by Ed West
De Clisson was a major figure in Brittany, one of the king’s liegemen, and in response Charles now mounted an expedition to hunt down the would-be assassins. August 8 was an extremely hot day, dry and intense, the sun beating down on their skulls as they made their way west. Along the way a stranger in a smock stopped the royal party and warned them, “King, ride no further! Turn back, for you are betrayed!” Charles’s attendant, thinking the man mad, beat him.
At midday the royal party left the forest and crossed the broad sandy plain under a boiling hot sun. Charles’s uncles, the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, were one hundred yards to his left. A chronicler wrote: “The sand was hot underfoot and the horses were sweating.” The king was overdressed, wearing “a black velvet jerkin, which made him very hot, and a plain scarlet hat.”10 Behind him rode a page in a polished steel helmet followed by another with a lance. Distracted by the heat, the second page dropped his lance, the weapon falling and striking the helmet of the man in front of him.
Frossiart recorded:
There was a loud clang of steel, and the King, who was so close that they were riding on his horse’s heels, had a sudden start. His mind reeled, for his thoughts were still running on the words which the madman or the wise man had said to him in the forest, and he imagined that a great host of his enemies were coming to kill him. Under this delusion, his weakened mind caused him to run amok. He spurred his horse forward, then drew his sword and wheeled round on to his pages, no longer recognizing them or anyone else.11
Charles’s uncles looked over and Burgundy shouted “Disaster has overtaken us. The king’s gone out of his mind!” There was the sickening sound of steel cutting flesh as the tormented man, believing himself to be in battle, struck at the pages around him, shouting “traitors.” By the time he was overpowered the mad king had killed five men, his brother Louis of Valois only surviving after running for his life.
Afterward, the frightened and confused young king was brought to Le Mans where a well-respected and learned ninety-two-year-old doctor, Guillaume de Harsigny, was dragged from his home and brought to him. He regained consciousness and was moved slowly and delicately to Paris. Later in the autumn he was well enough to make a pilgrimage of thanks to Notre Dame de Liesse, a church near Laon in Picardy.
But, in fact, it was only the beginning of the mad king’s personal hell.
In January 1393 Charles, now recovered, attended a masked ball in Paris. The dance was held to honor the third marriage of the queen’s lady-in-waiting, and such remarriages were often celebrated in a spirit of mockery and license, with masquerades and outlandish music.
It was common in late medieval Europe to dress up as “wild men” for parties, and records of such a tradition date back to at least the ninth century and are found in Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and Latin folklore. It was believed that lutins, wild men, lived in remote mountain areas—in France the Pyrenees was said to be home to many—and they danced by firelight as part of fertility rituals or for supernatural purposes. This folklore may reflect the lingering survival of older indigenous groups driven into the mountains, and at harvest times people dressed as wild men and ran around until they were caught, after which an effigy of the wild man was burned, an obviously pagan ritual of unknown origin.
The fatal masquerade in Paris involved six young men, including the king and Yvain, bastard of the Count of Foix, disguised as woodland savages. They had linen cloth sewn onto the bodies and soaked in pitch to hold the hemp, giving them the hairy appearance of the lutins. Their face masks, meanwhile, concealed their identity.
The party had been thought up by the “cruelest and most insolent of men,” Huguet de Guisay, a man of “wicked life” who “corrupted and schooled youth in debaucheries,” and was a much-demanded figure at court. He was also a sadist. Holding the poor in contempt, he called them dogs and was known to force them to bark at the point of a sword. He even made his own servants lie on the ground while he stood on their backs and had them make the sounds of a hound, shouting “bark, dog!” as they screamed in pain.
That night the six anonymous mask-wearers arrived at the royal ball, imitating the howls of wolves and stunning and delighting their fellow guests. King Charles was flirting with and teasing his fifteen-year-old aunt the Duchesse de Berry when his brother Louis and another young dandy Philippe de Bar walked in, heavily intoxicated from another party.
Louis of Orléans, a “devoted servant of Venus” who liked the company of “dancers, flatterers, and people of loose life,” was a risk taker and a show-off, and now entered the hall with torches, despite the guests having been forbidden to carry any flames during the dance. Some people later suggested that he wished to see who these mystery men were, or that he simply got a thrill out of the danger; others had darker explanations. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, and first one man was on fire, then another. The queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted, and the room erupted with screams and cries of horror as the men burned in agony; guests tried to fight the flames, desperately tearing the fancy dress costumes from the burning flesh, many sustaining agonizing injuries themselves. But the tar was too flammable.
Charles was alive only because his quick-thinking young aunt threw her skirt over him, so shielding him from the sparks. Another wild man, the Sire de Nantouillet, saved himself by jumping into a large wine cooler filled with water. The others were not so lucky; as the Monk of St Denis wrote, “four men were burned alive, their flaming genitals dropping to the floor . . . releasing a stream of blood.”12 The Count de Joigny burned to death immediately, and Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers both succumbed two days afterward. Huguet de Guisay took another three days to die in agony, and as his coffin was carried through the streets of Paris, the small folk shouted out “Bark, dog!”
The disaster became known as the Bal des Ardents, the Ball of the Burning Men. The people of Paris were shocked but also disgusted, and now viewed their rulers as incompetent and decadent, and even suspected Louis of attempting to kill his brother. The king’s nerves were broken, and he collapsed again later that year, and would continue to do so repeatedly.
During his frequent periods of insanity, Charles foamed at the mouth, became covered in sores, and would eat from the floor. He came to believe he was made of glass and might shatter if anyone touched him. People thought his condition was caused by wet or melancholic humor—black bile—but they also believed, probably correctly, that he had inherited a weak constitution. Charles’s mother Jeanne de Bourbon had suffered a nervous breakdown too and while historical diagnosis is a sketchy business, many today suggest he suffered from schizophrenia, which like all mental illnesses is hereditary. Charles’s grandfather Peter of Bourbon had also been mentally unstable.
The king’s servants at the Hotel St Pol, the royal residence in Paris, walled the palace doors to stop him escaping, and he ran around wildly indoors. The mad king would scream that he felt a thousand iron spikes were ripping into his flesh; he refused to bathe and could be found covered in his own feces. His spirit “was covered by such heavy shadows” that he could not remember who or what he was.13 He didn’t know he was married, or that he was king, or even what his name was; he appeared particularly hostile to the royal coat of arms, which he tried to vandalize in a rage, and also to his wife, from whom he ran in terror. When she talked to him he would scream “who is that women the sight of whom torments me? Find out what she wants and free me from her demands if you can, that she may follow me no more.”14 When the king saw the arms of Bavaria—his wife’s sigil—he made rude gestures. He didn’t even know his own children, although he recognized brothers and uncles, but much to the queen’s rage the only person he would talk to was his brother’s now-estranged wife, Valentina, who he called “dear sister.” Naturally many believed she had bewitched him with poison.
In 1399 alone, Charles suffered six serious attacks, while his wife entertained a series of lovers and amassed a fortune in treasure
, jewels, and cash.
No doctor brought to the king made any positive difference. “An unkempt, evil-eyed charlatan and pseudo-mystic named Arnaut Guilhem” was given the task of treating the patient after claiming to possess a book given by God.15 He insisted the madness was caused by sorcery, but even after he was removed others had similar ideas. Two monks, having failed to make any progress from magic chants and a liquid made from ground-down pearls, suggested cutting open his head. When the Duc d’Orléans refused their suggestion, they accused him of sorcery and so were tortured and—after admitting to being in league with Satan—put to death.
It was not unknown for monarchs in the middle ages to suffer from madness. Joanna of Castile and Ivan the Terrible of Russia were two of the most striking examples, while William of Hainault-Bavaria, cousin of John of Gaunt and the Black Prince, had been “a raving maniac confined in a castle for thirty years, most of the time with both hands and feet tied.”16 The mentally ill were rarely confined away, although large towns would have a “narrentum” or “fool’s tower” and as far back as 872 the Islamic ruler of Egypt had established the first home for the mentally ill, in which music was used as therapy. London’s Bethlehem hospital was founded in 1329 out of the priory of St Mary Bethlehem and from 1377 it took “distracted” patients who were chained to the wall by the leg or ankle and dunked in water and whipped if they got violent.17 Until the eighteenth century, visitors could pay money to watch and laugh at them. Needless to say, not many recovered.
Among the other treatments, on top of rest and sleep, bleeding and potions made of metal were also used, as was exorcism, with patients having a cross shaved into their head or tied to the rood screen above the altar at church while Mass was said. Surprisingly, this didn’t seem to help much, either. Since it was often seen as having spiritual origins, the mad were also frequently found on pilgrimage stops such as Mont Saint-Michel, Compostella, or the road to Rome, along with “the paralytics, the scrofulous, and the very numerous cripples.”18
The dark insanity at the heart of French politics mirrored a mood of despair following the Black Death. The Danse Macabre was a new kind of poem that first appeared in 1376 and reflected the darkness that had overcome the European mind. It consisted of the dead, or death himself, speaking to people from various spectra of society, reminding them of their upcoming demise, a reflection of mortality known as the memento mori—“remember that you have to die.”
The Danse appeared on numerous frescos and houses, reminding the traveler who passed by:
Emperor, your sword won’t help you out
Sceptre and crown are worthless here
I’ve taken you by the hand
For you must come to my dance19
Tombs from the thirteenth and early fourteenth century showed the departed at their peak, often in a knight’s outfit or as a beautiful young woman. Those from the fifteenth century show the effigies as skeletons, even with worms poking out of their eyes, to reinforce the message that horrible death was always close.
To make matters worse, a new pope was elected in 1378 and he also turned out to be insane. Urban VI, a Neopolitan from outside the Church hierarchy, had appeared to have undergone a complete change of character within weeks of his election, hurling insults at stunned cardinals during Church councils, and even physically lunging at one. He launched abusive tirades aimed at Joanna, the Queen of Naples, and soon some of the French Church leaders were expressing alarm—so he had six of his cardinals tortured while beneath the interogation chamber he muttered passages from his prayer book as the screams echoed out. This led to a schism with a second pope elected in Avignon, Clement, who was bad rather than mad, having had the whole town of Cesena massacred, an act so gruesome that it horrified even the English mercenaries he’d asked to carry it out.
Urban was eventually driven out of Naples by Joanna’s successor, Charles, Duke of Durazzo—and with some mercenaries went on a rampage through Italy, dragging behind him the cardinals he had accused of conspiring against them, killing five en route. His rival Clement, “the Butcher of Cesana” died of a heart attack or apoplectic stroke in 1394, of “profound chagrin,” after hearing of a proposed strike by academics, perhaps the most effective such action in academia’s history. Urban had expired six years earlier, having moved to Perugia with his army, where he fell from a mule and died of his injuries—although poison, naturally, was suspected.
But then, of course, all men must die.
22
FIRE AND BLOOD
Aegon the Conqueror brought fire and blood to Westeros, but afterward he gave them peace, prosperity, and justice.
—DAENERYS TARGARYEN
The Valryians are physically distinctive people, with silver hair and purple eyes, so unusual-looking that it is thought they are “not entirely of the same blood as other men.”1 One maester thinks it most likely the result of some sort of selective breeding, so that they have developed distinctive traits, one of which is that they do not seem to get sick. At least, one might assume, they have developed resistance to the most common diseases that affect other people. This is not that odd an idea, indeed it has been observed throughout history, the most common example being smallpox. The disease had affected populations in the old world for many centuries before arriving in the Americas through the Spanish where it immediately proved devastating to the native inhabitants. Some 90 percent of the New World’s indigenous people were wiped out by the illness, while most Europeans would recover, after centuries of outbreaks had left the surviving population relatively immune.
Even today, because of epidemics that took place in the first millennium AD, some 1 percent of northern Europeans are immune to the HIV virus and another 15 percent carry mutations that reduce their chances of infection from even the riskiest activities, with the highest proportion being among Swedes.2
When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain in the fifth century, they might also have had greater immunity to the Justinian plague that was then rampaging through Europe, according to one theory. However, the people who conquered them, the inspiration for the Valryians, had an even stronger advantage, for just as Aegon conquered with dragons, so William the Bastard conquered with cavalry.
Among the restless, violent peoples that emerged out of the early medieval period, there were few more frightening than the Normans, who were descended from a group of Vikings who had settled the land around the Seine River after repeatedly menacing the Franks. They would play a major part in English history and inspire Martin’s world too. In the author’s own words, the story of Aegon the Conqueror, founder of the Valryian dynasty, is that of William, Duke of Normandy,3 one of the greatest and most ferocious figures of this period, and who conquered a nation much larger than his own.
An enigmatic figure whose only friend was his bastard half-brother Orys Baratheon, Aegon is a great warrior who wears a shirt of black scales and is faithful to his spouse (even if he has two, so not really, you might say). The real-life Conqueror was not so different, a fearsome and ruthless leader in chain mail who grew up to trust no one except close kin, especially his half-brothers, and who never kept a mistress—so unusual for French aristocrats that some actually found it sinister.
By the Christmas of 1065, with his grand abbey almost complete, King Edward lay dying, in a state of delirium shouting about hideous curses that would ruin the kingdom; across the narrow sea to the south, William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, was expecting to be named successor, although his claim was tenuous in the extreme. William was a great-nephew of King Edward, whose Norman mother Emma was the sister of William’s grandfather, Duke Richard II. The Norman leader had convinced himself that Edward had promised him the throne, even though this was not within his power, since kings at the time were selected by the Saxon ruling council, the Witenagemot.
Duke William had been out hunting when a messenger gave him the unhappy news that the Witan had named Harold Godwinson as king, crowned on the same day as Edward’s funeral.
His rage knew no bounds, and soon the sounds of axes against trees could be heard across the duchy as he assembled a fleet. This was bold, for despite their own Viking ancestry, the Normans were not a seafaring people and the barons were scared of crossing this dangerous stretch of ocean.
William called a council, where with bullying and lying and the promise of riches, he proclaimed that he would become King of England. His success in doing so is testimony to his sheer force of will; appropriately, as his name, which would have been closer to the German Wilhelm than the French Guillaume, meant just that, “willful protector.”
Today in the British Library in central London there is a codex, an A4-sized paper listing all the families that came over with the Conqueror, part of antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton’s great collection amassed during the seventeenth century. It was once a matter of great importance to aristocratic houses to trace their line to that bloody Saturday in October 1066, when as many as fifteen thousand men fought on a sloping hill in Sussex.
Normandy was “a bloody crossroads of war since antiquity,”4 viciously fought over by Celts, Romans, Franks, Vikings, and later the English. From the time of Clovis it had come under the sway of the Franks, who were the leading experts in cavalry warfare. But with Charlemagne’s grandsons, the kingdom of the Franks had fallen into civil war, a bad time to have a family argument since Viking raids were intensifying in Britain and France. For many years they threatened the River Loire region before returning to England, but Alfred the Great’s military success drove them back to France again; there the Norsemen had terrorized the northwest coast until, eventually, in 912 the king of the Franks granted them territory by the mouth of the Seine.
