Charles V of France

Charles was born on January 21, 1338, at the château of Vincennes east of Paris, the eldest son of the future John II of France and Bonne of Luxembourg ^[1]. His grandfather Philip VI, the first Valois king, then sat on the French throne, and the war with England that would dominate Charles's entire life had begun only a year before his birth. His mother, a daughter of the celebrated blind king John of Bohemia, died of plague in 1349 when Charles was eleven, during the same epidemic that devastated much of Europe ^[2].

In 1349 the family purchased the Dauphiné, a territory in the southeast of the kingdom, from its last independent ruler, Humbert II. Charles received it as his appanage, and from that transaction came the title Dauphin, which he was the first French royal heir to bear and which every subsequent heir to the French crown would carry until the nineteenth century ^[1]. In April 1350 the twelve-year-old Charles married his cousin Joan of Bourbon, a union arranged within the tight circle of the French high nobility ^[3].

Contemporaries described the young prince as thin, pale, and frequently unwell. A mysterious illness in his adult years left his right hand swollen and weak, and modern historians have proposed various diagnoses without settling the question ^[2]. Whatever its cause, his fragile constitution ruled out the athletic, chivalric kingship his father and grandfather had practiced, and it pushed him toward books, counsel, and calculation instead.

The catastrophe that made Charles a ruler came at Poitiers on September 19, 1356. Edward the Black Prince destroyed the French army and took King John II prisoner, and the eighteen-year-old Dauphin, who had commanded a division that left the field before the end, rode back to Paris as regent of a kingdom without a king ^[4]. Anyone asking who was Charles V of France before his coronation finds him here: a teenager holding a bankrupt state together while England dictated terms.

The next four years tested him brutally. The Estates General, led by the Parisian cloth merchant Étienne Marcel, demanded sweeping control over royal finance and government. In February 1358 Marcel's partisans forced their way into the Dauphin's palace and murdered two of his marshals in front of him, sparing Charles only after placing Marcel's red and blue hood on his head ^[4]. Charles escaped Paris, raised support in the provinces, and waited. That summer the peasant uprising known as the Jacquerie swept the countryside north of Paris before the nobility crushed it, and Marcel himself was killed by fellow Parisians in July 1358. Charles reentered the capital in August, notably sparing most of the city from reprisals ^[2].

The Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 bought peace at a terrible price: roughly a third of France ceded to Edward III in full sovereignty and a ransom of three million gold crowns for King John ^[5]. When a hostage held in John's place slipped away in 1363, the king voluntarily returned to captivity in London, where he died in April 1364. Charles was crowned at Reims on May 19, 1364, already more experienced in the hard mechanics of government than most kings ever became ^[1].

Any account of Charles V of France achievements begins with the reconquest. Rather than lead armies himself, he chose commanders on ability and gave them consistent funding. His greatest find was Bertrand du Guesclin, a minor Breton noble of famously rough appearance whom Charles raised to Constable of France in 1370 ^[6]. Du Guesclin fought the way his king thought: avoiding pitched battles, retaking towns and castles one by one, harassing English columns, and letting the great chevauchées of the enemy exhaust themselves against fortified walls. Days after Charles's coronation in 1364, du Guesclin's victory at Cocherel had already broken the power of the king's dangerous rival Charles the Bad of Navarre in Normandy ^[6].

When war with England resumed in 1369, after Gascon lords appealed to Paris against the Black Prince's taxation and Charles asserted his right to hear the appeal, the strategy paid off with remarkable speed. By 1375 the vast English holdings confirmed at Brétigny had shrunk to a coastal strip around Bordeaux and Bayonne in the southwest and the fortress of Calais in the north ^[5]. Charles also rebuilt French naval power, and in 1372 a Castilian fleet allied to France destroyed an English fleet off La Rochelle, giving the alliance control of the Channel approaches ^[4].

The money for all this came from fiscal reform. Charles regularized the hearth tax known as the fouage, along with sales taxes and the salt tax called the gabelle, converting emergency wartime levies into something close to permanent royal taxation ^[2]. He also stabilized the coinage after decades of ruinous debasement; the gold franc, first struck in 1360 to pay his father's ransom, became a byword for sound money. In Paris he ordered a new eastern wall, began the fortress of the Bastille at the Porte Saint-Antoine, and rebuilt the Louvre from a grim fortress into a residence fit for a court ^[7].

The epithet le Sage meant wise in the sense of learned, and Charles earned it deliberately. He assembled a library of well over nine hundred manuscripts, an extraordinary figure for the fourteenth century, and installed it in a tower of the Louvre with fittings designed to protect the books ^[7]. This collection, dispersed after his dynasty's later troubles, is traditionally counted as the seed of the royal library and ultimately of the Bibliothèque nationale de France ^[7].

He did more than collect. Charles commissioned translations of major Latin works into French so that his officers and successors could read them, a program without precedent at the French court. The philosopher Nicole Oresme translated Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, and Economics for him, coining dozens of French words in the process, and other scholars rendered Augustine's City of God and John of Salisbury's Policraticus into the vernacular ^[8]. Oresme, who also wrote a treatise condemning coinage debasement, was rewarded with the bishopric of Lisieux in 1377.

The king's daily routine, recorded admiringly after his death by the writer Christine de Pizan in her Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, mixed mass, council meetings, audiences, and set hours for reading ^[3]. Christine, whose father Thomas de Pizan served Charles as astrologer and physician, presented the king as a model of prudent rulership, and her biography remains one of the principal contemporary sources for his reign.

Charles and Joan of Bourbon had known each other since childhood, and observers regarded the marriage as genuinely close. Joan suffered a severe mental collapse in 1373 after the birth of one of her children, an affliction that grieved the king and that historians have noted as an unsettling precedent, since their son Charles VI would later descend into far more famous episodes of madness ^[3].

The couple had at least nine children, most of whom died young. The heir, the future Charles VI, was born in December 1368, followed by Louis, later Duke of Orléans, in 1372, and a daughter Catherine ^[1]. Joan died in February 1378, reportedly after taking a bath against medical advice while recovering from childbirth, and Charles did not remarry ^[3].

The king's own health remained precarious throughout his reign. Alongside the withered hand, he suffered from gout, abscesses, and what contemporaries described as a fistula that physicians expected would eventually kill him ^[2]. He governed around his body's limits, working through a small circle of trusted councillors, nicknamed the Marmousets by their noble critics, drawn from the lesser nobility and the legal class rather than from the great princes ^[4].

The final years brought setbacks that qualified the triumphs. In 1378 Charles moved against Duke John IV of Brittany, attempting to confiscate the duchy outright for treasonable dealings with England. Breton nobles who had otherwise supported France closed ranks against annexation, recalled their exiled duke, and forced Charles into an embarrassing retreat ^[5]. The same year, the disputed papal election that opened the Great Schism divided Latin Christendom; Charles recognized the Avignon claimant Clement VII, a choice that bound French policy to the schism for decades ^[2].

Money remained the sorest point. The taxes that funded the reconquest weighed heavily on ordinary subjects, and unrest simmered in Languedoc, where the harsh lieutenancy of the king's brother Louis of Anjou provoked lasting resentment ^[4]. On his deathbed, troubled in conscience, Charles ordered the abolition of the fouage, the hearth tax that anchored royal finance. The gesture eased his soul and wrecked his successors' budget, contributing to the tax revolts that erupted across France in the early 1380s ^[5].

Du Guesclin died on campaign in July 1380, and the king outlived his constable by barely two months. Charles V died at Beauté-sur-Marne near Vincennes on September 16, 1380, at the age of forty-two, and was buried at the abbey of Saint-Denis among his ancestors ^[1]. His heir was a boy of eleven, and the uncles who took charge of the regency quickly spent down what the wise king had built.

Historians reading any Charles V of France biography confront a paradox: the most successful French king of the Hundred Years' War never won a famous battle. His method, systematic taxation, professional captains, fortification, and the refusal of risky engagements, anticipated the administrative warfare of later centuries and reversed in a decade what Crécy and Poitiers had cost ^[5]. That the recovery collapsed under his son does not diminish the demonstration; it shows how much of it depended on one careful mind.

His institutional and cultural marks proved more durable than his conquests. The tax machinery he regularized became, with interruptions, the backbone of French royal finance into the early modern era ^[2]. The translation program and the Louvre library shaped the French language and the tradition of state patronage of learning, and Christine de Pizan's portrait of the reading, consulting, measured king created an enduring model of wise rulership in European political writing ^[8]. Among the basic Charles V of France facts that survive in the fabric of Paris are the Bastille he founded, stormed four centuries later in 1789, and the expanded Louvre, now the most visited museum in the world in its later incarnations ^[7].

Modern scholarship, led by Françoise Autrand's substantial French biography and by Raymond Cazelles's studies of his political society, treats Charles as the ablest of the Valois: not a saint, not a warrior, but a convalescent tactician who understood that a kingdom is preserved by revenue, walls, and patience ^[3].