Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne

Epilogue: A Deplorable and Dangerous State: Crisis, Consolidation, and Collapse

201 Epilogue A Deplorable and Dangerous State: Crisis, Consolidation, and Collapse The crisis began almost imperceptibly. Inflation had persisted steadily through the second half of the thirteenth century. Taxes for crusade expeditions became a regular burden. Sometime in the mid1280s the price of grain began to rise. A few nunneries borrowed money or put more lands to lease to cope with these conditions and to purchase enough food for the year. It is likely that they did so with the hope, perhaps even the conviction,that prices would drop and the values of their rents would return to what they had been the year before.1 Yet by the end of the thirteenth century the twin pressures of inflation and population growth began to exert themselves, eroding the economic stability of Champagne and its Cistercian convents.2 Some nunneries attempted to counteract fiscal shortcomings with better accounting and administration, but none of these measures became routine practice. Rather for most small houses the goal remained solvency. 1. See G. Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du Moyen Âge, du milieu du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1964), who shows that the price of cereal doubled between 1287 and 1303 in the region of St.-Denis. See also Guy Bois, Crise de féodalisme: Économie rurale de démographie en Normandie orientale du début du 14e siècle au milieu du 16e siècle (Paris, 1976); in English, The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1550 (Cambridge, 1984); Gérard Sivéry, L’économie du royaume de France au siècle de Saint Louis (vers 1180—vers 1315) (Lille, 1984); Philippe Contamine et al., L’économie médiévale, 3rd ed. (Paris, 2004), 251–383; and Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 2009). 2. Bois, Crise de féodalisme, 263–70. 202 EPILOGUE Political changes in the county sharpened the effects of economic constriction . In 1284 Champagne was formally joined to the kingdom of France through the marriage of Countess Jeanne to Philip the Fair, the future king of France. At first the union seemed to have little effect on the county. From the middle of the thirteenth century the counts had frequently been absent from the region, in the kingdom of Navarre, on crusade, or increasingly in residence in Paris. Immediately after 1284 only aspects of the highest level of the county’s administration seemed to change. Taxes collected by the bailli and prévôts of the county were paid into the royal treasury. The high court of Champagne, the Jours de Troyes, came to be staffed by royal officials who heard cases in Troyes and in Paris in the name of the king. And, as Abbess Alice of St.-Jacques knew and others soon learned, it was now possible to appeal a case up from Troyes to Paris.3 On the whole the mechanisms of fiscal and judicial administration as experienced by individuals living in Champagne remained little altered. But just as the courts were made subject to Paris, the economy of the county suffered in the 1290s when Philip the Fair debased the currency of the kingdom to cover the costs of war with the English. In 1305 he reversed his original triple debasement, an act that plunged the kingdom further into economic crisis.4 In Champagne this was felt even more acutely, for the economic engine of the county—its annual round of fairs—began to wane. Merchants preferred to sell in Paris, and Italian creditors and bankers relocated closer to the source of new profits and debtors: to Flanders, where the cloth they financed and purchased was produced, and to Paris, where deeper pockets of wealth accrued alongside more cosmopolitan habits of consumption.5 For Cistercian nunneries, like other religious institutions, the burdens of crusade taxation compounded the growing fiscal crisis. In 1245 the papacy and the Cistercian order began negotiations regarding the payment of a crusade tax. The papacy had granted a special crusade tithe to Louis IX to support his first expedition to Egypt, and the levy was intended to affect churches throughout France. In 1248,to preserve the order’s privilege of tithe exemption, the General Chapter volunteered the payment of a fixed sum of 3. For a general overview, see John F. Benton, “Philip the Fair and the Jours de Troyes,” reprinted in his Culture, Power...