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(Il)Licit Violence in the Fifteenth Century

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(Il)Licit Violence in the Fifteenth Century Chapter 4 Tyrannicide and the Question of (Il)licit Violence in the Fifteenth Century David Zachariah Flanagin How do you get rid of a bad, or at the very least, a problematic, leader? In many ways, this was the primary question at the dawn of the fifteenth century. More specifically, how do you get rid of a problematic leader without creating the kind of anarchy that undermines society as a whole? One of the hallmarks of a stable, modern society is the ability of its people to transfer power from an old leader to a new one without widespread violence or other forms of social unrest. In the fifteenth century, this was essentially the problem raised by the Great Western Schism of the papacy. How do we get rid of some (or all) of the current popes without either the violence of war (the failed via facti) or the undermining of the hierarchical order in the Church that was believed to have been established by God? Much time and energy has been devoted in modern scholarship, especially since the 1950s, to the explanation, analysis, and eval- uation of the conciliar solution to this papal crisis.1 But the struggle with the multi- headed hydra of the papacy was not the only realm of life and thought in which people were asking significant questions about the proper response to problematic leadership. In England (1399), the unpopular Richard ii was dethroned by Henry of Lancaster. Likewise, the German Electors (1400) saw fit to depose Wenceslas, king of the Romans, in favor of Rupert of Bavaria, and in Poland, the Teutonic knights were crusading against and trying to delegitimize the Lithuanian monarch Jagiello, who had recently converted to Catholicism and assumed leadership of that land.2 It is in this larger context that we get the debate over the legitimacy of tyrannicide that overwhelmed first France 1 The classic work is Brian Tierney, The Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge: 1955). For more re- cent insights, see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300– 1870 (Oxford: 2003); and Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Christo- pher M. Bellitto, eds., The Church, the Councils, & Reform: The Legacy of the Fifteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: 2008). 2 A second debate over tyrannicide, in addition to the French affair, arose at the Council of Constance, concerning statements by the Dominican John of Falkenberg that legitimized attempts to kill King Jagiello and his supporters. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/ 9789004382411_ 005 Tyrannicide and the Question of (Il)licit 49 and then the entire leadership of Western Christendom at the Council of Con- stance, a debate that ultimately destroyed the university career of Jean Gerson and played no small part in undermining larger attempts at church reform at the Council.3 The actual events leading up to the tyrannicide debate in France are well known.4 Ever since the death of Charles V in 1380, France had suffered under an unworkable situation in which the weak Charles vi—initially young (ac- ceding to the monarchy at age 12) and later stricken by frequent fits of madness (beginning in 1392)— was dominated by much more powerful relatives among the French nobility, whose administration was characterized by a rapacious and licentious excess that would be hard to rival. Eventually, the grab for royal power— and especially the royal treasury— came down to a two- way struggle between, on the one hand, the most powerful political force in the realm, the dukes of Burgundy— at first, Philip the Bold, the king’s uncle, and then Philip’s son, John the Fearless (from 1404)—and, on the other hand, the king’s favored younger brother, Louis, the duke of Orléans. The balance of power shifted back and forth regularly, with Burgundy on the ascendancy during the periods of the king’s madness and Orléans in power during the king’s sanity. This state of affairs came to a sudden end on November 23, 1407, when John of Burgundy employed a group of armed men to assassinate Louis of Orléans as he returned from a visit at the queen’s residence. A few days later, the Duke John confessed to some of the royal councilors that he committed this crime at the instigation of the devil, and he quickly fled to Flanders in fear of the repercussions. Three months later (at the end of February) John returned to Paris to a warm greet- ing, and a master of theology on his payroll, Jean Petit, delivered before the king and the nobility an elaborate Justification of the Duke of Burgundy (March 3 The seminal treatment of the debate over tyrannicide at Constance is Alfred Coville, Jean Petit: La question du tyrannicide au commencement du xve siècle (Paris: 1932). Helpful and more recent are Anna Lisa Merklin Lewis, “Tyrannicide: Heresy or Duty? The Debates at the Council of Constance” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1990), and Andrei Sălăvăstru, “The Rhetoric of Tyrannicide in Early Fifteenth Century France: Jean Gerson’s First Reply to the Justification of Jean Petit,” Argumentum: Journal of the Seminar of Discursive Logic, Ar- gumentation Theory and Rhetoric 14 (2016), 119– 38. The larger picture of France at the time of the schism is detailed in Noël Valois, La France et le Grande Schisme d’Occident, 4 vols. (Paris: 1896– 1902; repr. Hildesheim: 1967), of which 4.315– 32 focuses especially on the debate over tyrannicide at the Council of Constance. A focus on Gerson’s role in the affair is found in Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park, Pa.: 2005), pp. 190– 202, 229– 34, 240– 68, 274– 86. 4 In addition to works cited above, a fine synopsis of the political details can be found in Alfred Coville, “France: Armagnacs and Burgundians,” in The Cambridge Medieval History, eds. J.R. Tanner, C.W. Previté- Orton, and Z.N. Brooke (Cambridge: 1932), 7:368– 92..
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