John the Fearless won his name as a young man. He led the French at Nicopolis on September 25, 1396, was captured, and was freed the next year after a large ransom. In 1407 he killed his cousin Louis of Orleans in the streets of Paris, admitted it, and called it tyrannicide. His troops took Paris on May 30, 1418. By 1419 the one man he could not control was the Dauphin Charles.
The Horror
In July 1419 John and the Dauphin swore peace on a bridge at Pouilly-le-Fort. A second meeting was set for September 10 on the bridge at Montereau, where it meets the Yonne. Carpenters built two barriers across the bridge, with a door on each side, and each party was to bring ten escorts. John was said to have had second thoughts.
He knelt before the Dauphin, who feigned indifference. When John rose, he put a hand on the hilt of his sword, and Robert de Loire objected. Tanneguy du Chastel then struck him in the face with an axe, shouting “Kill, kill!” That detail comes from the account of John’s own secretary, Jean Seguinat, given to a Burgundian inquiry, so it is a partisan source. Men-at-arms rushed in from the Dauphin’s side, which had been left open. John was stabbed repeatedly. Only three bodyguards reacted, and one of them, Archambaud de Foix, was killed.
The Dauphin watched from a distance. Whether he planned the killing is argued to this day. He denied it and offered excuses, but his parents disinherited him.
The consequences are documented. John’s son, Philip the Good, became Duke of Burgundy and allied with the English. He accepted the terms of the succession in December 1419, and on May 21, 1420 the Treaty of Troyes named Henry V of England heir and regent of France and excluded the Dauphin. The war went on for decades. The Treaty of Arras in 1435 ordered a cross to be raised on the bridge in memory of the murder.
The Legend
The best-known line is later than the killing by a century. In 1521, during the visit of Francis I to Dijon, a Carthusian monk is said to have presented the king with John’s skull and remarked that it was the hole through which the English entered France. It rests on a single cited item and is reported tradition, unconfirmed. Some accounts also say John’s right hand was cut off, as a mirror of what he did to Louis of Orleans in 1407. That detail carries no citation and is unconfirmed.
The Modern Relic
John was buried at Dijon in 1420. His tomb, contracted by Philip the Good in 1443 to Jean de la Huerta and continued by Antoine le Moiturier from 1461, was placed in the choir of the Champmol church in 1470. It was moved in 1792 and partly destroyed in 1793, then restored between 1819 and 1826. It stands now in the salle des Gardes of the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, in the old palace of the dukes, among the mourners carved for the Burgundian tombs.
At Montereau, a plaque on the bridge over the Yonne commemorates the murder. The collegiate church of Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Loup has a sword long said to have been John’s, which is certainly more recent.
