John the Good

John II (the Good; reigned 1350–64) succeeded to a weakened authority and kingdom; he was a mediocrity whose suspicions and impetuosity were ill suited to the changed circumstances. John hoped to rally baronial loyalties to himself. But he failed to reconcile Charles II (the Bad), king of Navarra, whose strong dynastic claim to the throne (he was the grandson of Louis X) was matched by his ambition; Charles’s conspiracy—at first appeased, then too violently put down—seriously weakened John during 1355–56, when the English war broke out anew. When Charles sought alliance with Edward III, French diplomats abandoned full sovereignty over Aquitaine, a reversal of policy too gratuitous to hold for long; its prompt revocation, with papal support, encouraged Edward’s son, Edward the Black Prince, to undertake destructive raids through Languedoc in 1355. That November the Estates of Languedoïl, meeting at Paris, insisted on controlling the military appropriations they voted; when the Black Prince advanced from Bordeaux to Touraine in the summer of 1356, John hastened to prevent his union with rebellious Norman barons. The armies met near Poitiers in September. Once again the French had the advantage of numbers and position, only to suffer a disastrous defeat. King John allowed himself to be taken prisoner.

France was to experience no worse years than those of the regency, during John’s captivity, of the dauphin Charles (1356–61). Unpaid or poorly disciplined armies ravaged the countryside. The dynasts, nobles, and townspeople had new reasons to resist the monarchy. The dauphin showed no sign of adjusting to meet the crisis. The Estates-General, convoked in 1356 to provide for the king’s ransom, demanded sweeping administrative reforms, even imposing upon the regent a council representing the Estates. Their program proved unworkable, and Charles tried to resume power on terms already rejected by the Estates. This move radicalized Étienne Marcel, provost of the Parisian merchants and leader of the urban estate. Marcel arranged the brutal murders of two of the dauphin’s noble associates, which created an irreconcilable breach with the dauphin, who fled Paris and convoked his own assembly at Compiègne. Marcel’s enthusiasm mounted as his position became more precarious; he drew strength from alliance with Charles the Bad but failed to win the Flemish towns to his cause. The climactic complication was a terrible uprising of the peasants (the Jacquerie), which broke out in Picardy in May 1358 and which antagonized Marcel’s noble supporters, notably Charles the Bad, who helped to quell the disturbances. Marcel was increasingly isolated when loyalist sentiment mounted and administrative failures became evident. His assassination on July 31, 1358, not only secured the dauphin’s authority but ended the burgher influence that had originated in the Estates of 1355.

Intense efforts were then made to end the English war. Negotiations dragged past the term of truce set in 1356; when an initial and too humiliating treaty was rejected by the dauphin, Edward made yet another demonstration in France (1359). At Brétigny (May 8, 1360) King John’s ransom was set at three million gold crowns, while England was assigned full sovereignty over Aquitaine (including Poitou). Two months later John arrived in Calais, where a first payment of ransom was made. In the definitive Treaty of Calais (October 24, 1360), for reasons not clear, the monarchs’ renunciations—Edward’s claim to the crown of France, John’s claim to sovereignty over the ceded territories—were postponed. The Black Prince, however, proceeded to take control of Aquitaine, while the regent tried with little success to extract additional money for the ransom from an exhausted country. When the Estates at Amiens (October 1363) refused to ratify an irresponsible agreement between the king’s replacement hostages and Edward III, John returned to captivity in London, where he died a few months later.