Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/30

12 in hostility, "for princes are men, and their affairs are high and perilous, and their natures are subject to many passions, such as hatred and envy; their hearts are veritable dwelling-places of these, because of their pride in reigning."

In writing the history of the house of Burgundy, the leitmotiv should constantly keep before our minds the spirit of revenge. Nobody, of course, will now seek the explanation of the whole conflict of power and interests, whence proceeded the secular struggle between France and the house of Austria, in the family feud between Orleans and Burgundy. All sorts of causes of a general nature—political, economic, ethnographic—have contributed to the genesis of that great conflict. But we should never forget that the apparent origin of it, and the central motive dominating it, was, to the men of the fifteenth century and even later, the thirst for revenge. To them Philip the Good is always, in the first place, the avenger, "he who, to avenge the outrage done to the person of Duke John, sustained the war for sixteen years." He had undertaken it as a sacred duty: "with the most violent and deadly hatred he would give himself up to revenge the dead, as far as ever God would permit him, and he would devote to it body and soul, substance and lands, submitting everything to Fortune, considering it more a salutary task and agreeable to God to undertake it, than to leave it."

Read the long list of expiatory deeds which the treaty of Arras demanded in 1435—chapels, monasteries, churches, chapters to be founded, crosses to be erected, masses to be chanted—then one realizes the immensely high rate at which men valued the need of vengeance and of reparations to outraged honour. The Burgundians were not alone in thinking after this fashion; the most enlightened man of his century, Aeneas Sylvius, in one of his letters praises Philip above all the other princes of his time, for his anxiety to avenge his father.

According to La Marche, this duty of honour and revenge was to the duke's subjects also the cardinal point of policy. All the dominions of the duke, he says, were clamouring for vengeance along with him. We shall find it difficult to believe this, when we remember, for instance, the commercial relations between Flanders and England, a more important political