Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Increasingly paranoid, Richard kept an armed guard of Cheshire bowmen. In 1399 he unwisely exiled his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster, subsequently seizing his lands. When Richard departed for a military campaign in Ireland, the popular Bolingbroke, who claimed that “the realm was on the point of being undone for default of governance and undoing of the good laws,” landed with a small force in Yorkshire, triggering a widespread rebellion. By the time Richard had arrived back on the Welsh coast, most of the influential nobles of the realm had turned against him. Following his capture, Richard was taken to London and paraded through the streets, where large crowds mocked him and pelted him with rotten fruit. Deposed and humiliated, he was starved to death by his captors in Pontefract Castle in February 1400. His nemesis ruled as Henry IV, father of the victor of Agincourt

  HENRY V

  1387–1422

  Too famous to live long.

  Duke of Bedford

  On August 31, 1422, at Bois de Vincennes outside Paris, Henry V of England succumbed to the grim fate of so many of his soldiers and died of “camp fever”—most likely dysentery. Shakespeare’s Young Prince Hal was just thirty-four years old and had succeeded his father to the English throne only nine years earlier. Yet Henry was young in years, not in experience. Indeed, such were the accomplishments of his brief life that he has been described by one modern historian as “the greatest man that ever ruled England.”

  When Henry came to the throne in 1413, the country had been riven for decades by dynastic warfare: his father Henry IV—Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt—had seized the throne in 1399 from his cousin, Richard II. Henry IV spent the early years of his reign at war and on the defensive, suppressing rebellions by the Percy family and the Welsh. His son was given independent commands in these campaigns and soon distinguished himself. In one battle, the young prince was grievously wounded with an arrow that penetrated and broke off deep in his face. He was miraculously saved by an ingenious surgeon who invented a contraption that pulled the arrow out, not through its entry wound but through the neck. Henry recovered.

  During the last years of his father’s reign, king and prince competed for power and almost came to conflict. On succeeding in 1413 it became clear how exceptional the new young king was: he was profoundly pious and religious, believing in his sacred mission, but also generous-spirited, energetic, highly intelligent, brave and gifted as a military planner as well as a general. Young Henry V, offering hope of a clean break with the past, rapidly set about doing his all to unite the country. A “very English Englishman” himself, he aimed to nurture a sense of nationhood and national identity, abandoning the usual practices of his predecessors and reading and writing in English rather than in French. Like his predecessors in the Hundred Year War, he believed himself to be the rightful king of France.

  Just before he set off for France, he uncovered an aristocratic conspiracy against himself: he ruthlessly crushed the so-called Southampton Plot, executing Henry, Baron Scrope and his cousin the earl of Cambridge. Nothing could interfere with Henry’s solemn war.

  Henry set sail for France in August 1415 with a plan to capture a number of strategically placed towns in northern France that could be garrisoned and used as footholds for further conquests. By the end of September he had succeeded in taking the port of Harfleur, but as his army had already been severely depleted by disease, he decided to return to England to regroup. On October 25 the English army of around 6000 found its path to Calais blocked near Agincourt by a far superior French force. Outnumbered by at least three to one, the thin English line was drawn up in a strong defensive position, forming a funnel with trees on either flank and several large groups of archers positioned along the line. When the French knights, on horseback and wearing heavy armor, finally advanced, they found themselves increasingly constricted and caught in a deadly hail of arrows. Laying down their bows after the initial volleys, the English longbowmen then piled into the French, now hopelessly crushed together and in total confusion, and inflicted horrendous casualties. Henry’s great victory was thus also the triumph of the powerful longbow of the English archers (many of them from Cheshire), whose sustained barrage of arrows was, in its terrifying and murderous way, the medieval equivalent of the machine gun.

  Over the next few years, inspired by the leadership of their charismatic and dynamic young king, the English army rampaged through northern France, inflicting one devastating blow after another on the disorganized and divided French. Buoyed up by his successes, by 1420 Henry was in a position to impose a severe settlement on his adversaries, and according to the terms of the Treaty of Troyes the ailing French king Charles VI accepted Henry as his regent and future heir. Early death prevented Henry from fully exploiting his victories, but he was already guaranteed immortality as one of the greatest heroes that England has produced.

  Henry’s victory brought France to its knees, and much of it under English control, but he wanted not just the restoration of the old Angevin empire but the throne of France itself. In 1417, he captured Rouen. The murder of the duke of Burgundy by its powerful Armagnac faction at the French court pushed the Burgundians into alliance with Henry and this, along with his military success, was decisive. The French signed the Treaty of Troyes in 1420: Henry became regent of France with the right of succession to the French throne and he married the French princess Catherine, with whom he had a an heir, the future Henry VI. The Dauphin of France fought on against Henry, killing his brother the duke of Clarence in battle in 1421, but the next year, Henry captured Meaux. It seemed likely that Henry V would indeed add the crown of France to that of England and establish an Anglo-French empire with his Anglo-French baby son as heir. Instead he died young and unexpectedly, leaving a baby heir and his brothers in control. Of these, the duke of Bedford won remarkable victories in France—though Orleans was saved with the help of the Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc.

  The child-king Henry VI was crowned king of France in Paris but there was a deep problem on the English side: Henry VI lacked any of the characteristics necessary for medieval kingship, suffering long periods of mental illness. Henry V’s French conquests were lost—and ultimately England was lost too in the dynastic civil conflict the War of the Roses. Henry VI was murdered in the tower of London in 1471.

  GILLES DE RAIS

  1404–40

  Gilles de Rais … did cut the throats of, kill and heinously massacre many young and innocent boys … he did practice with these children unnatural lust and the vice of sodomy …

  Report of the Bishop of Nantes on Gilles de Rais, 1440

  Sadistic, depraved and mentally unhinged, Gilles de Rais was the first known serial killer, accused of the torture, rape and murder of scores of boys and young men in pursuit of extreme sexual gratification. His bouts of killing were interspersed with periods in which he would be racked with guilt, only to murder again as soon as the urge gripped him.

  Gilles de Rais was born to a wealthy French aristocratic family during the long conflict with England known as the Hundred Years’ War. In 1415, when Gilles was just over ten years old, his mother became ill and died, and his father was killed by a wild boar while hunting. That same year, his uncle was killed fighting the English at the Battle of Agincourt, leaving Rais as the heir to the family fortune, which was still, for the moment, controlled by his grandfather, Jean de Craon.

  Jean de Craon took custody of Gilles, but showed little interest in the boy’s welfare, using him as a political pawn while giving him a free rein to pursue his every desire. After two failed attempts to marry his grandson into wealthy families, he finally succeeded in finding a bride for him—a rich heiress who was kidnapped and held captive until she agreed to the marriage.

  From the age of twenty-three Rais fought against the English with distinction, serving alongside Joan of Arc on a number of campaigns, although it is not known how close he was to her. Like Joan, he was believed to be deeply pious, and he certainly contributed to the build
ing of a number of churches and one cathedral.

  In 1432, the year after Joan had been burned at the stake, Rais retired from military service and returned to his family’s great castle at Machecoul, near the border with Brittany. With his grandfather now also dead, he began to spend his large inheritance on lavish entertainment and a luxurious lifestyle, provoking the irritation of his brother René, who was terrified that Gilles was whittling away the family fortune.

  A more sordid truth lurked under the surface. From his base in Machecoul and using a number of accomplices, Gilles de Rais embarked upon a spree of carefully planned, sadistic sex murders, and may have been responsible for the killing of anything between 60 and 200 children—mainly boys—between the ages of six and eighteen.

  The victims, who were usually blue-eyed and blond-haired, were either lured to the castle on a variety of pretexts or forcibly taken from the village of Machecoul or the surrounding area. The first victim was said to have been a twelve-year-old messenger boy, who was hanged by his neck on a metal hook, raped by Rais, and then murdered. As more and more children disappeared, the finger of suspicion soon pointed at Rais. However, the locals were terrified and ill-equipped to challenge one of the most powerful and wealthy men in France.

  The majority of the victims were tortured in a specially built chamber, where they were strung up or tied down and then raped, before being killed by a variety of methods, including dismemberment, decapitation and disembowelment. At his trial Rais confessed to admiring the severed heads of the more beautiful victims, and taking pleasure from seeing their entrails ripped out. It was also alleged that Rais indulged in black magic and devil worship.

  Meanwhile, René de Rais had determined to take control of the family fortune before Gilles spent it all, and threatened to march on Machecoul. The duke of Brittany also had designs on Gilles’ lands, and captured one of his castles. In response, in May 1440, Gilles seized the brother of one of his foes, a priest who had been in the middle of conducting Mass, provoking the bishop of Nantes—who also had a vested interest in Rais’ downfall—to instigate an inquiry into his behavior.

  The bishop went on to interview the families of children abducted by Rais, and built up a shocking case against him. Rais was arrested in September 1440, and indicted on thirty-four counts of murder. Within a month he had confessed to his crimes—under the threat of torture—and been found guilty of murder, sodomy and heresy. On October 16, 1440, after expressing his remorse and being granted the right of confession, he was hanged and then burned, along with two of his servants.

  To the last, Gilles de Rais professed the strength of his faith. The one charge that he refused to admit to was devil worship, and he broke down in a fit of sobbing when he was told that he would be excommunicated and denied the right of confession. Yet such flashes of conscience had done nothing to stop his campaign of sadism, murder and what he called “carnal delight.”

  JOAN OF ARC

  c. 1412–1431

  I have been sent here by God, the King of Heaven, to drive you, an eye for an eye, from the whole of France.

  Joan of Arc, in a letter to the English forces besieging Orléans (March 22, 1429)

  France’s national heroine, Joan of Arc, was a simple peasant girl who became a soldier, a martyr, and finally a saint. Convinced that God had told her to free France, she showed remarkable moral and military leadership and inspired the French to fight on against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. Dressed in men’s clothes, Joan defied convention, and the objections of both statesmen and churchmen, and in the end embraced death in her pursuit of salvation.

  Joan was just fourteen when she first heard the “voices” of Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret calling her to save France from the English. After half a century of war, the French seemed on the verge of losing the contest for their crown. Five years after the death of the Valois king Charles VI, his son, the Dauphin Charles, had still not been crowned, and the city of Orléans, the key to central France, seemed about to fall to the English.

  Joan traveled across war-torn enemy territory to seek an audience with Charles, driven on by the persistent voices of the saints. Her quiet unbending determination gained her access to the Dauphin and persuaded him that he must reinvigorate the campaign against the English, and that it was God’s will that he should be crowned at Rheims. She never disclosed what she had whispered to him that day, but Charles and the French leadership were either convinced that she had divine guidance or that this peasant girl would be useful to the French cause, probably a little of both.

  Clad in white armor and wielding a battle-ax, Joan rode at the head of Charles’s army to relieve the besieged city of Orléans. The English were routed, and other victories followed—as Joan was somehow sure they would. Hailed by the French as their savior, and accused by the English of being a witch, it seemed that the Maid of Orléans must have some supernatural power, as the myth of English invincibility that had sprung up since Agincourt was conclusively shattered. In July 1429 the Dauphin was crowned as Charles VII at Rheims, with Joan in attendance.

  Indefatigable, Joan urged the vacillating Charles on to push his advantage and press on to Paris. When Valois forces finally attacked the capital, Joan stood high on the earthworks, calling to the city’s inhabitants to surrender to their rightful king. Undaunted by wounds received in the fight, she refused to leave the field—although the attempt to take Paris was not successful.

  Captured by the English allies, the Burgundians, as she rushed to help the besieged town of Compiègne, Joan was sold to the English and tried as a heretic in Rouen, the seat of English power in France. Charles, eager for a truce with Burgundy and reluctant to be associated with a witch, was nowhere to be seen. At her trial the peasant girl faced up to France’s leading theologians, confident of her divine mission, while avoiding being tricked into criticizing the Church. Joan was so impervious to the threat of torture that her interrogators decided that it would be useless to try.

  But when the Church threatened to hand her over to the secular courts, Joan—petrified and ill—confessed to heresy and agreed to put on women’s clothes, choosing life imprisonment over a painful death. Within days of recanting, however, Joan changed back into men’s clothes, saying the voices had censured her treacherous abjuration. Handed over to the secular authorities, the young woman barely out of her teens—who had always had a premonition of an early death—was burned at the stake as a witch.

  Joan’s conviction was unwavering. Allowed to make her confession and receive communion, she died gazing at a cross held up by a priest, who, acceding to her request, shouted out assurances of salvation so that she could hear him over the fire’s roar. So anxious were the English that no relic of her should remain to keep her legend alive, they burned her body three times, then scattered her dust in the River Seine.

  Twenty years later, safely installed on his throne, Charles VII ordered an inquiry into the trial. Joan’s conviction was overturned. Five hundred years later, on May 16, 1920, she was made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

  TORQUEMADA

  1420–98

  If anyone possesses a certain amount of learning, he is found to be full of heresies, errors, traces of Judaism. Thus they have imposed silence on men of letters; those who have pursued learning have come to feel, as you say, a great terror.

  Don Rodrigo Manrique, son of the inquisitor general, letter to Luis Vives, 1533

  The very name of Tomás de Torquemada, the first inquisitor general in Spain, was enough to induce a tremor of fear among even the most hardened of his contemporaries. Since then, Torquemada—the persecutor of Jews, Moors and other supposed heretics under the intolerant and repressive rule of Ferdinand and Isabella—has become a byword for religious fanaticism and persecuting zeal.

  Little is known of his early life, other than the fact that the man who would become the bane of Spain’s Jews was himself of Jewish descent: his grandmother was a converso—a Jewish convert to Cathol
icism. During his youth Torquemada joined the Dominican religious order, and in 1452 he was appointed prior of a monastery in Santa Cruz. Though he continued to occupy that post for the next two decades, he also became a confessor and adviser to King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, whose marriage in 1479 effectively united the two principal Spanish kingdoms. Under their dual monarchy, a renewed effort was made to complete the Reconquista (the re-conquest of Spain from Muslim rule) that had stalled some two centuries earlier. This endeavor ended in success in 1492 with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim outpost in Spain.

  In the meantime, Torquemada had convinced the government that the continued presence in Spain of Jews, Muslims and even recent converts to Christianity from those faiths represented a dangerous corruption of the true Catholic faith. As a result of Torquemada’s urging, repressive laws had been passed aimed at forcing the expulsion of Spain’s non-Christian minorities.

  The Spanish Inquisition was established on November 1, 1478 by Pope Sixtus IV. Its job was to root out deviance and heresy from within the Church, and every girl over the age of twelve and every boy over the age of fourteen was subject to its power. It was not the first time such an entity had been created—an inquisition had temporarily existed in 13th-century France, to deal with the remnants of the Cathar heretics in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade. This new Inquisition, however, was to be far more enduring and methodical in its operation.

  The first two inquisitors were appointed in 1480, and the first burnings followed a few months later, in February 1481, when six people were executed as heretics. Thereafter the pace of killing picked up, and in February 1482, to cope with the increasing workload, a further seven inquisitors—including Torquemada—were appointed by the pope. Within a decade, the hearings of the Inquisition were operating in eight major cities across Spain.