The Plantagenets (1) by Dan Jones (2012)

The House of Plantagenet held the English throne from 1154 (with the accession of King Henry II) until 1485 (when Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth).

The origin of ‘plantagenet’

The name derives from Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou in north-west France (tucked in behind Normandy and Brittany) from 1113 to 1151, and here’s why:

When Henry I of England’s only son and heir, William Aetheling, drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120, Henry took a second wife, Adeliza, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless. So Henry named his daughter, Matilda, born in 1102, as his heir and called the nobles of England together to vow to accept her as monarch after his death. All he had to do now was marry her off to another royal family so she could continue the line. Henry received various offers for Matilda’s hand and eventually chose the 15-year-old Geoffrey of Anjou, son of Fulk V, Count of Anjou – for the good reason that the county of Anjou lay to the south of Henry’s kingdom of Normandy, so this alliance would secure his southern border.

Now according to legend, young Geoffrey of Anjou was not only a keen rider and fierce warrior but liked to sport a sprig of yellow broom in his hair. The Latin for broom is Planta Genista – hence the nickname Plantagenet which came, in retrospect, to be applied to the entire ‘house’.

(In actual fact, the family didn’t start using this as a family name until several centuries after Geoffrey’s death, but history now refers to the entire line as ‘the Plantagenets’ and ‘the Plantagenets’ they will forever remain.)

Anyway, when Henry I of England died in 1135, his daughter Matilda theoretically became Queen (a title everyone was uncomfortable with, so she took the title ‘Lady of England’).

But such quibbles were rather academic because Henry’s sister’s son, Matilda’s cousin, Stephen of Blois, hastened to England to lay claim to the throne himself. Although his claim was more remote than Matilda’s, he had one big advantage – he was a man.

On this basis, Stephen secured the loyalty of many of the more conservative nobles. As Dan Jones points out, the law of primogeniture i.e. the automatic succession of the first-born child of a monarch, was, during this period, only taken as a rough guideline. In practice, each new king needed the support of a majority of the nobles in order to secure the throne. And this support Stephen managed to achieve, helped by influential relatives, notably his younger son, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester.

However, not all of the nobles of England supported Stephen, some cleaved to Henry’s original wish that Matilda succeed to the throne – and so England fell into a nineteen-year period of anarchy and civil war, fought between the brutal mercenaries of Queen Matilda and the equally brutal mercenaries of King Stephen.

It was only towards the end of the period that Matilda’s son, Henry, began to emerge as a capable leader and successful warrior in his own right. Henry won successive campaigns in England, lobbied the pope to be recognised as the valid successor to Stephen and won over regional English barons. Eventually in 1153 King Stephen recognised Henry’s right to the throne and adopted him as his ‘son’. Next year Stephen died and Henry ascended the throne as Henry II, thus ending the civil war and unifying the realm of England but also the family’s extensive lands in France.

And thus begins the real chronicle of the Plantagenet kings.

Dates

Dan Jones has written a rip-roaring, boys-own-adventure version of the history of the Plantagenet kings (and queens) between the ascension of Henry II in 1154 and 1399, when Richard II was overthrown by Henry Bolingbroke, who thus became King Henry IV of England.

The Plantagenet dynasty continued for another 85 years after Richard’s overthrow, up till the day when King Richard III was cut down at the Battle of Bosworth Field and was succeeded by a new family, the Tudors; but Jones brings his account to an end at 1400, partly for thematic reasons – to continue means getting into the Wars of the Roses which is a whole new story – but mostly because of size – this paperbook book is already a hefty 601 pages long: another 85 years-worth would have made it too big and heavy to hold or read easily!

And not to worry, Jones has gone on to publish the sequel – Plantagenets II you might call it – or, as it’s actually titled, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors. For although Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard II are all theoretically Plantagenets, the 15th century has a feel of its own, dominated by the prolonged civil war between two branches of the Plantagenet line which came to be known as the Yorkists and the Lancastrians.

Narrative history

Conventional academic history normally includes surveys of society, analyses of changing social structures, a look at the developing economy, technology and commerce, developments in law and governance, with sections thrown in about the arts, poetry, painting and architecture.

Well, none of that features in this big book. All that social, economic and cultural history has been chucked out to make The Plantagenets read almost like a novel, with Jones concentrating exclusively on the triumphs and reversals experienced by the strong central characters, the successive kings and their immediate families – scheming, strategising, involved in endless in-fighting, marrying off members of the family, making alliances, breaking alliances, raising armies of mercenaries and marching off to war. The result is ridiculously fun and readable.

Adding to the popular feel, the book is divided into seven sections with romantic titles like ‘Age of Shipwreck’, ‘Age of Empire’, ‘Age of Opposition’ and so on, giving a bright Hollywood feel to each era. And these sections are themselves broken up into surprisingly numerous chapters, 85 of them to be precise.

Given that the seven section headings each require a title page and a blank page (i.e. 14 pages with no text), this means that the chapters are an average of 601 – 14 blank pages = 587 text pages / 85 chapters = 6.9 pages long.

In other words, the chapters are short, focused and punchy, and Jones likes to end them on a cliff-hanger:

It would be here, however, that all his decades of triumph would dissolve, finally, into heartbreak. (p.99) [setting up the next chapter which describes the war which eclipsed the end of Henry II’s reign]

Yet for every month he spent on his crusade, problems loomed larger and larger for the Plantagenet empire back at home. (p.123) [describing the mounting problems facing Richard I]

All he could do was sit behind his ever-receding lines and hope for a miracle. None would be forthcoming. (p.165) [King John loses Normandy to the French]

The book often has a soap-opera-ish tone but then many of the actual events are barely believable, and the whole story presents a vast panorama of lying, treachery and blood-curdling violence on an epic scale.

All in all, this is a hugely enjoyable, racy, pacy page-turner of a popular history.

A war of all against all

It is fairly common knowledge that the Middle Ages were warlike, but it’s still breath-taking to read quite how much it consisted of back-to-back fighting. With the spring of each year came the return of the ‘campaigning season’ and off they’d go, pretty much every leader of every country, duchy, princedom, earldom and so on – keen to gain ‘honour’ and loot by attacking their nearest neighbour and reneging on every deal they’d made the previous year.

And it wasn’t just wars between ‘nations’ – after all, nations in our sense barely existed – the fighting is between everybody. Henry II was reckoned a great king in his day because he held together an ’empire’ which stretched from the border with warlike Scotland, across all of troublesome England, down through the duchy of Normandy (which he owned as a descendant of William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy), along with Anjou which he’d inherited, into Brittany which he’d conquered, and across the vast area of south-west France known as Aquitaine, which came into his possession after he married its queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, in 1152.

It comes as no surprise that holding on to all this land involved the king in non-stop conflict against the Scots in the north, against the King of France in the East, and in putting down a ceaseless stream of rebellions everywhere else, especially in the territories scattered on the periphery of his ’empire’ (namely in Poitou, Maine and Brittany).

So much is to be expected. What was a revelation to me was the extent to which Henry II ended up fighting his own family. He had four sons – William, Geoffrey, Richard and John. He parcelled out bits of the empire to each of them but they were never satisfied, his eldest son William in particular, champing at the bit for more land and more power, and in 1173 this led to ‘the Great Revolt’ when Henry’s eldest three sons united to rise against him, supported by their mother Eleanor (!) and numerous rebel counts.

It took Henry 18 months of unremitting fighting and canny diplomacy to put the rebellion down. He then showed astonishing clemency in forgiving his sons and re-allotting them their various dukedoms (Richard retained Aquitaine, Geoffrey Normandy, and so on). After all, he needed them – they were his heirs.

(The example of Henry’s wise forbearance is revisited later in the book, when bad King John and weak King Henry III are seen vindictively punishing those who opposed them – and thus creating enemies for life, not only in the enemies themselves, but animosity among their wider families and children. In this, as in so much else, Henry II showed a tough wisdom.)

But if Henry forgave his sons, he didn’t show the same clemency to his wife and rebel queen, Eleanor, who he locked away in Shrewsbury castle for her pains (and to guarantee her sons’ good behaviour). In any case, despite his forgiveness, the three unfilial boys carried on making alliances with the king of France, with rebellious counts, with anyone they could get to listen to them, and carried on non-stop plotting against their father and against each other.

At this high level of courtly politics the unscrupulous politicking, back-stabbing, levying of mercenaries and fighting small battles to put down rebels, uprisings, invasions and attacks is constant.

If there’s one conclusion from this long, violent, treacherous and cynical record it is what a terrible system of government ‘kingship’ was, when the throne so often ended up in the hands of women who no-one would follow, of psychopaths who suspected everyone of betraying them, of children who were easily manipulated by cabals and cliques, or of men who were simply not up to its almost impossibly demanding requirements.

Plantagenet or Angevin

Historians are divided in their use of the terms ‘Plantagenet’ and ‘Angevin’ in regards to Henry II and his sons. Some make Henry II the first Plantagenet King of England, while others refer to Henry, Richard and John as the ‘Angevin dynasty’, Angevin being the adjective derived from the region of Anjou, because all three were Dukes of Anjou and (Henry in particular) expanded their realm to contain all of England, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Maine, and Aquitaine i.e. the western half of France.

In 1204 John lost much of the Angevins’ continental territories, including Anjou itself, to the King of France. This is why the Angevin’ dynasty is considered to end with John, and John’s sin – Henry III of England – being considered the first Plantagenet, a name derived, as we’ve mentioned, from the nickname of his great-grandfather, Geoffrey of Anjou.

King Henry I (1100 to 1135)

Youngest son of William the Conqueror, King of England and Duke of Normandy, Henry I groomed his own son William Aetheling for the succession, having him named co-ruler when he turned 16, as was the custom.

The drowning of this son in the White Ship tragedy (the Aetheling and a group of courtiers were aboard ship in Barfleur harbour drinking late into the night, at which point the captain ill-advisedly set off to sail back to England in pitch darkness and crashed into some rocks) left the succession to the throne vacant.

Henry’s first wife was by now dead, so he quickly remarried the nubile young Adeliza of Louvain, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless. So as a last resort, Henry declared his daughter, Empress Matilda, his heir. She had been married to the Holy Roman Emperor when just eight, but he had died and she had returned to England. Now Henry quickly remarried her to Geoffrey of Anjou who was just fifteen, in 1128. Their marriage was difficult but eventually Matilda did her duty and gave birth to two sons, Henry (who would become Henry II) and Geoffrey, in 1133 and 1134. Then, after a day hunting, Henry fell ill after – according to legend – consuming ‘a surfeit of lampreys’ at dinner, and died on 1 December 1135.

The Anarchy (1135 to 54)

After Henry I died without a male heir, his daughter Matilda claimed the throne but was beaten to it by her cousin, Stephen, who ruled the centre of England as King Stephen, while Matilda managed to establish a base in the West Country, with regular incursions by her allies in the East and North. Both sides hired mercenaries, mainly Flemish. Over the next 19 years hardly a part of England wasn’t ravished and burnt by these hated foreigners. England became a wasteland.

King Henry II (1154 to 1189)

Cut to a generation later and young Henry – Henry FitzEmpress as he was called ‘Fitz’ meaning ‘son of’ and Queen Matilda often being referred to as an empress – is turning twenty.

Henry has shrewdly married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 and plots to overthrow the ageing king Stephen. The major obstacle to Henry’s plan to take back the throne of England was Stephen’s own son, Eustace. But Eustace did everyone a favour by dying in 1153, just as Henry mounted an invasion of south England backed by Norman forces. Now lacking an heir, and faced with Henry and Matilda’s sizeable forces, King Stephen made a deal, declaring Henry his heir and adopting him as his ‘son’ – and then very conveniently dying the next year (1154).

Thus Henry smoothly succeeded to the throne and became King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Count of Nantes and sometime Lord of Ireland.

21 when he came to the throne, Henry was clever, resourceful and aggressive, and faced almost continual warfare from the King of France and neighbouring counts and dukes for the next 37 years. He not only held his empire together but expanded it south towards Toulouse, while seizing Eastern Wales and East Ireland, repeatedly defeating his enemies, while also finding time to supervise reform of the tax and legal systems, especially in England.

Maybe the most striking thing about these kings is the way the way England continued to be only one of their realms. English historians see them as English kings concerned with English law etc, but Henry and his sons Richard and John were as much or more concerned with courtly politics, appointments, the laws and customs and even the smallest castles and lords in Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, Maine, Anjou or Aquitaine as well.

The simplest proof of this is that when Henry II, caught up in his last campaign (against his eldest son Richard who had rebelled against him, in alliance with the king of France), realised that he was dying, he headed not north to England, but south into his home domain of Anjou, dying at Chinon Castle and asking to be buried at nearby Fontevraud Abbey. This abbey is also the last resting place of his queen Eleanor, and their son Richard I. It’s only by bending the truth that we call these early Plantagenet rulers ‘English’. They were something else, really, for which no modern word quite exists. Rulers of the Plantagenet Empire.

Henry had five legitimate sons with Eleanor of Aquitaine:

  • William (b.1153) who died aged 3.
  • Henry the Young King (b.1155) who died aged 28 in the midst of fighting against his father and brother Richard.
  • Richard (b.1157) who became king in the middle of waging a military campaign against his own father (one chronicler said that his father’s corpse, laid out in the chapel at Chinon, began to bleed from the nose when Richard approached it – and who would blame it!).
  • Geoffrey (b.1158) the sneaky devious one who was involved in countless plots against his father and brothers but died in a tournament in 1186, aged 27.
  • John (b.1166) who schemed relentlessly during his brother Richard’s absence in the Holy Land. While Richard was away, John handed over much of the Angevin empire to King Philip Augustus of France in return for being allowed to rule it, and then plotted with Philip to try and prolong Richard’s captivity in Germany. What a creep.

King Richard I (1189 to 1199)

It is interesting to learn that Richard was always closest to his mother, Eleanor. Once is father Henry II had given him her territory, the Duchy of Aquitaine, Richard refused to be budged from it despite Henry II’s complicated plans to move his sons around the empire and frequent generous offers to Richard. No. Aquitaine was his!

When the Saracen leader Saladin seized Jerusalem in 1187 all Europe was shocked and Henry II negotiated a peace with his enemy King Philip of France in order to ‘take the Cross’ and go crusading to the Holy Land. But Henry died in the midst of the rebellion against him led by Richard and so the onus to take up the cross fell on the latter, a doughty warrior who, of course, was to go on and earn the sobriquet Cœur de Lion or Lionheart.

As for Henry, so England was only one of Richard’s many realms and one he wasn’t particularly attached to, always preferring his ancestral homeland of Aquitaine. Richard mainly regarded England as a cash cow and mulcted it mercilessly in order to fund and provision a huge fleet for the crusade. (Richard is widely quoted as having said that if he could have sold London to raise funds, he would have.)

Richard rampaged across the Mediterranean, seizing Cyprus for his empire and alienating other European notables engaged on crusade. Once actually in the Holy Land he won some famous campaigns, including recapturing the port of Acre, but he never got near recapturing Jerusalem and he alienated many important European leaders with his braggadochio.

In his absence the condition of his empire decayed. King Philip of France (who had returned early from the crusade, in anger at Richard’s bossiness) now attacked Normandy, and England was brought to the brink of civil war between the forces of the chamberlain Richard had appointed, William Longchamps, and rebel nobles allied with his slimy brother, John.

While all this was happening at home, the crusade dragged on but a) Richard was physically ill for most of it b) military might turned out to be even between the Crusaders and Saladin, leading to a costly stalemate.

Eventually, Richard signed a peace pact with Saladin allowing for Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem in peace, and set sail, vowing to return.

It was only on the return journey that Richard discovered just how many enemies he had made in the Holy Land, and just how blackened his reputation had become. Travelling overland from the Adriatic, Richard was caught and imprisoned by Leopold of Austria who he had insulted at the siege of Acre (by refusing to let Leopold enter the captured city on equal terms with himself and Philip of France, and then by ordering Leopold’s standard inside the captured city to be torn down).

Leopold now sold Richard on to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who promptly insisted that England pay a vast ransom for Richard’s release. Despite lobbying from the King of France and his brother John to keep him imprisoned, loyal nobles in England eventually raised the ransom and paid the Emperor, who released Richard. He had been in prison from Christmas 1192 to February 1194.

Back in England, Richard set about raising more money in order to put this realm back on a sound footing, before setting off to Normandy to reclaim the territory the King of France had seized in his absence.

It was in the south, in Aquitaine, that Richard met his death, unexpectedly shot from the battlements of the castle of Châlus-Chabrola, as Richard suppressed a relatively minor revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Richard was hit in the shoulder by a stray crossbow bolt. Trying to pull it out, he snapped off the shaft leaving the metal arrowhead deep in his shoulder. The surgeon who removed the metal arrowhead hacked deep into the flesh and muscle to get at it. The wound became infected and then gangrenous. Richard died in his mother’s arms, in agony. He was 41.

Richard was buried in the same church – Fontevraud Abbey near Chinon – as the father he had spent so much energy rebelling against (Henry II).

King John (1199 to 1216)

‘England’s most callous and remorseless king’ (p.216)

Richard had married Berengaria of Navarre in 1191 during his sojourn in Cyprus. Despite eight years of marriage they failed to produce any children. Richard’s death without an heir was the trigger for the dissolution of the empire his father had so laboriously built up and defended.

Towards the end of his life Richard had nominated his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, the son of his late brother Geoffrey, to be his heir, and when Richard died, Brittany declared for Arthur. But England declared for John, while Aquitaine was left to fight for.

John’s lack of political nous, his ability to rub everyone up the wrong way, his reputation for treachery, and his uselessness as a general all contrast sharply with the ascendant French king, Philip II, who had come to the throne in 1180 as a 15-year-old. (John, born in 1166, was 33 when he came to the throne; Philip, born in 1165, was one year older and infinitely more experienced and canny.)

As English people we tend to focus on the failures of bad King John, but this is to miss the point that Philip was the star king of the age, not only going on Crusade, but fighting off a north European alliance at the crucial Battle of Bouvines, which was a defining moment in the unification of France. Philip won Normandy and Brittany and most of Aquitaine from John, as well as extending French possessions further to the south-east.

Philip built a great wall around Paris, re-organized the French government, reined in his nobles and brought financial stability to his country. All in all he transformed France from a small feudal state into the most prosperous and powerful country in Europe and no wonder contemporaries came to call him Philip ‘Augustus’ during his lifetime (in reference to the Roman emperor Gaius Octavius Thurinus whose success in extending and bringing peace to the Roman Empire earned him the title ‘Augustus’).

Jones chronicles John’s loss of almost all the continental parts of the Angevin empire. For the first time, a Plantagenet king really was forced back into these British islands and could now truly be described as an English king. The surprise of this section of the book is how firm and effective John’s rule actually was in Britain, where he extended Plantagenet rule over all of Wales and most of Ireland.

John was fascinated by law and instituted circuits of judges, himself taking a close interest in even trivial law cases. In the height of his reign from 1207 to 1212 he devised countless new ways to extract money from his nobles, as well as turning on the small but wealthy Jewish community in England with terrifying rapacity, torturing wealthy Jews till they handed over more or less all their belongings to him.

With these devices John became the richest of the Plantagenet kings, and yet the loss of Normandy and his unscrupulous money-raising turned the aristocracy against him. A series of revolts in the 1210s led to lengthy negotiations over a peace treaty. This expanded – as medieval texts had a way of doing – into a complete set of rules which king and nobles should abide by, and was given the name of the Big Charter, or Magna Carta. The nobles forced King John to sign it at Runnymede in East Berkshire in June 1215.

It was news to me that the Magna Carta was:

  • less a bill of rights than a peace treaty between the king and his rebellious barons
  • that it failed – within months it was renounced by the king and his main supporter, the pope, and open rebellion broke out again

As civil war erupted both sides raced to seize London and the rebel barons succeeded. In January 1216 Philip of France’s son Louis landed with a French army and was warmly welcomed into rebel-held London. Deprived of money, support and arms John’s forces took to picking off rebel strongpoints and he was campaigning in East Anglia when, in late 1216, he contracted dysentery and died, leaving his nine-year-old son to inherit a country divided between rebel and loyalist forces.

P.S. Arthur of Brittany

John hadn’t ascended the throne uncontested. On Richard’s death in 1199 he was certainly the eldest surviving son of Henry II, but an elder brother of his, Geoffrey, although he had died in 1186 (aged just 27) had had a son, Arthur, who succeeded his father to become Arthur I, Duke of Brittany.

John’s claim was supported by the bulk of the English and Norman nobility and he was quickly crowned at Westminster Abbey, backed by his mother, Eleanor. But young Arthur was supported by the majority of the Breton, Maine and Anjou nobles and received the support of Philip II, King Of France.

For the next four years the two were involved in a complex powerplay involving complex interactions of allies and enemies. In 1202 John’s forces captured young Arthur and John sent him to the castle at Falaise (or Rouen, according to some accounts). It isn’t known for certain what happened next but one chronicler says that, one night, drunk after dinner, John went to Arthur’s cell, murdered him, weighted his body with a stone and threw it into the River Seine. Whatever happened, Arthur never re-emerged, and the rumour of his death alienated the entire population of Brittany from John, and eventually became well known throughout France and England. When Philip II of France invaded England in 1216 he cited John’s alleged murder of Arthur as one of the pretexts.

Interdict and excommunication

Among the other perils of being a 12th century king (or emperor or count or prince or duke) was having to manage your relationship with the pope. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died in 1205, John proposed a successor but he was rejected by the cathedral chapter for Canterbury. Both sides put their proposals to the pope who turned them both down and imposed his own candidate, Stephen Langton. Infuriated, John banned Langton from entering England and seized the church’s property. The pope retaliated by placing the entire country of England under an Interdict, in March 1208, prohibiting clergy from conducting religious services, with the exception of baptisms for the young, and confessions and absolutions for the dying. John seized land and estates belonging to the church, prompting the pope to personally excommunicate John in November 1209. Jones’s account of all this is very funny, John’s lead characteristic being complete indifference to the Interdict and excommunication.

Eventually both sides saw a solution was required and in 1213 the papal legate brokered a deal whereby John offered to surrender the Kingdom of England to the papacy for a feudal service of 1,000 marks, and agreed to pay back the huge sums he had gouged out of his clergy and church during the Interdiction. It sounds like a bad deal but in fact it won the pope over to John’s side and he gave unstinting support to the king throughout the Magna Carta crisis. Pope Innocent in fact excommunicated the barons who forced John to sign the Big Charter, and then excommunicated King Philip of France when he invaded England in January 1216. Hard not to conclude that excommunications were thrown around like smarties.

King Henry III (1216 to 1272)

‘Born without a father, abandoned by his mother, never allowed to grow up watching another king rule, all his life dominated by others: Henry was from the start a poor candidate for the Crown…’ (p.266)

Henry III had such a long reign because he came to the throne aged just 9. He was the oldest son of King John and his wife Isabella of Angoulême. As we’ve seen, his father died in the middle of what became known as the First Barons’ War (1215–1217). The rebel barons had allied with the crown of France and the French had invaded England, led by the king’s son, Prince Louis, the future Louis VIII. There followed a year and a half of complex manoeuvres, sieges and battles, notably the second Battle of Lincoln (p.222) where an army led by the 70-year-old William Marshall managed to defeat the pro-French English barons. These land defeats were accompanied by several sea victories against the French – before Louis finally gave up and signed the Treaty of Lambeth relinquishing French claims to the English crown.

Henry was humourless and devout and, as he matured, became increasingly obsessed with the last Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. He was impressionable and remained under the influence of older guardians till well into his 30s, allowing them to fleece the country in the usual way, despite the limits supposedly set by Magna Carta. First Hubert de Burgh and then Peter des Roches gained influence over Henry, and used their positions to award law cases in their own favour, seize land, divert royal revenue to their own families etc, prompting a number of uprisings and virtually small-scale civil wars.

During Henry’s reign the Magna Carta, along with the Law of the Forest, were reissued and widely distributed. Generally ignored under John, it was only during Henry III’s reign that these documents began to take hold as a list of rights and duties which a king was expected to obey. They formed the basis of the notion that, in order to have his way – and especially raise money for foreign war – the king could be held to account to the numerous clauses of the two documents. In other words, that the king had to bargain and barter for financial support.

Such was Henry’s misrule that a consistent body of barons now began to meet three or four times a year to consult on Henry’s actions. One of them is referred to as a ‘parliament’ in a document of Henry’s, in 1236 (p.251). And this is how the English Parliament began, sitting in judgement on an incompetent king. As early as 1233 there was talk of deposing the king.

Simon de Montfort came from France and was the latest in a line of strong father figures that Henry seemed to need. Simon married Henry’s widowed sister, Eleanor of England, in 1238, shocking commentators; usually royal women were kept as bargaining chips to marry off to foreign kings not mere aristocrats. The king’s brother Richard of Cornwall, briefly rose in revolt against the marriage, until paid off.

As the 1240s rumbled along de Montfort and Henry fell out. After a mad project to conquer Sicily barely got off the ground, though incurring huge debts in the mid-1250s, the barons, once again, rebelled against an incompetent Plantagenet king. Summoned to Oxford to give money and support to Henry’s scheme, the barons refused to a man, and instead imposed the Provisions of Oxford, an extension of the Big Charter rights, with the insistence that England be ruled by a council of 25 barons elected by their peers, and a new innovation – that justice in the shires should be administered by four knights who would go on circuit to review law cases (p.261).

These were followed by the Provisions of Westminster in 1259 which lay down far-reaching reforms in administration. Henry had become ‘a dithering irrelevance’ in his own land (p.263).

Having read these accounts of the reigns of King John and Henry III, what they really amount to is the glaring fact that rule by one man was a terrible, terrible system, which seemed to have embedded in its essence institutional corruption, favouritism, unfair and arbitrary taxation, brutal torture and execution on trumped up charges, personal vendettas, and the pursuit of mad, exorbitantly expensive foreign wars.

Alas it would take another 400 years of personal rule by various incompetent kings before Oliver Cromwell’s regime took opposition to its logical conclusion and cut off the head of yet another incompetent, spendthrift ruler, thus chastening and limiting all his successors.

The only successful campaign of Henry’s rule was carried out by the Earl of Salisbury, who secured the land around Gascony in south-west France, thus establishing a 200-year-long commercial connection with this important wine-growing region.

But for the rest, Henry was ultimately forced, under the Treaty of Paris, to go to France and kneel before the French King Louis IX, and do him formal obeisance, and renounce his claims to Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Poitou.

If there’s a dramatic plotline to his long reign it’s in the relationship with Simon de Montfort. Born in France, Montfort inherited the earldom of Leicester and arrived in the English court in the 1230s. His fierce Catholic faith and manly confidence (he had already been on several crusades) dazzled the impressionable Henry who, as mentioned, married him to his sister Eleanor. But relations slowly became strained, as de Montfort presumed on their friendship to borrow money against the king’s name in 1239. de Montfort was also squeezed out by the arrival of the de Lusignan clan from France in the 1240s, who also began to manipulate the impressionable king.

A long line of disagreements – over Henry’s mismanagement of a campaign in Poitou, and then over de Montfort’s heavy-handed administration of Gascony – led to de Montfort becoming the leader of the rebel barons in the later 1240s and into the confrontations of the 1250s, where he led the deputation which forced Henry to accept the Provisions of Oxford.

A complicated sequence of failed negotiations led up to the Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264, the first set-piece battle on English soil in a century. The rebels won, capturing the King, Lord Edward, and Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother and the titular King of Germany. This led to the Great Parliament of 1265 (also known as de Montfort’s Parliament). For the first time representatives were invited from all the counties and selected boroughs of England. Voting rights were discussed. All this is the seeds of modern democracy.

But Henry’s son, Prince Edward, escaped from captivity and rallied royalist nobles as well as Welsh rebels and this led to a pitched battle with de Montfort’s forces at Evesham (4 August 1265), which was a decisive royalist victory.

Jones describes how a 12-man hit squad was commissioned to roam the battlefield, ignoring all distractions, with the sole task of finding and killing de Montfort. They succeeded. Montfort’s body was mutilated, his testicles, hands and feet cut off. To later generations he became a sort of patron saint of representative government. Today, De Montfort University in Leicester is named after him.

Henry III was once again titular king but he was a broken, dithering old man. The real power in the land during his last few years was his forceful and energetic son, Edward (named after Henry’s icon, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Edward the Confessor) who turned out to be a very different character from his saintly Saxon namesake.

[To be continued…]


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A Chronology of the Crusades

The Crusades lasted about two hundred years from 1095 to about 1295 and were designed to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Places from the control of Muslim rulers. Although there were later military adventures or social movements which called themselves crusades, they either petered out or were diverted to other targets. Historians squabble over whether there were seven or eight or nine crusades.

Muhammed

632 Muhammed dies.

637 Muslim armies besiege and take Jerusalem from the Byzantines.

The Great Schism

1054 Eastern and Western Christianity finally split after years of drift, crystallising into the Eastern Orthodox church based in Byzantium and the Roman Catholic church based in Rome, their respective followers known as Latins (or Franks) and Greeks.

1063 King Ramiro I of Aragon murdered by a Muslim and Pope Alexander II offers an indulgence (forgiveness of all sins; go directly to heaven) to anyone taking arms to revenge this crime.

1064 to 1066 – A group of about 7,000 Germans, some heavily armed, travel to Jerusalem and back unhindered.

1073 Pope Gregory VII helps organise an army against the Muslims in Spain, promising any soldier he can keep the land he seizes.

1095 Byzantine Emperor Alexios I sends an ambassador to Pope Urban II asking for military help against the growing Turkish threat (in fact the fast-expanding Great Seljuk Empire). Urban sees an opportunity to reassert Western control over the East and starts preaching a new idea: anyone who takes up arms and travels to liberate the Holy Land under the order of the Pope will go to heaven. Killing the infidel will no longer require penance: it will be a penance.

The First Crusade 1096 to 1099

1096 Easter. Peter the Hermit led a mass of maybe 20,000 people to set off to the Holy Land. As they moved through Germany they sparked off a series of massacres of Jews in every town and city. Having reached the Byzantine Empire they were ambushed by Muslim forces and only about 3,000 survived. Official crusader armies departed Europe August and September 1096.

1097 Siege of Antioch until June 1098. Crusaders massacre the Muslim inhabitants and loot the city.

1099 15 July – CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM The remnants of the army enter/liberate Jerusalem, massacre native Muslims, killing all the Jews, burning the synagogue, looting all the holy buildings. The chronicler claims some 70,000 were slaughtered and the streets piled high with corpses.

1100 On Christmas Day in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Baldwin of Edessa is crowned King of Jerusalem.

[1101 The Crusade of 1101, also known as The crusade of the faint-hearted due to the involvement of soldiers who had turned back from the First Crusade, was in three distinct groups of western soldiers, all of which were soundly thrashed by Seljuk Turks led by Kilij Arslan. As usual when the crusaders took Caesarea they rounded up all the Muslims into the Grand Mosque and massacred them all. And were then themselves beaten and killed by Kilij. The survivors eventually made it to Jerusalem, more as a pilgrimage than a military force.]

1109 The Franks sack the city of Tripoli after a five year siege, then rampage through it, burning the Banu Ammar library, the largest in the Muslim world, containing over 100,000 manuscripts.

1118 Baldwin dies, succeeded by his cousin, Baldwin II.

1124 Tyre falls to the Franks who now hold the entire cost from Egypt to Antioch.

1131 King Baldwin II dies and is succeeded by his son-in-law, Count Fulk of Anjou.

1122 to 1124 The Venetian Crusade A combination of religious fervour (it was sponsored by Pope Callixtus II) and commercial savvy, some 120 ships carrying over 15,000 men left Venice on 8 August 1122: they besieged Corfu to settle a commercial dispute; defeated a navy from Fatimid Egypt; besieged and took the sea port of Tyre, which became a Venetian trading centre, and on the way home ravaged various Greek islands, forcing the Empire to concede their trading privileges.

1135 Pope Innocent II’s grant of crusading indulgences to anyone who opposed papal enemies can be seen as the beginning of politically motivated crusades.

The Second Crusade 1145 to 1149

1144 King Fulk dies. Army of Imad ad-Din Zengi recaptures Edessa (modern Urfa), massacring the men and selling the women into slavery. Which leads Pope Eugenius III to call for another crusade, supported by various clerics, notably Bernard of Clairvaux.

1146 March 31 – Bernard delivers the first of many thundering first crusade sermons. In May and June armies from France and Germany led by King Louis VII and Conrad III set off.

[1147 A group of crusaders from northern Europe allied with the king of Portugal, Afonso I, retaking Lisbon from the Muslims.]

1147 October 25 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Conrad III and his army of 20,000 men was badly defeated by the Seljuk Turks led by Mesud I. The Germans abandoned the crusade and Conrad and the 2,000 survivors retreated to join the forces of King Louis VII of France.

1148 Louis and Conrad’s surviving soldiers besiege Damascus. It ends in complete defeat and a ruinous retreat. ‘St Bernard’s crusade ended in fiasco.’ (p.93)

1150 Louis and Conrad return home, failures.

The Wendish Crusade

1147 German knights attacked western Slavs on their border with a view to christianising them. Henry restarted efforts to conquer the Wends in 1160, and they were defeated in 1162.

[1172 Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, made a pilgrimage that is sometimes considered a crusade.]

Saladin

1169 Saladin – Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb – a Kurdish Muslim from Damascus, is in complete control of Egypt.

1169 to 1187 the campaigns of Saladin to unite the usually warring Arab kingdoms.

1180 King Baldwin IV negotiates a peace treaty with Saladin.

1185 24-year-old Baldwin IV dies, leaving the throne of Jerusalem to the eight-year-old Baldwin V.

1186 Baldwin V dies. The kingdom is weakened by complicated dynastic feuds which lead to Guy of Lusignan being crowned king.

1187 SALADIN RETAKES JERUSALEM Saladin led an enormous army of 30,000 into Palestine and inflicted a crushing defeat on the army of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July. He took his time capturing all the surrounding towns and then retook Jerusalem on 29 September. In studied contrast to the crusader’s massacre and pogrom of 1099, Saladin enforces his army to respect the city and its inhabitants: not a building was looted, not a person harmed.

When Pope Urban III heard the news he died of a heart attack. On 29 October Pope Gregory VIII issued a papal bull calling for the…

The Third Crusade 1189 to 1192

1189 Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, Holy Roman Emperor, commanded a vast army which sailed to Constantinople, then fought its way across Anatolia, winning battles but suffering from the heat and lack of supplies. Coming down the other side of the Taurus Mountains, Frederick went for a swim in the river Göksu and drowned. His disheartened troops turned back. Philip II of France, and Richard I of England led their armies on to the Holy Land.

1190 Pre-Crusade pogroms of Jews spread across England climaxing in a particularly violent massacre of Jews at York in March.

1191 Richard the Lionheart captured Cyprus from the Byzantines, then recaptured Acre and Jaffa. But they ran out of food before reaching Jerusalem which he knew, anyway, he didn’t have the force to hold.

1192 Richard negotiates a treaty with Saladin allowing Christian pilgrims free passage, then sails home. ‘Jerusalem would never again be captured by crusaders.’ (Crusades p.151) In Palestine Richard had had a big argument with Leopold of Austria. Now, travelling overland back through Leopold’s territory, Richard was identified and arrested. Leopold handed him over to the Emperor Henry VI who held him in prison for a year before a vast ransom could be organised to buy his freedom.

1193 Saladin dies worn out.

1199 Richard dies of gangrene from an arrow wound at an insignificant siege in Aquitaine.

The German Crusade

1197 Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, fulfils a promise to his father. Led by Conrad of Wittelsbach the army landed at Acre and captured Sidon and Beirut, but when Henry died most of the forces returned to Germany.

The North European Crusade

1193 Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against Northern European pagans and his successor Pope Innocent III issued a papal bull declaring a crusade against the pagan Livonians. Bishop Berthold of Hanover led a large army against them, during which the Christian settlers found the city of Riga, although Berthold was himself killed in battle in 1198.

1201 Albrecht von Buxthoeven established Riga as the seat of his bishopric in 1201.

1202 Albrecht formed the Livonian Knights to convert the pagans to Catholicism. The Livonians were conquered and converted between 1202 and 1209.

1217 Pope Honorius III declared a crusade against the Prussians.

1226 Konrad of Masovia gave Chelmno to the Teutonic Knights in 1226 as a base for the crusade.

1236 The Livonian Knights were defeated by the Lithuanians at Saule.

1237 Pope Gregory IX merged the remainder of the troops into the Teutonic Knights as the Livonian Order.

1249 The Teutonic Knights completed their conquest of the Old Prussians. They then conquered and converted the Lithuanians, a process which lasted into the 1380s. The order tried unsuccessfully to conquer Orthodox Russia.

The Fourth Crusade 1202 to 1004: the Sack of Constantinople

1199 Pope Innocent III began preaching the Fourth Crusade in France, England, and Germany. The two military leaders Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice and German King Philip of Swabia had their own political agendas and when the enterprise turned out not be able to pay the Venetian fleet, they decided to conquer and loot Constantinople instead.

1202 They seized the Christian city of Zara prompting Innocent to excommunicate them.

1203 Easter – the army set sail for Byzantium.

1204 The army entered Constantinople and enacted the complicated plot to put Prince Alexius IV on the throne. Alexius had promised wild amounts of money in return but turned out to be unable to pay. Alexius was murdered in a palace coup; the blind old emperor died; the coup plotter announced himself emperor. All this made it easier for the Latins and their Catholic leaders to give the go-ahead for a devastating sack of the city, which spread out of control to unbridled looting, massacring, churches pillaged and thousands murdered in the streets.

1205 Bulgars defeated the crusaders and remaining Greeks at Adrianople. The devastation of Byzantium permanently weakened the Eastern Empire, didn’t bring its church under Latin rule, as the Pope dreamed, and probably benefited Venice most, which seized control of commerce in the empire.

The Albigensian Crusade 1208 to 1229

1208 launched to eliminate the Cathars of Occitania (present-day southern France) lasted for decades and led to Northern French domination of the South. In July 1208 the crusaders took Béziers and massacred every man, woman and child. When soldiers asked the Abbot how they could avoid killing ‘true’ believers, he replied:

‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’

Mindset of terrorists throughout the ages.

[1221 Pope Honorius III asked King Andrew II to put down heretics in Bosnia. Hungarian forces answered further papal calls in

1234 and 1241. This campaign ended with the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241.]

The Fifth Crusade 1213 to 1221

1215 Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215. It was at this mass assembly of bishops and cardinals that ‘heresy’ was defined, ‘inquisition’ formalised, Jews were ordered to wear special clothing and Innocent announced his new crusade.

1216 Innocent III dies.

1217 Duke Leopold VI and Andrew II arrived in Acre but failed to assert their power and left.

1219 The remaining forces besieged Damietta in Egypt and captured it in November 1219. But further plans were blocked by the Arab leader Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil and the crusaders were forced to surrender and hand back Damietta.

The Sixth Crusade b.1228

1228 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, after being repeatedly threatened and eventually excommunicated by Innocent’s successor, Pope Honorius III, for his delays, finally landed at Acre.

1229 RESTORATION OF JERUSALEM – However, both sides being reluctant to fight, Frederick agreed a peace treaty with Al-Kamil which allowed Latin Christians to rule most of Jerusalem and a strip of land along the coast, with the Muslims controlling their sacred areas in Jerusalem. Frederick had himself crowned in the Holy Sepulchre and declared himself the mouthpiece of God. Frederick returned home to find the Pope had organised armies to invade his realm.

1238 Frederick tried to extend his lands into northern Italy and Pope Gregory declared a crusade against him. ‘The Holy War was now being preached not against the ‘infidel’, not even against a heretic – no such charge was made against Frederick – but against a political enemy of the Pope.’ (Crusades p.181) Crusade had become degraded to a purely secular concept.

1239 A force led by King Theobald I of Navarre arrived in Acre in September. Defeated in battle in November, Theobald negotiated another treaty with the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil.

1244 The Destruction OF Jerusalem

The Ayyubids invited Khwarazmian forces whose empire had been destroyed by Genghiz Khan’s Mongols, to reconquer the city. It fell July 15, 1244 and the Khwarezmians completely razed Jerusalem to the ground, leaving it in ruins.
1244 An Arab force led by al-Salih Ayyub seized Jerusalem.

The Seventh Crusade 1248 to 1254

1245 to 1250 King Louis IX of France organized a vast army, set sail in 1248 and landed in Egypt in June 1249. In a series of battles they were defeated, and in 1250 Louis was captured and ransomed for 800,000 bezants, and a ten-year truce agreed.

1254 Louis withdrew to Acre, now the only Crusader territory of any significance, which he built up again until his money ran out in 1254 and he had to return to France.

[1256 The Venetians were evicted from Tyre, prompting the War of Saint Sabas over territory in Acre claimed by Genoa and Venice. The war dragged on for a decade during which both Christian sides allied with Muslim forces and most fortified buildings in Acre were destroyed.

1266 Louis IX’s brother Charles seized Sicily and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean with a view to restoring the Latin empire by reconquering Byzantium.]

The Eighth Crusade 1270

1265 The ferocious Mameluk Sultan Baibars ibn-Abdullah had captured Caesarea, Nazareth, Haifa, Safed, Toron, and Arsuf.

1268 Baibars captures Antioch and massacres its entire population.

1270 These events inspire King Louis IX of France to sail to Tunis with a large fleet and impressive army. However it was the height of the Saharan summer, the army was devastated by disease and Louis died. Thus ended the last major attempt to take the Holy Land.

The Ninth Crusade 1272

1270 The future Edward I of England had travelled with Louis. He sailed with his forces to Acre in May 1271. His forces were small and he was unable to alter the existing peace treaties between Baibars and King Hugh of Jerusalem.

1272 Edward learned of his father’s death.

1274 Edward I returns to England to take up his crown.

1277 The fearsome Baibars dies.

The last crusade

1281 Election of a French pope, Martin IV who threw himself behind the campaigns of French king Charles I. His ships were at Sicily when the Emperor of Byzantium conspired to provoke the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, an uprising during which the crusader fleet was abandoned and burnt.

1287 King Charles I dies, allowing Henry II of Cyprus to reclaim Jerusalem.

These kinds of struggles are typical of the endless disunity and conflict among the Roman Christians which continually undermined efforts to hold the Holy Land. In this two hundred year period the papacy, far from creating the kind of total control over Christendom which Innocent and Urban dreamed of, had become just one among a hectic throng of nationalist kings and princes all fighting each other. The papacy had lost all its moral authority. Thus:

1284 The Crusade of Aragon was called by Pope Martin against Peter III of Aragon, Peter supporting anti-Angevin forces in Sicily, Martin supporting Charles of Anjou.

1298 Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed a crusade against Frederick III of Sicily (Peter’s younger brother).

The end of the Crusader states

1291 A group of pilgrims from Acre was attacked by Muslim forces and in retaliations killed some innocent Muslim merchants. The Sultan demanded compensation from the king of Acre and, when none came, used it as a pretext to besiege and then capture the city. Men, women and children were massacred: prisoners were beheaded. Acre had been the last independent Crusader state in the Holy Land and its fall signified that – The Crusades had ended.

Non-Holy Land ‘crusades’

1365 The Alexandrian Crusade Peter I of Cyprus captured and sacked Alexandria for mainly commercial reasons, killing as many Christians as Muslims and Jews.

1390 The Mahdian Crusade Louis II led a ten-week campaign against Muslim pirates in North Africa. After a siege the crusaders signed a ten-year truce.

1396 Crusade against the Ottomans led by Sigismund of Luxemburg, king of Hungary which was defeated by the Ottomans in the Battle of Nicopolis.

1420s The Hussite Crusades military action against the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia from 1420 to about 1431. Crusades were declared five times during that period: in 1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, and 1431.

1440s Crusade against the Ottomans Polish-Hungarian King Władysław Warneńczyk invaded recently conquered Ottoman territory, reaching Belgrade in January 1444. Negotiated a truce with Sultan Murad II. The Ottomans won a decisive victory at the Battle of Varna on 10 November, and the crusaders withdrew. This left Constantinople exposed and it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

John Hunyadi and Giovanni da Capistrano organized a 1456 crusade to lift the Ottomon siege of Belgrade.
1487 Pope Innocent VIII called for a crusade against the Waldensians in the south of France but little military activity followed and it had no effect…


Sources

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