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The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France. R. Knecht J.
Читать онлайн.Название The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France
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isbn 9780007393381
Автор произведения R. Knecht J.
Издательство HarperCollins
‘Father of Letters’
Francis I was anxious to be seen as a great patron of learning as well as a great soldier. Though primarily a man of action, he liked books and enjoyed being read to at mealtimes. His baggage train included two chests of books whose titles point to his main interests: Roman history and the heroic deeds of antiquity. Like many other princes of his day, he was also interested in astrology, alchemy and the Cabala, occult sciences which were believed to hold the key to the universe. Francis asked Jean Thenaud to write two works for him on the Cabala, but the author warned him of its dangers: ‘It is far better’, he wrote, ‘to be ignorant than to ask or to look for what cannot be known without sinning.’
In the early sixteenth century the crying need for humanists in France was an institution in which classical languages that were excluded from the universities’ curriculum could be taught. In February 1517, Francis announced his intention to found such a college. He invited Erasmus to take charge of it, but the great Dutchman was far too keen on his own intellectual freedom to tie himself to the service of any prince. So Francis had to fall back on Janus Lascaris, who was now head of the classical college recently founded in Rome by Pope Leo X. As a first step towards establishing a college in France, the king asked Lascaris to set one up in Milan and provided him with some funds, but these soon ran out and Lascaris had to abandon the venture. In January 1522, Francis decided to establish a college for the study of Greek at the Hôtel de Nesle in Paris, but before this could get under way, his attention was absorbed by his war with the emperor which had begun in 1521.
The beginnings of heresy
Heresy was not unknown in France at the close of the Middle Ages, but except in parts of the south which had been infiltrated by Waldensianism (see below p. 221), it was not an organized movement. Thus Erasmus was broadly correct when he described France in 1517 as the only part of Christendom that was free of heresy. But this happy state was short-lived. In 1519, only two years after Martin Luther had posted up his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg, Lutheranism first appeared in Paris. John Froben, the Basle printer, reported on 14 February that he had sent 600 copies of Luther’s works to France and Spain. They were being avidly read, even by members of the Paris Faculty of Theology. In July 1519, Luther and Eck held their famous debate in Leipzig, and soon afterwards they agreed to submit their propositions to the judgement of the universities of Erfurt and Paris. While the Paris theologians were pondering the matter, Luther gave them further food for thought by publishing three radical tracts. On 15 April 1521 the faculty published its Determinatio condemning 104 Lutheran propositions. On 13 June the faculty and the parlement assumed joint control of the book trade in and around Paris. It became an offence to print or sell any religious book without the faculty’s prior approval. On 3 August a proclamation was read out in the streets to the sound of trumpets, calling on all owners of Lutheran books to hand them over to the parlement within a week on pain of imprisonment and a fine.
Whatever his private beliefs may have been, Francis I repeatedly expressed his opposition to heresy, sharing the view, almost universally held in his day, that religious toleration undermined national unity. The oath he had taken at his coronation bound him not only to defend the faith, but to extirpate heresy from the kingdom. However, at this early stage of the Protestant Reformation heresy was not easily recognized; the boundary between Christian humanism, as expressed in the works of Erasmus or Lefèvre, and Lutheranism was far from clear. Nor was the king obliged to endorse any definition of heresy, not even that of the Faculty of Theology. Having already committed himself to the cause of humanism, Francis must have found it difficult to accept Béda’s view that ‘Luther’s errors have entered this [kingdom] more through the works of Erasmus and Lefèvre than any others.’ The king was also much influenced by his sister Marguerite, a deeply devout person, who corresponded with Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, from June 1521 until October 1524, and through his teaching imbibed the ideas of Lefèvre.
Sooner or later trouble was likely to break out between the king and the faculty. While Francis was ready to suppress Lutheranism, he was unwilling to silence the voice of Christian humanism. The first sign of conflict occurred in November 1522, when Guillaume Petit, the king’s confessor, complained to the faculty about the sermons of Michel d’Arande, an Augustinian hermit who had become Marguerite’s almoner. By 1523 the Faculty of Theology and the parlement were seriously worried about the growth of heresy. Lutheran books were being reported from many parts of the kingdom, and evangelical preachers were increasingly active. In June 1523 the faculty was told of scandals provoked by the publication of Lefèvre’s Commentarii initiatorii in IV Evangelia, but it decided not to examine the work after a warning received from Chancellor Duprat. In July it summoned Mazurier and Caroli, two members of the Cercle de Meaux, to answer a complaint arising from their sermons. This marked a change of policy by the faculty: hitherto it had been content to judge doctrine; now it was encroaching on episcopal jurisdiction. The faculty’s action was, in effect, an attack on the entire Cercle de Meaux. In August, prompted by the publication of Lefèvre’s edition of the New Testament, Béda forced through the faculty a condemnation of all editions of Scripture in Greek, Hebrew and French, causing Francis to intervene again. In April 1524 he forbade any discussion of Lefèvre’s work, alleging that he was a scholar of international renown. In October he nipped in the bud a move by the faculty to condemn Erasmus.
By 1523 heresy was so firmly entrenched in France that the Faculty of Theology and the parlement decided that censoring books was not enough: it was time to make an example of the heretics themselves. On 13 May the home of Louis de Berquin, a young nobleman-scholar, was searched by the parlement’s officials. On his shelves they found books by Luther and other reformers as well as Berquin’s own writings. These the faculty was asked to scrutinize, but the king, after giving his consent, changed his mind: he appointed a special commission, headed by Duprat, to carry out the examination. But the faculty, having already examined Berquin’s books, condemned them, and on 1 August he was imprisoned by the parlement. Four days later he was sent for trial on a heresy charge by the bishop of Paris, but Francis evoked the case to the Grand conseil. Meanwhile, Berquin was set free by royal command and allowed to go home. His books, however, were burnt outside Notre-Dame.
EIGHT Defeat, captivity and restoration(1525–7)
In September 1524 everything seemed set fair for the king of France. The threat of internal rebellion had been removed; Bourbon was beating a hasty retreat to Italy after failing to capture Marseille. Though advised to wait until the spring before invading Italy, Francis was keen to reach Lombardy before the imperial forces could regroup. On 17 October he appointed his mother as regent and soon afterwards led a powerful army across the Alps. The weather being exceptionally mild, he accomplished the crossing in record time. As he pressed forward into Lombardy, the imperialists retreated to Lodi, abandoning Milan. Francis now had the choice of either pursuing them to Lodi or besieging Pavia. He chose the latter, prompting the imperial captain, the marquis of Pescara, to exclaim: ‘We were defeated, soon we shall be victorious.’ For Pavia was a hard nut to crack, protected on three sides by a wall and on the south side by the River Ticino. The garrison, consisting of German and Spanish veterans, was commanded by Antonio de Leyva, one of the ablest captains of his day.
The battle of Pavia (24 February 1525)
The French began bombarding Pavia on 6 November. Within three days they had breached the wall, but an assault by them was repulsed with heavy losses. They then tried to divert the Ticino by building a dam, but it was washed away by torrential rains. The siege degenerated into a blockade punctuated by skirmishes and artillery