The Bal des Ardents (also known as Ball of the Burning Men, in French Le Bal des Sauvages) was a 28 January 1393 masquerade ball[1] during which Charles VI of France was almost killed and four members of the nobility were burned to death during a series of balls and dances held at the French court. The occasion was held on the advice of a physician, and were intended to provide a pleasurable atmosphere for the young king after he suffered a severe attack of madness from which many believed he would not recover. During his illness, power shifted from the Marmousets to Charles' powerful uncles and a schism was created between them and his younger brother and heir to the throne, Louis I, Duke of Orléans.
The incident led to a loss of confidence in Charles' capacity to rule, coming after his attack of madness the previous summer. Parisians considered it proof of courtly decadence and threatened to revolt against Charles' advisors, uncles and the more powerful members of the nobility. Eventually the King and his brother, Orléans—whom at least one contemporary chronicler accused of attempted regicide and sorcery—were forced by public outrage into penance for the event. The event was blamed on Orléans and partially used as justification for his 1404 assassination which culminated in a decades long civil war between Orléanist factions and Burgundian factions.
The dancers were dressed in combustible costumes, disguised as wild men, a folkloric custom in which a costumed wild man was ritually burned as a fertility rite. Although often associated with demonology, the myth of wild men, rooted in antiquity, was common in medieval Europe and documented in revels in Tudor England. The event was chronicled by a number of contemporary writers, including a monk of St. Denis and Jean Froissart in Froissart's Chronicles. It was illustrated in a number of 15th century illuminated manuscripts by painters such as the Master of Anthony of Burgundy.
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Charles VI of France became King of France in 1380 as a 12-year-old after the death of his father Charles V.[2] Although all of his uncles Louis of Anjou, Philip of Burgundy (commonly known as Philip the Bold), John of Berry and Louis of Bourbon, who were ambitious men, acted as regents during his minority,[3] by 1382 Burgundy had sole control of the regency at a time when he was "one of the most powerful princes in Europe".[4] In September of 1387 Charles assumed sole control of the monarchy, discharging his uncles and reinstating his father's councillors, the Marmousets. The Marmousets were in favor of peace with England, lower taxes and responsible government.[5] When two years later the Constable of France and leader of the Marmousets Olivier de Clisson barely survived an assassination attempt by Pierre de Craon, who had been hired for the job by John V, Duke of Brittany, Charles reacted with outrage, believing the assassination an attack against himself and the monarchy, immediately planning an invasion of Brittany, which was quickly approved by the Marmousets.[5] In August a party of knights led by the King left Paris for Brittany.[6]
Charles led the campaign from Paris in August. Outside Le Mans he suffered what was to be first attack of madness on a hot day in August when he suddenly and violently turned against his knights, including his brother with whom he had a close relationship, attacking and killing four men.[6][7] He then fell in into a deep coma for four days. Believing the King to be dying, Burgundy and Berry again seized power, immediately dissolving the Marmouset council and ignoring the Duke of Orléans' stronger claim to the throne; Berry claimed "Now is the hour...I shall pay them back in kind".[6]
Enguerand de Coucy summoned Guillaume de Harsigny—a venerated and well-educated 92-year-old physician—to treat the King. Charles recovered and within two months was well enough to return to Paris. The sudden attack was explained as a sign of divine anger and punishment or thought to have been caused by sorcery.[6] He continued to be fragile, believing he was made of glass, and running "howling like a wolf down the corridors of the royal palaces".[8] Contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart write that he was so sick that "far out the way no medicine could help him".[9] He appeared unable to recognize his wife Queen Isabeau , demanding her removal when she entered his chamber; after his recovery, however, he made arrangements for her to retain guardianship of their children, and later to become the "guardian of the dauphin" (b. 1397) which gave her great power and ensured that if he were to again become ill she would be a member of the council of regents.[10]
Harsigny told the courtiers to shield him from the duties of government and leadership, telling his advisors "be careful not to worry or irritate him .... Burden him with work as little as you can; pleasure and forgetfulness will be better for him than anything else."[11] To surround Charles with a festive atmosphere and to shield him from the rigor of governing, the court turned to amusement. Women's fashions became excessive as Isabeau and her sister-in-law Valentina Visconti, Duchess of Orléans indulged in extravagant clothing, jewel-laden dresses, that reportedly required doorways to be widened to accommodate elaborate braided hairstyles coiled into tall shells and covered with wide double hennins. The extravagance seemed excessive to the common people, but they loved their young king, whom they called Charles le bien-aimé (the well-beloved); blame for unnecessary excess and expense was directed at the foreign queen brought from Bavaria and at Charles' uncles.[11] Neither Isabeau nor her sister-in-law Valentina—the ruthless Duke of Milan's daughter—were well-liked by the court or by the people.[7] Charles' uncles were content to allow the frivolities for "so long as the Queen and the Duc d'Orléans danced, they were not dangerous or even annoying."[12]
On January 28, 1393, Isabeau held a masquerade at the Hôtel Saint-Pol in celebration for the third marriage by her ladies-in-waiting, Catherine de Fastaverin.[13] Traditionally a woman's remarriage was an occasion for mockery and foolery, celebrated with masquerades or charivari characterized by "all sorts of licence, disguises, disorders, and loud blaring of discordant music and clanging of cymbal".[14] On Huguet de Guisay's suggestion, who was well-known for "outrageous schemes" and cruelty, six high-ranking knights performed a dance costumed as wood savages. They were sewn into costumes made of linen soaked with resin to which flax was attached "so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot". Masks made of the same materials covered the faces completely so that the dancers' identities was hidden from the audience. According to Barbara Tuchman, some of the chronicles report the dancer's were bound together by chains. Unknown beforehand to the audience, Charles appeared as one of the dancers. Strict orders were given to prevent hall torches from being lit during the dance and to prevent anyone from entering the hall carrying a torch during the performance so as to prevent the costumes from catching fire.[11]
The men capered about, howling "like wolves", spitting obscenities, inviting the audience to guess their identities while dancing in a "diabolical" frenzy.[13] Charles' brother Louis, arriving with Phillipe de Bar to the event late and drunk, entered the hall carrying lit torches. Accounts vary, but Louis may have held his torch above a dancer's mask to see his identity when a spark fell, catching fire on the leg of one of the dancers, causing it to burst into flames.[11] According to a contemporary description, "the Duke of Orleance ... put one of the Torches his servants held so neere the flax, that he set one of the Coates on fire, and so each of them set fire on to the other, and so they were all in a bright flame.[15] In other accounts Louis, who was known to have practiced sorcery, was accused of intentionally causing the fire.[13]
As the men burned in front of her, knowing her husband was one of the dancers, Isabeau fainted. Unknown to her Charles had been standing at a distance from the other dancers, near the 15-year-old Duchesse de Berry, who swiftly saved his life by throwing her voluminous skirt over him thereby protecting him from the sparks. The hall filled with burning men screaming in pain and the members of the audience, unable to save them, screaming.[11] According to Veenstra, the event is chronicled in uncharacteristic vividness by the Monk of St. Denis who wrote "four men were burned alive, their flaming genitals dropping to the floor ... releasing a stream of blood".[13] Many guests were severely burned as they tried to rescue the dancers. Sire de Nantouillet jumped into an open vat of wine where he hid until the flames were extinguished. The Count de Joigny died at the scene; Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers, son of the Count of Valentinois, lingered in pain for two days. The instigator of the affair, Huguet de Guisay, survived for three days, bitterly "cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour".[11]
The people of Paris were angered at the event and the danger posed to their monarch, and blaming Charles' advisors. After the dramatic episode of madness the previous summer, Charles was became a pawn in a power struggle between his uncles and his younger brother. A "great commotion" swept through the city as the citizens threatened to depose the uncles and kill those courtiers thought to be dissolute and depraved. Greatly concerned at the popular outcry and chastened by the Maillotin revolt of the previous decade, the court sought penance at Notre Dame, preceded by an apologetic royal progress through the city in which the uncles walked in humility behind the King on horseback. Louis of Orléans, who was blamed for the tragedy, built a chapel at the Celestine monastery in atonement.[11]
The Duke of Orléans' reputation was severely damaged and he was blamed for the tragedy. A few years earlier he had been associated with an apostate monk whom, it was said, Louis had hired to raise demons to imbue a ring, dagger, and sword with sorcery. Jean Petit would later say that the Duke practiced sorcery, and that he attempted regicide in retaliation for having been attacked by Charles in his fit of madness the previous summer.[16] In 1404 John the Fearless had Orléans assassinated for reasons of "vice, corruption, sorcery, and a long list of public and private villainies", and at that time Isabeau was accused of having become mistress to her husband's brother.[17] Orléans' assassination pushed the country into civil war between the Burgundians and the Orléanists (known as the Armagnacs) which was to last several decades.[18]
Scholars consider the masquerade a form of courtly theater, although the extent of audience participation is unclear. The Duchess of Berry's actions have been variously described as either participatory or not: it is unknown if she pulled the King from the dancers to speak to him or if he himself chose to move away toward the audience. According to Froissart: "The King, who proceeded ahead of [the dancers], departed from his companions ... and went to the ladies to show himself to them ... and so passed by the Queen and came near the Duchess of Berry".[19]
Common superstition held that areas such as the Pyrenees contained wild men with long black hair who danced in firelight either to conjure up demons or as part of fertility rituals, and the belief in wild men was common enough that Penitentials forbade believing in them or dressing as one. In remote villages it was believed that by dressing as wild men, villagers ritualistically "conjured demons by imitating them".[20] Some village charivaries included dancers dressed as wild men, to represent demons, who were ceremonially captured and symbolically burnt to appease evil spirits at harvest or planting time. The Church, however, considered the rituals pagan and demonic.[20] Early medieval folk festivals in some areas included a ritual called the "Expulsion of Death" which was often performed on the fourth Sunday in Lent, also known as Todten-Sonntag (Sunday of the dead). An effigy was killed, often by burning, with the fragments scattered on fields as a fertility ritual. As early as the 8th century in Saxony and Thuringen in Germany a being known as the pfingstl—a leaf and moss clad wild man—was ceremonially hunted and killed in village ceremonies.[21]
Although common in medieval Europe the myth the wild men is rooted in antiquity. In the Book of Daniel Nebuchadnezzar II is depicted as a long-haired creature living on the outskirts of civilization. In Swiss folklore, notably in Graubünden, the people of the Grisons caught wild men by making them drunk which corresponds to the much earlier story of shepherds catching a forest being called Silenus or Faunus, in the same fashion and for the same purpose.[22] By the 16th century the figure wild men were documented in courtly masquerades as with an event in 1513 at the court of King Henry VIII when two "mighty woordwoosys or wyldmen" appeared in a revel,[23] and documentation exists that shows in the same century green men, leafy covered costumed semi-savage men, were often combined or substituted with wild men in village revels and courtly dances.[24]
In the medieval period the wild man was a metaphor for man without God or man outside of Christianity. Often depicted carrying a staff or a club, the wild man was outside of and beyond civilization, without shelter or fire, without feelings, and without a soul. The wild man represented humankind without God.[24] The mythology of wild or forest men was then often associated with demonology. At the time of Isabeau's event, the folkloric depiction of wild men was an acceptable theme in the literature of noble society.[25]
In his Magic and divination at the courts of Burgundy and France, Jan Veenstra notes that a ritual burning on the wedding night of a woman re-marrying has Christian origins. In the apocryphal Book of Tobit, the demon Asmodeus is banished through the burning of the heart and liver of a fish after the murder of each husband of a woman who married seven times. By the 15th century ritual burning of evil, demonic, or Satanic forces became commonplace as exemplified by the Duke of Orleans' later persecution of the King's physician Jehan de Bar, who under torture confessed to practicing sorcery and was burned to death.[26]
The event was recorded by Jean Froissart in his Chronicles and has been recorded in a number of illuminated manuscript copies. The Harley Froissart, held in the British Library and dated from c. 1470 to 1472, identifies the costumed dancers as wodewoses and shows four dancers in the hall; the Queen sits with two ladies on the dais.[27] A 15th century illuminated manuscript of Froissart's Chronicles with the event illuminated by the Master of Anthony of Burgundy held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles shows the Bal des Ardents, with the Queen in a standing position flanked by ladies-in-waiting, wearing high conical hennins. The King cowers beneath the Duchess' skirts and the dancers are engulfed in flames.[28]
In his chronicles Froissart places the blame for the tragedy on Louis, the Duke of Orléans, writing "and thus the feast and the marriage celebrations ended with such great sorrow and grief that [Charles] and [Isabeau] could do nothing to remedy it. We must accept that it was no fault of theirs but of the duke of Orléans".[29] Other contemporary chroniclers were Jean Juvénal des Ursins who became Bishop of Beauvauis, Laon and Archbishop of Reims, the author of L'Histoire de France with emphasis on Charles VI, although scholars believe he may have relied heavily on the Chronique du Religieux de St. Denis.[30]