In the Wake of the Plague Page 3

  But normally the rich townsmen kept their radical thoughts to themselves and bent the knee as they greeted a scion of the royal family with trumpets and lavish gifts.

  From the long quays of the port of Bordeaux, ships customarily departed for England carrying barrels of red wine from vineyards that had in the twelfth century belonged to the famous duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine. By her second marriage (after divorce, technically annulment of marriage, from the king of France) Eleanor had in 1152 married the nineteen-year-old stud Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou, ten years Eleanor’s junior. Eleanor’s wealth and political influence helped Henry Plantagenet to assert his hereditary claim to the English throne, and he ruled as the great monarch Henry II until 1189.

  Queen Eleanor lived on into the thirteenth century, long enough to see two of her four sons by Henry Plantagenet (she had two daughters by the king of France before her divorce) sit on the English throne as Richard I the Lion-Hearted and the manic-depressive John. The latter came to be called John Lackland because he lost the ancestral territories of the royal family in Normandy and Anjou to the king of France and some of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s vast domain in western France as well.

  During the long reign of Henry III, John’s pious, feckless and cowardly son, more of Eleanor’s patrimony was lost to the ever-expanding French monarchy, including her capital city of Poitiers.

  But in 1348, in the midst of a war that Henry III’s great-grandson Edward III had begun in 1342 (it is known to us as the Hundred Years War) to recover the ancient French Plantagenet lands, Bordeaux was still a great port for shipment of wine to England. It was the principal city of the English-ruled territory called Gascony, which stretched narrowly (never more than a hundred miles wide) along the French coast from Brittany in the north to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south.

  The English nobility and gentry, which drank many thousands of gallons of Queen Eleanor’s red Bordeaux wine each year, came to call it claret, which means clear, that is fresh and cool wine. Labels from Gascon vineyards within fifty miles of Bordeaux still stand out in the French wine section of our liquor stores today—names like Graves and St. Emilion. But the prestige label is Château Lafite Rothschild, from the centerpoint of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s vineyard. The Jewish banking family bought these vineyards in the second half of the nineteenth century. Today Lafite is so prized that it is sold normally only at auctions, at a minimum of three hundred dollars a bottle.

  So does the heritage of medieval history and the grandeur of the Plantagenets flow down the throats of the rich today, just as it was relished by the French-speaking English nobility in the fourteenth century.

  It was a glorious scene in early August 1348 as four English ships with sails set and banners flying sailed down the Gironde estuary and docked at the port of Bordeaux. The lead ship carried Princess Joan, the daughter of King Edward III, on her way through Gascony southward to Spain, where she was engaged to marry Prince Pedro, heir to the kingdom of Castile.

  Castile, centrally located in the Iberian peninsula, was renowned for its wool and grain and its fierce nobility, who had sharpened their military skills in two centuries of fighting and pushing back the Muslim Arabs, driving them into Grenada, a small redoubt in the southwest corner of the peninsula. Here the Arabs were finally overcome in 1492 after the union through dynastic marriage of the two richest Iberian kingdoms, Castile and Aragon.

  At the battle of Crecy in 1346, two years before Princess Joan landed at Bordeaux and retired to the royal family’s Château de l’Ombriere overlooking the estuary of the Gironde and the main port areas of Bordeaux, Edward III had won a devastating victory over the French king and nobility. Edward had surprised aristocratic Europe by showing that the days of aristocratic prowess through cavalry charges by heavily armored knights were numbered.

  The English army had fought mainly as infantry, protected by leather and thin armored pieces. They were well-trained and generously paid peasants who fought as pikemen, wielding big globs of iron to break the charge of the French cavalry, and as bowmen. From fighting the recalcitrant Welsh in the late thirteenth century the English had also learned that peasants using longbows could create havoc on a cavalry charge by firing showers of metal-tipped wooden arrows in rapid waves, maiming, killing, and terrifying the enemy’s horses and sometimes even penetrating some knights in plated armor.

  The French had mercenaries wielding crossbows, which fired a devastatingly heavy metal bolt often demonstrated today in Hollywood horror movies. But the crossbow range was short, only thirty yards, and once a French crossbowman had shot his bolt (the origin of the phrase) he would need an assistant and a half-hour to reload. The English longbows were rapid-fire weapons dispatching death and confusion two hundred yards upfield upon the advancing French knights and their vulnerable horses.

  England in 1346 had one-third the population of France and at most half the gross domestic product of the continental kingdom. Edward was only able to mount powerful armies against the king in Paris because of a much superior English tax system. This generated resources enough to fight and win great battles against the French but not enough to achieve Edward’s ultimate goal of making himself king of France as well as England.

  Yet for twelve decades the English held on to large stretches of the western third of France. Their mercenary bands of “free companies,” consisting of gentry, peasants, occasional lords, and not a few professional criminals, ranged the French countryside, burning, looting, kidnapping, and raping. Finally in the 1440s the English Parliament got tired of paying for this Holocaust and the French—according to doubtful national legend rallied by a visionary peasant girl, Joan of Arc—defeated the marauding English and drove most of them out. The English kept only one French city, the port of Calais, until the mid–sixteenth century, and they never again made aggressive war on the European continent, preferring to create instead an empire overseas.

  Even then, not all of the English army went home. Some made their peace with the king in Paris and settled down in Gascony, which had been their homeland for a century. Among these was Captain Hennessy, an Irish mercenary fighting in the English army. He settled down near Bordeaux and learned from Benedictine and Carthusian monks how to make brandy. The Hennessy label on cognac is almost as prestigious today as the Rothschild label on Bordeaux wine.

  Princess Joan thus landed in Bordeaux in early August 1348 at the high point of fourteenth-century Plantagenet fortunes, when there still seemed a good possibility that Edward III and his successors would sit on the Parisian throne (Edward’s great-grandson Henry V, after his victory at Agincourt in 1415, again came close to achieving this goal but died young before he could work out the political and diplomatic angles).

  Now that France seemed to be on the verge of being swallowed up into the domains of the awesome and restive Plantagenets, Edward looked further afield to the rich cities and fecund plains of Andalusia. He would marry his fifteen-year-old daughter Joan to the heir of Castile and eventually the Plantagenet line would prevail in Spain as in England, Wales, and France.

  Edward III always couched his imperial ambitions in the language of hoary dynastic claims and refined aristocratic honor. He was the founder of the super-elite aristocratic Order of the Garter. His propagandists in letters and art presented him as a King Arthur incarnate, as the embodiment of European chivalry, as the exemplar of virtuous noble temperament, as the purest refinement of Christian militarism, a gentleman’s gentleman.

  Edward III in fact was an avaricious and sadistic thug who aimed to conquer much of Western Europe, from Flanders in the north (what is now called Belgium) to the Strait of Gibraltar at the tip of Spain in the south.

  From the heated loins of Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine had sprung a genetic order of fighting royal monsters. Edward III was the epitome of this devilish breed. He was personally brave, a skillful general, a good organizer. Edward III’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince (so-called for his arms and his hea
rt), was the exact copy of his ruthless, devious, and greedy father.

  As Edward III aged (he didn’t die—from gonorrhea—until 1377), the Black Prince took over leadership of the English continental armies, laying waste to huge parts of France and Spain. The Black Prince, overcome by malaria he contracted fighting in Castile, died a few years before the horrible old man, who was clutching his venereal mistress to the end.

  Did contemporaries think of Edward III as an evil scourge? Plenty of French peasants did, but among the articulate and literate classes, aside from a handful of radical friars, he was not even considered a tyrant. That term, derived from Roman writers, was reserved for an absolute monarch who ruled without consent of the people. By that definition, Edward III was no tyrant.

  Almost yearly he met in Parliament with the lay and ecclesiastical magnates, and with representatives of the gentry and the merchant class. The king could not impose his more lucrative taxes without their consent, and usually he got what he wanted. Some important legislation was also presented to him by Parliament, and he usually approved it. Probably Edward III would have preferred to rule by fiat and dispense with Parliament, but constitutional development under his grandfather and father in the previous ninety years prevented him from doing so.

  That today we may look back on the English king of the fourteenth century as a kind of destructive and merciless force, while to nearly all articulate and literate contemporaries he was a constitutional king and very model of chivalry and aristocratic honor, illuminates a gap between our world and fourteenth-century Europe.

  Fourteenth-century people lacked the moral categories that could transcend traditional political and social roles. They lacked a critical value system that judged rulers by consequences and not the formal categories in which their behavior was structured.

  There were plenty of passages in the biblical prophets and Gospels to condemn the Plantagenets’ savage behavior in the Hundred Years War, and there were a few churchmen at the margins painfully aware of this. But the magnates of the Church—the pope, cardinals, bishops, and abbots—were too enmeshed in the prevailing political and social nexus to assess critically the behavior of the English crown. Themselves from the aristocracy or gentry, they accepted current society and its values.

  Edward III and the Black Prince were regarded as divinely ordained forces of nature like the sun and the wind. In person they were admirable gentlemen, superior human beings. As officeholders they were capable of distributing generous patronage. They were to be obeyed and eulogized, not criticized or condemned. It was natural for Edward III to press his marginal claims to the French throne, inevitable that hundreds of thousands of commoners would suffer in the consequent wars.

  Again and again the pope sent emissaries to make peace between the English and French kings; the popes and legates were rebuffed, especially by the English government. The pope was living in exile from Rome in Avignon on the Rhone river and was regarded as a French puppet. This futile peace-making gesture sufficed to calm ecclesiastical guilt. The moral and intellectual conscience of the church was suffocated and stilled within the structure of wealth and power.

  But the coming marriage of Princess Joan and Prince Pedro loomed as a great event in every respect, political, religious, and diplomatic. Joan rested at the royal castle overlooking the port of Bordeaux before proceeding southward overland through Gascony to Castile. The marriage had the pope’s eager blessing, although the dynastic union in the long run would lead to yet more savage conflict in both France and the Iberian peninsula.

  Religious authorities, whether priests or rabbis, are always in the front rank of celebrants of the marriage of the scions of rich families. It is and was an appearance they relish making, and not just because of the succulent gifts that they will receive from the families involved. They are happy to perform ceremonies in festive and lavishly decorated surroundings that the rich and powerful own.

  Fifteen was not unusually early for a royal princess like Joan—or the daughter of any rich man—to marry in the fourteenth century. Whenever a girl of the more affluent classes, from Jane Austen–like middle-class gentry or merchant all the way up the social ladder to the royal family, reached the age of menstruation, she had only two life prospects before her: marriage or the nunnery. And a royal princess was too valuable a commodity in political machination and diplomacy to be wasted as a decaying virgin in a convent.

  Women in the Middle Ages had an even shorter life expectancy than men as long as they continued to produce children. Their frequent pregnancies and childbirths commonly led to death by thirty from some obstetrical or gynecological complication. Medieval princes, noblemen, and gentlemen tended to have serial marriages because of the Russian roulette of pregnancy and childbirth imposed by crude medical science upon their wives.

  The male rich and powerful were often on their third or fourth marriage by the time they died before their forty-fifth birthday—of natural causes, infectious disease, or heart attacks from a very high-cholesterol diet, if they were not struck down earlier in battle or brawl. If a queen or other rich woman did not get pregnant and give birth she was shunted off to a nunnery and a new, younger, and perhaps more fruitful wife was chosen. It was only the wife who was considered to be infertile, never the husband.

  Since menopause then came around age thirty, the wife’s main job as breeder was fulfilled when childbirth crisis struck her down around that age. When a Sicilian princess around 1200 produced a son at age forty it was regarded as a miracle, with parallels to the virgin birth of Christ—so said the court propagandists of the emperor Frederick II, the celebrants of this unheard-of event.

  A modern actuary would have given the menstruating fifteen-year-old princess Joan just another ten years to live. This is why the premature death of young women of royal and noble families generated modest grief.

  This was not the first time that princess Joan had been abroad. As a five-year-old she had been taken on the king’s trip to meet the German emperor at Coblenz. No effort was spared now in the preparation for Joan’s wedding venture, although as was usual with royal weddings Edward III shifted as much of the cost as possible to his long-suffering tax-paying subjects. From December 1347 several ships had been commandeered along the south coast of England for the voyage to Bordeaux.

  Three flunkies of the royal household were dispatched to purvey (that is, extort) food from the south coastal county of Devon (later the scene of most of Thomas Hardy’s novels). Baron Robert Bourchier, a man of substance and high visibility and former royal chancellor, was to head the diplomatic delegation accompanying the princess. The king was too busy organizing and fighting his French war to accompany his daughter. Her mother, Queen Philippa of Hainault, never traveled abroad except to visit her homeland in the Low Countries. Bourchier had served as the head of the royal administration in 1340–41. He was an accomplished diplomat and soldier and had fought with distinction at Crecy.

  Another member of the princess’s entourage was Andrew Ullford, an Oxford doctor of civil (Roman) law, who held a high position in the cathedral of York. Ullford was also an experienced diplomat. The king sent these important diplomats to assure that a treaty would be drawn up before the marriage of Joan and Pedro assuring that any son born to this union would succeed to the throne of Castile regardless of any subsequent marriage by Pedro.

  The princess’s spiritual needs were to be addressed by a prominent priest of Bordeaux Cathedral, Gerald de Podio. Then there was the minstrel. Prince Pedro had dispatched to England his favorite court minstrel, Gracias de Gyvill, to entertain Pedro’s betrothed with the songs of the land of which she was to be queen, a charming idea.

  Princess Joan was also to be accompanied by one hundred formidable English bowmen, some veterans of the Battle of Crecy. They were not just a ceremonial bodyguard. Traveling through long stretches of thinly populated southern Gascony had its risks and dangers from criminals and freebooting mercenaries, perhaps even from an avenging agent of
the king of France, who could only look with fear on the prospects of a Plantagenet-Castilian alliance against him—as if the Parisian king didn’t have enough troubles already, not only from English armies and brigands but from the politically restless bourgeoisie of Paris, scorning the king and his nobility for their military defeats.

  One English ship was needed to carry to Bordeaux the lavish clothing and other belongings of the little princess. In dressing and equipping Joan, Edward III had characteristically spared no expense, partly out of love for his daughter and partly as a display of kingly prowess and wealth toward his Spanish allies and prospective in-laws.

  Over 150 meters of rakematiz, a thick imported silk woven with gold, were used to make Joan’s wedding dress. She also had a suit made from ten pieces of red velvet. Two of her five corsets were made from cigaston, the heaviest silk, newly in fashion at Edward’s court, and woven with gold patterns of stars, crescents, and diamonds. She had two sets of twenty-four buttons, each one made of silver gilt and enamel.

  There were two elaborate dresses, called ghitas, with an inbuilt corset. Both of these ghitas were also made of rakematiz, one in green, one in dark brown. The green was embroidered all over in gold with images of rose arbors, wild animals, and wild men. The brown had a base of powdered gold onto which was set a pattern of repeating circles, each enclosing a recumbent lion, symbolic of monarchy, each embroidered in bright colored silk and metal threads. Good taste was not a quality of the English monarchy then or now.