Chevalier de Bayard

French military leader

• Born: c. 1473
• Birthplace: Château de Bayard, Pontcharra, France
• Died: April 30, 1524
• Place of death: Near Roasio (now in Italy)

The ideal of chivalry, exemplified in Bayard’s actions, became a significant element in the education of young men of the upper classes in the Renaissance period.

Early Life

Chevalier de Bayard (sheh-vawl-yay bay-ahrd), born Pierre Terrail, lord of Bayard, was the son of Aymon Terrail and Hélène Alleman. He received a rudimentary education under the eye of his uncle, Laurent Alleman, bishop of Grenoble. In 1486, he left home to serve as page at the court of Charles I, duke of Savoy, where he was expected to acquire the experience and skills of a young nobleman. That same year, he followed his master on a trip to Italy, where he observed the flowering of Renaissance culture without noticeable effect on his medieval chivalric mind. On returning to Savoy in 1489, Bayard traveled with the duke to the court of Charles VIII of France, where he served the French king first as a page and then as a soldier. He took part in the king’s expedition to Naples and, in 1495, was knighted for his valor in the Battle of Fornovo.

In 1501, as Louis XII reasserted his claim to the kingdom of Naples, Bayard became one of the most celebrated knights in the French army, widely known for his horsemanship and swordplay. By July, 1502, the French were clashing with the Spanish, who also claimed Naples. Lack of supplies and adverse conditions made for small-scale operations that offered opportunities for Bayard to display courage and skill in individual combat. Encased in steel armor and wielding an enormous two-handed sword, Bayard led the charge of the French into the breach of the Spanish fortress at Canossa.

In the winter of 1503, Bayard joined ten other French knights in a duel with eleven Spaniards. Bayard saved the French cause from disaster, and the match ended in a draw. In another incident, the capture of a Spanish paymaster’s hoard, Bayard distributed the treasure with characteristic magnanimity, half to a fellow captain and the rest to his men, keeping nothing for himself.

Bayard gained honor even as the campaign turned against the French. He killed the Spaniard Alonzo de Soto-Mayor in a famous duel. Despite fighting at a disadvantage he was weakened by fever and on foot rather than mounted Bayard dispatched his much larger opponent, then honored him by preventing a trumpeting of the victory. During the retreat from Naples, without armor and wielding a pike, he held the bridge over the Garigliano against hundreds of Spanish.

Life’s Work

At his prime, about twenty-five years old, tall and slender, his eyes black, his nose aquiline, his beard shaved close, Bayard exuded energy and good humor. His loyal service to his king was rewarded with greater responsibility in the Italian campaign that began in 1509. Having earlier received the title of captain, he was given command of 500 infantry and 180 horsemen in the War of the League of Cambrai , which pitted France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Papacy against the Republic of Venice. Under his discipline, the infantry, little more than rabble, became an effective fighting force, distinguishing itself in the Battle of Agnadello on May 14, 1509. Subsequently, he fought in several skirmishes, leading his men in the thick of battle.

In September, 1510, as second in command, he defended the duchy of Ferrara against Pope Julius II , now a Venetian ally, and nearly captured the aged, warlike prelate. To the astonishment of his Ferrarese allies, however, he rejected with horror a plot to have the pope poisoned.

The following summer, Bayard was given command of the duke of Lorraine’s company of six hundred horses; he had risen to approximately the rank of brigadier general in a modern army, and he had a significant voice in councils of war. After campaigning in the Friuli during the summer and fall against the Venetians, he hastened to support French garrisons in the duchy of Milan, which was threatened by the Swiss from the north, papal and Spanish armies from the south, and Venetians from the east. He was severely wounded in the thigh in the French capture of Brescia. Although the French brutally sacked the rest of the city, Bayard took nothing from the family with whom he convalesced, and he left large dowries for each of the family’s two daughters.

He recovered well enough to participate in the French victory over the Spaniards at Ravenna in April, 1512. Deprived of theri leader, Gaston de Foix, who dided in the battle, and pressed by the Swiss and the Venetians, the French largely abandoned the duchy of Milan. Covering the retreat, Bayard was wounded in the shoulder.

Back in France, he recovered from a bout of typhoid fever in time to participate in a failed campaign in Spanish Navarre against the duke of Alva. Bayar again commanded the rearguard in the retreat under winter conditions over th Pyrenees back to France. By the midsummer of 1513, he was in Picardy with French troops awaiting an invasion by Henry VIII and Emperor Maximilian I . In the ensuing rout of the French, Bayard was captured by Burgundians during rearguard action at the bridge of Guinegatte. He spent several weeks in imperial Flanders and is said to have met the English king and the emperor. After a ransom was paid for him, Bayard returned to France in October.

Following the death of Louis XII on January 1, 1515, his successor, Francis I , appointed Bayard lieutenant-governor of Dauphiné, his home province, where he was beloved and esteemed. He assembled a force of four hundred cavalry and five thousand infantry; his troops were to pave the way for the main body of the king’s army in a confrontation with a new coalition of enemies the Swiss, the new pope Leo X , and the Spaniards. Francis would once more reconquer Lombardy. After a daring passage over the Alps, Bayard’s men captured the papal commander, Prospero Colonna, and his supplies.

On September 13, 1515, Bayard shared in the French victory over the Swiss pikemen at Marignano, delivering Milan to the young French king. Exalted by the occasion and his own worthy contribution to it, Francis chose to be knighted by Bayard, the most highly reputed knight of the age.

By the summer of 1516, Bayard was back in Grenoble, tending to his duties as the king’s representative in Dauphiné; his military skills were employed in running down marauding bands of former soldiers who ventured into his province. There were also opportunities for his legendary kindness and generosity. Urged by strong religious faith, he aided needy widows and comrades and helped others in distress, always with tact. By reason of this charity, and because he refused to profit by war, he remained throughout his life a relatively poor man.

In 1521, he left the peace of Dauphiné to assume command of the eastern frontier fortification of Mézières, which was threatened by an imperial army of thirty thousand. Beginning in August, Bayard, with fifteen hundred men, most of them peasants, held out for several weeks until Francis raised an army strong enough to relieve them. Having saved the country’s eastern provinces, Bayard received the gratitude of his king, who made him captain-in-chief, a rank for the command of an army corps. His reputation among his country folk, borne with characteristic modesty, reached its zenith.

By year’s end, he was en route to Genoa to shore up French control of that city. He could do little, however, to prevent first the duchy of Milan, then Genoa from being overrun by imperial and papal forces. At the end of 1522, France was threatened by enemies on all its frontiers. In the spring of 1524, Bayard, at the head of a company of fifteen hundred men, marched again with the French army toward Lombardy. It was an ill-fated expedition under an incompetent commander, the royal favorite Admiral Bonnivet. Though Bayard’s force grew to make up a third of the French army, it accomplished little in the face of a qualitatively superior and better-led enemy. Bayard retreated with the rest of the army to the west of Milan. Sick, his energy diminished, he was surprised in camp at Robecco, and his division was routed.

In the crossing of the Sesia River, April 29, Bonnivet was injured, and he turned his command over to a reluctant Bayard. Ill, entrusted with the wreckage of an army, the great captain resumed the retreat toward France, himself leading the rearguard. Near Roasio, April 30, in a skirmish with the enemy’s vanguard, he was struck by a bullet that pierced his armor and broke his spine. Realizing the wound was fatal, he had himself laid against a tree, facing the enemy. The Spanish captain, Pescara, approached him with awe, placed him on a camp bed, raised a tent above him, and stationed a guard of honor around him. He lived eight hours while his enemies paid him respect. His body was carried to Grenoble, where he was buried.

Significance

Bayard lived out the knightly ideal of medieval Christianity, sans peur et sans reproche (without fear or reproach), a motto conferred on him by contemporaries. Like Joan of Arc, he became a great mythic figure, a national hero. Other less famous soldiers achieved as much or more, but Bayard’s reputation was rooted in the personal qualities that he demonstrated so remarkably under adverse circumstances, often in defeat, fighting rearguard actions.

In a pragmatic world of decaying chivalric ideals and amoral statecraft, he remained brave, loyal, sincere, and generous. His piety, sustained by regular prayer and devotion, informed his knightly ethos. Neither defeat nor the agnosticism or hypocrisy prevalent among his peers ever shook his simple belief in his calling by God to be a Christian knight. Neither a saint nor a prude, he enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh. A liaison with an Italian woman produced a daughter, Jeanne Terrail, to whom he gave his name and whom he lovingly supported. He never married.

The measure of Bayard’s influence is evident in a vast body of writing that has grown around him, beginning in his lifetime and extending unbroken to the present, especially in France. His valor and sense of duty also can be detected in the lives of admirers such as the French president and military leader Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), American military leader Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), and many less well-known military men.

Bibliography

Arnold, Thomas F. The Renaissance at War. London: Cassell, 2001. Detailed examination of the developing technologies and conventions of war in Bayard’s time, including the impact of chivalry on military tactics, and of military tactics on chivalry.

Baumgartner, Frederic J. Louis XII. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Treats Bayard briefly in the context of Louis XII’s Italian campaigns.

Garrisson, Janine. A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483-1598: Renaissance, Reformation, and Rebellion. Translated by Richard Rex. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Provides political, social, and cultural background for an understanding of Bayard’s life.

Grummitt, David, ed. The English Experience in France, c. 1450-1558: War, Diplomacy, and Cultural Exchange. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002. Explores the role of chivalry in influencing the personal relationships of key French and English figures of the period, and the influence of those relationships in turn on the development of both France and England into early modern states. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Guyard de Berville, Guillaume François. The Story of the Chevalier Bayard. Translated by Edith Walford. Edited, with notes and introduction by James H. Friswell. London: S. Low and Marston, 1868. De Berville in 1760 amplified the memoirs of the Loyal Servant, most likely Bayard’s steward, Jacques Jeoffre of Millieu.

Hale, John Rigby. War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450-1620. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Treats Bayard in terms of the transition from medieval to early modern systems of warfare.

Knecht, Robert Jean. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I. 2d ed. London: Cambridge University Press, 1994. The most detailed study of French history for the last decade of Bayard’s life.

Shellabarger, Samuel. The Chevalier Bayard: A Study in Fading Chivalry. 1928. Reprint. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1971. The best study of Bayard in English separates facts from myths about the great captain.

Simms, William Gilmore. The Life of the Chevalier Bayard. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847. Reflects the attractiveness of Bayard’s chivalric ethos to the planter aristocracy of the antebellum South.

Wiley, W. L. The Gentleman of Renaissance France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954. This analysis of social attitudes uses Bayard to illustrate the qualities of a complete gentleman.