Yesterday was quite a day, riding around with Elo on the wine tour, hanging out with our buddy in Place Emile Zola, having evening refreshments by the Dukes’ Palace, and then going to dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. Today the plan is to visit the Dijon Museum of Fine Arts.
Unfortunately, late last night my beautiful, demure, and normally chipper Better Half started feeling poorly. By the time morning rolled around, she was really sick, with flu-like symptoms. By mid-morning she was feeling a little better, but she was in no condition to go anywhere.
She didn’t want me to have to hang around the apartment all day because she was sick, so we decided that I’d go to the museum without her. When I had convinced myself that there wasn’t anything further that I could do to help, I headed off to La Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, otherwise known as…
The Dijon Museum of Fine Arts
The museum is located inside the Palace of the Dukes of Burgundy. It’s supposed to be full of stuff from the days when the Dukes were doing all those things that Dukes were wont to do – whatever those were. I guessed I’d find out.
There were four Dukes of Burgundy: Philip the Bold, John the Fearless, Philip the Good, and Charles the Reckless. Maybe you can guess which one didn’t do as well as the others. The Dukes’ heyday was the 14th and 15th centuries.
The first Duke of Burgundy was Philip. The year was 1364. The King of France at the time had four sons. Philip was the youngest. He had distinguished himself in battle, so people were already referring to him as Philip the Bold. — And he was only fourteen years old. The kid definitely had potential!
Philip the Bold
The King took note of this and thought to himself, “This youngster has got something on the ball. I’m going to make him a Duke!” And that’s what he did. He made Philip the first Duke of Burgundy, and gave him the area around Dijon to make his own. Philip was 22 years old.
It turned out that the French King was right. Philip really WAS on the ball, because one of the first things he did was to marry the richest girl around, Margaret of Flanders. (Flanders was just northeast of Burgundy, where Belgium and the Netherlands are now).
Well, those two made quite a pair. They had tons of money, and they liked the finer things in life. They liked to live it up, too, but they were smart enough to always have more money coming in than was going out. Burgundy, and Dijon in particular, became known as a center for the arts, culture, and fine feasting.
But storm clouds were gathering. The good times had not been rolling everywhere. England and France had been fighting the Hundred Years War off and on since 1337, mostly in southwestern France. They were fighting because the King of England thought he should rightfully be the King of France, too. The French King didn’t agree. It was a complicated family thing.
Meanwhile, the King of France died, and was succeed by his eldest son, Charles. Charles VI, to be exact. Unfortunately, Charles was only eleven years old. (When the ruler of a country is only eleven years old, it’s never good, eh?)
Four guys who were all cousins, (including the Duke of Burgundy), were put in charge until Charles was old enough to rule by himself. Unfortunately, each of them cared only about what they could get out of the deal for their own territories: Armagnac in the southwest, Orléans just south of Paris, and Burgundy in the east. The French government was a mess.
Charles grew up and eventually took charge. Unfortunately, he had inherited a bad family gene, which was causing him to go berserk. Not all at once — a little bit at a time, every so often, but with increasing frequency. Eventually he became known as Charles the Mad, and not as in “mad-angry”.
In 1404, Philip the Bold died. He had lived a long life, and he had put Burgundy on the map. His eldest son, John, became the second Duke of Burgundy. They had said that Philip was bold in battle, but John was even bolder – fearless, in fact. He was so fearless that he got himself captured by the Turks during one of the Crusades. It cost Burgundy a fortune in ransom to get him back.
John the Fearless
After John took Philip’s place as one of the King’s regents, an already bad situation became even worse. Backroom deals, plots, and assassinations started to become commonplace. The French territories that had just been arguing before were now practically at war with each other.
The King of England, Henry V, who was no dummy, saw that France was practically having a civil war, which would make it the perfect time to invade France from the north. So across the Channel he came, along with 10,000 troops. The English proceeded to rout the disorganized French left and right.
While the English were storming the north of France, John the Fearless was finagling all kinds of deals with his friends, enemies, cousins, and even with the King of France. But he finagled once too often with the French King, Charles the Mad. At a pre-arranged meeting to work out one of those secret deals, the King’s men ambushed John, and Fearless or not, they killed him. (With an axe).
Maybe the lesson here is to never make secret deals with anyone whose nickname ends with “the Mad.” Anyway, things in France were already in bad shape, with plots and assassinations, civil war, and the English invading. But they were about to get much worse.
To be continued…
Featured Image: A portion of a painting by Claude Monet — Étretat, la porte d’Aval: bateaux de pêche sortant du port, housed in the Dijon Museum of Fine Arts. Courtesy of CeCILL and CC-by-sa-2.0-fr
