The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  He died shortly afterward, and during his funeral service his already corpulent decomposing body swelled to such a size that it broke open his coffin and sickened the assembled mourners with the stench it gave off. An ironic footnote to the life of the grandson of an undertaker!

  Yet Another Literal Bastard

  Referred to by even his own subjects in France as “Guillaume-le-Batard” (“William the Bastard”), the future King William I of England was constantly reminded (especially by his foes) that the family business of his maternal grandfather was that of an embalmer.

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  ODO OF BAYEUX

  When Your Vows Forbid You to Shed Blood, Use a Big, Heavy Club Instead

  (CA. A.D. 1030–1097)

  God forbid that I should touch the Bishop of Bayeux,

  but I make the Earl of Kent my prisoner.

  —William I the Conqueror of England

  The younger half-brother of William the Conqueror, Odo went from being the bishop of a minor holding in Normandy to the second-most-powerful man in England in less than a year. Once ensconced as William’s regent (and earl of Kent), Odo ran the country with little interference from his brother, as long as he kept sending the new king plenty of revenue from his conquered subjects. Odo took the opportunity to skim from the tax revenues, making himself wealthy and powerful enough to fancy himself a viable candidate for pope.

  Though a priest is forbidden to shed blood, Odo was an active participant in both the planning and the execution of his brother William’s invasion of England in A.D. 1066. In battle, he wore armor and carried a heavy oaken club that he used as a weapon in place of a sword (thereby getting around the whole “shedding blood” thing).

  In recognition of Odo’s crucial assistance, William made him his regent. It was Odo who set about consolidating his brother’s conquest, centralizing the government, and serving, in addition to all of his other duties, as England’s first chief justice.

  By the early 1180s, Odo had amassed such wealth and made so many connections that he dared to dream that he might one day go where neither Frenchman nor Englishman (since as a Norman he was technically both) had gone before: getting elected pope. At about this time, he began laying the groundwork for taking the Holy See: buying a villa in Rome, laying out massive amounts of gold in the form of bribes to the large number of church officials whose support would be needed if he were to become pontiff, even hiring a small mercenary army to protect himself and his interests once he became pope.

  Once William got wind of Odo’s pontifical ambitions, he came back to England himself, took one look at the books (because no earl, no matter how powerful, ought to have been able to afford the outlays that Odo had been making!), and called kid brother to account.

  Odo languished in prison for years until William’s death in A.D. 1187. Freed by William’s son William II Rufus, Odo promptly set about rebelling against the new king, supporting the claims of his older (and more pliable) brother Robert. The rebellion was crushed and Odo was banished. Eventually going on crusade, he died in Sicily on his way to the Holy Land in A.D. 1097.

  Bastard Justice

  Since the office of chief justice was newly created by the Conqueror, no one was sure just how far the duties of the person filling the position should extend. In Odo’s case, he wasn’t just the highest-ranking legal officer in the realm, he also served as both the head tax man and the de facto finance minister. In an interesting bit of unsurprising irony, one of only two surviving records of a court case involving Odo by name is a case in which he appeared not as presiding judge but as the defendant in trial involving the illegal seizure of church land. He was found guilty and had to forfeit the land and make restitution.

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  HENRY IV OF GERMANY

  How Much Penance Can One King Do?

  ( A.D. 1050–1106)

  I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he cannot have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.

  —Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV

  The original author of a quote attributed to twentieth-century American bastard populist politician Huey Long was a king who spent his life and his reign locked in a political struggle with the Catholic Church over control of both the church itself and most of central Europe. Henry IV became ruler of the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither “Holy” nor “Roman” nor truly an “Empire,” more a hodgepodge of secular German and Italian principalities loosely strung together) in his mid-thirties, many years after he had inherited the German throne (to which he ascended at the age of six).

  Kidnapped at age twelve and forced to serve as the figurehead of a government run in everything but name by German Catholic Church officials, Henry even married an heiress chosen by his church masters. Once he reached his majority (in A.D. 1068), he attempted to divorce her, but threat of excommunication from the church sufficiently cowed him, and he backed down.

  Because Henry had little support from among Germany’s nobles, he supported the papacy in its wars against Norman brigands in southern Italy for much of the next two decades, as he needed the Church’s authority to survive in power.

  After becoming Holy Roman Emperor in A.D. 1084, Henry got into a tug-of-war with the pope, a fellow German named Gregory VII. Henry wanted to be allowed to appoint high-level churchmen (cardinals, bishops) to empty positions within Germany himself, instead of accepting the pope’s appointments. This was pure politics: clergy who owed their cushy positions to the king were more likely to support the king in disputes with the papacy, whereas papal-appointed clergy would obviously look to Rome for guidance.

  Gregory VII responded to Henry’s attempt to circumvent papal power by excommunicating him, literally kicking him out of the church. An excommunicated monarch, the pope claimed, was illegitimate in the eyes of God, and his subjects were not required to either pay taxes or obey his laws.

  Henry famously did penance by standing outside a mountain castle where the pope was riding out a snowstorm for two days before being granted an audience with the pope. Gregory accepted Henry’s penance and reversed his excommunication.

  But in A.D. 1105, Henry ran afoul of a different pope (Victor III), who promptly excommunicated him again (this time for going back on the oath he had given Gregory). His own son betrayed him, forcing him to abdicate in his favor. Henry IV died the next year, still attempting to regain his throne.

  Bastard’s Son and Successor

  Ironically enough, the son who forcibly deposed Henry IV was his second son, also named Henry, who owed his own position as king of Germany to his father’s decision to elevate him to the throne in A.D. 1099 instead of his elder brother Conrad, who was in rebellion against Henry IV at the time. Six years later this “more loyal”(but certainly equally ambitious) of the two sons would betray his own father on the grounds that an excommunicated king had no legitimacy to rule his subjects!

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  WILLIAM II OF ENGLAND

  Red-Headed Bachelor Bastard

  (CA. A.D. 1056–1100)

  Through the counsels of evil men, who were always grateful to him, and through his own greed, he was always tormenting this nation with an army and with unjust taxes. . . . He was hateful to almost all his people, and odious to God, as his end made clear.

  —The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  Nicknamed “Rufus” (Latin for “red”) either because of his red hair or ruddy complexion, William was the third son and chosen successor (as king of England) of William the Conqueror. A confirmed bachelor in an age where royal families married their kids off early and often, a religious skeptic in an age of faith, and quite possibly a gay man in that most closeted of times, the Middle Ages, William Rufus was also a rapacious and innovative taxer of his subjects, especially the clergy.

  Indifferent to the church throughout much of his reign, William Rufus seems to have looked on it largely as many in his family did—as a source of revenue. When a bishop, abbot, or other high church official died, the king was supposed to select a
successor. But because the monarch was also expected to maintain and care for the properties of the office in question while seeking out a worthy successor, he was also allowed to collect the rents, taxes, and other revenues due the abbey/monastery/other sort of church property in question in the interim.

  William Rufus exploited this loophole as a source of enormous revenue by simply not bothering to fill vacant church offices within his kingdom.

  Like his father before him, William needed a lot of money because he was constantly fighting in France, and war was expensive. He dreamed of reuniting his father’s realms of England and Normandy by deposing his brother Robert. He got his wish in A.D. 1096, when Robert pawned his duchy to William in return for a large amount of cash to fund his going on the First Crusade.

  Whether because of the way he squeezed them for revenues or because of his debauched lifestyle, the contemporary church chroniclers weren’t very kind to William Rufus, alleging darkly that the king’s court was rampant with all-night drinking parties, frequented by loose women (and men), a haven of lawless, godless knights committed only to a king who promised them easy living, lots of hunting, and enough fighting to enrich themselves at the expense of conquered foes. In other words, pretty much like most other royal courts at the time!

  In A.D. 1100, Rufus was out hunting with a bunch of his knights, including his youngest brother, Henry (who’d gotten nothing but money from daddy). In what was later termed a hunting accident, one of his companions killed him with an arrow shot to the chest.

  Seizing the initiative, Henry made his way to Winchester, took possession of the royal treasury, had himself crowned king, and buried William at the abbey there.

  Right place, right time, huh?

  Capable Bastard

  William the Conqueror had quarreled with his incompetent older son Robert for years before he died. Thus it was little surprise to anyone when he left his third son William the throne of England, and forced Robert to settle for the Duchy of Normandy. The Conqueror’s last surviving son Henry didn’t get any land, just a large cash settlement with which he was directed in the dead king’s will to go out and buy some property!

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  ENRICO DANDOLO

  OF VENICE

  The Man Who Hijacked the Fourth Crusade

  ( A.D. 1107?–1205)

  We cannot be sure of his age when, on 1 January 1193, he was raised to the ducal throne. . . . But even if he was in only his middle seventies, he would still have been, at the time of the Fourth Crusade, an octogenarian of several years’ standing. A dedicated, almost fanatical patriot, he had spent much of his life in the service of Venice.

  —John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee

  In A.D. 1202, tens of thousands of French and German crusaders camped outside the powerful maritime city-state of Venice. Out of money and with no means to proceed further on their own, they turned to the Venetians and their leader (or “doge”) for help.

  The doge was a formidable character named Enrico Dandolo. A diplomat of many years’ service to the Serene Republic (as the Venetians called it), Dandolo was of advanced age, blind as justice, and cunning beyond expression.

  By the time he had died of old age three years later, the octogenarian had manipulated the crusaders into serving as mercenaries for the Venetians in return for passage to their destination, and rerouting their crusade away from the Holy Land to the Christian city of Constantinople.

  He even succeeded in gulling the crusade’s leaders into thinking it was their own idea!

  Why did Dandolo, in this age of faith, wish to attack co-religionists in Constantinople? The answer is simple and illustrative. In Dandolo’s view, it seems, the interests of commerce and power politics trumped those of faith. Turns out the Venetians had just signed a lucrative trading treaty with the rulers of Egypt, and had no interest in destabilizing the current regime there. With Constantinople in crusader hands, the Venetians, with their large and powerful fleet, would be unrivaled for control (both political and commercial) of the entire eastern Mediterranean.

  Dandolo’s scheme turned out better than even he could have foreseen. In A.D. 1204, the knights of the Fourth Crusade did something no one had been able to do in the nine hundred years of Constantinople’s existence: they breached the city’s huge walls and captured it.

  You can guess what happened next: thousands killed, looting on a massive scale, the crusaders squabbling among themselves over their captured booty. And Venice ascendant in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries to come.

  And Dandolo? He never returned to Venice. When he died in the city he had helped conquer in A.D. 1205, his countrymen buried him in a corner of the church of Hagia Sophia—a final honor for him, and a final insult to the residents of the city of Constantine.

  Manipulative Bastard

  Blind as he was, Dandolo still knew how to put on a show and make the most of an impressive stage. Having convinced the leaders of the Fourth Crusade that it was the decision of the Venetian citizens as to whether to help them, he packed the gorgeous and imposing church of St. Mark with thousands of Venetian citizens for Sunday Mass. As historian Steven Runciman later reported it: “Then the Doge and people raised their hands and cried aloud with a single voice, ‘We grant it! We grant it!’ And so great was the noise and tumult that the very earth seemed to tremble underfoot.”

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  HENRY II OF ENGLAND

  Putting the “Devil” Into “Devil’s Brood”

  ( A.D. 1133–1189)

  May God let me live until I can have my revenge on you.

  —Henry II’s last words to his son and successor Richard I

  Imagine a medieval French noble actually wealthier and more powerful than his feudal overlord, the king of France. Now imagine that this noble, already owning more than half of France as his birthright, also won the crown of England, then in turn stole the French king’s queen.

  Further imagine that this monarch fathered a nest of vipers so disloyal to him, and so contentious with one another, that they were eventually dubbed “the Devil’s Brood.” Lastly, picture a man so committed to marital gamesmanship that he took a much younger French princess intended as a bride for one of his sons as his own mistress.

  Imagine no further. This guy actually lived.

  Ladies and gentlemen, meet Henry II: king of England; duke of Aquitaine, Gascony, and Normandy; count of Anjou, Maine, and Nantes; lord of Ireland; husband of the celebrated Eleanor of Aquitaine; and father of both Richard the Lion-Hearted and John I of England.

  In A.D. 1173, all four of Henry’s sons, egged on by his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, rebelled against him, allying themselves with the French king Louis VII, who sought the return of his daughter (now Henry’s mistress), Princess Alys of France, engaged but never married to Henry’s son Richard.

  Henry masterfully played his sons off against each other, forcing the most capable of them, then-sixteen-year-old Richard, to do obeisance in order to keep his power base in southern France. Outwitted and outmaneuvered (not for the first or the last time) by his vassal, Louis gave up the fight and sued for peace. For her deeds, Henry kept Eleanor prisoner for the next sixteen years until his own death in A.D. 1189.

  Predeceased by two of his sons (Henry the Young King and Duke Geoffrey II of Brittany), betrayed in the end by the one he most favored (John, who has his own chapter in this book), toward the end of his reign, Henry also faced the bitter reality of being beaten at his own conniving game by Louis VII’s wily son Philip Augustus. At last outmanned and outmaneuvered, Henry swallowed his pride and acknowledged his third son, Eleanor’s favorite, Richard, as his heir and successor. It was at this meeting that the old king quietly spoke the words quoted above even as he made a show of making peace with his son. Even then he was suffering from the fever (likely dysentery) that killed him two days later.

  Henry II, royal bastard to the bitter end.

  Attention Deficit Bastard

  If Henry Plantagenet lived toda
y, his doctors would likely have prescribed him Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder. As king he was famously restless, and would pack up and move the court at a whim, wandering ceaselessly among his many holdings both on the Continent and in England. This applied in diplomatic and military matters as well. With vast holdings in England and France, Henry had difficulty leaving well enough alone, and literally couldn’t keep himself from stirring the pot, whether it was picking fights with neighbors or underlings (including his own sons) or needlessly alienating allies. In other words, the man made much of his own trouble.

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  ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

  Brood Mare to the Devil’s Brood

  ( A.D. 1122–1204)

  I advise you, King, to beware your wife and sons.

  —Count Raymond of Toulouse to King Henry II of England

  Every inch a match for her formidable husband, Henry II of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine not only bore him eight children (including both the famous Richard the Lion-Hearted, and the scurrilous John of England), she also outlived him by more than fifteen years, the same number of years in which he held her a virtual prisoner in Windsor Castle after she supported his sons in their rebellion against him in A.D. 1173.The fact that Eleanor outlived her husband by so many years is rendered all the more remarkable by the revelation that she was in fact twelve years older than her famous husband and had already borne two children by her first marriage.

  Too much woman for her first husband, Louis VII of France, Eleanor found her match at age thirty in eighteen-year-old Henry Fitzempress, at the time duke of Normandy (and soon afterward king of England). Whether or not this second marriage was a love match, there can be no question that the couple shared a whole lot of passion. The two had eight children, seven of whom survived into adulthood, the so-called “Devil’s Brood.”