The king's malady and Valentina as scapegoat
As we have seen, Charles VI suffered the first in lifelong series of episodes of insanity in August 1392 during a military expedition against the Duke of Brittany. The chronicler Michel Pintoin, monk of St.-Denis, reports that doctors initially believed the attack to have resulted from a release of black bile brought on by anger that his men-at-arms had not been reacting quickly enough.
Another explanation was that God was angry with the sinful French. But, given the suddenness and severity of the illness, Pintoin wrote, most of the nobility and the masses believed that the episode had been caused by a magical spell.[211] Cast by whom? Although several different sources describe the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy accusing each other of bewitching the king over the years, Pintoin, Froissart, and the anonymous author of the Le Livre des trahisons de France reveal that Valentina was a chief suspect.In an entry of 1393 Pintoin writes that many believed that Valentina was bewitching Charles VII, because, during his episodes of insanity, the king loved Valentina above all others, preferring her to the queen, whom he appeared not to recognize. The monk describes the afflicted queen, exhausted with crying, trying to show her husband her love but being thrust away, the king demanding, “Who is this woman whom I am so tired of seeing?”[212] Valentina visited him daily, which many interpreted in a negative way, writes Pintoin, all the more so because in Lombardy, where the duchess came from, poisons and spells were more common than anywhere else.[213] In the following entry, Pintoin writes that in the summer of 1393, the king’s despairing counselors summoned a magician named Arnaud Guillaume who claimed that he would be able to cure the king with a single word.[214] However, the king did not get better under Arnaud’s care, and, when the queen and the nobility questioned the magician about his visible lack of success, he declared that the same actors (“auctores”) performing black magic on the king were obstructing his cure.
Although Pintoin does not reveal their names, based on the previous entry, Valentina must have been among the supposed actors.Pintoin next mentions Valentina’s alleged sorcery in a description of the continuing anxiety at the court — doctors were called upon and then chased away when their cures failed.[215] At the same time, many others throughout the kingdom began to suffer from the same disease, and they also blamed magical spells. Pintoin explains in this entry that suspicion fell on Valentina because of her father, writing that “the people claimed that this was caused by witchcraft and spells and that the king had been bewitched and that this likely was caused by the Lord of Milan.” The reasoning, once again, was that “the king recognized only the Lord of Milan’s daughter, the Duchess of Orleans, when he was deranged, and that he could not bear for her not to visit him daily, and that whether she was absent or present he called her his beloved sister.”[216] Pintoin, however, insists that the charges against the duchess were without foundation, professing to believe, along with doctors and theologians, that the king’s state was the result of his youthful excesses.
Froissart, who, in contrast with Pintoin, is not at all sympathetic towards Valentina, also describes rumors that the Duchess of Orleans, coveting the throne for her husband, was bewitching the king.[217] [218] The chronicler reports that Valentina’s father, Lord of Milan Giangaleazzo Visconti, learned of the gossip and sent messengers to the king and his council with words that the king understood as a threat of war. The king took no heed and sent the messengers on their way.11 But Froissart’s best-known anecdote of Valentina’s supposed sorcery involves a poisoned apple. The anecdote is picked up and embellished in the Burgundian- promoting Livre des trahisons de France. The Duchess of Orleans, daughter of the said Galeazzo, was one day in the garden of the Hotel Saint Pol, where there were at that moment many noble lords, ladies, young ladies, and children of all sizes of the the lords and ladies. The accusations came to a head in 1396 when Louis of Orleans, acquiescing to the counsel of many lords, sent his wife from court. Pintoin reports that the Duke, hoping to prevent scandal (“scandalum”), arranged to have Valentina ushered from Paris to another of their properties in a magnificent cortege.[220] Valentina’s exile, however, did not bring an end to the king’s episodes. The dukes continued to exchange accusations of witchcraft. Pintoin depicts the conflict in 1398, explaining that connetable Louis of Sancerre summoned two charlatan Augustinians called Pierre and Lancelot to cure the king through magic. When the king continued to fall into his habitual episodes, the pair accused Louis of Orleans of interfering with their cures. The chronicle attributed to Jean Juvenal des Ursins gives a somewhat different version of the event, reporting a rumor that the Augustinians had claimed to be the Duke of Orleans’s men, and that, for this reason, the Duke of Burgundy had them arrested. A further incident involved a magician called Jean de Bar, who was eventually burned at the stake, and whom the Duke of Burgundy accused Louis of hiring, a charge Louis denied.[221] Whatever the truth, the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris perceived the frequent accusations at the highest levels of court as so disruptive that in 1398 Chancellor Jean Gerson published a solemn determinatio condemning 28 articles forbidding the use of magic, even for ostensibly positive reasons. The effects of the determinatio, however, were limited, for by 1403 Philip was back at work. The Duke of Burgundy’s accounts show that for a period of seven months beginning in October 1402, he paid a pair of magicians called Ponset du Solier and Jean Flandrin to discover who was guilty of bewitching the king and to cure him.[223] But, incapable either of discovering who was responsible or of curing the king, they were both eventually burned. Louis continued to be accused even after his violent death at the hands of Jean of Burgundy’s henchmen in late 1407. In early 1408, Jean engaged the Franciscan Jean Petit to justify the murder of the duke before the court. The harangue, transcribed in Monstrelet’s chronicle and known today as the “Justification of Jean Petit,” offers a long list of Louis’s supposed crimes, among them the use of magical spells and poisons for the purpose of getting rid of the king and assuming the throne for himself.[224] Valentina, in contrast, receives no mention. Indeed, Petit references the story of the poisoned apple, but makes Louis the culprit. Valentina’s complete absence from the justification and the transfer of the poisoned apple crime to Louis suggests that the real target of the accusations had always been the duke: that Valentina had been made the scapegoat. Although Valentina is named in the earliest days of the king’s malady as a suspect, then, she seems to have been a stand-in; Louis and Philip, and, after Philip’s death, Jean, were the chief antagonists in the battle to control the king. The king’s madness had occasioned a crisis in the form of a power struggle that threatened to break into a war between the dukes, and Valentina, the perfect victim, positioned both inside and outside the royal circle, both foreign and French, was expelled from the community in an unsuccessful attempt to restore peace.