The tomb of John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria

By far the most spectacular room in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon is the Hall of the Guard (salle des Gardes). Here we find the funerary monuments of dukes Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, rulers of Burgundy and many other territories between 1363 and 1404, and 1404 and 1419 respectively. I have already discussed the tomb of Philip the Bold in a previous post. This post is dedicated to the tomb of John and his German spouse Margaret of Bavaria (1363-1424). The tomb is truly a splendid monument, but unfortunately large parts of it are not original. Hundreds of years after their deaths, John and Margaret became the victims of French revolutionaries’ appetite for destruction.

John the Fearless

John the Fearless was born in 1371 as the first son of Duke Philip the Bold and his Flemish wife Margaret of Male (1350-1405). In 1405, upon the death of his mother, John became the new Count of Flanders, a rich province with prosperous cities and booming trade. Philip and Margaret had managed to arrange an advantageous marriage for John as well. Their initial plan was to help their daughter Margaret of Burgundy (1374-1441) find a suitable husband. For this they got into contact with Albert of Bavaria and his wife Margaret of Brieg. Albert was not just Duke of Bavaria, but also Count of Holland, Zealand and Hainault. He was willing to let his son William marry Margaret of Burgundy, but only under the condition that Philip’s son John marry Albert’s daughter, whose name was – you would never have guessed it – Margaret as well. Apparently the name Margaret was hugely popular at the time. Philip the Bold and Margaret of Male accepted Albert’s condition, and so it came about that in 1385 two weddings were held in Cambrai.

In 1396 John joined a crusade in an attempt to help the Hungarian king Sigismund against the advancing Turks. Unfortunately for the Burgundians the crusade ended in total disaster. As a result of tactical screw-ups, the crusader army was crushed at Nicopolis by the Turkish sultan Bayezid on 25 September 1396. John reportedly fought bravely during the battle and so acquired the nickname “John the Fearless”. Not that it did him much good, for he ended up in captivity. Bayezid had most of the prisoners executed. It was an atrocity, but the crusaders had previously done the same to Turkish prisoners. The Turkish sultan decided to keep just the most valuable prisoners and demand a king’s ransom for their release. After more than a year in a Turkish prison, John was released after his father had managed to scrape together 100,000 florins. Meanwhile Margaret of Bavaria had given birth to the couple’s first son, who was named Philip after his grandfather. He is more commonly known as Philip the Good (1396-1467).

Much more than his father, John the Fearless was a soldier. This was demonstrated not just by his participation in the failed crusade, but also by other feats of arms. In 1408 he came to the rescue of his brother-in-law John of Bavaria, the bishop-elect of Liège. In the Battle of Othée, fought on 23 September 1408, the Burgundian army annihilated the Liègeois rebels. In the aftermath John of Bavaria had many captured rebels executed, acquiring the nickname John the Pitiless in the process. For John the Fearless the victory proved to be very beneficial as well, as after “Othée” Liège had basically become a Burgundian protectorate. Burgundian influence now stretched well into Flanders (of which John himself was count), Brabant and Limburg (governed by his brother Anthony) and Liège, while because of the aforementioned double wedding the provinces of Holland, Zealand and Hainault had also been drawn into the Burgundian sphere of influence.

Burgundy moreover had a finger in the pie in France, of which it was, after all, formally a fief (apanage). In 1392 King Charles VI had become insane, but his life dragged on until 1422. Philip the Bold had always had an important position in the council of regents, but he had to tolerate the presence of the king’s brother, Louis of Orleans. After Philip’s death, Louis decided to exclude his son from the council. John the Fearless reacted furiously. He contacted his brother Anthony of Brabant and brother-in-law William VI of Holland, Zealand and Hainault (the husband of his sister Margaret of Burgundy), and raised an army with which he marched on Paris. It was enough to force Louis of Orleans to grant him a seat in the council of regents, but Louis had more than enough supporters in the council to overrule John on any given occasion.

John and Louis were now forever enemies. On 23 November 1407 John had his cousin murdered in the streets of Paris by a band of hired assassins. Although he is said to have immediately regretted the act, the damage had already been done. The murder led to a drawn-out conflict between Burgundy and the Armagnacs, the party led by Count Bernard VII of Armagnac, who had been the father-in-law of the slain Louis. The conflict basically amounted to a civil war, of which the English profited in 1415 by invading France and occupying Harfleur. They subsequently won a crushing victory over the French army in the famous Battle of Agincourt. Three years later Paris too fell into English hands, after which crown prince Charles VII (the dauphin) was forced to flee to Bourges. In 1419 Charles invited John for a meeting on the bridge of Montereau-Fault-Yonne. There the crown prince took revenge for the murder of his uncle. John the Fearless was lured into a trap and brutally killed, almost twelve years after the murder of Louis of Orleans.

The consequences of the death of John the Fearless were immense. At Agincourt the Burgundians had fought on the French side and Anthony of Brabant had even been killed in French service. But after the death of his father, John’s son and successor Philip the Good made an alliance with the English. Moreover, in 1420 the so-called Treaty of Troyes was signed, which stipulated that not Charles VII, but the English king Henry V would inherit the French throne upon the death of Charles VI. Charles VI and Henry V both passed away in 1422, but because Henry died some two months before Charles, the English claimed the throne for his infant son Henry VI, who was not yet one year old. Young Henry VI obviously needed a regent, and in this position John of Lancaster was appointed, better known as the Duke of Bedford. France had now been split into three parts. The English controlled large parts of the north, including Paris, the capital. The Burgundians had a tight grip on the east and only in the centre and south of France did Charles VII manage to stand firm. His enemies mocked him as the “king of Bourges”, Bourges being a city that is almost 200 kilometres south of Paris. It took a Joan of Arc to make Charles VII a proper king.

The tomb

While still alive, John the Fearless had commissioned the Dutch sculptor Claus van de Werve (died 1439) to design a tomb for him. The choice for Van de Werve was a logical one, as it was this artist who had also completed the tomb of his father Philip the Bold. The murder of John the Fearless in 1419 unfortunately disrupted the whole project, and in the twenty years that Claus van de Werve had left on earth he did not manage to complete anything (according to the information panel in the museum he was unable to procure the alabaster that he needed for the work, which does not sound very convincing).

In the end it was Philip the Good who in 1443 hired the services of the Spanish sculptor Jean (or Juan) de la Huerta (ca. 1413-1462) to craft a tomb for his father. The Gothic gallery into which the pleurants were placed is his work, as are the angels. However, in 1456 De la Huerta left Dijon without having completed the monument. Five years later Philip commissioned Antoine Le Moiturier (ca. 1425-1495?) from Avignon. He was responsible for the pleurants, the gisants or effigies and the lions at the feet of John and Margaret. In 1470, three years after the death of Philip the Bold and more than half a century after that of John the Fearless, the funerary monument was finally completed and set up in the church of the monastery of Champmol.

The distribution of work between Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier is clear. Jean did the galleries and angels, Antoine the pleurants, gisants and lions. The funerary monument later regretfully fell victim to the French Revolution. The monastery of Champmol was dissolved and the funerary monument was moved to the cathedral of Dijon. In 1793 it was disassembled and large chunks of it were lost. The two gisants are for instance nineteenth-century replicas, although the faces and hands are original. Also original are the angels and lions. The pleurants are original, although not all of them were recovered and it is known that one pleurant is currently in the museum of Cleveland in the United States.

What is special about this funerary monument is that John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria are presented together. This is a significant difference with the tomb of Philip the Bold, where Margaret of Male is notably absent. John and Margaret are lying on their backs, hands folded in prayer, heads on pillows, gazing towards heaven. John’s robes are blue and white, while those of Margaret are white and blue. Remarkably, the lion at her feet is a little bigger, but that is probably because her gisant is a little shorter than that of her husband John. At John’s crowned head two kneeling angels are holding a knight’s helmet. At Margaret’s head we see an escutcheon with the coats of arms of Burgundy (left) and Bavaria, Holland, Zealand and Hainault (right). The escutcheon is completed by the Flemish lion in the centre.