These actions caused Marcel to break with the king, no
longer providing him with Parisian troops. When John
met defeat and capture at Poitiers in September, he had
no bourgeois troops but relied solely on nobles.
In the last months of 1356, Marcel seems to have
become a partisan of Charles the Bad, the rebellious king
of Navarre. An infl ammatory Navarrese partisan, Robert
Le Coq, dominated the Estates that met after Poitiers,
and the urban representatives, led by Marcel, lent at
least tacit support to his demands. In December, Marcel
organized his fi rst large Parisian street demonstration
against the government. He made frequent use of such
intimidating tactics in subsequent months.
The Estates obtained a sweeping ordinance of reform
in March 1357, but when they failed repeatedly to de-
liver the taxes needed to prosecute the war, the govern-
ment ceased to feel bound by the reforms. Marcel and
the Parisian crowd became increasingly intimidating,
and in February 1358 they murdered two military com-
manders in the presence of the dauphin Charles, thereby
alienating the nobles who had originally spearheaded
the reform movement. Marcel and his followers became
increasingly radical in their hostility to nobles and gave
some support to the Jacquerie of late May. The dauphin,
meanwhile, left Paris in March and began to rally noble
support. Marcel failed in his effort to organize a league
of towns to oppose them, and Paris became increasingly
isolated. At the end of July, one of the citizens murdered
Marcel, paving the way for the dauphin’s triumphant
return to the capital.
See also Charles II the Bad
Further Reading
Avout, Jacques d’. Le meurtre d’Étienne Marcel. Paris: Gal-
limard, 1960.
Cazelles, Raymond. Étienne Marcel: champion de l’unité fran-
çaise. Paris: Tallandier, 1984.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
MARCHETTO DA PADOVA
(early 14th century)
Marchetto da Padova (Marchetus de Padua) was the
most important and most infl uential music theorist in
Italy during his time. Documents at the cathedral of
Padua attest to his presence as a teacher in 1305–1307.
Three treatises of his survive: Lucidarium in arte musice
plane (Cesena and Verona, 1317 or 1318), Pomerium in
arte musice mensurate (Cesena, later than Lucidarium
but no later than 1319), and Brevis compilatio in arte
musice mensurate pro rudibus et modernis (later than
Pomerium). An acrostic in the text of the motet Ave
regina celoruml Mater innocencie identifi es Marchetto
as its author.
Marchetto made fundamental contributions to the
theories of mode, chromaticism, and tuning in Lu-
cidarium, and to the theory or mensuration in Pomerium
and Brevis compilatio. The theory of mode involves the
classifi cation of plainchant melodies by fi nal (a sort of
keynote), range, scale structure, and melodic articula-
tion. This classifi cation is crucial for the correlation of
(among other sorts of pieces) recitation tones for the
psalms with the antiphons that frame them. Whereas
traditional modal theory had stressed fi nal and range as
determinants of mode, Marchetto stressed scale structure
and articulation; this change of perspective, along with
his development of the concept of modal mixture, en-
abled the classifi cation of melodies that had earlier been
dismissed as anomalous. Marchetto’s modal doctrine
spread through Italy and beyond during the next 200
years and became the foundation of the modal theory
of polyphonic music during the Renaissance.
Earlier theories of melody based on hexachords (six-
note ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la prototypes) and their connection
through a process called mutation allowed only for
diatonic progressions; though they served plainchant
melodies well, these theories failed the chromatic pro-
gressions (e.g., progressions directly from c-natural
to c-sharp) favored by Italian composers of the early
fourteenth century. Marchetto developed a theory to
accommodate such progressions and coined the term
“permutation” for the hexachord connections they
entail; though the term gained a certain currency in
music theory of the fourteenth century, it disappeared
as fi fteenth-century composers abandoned chromatic
progressions.
Though he espoused the traditional so-called Pytha-
gorean tuning system, in which all perfect fi fths are pure,
Marchetto modifi ed the system by describing the slight
raising of sharped notes in certain contrapuntal contexts,
a process that increases the harmonic piquancy of some
combinations of notes and makes them seem to drive
toward notes of resolution; this procedure has important
implications for the performance of fourteenth-century
music. Marchetto’s “fi fths” of whole tones must surely
be taken as rough approximations rather than precise
measurements; nonetheless, the concept of fractional
division of whole tones represents a crucial step in the
abandonment of the arithmetic strictures of the Pythagor-
ean system, in which equal division of the whole tone
was conceptually impossible. This step was necessary
for the eventual development of equal temperament.
The thirteenth century had seen far-reaching devel-
opments in the theory of mensural notation, a theory
which Franco of Cologne codifi ed late in the century.
Franco based his system on a note value called the
breve (corresponding roughly to a measure in modern
notation) that was divisible only into thirds at primary
and secondary levels; Franco worked out elaborate rulesMARCEL, ÉTIENNE