The Third Horseman
Page 1
ALSO BY WILLIAM ROSEN
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire
VIKING
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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by William Rosen
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ISBN 978-0-698-16349-2
Maps by David Lindroth
Version_1
For Jeanine
All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals
true; but to die of hunger—starve to death
that’s the worst of all.
The Odyssey, Book XII (Fagles translation)
When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come and see!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
Revelation 6:5
CONTENTS
Also by William Rosen
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Maps
PROLOGUE
Eight Crowns in Boulogne • 1308
CHAPTER ONE
“The Fury of the Northmen” • 793–1066
CHAPTER TWO
“Henceforth Be Earls” • 1066–1298
CHAPTER THREE
“Penalty for Their Betters” • 1298–1307
CHAPTER FOUR
“Douglas’s Larder” • 1307–1312
CHAPTER FIVE
“Scots, Wha Hae” • 1313–1315
CHAPTER SIX
“The Floodgates of the Heavens” • 1315–1316
CHAPTER SEVEN
“A Dearness of Wheat” • 1316–1317
CHAPTER EIGHT
“She-Wolf of France” • 1313–1320
CHAPTER NINE
“The Dearest Beef I’ve Ever Seen” • 1320–1322
CHAPTER TEN
“The Mouse Tower of Bingen” • 800–1323
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Long Years of Havoc” • 1323–1328
EPILOGUE
The Delicate Balance
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF MAPS
MAP 1
The Conveyer Belts of the World’s Climate
MAP 2
Viking Conquests and Trading Posts
MAP 3
England, Scotland, and France during the Medieval Warm Period
MAP 4
The Battle of Bannockburn, 1314
MAP 5
A Manorial Village
MAP 6
The Holy Roman Empire in the Fourteenth Century
PROLOGUE
Eight Crowns in Boulogne
1308
In the fourth week of January in the year 1308, the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer played host to the very top tier of European society. Camped in canvas tents around the city square were dozens of princes, barons, counts, earls, and dukes, and seven kings and queens, including Philip IV, the king of France; King Louis of Navarre; Marie of Brabant, the dowager queen of France; Albert of Habsburg and Elizabeth of Tyrol, the king and queen of the Romans (the confusing name given to the rulers of Germany while they awaited confirmation in the office of Holy Roman Emperor); Charles II, the king of Sicily; and Marguerite, the dowager queen of England. They had arrived to celebrate the marriage of the eighth monarch, twenty-three-year-old Edward II of England, to his twelve-year-old bride, Isabella, the daughter of the French king, thus concluding a treaty and betrothal made five years earlier.
The most notable sovereign missing from the ceremony was the new king of Scotland, Robert the Bruce, whose absence was explained by the fact that he was, at that time, engaged in what would be a three-decade-long war to secure Scottish independence from England . . . and while Edward was pledging himself to Isabella, Bruce was managing a campaign that would, in a matter of months, leave him in control of a fifth of his enemy’s country.
Over the course of the next twenty years, the lives of virtually everyone in northern Europe would be powerfully influenced by a dizzying game of war, succession, diplomacy, and rebellion played out in Scotland, England, France, Flanders, and Germany by the monarchs in attendance at the wedding. The French would invade Flanders, and recognize Bruce’s sovereignty in Scotland. The death of the king of the Romans would lead to an eight-year-long struggle for his throne. Eventually Edward’s child bride would leave her new realm for her native land, later to return at the head of an invading army that would force her husband to abdicate in favor of her son.
None of this, of course, was much in evidence at the royal wedding. The most notable thing about the ceremony, in fact, was the unseasonable weather. As the thirteenth century turned into the fourteenth, daytime January temperatures in Boulogne had averaged about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and perhaps 10 degrees colder at night, and had been doing so for centuries. At Edward and Isabella’s wedding, the barons and earls sleeping in those hundreds of tents shivered to nighttime temperatures well below freezing. The freeze they were enduring was covering virtually all of Europe; ports along the Baltic were frozen in for the second time in the preceding five years.
The weather was changing. More than that, the climate was changing, and changing in a way that would affect the lives of millions, often enough by bringing those lives to an untimely end.
• • •
The great conceit of history is that humanity’s worst disasters occur within some identifiable and discrete time frame. Whether describing the arrival of a pandemic plague fifteen hundred years ago, or the world wars of the last century, conventional narratives offer a clear beginning and a decisive conclusion. The reality is more like a bridge collapsing: A minutes-long climax of forces that have been years—sometimes centuries or even millennia—in formation.
So it was with the events that transfixed northern Europe during the first decades of the fourteenth century. Less than a decade after the wedding ceremony at Boulogne, the most widespread and destructive famine in European history brought privation and starvation to millions. Its proximate cause was a series of what seemed, to its victims, to be isolated and unpredictable weather events: summer storms and freezing winters. Its true origins were an almost incomprehensibly complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation, that put tens of millions of men, women, and children in the path of apocalyptic disaster. Those elements can no more be understood in isolation than one of the great medieval tapestries can be appreciated by listing each of the threads that compose it.
When such a tapestry is viewed from an appropriate distance, however, the picture comes into focus. From Europe’s ninth century onward, the great theme at center stage was the most basic of all: How should a society feed itself? What political and cultural system can allocate, protect, sow, and reap the land that was the ultimate source of food? For Europe, during the four centuries before Edward and Isabella stood before a priest on that cold day in 1308, the answer was a pact—a contract sanctioned by law, and sanctified by religion—that bound the laborer to the land, and the landlord to the laborer.
A dozen institutions and doctrines depended on that pact. Some of the most significant:
• Manorialism, the system of land tenure that dominated the agriculture of Europe from the early ninth century and the reign of Charlemagne. It granted rights and duties to the peasants who worked the land, to the sovereign who granted rights of ownership to the land, and to the nobility and gentry who stood in between.
• Feudalism, the medieval system for legitimizing the use of armed force, again through grants of rights and duties up and down the line, from Europe’s lowliest peasants to its most powerful monarchs.
• The proto-nations under whose protection feudalism and manorialism survived, themselves struggling for legitimacy in medieval Europe—some of them still sovereign into the twenty-first century, like France; some subsumed into larger (or luckier) opponents, like Flanders.
• The transnational and hierarchical Catholic Church, with a rescript from God to lead a “United States of Europe,” and the Bishop of Rome, with the sole authority to sanctify feudal titles, manorial ownership, and the rights of the sovereign.
By the beginning of the fourteenth century, these institutions—manorialism, feudalism, nationalism, and papism—were collectively responsible for feeding a European population that, enabled by four centuries of anomalously mild weather, had grown from ten to forty million. Their aggregate success, however, had the seeds of failure built into it. By the time of the wedding of Isabella to Edward, the objectives of each was irrepressibly in conflict with the prerogatives of another. A crisis had been reached.
The crisis would play out in every region of northern Europe. When the mild weather vanished, seemingly for good, it struck at the heart of Europe’s food production, everywhere from the Atlantic to the Urals. It decimated Flanders, destroyed dozens of German-speaking towns, and starved villages from Brittany to Poland. For seven disastrous years, the homelands of the wedding guests would be visited by a series of curses unseen since the third book of Exodus: floods, ice, failures of crops and cattle, and epidemics not just of disease but of pike, sword, and spear. Riding alongside the third horseman of the Apocalypse, astride the black horse of famine, came the second, who “was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other.” War.
Both horsemen were to be found throughout northern Europe, but nowhere more dramatically than on the borders separating Scotland from England. It wasn’t merely that those unlucky lands were subjected to all of the climate-caused disasters of those calamitous decades: their harvests lost to rain; their herds to disease; and their homes, churches, bridges, roads, and ports destroyed by one terrifying weather event after another, virtually every year between 1314 and 1321. The borderlands were a battleground for every kind of conflict of the era: rebellions of feudal nobles against their kings, wars between nations, and wars of national independence. The confrontations between Scotland and England—between Robert Bruce and William Wallace on one side, and the first three English kings named Edward on the other, with French kings, Italian bankers, and three different popes as interested parties—became, in addition, a laboratory for a new set of battlefield tactics, in which the laboring classes of Europe, organized into disciplined infantry, proved more than the equal of the mounted nobility that had dominated warfare since the time of Charlemagne. The wars between Scotland and England even created victims for a new kind of warfare itself: nationalist guerrilla warfare that targeted farms as fiercely as it did opposing armies; bad enough in normal times, but disastrous during the greatest famine in European history.
In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the novelist Salman Rushdie tells us that all the world’s stories are found on the Earth’s second moon, reachable only by what he describes as a P2C2E—a “process too complicated to explain.” At first glance any attempt to tell the story of the disasters of the first decades of the fourteenth century seems a classic P2C2E. On its own, climate is almost irreducibly complicated, a system involving the most intricate processes of the Earth’s atmosphere, so sensitive to a change in initial conditions that, as the cliché description of chaotic systems reminds us, a butterfly flapping its wings in Ecuador can cause a tornado to touch down in Kansas. Combine that with the convoluted evolution of feudalism, manorialism, and the emergence of nationalism; with the strategies of diplomacy and warfare; with the incredible amalgam of molecules that comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world’s food (and the sciences that study it: agronomy, soil science, and plant biology) with digestive physiology and gastronomic history, and you have chaos squared.
Long before they ever hear of chaos theory, however, introductory physics students study the more mundane phenomenon known as resonance: the tendency of a system, like a pendulum, to oscillate in larger and larger swings when pushed at a specific frequency. Resonance is why a chain of tiny pushes can send a child’s swing fifteen feet into the air, and why a series of wind gusts can twist a concrete bridge into a pretzel.
It took centuries for the key resonant forces—rain, cold, disease, and warfare—to accumulate enough energy that they could destroy one life in ten from the Atlantic to the Urals. They began to do so some seventeen hundred miles northwest of, and four hundred years before, the wedding of Edward and Isabella.
CHAPTER ONE
“The Fury of the Northmen”
793–1066
There are many ways to get from the west coast of Greenland to L’Anse aux Meadows, none of them easy. You can fly from Kangerlussuaq to Reykjavik in a little less than five hours, and from there to New York in just under six; from New York to St. John’s, on the southeast side of the island of Newfoundland, will take about three more. From there, you either drive or fly four hundred miles west—perhaps ten hours by road; an hour and fifteen minutes by twin-engine turboprop—to Deer Lake. Then, another three hundred miles by car on Canada’s picturesque Route 480, along the Newfoundland coast, until you run out of road, and walk the last bit to a peat farm, a reconstructed forge, and half a dozen sod-roofed houses.
All of the available options are far easier than the direct route, first taken a thousand years ago: nine hundred stomach-heaving miles across the North Atlantic in a sixty-foot-long square-rigged wooden ship. But that ship, and others like it, are the reason L’Anse aux Meadows is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the first European settlement in the New World, and probably the most famous place ever colonized by the merchants and traders we know as the Vikings.
It’s nowhere near the largest. A Viking settlement on the banks of the Dnieper River, near Smolensk, has more than three thousand funeral mounds scattered across its forty acres. For centuries, the people who built them controlled the trade that moved along Europe’s rivers all the way from the Baltic to Constantinople, and even as far as ninth-century Baghdad, when it was Islam’s—and probably the world’s—richest and most sophisticated city. Along the Dnieper and Volga, the traders were generally known as Varangians or “rowers” and formed the personal guard of the Byzantine Emperor; sometimes as Rus, from which modern Russia takes its name. Closer to home, in Ireland, they were often known as Finngaills, or “fair foreigners.” The earliest occupants of Britain called them Danes—in the story of Beowulf, “east-Danes” or “spear-Danes.” Most frequently, they were known as Northmen, or Norsemen; after 793, when they raided the monastery at Lindisfarne, on the east coast of England, with “rapine and s
laughter,” it was said that all over Europe, people prayed, “A furore normannorum libera nos, Domine”: From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us, Lord.*
The Norse—the word “Viking” comes from an Old Norse word meaning “voyaging,” later refined to mean “raiding,” rather than “trading”—were merchants, warriors, farmers, and artisans. Despite a well-earned reputation for fearsomeness in battle, they appeared less savage to their contemporaries than to their modern mythmakers; in 1220, the chronicler John of Wallingford described them as, in thirteenth-century terms, a bit dandified:
They were—according to their country’s customs—in the habit of combing their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their clothes frequently and to draw attention to themselves by means of many such frivolous whims. In this way, they besieged the married women’s virtue and persuaded the daughters of even noble men to become their mistresses.
But first, last, and always, they were sailors. Their only real competition for the title of the greatest sailing culture in history came from the eleventh- and twelfth-century Polynesians who colonized Hawaii and Easter Island, and their greatest accomplishments are best understood in the same context: travel across vast distances with neither magnetic compasses nor maps, navigating by their knowledge of currents, swells, and the migrations of birds and fish.
The fish weren’t just an aid to sailors but the most important reason they went to sea in the first place. Long before they were trading gold and amber along the shores of the Caspian, Black, and Mediterranean seas, Norse sailors honed their maritime skills in the most basic of human activities: gathering food, especially cod from the North Atlantic, which was, and is, the world’s greatest fishery.