Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Henry’s policies in the late 1170s have to be understood in light of a threefold aim. He continued his long, bitter conflict with Louis and France, opting for diplomacy until and unless Louis lost patience; meanwhile he was determined once and for all to break the local power of Angoulême and its allies - the same who had caused him so much trouble in 1175-76 - because Angoulême commanded the important trade routes in the Charente valley and was potentially poised to dominate west-central France; and finally he aspired to be the power in northern Spain. Unfortunately the later ambition collided with an equal and opposite one entertained by the young King Alfonso II of Aragon, count of Barcelona, who had fantasies of being the ‘emperor of the Pyrenees’ and in 1178 allied himself with Castile as a prelude to gobbling up Navarre.9 The fact that Alfonso stood forth as a champion of troubadour culture at the very moment Richard was finding himself at odds with the troubadours within Aquitaine added further ingredients to a very turgid political bouillabaise. It was mainly to counter the expansionism of Aragon that Henry in 1178 again sent Richard to the far south. As Richard advanced on Dax, he received some welcome tidings: Alfonso’s ally the count of Bigorre had been seized by the townspeople who wanted to hand him over to Richard to avoid the rigours of a siege.10 Alarmed by this development, Alfonso, who regarded Bigorre as his true friend, was forced to come in person before Richard to plead for his comrade and ally and to give surety for his behaviour. Triumphant on the Spanish border, Richard then turned back to deal with the opposition in Angoulême, now led by Count William’s son Vulgrin. William himself, after the humiliation at Winchester, departed for a pilgrimage in the Holy Land and, as his son had not made the submission, technically he was within his rights to resist Richard. Vulgrin allied himself with the powerful baron Geoffrey de Rancon, an important figure in Poitou and the veteran of revolts in 1168 and 1173-74. De Rancon’s castles at Pons and Taillebourg were so situated as to be able to cut communications between La Rochelle and Saintes in the north and Bordeaux in the south,11 so it was to the investment of these strongholds that Richard applied his already formidable skills in siegecraft.

  The siege of Pons began badly, as it became clear that Geoffrey de Rancon had laid in huge food supplies and would not crack easily. For Richard, on the other hand, his credibility as duke of Aquitaine hinged on being able to bring Geoffrey to heel.12 To save face, he invested, forced to surrender and then demolished five easier targets, the castles at Richemont, Genzac, Marcillac, Grouville and Anville. Having thus restored his men’s morale after the humiliation at Pons, he gambled everything on an attempt to reduce the supposedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg - a task no one had even attempted before because of its supposed impossibility. The stronghold of Taillebourg was situated on an outcrop of rock on the right bank of the River Charente. Three sides were inaccessible on account of the sheer rock face and the fourth, approached over marshy ground, was protected by a triple ditch and a triple wall; additionally, the castle was well stocked with food and defended by well-armed men. On 1 May 1179 the dauntless Richard brought up siege engines and trebuchets and began bombarding this fourth side, pitching his tents alarmingly close to the walls. With his wonderful eye for ground, he saw that the one weak card in an otherwise unbeatable hand was that Taillebourg would have to open the town gates if the burghers wanted to make a sortie. He then unleashed his troops on a scorched-earth rampage around the nearby fields and vineyards. Seeing the smoke of their ravaged property drifting skywards on a daily basis, the defenders finally took the bait and sallied out on 8 May. The sortie was repelled with heavy losses and, as the defeated throng crowded back into the town that lay beneath the citadel itself, the pursuers followed them in before the gates could be closed. Richard’s troops spent three days ostentatiously laying waste the town and taunting the garrison in the citadel with having seized most of their supplies. Finally the defenders in the citadel could take no more and surrendered.13 Aghast at this ‘impossible’ exploit, Geoffrey de Rancon threw in the towel and surrendered Pons also. Outflanked by this surprise development, Vulgrin had no choice but to capitulate. Richard methodically razed Taillebourg and Pons then went on to demolish the walls of Angoulême and Montignac, controlling the River Charente, which he had demanded as the price of making peace with Vulgrin.

  At the age of 21 Richard had crowned a five-year apprenticeship in the art of war with a stunning success. Having crushed all opposition he went to England to be greeted by his father with all the honours due a military hero. As a warrior Richard was a hard worker, a close observer and meticulous planner, not too proud to learn from his mistakes or take advice from followers like Theobald Chabot.14 Siegecraft was almost more important than winning battles for a twelfth-century conqueror in western Europe for it meant victory without enormous loss of life and without tempting the fates; too many battles hinged on luck or accident or depended on circumstances one could not control. A master of sieges was therefore more highly esteemed than a battlefield commander. Sieges were seldom protracted, for in a long drawn-out affair, where a castellan stubbornly refused to surrender after a suitable period of time had elapsed in which to save face, there was the danger of a wholesale sack and massacre. Usually a commander would refuse to surrender and then do so some days later, unless the besiegers concluded that the mission was impossible and moved on elsewhere. It was normal practice to set a date for surrender, leaving the overlord or allies time to relieve the castle. If they failed to do so, once the castellan had delayed the enemy for long enough, it was in everybody’s interest that sense, i.e. surrender, should prevail. The art was to work out how long a castle could hold out before a bloodless surrender occurred; if the castellan surrendered too soon, the element of enemy hampering was lost; if too late, the besiegers might assuage frayed tempers and casualties with atrocities. In the twelfth-century kaleidoscope of shifting alliances not to mention fratricidal warfare, where today’s enemy was tomorrow’s ally, it made no sense to shed blood needlessly. And it was usual for surrender terms to be observed punctiliously.15 Certainly while he fought in Western Europe, Richard always obeyed these traditional rules.

  After the triumph at Taillebourg, Richard’s biography enters a black hole, for the sources unaccountably dry up for the year 1180. In part this was because Henry II was in France and the chroniclers naturally focused on his achievements and exploits. But it surely was in part because Aquitaine was unusually quiet. Led by old Count William of Angoulême, the vanquished of 1179 travelled en masse to the Holy Land, glad to be away from the scene of their humiliation by Richard.16 Meanwhile Richard, as duke of Aquitaine, enjoyed powers over the province no ruler had ever managed to attain before. As far as the south was concerned, Henry’s policy of devolving power to his sons while still retaining overlordship was proving itself. Henry always had autocratic and centralising tendencies and his ‘federalism’ was always pragmatic, but he worked within the art of the possible. Military dictatorship was not an option for the Angevin empire, as the necessary technology was lacking and, even with Henry’s vast revenues, it was too expensive to try, for another situation like that of 1173-74 might arise, where all potential enemies suddenly became actual simultaneously. The use of force therefore had to be selective, focused on the most dangerous threats. In contrast to the Young King’s lacklustre performance, Richard had proved a sensational success, though the very success was dangerous, since one day the son might think himself strong enough to defy the father. For Richard the problem was that he was now bitterly unpopular in Aquitaine. Although he was almost certainly not a harsh ruler, he did believe in the Latin motto oderint dum metuant (let them hate provided they fear), and certainly made the pips squeak all the way from La Rochelle to the Pyrenees.17 Stripped of their traditional liberties and privileges, the dispossessed nobility brooded and bided their time, waiting for Richard to make a bad mistake. Their chance came in 1182.

  The crisis in Angoulême that year was in many ways a rerun of the imbroglio at Berry
four years earlier. Once again it involved a collision between Angevin overlordship and local mores and customs. Count Vulgrin of Angoulême died, leaving only an infant daughter, Matilda. This meant, according to Richard, that Matilda should inherit the county of Angoulême and he, as duke and overlord, should have wardship over her: in effect it was introducing the English law of primogeniture into an alien context. Naturally, this was not at all how the brothers of the dead Count Vulgrin, who stood to gain from the traditional divided inheritance, saw matters. In their eyes Richard’s stance was a tyrannical breach of the ancient traditions of western France, which ultimately called in question the entire structure of fiefs and thus introduced uncertainty and chaos. Driven out by Richard when they contested his claim, Vulgrin’s brothers Richard and Aldemar fled to their half-brother Aimar of Limoges, where they were joined by the count of Périgord and the viscounts of Ventadour, Comborn and Turenne. These men were united in what they saw as a sacred struggle against Richard’s contempt for their inheritance customs.18 Richard struck back hard at them, launching a surprise attack on the count of Périgord’s fortress at Périgeux in April 1182, then cutting a swathe through the Limousin territory of his foes, burning and looting as he went. Although temporarily with a local inferiority in numbers, Richard had received assurances that his father was on the way to help him, and his confidence was not misplaced. At a conference at Grandmont in May, Henry summoned the rebels before him to hear their predictable complaints about Richard’s tyranny, though the mere fact of the conference led some optimists to suppose that Henry was secretly displeased with Richard’s actions. Such hopes were vain. Henry dismissed the charges as mere baronial contumacity and began a systematic campaign of reducing enemy strongholds in the Limousin. He and Richard, collaborating on a major military mission for the first time ever, took castle after castle: Excideuil, St Yrieix, Pierre-Buffière, Puy St-Front. Joined on 1 July by the Young King and his forces, the tripartite army swept all before it, forcing the rapid surrender of Aimar of Limoges and Elie of Périgord; Richard took particular delight in demolishing the walls of Périgord.19

  It was quite clear that the combined forces of the Angevin empire were irresistible and no enemy could stand against them. The trick was to divide the Devil’s Brood, and this was a task for which the troubadour Bertran de Born was particularly suited. He set himself at once to whip up discontent against Richard and to inveigle the Young King into fresh rebellion. Bertran de Born is himself an historical conundrum in more ways than one. A fine poet and a mighty warrior, he was a genuinely wicked human being. The source of his manifold discontents was that his father had bequeathed the family castle of Hautefort jointly to Bertran and his brother Constantine. Bertran found this intolerable and fought an almost continuous mini-civil war against Constantine, in which the castle constantly changed hands. This struggle was a microcosm of the father-son conflict in the wider kingdom, for Constantine sought and received support from Henry the Old King and Bertran from Henry the Young King. Within Aquitaine Bertran, who could put 1,000 men in the field was forever at daggers drawn with his neighbours the count of Périgord and the viscount of Limoges and above all Duke Richard, who composed his own political satires or sirventes in response to Bertran’s and easily held his own in the ideological duel; indeed it has been suggested that Bertran’s low output of love songs was basically caused by his concentration on the political battle with Richard. He liked to insinuate to the Young King that Richard was becoming too powerful and it was a grave mistake to help him quell the opposition within Aquitaine. Bertran de Born was at root a cynic who tipped over into nihilism and advocated political anarchy: ‘I would that great men should always be quarrelling among themselves’ was his most famous dictum.20 A believer in ‘the war of all against all’ and ‘permanent revolution’ Bertran was an obvious forerunner of both Thomas Hobbes and Leon Trotsky. An avowed lover of war - ‘peace gives me no comfort’, he declared - he reveals through his poems a malevolent ideology of ‘chivalry’ that Dante found deeply shocking. Bertran loved war because it carried off both the mighty and the lowly and he famously stated that the pleasures of sleep, drink and food could not compare with the cry of ‘charge’, the sight of riderless and disembowelled horses neighing in agony or the sound of wounded men crying out for mercy.21 At first blush his love of war should have aligned him more naturally with Richard than with the Young King, but Richard’s love of war was always purposive rather than mindless and he always despised de Born.

  Some historians have affected to relegate Bertran de Born to the briefest of footnotes, on the ground that he has been taken too much at his own inflated estimate .22 Yet his influence on the Young King seems undeniable. And even if he were only a minor political gadfly, he represented something significant in the state of Aquitaine. The struggle between the rebels of the south and the Angevin empire turns out to have been more socio-economic than cultural. Bertran de Born and the other troubadours were usually spokesmen and propagandists for the minor nobility - la petite noblesse - constables of castles, holders of minor fiefs, landless younger sons of knightly families. The aim of the troubadour ethos was a new, more broadly based nobility, with class distinctions more important than distinctions of wealth and power. Alongside the promotion of courtly love, hunting and tournaments, they advocated increasing the number of courtiers and forcing the great magnates to share their wealth with lesser barons. The ethos of constant warfare was, in the minds of more thoughtful troubadours, though not Bertran de Born, a means of forcing the great barons to keep landless knights permanently on their payroll and thus in time to accept a de facto widening of the nobility. It can be seen why, for most of the troubadours, Richard was public enemy number one. In their eyes he was a boorish pragmatist, uninterested in tournaments or courtly love. They portrayed him as a harsh lord and a despot because he refused the customary Aquitaine right of vassals to wage war on each other without leave of their common lord. From Richard’s point of view, he was bringing civilisation to the south. He kept mercenaries and routiers but they were paid punctually and so did not rampage through the countryside. He believed in what later writers would call ‘the monopoly of violence’ for he expressly forbade his vassals to hire mercenaries; any routiers who came into Aquitaine other than in his service were hunted down ruthlessly, hanged, drowned or blinded. Peace, rigidly enforced laws, legal codes that emphasised primogeniture and swept away uncertainty and dispute, and a clearly stratified hierarchy of the kind the Angevins preferred sounded the death-knell for the ambitions of la petite noblesse.23

  Bertran de Born did not abandon hope. Another ace in the hole for him was the new king of France. Philip Augustus had been a sickly child, to the point where Louis VII of France visited England in 1179 and got Henry II to accompany him to Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. There he prayed for the intercession of the saint and martyr on behalf of the seriously ill Philip. His prayers were answered but he himself suffered a severe stroke almost immediately on returning to France. He died on 18 September 1180.24 Unlike Henry, he was never unscrupulous, but was modest, God-fearing and chaste, living proof that a king could also be a model of chivalry. Although he could not match Henry in deeds and achievement, he left behind a far more glowing reputation, and his career did much for the prestige of the French monarchy. His successor, Philip Augustus, was only fifteen at the time, but was destined to become one of the great kings of France, second only to Louis XIV in power and magnificence according to some historians. Philip was another paradox, a physical coward who never mastered horsemanship or learned to ride properly - it was said that the one destrier he could master was kept in readiness to carry its rider away from any fighting at full tilt - but he became a master strategist and the hammer of the Plantagenets.25 Where the ruthless Henry II had always been able to outwit the ingenuous Louis VII, the Devil’s Brood were to find that they had in the new French king a man even more cunning and ruthless than their own father. From very early days he was convin
ced he had been marked down by destiny to carry the house of Capet to glory. When still no more than a child, he sat dreamily at a meeting of the King’s Council, chewing a hazel twig. When asked what was on his mind, he replied that it was his ambition to make France as great as it had been in Charlemagne’s day.26 He began his reign as he meant to go on by intervening in the crisis over Vulgrin of Angoulême in Aquitaine and accepting the homage of Angoulême. Bertran de Born could scarcely believe his luck. ‘Now we will know for sure’, he wrote, ‘whether king Philip takes after his father or follows in the footsteps of Charlemagne.’27