By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  A similar policy was followed by military leaders when castles fell into their hands: if the place was useful, they would strengthen and garrison it; if it were thought to be difficult to hold or of no direct strategic value to them, they would destroy it. With towns, there was more to be taken into consideration, as the above quote indicates. Any government needed regional seats of administration; and for these to be of value the areas needed to be economically viable. In many cases, it was more than the infrastructure that required preserving. Where colonists could not be imported to make up for displaced or slaughtered inhabitants, it would be counter productive to slay everyone in a captured town. A depopulated city was one without markets and hence without economic benefits to its ruler. Furthermore, scarcity of labour would serve to raise the cost of labour, a well-known aftereffect of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. It could make military sense to kill the garrison, especially as a warning to others; it could also make sense to kill many of the male population as a way of keeping the masses subjugated through fear; but to kill all the population made military sense only on rare occasions, as an exception to the rule or when it was felt a particularly draconian punishment was called for in order to intimidate and inhibit resistance.

  Béziers, then, may well have been a planned massacre that rapidly escalated out of control in the unexpected success of the moment. If so, the leadership was unlikely to have been greatly disconcerted, as the victory was so quick and, for them at least, painless. Some booty might have gone up in the flames, but at the same time they had incurred none of the expenses or risks of a lengthy siege. But most of all, the savagery of the sack helped break the resolve of further resistance. Carcassonne was the main prize, and this capitulated after only a fortnight’s siege, submitting to harsh terms which nevertheless spared the lives of the inhabitants (even the Cathars among them avoided the stake) and which left the crusaders laden with spectacular spoils of war.

  The real financial benefits of Béziers were reaped at Carcassonne. The orderly taking of that city, even after fierce fighting, reveals that medieval armies did not always conform to the popular and largely false image of ill-disciplined rabbles always on the verge of being out of control (which, of course, did happen on occasion). It also suggests that, when coupled with the knights’ seeming indifference to the massacre, the carnage at Béziers was the result of a policy that had encouraged the slaughter. Arnald Amalric’s infamous cry of ‘Kill them all; God will know his own’ is today considered apocryphal, but certainly cannot be judged definitively as such. The German chronicler who recorded the phrase did not actually add ‘all’ (a later addition) and reported the phrase as hearsay. The merciless exhortation allegedly followed questions to the legate as to how the crusaders might distinguish Cathar from Catholic in the chaos of bloodletting, and that the legate demanded the death of everyone lest the former pretended to be the latter. But it is just as likely that if these words were actually spoken, they merely reflected the crusading leadership’s agreed policy on massacring those who resisted. Whatever the truth, Béziers had launched the crusade off to a spectacularly good start.

  Limoges, 1370

  The storm and sack of Limoges in 1370 by Edward the Black Prince is an event that appears to conform to the laws of medieval war siege warfare, even if the extrapolation from Deuteronomy is somewhat forced. Despite this, it certainly shocked many contemporaries for its brutality, and it provides the chronicles of Froissart with one of its most famous passages. Even Froissart, the most celebrated contemporary recorder of chivalrous feats of arms and a writer who tends to romanticize the Black Prince, the epitome of heroic English chivalry at the time, condemns the actions of Edward at Limoges.

  In 1369, the Anglo-French Treaty of Brétigny broke down and the Hundred Years War resumed. The terms of the treaty had reflected English successes under Edward III and his son Edward the Black Prince, culminating in the spectacular victory at Poitiers in 1356 and the capture of the French king John. In order to finance his wars in Spain, the Black Prince imposed high taxes on his principality of Aquitaine, provoking the lords of this region to rise in revolt. The Valois offered considerable support in the form of French troops and finance, and rebellion became, in effect, all-out war. Things went badly for the ill-prepared English from the outset and they were forced onto the retreat. Chandos and Audley, leading English commanders and close friends of Edward, fell in the vain effort to save the principality.

  Limoges was just one of the many towns and castles that went over to the French at an alarming rate. Its abrupt transference of allegiance was a particular blow for Edward, not least because it had been held for him by Bishop Jean of Cros, a previously faithful adviser and intimate who was godfather to one of the Prince’s children. Froissart claims that the Black Prince ‘swore on the soul of his father – an oath which he never broke – that he would attend to no other business until he had won the city back and made the traitors pay dearly for their disloyalty’.44 As the capital of Limousin, Limoges was of central strategic importance and an early objective of the English counterattack. It was also extremely prosperous; historians have sometimes underestimated its reputation for riches: a medieval equivalent of ‘for all the tea in China’ was ‘for all the wealth of Limoges’. One authority has estimated that the central area of the city under siege consisted of perhaps over three thousand people, including garrison and refugees.

  The siege began in mid-September 1370. The Prince took personal control of the operation, even though he was ill with disease and, says Froissart, had to be carried about on a litter. He had with him his leading nobility and just over three thousand men, split equally between cavalry, infantry and archers; but it was his miners, ‘rough labourers’, who proved the most effective component of his force. These had to operate quickly, as French forces were not far off. They quickly drove their mine to the city walls, and may even have had to fend off a subterranean attack: according to Froissart and the French source The Chronicals of the First Four Valois, the garrison commander Jean of Vinemeur ‘had a countermine made, and so it came about that the miners encountered one another and attacked each other’.45 The mine was ready within a week; when it was fired it brought a great section of wall down into the moat. The English stormed through. Froissart describes the sack that followed. The nobles and their men

  burst into the city, followed by pillagers on foot, all in a mood to wreak havoc and do murder, killing indiscriminately, for those were their orders. There were pitiful scenes. Men, women and children flung themselves on their knees before the Prince, crying: ‘Have mercy on us, gentle sir!’ But he was so inflamed with anger that he would not listen. Neither man nor woman was heeded, but all who could be found were put to the sword, including many who were in no way to blame…. Many more than 3,000 persons, men, women and children, were dragged out to have their throats cut.46

  One contingent of English troops was given instructions to make for the Bishop’s palace and seize him. He was brought before the Black Prince, who told him he would have his head cut off. The garrison commander and some of his men put up a valiant resistance before surrendering. ‘But there was no respite elsewhere,’ reports Froissart. ‘The city of Limoges was pillaged and sacked without mercy, then burnt and utterly destroyed.’47

  Limoges, together with Agincourt and chevauchées, has come to symbolize the brutality of the Hundred Years War. Yet as with so many atrocities, the extent of the slaughter has been questioned. Richard Barber has questioned the figure of 3,000; his research puts the figure at about ‘300, or one in ten of the population’, which ‘may well have been less than the number of those carrying arms in defence of the city, estimated at about 500’.48 If this lesser figure is correct it raises an interesting but uncommented on parallel with Roman practice. Legions that were deemed not to have put up a sufficient fight were decimated: every tenth man of their number was killed as a warning to stiffen resolve when fighting the enemy in future. Was Edward conscious
ly acting on this classical precedent? He may have deemed the punishment appropriate, as Limoges had surrendered quietly to the enemy. Whether the death toll was three hundred or the less likely three thousand, Edward was clearly issuing a dire warning to castles and towns in his principality which capitulated too readily. English accounts play up the carnage, Walsingham writing that the Prince ‘killed all those he found there, a few only being spared their lives and taken prisoner’, while Chandos Herald claims ‘all were killed or taken prisoner’.49

  As with Agincourt, French sources make little of the massacre, and what little there is proves contradictory. One monk states that people were slaughtered in the churches and monasteries, places sought out for refuge and sanctuary as at Béziers, and The Chronicle of the First Four Valois reports that the English ‘put many of the citizens to death’.50 But a chronicle from Limoges itself informs us that ‘all those of the city, men, women and clergy, were taken prisoner’.51 Such was Edward’s anger he had Limoges so comprehensively burnt that reconstruction was not completed until the sixteenth century. As Michael Jones has pointed out in his paper ‘War and Fourteenth-Century France’, the ‘systematic destruction of whole towns or even quartiers was relatively rare’.52 So if the fate of the inhabitants in any way matched that of their city, then the slaughter was indeed savage, and many non-combatants surely fell victim to the vengeful onslaught.

  That Edward gave orders for no quarter at Limoges and had the city destroyed has been understood by most historians and contemporaries as complying with the laws of war against rebellious cities and judged accordingly. Of the justifications from Deuteronomy this was the most clear-cut, as Limoges was a possession of the Black Prince in his own principality. By going over to the French without a fight, Limoges had committed treason. Chandos Herald judges that ‘the good city of Limoges was surrendered by treachery’.53 Froissart has Edward calling the inhabitants ‘traitors’ and, even though sympathetic to their eventual plight, writes that ‘the Bishop and chief citizens knew that they had acted wrongly and had incurred the Prince’s wrath’.54 A French chronicle makes clear the consequences: the English ‘put many of the citizens to death, because they had turned French’.55 Thus one historian has declared that condemnation of the event stemmed more from ‘political opposition than offended sensibilities. If one condemns the Black Prince, then one condemns virtually all medieval siege commanders.’56

  By the time Froissart was writing about Limoges, it is possible, argues one historian, to detect a growing anti-English bias. Yet his account is palpably both compassionate and perceptive on the strength of the writing alone. He observes of the citizens that ‘there was nothing they could do, for they were not masters in their city’, and of the English:

  I do not understand how they could have failed to take pity on people who were too unimportant to have committed treason. Yet they paid for it, and paid more dearly than the leaders who had committed it. There is no man so hard-hearted that, if he had been in Limoges on that day, and had remembered God, he would not have wept bitterly at the fearful slaughter which took place.57

  Thus, as Christopher Allmand has indicated of Limoges, it was ‘a technical treason’, but no more.58 Froissart is making the clear point that those responsible for the treason escaped lightly while the innocents were punished harshly and unfairly in a wholly unreasonable act of collective responsibility. Jean of Vinemeur and the men who surrendered while fighting after the storm were taken into honourable captivity when siege laws allowed for them to be struck down where they stood. The Bishop of Limoges did not have his head (or anything else) cut off but was moved to comfortable retirement in Avignon at the request of the Pope. It was a case of one rule for them and another rule for the others. But Deuteronomy does not provide exception clauses for class discrimination. Once again, the interpretation was made to fit the circumstances or, just as frequently, the whims of the moment. This heartless manipulation of the laws to mean whatever the victor wanted them to mean was nothing new. In his authoritative study of the law of arms and the law of treason, Matthew Strickland has astutely observed that ‘sovereigns were ostensibly bent on inflicting the death penalty on those whom they regarded as rebels, guilty of withholding their rightful possessions, even if in reality these men were only loyally defending a key fortress for their own sovereign’.59 As Michael Prestwich has accurately noted, ‘Rebellion remained a useful justification for a removal of the chivalric constraints’.60

  As already discussed in chapter two, clemency had a significant part to play in the symbolism of power politics, as Edward III displayed in the famous episode of the Burghers of Calais. The Black Prince was in no mood for such a display at Limoges and he has been condemned for his lack of pity here. John Barnie has painted a portrait of the Prince as a stern and unforgiving character, who ‘waged war with a ruthlessness which terrified his enemies as much as it gladdened his allies’.61 The Prince’s image as an icon of chivalry was built on his involvement in the victories at Crécy, Poitiers and Nájera, but his reputation was built more upon his implacable style of warmongering, as exemplified by his devastating chevauchées and his uncompromising stance at Carcassonne in 1355 where, refusing a generous pay-off from the trembling city, he razed the suburbs to the ground. The Walsingham chronicler says that Edward had repeatedly sent messengers to the citizens of Limoges to demand that the city place itself at his mercy and inform them that failure to do so would mean the destruction of the city and its inhabitants. If so, it may have been the very harshness of his reputation that persuaded them to resist, doubting the extent of this mercy. The ordinary townspeople had no real say anyway, as Edward knew; perhaps he hoped that they would rise up against the city’s leaders. Ironically the leaders who, by nature of their positions, had most to fear from submission in the form of retributive and judicial executions and hence were not inclined to savour the quality of the Prince’s mercy, were the ones who escaped most lightly.

  A number of factors in combination may explain the Prince’s severity at Limoges. The nature of the treason, his wish to inflict punishment and his style of unrestrained warfare are three, but there are others to consider also. In the most recent study of the Black Prince, David Green hints that honour was at stake: ‘The speed with which the principality fell was startling and shaming.’62 Edward had suffered a humiliating affront to both his power and his reputation, hence retaking Limoges became a matter of honour. He was not predisposed to show leniency to the source of his great humiliation. In more basic – and perhaps more realistic – terms this comes down to a form of vengeance, which may have been fuelled further still (in an aggravating factor usually overlooked) by the loss of three friends: the Bishop to treason, and Audley and Chandos to the French when fighting against the reverses of which Limoges formed part. Nor should his illness be discounted; not because, as some historians think, that it clouded his sense of chivalry, but more because it exacerbated his brutal tendencies and added to this bitterness. Also neglected is the financial angle: the renowned wealth of Limoges obtained in the form of immediate spoils – liquidated assets – would help finance the Black Prince’s campaign to reverse his losses.

  Finally, and perhaps most convincingly, it may have been a savage outlet for Edward’s deep frustration at his inability – physically and militarily – to save the situation in his disappearing principality. Thus it is hard to disagree with Michael Prestwich that the slaughter at Limoges ‘was suggestive of desperation’63 or with Richard Barber’s verdict that ‘the very destruction of the city was an admission of weakness, that he [Edward] could not hope to re-establish his authority and had to content himself with trying to overawe his restless subjects’.64 Just as chroniclers of the sack of Jerusalem reported that those who killed or not did so on a whim – ‘as the notion took them’ – so personal and petty motivations in vindictive slaughter cannot be easily discounted, even when these motivations are cloaked in the justifications of strained biblical exegesis and military r
easoning.

  CONCLUSIONS

  Sieges prompted the worst excesses of medieval warfare simply because wars centred on the taking and keeping of strongholds. Occasionally, as we shall see in the next chapter, alternative objectives were pursued, but these were very much the exceptions to the rule. Sieges had an importance beyond the immediate geopolitical and military strategies of commanders and kings because, with towns especially, the places under siege usually held concentrations of wealth and hence plunder; and, of course, they always contained people – garrisons or citizens – that could be ransomed. On the larger scale, the spoils from such places as Carcassonne in the Albigensian Crusade could help whole campaigns keep rolling with finances and provisions; on the individual scale, the booty from such places was a huge motivating factor for the common soldier to stay with an army and fight his way into defended places. The prospect of getting rich – or, in the case of the nobility, richer still – was a driving force behind knights and foot soldiers that cannot be underestimated. No one could retire early from soldiering on wages alone, but booty and ransom could transform lives. When Southampton was taken in 1216, the History of William Marshal states that ‘such was the booty taken in that town that the poor folk who wished to take advantage and had their minds on profit were all made rich’.65 In 1097 on the First Crusade, as the Battle of Dorylaeum in central Asia Minor was about to begin, Bohemond of Taranto does not put courage into his men with thoughts of winning honour or, as one might expect, spiritual rewards, but those of winning booty: ‘Stand fast together united in the faith of Christ and the victory of the Holy Cross, because today, God willing, you will all be made wealthy.’66 Recruitment to Charles the Dauphin’s army shot up in 1358 when he promised his forces the spoils of Paris.