Isabeau of Bavaria
Isabeau of Bavaria was Queen of France as the wife of King Charles VI from 1385 to 1422. She was born into the House of Wittelsbach as the only daughter of Duke Stephen III of Bavaria-Ingolstadt and Taddea Visconti of Milan. At age 15 or 16, Isabeau was sent to France to marry the young Charles VI; the couple wed three days after their first meeting. Isabeau was honored in 1389 with a lavish coronation ceremony and entry into Paris.
In 1392, Charles suffered the first attack of what was to become a lifelong and progressive mental illness, resulting in periodic withdrawal from government. The episodes occurred with increasing frequency, leaving a court both divided by political factions and steeped in social extravagances. A 1393 masque for one of Isabeau's ladies-in-waiting—an event later known as Bal des Ardents—ended in disaster with Charles almost burning to death. Although the King demanded Isabeau's removal from his presence during his illness, he consistently allowed her to act on his behalf. In this way she became regent to the Dauphin of France, and sat on the regency council, allowing her far more power than was usual for a medieval queen consort.
Charles' illness created a power vacuum that eventually led to the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War between supporters of his brother Louis I, Duke of Orléans, and the royal dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold and John the Fearless. Isabeau shifted allegiances as she chose the most favorable paths for the heir to the throne. When she followed the Armagnacs, the Burgundians accused her of adultery with the Duke of Orléans; when she sided with the Burgundians, the Armagnacs removed her from Paris and she was imprisoned. In 1407, John the Fearless assassinated Orléans, sparking hostilities between the factions. The war ended soon after Isabeau's son Charles had John assassinated in 1419—an act that saw him disinherited. Isabeau attended the 1420 signing of the Treaty of Troyes, which decided that the English king should inherit the French crown after the death of her husband. She lived in English-occupied Paris until her death in 1435.
Isabeau was popularly seen as a spendthrift and irresponsible philanderess. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries historians re-examined the extensive chronicles of her lifetime, concluding that many unflattering elements of her reputation were unearned and stemmed from factionalism and propaganda.
Lineage and marriage
Isabeau's parents were Duke Stephen III of Bavaria-Ingolstadt and Taddea Visconti, the eldest child of Bernabò Visconti, Lord of Milan, who turned her over to Duke Stephen for a dowry of 100,000 ducats. During this period, Bavaria was counted among the most powerful German states, divided though it was at certain times among members of the House of Wittelsbach. The Visconti family was anxious to cultivate political connections with the powerful Wittelsbachs, and three of Taddea's siblings also married members of various branches of the family. Isabeau was most likely born in Munich, where she was baptized as Elisabeth at the Church of Our Lady. Her notable Wittelsbach ancestors included her great-grandfather Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV.In 1383, Isabeau's uncle, Duke Frederick of Bavaria-Landshut, suggested that she be considered as a bride for King Charles VI of France. The match was proposed again at the lavish Burgundian double wedding in Cambrai in April 1385. At this event, John, Count of Nevers married Margaret of Bavaria, whereas John's sister, Margaret of Burgundy, married Duke William II of Bavaria-Straubing, one of the brothers of Margaret of Bavaria. Charles, then 17, rode in the tourneys at the wedding. He was an attractive, physically fit young man who enjoyed jousting and hunting and was anxious to be married.
File:Charles VI-Isabeau de Bavière.png|thumb|Miniature showing King Charles VI at the hunt. Queen Isabeau and her retinue are shown riding palfreys. From Enguerrand de Monstrelet's Chronique.
As part of his duties as a member of the regency council that governed France during the minority of Charles VI, the king's uncle, Philip the Bold, thought that the proposed marriage to Isabeau would be an ideal means to build an alliance with the Holy Roman Empire in opposition to the crown of England. Isabeau's father reluctantly agreed to the plan and sent her to France with his brother Frederick on the pretext of taking a pilgrimage to Amiens, whose Cathedral housed a celebrated relic of the time. He was adamant that she was not to know that she was being sent to France to be examined as a prospective bride for Charles and refused permission for her to be examined in the nude, as was customary at the time. According to the contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart, Isabeau was 13 or 14 when the match was proposed and about 16 at the time of the marriage in 1385, suggesting a birth date of around 1370.
Before her presentation to Charles, Isabeau visited Hainaut for about a month, staying with her granduncle Duke Albert I, Count of Holland, who also ruled part of the hereditary Wittelsbach territories of Bavaria-Straubing. Albert's wife, Margaret of Brieg, had Isabeau discard her Bavarian style of dress, which would have been deemed unsuitable as courtly attire in France, and taught her etiquette suitable for the French court. She learned quickly, suggestive of an intelligent and quick-witted character. On 13 July 1385, she traveled to Amiens to be presented to Charles.
Froissart writes of the meeting in his Chronicles, saying that Isabeau stood motionless while being inspected, exhibiting perfect behavior by the standards of her time. Arrangements were made for the two to be married in Arras, but on the first meeting, Charles felt "happiness and love enter his heart, for he saw that she was beautiful and young, and thus he greatly desired to gaze at her and possess her". She did not yet speak French and may not have reflected the idealized beauty of the period, perhaps inheriting her mother's dark Italian features, which were considered unfashionable at the time. Nonetheless, Charles and Isabeau were married just three days later. Froissart documented the royal wedding with jokes about the lascivious guests at the feast and the "hot young couple".
Charles seemingly loved his young wife, and he lavished gifts on her. On the occasion of their first New Year in 1386, he gave her a red velvet palfrey saddle trimmed with copper and decorated with an intertwined K and E, and he continued to give her gifts of rings, tableware and clothing. The king's uncles were apparently also pleased with the match, which contemporary chroniclers, notably Froissart and Michel Pintoin, describe similarly as a match rooted in desire aroused by Isabeau's beauty. The day after the wedding, Charles departed for a military campaign against the English, whereas Isabeau traveled to Creil to live with his step-great-grandmother, Queen Dowager Blanche, who taught her courtly traditions. In September, she took up residence at the Château de Vincennes, where, in the early years of their marriage, Charles frequently joined her. It soon became her favorite home.
Coronation
Isabeau's coronation was celebrated on 23 August 1389 with a lavish ceremonial entry into Paris. The noblewomen in the coronation procession were dressed in lavish costumes with thread-of-gold embroidery and rode in litters escorted by knights. Philip the Bold wore a doublet embroidered with 40 sheep and 40 swans, each decorated with a bell made of pearls.The procession lasted from morning to night. The streets were lined with tableaux vivants. More than a thousand burghers stood along the route; those on one side were dressed in green facing, those on the opposite in red. The procession began at the Porte de St. Denis and passed under a canopy of sky-blue cloth beneath which children dressed as angels sang, winding into the Rue Saint-Denis before arriving at the Notre Dame for the coronation ceremony. As Tuchman describes the event, "So many wonders were to be seen and admired that it was evening before the procession crossed the bridge leading to Notre Dame and the climactic display."
As Isabeau crossed the Grand Pont to Notre Dame, a person dressed as an angel descended from the church by mechanical means and "passed through an opening of the hangings of blue taffeta with golden fleurs-des-lis, which covered the bridge, and put a crown on her head." The angel was then pulled back up into the church. An acrobat carrying two candles walked along a rope suspended from the spires of the cathedral to the tallest house in the city.
After Isabeau's crowning, the procession made its way back from the cathedral along a route lit by 500 candles. They were greeted by a royal feast and a progression of narrative pageants, complete with a depiction of the Fall of Troy. Isabeau, then seven months pregnant, nearly fainted from heat on the first of the five days of festivities. To pay for the extravagant event, taxes were raised in Paris two months later.
The illness of Charles VI
In 1392, Charles suffered the first of what was to become a lifelong series of bouts of insanity when, on a hot August day outside Le Mans, he attacked his retinue, including his brother Orléans, killing four men. After the attack he fell into a coma that lasted four days. Few believed he would recover. His uncles, the dukes of Burgundy and Berry, took advantage of his illness to seize power quickly by re-establishing themselves as regents and dissolving the so-called Marmouset council, a group of clerics and lesser nobles who had advised Charles V. The uncles of Charles VI ruled France as members of a regency council during his minority between 1380 and 1388. The Marmousets then returned as royal counselors until Charles VI became ill.The King's sudden onset of insanity was seen by some as a sign of divine anger and punishment and by others as the result of magic. Modern historians speculate that he may have suffered from the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. The comatose king was returned to Le Mans, where Guillaume de Harsigny—a venerable 92-year-old physician—was summoned to treat him. Charles regained consciousness and his fever subsided; he was gradually returned to Paris in September.
Harsigny recommended a program of amusements to assist the king's recovery. A member of the court suggested that Charles surprise Isabeau and the other ladies by joining a group of courtiers who would disguise themselves as wild men and invade the masquerade celebrating the remarriage of Isabeau's lady-in-waiting, Catherine de Fastaverin. This came to be known as the Bal des Ardents. Charles was almost killed and four of the dancers burned to death when a spark from a torch brought by the duke of Orléans lit one of the dancer's costumes on fire. The disaster undermined confidence in king's capacity to rule. Parisians considered it proof of courtly decadence and threatened to rebel against the more powerful members of the nobility. The public's outrage forced the King and the duke of Orléans, whom a contemporary chronicler accused of attempted regicide and sorcery, into offering penance for the event.
File:Fire carles6.jpg|thumb|left|The Bal des Ardents in a miniature from Froissart's Chronicles: Charles VI huddling under the skirt of the Duchess of Berry at middle left and burning dancers in the center
Charles suffered a second and more prolonged attack of insanity the following June; it removed him from his duties for about six months and set a pattern that would hold for the next three decades as his condition deteriorated. Froissart described the bouts of illness as so severe that the King was "far out of the way; no medicine could help him", although he had recovered from the first attack within months. For the first 20 years of his illness, he experienced sustained periods of lucidity to the extent that he could continue to rule. Suggestions were made to replace him with a regent, although there was uncertainty and debate as to whether a regency could assume the full role of a living monarch. When he was incapable of ruling, his brother, the duke of Orléans, and their cousin John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, were chief among those who sought to take control of the government.
When Charles became ill in the 1390s, Isabeau was 22; she had three children remaining to her after losing two infants. During the worst of his illness, Charles was unable to recognize her and caused her great distress by demanding her removal when she entered his chamber. The Monk of St Denis wrote in his chronicle, "What distressed her above all was to see how on all occasions ... the king repulsed her, whispering to his people, 'Who is this woman obstructing my view? Find out what she wants and stop her from annoying and bothering me. As his illness worsened at the turn of the century, she was accused of abandoning him, particularly when she moved her residence to the Hôtel Barbette. Historian Rachel Gibbons speculates that Isabeau wanted to distance herself from her husband and his illness, writing, "it would be unjust to blame her if she did not want to live with a madman."
Since the King often did not recognize her during his psychotic episodes and was upset by her presence, it was eventually deemed advisable to provide him with a mistress, Odette de Champdivers, the daughter of a horse-dealer. According to Tuchman, Odette is said to have resembled Isabeau and was called "the little Queen". She had probably assumed this role by 1405 with Isabeau's consent, but during his remissions, the King still had sexual relations with his wife, whose last pregnancy occurred in 1407. Records show that Isabeau was in the King's chamber on 23 November 1407, the night of the assassination of the duke of Orléans, and again in 1408.
The King's bouts of illness continued unabated until his death. He and Isabeau may have still felt mutual affection, and Isabeau exchanged gifts and letters with him during his periods of lucidity, but she distanced herself during the prolonged attacks of insanity. Historian Tracy Adams writes that Isabeau's attachment and loyalty is evident in the great efforts she made to retain the crown for his heirs in the ensuing decades.