreover, as wife and mother she was sorely lacking. when she was not off on some pilgrimage, or confined to bed because of childbearing, she lived in a whirlwind of insane amusements and splendid celebrations. And while the king wasted his strength, compromised his dignity, ruined his intelligence, she, because of her immoderate lifestyle, produced for the kingdom only sickly babies.[162] Above all, Thibault judges that she was never truly French. She dressed and behaved, outwardly, in ways “that were appropriate to her role on the French ‘stage;’ but, underneath, she remained German.”[163] Perhaps most damning of all, Isabeau has consistently been assumed to have been obese, an assumption that lingers even in the most recent scholarship. A 2022 study of representations of queens’ bodies refers to Isabeau’s “embonpoint,” her stoutness.[164] The notion seems to have worked its way into modern scholarship via nineteenth-century medical historian Auguste Brachet, who asserted that the queen suffered from a “pathlogical obesity.”[165] As for Brachet’s source, he cites Pintoin. However, when one follows the footnote, one discovers a significant misinterpretation. Pintoin reports that in 1409, the king, who had recently regained his senses, decreed, once again, that during his “absences” the queen would substitute for him; when she was prevented from stepping in because of “mole carnis” (physical maladies) or other problems, the dauphin would take over.[166] Brachet, following Pintoin’s translator Louis Bellaguet, misinterprets this as excess weight. But “moles carnis” is a common expression for physical illness or anguish of the flesh in a philosophical sense, as quick google search reveals. Still more conclusive, the king’s decree makes the translation of “moles carnis” as obesity impossible. As for the unflattering renditions of Isabeau, nineteenth-century historians tend to imagine three periods during which the queen lost control of her reputation: 1405, 1413, and 1417. In 1405, the year that I have highlighted as a particularly strained moment during which Jean of Burgundy tried to incite an uprising in Paris while Louis and Isabeau holed up in Melun, four criticisms of Isabeau appear in Pintoins’s chronicle, the only criticisms of the queen in that massive work.[167] It is crucial to note that the chronicler received his information during this period from Burgundians; the short-lived disapproval is therefore predictable.[168] During roughly this same time, a Burgundian poem, the “Songe veritable” appeared in which Charles VI’s closest advisors and Isabeau are chastised for cupidity. And yet, a close reading the entire poem shows that Isabeau enjoyed a positive reputation during those years, except among the Burgundians. The poem criticizes Louis of Orleans, Jean of Berry, and the king’s grand maitre d’hotel, Jean de Montaigu, whom Jean of Burgundy would have put to death in 1409, and, last, Isabeau: in short, all those standing between the king and Jean of Burgundy. In the poem, the allegorical figure Fortune proclaims that she is going to deprive the Orleanists, including the queen, of their greatest gifts. But, for the queen this is not her riches. Rather, it is her reputation. Indeed, Fortune adds, she has already begun to erode Isabeau’s good name over the past months. The timing, of course, corresponds to the time when Jean of Burgundy began to perceive Isabeau as a threat.[169] Fortune is scheming to ruin other courtiers—but has not yet succeeded at the time of the poem’s composition—and she is also planning to destroy Isabeau’s reputation. Such a scheme only makes sense if the queen was well regarded. The second period during which Isabeau’s reputation supposedly took a hit is the Cabochian uprising of 1413. A common perception exists that Isabeau’s ladies, arrested by the Burgundians, were targeted either because they were genuinely a dissolute group or because they were believed to be so. But neither of these is accurate. Their arrest must be seen the larger context of a series of arrests of non-Burgundians in positions of power. A survey of the chronicles shows that the dauphin’s chancellor and his chamberlain, both of whom the young man had appointed to replace the Duke of Burgundy’s men, were arrested along with several other of his men. About a month later a group of Parisians broke into the Hotel Saint Pol, where they demanded that another group associated with the royal family, male and female, be handed over.[170] The latter group was released on August 4.[171] The ladies, then, were arrested, like their male counterparts from the households of the king, the dauphin, and the queen because they held important positions. The chroniclers describing the incident do not distinguish between the reasons for arrest or on their gender, nor do they claim that the ladies were defamed. Only modern scholars focus exclusively on the queen’s ladies and assert that their bad reputations were the reason for their arrest. Finally, in April 1417 the Armagnacs, claiming that certain of the queen’s men-at-arms were up to “dishonest things,” made a sweep of Isabeau’s chateau at Vincennes, arresting several of her men-at-arms and shutting down her court.[172] On 5 April 1417, with the Armagnacs in control of Paris, the dauphin Jean of Touraine, a Burgundian protege, died suddenly. The new dauphin, Charles, had been married into the house of Anjou, which was Armagnac. Just before the death of the dauphin Jean, Isabeau and the young Charles had been in Senlis, negotiating the nervous dauphin’s entry into Armagnac-controlled Paris.[173] When Jean died, Isabeau and the new dauphin installed themselves in the chateau at Vincennes. But the Armagnacs did not want the new dauphin to remain with his mother, who was seeking reconciliation between the factions.[174] The Burgundians were preparing to march on Paris to “find a way to govern the king and the dauphin,” and the Armagnacs knew that if Jean of Burgundy made peace with the dauphin, they would be cast from power.[175] The Armagnacs, “the important men of the court,” counseled the king to chase the queen’s security from her chateau.[176] Isabeau was exiled to Blois and then Tours. Despite its flagrantly political motivation, early historians touted this incident as evidence of Isabeau and her court’s reputation for debauchery: the court, historians have assumed, had been regarded as a den of iniquity. And yet, even some contemporary chroniclers understood the political motivation. Monstrelet, for example, notes that with the queen safely under lock and key, the dauphin and the Armagnacs plundered her treasure.[177]