Fortunately for Johanna, Louis died in 1362 and she reclaimed control of her kingdom. Johanna benefitted from a change in the papacy, since the decline in her fortunes had in part been due to the loss of Clement VI’s protection, as Innocent VI (1352–62) did little to support her, and his reign coincided exactly with Louis of Taranto’s supremacy. Innocent died in the same year as Louis, and the new pope Urban V (1362–70) had been the papal legate sent to Naples in 1362 on Louis of Taranto’s death, and thus had already been instrumental in restoring Johanna to power before he succeeded to the throne of St Peter.
The Angevins were still a large and troublesome family, but Louis of Durazzo, the last of his generation from that branch of the family, also died in 1362, leaving only a young son, the future Charles III. Johanna brought him to be raised in the royal household, though he repaid this by later overthrowing and murdering her. The only other direct rivals for the throne were Philip and Robert of Taranto, and since Philip was married to Johanna’s sister Maria he was a considerable threat. Maria had four daughters who were also claimants to the throne, and this tangled inheritance would cause problems for the rest of Johanna’s reign, until Charles III of Durazzo eventually emerged as the winner. This again was through mortality, as Robert of Taranto died in 1364, Maria in 1366 and Philip of Taranto in 1374.
However, Johanna in her final years, as well as Charles of Durazzo and his descendants, would not be unopposed, and surprisingly their main competition would come not from the Hungarian Angevins as it had previously, but from yet another new Angevin dynasty springing from Anjou. To understand the rise of this ‘Second House’ of Anjou, we must first look at what had happened in France during the reigns of Robert and Johanna, and the vital role the final Angevin dynasty played in the affairs of Naples and Hungary.
CHAPTER 10 – PLANTAGENETS AND ANGEVINS
AT THE BEGINNING OF the 14th century, France was the largest and most stable state in Europe, but it was not without its problems. In the aftermath of the disastrous Aragonese Crusade that ended with the death of Philip III of France and a war between his successor Philip IV and Edward I of England, France needed money. The richest body in the medieval world was of course the Church, and Philip was drawn into conflict with Pope Boniface VIII as we have already seen, but he also began trying to assert his authority against the rich towns of Flanders. This culminated with a massacre of the flower of French chivalry by Flemish weavers at Courtrai in July 1302, one of the most shocking military defeats in French history, though it would not bear this title for long. Courtrai prefigured future defeats, because mounted French knights heedlessly charged into battle against low-born enemy foot soldiers, only to blunder into a series of ditches where they were thrown from their horses and ‘speared like fish’.1 The defeat at Courtrai seriously weakened Philip, and once again put pressure on him to raise additional funds.
The Curse of the Templars
If the surviving fragment of the Angevin Empire in Gascony would be one cause of the Hundred Years War, another was even more dramatic: the curse of the Templars. By the early 14th century, there may still have been a king of Jerusalem, the Angevin Charles II, but the loss of Acre in 1291 had ended the Christian states in the Holy Land. Despite repeated calls for a new Crusade to reestablish the Crusader States, after nearly a century of toxic political Crusades against Christian enemies of the pope and the Angevins, the chances of an actual military expedition being mounted were minimal.
However, if the Crusader States had vanished, the three great institutions spawned by the Crusades had gone from strength to strength: the orders of the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights. The three military orders had taken dramatically different paths. Only the Hospitallers remained true to their original purpose, and continued to be militant monks fighting the Turks from their new base on Rhodes. They would lose Rhodes to the Ottomans and move their base to Malta, where after resisting one of the most brutal sieges in history in the 16th century, they would evolve and endure to the present day as the Knights of St John of Malta.
The Teutonic Knights have a complicated reputation. They initially remained a Crusading force, but directed their zeal against the pagan peoples living near the Baltic. They were heavily involved in the political development of central Europe because, exactly as the first Crusaders did, they established a new state in the conquered territory. This cannot help but be bound up with the ethnic dimension of the knights, since they were mostly German and their conquests were viewed as German conquests. We have seen that most of the other Crusaders and military orders were largely French, but for modern historical reasons this is not viewed as so problematic. One important factor in establishing the reputation of the Teutonic Knights for a modern audience was Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, where his depiction of the Russian hero’s victory is portrayed in straightforward terms as a victory of heroic Russians against the evil German Knights, who are even adorned with swastika motifs.
The Templars had augmented their military role by becoming a leading force in banking, simply because potential Crusaders would deposit money with their local Templars to prepare for their Crusade, meaning every major city now had a ‘Temple’ that was a storehouse for vast sums. The Templars quickly learned to lend this money out, and by the early 14th century rivalled the Italian banking houses in their wealth. Inevitably this caused the resentment always directed at moneylenders, but unfortunately for the Templars it also coincided with the loss of Acre in 1291.
Some asked what purpose the Templars served, now that there were no Crusader States for them to defend. Worse, the Templars were criticized by many for their role in Acre’s fall, since their constant strife with the Hospitallers was well known. The opprobrium that attached to William of Beaujeu, the Master of the Templars at the time of Acre’s fall, was also connected to his earlier support for Charles of Anjou’s claim to Jerusalem in opposition to King Hugh of Cyprus, since this further complicated the politics of the city at the time of its gravest crisis. Despite the fact that William of Beaujeu died in the fight to save Acre, these accusations would be remembered when the order was attacked by Philip IV of France.2
Philip IV is one of the most fascinating and least attractive (despite his name, Philip ‘Le Bel’, the Handsome) characters of the 14th century. Like all monarchs, Philip constantly needed money, and he was deeply in debt to the Templars, who were most numerous in France although they were a Europe-wide institution. After his damaging conflict with Boniface VIII and military defeat in Flanders, it would be useful for Philip to have an enemy that the ‘most Christian king’ could oppose, and he now launched a full-scale attack on the Templars and confiscated their property. As he had with Boniface VIII, Philip couched this attack in religious and moral terms, accusing the Templars of heresy, sodomy and witchcraft. In 1307 he ordered the arrest of all the Templars and their examination under torture.
Unsurprisingly, all manner of shocking crimes were confessed, most notably around the initiation ceremonies for new candidates. These coalesced into a standard group of claims: that initiates renounced and spat on the cross; received the ‘kiss of shame’ from the order’s preceptor on the mouth, navel and anus; and that there was an idol of a man’s head revered by the order. These kinds of accusations – of a head that foretold the future, black cats, deviant sexual practices – had been seen before, and would return again and again in trials for witchcraft. It is difficult to analyse them. Certainly in an all-male military fraternity, the fact that the initiation rites and other behaviour may have had a homoerotic dimension is not impossible, but there is no evidence to suggest that the Templars were guilty of the crimes attributed to them.3
Outside of France, Philip was criticized for his actions against the Templars, and in other kingdoms, such as England, the Templars were not all arrested. But Philip compelled the newly elected pope, Clement V, to support him by threatening to reopen the case of Boniface VIII and resurrect the (very similar) clai
ms about his sorcery, heresy and sodomy, as well as accusing the Templars of having ‘betrayed the Holy Land’ when Acre fell.4 After a series of trials and confessions, the Templars were suppressed throughout Europe. Knights who confessed their ‘crimes’ and sought absolution would be spared, although they would remain imprisoned, but those who refused to confess would be burnt at the stake as heretics.
The Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, first denied the accusations, then confessed under torture, recanted his confession before the pope and then admitted the crimes again under further torture. As a result he would be allowed to live, but in 1314, when called to make his final admission of guilt, he repudiated his confession and insisted on the Order’s innocence. He was sentenced to death and burnt at the stake on 18 March 1314 in Paris. Legend says that as the flames began to rise around him, Jacques de Molay called down a curse on his persecutors, condemning the pope and the French king to death within a year, and the extinction of the French royal line.5
The Templar curse was supremely effective. Pope Clement V and Philip IV, although neither was particularly old, were both dead within months. Philip had three sons, yet each died along with their own sons, and they suffered further lurid scandals such as the imprisonment of their wives for adultery and the murder of one. The rapid turnover in succession introduced some challenging constitutional issues for the French court.
Philip IV was succeeded in 1314 by his son Louis X. Louis died in 1316, leaving a young daughter, Jeanne, and a posthumous son, Jean I, who lived only a few days. Louis’s brother, Philip Count of Poitiers, asserted a similar argument to King John in England or Robert the Wise in Naples and advanced his own candidacy over that of Jeanne, though because she was female rather than only because of her youth. He succeeded as Philip V, but when he died in 1322 leaving only a teenaged daughter, the logic of his own path to the throne precluded her from succeeding. His brother Charles succeeded as Charles IV, but reigned for six years and died in 1328, again leaving only a daughter, though his wife was pregnant. If the child were male, he would succeed, but when she proved to be a daughter, the direct male line was at an end.
Philip IV and his sons may have been dead, but Philip’s daughter Isabelle and her son were very much alive. The only problem was that Isabelle had married Edward II of England and her son was King Edward III. Worse, in 1326 Isabelle and her lover Roger Mortimer had led an invasion of England to deprive Edward II of power, and Isabelle was widely believed to have ordered Edward’s murder in 1327. The French barons had decided that they would not allow a woman to succeed, but Isabelle argued that her son Edward should be able to inherit via his mother’s claim. The French now had to decide whether they wanted to allow the king of England to take the French throne, which unsurprisingly they did not.6
With the precedent already established that female succession was forbidden, the barons and prelates of France asked the scholars of the University of Paris to delve into the past to ‘discover’ that their ancient forebears, the Salian Franks, allowed neither female succession nor succession through the female line. On the basis of this ‘Salic law’, Isabelle and all her progeny were excluded from the throne, as would be all succession in the female line in the future.
With Philip IV’s descendants dead or excluded from the succession, who was next in line? Who else could it be but the Count of Anjou. Philip IV’s younger brother, Charles of Valois, had as we know married King Charles II of Naples’s daughter Margaret, and received Anjou and Maine as her dowry, but he kept his own title. His son Philip of Valois was also Count of Anjou when he was chosen to become King Philip VI of France in 1328, but because their first title was to Valois, the new line of kings is known as ‘Valois’ and not ‘Angevin’.
With the deposition and murder of Edward II in 1327, it was no time for the English royal family to take over France, however strong their claim might appear. Yet Edward III proved to be of a different calibre than his father, and he quickly revitalized royal power, though as Duke of Aquitaine he had grudgingly paid homage to his cousin Philip VI. A further complication was that the French had renewed their alliance with Scotland, and each country promised to support the other if attacked by England. After the Scottish defeat at Halidon Hill in 1333, Philip VI sent a French fleet into the Channel to threaten England in 1336. As tensions mounted, the old conflict over English territory in France arose again, and Philip VI formally confiscated Aquitaine in 1337. Edward III responded by declaring war on France as his father and grandfather had, but also advancing his own claim to the throne, and in 1340 he adopted the title ‘King of France’ and quartered the lions of England with the lilies of France on his arms. The Hundred Years War had begun.7
The Hundred Years War: Crécy and Poitiers
A few points are worth considering first. England had been through a punishing series of wars in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, occupying Wales and nearly conquering Scotland, before the shattering defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 secured Scottish independence and threw the English monarchy into crisis. In these wars the English discovered new types of warfare and weapons, most notably the longbow in Wales. These were the experiences that served the English so well in the Hundred Years War.
On the other side, France was unquestionably the biggest, wealthiest and most powerful state in Europe. Yet this is slightly misleading. Although France was huge and had expanded nearly to its modern boundaries, the perception of French dominance was based to a considerable extent on French cultural and linguistic hegemony over Europe, which is not quite the same thing as real power. Angevin Italy was ‘French’ and was perceived by contemporaries as an example of French dominance, but it was not part of France and did nothing to help during the Hundred Years War. Apanages such as Burgundy would become independent and, by the 15th century, actually antagonistic to ‘France’, with devastating effects. The ruling class in England itself was French in language and culture well into the 14th century, though not coincidentally in the 14th century, as English national identity began to solidify, so too did the English language. So if France was not a paper tiger, at the same time – as would be brutally revealed very soon – it was not the military behemoth that most believed it to be.
The stage was set for the century of military conflict that would engulf France, but as we are about to encounter a new, and final, line of Angevins, we must trace their origins. They are known as the ‘Second House’ of Anjou, following the ‘First House’ founded by Charles of Anjou. Obviously this ignores the existence of the counts of Anjou whose history we traced from the 9th century until the time of King John, but this is how most modern historians classify them.
When Philip of Valois became king of France, his county of Anjou became a royal demesne and remained so under his son Jean II (Jean ‘le Bon’, the Good). Jean made his second son Louis Count of Anjou in 1350, but didn’t formally cede the county to him as an appanage until 1360. At that time the county was elevated to a duchy, making Louis the first Duke of Anjou. In 1361 Maine was added to the duchy, and other familiar names were added over time, such as Loudon in 1367, Touraine in 1368, Chinon in 1370 and Mirebeau in 1379. The arrival of Louis gave new life to Anjou: members of the First House had never really lived there, but despite their foreign expeditions, the dukes of the Second House usually did reside in Angers or Saumur.8
Analysing the conflict from an Angevin perspective will give us a different view of the Hundred Years War, and as we would expect, the Angevins were so intimately involved in events that focusing on them will give us a good account of what happened. Although some of the Angevins still exhibited a knack for avoiding major battles (think of Fulk Réchin and the First Crusade, King John and the Battle of Bouvines) and they missed out on Crécy and Agincourt (fortunately for them), Louis I fought at Poitiers in 1356. More importantly, Louis I was regent of France from 1380–82, and Louis II, Yolanda of Aragon and King René were intimately involved in all aspects of French government in the 15th century.
/> In the absence of French Angevins in the early part of the war, which coincided with the reign of Robert the Wise and Johanna I in Naples and Carobert in Hungary, we can summarize it by focusing on a few key issues. Both sides sought allies, and the Holy Roman Empire was drawn into the conflict. Edward had an early success, when in 1337 he gained an alliance with Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria by means of a large bribe. Ludwig had given up his designs in Italy, and although still excommunicated, he gave Edward the right to summon imperial subjects outside of Germany to join him in the war, though this amounted to little. Philip VI also allied with a former Angevin opponent, John of Bohemia, who was now – and forever after – known as ‘Blind King John’. He had lost his sight, probably due to disease, around 1336, though some contemporary sources claimed his blindness was caused by being poisoned in Italy, an early example of Italy’s reputation as a land of intrigue, poison and murder. John brought a contingent of knights and fought personally at Crécy, but otherwise, like Ludwig, he had little impact on the struggle.9
When the war began in earnest, Edward’s strategy became clear: he began extended chevauchées, ravaging the French countryside and trying to cause as much pain as possible to force Philip to grant him outright sovereignty in Aquitaine. None of his actions look like an attempt at conquest. The crushing victories of Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 were completely unexpected, and left the English in the embarrassing position of having achieved much more than they anticipated and being unsure what to do about it.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 41
