Souls under Siege

Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence

Nicole Archambeau

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501753664
• eBook ISBN: 9781501753671
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In Souls under Siege, Nicole Archambeau explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, she finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession.

Archambeau draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years' War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike.

Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Souls under Siege illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that "healing" had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.

CHAPTER 1

Bertranda Bertomieua and the Death of King Robert of Naples, 1343

The death of King Robert of Naples, the Count of Provence, was a precarious moment. His sons were dead, and a host of powerful lords had claims to the throne. Despite the strategies set out in King Robert’s will, decades of violent political machinations emerged from this moment. For many witnesses in Delphine’s canonization inquest, King Robert’s death was the root of the first two chronological moments of danger: the narrowly averted civil war in Provence and the first mercenary invasion.¹

The witness who provided the most insight into the death of King Robert in 1343 and the immediate transfer of political power was not a cardinal or a nobleman. Instead it was Delphine’s maid, Bertranda Bertomieua. As Delphine’s companion for almost fifty years, Bertranda lived with Delphine in Naples in 1342 and 1343 when Delphine was a guest of Queen Sanxia. Bertranda experienced the events in Naples neither from a political insider’s view nor from the bird’s-eye view of the historian. She brought instead the personal perspective of a member of Delphine’s household.

Bertranda’s testimony is a useful reminder that each witness in the inquest not only brought his or her own perspective to events, but they also saw different events. A witness like Bertranda saw what happened where she lived and to the people she knew. And through her individual background, her testimony gives us access to a specific political, social, and cultural moment. Members of the papal or royal courts, for example, would have presented events differently than she did. They had different experiences and information to draw on. Bertranda, as our closest vantage point in the inquest to King Robert’s death, had a perspective shaped by her respect for Delphine’s sanctity and her concern for Delphine’s safety and reputation. She valued those who imitated and respected Delphine and critiqued those who did not, even if this meant subtly critiquing Robert’s heir, Queen Johanna of Naples. We can use her testimony to understand the roots of two chronological moments of danger that witnesses faced. At the same time, we can also use her testimony as an introduction to what it meant to testify in this canonization inquest.

Bertranda Bertomieua as a Witness

Unlike the majority of witnesses—who were significantly younger than Delphine and had only known the holy woman for fifteen to twenty years—Bertranda had been Delphine’s companion for almost five decades. She had entered Delphine’s household shortly before Delphine’s husband Elzear died in 1323 and lived with Delphine afterward. Bertranda slept in the same room as Delphine, ate with her, and traveled with her. From Bertranda’s testimony, we learn about Delphine’s private moments away from the eyes of various courts and convents. Bertranda gives an intimate view of Delphine as a wife. She described how Delphine and Elzear had practiced an intimate chasteness—lying in bed together as a married couple should, but remaining clothed. She even described how Delphine washed and cut Elzear’s hair.²

Bertranda was an observant person, who, through Delphine, had spent years attached to the royal household in Naples and Provence. She saw how Elzear and Delphine had been close to the royal couple. King Robert had made Elzear Count of Ariano—a region close to the city of Naples—and depended on him as a political adviser who could handle difficult tasks with fairness. Elzear brought Delphine from Provence to live in Robert and Sanxia’s court in Naples in the early 1300s. Delphine and Elzear were considered a pious couple and critiqued by some for having a court more like a monastery, in which they discouraged displays of wealth and activities such as dancing or gossiping.³

Most importantly for this study, Bertranda was present in Naples when King Robert died in 1343. Within Bertranda’s poignant description of Countess Delphine as a caring, pious, and defiant woman, we also see a world of political instability. Her testimony about events in Delphine’s life in 1343 reveals her impression of Naples and the royal court. Bertranda described how Delphine was insulted and threatened in the streets of Naples. But she also described how Delphine was welcomed into Sanxia’s court and solved problems even King Robert could not solve.

We must keep in mind, however, that the stories Bertranda told as an inquest witness in 1363 were shaped by the twenty complicated years that had passed since King Robert’s death. The ugly political infighting that followed his death had cast a dark and violent shadow over political relations with Provence. To understand her reaction to King Robert’s death and her understanding of its implications, we have to listen closely. We ought to consider the stories that Bertranda chose to share not as random memories, but as selected stories from a woman who saw and heard a great deal as a member of Delphine’s household.

What we know about Bertranda as a person comes from the inquest and from inference. At the time of Delphine’s inquest, Bertranda was in her sixties, somewhat younger than Delphine, but still of a similar generation. Although her own testimony does not indicate where she was from, another witness referred to her as Lady Bertranda, and still others indicated that she was a member of the lower aristocracy from Puimichel, where Delphine’s family had lived.⁴ This makes sense for fourteenth-century Provence, where women from the lower aristocracy would serve in the households of powerful women.⁵ Just as Countess Delphine and other aristocratic women of Provence waited on Queen Sanxia, Bertranda waited on Delphine. We also know from inquest testimony that Bertranda shared Delphine’s commitment to avoiding a worldly lifestyle. Perhaps the strongest indication of this is that Bertranda never married. Instead she moved with Delphine from court to hermitage to convent.

At the time of the inquest, Bertranda was living in the Holy Cross convent in Apt, Provence, where Delphine had had her own room. Bertranda was very ill and could not get out of bed. But she was such an important witness that the papal commissioners, the proctor, and the notaries relocated to her room in order to hear her testimony. Not surprisingly, Bertranda has one of the longest testimonies in Delphine’s inquest. She spoke to forty-eight articles of interrogation, and as she testified, we see a household member’s perspective of this moment of political transition. Even when she was not present for important events, people of diverse social levels spoke to Bertranda, including King Robert of Naples, noblewomen of Provence, and other household servants.

Bertranda was a significant source of information about other people. In her testimony, Bertranda referred to over seventy-five people, all but a handful of whom she claimed to have spoken to directly or seen in person. Only about a third of these people were other witnesses in Delphine’s inquest in 1363. So Bertranda’s testimony brought many perspectives into the inquest. When the papal commissioners asked questions such as “Who told you this?” or “Who was there?,” Bertranda’s answer brought another person into the inquest. And by doing so, she shared their stories of the dangers they faced and how Delphine had helped them.

Twenty people that Bertranda mentioned were people she spoke to in Naples. Although this was a troubled time, Bertranda’s stories of living in Naples with Delphine were not overly negative. She focused on what she had seen, which was mostly Queen Sanxia’s household, including miraculous healings and the impact of Delphine’s divinely inspired prayer. There is no sense in her testimony that she was circumscribed by the articles of questioning or limited to formulaic or uniformly positive statements.⁶ Nor was this like a heresy inquest where a witness like Bertranda might have to speak carefully because people’s lives and property were at stake. Bertranda had relative freedom to speak. If there was censorship of content, it was likely self-imposed.

The political and social events of 1363 shaped how Bertranda talked about 1343. Bertranda spoke at a transition point—a possible end to the troubled relations between Naples and Provence. In 1363, Queen Johanna of Naples was in a new position of political strength. Her second husband, Louis of Taranto, had died, and she was able to act on her own. This was a moment when Queen Johanna could be a powerful support for Delphine’s canonization. And this was not an unlikely idea. Historian Gábor Klaniczay describes Queen Johanna, as part of the Angevin monarchy, as an active supporter of saints, especially those like Delphine’s husband, Elzear de Sabran, who were connected to the Crown.⁷ Historian Elizabeth Casteen also presents Queen Johanna as supportive of saints, particularly Birgitta of Sweden.⁸ So overt criticism, while not forbidden to a witness like Bertranda, was not a savvy option for Delphine’s canonization.

But a critique of Queen Johanna gradually emerged, especially in Bertranda’s answers to the papal commissioners’ questions.⁹ The stories she chose to tell about 1343 brought events from Johanna’s early reign to mind. Perhaps the strongest critique emerged in what Bertranda did not say. As Bertranda answered commissioners’ questions about who had told her about events or whom she had seen interacting with Delphine, she never named Queen Johanna. Bertranda obviously thought it important to include names. She named seventy-five different people. So her silence is powerful. Bertranda left Queen Johanna out of Delphine’s experience of Naples. As we will see below, this was not an oversight, but a conscious choice.

A more subtle critique of Queen Johanna emerged in how Bertranda spoke about time. The commissioners frequently asked her when an event happened. This is a common question in all types of inquest, but people answered it in different ways.¹⁰ Like many medieval witnesses, Bertranda rarely recalled specific years or months. Instead, she dated events in relation to significant events she recalled. In Bertranda’s case, these events were most often deaths. She organized Delphine’s life events and miracles as coming before, after, or at the same time as significant deaths. The death of Delphine in 1360 was, of course, a fixed point in Bertranda’s testimony. For example, if she were talking about Delphine’s saintly characteristics, she described them as lasting from when she met Delphine until the time of Delphine’s death. If she described an illness Delphine suffered, she described it as afflicting Delphine until her death. Another important moment of death was the “first mortality”—the prima mortalitas. This is the phrase that many witnesses used to describe the first wave of plague in 1348. It was a fixed point in Bertranda’s understanding of the past. Bertranda used this phrase five times in her testimony to date other events.¹¹

Both of these significant moments of death—Delphine’s death and the prima mortalitas—in turn shaped the events that Bertranda described by giving them a positive or negative impression. By placing a miraculous healing before Delphine’s death, for example, she infused Delphine’s life with God’s grace and the miraculous healing with Delphine’s sanctity. In other words, God’s grace and the person being healed were linked by Bertranda’s testimony in the minds of the papal commissioners and anyone who read her testimony. At the same time, the healed person and the event of their healing became infused with God’s grace. In contrast, by placing an event in the same year as the first mortality or even several years before or after, Bertranda brought the plague to listeners’ minds and permanently linked the first mortality in the recorded testimony to the event she described.¹²

Bertranda’s expression of time also emphasized for her audiences—from the papal commissioners to the readers of this book—that she was linking her past and present. She might be speaking about 1343 or 1348, but all the events of the intervening years shaped how she described those times in the testimony she gave in 1363. All the moments of danger that emerged in witness testimony weighed on her answers to commissioners’ questions. This is an important point to revisit. While the first part of this book builds a chronological narrative, we must remain aware that witnesses’ perceptions of the past and the ways they described the past were shaped by later events. For Bertranda, who was so very ill in 1363, perhaps death seemed the appropriate way to mark time. But the deaths she spoke of reflected on more than just her own situation. They reflected on the personal and political events she described.

A third significant death, which bears directly on Bertranda’s presentation of Queen Johanna, appears as a time marker in Bertranda’s testimony. She used the death of King Robert of Naples to date two events. Both of them, according to Bertranda, occurred shortly before h...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Names
• Introduction
• 1. Bertranda Bertomieua and the Death of King Robert of Naples, 1343
• 2. Bishop Philippe Cabassole and the “War of the Seneschals,” 1347–1349
• 3. Master Nicolau Laurens and the Mercenary Invasion of 1357–1358
• 4. Lady Andrea Raymon and the Great Companies, 1361
• 5. Master Durand Andree and the Sacrament of Penance as a Moment of Danger
• 6. Sister Resens de Insula and the Desire for Certainty
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index