regional aristocracy became the core of a regularly financed French army at a time when
England began to face weak and divided leadership.
The war resumed in 1369, when Charles V agreed to accept appeals from Gascon
lords who chafed under English rule. The Caroline war of the next twenty years was
bitter and destructive but lacked dramatic battles. Bertrand du Guesclin (constable of
France, 1370–80) was a master at the tactics of the routiers. His close associate and
successor as constable, Olivier de Clisson, exerted a strong influence against pitched
battles and commanded the respect of the northwestern nobles. Under these two able
Bretons, the French regained large amounts of territory while the English squandered
resources on expeditions that inflicted great damage without producing strategic results.
Yet England did retain key ports in France, like Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg, and Calais,
while French attempts to carry the war across the Channel in the 1380s did not succeed.
Peace negotiations in 1389–96 produced a prolonged lull in the war but no definitive
settlement, and the advantage in leadership swung back to England. The French military
elite suffered dreadful losses on crusade at Nicopolis (1396) and became badly divided
during the mental incapacity of Charles VI, as the dukes of Burgundy engaged in a power
struggle with the Orléans-Armagnac faction. The English reopened the conflict,
inaugurating the Lancastrian war in 1415 and winning a crushing victory at Agincourt in
October of that year. The weakened nobility of northwestern France was decimated by
death or capture. Leaderless Norman lordships were in no position to halt Henry V’s
subsequent conquest of the region. Supported by Burgundy after the murder of John the
Fearless in 1419, Henry in 1420 secured the Treaty of Troyes, which acknowledged him
as heir to the French throne. His early death did not immediately change the situation
because his able brother, John of Bedford, continued to advance, defeating the French
badly at Verneuil (1424) and overrunning Anjou and Maine.
A new stalemate ensued only after the English failed to take Orléans in 1428–29. In
stopping their advance, the French found an unlikely group of leaders: the bastard of
Orléans Jean de Dunois, the routier captain La Hire, the young, rich, and unstable
marshal Gilles de Rais, and, most celebrated of all, the teenaged visionary Jeanne d’Arc.
Jeanne’s presence seems to have had an inspirational effect on French morale and a
correspondingly negative impact on the English. Jeanne was involved in several French
victories that culminated in the coronation of Charles VII at Reims, but in 1430 she fell
into Burgundian hands, and the English, who accused her of heresy and sorcery, had her
executed in 1431.
The pendulum of leadership began swinging back in favor of the French after the
ouster of Georges de La Trémoille from court in 1433 and the rise of Arthur de
Richemont, who had been constable since 1425 and favored a rapprochement with
Burgundy. The English did not join in the Franco-Burgundian treaty of 1435, and
Bedford’s death was a blow to Lancastrian unity. Richemont regained Paris in 1436, but
after a new stalemate the two sides concluded a five-year truce in 1444. While the French
were rebuilding Charles V’s system of regular taxes and a salaried army, England began
to suffer from problems resembling those that had afflicted France at the turn of the
century—princely rivalries around a weak and mentally unstable king, Henry VI. The
French mastery of firearms rivaled the earlier English success with the longbow. When
the truce expired, French victories at Formigny (1450) and Castillon (1453) sealed their
rapid reconquests of Normandy and Aquitaine, respectively.
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