Jacques Coeur

Jacques Coeur (born c. 1395, Bourges, Fr.—died Nov. 25, 1456, probably Chios in the Aegean Sea) was a wealthy and powerful French merchant, who served as a councillor to King Charles VII of France. His career remains a significant example of the spirit of enterprise and the social progress among the merchant classes in the beginning of the period of the rise of France after the Hundred Years’ War.

Coeur’s father was a furrier in the cloth-producing commercial town of Bourges. Coeur acquired his own training through experience in financial operations and on a commercial trip to the Middle East. After Paris was recovered from the English by Charles VII, Coeur won the confidence of the king and became an argentier (steward of the royal expenditure and banker of the court) and then a member of the king’s council. He was put in charge of the collection of taxes, as commissaire in the estates’ assemblies of the Languedoc region and as inspector general of the salt tax. He also was sent on diplomatic missions to Spain and Italy. Ennobled in 1441, he arranged the marriage of his daughter to a nobleman and obtained the archbishopric of Bourges for his son Jean and the bishopric of Luçon for his brother. He acquired about 40 seugneuries, or manors, and built a palace in Bourges, a structure that remains one of the finest lay monuments of Gothic architecture from the end of the European Middle Ages.

Because of his flair for business opportunities, Jacques Coeur was able to make use of every occasion and every means to increase his wealth. Without being a real statesman, he was able to serve the state as much as he served his own interest. His position as argentier was the basis for all his activity. It gave him not only access to the king and to the clientele of the court but also access to merchandise from every source; his stores, located in Tours, stocked cloth, silks, jewels, armour, and spices. Coeur also augmented his fortune by dealing in salt on the Loire and the Rhône rivers, in wheat in Aquitaine, and in wool in Scotland. Montpellier, where he built a loge, a kind of stock exchange for the merchants, was the first centre of his Mediterranean trade. In Florence, where he was registered in the Arte della Seta (Silk Makers’ Guild), he owned a workshop for the manufacture of silks. A staff of traveling salesmen, drivers, and especially ship owners supplied his communications and transportation needs, and he himself owned at least seven ships in the Mediterranean. Like the Italians, Coeur set up individual companies for each branch of trade. He financed his businesses with credit (bills of exchange) that he obtained at fairs in Geneva, Avignon, Florence, and Rome, and by using recettes fiscales (fiscal receipts) from the king. He had the political support of Alfonso V, king of Aragon, and the cities of Genoa, Florence, and Barcelona, as well as the popes, who authorized his trade with the Muslims in Alexandria.

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While his wealth in real estate and personal property, his luxurious style of life, and his titles, influence, and personal dynamism were impressive, his prosperity was in fact fragile. He had few efficient associates, the risks of maritime commerce were great, and his competitors, especially in Montpellier, were ruthless. Though he always appeared to be short of money, he was rich enough to be able to lend the king funds necessary for the reconquest of Normandy in 1450 and to become creditor for a large part of the aristocracy. Coeur thus became to many an object of envy and jealousy.

Falsely accused of having arranged the poisoning of Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII, and of having engaged in dishonest speculation, he was arrested in 1451 and condemned to remain in prison until an enormous fine was paid. With the help of friends, he escaped from prison and took refuge, first in Florence and in 1455 in Rome. In November of the following year he died, probably on the Aegean island of Chios, where he had gone in command of a naval expedition organized by Pope Calixtus III against the Turks. After his death Louis XI made amends for Coeur’s treatment by his father, Charles VII, by returning some of Coeur’s property to his sons and by reviving enterprises that the former argentier had initiated: the silk workshop in Lyon and the first attempts to set up a company in the Middle East.

Jacques Coeur was representative of his generation; his ambitions were traditional: honours, noble rank, land. He differed from his more mediocre contemporaries by the sheer volume and extent of his trade, his audaciousness and tenacity, his self-confidence, his talent for making himself loved or hated, and especially by his flair for seizing opportunities. He understood business opportunities for his generation but was not prophetic. He was the incarnation of the rise of the merchant middle class, imitated in succeeding generations in Lyon and Tours with the same success.

The legend of Jacques Coeur remains many-faceted, and history has preserved conflicting images of him. For a long time he was seen as an adventurer, exploiting for his own profit the revenue of the kingdom and deceiving his master. The crowd, hostile to a nouveau riche, brought him down; he was accused of magic. The 18th century, the century of the Enlightenment, took pity on him as a victim of despotism. An eminent 19th-century historian, Jules Michelet, however, was the first to look upon Coeur as the model for a whole generation and a precursor of the powerful bourgeois class of succeeding centuries.

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