50,000. A battle ensued which proved for the French a second Crècy. The arrows of the English bowmen drove them in fatal panic from the field, which was strewn with 11,000 of their dead.
Battle of Agincourt (1415).—For half a century after the Peace[1] that followed the battle of Poitiers there was a lull in the war. But while Henry V. (1413–1422) was reigning in England, France was unfortunate in having an insane king, Charles VI.; and Henry, taking advantage of the disorder into which the French kingdom naturally fell under these circumstances, invaded the country with a powerful army, defeated the French in the great battle of Agincourt (1415), and five years later concluded the Treaty of Troyes, in which, so discouraged had the French become, a large party agreed that the crown of France should be given to him upon the death of Charles.
Joan of Arc.—But patriotism was not yet wholly extinct among the French people. There were many who regarded the concessions of the Treaty of Troyes as not only weak and shameful, but as unjust to the Dauphin Charles, who was thereby disinherited, and they accordingly refused to be bound by its provisions. Consequently, when the poor insane king died, the terms of the treaty were not carried out, and the war dragged on. The party that stood by their native prince, afterwards crowned as Charles VII., were at last reduced to most desperate straits. A great part of the northern section of the country was in the hands of the English, who were holding in close siege the important city of Orleans.
But the darkness was the deep gloom that precedes the dawn. A strange deliverer now appears,—the famous Joan of Arc, Maid of Orleans. This young peasant girl, with imagination all
- ↑ The Treaty of Bretigny (1360).
ties, one-half of the population was swept away. The pestilence was also especially severe in Florence, in Italy. Under the terror and excitement of the dreadful visitation, religious penitents, thinking to turn away the wrath of heaven by unusual penances, went about in procession, lacerating themselves with whips (hence they were called flagellants). This religious frenzy had its most remarkable manifestation in Germany.
