Who Was Charles V of France?

Charles V of France (1338–1380), known to posterity as Charles the Wise (le Sage), reigned from 1364 to 1380 and presided over the most important reversal of fortune in the entire Hundred Years’ War. He inherited a kingdom that had been dismembered by the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 — Aquitaine, Ponthieu, and Calais all ceded to England — and by the time of his death he had recovered nearly the whole of it, leaving England with a coastal strip around Bordeaux and a channel port. The architect of that recovery was his constable Bertrand du Guesclin; the mind was Charles’s own.

Regency and inheritance

Charles was born on 21 January 1338, the third son of John II and Bonne of Bohemia. He received the duchy of Normandy in 1350 when his father acceded to the throne, and was styled Duke of Normandy for the rest of his father’s reign. The capture of King John at Poitiers on 19 September 1356 made Charles regent at eighteen. The regency was brutal. The Estates-General of October 1356, called to vote a ransom, was followed by the Parisian revolt led by Étienne Marcel, then by the Jacquerie of May 1358, and then by a second revolution in Paris. Charles weathered each of them, but the political education of those years shaped the cautious, administrative king he would become.

John II, released to negotiate the ransom and unable to raise it, returned voluntarily to captivity in London and died there on 8 April 1364. Charles succeeded him and was crowned at Reims. He was twenty-six, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do: undo Brétigny, but never on a pitched battlefield.

The strategy of avoidance

Charles understood what Charles of Blois and the marshals of Philip VI had not: the English longbow, deployed from a prepared position, broke any frontal assault by mounted men-at-arms. The battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) had demonstrated the principle. Charles’s response was not a better army but a different war. He reduced the garrisons he could not hold, denied the English the chance to bring him to battle, and pushed the fighting into Castile, where du Guesclin’s free companies fought the English-backed Pedro the Cruel at the cost of French tax revenue but in the end at the cost of English treasure and Aquitanian loyalty.

The naval turning point came at La Rochelle on 22 June 1372, when a Franco-Castilian fleet under Ambrosio Boccanegra destroyed an English squadron under the earl of Pembroke. The Channel seaboard of Aquitaine was now cut off from England, and the reconquest of the duchy could begin. By 1377, Bordeaux itself was negotiating terms; the great English seneschalies of the south had been eaten away. Jonathan Sumption’s third volume (The Hundred Years’ War: Divided Houses, 2009) is the standard English account; Philippe Contamine’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1968) is the standard French one.

The duke of Burgundy and the end of the war

The truce of Leulinghem, signed on 18 June 1389 between Charles’s son Charles VI and Richard II, was meant to run for twenty-eight years. It did not survive the madness of Charles VI and the ambition of Henry V. But for the rest of Charles V’s reign, the war was effectively over.

Patron and bibliophile

Charles’s other great monument is the library he assembled in the Louvre. At his death it contained roughly 1,000 volumes — a substantial fraction of the literary patrimony of the Latin West — bound in his characteristic crimson and blue morocco, stamped with the salamander. The inventories of 1373 and 1380 are the most important bibliographical documents of the 14th century. He commissioned French translations of Aristotle (Nicolas Oresme), Augustine (Raoul de Presles), and the Bible (Guyart des Moulins), and employed Jean Bondol and André Beauneveu as court artists. The library was the working tool of a king who believed that good government was first of all a matter of well-managed information.

Charles and the succession

Charles died of unknown causes on 16 September 1380 at Beauté-sur-Marne, aged 42. His heir was the twelve-year-old Charles VI, and the regency that followed stripped the crown of the resources Charles had accumulated. The fiscal reforms of the 1360s and 1370s, the standing army of gens d’armes, the strengthened royal administration — all were quickly dismantled by the uncles who governed for the boy king. Within twelve years the new king was mad, and within thirty-five the English were in Rouen.

Charles’s posthumous reputation, the epithet le Sage, was fixed by Christine de Pizan and the chroniclers of the next generation. Modern scholarship — Sumption, Contamine, and Favier — has sustained the verdict. He was not a soldier; he was something rarer in the Middle Ages, a strategist.