Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 95

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500 Years after the Great Battles
Richard Vaughan

Predictably, the five-hundredth anniversaries of the three great Burgundian defeats of Grandson, Murten and Nancy, were celebrated by the academic world with a trio of colloquia, the contributions to which have found their way into print in the usual form. Predictably, too, the first two battles were celebrated by the Swiss, while it was left to the French to organize a conference to commemorate the third, which was fought on French soil and won by a French prince, the Swiss only participating as hired mercenaries. My purpose is to review these three volumes.

A hundred years ago, when the four-hundredth anniversary of the battles came round, the learned world was fortunately still preoccupied with the monumental publication of the raw materials of history - it was the great age of the Rolls Series and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; a time when in Switzerland P.A. von Segesser had just completed the Sammlung der Eidgenössischen Abschiede, and in Germany the Hanserecesse were getting under way at Leipzig. Against this background, the fourth centenary of the battle of Murten was marked by the publication of a near exhaustive collection of source material by G.F. Ochsenbein. This work, published at Fribourg in 1876, was entitled Die Urkunden der Belagerung und Schlacht von Murten. Unfortunately the editing was poor; many documents were inadequately dated, many lacked references or were not properly identified. Nonetheless, Ochsenbein did bring together virtually all the available source material about the battle, including extracts from accounts, for example of the Murten burgomasters, excerpts from the chroniclers, and, above all, the correspondence that passed daily in those critical months of 1476 between Bern and her allies. Nothing relevant to the battle in the very full minute-books of the Bern town council was omitted by Ochsenbein, and his work is still essential reading for any serious student of the battle of Murten.

A further contribution to the celebrations of June 1876 was a book entitled Morat et Charles-le-Téméraire by C. Hoch and A. de Mandrot, published at Neuchâtel. The authors referred to the grand fête commemorative as an ‘impressive patriotic manifestation’ on the part of the Swiss, and they provided a

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sound, popular and readable account of both battles. Further evidence of the patriotic sentiments of those days is revealed when the authors state that ‘soon the noble banners of Luzern, Uri and Schwyz arrived, which had already been used in so many glorious combats for the independence of the country’.

In terms of pure scholarship one is bound to conclude that the fifth centenary celebrations of these battles have been disappointing. So far nobody has come forward to re-edit the sources collected by Ochsenbein; nobody has provided a critical edition of a single new document bearing on one or other of these battles; nobody has thought to provide a systematic review of known sources of information. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, in view of recent developments in archaeology, which scarcely existed at all at the time of the fourth centenary, nobody has published or even probably made an archaeological survey of any of the battles. Instead, in the three commemorative volumes of 1976-1979, we have a somewhat heterogeneous collection of essays - short pieces by great and famous historians no doubt - many of which have little or nothing to do with the battles themselves (Chevallaz and others 1976, Rück and Schöpfer 1976, and Parisse and others 1979). However, the organisers of the Nancy colloquium are producing a second volume which will contain critical editions of hitherto unpublished texts relating to the battle. A sort of twentieth-century Ochsenbein for the battle of Nancy, which may well prove to be the most important single outcome of all these fifth centenary celebrations.

The Grandson volume contains little of real substance. Even Adolf Gasser's contribution on the Burgundian wars, by a long way the most elaborate and detailed essay in the book, is little more than a survey of Franco-Swiss relations between 1469 and 1475 apparently based on the painstaking researches of the Austrian historian Karl Bittman (1964, 1970). Jean Etienne Genequand provides some useful notes on the pays de Vaud at the time of the Burgundian wars, based in part on archive material; Jean François Bergier gives an idea of the economic background, showing in particular how miserable and insecure life was for the ‘contemporaries of Grandson’; and Régine Pernoud contributes a thumb-nail sketch of Louis XI which appears to owe more to Joseph Calmette than any other writer.

More pertinent no doubt than the general history so far mentioned is the military history, which takes up about half of the Grandson volume. But here, too, a certain superficiality is all too apparent. Eugène Heer presents the essential facts about the arms and armour used on both sides in an alphabetical arrangement, creating a sort of mini-encyclopedia which in fact provides little new material. At least, however, one can look up ‘culverin’ or ‘halberd’ and ascertain exactly what one or other of these weapons was and in what circumstances and by whom it was used.

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The lengthy study of the compagnies d'ordonnance in Charles the Bold's army, by Colonel Charles Brusten, is not notable for its originality. Indeed much of it is based on the works of Guillaume and de la Chauvelays and much of the ground has been gone over already by the author himself in his own earlier publications. Moreover, no account is taken of certain important recent contributions to our knowledge of the subject, most notably the Göttingen 1966 thesis of D. Schmidt-Sinns, entitled Studien zum Heerwesen der Herzöge von Burgund, 1465-1477. Worst of all, Colonel Brusten has signally failed to make effective use of the available archive sources, above all the accounts of Charles the Bold's trésorier des guerres, especially those of Hue de Dompierre, in Brussels, Archives Générales du Royaume, Chambre des Comptes, nos. 25542 and 25543.

Everyone knows how Charles the Bold reviewed his newly-made post-Grandson army at Lausanne on 10-13 May 1476. Everyone knows because the reviews were described in detail in the despatches of two Italian ambassadors, Antonio de Aplano or d'Appiano and Johanne Petro Panigarola, and a special military ordinance was issued by the duke which set out the order of march of the eight battles of this army and its composition in great detail. Colonel Brusten reproduces this arrangement and the numbers given in these sources. If he had consulted the accounts of the duke's war treasurer he could have discovered the numbers of men in each category that were actually present. For example Troylo da Rossano, captain of 1,000 foot, in ten companies, was slightly under strength: he only mustered 919 men; another of the 1,000-man strong infantry contingents only numbered 782 men on 12 May. But the twelve companies of ordinance, each comprising 101 men-at-arms and 202 or 303 mounted archers were well up to strength. Even so, as I have shown, it is not easy to discover more than 10,000 or so combatants on the ducal payroll at this time, even if we include the Spanish contingent not hitherto noticed by historians but entered in the war treasurer's account as reviewed at Lausanne on 20 May and as comprising Petit Salezard, six other men at arms, thirteen mounted crossbowmen and five crossbowmen on foot.

In the 1969 Murtenschlacht volume Georges Grosjean discusses these very same figures from the very same sources and again utterly ignores the one source that actually states how many men there were - the account of the war treasurer! He even speculates as to wether the units were up to strength or not, and decides, mostly wrongly, that they were not. In any event the reviews and payments made a month later, at Morrens and Murten on 3 and 10 June, which are also in the war treasurer's account, are infinitely more relevant for the battle of Murten, and they show that the companies of ordinance had been effectively kept together and up to strength: losses were fewer than 100 men out of nearly 4,000.

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The actual figures are:

Captain of the company	Number of men-at-arms and mounted archers at Lausanne 12 May	Number of men-at-arms and mounted archers at Morrens and Murten 3 and 10 June
Jehan le Dommarien	405	388
Jehan Francisque de Rosano	304	304
Olivier de Somme	304	301
Anthoine, lord of Saleneuve	390	405
Loys Taillant	405	381
Guillaume de Lignane	304	304
Anthoine de Lignane	293	298
Jacques Galyot	304	304
Alixandre de Rossane	304	296
Guillaume de Vergey	303	304
Angele de Montfort	301	291
Dom Denis de Portugal	299	304
Sum total of all twelve companies out of a possible maximum of 3,951	3,916	3,880

The battle of Murten will concern us later. For the moment, in completing our review of the contents of the Grandson volume, we need to look at two contributions which deal directly with the battle of Grandson itself, those of Daniel Reichel and Hans Rudolf Kurz. The second of these is not greatly dissimilar from the same author's account of the battle of Grandson in his book Schweizerschlachten published at Bern in 1962. Neither of them is more than fragmentary, and neither discusses the sources, though each seems to attach special importance to a suspect source. Thus Reichel insists on Olivier de la Marche's claim that Charles deliberately decoyed the Swiss and their allies by garrisoning Vaumarcus castle with elite troops; yet Olivier de la Marche was not present at the battle, being sick at Salins in the Franche-Comté; and the only contemporary source quoted from and referred to by Kurz is that colourful work Les entreprises du duc de Bourgogne contre les Suisses (Schnegg 1948) which is noteworthy mainly for the vivid speeches the author puts into Charles the Bold's mouth, and is notoriously unreliable.

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Obviously this is no time and place for a systematic investigation of the battle of Grandson, much needed though this indubitably is. There is no serious dispute about the main course of events. Each side, it seems clear, fully intended to stake everything on one big pitched battle. Whether or not Duke Charles intended, as Kurz claims on uncertain evidence, to ‘march directly on Bern’, he certainly had no intention of doing this before securing his lines of communication and reestablishing Burgundian control of the Vaud, which Bern had invaded and conquered in the previous year. For still unexplained reasons, the castle of Grandson surrendered to him on 28 February 1476 after a brief siege. Probably because he had been informed that the Swiss and their allies were assembling on the north shore of the Lake of Neuchâtel in order to relieve Grandson, Charles resolved to move in that direction. On 29 February he reconnoitred as far at least as Vaumarcus in person, garrisoned that place with elite household troops, and posted other forces a little north of Vernéaz where the path crossed a wooded ravine and where the redoubte des Bourguignons is marked on the map. Careful and unhurried, rather than rash and precipitate as Kurz and Reichel insist, Charles devoted the whole of the next day, Friday 1 March, to discussing plans of action with his captains.

Unknown to each other, on 1 March each side came to a decision which directly led to their clash in battle next day. The allies decided to storm the castle of Vaumarcus; Duke Charles decided to move out of his siege positions around Grandson and pitch a new camp a few kilometres north-east along the lake shore. On the morning of Saturday 2 March some six or eight thousand allied troops began the attack on Vaumarcus castle, but a substantial force, perhaps a couple of thousand strong in all, advanced instead through the wooded slopes of Mont Aubert towards Vernéaz. These men, from Schwyz and Thun and probably Bern and Zurich too, brushed aside the Burgundian forces already mentioned and apparently emerged from the forest, perhaps at Prise Gaulax, in mid or late morning. Ahead of them, on the open undulating plain along the lake shore, the Burgundian army was moving forward in three columns, while immediately below, it seems, probably between Concise and La Lance, the duke's new camp was being set up.

This unofficial Swiss vanguard had already sent messengers back to bring up the rest of the allied forces. Abandoning the attack on Vaumarcus they hurried forward through the forest, some taking the higher road through the woods, others the lower, along the lake shore. Around mid-day battle was joined by the vanguard after some exchanges of artillery fire and apparently before their colleagues had come up. Though successfully warding off a Burgundian cavalry charge with their long pikes, these troops were in imminent danger of being surrounded and overwhelmed when the rest of the allied army began to emerge

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out of the woods. It seems to have been at this moment that a manoeuvre organized by Duke Charles, in which he tried to withdraw some forces near the Swiss van in order to counter-attack it more effectively, was misinterpreted as a retreat by other elements in his army. This withdrawal soon became a precipitate flight. Casualties among the Burgundians were few, especially because the Swiss had no cavalry: apparently the thousand-strong mounted contingent from the Sundgau, Breisgau and Black Forest had been left somewhere far behind. But booty was enormous, for the Swiss captured nearly all the duke's baggage train, in process of removal from one camp to another.

Such was, in very broad outline, the main course of the battle of Grandson. On both sides, it seems, there was no very logical or clear-cut plan of action. There is no real evidence that the action of the Swiss van was officially approved of by the main allied army; neither its instructions, if any, nor its exact purpose, can be ascertained. If the Swiss hoped to tempt the duke to leave his fortified encampment near Grandson by attacking Vaumarcus, as claimed by Etterlin and others, they showed no sign of having made contingency plans for this. Nor is there a scrap of evidence that Duke Charles was tempted out of a prepared position by the Swiss attack on Vaumarcus. Kurz and Daniel are both surely wide of the mark here. Kurz is quite unjustified in suggesting that Charles threw caution to the winds and decided, in an ill-considered moment, to attack the enemy at all costs. It is abundantly clear that, on the morning of 2 March, his army was not drawn up in battle order, and he was in process of moving camp. He must have been fully aware of what was going on ahead of him that morning around Vaumarcus: he personally had inspected that castle and the lie of the land around it on 29 February. He was not taken by surprise. His army had been moving in three contingents, he re-formed it into a single mass, albeit a mile long, ready for the encounter.

What then went wrong? Chiefly, the duke's attempt to execute a delicate complex manoeuvre while in contact with the enemy. Far from behaving rashly, he was playing it too cool; his parade-ground manoeuvre just would not work on the field of battle. But to the unfortunate effects of this move must be added the remarkable fighting qualities and cohesion of the Swiss van, which proved to be more than a match for the redoubted Burgundian cavalry, and the failure of the duke's much-vaunted artillery to cause more than a handful of allied casualties. Jörg Hochmut describes how a Burgundian artillery master's hair and clothes caught alight when his powder exploded, and he was killed.

It is high time that someone undertook a study of the battle of Grandson after a critical evaluation of all the available source material. Neither Kurz nor Reichel nor other recent writers have used what is probably the best and most reliable source on the allied side. This is the long letter sent by Jörg Hochmut to the

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burgomaster and council of Nordlingen. The late Dr. Henny Grüneisen sent me a transcript of it years ago but it has never even been printed! The other main source on the Swiss side is the chronicle of Diebold Schilling of Bern. On the Burgundian side, apart from the reports of Panigarola and other ambassadors which, ridiculously enough, have still not been printed in full, the only eyewitness was the knight Jean de Margny. His account is however of great significance, for he makes it clear in his poem L'aventurier (de Chevanne 1938) that Charles advanced on that Saturday morning with his quartermasters and baggage in the van and they were among the first victims of the Swiss attack.

So much, then, for the Grandson book and battle. The Murtenschlacht book is rather more substantial, especially as regards the battle itself, but still disappointing. We are treated to some reflections on fifteenth-century Europe by Carl Pfaff, on Burgundy by Philippe Contamine, on Habsburg and the Empire by Hermann Wiesflecker, on Switzerland by Louis Roulet and even on Europe, by Baron Snoy et d'Oppuers. To set against these rather rarified distillations there is only one down-to-earth piece of historical research - by Gigliola Soldi-Rondinini, who contributes a notable study of G.P. Panigarola and his despatches.

But I have so far not mentioned the nub and centre-piece of the book, a detailed and thoughtful account of the battle of Murten by Professor Georges Grosjean, Director of the Geographical Institute of the University of Bern, to which I referred briefly when discussing the Burgundian army at Lausanne in May 1476. This is based on a discussion of the sources, which is not, however, very full, especially on the Burgundian side, and comprises a hypothetical reconstruction of the battle which is in many respects similar to that put forward by myself in my Charles the Bold, published in 1973 - but not mentioned, and perhaps not read by, Professor Grosjean.

Most of the earlier historians placed the battle of Murten much too far away from Murten itself; a favourite area for having the Burgundian army drawn up ready for battle was on the plateau between Cressier and Courgevaux, over 3 km SSW of Murten. But in fact from 11 June onwards Murten was very closely besieged, and Charles the Bold's tent was surely pitched and his headquarters established on the summit of the Bois Domingue only one kilometre south of the town and with a commanding view over it and over his own siege positions. On the other hand Duke Charles was probably more interested in winning a pitched battle than in necessarily lengthy sieges, and it may have been with a view to deliberately provoking the Swiss and their allies into a major confrontation that, on the very next day after the opening of the siege, 12 June, he ordered attacks to be made well beyond Murten in the direction of Bern, on the river crossings defending Bern at Aasberg, Gümmenen and Laupen. This act of direct

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provocation immediately set in motion the mobilization of the entire allied army.

Duke Charles could have been in no doubt, as he invested Murten even more closely and ordered a series of assaults on it, that a relieving force would advance from the direction of Bern. The only possible line of attack for such a force, which would naturally hurry from Bern directly towards the beleaguered town of Murten, was along the road that led over the River Saane at Gümmenen and thence via Lurtigen to Murten. The duke's only problem was, exactly when would the enemy arrive? He seems to have been remarkably well informed of allied intentions, believing at first that they would attack on Saturday 22 June, which was indeed their original idea; then expecting an attack on 21 June, to which date they had put forward their planned march to relieve Murten because of its garrison's dire straits. Throughout that day the Burgundian army was drawn up in battle order ‘on elevated ground where there was a fine plain above the camp’. But the late arrival of some elements persuaded the Swiss to defer their advance to the Saturday.

Heavy rain fell during the night of 21-22 June and Duke Charles now unaccountably made up his mind that, after all, no attack would be forthcoming that Saturday morning, especially as the downpour continued. At about 10.00 hours he ordered his war treasurer to pay each infantryman 12s, each mounted archer 16s, and each English archer 20s. When the war treasurer expostulated that he could not pay some 8,000 men just like that, the duke insisted on enlisting additional clerks to assist him. Everyone was ordered to report at once to his commander and a start was made in paying the 800 foot of the ducal household. These men and many others were in the trenches below the walls of Murten.

On the morning of Saturday 22 June then, as the allied army formed up in the forest and got ready to march in two or three massed contingents towards Murten, Duke Charles' army was dispersed in its siege positions and tents around Murten. On the high ground south of Burg, and along towards Salvenach, where on the day before the entire Burgundian army had waited in battle array for an enemy who never arrived, there was now only a skeleton force of defenders along the line of the famous ‘green hedge’.

Where exactly was the ‘green hedge’? Earlier writers placed it too far south, too far away form the town of Murten, in front of Münchenweiler or even between Münchenweiler and Cressier. It took a Professor of Geography of Bern, none other than Georges Grosjean, whose work we are discussing, to establish the ‘green hedge’ at least in the correct general area, namely on the plateau between Burg and Salvenach, though he was here only following the earlier suggestions of Hans Wattelet (1894). But Grosjean has perhaps attached too much importance to the evidence of illustrations of the battle showing the green hedge; indeed his supposed ‘battle plan of Charles the Bold’ shows the green hedge lying at right

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angles across the Bern-Lausanne or Altavilla-Münchenweiler road with the Burgundian artillery on its left flank more of less where one might think Martin Martini had placed it in his famous 1609 copper plate of the battle. In actual fact the Swiss and their allies marching directly towards Murten from the Gümmenen-Ulmiz area would have been expected to advance through the forest via Lurtigen. To oppose them frontally the duke would have drawn up his forces along a straight line between the top of the wooded ravine called Burggraben and the village of Salvenach - thus along the line of the present day road which leads to Salvenach from the crossroads below Burg. It is along the line of this road that one would expect the ‘green hedge’ to have been situated and, sure enough, remains of a green hedge may be seen there to this day. All I am requiring of Professor Grosjean is to advance his hedge by some 200 metres so that it lies immediately on the south side of the Burg-Salvenach road, thus coinciding in part with the sections of hedge still existing which, from the variety of species comprising it, would seem to be of considerable antiquity.

Perhaps it was the heavy rain during the night of 21-22 June and in the early morning of 22 June that convinced Duke Charles that the enemy would not attack him and persuaded him to have his men paid. Be this as it may, the few eye-witness accounts on the Burgundian side are agreed that the duke's army was taken completely by surprise. Only one of these, the Milanese ambassador, J.P. Panigarola, is mentioned by Grosjean. He emphasizes how Duke Charles was in no hurry on that Saturday morning as the allies attacked the skeleton forces Charles had posted on the Burg-Salvenach plateau. Panigarola was on the plateau himself, he saw the enemy advancing in two massed infantry divisions with long lances and a separate mounted contingent. He galloped back to the duke but it is clear from Panigarola's despatch that the duke and his army never were drawn up in battle array (Ghinzoni 1892). By the time they began to reach the plateau the defensive position of the green hedge had been forced, the Burgundian van was in flight, and the Swiss were surging onwards towards the duke's headquarters on the Bois Domingue which they could see ahead of them as soon as they had broken through the green hedge.

All this from Panigarola's despatch and the lie of the land. But what of our other two Burgundian eye-witnesses? One was Jean de Margny, whose poem L'aventurier has already been mentioned in connection with the battle of Grandson. He does not tell us very much about the battle of Murten, but he does say that the enemy advanced so secretly that nobody knew they were coming: the duke and his men were taken completely by surprise. The other eye-witness was the clerk who wrote up the war-treasurer's account on that fateful morning. He says that the battle came so quickly that there was scarcely time to put the money into the coffers, load them onto horses, and send them off: even so, the coffers

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were never seen again.

According to Professor Grosjean's account of the battle, its course corresponded to the dispositions taken up on either side. But in fact Charles the Bold's army never did take up position; it was routed piecemeal before it could do so. To the element of surprise must be added the crushing numerical superiority enjoyed by the Swiss and their allies. Massed together, they delivered a well-organized frontal attack on Duke Charles's dispersed forces, most of whom scarcely had time to scramble out of their trenches and siege positions around Murten. It seems unlikely that the allies had fewer than 15,000 or 20,000 men in their attacking columns whereas Duke Charles was initially only able to oppose them with 2,000 or 3,000 men.

Before leaving the subject of the battle of Murten I would like to draw your attention to the very interesting suggestion Professor Roulet makes in his paper in this same book entitled ‘Formation de la Suisse’. He points out that the Swiss directed their attack on the prepared Burgundian battle-positions and not at all on the siege-positions of Jacques de Romont and his Savoyards to the north or north-east of the town of Murten. Nor did the Swiss garrison in Murten make any sortie against Romont and his men during the battle. Nor, apparently did Jacques de Romont make any move to attack the vulnerable right flank of the advancing and soon victorious Swiss. Perhaps treachery is too strong a word; perhaps there was no understanding of any kind between Savoyards and Swiss. Nevertheless, it seems that Jacques de Romont and his men from the pays de Vaud and elsewhere in Savoy did refuse to take part in the battle, and that Bern and her allies, intent perhaps on restoring good relations with Savoy, did decline to attack them and even allowed them to escape and return home after the battle.

The third volume of the trilogy commemorating the great Burgundian battles is much the most elaborate. As long as the other two put together, it boasts twice as many contributors and, while the Grandson volume is mainly a Swiss affair, and the Murten one broadens out to include contributors from France, Italy and Belgium, the Nancy volume is truly international; they even invited a handful of Englishmen and a Dutchman or two in the shape of Professor Jongkees and his students. On the other hand while the Murten volume was partly in German, partly in French and partly in Italian, contributions at Nancy were strictly in French. An Italian who had the temerity to read his paper there in Italian failed to make his way into print in the Cinq-centième anniversaire volume - which, incidentally, is garnished with some splendid colour illustrations. It would be quite impossible to review each of the twenty-three contributions separately here; all I can do is to mention one or two of them.

The section entitled Aspects économiques contains three very interesting pieces, in one of which my compatriot Peter Spufford of the University of Keele argues

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- in elegant French - that in Burgundian monetary history 1477 was by no means a turning-point: no immediate change in the quantity of money in circulation, which had been increasing for at least a decade, since the end of Duke Philip the Good's reign; no change in the types of money in circulation; no break in the traditional policy of monnaie ferme et durable. Henri Dubois of the University of Rouen argues convincingly along the same lines for economic life in general; he could find no evidence of a significant break in 1477.

The third paper in this section is a somewhat less convincing attempt by Professor Michel Mollat to suggest that Charles the Bold may have been on the brink of financial disaster at the time of his defeat at the hands of the Swiss and their allies in 1476-1477. But here too, it seems that the year 1477 scarcely marks a significant break in Burgundian financial history. Charles was certainly critically short of ready cash during those hectic months of the 1476 campaign, but the Burgundian financial administration seems to have regained its equilibrium very rapidly. We learn from the already-mentioned war treasurer's account that the manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici bank, Tommaso Portinari, was paid the £ 2,000 commission he was owed for transferring £ 72,000 from the Low Countries to Savoy in summer 1476, just a year later, at the end of June 1477. We also learn from the same entry that £ 21,000 of this money, not needed by Duke Charles in his southern territories in autumn 1476, was sent back to the Low Countries by Portinari and handed over to Pierre Lanchals, who remained in office as receiver general of all finances under Mary of Burgundy, in the summer of 1477. Professor Mollat is absolutely right, however, in his main point, namely that Charles the Bold's finances require the attention of a team of dedicated research students armed with a computer.

The Aspects politiques section of the book is somewhat fragmentary. The one paper I would like to comment on is Professor André Leguai's discussion of Charles the Bold's relationship to the king and kingdom of France.

In the first place, Professor Leguai seems to me to make too much of the confrontation, in large part a clash of personalities, between Louis XI and Charles the Bold. There was mutual disdain, even hostility; Louis did genuinely believe that Charles was crazy. On the other hand each ruler was involved in other confrontations: Louis with Aragon and England, Charles with the towns; and in other preoccupations, Louis with the internal affairs of France, Charles with his own territorial ambitions. So it is scarcely surprising that, instead of continuing the struggle which came to a head first in 1472, both rulers gladly made truces. In the event, they not only signed the famous truce of Soleuvre on 13 September 1475 but actually respected its terms.

Secondly, Professor Leguai appears to share a streak of what might crudely be termed French nationalism with other French medievalists - for example

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Bernard Guenée (1971). He emphasizes - indeed I would suggest overemphasizes - the authority and solidarity of the French monarchy in the fifteenth century, suggesting that it was much more stable than the English monarchy and much more powerful than its Burgundian equivalent. He points out, for instance, that the French monarchy never, between 987 and 1792, suffered the deposition of a reigning king, whereas in England this happened on five occasions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But he fails to note the crisis of the French monarchy under King Charles VI. He sees Louis XI ‘at the head of a coherent realm’ in part based on ‘a feeling for the existence of a national community’, while Burgundy was incoherent, novel, nameless effectively, and its ruler was everywhere a stranger.

Rather than argue that Leguai's view of fifteenth-century France is overtly and misleading nationalist, or even monarchist, and that neither it, nor Burgundy, was inspired and supported by any national sentiment of significance, I would prefer to suggest that there was a comparable Burgundian national sentiment, and that there is no evidence at all that the supposed lack of solidarity in Burgundy, the apparent absence of any popular support for its ruler, the alleged financial difficulties, and above all, the fact that its territories were newly put together, made any contribution whatsoever to the collapse of Burgundian power in 1477.

The Dutch medievalist H.M.E. Wouters (1949) published a detailed study of ‘The national sentiment in the Burgundian Low Countries according to fifteenthcentury chroniclers’. He found virtually no sign of it. But perhaps he was looking in the wrong place? Burgundy did have a ‘national’ saint, Andrew; it did have a ‘national’ religious foundation, the Charterhouse of Champmol outside Dijon. There was, too, a Burgundian literary tradition based on Girart de Vienne, anti-French hero and symbol, and on Garrin le Lorrain, embracing Lorraine and Brabant and representing Burgundian expansion along the Rhine and into the Low Countries in the shape of Brabant, as well as a strongly classical tradition - Jason, Hector, Alexander the Great, Caesar - and a Frisian one (Lacaze 1972). These mythologies together contributed to the formation of a Burgundian ‘national’ sentiment, strongly promoted as they were by the last two dukes.

Alongside all this one can recognize what might be termed a chancery tradition of Burgundian ‘national’ sentiment. In a speech made to the Estates of Brabant in 1398, probably by the Burgundian chancellor, it was argued that, if the dukes of Burgundy became rulers of Brabant in addition to the territories they already had, ‘they would have the power of France or England’. Thus Burgundy was from the start thought of as a major power to be put together to rival her monarchic neighbours. These sentiments are echoed in the advice John the Fearless's chancellor Jean de Saulx gave to the duke in 1413 about Burgundian

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policy towards Besançon, and enshrined in the preamble of the famous ordinance of Thionville of 1473, which says that God has ‘instituted and ordained princes to rule principalities and lordships so that the regions, provinces and peoples are joined together and organized in union, concord and loyal discipline’.

Finally, I would like to mention the contents of the last section of the Nancy volume, entitled Aspects militaires. The irrepressible Colonel Brusten crops up again here with a short piece which contains nothing new and is partly a summary of his contribution to the Grandson volume, already mentioned. Professor Contamine contributes a well-researched piece on the army of Duke René II of Lorraine - but referring to the period after the battle of Nancy - and Professor Louis Roulet (who combines being President of the Swiss Historical Society with the duties of a part-time general in the Swiss army) provides an interesting piece on Duke René at the battle of Murten. Modesty may have prevented him from including it, where it should logically have belonged, in the Murten vulume, because he himself was the President of that colloquium and had already made one important contribution to it; but at least this notable paper was read in Duke René's capital and bonne ville of Nancy.

Two other contributions on military affairs in the Nancy volume remain to be mentioned. Roger Sablonier's paper on aspects of the military machine which the Swiss had created, but referring to around the year 1480, shares the tendency of so many contributions, especially and naturally those from his own country, to concentrate on what we might call Swiss national history and to give a specifically Swiss explanation of events, as if a certain fifteenth-century South German confederation was already Switzerland. To my mind the one remaining contribution on military affairs not so far mentioned administers a salutary corrective to this view. I refer to Professor Rapp's paper on Strasbourg and Charles the Bold. It reminds us that the resistance to Charles the Bold's expansionist Burgundian state was almost everywhere intensely urban in character and that organized hostility to Duke Charles was nowhere stronger, nowhere more effective, than in Strasbourg. Nowhere, that is, except perhaps in Bern herself. It was the conjunction of Bern and her allies on one side, and Strasbourg and her allies on the other, which defeated Charles the Bold. It was the prince against the towns and, this time, the towns were victorious.

All in all, the three commemorative volumes represent the work of a remarkable galaxy of luminaries from many countries - widely spread in spite of the existence of a sort of hard core of Burgundian conference-attenders, many of whom are gathered here today in honour of Professor Jongkees. In the three volumes I have considered, however, there is one national group which has made, and is making, quite fundamental contributions to Burgundian studies,

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but which has been entirely omitted. There are no German contributions at all to any of these volumes. I am sure this is the fault neither of the organizers nor of the Germans themselves. Sadly, both Henny Grüneisen and Karl Bittmann died recently in the midst of important and unfinished labours. But the mantle once borne by Hermann Heimpel has already passed to Werner Paravicini and others, and we may expect these German medievalists to continue the scholarly tradition so ably expounded by him. This tradition is in any case well represented in the volume of essays issued in 1975 to commemorate the fifth centenary of the siege of Neuss, entitled Neuss, Burgund und das Reich - mention of which could scarcely be omitted here and is a suitable point at which to conclude these remarks.

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