by Alan Ereira
The Prince, coming that way in his carriage, looked on the combat with great pleasure, and enjoyed it so much that his heart was softened and his anger appeased. After the combat had lasted a considerable time, the Frenchmen, with one accord, viewing their swords, said, ‘My lords, we are yours: you have vanquished us: therefore act according to the law of arms.’ ‘By God,’ replied the duke of Lancaster, ‘Sir John, we do not intend otherwise, and we accept you for our prisoners.’ Thus, as I have been informed, were these three knights taken.
The Chronicles of Froissart
Roger, in Froissart’s eyes, was now a knight after all. This was the classic chivalric encounter: war as combat, to be admired and enjoyed.
THE REALITY BEHIND THE CHIVALRY
All was gentility and chivalry, unless you happened to be outside the charmed circle of men in armour. The Black Prince’s orders had been simple and brutal, as reported by Froissart:
You would then have seen pillagers, active to do mischief, running through the town, slaying men, women, and children, according to their orders. It was a most melancholy business; for all ranks, ages and sexes cast themselves on their knees before the prince, begging for mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge that he listened to none, but all were put to the sword, wherever they could be found, even those who were not guilty: for I know not why the poor were not spared, who could not have had any part in this treason; but they suffered for it, and indeed more than those who had been the leaders of the treachery.
There was not that day in the city of Limoges any heart so hardened, or that had any sense of religion, who did not deeply bewail the unfortunate events passing before their eyes; for upwards of three thousand men, women and children were put to death that day. God have mercy on their souls! for they were veritable martyrs.
The Chronicles of Froissart
The whole town was pillaged, burnt, and totally destroyed.
Froissart listed many other instances of the Black Prince’s savagery, from his ‘right good beginning’ burning and ravaging in northern France as a teenager, through the slaughter of women and children at Mont Giscar the year before Crécy to the systematic looting and killing of people whose crime was to be ‘good, simple, and ignorant of war’, but nothing so moved him to pity as the slaughter at Limoges. Perhaps it was because he understood what was being destroyed. Froissart was a high-level courtier, a man of education and taste, who knew that what was being lost was not just human life. The Black Prince was eliminating the brilliant colours of Limoges, killing the master craftsmen and skilled artisans along with their wives and children, and looting and destroying their factories.
One of the great treasures of the world was wiped away.
Limoges did eventually recover, and went on to achieve perhaps even greater heights of artistry in other crafts. But the expertise that had produced the brilliant, jewel-like enamels of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was gone, the keepers of its secrets dead, and that work was not seen again.
Froissart did not regard the Black Prince as barbarous, or as a criminal. On the contrary, he described him as ‘the perfect root of all honour and nobleness, of wisdom, valour and largesse’. The prince was a man who played out the role of chivalric hero, and if we see an incomprehensible contradiction here it is because we have developed our own unhistorical idea of chivalry.
Froissart’s view of chivalry was the one held by the court, not the religious one.
Edward III set up a court of chivalry to deal with chivalric disputes. But it’s no good thinking of knights on trial for failing to open the drawbridge for a damsel or for slaughtering the poor and weak.
The main preoccupation of the court was money – knights squabbling over the loot from some unfortunate town, or arguing over how to split the profits of ransom, or claiming to own the rights to a particular prisoner. The other major concern was quarrels about who owned the rights to a particular coat of arms.
The court of chivalry was simply another way in which the king tried to exert some sort of control over the business of warfare.
CRÉCY AND THE DEMISE OF CHIVALRY
Edward III may have been busy helping to glamorize chivalry, but this does not mean he used it as the basis for war. Elegance was for romances and for tournaments. But battles had to be won, and knights in armour were vulnerable to inelegant new weapons.
By the fourteenth century it was shatteringly expensive to get a knight on to the battlefield. Since Roman times the standard piece of fighting kit had been the chain-mail coat, but developments in missile technology had brought a new kind of arrow that could pass through mail. So knights started wearing heavier armour – like a coat of metal plates. Then a crossbow was developed that could penetrate the plates, and so on. As the kit become more expensive it took more land to sustain a knight, so the link between landholding and military duty began to collapse.
In fact, within 100 years of the Norman Conquest people were opting out of the system in serious numbers. As the age of the Conquest came to an end, fewer and fewer landholders saw themselves as warriors. Widows could and did inherit their husband’s estates, young men turned into old men and, anyway, there were a lot better things to do with your money than spend it on elaborate handmade armour just so that you could go and be frightened to death by some professional lout. The system of land tenure by military service began to give way to money payments, and it soon became common for the holder of a knight’s fee to fail to get himself knighted. (Knighthood in England was never hereditary.)
The Battle of Crécy, where the Black Prince had begun his military career, was no chivalric battlefield tournament. By 1346, the English had lost interest in chivalry as a military occupation.
They were massively outnumbered, and the French had assumed that the knights on both sides would battle it out on horseback, and that the smaller English force would be overwhelmed, ransomed and go home ruined. But the English were playing by a new rule-book. When they arrived at the battlefield most of the knights got off their horses. This wasn’t at all what they were supposed to do. But then they weren’t planning to go through the usual chivalric routine. They were relying on the support of their non-noble longbowmen.
The English longbow (as it is now called) was not a noble weapon, and it was not wielded by rich young men whose kit cost the equivalent of a Ferrari. Thousands of French noblemen charged in full pageantry. In the first five minutes, the English loosed more than 3000 arrows. The flower of French chivalry was cut down by archers on sixpence a day.
The French lost over 5000 men; the English a few hundred. Using archers to shift the balance of power in a battle was not in itself new; what was new was the sheer scale on which the English employed them. If armies of the future were going to behave like this, the mounted knight was pretty much out of business.
And something else was eating away at the shaky (perhaps even non-existent) edifice of chivalry: the feudal host was itself being replaced by a modern regular army consisting of professional soldiers.
THE RISE OF THE MERCENARIES
The feudal levy of landed knights had never been the sole military force used by kings. They relied at least as much on the military forces of their own household and, from the twelfth century, on landless knights who needed to be paid. Henry I, for example, could only call on a levy of some 5000 knights from the whole country, and hired bands of 1000 knights at a time. The coins used to pay them, called solidi, gave rise to the English word ‘soldiers’. At the time when Lull’s handbook on Christian chivalry was becoming widely translated and imitated, the military significance of the feudal knight was fading into history.
The armies of kings became professionalized, mercenary forces; more and more, courtly knights stayed home jousting prettily at court and feasting with other members of their orders of chivalry, and paid a tax instead of performing their military duty. Increasingly on the battlefield, knights were paid professionals who preferred to do the business against m
en who were poorly equipped and untrained. When Edward III landed in France in 1337, at the start of the Hundred Years War, his army included only about 1500 feudal knights. The rest, whether armoured men on horseback or pikemen on foot, were paid wages.
This new class of professional soldier did not live off his estates, for he had none; war was how he made his living. If the king would not employ him, someone else must. Nobody had envisaged the disaster this was to bring on Europe.
In 1360 Edward signed a peace treaty – the treaty of Brétigny – with the French. It was the kind of thing kings had done countless times before, but this time there was a difference. Lots of the English (and many of the French) had no homes to go to. Some had been fighting in France for up to 20 years. They might have captured a nice chateau, and there they were living like lords – why should they go back to England where, as like as not, they’d end up in jail or slaving for someone else?
The result was that France and Italy were infested by hard men in hard armour, hired to do other men’s dirty work.
They started with freelance pillaging in northern France. Edward sent royal officers to try to force his men to stop, but he had no power to bring them under control. Gradually English mercenaries, together with men from other countries, started forming themselves into freelance armies, which eventually coalesced into a single force that was reckoned to be 16,000 strong – bigger than Edward’s own army!
The mercenaries called themselves free companies. They were bands of robbers on a nightmare scale, who swept down through France causing havoc and destruction. And there seemed to be no way of stopping them. Every attempt to crush them backfired. Mankind had opened a Pandora’s box, and civilization itself had broken down.
Eventually the free companies descended on Avignon, which in those days happened to be the residence of the pope. (The papacy had moved there fifty years earlier; Rome had been a violent and dangerous city for a Pope who was, unusually, a Frenchman.) They burnt the surrounding countryside and threatened to attack God’s representative on earth unless he handed over a spiritually uplifting sum of money.
The pope tried to organize a crusade against them but, as the free companies had no land for crusaders to seize, his warriors would have to rely on him for payment. However, paying crusaders with anything other than indulgences was not on the pope’s agenda – so most of them packed up and went home. In fact, quite a few of the crusaders joined the companies. The pope had just made his problem worse. In the end, he paid the mercenaries 100,000 florins and also threw in a general pardon for all the sins they had committed so far.
Having successfully bought off the marauders, he persuaded the majority of them to move on into Italy, which was full of career opportunities for mercenary soldiers with nowhere to go.
‘Italy’ in those days consisted of a lot of city-states like Pisa, Milan, Rome, Florence and Mantua – each one almost a mini-nation in itself. For several centuries they had been at each other’s throats in the time-honoured manner of neighbours. Their citizens, however, hadn’t been all that attracted to fighting, and had got into the habit of employing mercenary companies to fight for them.
Italy had thus become the cradle of mercenary warfare. And once the free companies moved on from Avignon the north Italians found that employing mercenary companies was no longer a matter of choice – they either paid up or paid with their lives.
The mercenaries came from all over Europe, but now a sizeable proportion of them were Englishmen. One contemporary Italian chronicler, Pietro Azario, recorded how ‘some men imprisoned themselves in their own dungeons and locked themselves up at night when they [the English] rode forth . . .’*5
Of all the English soldiers who arrived in Italy none was to make a greater impression than Sir John Hawkwood – Giovanni Acuto, the Italians called him – ‘Sharp John’. He soon established himself as leader of one of the companies, the White Company. The younger son of a well-to-do Essex tanner, he had made his way up through the ranks during the Hundred Years War.
In Italy he established his own mercenary company, and for 40 years he made a good living offering his services to whomever would pay for them, often using intimidation to gain employment: ‘You had better employ my army now it’s here on your border, otherwise I can’t guarantee it won’t do a lot of damage.’ It was the old protection racket writ large.
Another contemporary Italian chronicler, Matteo Villani, left a vivid account of the kind of men Hawkwood was leading:
These people, all young, and for the most part born and raised during the long wars between the French and the English, hot and wilful, used to slaughter and rapine, were skilled in the use of cold steel, and had no thought for their own safety.*6
This was the army of the future. It was numbered in ‘lances’, each lance consisting of a knight on a charger, sheathed in iron and steel from head to foot, a squire, also on a charger but less heavily armed, and a page on a palfrey. There were 1000 teams of ‘lances’, so called because their principal weapon was a long and heavy lance. This required two men to wield it and was used only on foot, in a mass formation. The teams also carried heavy swords and daggers, and bows slung across their backs.
They were backed up by infantry, who were armed with longbows and carried swords and daggers, and also some light ladders that could be fixed together to scale towers. They were tough and disciplined professionals, five lances to a company, five companies to a troop, and were commanded by effective officers.
They specialized in surprise night raids on towns, when they would massacre the men, rape the women, carry off whatever was worth taking and burn the rest.
This was not in any sense chivalric warfare; it was a job. Hawkwood did not fight for glory or honour. He was simply a down-to-earth businessman – whose business happened to be war. There is a story that two friars once greeted him with the usual ‘May God grant you peace’. Whereupon Sir John retorted: ‘May God take from you your alms.’ When the friars asked why, he replied: ‘Why not? You come to me and say that God should let me die of hunger. Don’t you know that I live by war, and peace would destroy me?’
CESENA
In 1377 Sir John Hawkwood was under contract to Cardinal Roberto, Count of Geneva, when the citizens of Cesena killed some of his soldiers. Roberto offered them an amnesty if they would surrender their arms, which the citizens did, foolishly trusting the word of a cardinal-priest of the order of the ‘Holy Apostles’.
Then Cardinal Roberto summoned Hawkwood from nearby Faenza, where he’d been busy coordinating the rape of all the female inhabitants, and told him to go to Cesena and kill everyone. To do Sir John justice, it is reported that he protested this was not really playing the game, but the cardinal said he wanted ‘justice’, and by ‘justice’ he meant ‘blood and more blood’. The resulting massacre shocked Europe.
Hawkwood’s troop ‘burned and slaughtered all the town. The river was coloured with blood. And among the smoking ruins, the rapes, the killings was a pitiful episode. Twenty-four friars were killed in front of the main altar, together with the congregation.’ According to hostile chroniclers, as many as 8000 people died. Up to 16,000 fled and Hawkwood, ‘not to be held entirely infamous, sent about a thousand of the women to Rimini’.*7
Every building was destroyed and the town was completely rebuilt following the destruction. Only a few pieces of the original walls survive.
But the action did no harm to Hawkwood’s reputation. Maybe it even helped by showing how carefully he carried out orders. Over the next 20 years he continued to flourish. He bought castles and property in Italy and estates in England. For the last 15 years of his life he was under more or less permanent contract to the city of Florence, and before he died in 1395 the city promised him a magnificent marble tomb in the great cathedral – the Duomo – in the heart of Florence.
However, the Florentines were businessmen and they never lost their business sense. When the King of England requested that Hawkwood’s body be ret
urned to his native land, they felt there were better things to do with their cash than build an empty tomb, so they got an artist to paint a picture of what the tomb would have looked like if they had built it.
The non-aristocratic son of a tanner had become virtually a nobleman, by turning warfare into a business. Meanwhile, chivalry developed as a game of social status, ever further removed from the reality of war. And the knights of England became country gentlemen, the backbone of county administration.
Chivalry was a fantasy, used to put a respectable gloss on the horrors of war. It would be hard to argue that Norman knights were more violent or bloodthirsty than other warriors throughout human history, or that chivalric knights like William Marshal or the Black Prince were less bloodthirsty than mercenary captains like Sir John Hawkwood. But in the fourteenth century people felt something had changed with the commercialization of warfare.
The chivalrous knight in shining armour never really did exist. All that rescuing damsels and helping the weak was just wishful thinking – a construct of the medieval mind, taken up with enthusiasm by the Victorians and passed on to Hollywood film-makers of today.
But maybe we are better off without chivalry. Its fine ideals were all too often used to perpetuate war – which is what those who live by war want. Francho Sacchetti, one of Hawkwood’s contemporaries, said of him: ‘He managed his affairs so well that there was little peace in Italy in his time.’*8 And it is still true that those who promote war are usually those who stand to benefit from it – be they arms manufacturers, politicians or knights in shining armour.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DAMSEL
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
HELPLESS, THREATENED AND FOREVER IN NEED OF RESCUE, the medieval damsel-in-distress is an archetype deeply bound up with the image of the chivalrous knight in shining armour. It’s easy for us to understand that back in the brutal world of the Middle Ages women should be at the mercy of forces beyond their control, and that they should need rescuing by heroic males.
