On the one hand Magna Carta has been seen as the foundation of English democracy, guaranteeing equal treatment for all under the law and government only by consent of the governed, but on the other it is a solidly feudal document that also has many specific provisions that applied only to John. This is not a contradiction, since by the very act of limiting the monarch’s authority in specified ways Magna Carta achieved a broad and abstract definition of limited government, even if its actual provisions were quite narrow and specific. One that is often noted is the specific call for John’s ‘foreign’ counsellors to be removed. These ‘foreigners’ were mainly Poitevins, and it is telling that these inhabitants of the former Angevin Empire could be seen as aliens.36
When John died little more than a year after the issuance of Magna Carta, the document might have become an irrelevance. However, the circumstances of John’s death with the kingdom both embroiled in a civil war and having been invaded by the French meant that Magna Carta became a rallying point for the English barons, and was reissued in the name of the nine-year-old Henry III as a way of proving that the provisions of Magna Carta were more than a specific attack on John and did seek to be the ‘law of the land’. The charter’s definitive reissue in 1225 enshrined it as the governing contract between the king and his people, and this was what gave Magna Carta its lasting importance, and established it as the fundamental document that laid the foundation for English democracy.37
John’s final year of life was disastrous even by his standards. In August 1215 John received papal sanction to repudiate Magna Carta, as it had been imposed on him under duress, and the civil war began again. The barons still held London, but otherwise John was in a strong position since he possessed the most important castles, and he was supported by great feudal lords such as William Marshal and Ranulf Earl of Chester who had significant fighting forces. In opposition, the barons could portray themselves as fighting to defend Magna Carta and the rights of the governed against a tyrant. This moral advantage was somewhat diminished by the fact that the rebel barons also invited Philip Augustus’s son Louis to invade England to support the rebellion.
Innocent III took a dim view of this interference and excommunicated Louis, but the French invasion, so long feared but never materialising, finally became a reality. In May 1216 Louis landed in England. John had been preparing his response for some time, but in one of the very few English naval failures of any period, his ships were wrecked in a storm and couldn’t stop the French departing Calais. Although John had an army in Kent awaiting Louis, he chose to retreat to Winchester. The French followed and took the city.
The rebels failed to capitalize on this early success. Although Alexander II, the king of Scotland, now invaded from the north and personally joined the French at their siege of Dover castle, where Alexander did homage to Louis, he was not able to bring his full army south because of John’s energetic activity around the midlands and especially his attempts to relieve the siege of Lincoln castle, which blocked the Scots from joining the French. John had certainly not given up, and by October 1216 the situation was at a stalemate with the French holding the southeast, rebel barons holding the north and London, and John controlling the rest of the country. Neither side seemed capable of defeating the other, much as in the civil war between Matilda and Stephen, and John’s presence at Lincoln kept his foes divided.38
When John was on his way back to Lincoln after being received in the town of Lynn, one of the most iconic moments of his reign occurred: his baggage train was caught in the high tide in the Wash and entirely lost, including his money and jewels. This was more a humiliation than a substantive blow, but it highlights the desperation and bad fortune that marked John’s last days. Roger of Wendover’s Flores Historiarum (‘Flowers of History’), written around 1230, describes the lost loot as ‘treasures, precious vessels, and all the other things which he cherished with special care’. Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum describes it as ‘his chapel with its relics … and diverse household effects’. Another source describes the king’s ‘princely carriage and furniture’.39 It was also noted at Henry III’s coronation that some of the royal regalia had been lost in this disaster, though the crown of Edward the Confessor had been kept safe at Westminster Abbey. Records of the time show that the king was moving round the countryside at quite a rate – sometimes as much as thirty-seven miles a day – which suggests that he was not accompanied by a large baggage train, since that would have been extremely sluggish. Nevertheless, some people still believe John’s treasure lies beneath the mud and continue the search for it. One thing is certain: the ‘King John Cup’ in the museum in King’s Lynn dates to c1340 and didn’t belong to John, though it is one of the best examples of 14th-century enamelling techniques.
It was not clear how long the civil war would drag on, but fate intervened. John had been ill for some months, and on 19 October 1216 he died at the Bishop of Lincoln’s castle of Newark. Hostile chroniclers were delighted to note the last days of such a bad king, with parts of his kingdom held by rebels or invaders and his continental empire mostly lost. John’s son and heir was only nine years old, and a minority was always disruptive.
Yet it was precisely Henry III’s youth that saved the kingdom. If the problem was simply that John was a tyrant, well, he was gone. Rebels were now rebelling against a child who had never done them harm, and they were assisting French invaders. All the royalists needed was a strong leader to make this point and lead the fightback, and it was at this moment that William Marshal stepped forward for the crowning achievement of his long career.
Despite their differences, John had appointed William as the first of his lay executors; William’s biography elaborates this by having John say dramatically on his deathbed: ‘Sirs, for God’s sake beg the Marshal to forgive me, and because I am surer of his loyalty than that of any one else, I beg you to entrust to him the guardianship of my son, for the land will never be held by anyone except with his help.’40 Although William had preserved his obligations to Philip Augustus for the land he held in Normandy, there had never really been any question of his loyalty to the English throne, despite John’s insinuations to the contrary, and his leadership was critical to the English recovery.
William seized the moral high ground by reissuing Magna Carta and proving that the rebel barons had no real cause for dissatisfaction, and he was supported in this by the papal legate, nullifying the fears raised by Innocent III’s repudiation of the charter. Innocent himself had also died in 1216, helping to clear the way for compromise. In addition to winning the battle for hearts and minds, Henry III’s supporters had tangible success in the summer of 1217. The French had taken East Anglia and moved north against Lincoln, but they were comprehensively defeated by royal forces. Next, England’s navy defeated a French fleet near Dover, cutting off Louis’s support and potential reinforcements.
This marked the end of the French invasion; Louis was forced to agree a treaty and withdraw, and the rebel barons made peace. William Marshal, having saved the kingdom (according to his biographer), prepared to die in 1219 surrounded by his family, and he called on the papal legate to protect Henry III. His work done, William took the vows of a knight Templar on his deathbed, and was buried in the Temple Church in London, where his effigy, although damaged in the Blitz, can still be seen.
Emperor Frederick II: Wonder of the World
The Angevin Empire had collapsed and the Byzantine Empire had been seized by Latin invaders, so now we must turn to the Holy Roman Empire. The story revolves around perhaps the most fascinating character of the Middle Ages, the Emperor Frederick II. Frederick defies superlatives. Even in his lifetime he was called stupor mundi, the wonder of the world. His position as heir to Hohenstaufen power in Germany and the kingdom of Sicily would always have made him a pivotal figure in European history, and his actions as Crusader and Crusaded against, restorer of Jerusalem and enemy of popes, make him more interesting still, but his personality – irr
everent, brilliant, multilingual, intellectually curious – exercises a fascination that endures across more than seven centuries. Who but Frederick could simultaneously have been called the Messiah, the Anti-Christ and the eternal Emperor who will return to save Germany? How many medieval figures (who aren’t Angevins) leave even one memorable saying, much less a joke? Frederick reputedly said, ‘Of the three great holy men of the three great religions – Moses, Jesus and Mohammed – only one of them got what he deserved.’ This is still mildly shocking in our secular times, but how would this have been received in the 13th century? Dante duly consigned Frederick to the sixth circle of hell with the other heretics.41
Frederick inherited the throne of Sicily as an infant, was declared of age in 1208 when he was fourteen, and became Emperor in 1218. In return for the support of Pope Honorius III in becoming Emperor, he had promised to surrender Sicily to his own infant son and immediately go on Crusade. We have seen that the Fourth Crusade attracted serious criticism and was characterized as a perversion of the Crusading ideal, but it was the Crusades involving Frederick II that marked the real low point in Crusading history.
At the Fourth Lateran Council, the twelfth great council of the church and the most important of the Middle Ages, Pope Innocent III had called for yet another new Crusade, again to be directed against Egypt. Innocent died in 1216 before the Crusade was launched, although preaching was well under way and many people had taken the cross.42 The Fifth Crusade, which led to a failed attack on the Egyptian city of Damietta, was enough of a threat to frighten the Ayubbid sultan of Egypt into offering terms.43 One of these was the return of Jerusalem to the Crusaders in exchange for leaving Egypt unmolested.
The Crusaders were aware that from a military point of view this would be a mistake since, as had been known since Richard the Lionheart’s time, Jerusalem could not be held without controlling a substantial hinterland around it. It is interesting that the Crusaders never considered accepting this offer, and again raises the question of what a Crusade was for. Was it to return Jerusalem to Christian rule? Yes, but apparently only by military means, and the Fourth and Fifth Crusades had shown that the means of securing Jerusalem might involve an attack on somewhere else entirely. The Albigensian Crusade and Fourth Crusade showed that maybe the principal aim of the Crusades was fighting against Christianity’s enemies whoever they were, not just Muslims. We are now a step closer to the modern sense of a Crusade as an uncompromising attack against something that is believed to be wrong, no matter what or where. Yet these are abstract considerations. The Crusades also had the specific goal of supporting the Crusader States in Outremer, and it was this practical, strategic thinking that made a deal impossible. Securing free passage for Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem would do nothing to help Acre and Antioch.
Needless to say Frederick failed to surrender Sicily after becoming Emperor, and like many kings before him, including Henry II of England, he showed no haste in preparing for his promised Crusade. His lack of participation in the Fifth Crusade contributed to its failure, since the Crusade had no leader on the spot who could make binding decisions that would be respected by the king of Jerusalem, the pope and all the other figures with an interest in the region. This all changed when Frederick himself became the king of Jerusalem, though in a quite convoluted fashion.
The legal situation in Outremer remained as it was at the time of Fulk of Anjou and Melisende, in which women could inherit the throne, although a queen’s consort was also recognized as king. The current king was John of Brienne, the penniless younger son of a family in Champagne, who had become king through marrying the reigning queen. Outremer’s barons were scrupulous in recognizing where the true claim to the throne lay, and as John’s wife was dead he was now only regent for their daughter Yolanda (also known as Isabelle), who was fourteen and thus ready for marriage. Following the usual pattern, John of Brienne went to Europe looking for an appropriate husband for her. The Master of the Teutonic Knights seems to have been the instigator of the scheme to marry her to Frederick, and with the pope’s support John agreed to the union. This infuriated Philip Augustus, since as we have seen the French king traditionally arranged matches for the rulers of Jerusalem, but it was too late. John of Brienne must have been forgiven, as he was at Philip Augustus’s deathbed on 14 July 1223 and received a large donation to support the states of Outremer.44
Frederick II married Yolanda in November 1225, but things went wrong almost immediately. Although John had agreed to the marriage on condition that he would retain the regency until his death (and he was in his 70s at this point, so the condition would not have seemed unreasonable, although in fact he lived for another twelve years), Frederick immediately repudiated the agreement and proclaimed himself king, additionally seizing the money Philip Augustus had given John to support the kingdom. Frederick now had a much greater stake in promoting an expedition to the Holy Land. John of Brienne showed a penchant for becoming involved in lost causes, as after losing the kingship of Jerusalem he moved to the doomed Latin Empire of Constantinople and became Emperor for the last eleven years of his life. His daughter was not so lucky. Frederick treated Yolanda callously, allegedly seducing her cousin immediately after their wedding and then sending Yolanda to become part of his harem in Palermo. In 1228 she provided Frederick with a son, Conrad, who was now heir to Jerusalem, but she died six days after his birth when she was still only sixteen. Just as with John of Brienne, to the punctilious barons of Outremer this now meant Frederick was regent for Conrad, rather than king in his own right.45
Pope Honorius III had been Frederick’s tutor and always retained a fundamental stock of goodwill for his former pupil, but Honorius died in 1227. His successor Gregory IX had no such patience, and threatened Frederick with excommunication if he did not proceed with the planned Crusade immediately. He initially met with no resistance from Frederick, who viewed a Crusade to the Holy Land as nothing more than an expedition to make good his claim to the kingdom of Jerusalem.
Of course Jerusalem itself had been under Muslim control since 1187, but there was still a ‘kingdom of Jerusalem’ that consisted of the rump of the old Crusader States centred on Acre. Why would Frederick want this insignificant and imperilled kingdom? Rampant acquisitiveness has been the hallmark of most of the rulers we’ve encountered, but what was Frederick hoping to gain? He was in his prime by 1228, and as Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily he may have felt that his position as the most powerful figure in Europe would be enhanced by the glamour of leading a successful Crusade.
What is clear is that Frederick took a completely pragmatic view of the Crusade, and believed that its goal was recapturing Jerusalem by whatever means. When he arrived in the Holy Land he found his Muslim adversaries perfectly amenable to negotiation, and without any bloodshed he negotiated the return of Jerusalem to Christian rule, on condition that Muslims were still free to come and go in the city. To us, this may seem a sensible approach to resolve over a century of religious warfare, but it horrified Frederick’s contemporaries, and the pope promptly excommunicated him.
Frederick’s relationship with the papacy never recovered, and by 1247, this Crusader and King of Jerusalem was being described by the pope as ‘the limb of the Devil, the servant of Satan, the miserable precursor of Antichrist’ and had been deposed.46 We can see that the root of the conflict between Frederick and the papacy was Frederick’s dominion over northern Italy as Emperor and southern Italy as king of Sicily, which was a direct threat to the pope’s authority, but the ideology of the Crusades poisoned things further. This bitter conflict between Emperor and pope had numerous long-lasting consequences, but for us what is most important is that the papacy would consider the extermination of Frederick II and his descendants as a Crusade, unleashing decades of warfare and leaving the imperial throne vacant for more than sixty years. The Holy Roman Empire never fully recovered, losing its power in Italy but becoming a fairly successful Central European state.
It was
this conflict that drew Sicily into the Angevin orbit, but first we must consider how the Angevin lands were absorbed by the Capetians and how this launched the career of Charles of Anjou.
The castle at Angers.
Fulk Nerra haunted by the ghosts of his victims.
Melisende’s psalter.
Jerusalem, from King Rene’s Book of Hours.
Chinon.
Fontevraud.
Richard the Lionheart’s and Isabelle of Angouleme’s effigies at Fontevraud.
Chateau Gaillard.
Charles of Anjou’s effigy at St Denis.
Conradin’s memorial at Santa Maria del Carmine.
Robert the Wise.
Castel Nuovo, Naples.
Petrarch’s house, Arqua Petrarca.
Tomb of Jadwiga, Wawel Cathedral.
Tomb of Ladislas, San Giovanni Carbonara, Naples.
King Rene’s Book of Hours, office for the dead.
Motif from King Rene’s chivalric romance.
CHAPTER 7 – CHARLES OF ANJOU: LORD OF THE GREATEST PART OF THE WORLD
WE HAVE SEEN THE debates over whether the ‘Angevin Empire’ of Henry II, Richard I and John deserves this appellation, and we know that creating an empire was never their intention, but in the 13th century there was an Angevin who consciously set out to create an empire. Although Charles of Anjou nearly succeeded, the ultimate failure of his attempt to establish a Mediterranean empire provoked a full-blown Mediterranean war that effectively ended the Crusading movement and nearly destroyed the papacy. Despite this, Charles did create an Angevin state in Naples that lasted until 1435 and shaped Mediterranean politics throughout the period. In doing so he participated in (or caused) the most important events of the later 13th century: the extinction of the Hohenstaufen Emperors; two Crusades against Muslim states and countless others against fellow Christians; and finally the Sicilian Vespers, the repercussions of which echoed for centuries. Moreover, although his career was one of constant strife and his government was characterized by legendary rapaciousness, he was the brother of Louis IX of France, later Saint Louis, one of the great figures of the Middle Ages and a crucial supporter of Charles’s schemes.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 25
