Don’t forget the (in)famous Salic law, which would cause France all sorts of problems in the years to come. Besides, reasoned the Estates-General, women are too soft and womanly to become king. Plus they have cooties. Or, as Froissart will describe it later on in regards to one of the aforementioned problems in the year to come, “they said and maintained, that the Kingdom of France is so noble, that it ought not to go to a woman”.
Yeah, the Salic law kerfluffle is pretty amusing in its own right.
- I wanna be king ! You, lawyer guy, tell me there’s a law that says wimmin can’t inherit crowns.
- Sorry sir. Widows inherit land titles from their husband, firstborns (men or women) from their parents… We’ve been doing it this way for centuries I’m afraid.
- God’s pisspot. There oughta be a law, is all I’m saying
- Well you can’t just make a new one just for you sir, can you ?
- If I were king, I would.
- …
- Shut up. What about before for centuries ? Surely we can find some godforsaken tribe of misogynist mud dwellers who lived somewhere around these parts at some time in the past, yes ?
- It says here that in the Salian Frankish tribe, titles went to the first available male.
- Perfect ! Good old Salians. I always fancied myself a Salian. And the law was never repealed ?
- It doesn’t say. But it was in the fourth century, sir. We’ve kind of moved past that code, legal wise.
- You know what ? Fuck it. Ancient law. The decrees of Carolus Magnus himself. Sacred and most noble heritage and all that crap. Salic law is and has always been the French law. Who’s with me ?!
In practical terms, it’s pretty much equivalent to Bill Clinton dredging up a law of prima nocte* from medieval English books to argue he had the absolute and ancient right to fuck Monica Lewinski.
- yes, yes, I know, apocryphal. Never let facts get in the way of a dick joke.
This is basically correct. “Philip the Fair” meant “Philip the Good-Lookin’”, not “philip the Just in Judgments.”
Along with “Ivan the Terrible” translating better as “Ivan the Awe-Inspiring” or “Ivan the Respect Mah Authoriah Or Ah Will Kick Yahr Arse.”
The Dope is so ggggggoooooodddddd! Who would have ever thought that this topic would stir so many contributions and knowledge. You are sure keeping my attention and google-fu in practice.
Thanks to all contributors.
Oh, and I now have a crush on Mississippienne
You, Sir, have good taste. But can you make her happy? And can you inspire her enough that she will keep writing?
Yes! All hail me! All praise me!
So Philippe stuck a Roman numeral on his name after declaring that his niece Jeannette was totally ineligible to be monarch of France on the basis of her being a girl and having cooties. Things started out about as inauspicious for him as they had for his brother, Louis X. His mother-in-law, Mahaut of Artois, was accused of being an evil harpy and poisoning both the infant King Jean and bewitching Philippe V himself with potions; his wife Jeanne of Burgundy was disgraced by her association with her adulterous sisters-in-law; and to top it all off, Philippe and Jeanne’s only son, eight-month-old Louis, died two months after his father’s coronation.
I’d like to quickly touch on Philippe’s relationship with Jeanne. It’s notable that he alone of his brothers took his wife back after her part in the affair of the tour de Nesle. Jeanne claimed that she had not herself committed adultery, only covered for Marguerite and Blanche, and Philippe seems to have believed her. He was also extraordinarily generous to her financially. Some have suggested that his primary motivation was wanting to hold onto Burgundy, but I have to wonder. As the examples of his brothers showed, there were plenty of eligible princesses for the king of France and he could’ve left Jeanne to the tender mercies of her jailers or repudiated her without too much trouble – or worse 1. I think Philippe genuinely cared for her, at least enough not to leave her to rot in prison.
Weird fact: Jeanne of Burgundy was originally supposed to marry Philippe’s older brother, Louis. This plan was ditched when the match was brokered for Louis and Marguerite of Burgundy, and Jeanne was assigned the next brother in line, Philippe.
Philippe V’s first magic trick was disarming his rebellious vassals, many of whom were butthurt over his, uh, surprise takeover of the throne, or because his grandfather had stepped on their great-aunt’s shoe sixty years ago or some other crap like that. First up was Eudes IV of Burgundy, a brother of poor dead Marguerite of Burgundy, Louis X’s first wife. He was pissed about his niece Jeannette losing the French crown. Philippe’s simple yet effective method was to marry Eudes off to one of his several daughters 2. This worked so well he repeated the experiment a couple of more times.
PHILIPPE V: Here, recalcitrant vassal, marry my nubile daughter.
EUDES IV: Fuckin’ A! This is sweet!
ROBERT III OF FLANDERS: Hey, can I also have one of your daughters for my grandson? I’ll stop breaking shit if you hand her over.
PHILIPPE: Sure, no problem.
GUIGUES OF VIENNOIS: Hey, what about me? Can I have one, too?
PHILIPPE V: Why the hell not? There’s plenty to go around.
In early 1320, a strange madness fell upon the simple, plain, salt of the earth, mouth-breathing peasants of France. Inspired by what was reported to be visions of an angel, several thousand shepherds, farmers, peasant women, minor nobles, and clerics banded together and began marching across the countryside, looting, pillaging, and storming prisons. They were known as the Pastoreaux, the Shepherd’s Crusade. They reached Paris in early May, demanding that the king come and lead them to the Holy Land. Philippe V took one look at the unruly mob of grimy religious fanatics popping crazy eyes and yammering on about angels, and said, “Not no, but hell no.”
Angered, the ‘Crusaders’ stormed one of Philippe’s royal prisons before mercifully turning and marching south into Aquitaine. As they went, the pastoreaux sacked royal castles, attacked and robbed monks and clerics, and most horribly, slaughtered Jews like they were going out of season. The shepherds massacred the Jews of Saintes, Verdun on the Garonne, Cahors, Toulouse, Albi, Castelsarasin, Grenade, Auche, Rabastens, Lezat, Montguyard, and Gaillac. Philippe responded by having the pastoreaux chased into Aragon (where they quickly found King Jaime II to be more vigilant in protecting his Jews), and hanging and burning to death any he could capture. The Shepherd’s Crusade finally dissolved into smoke, leaving scorched earth and corpses in its wake.
The next year, in 1321, a new panic broke out over sensational claims that the lepers and Jews were planning to poison the Christians of France. Inevitably, this led to more massacres as the brave folk of France rose up against the one group unable to defend itself in any way: the blind, crippled, disfigured lepers. Philippe V, although he never fully turned against the Jews, was only too happy to have lepers burnt and tortured if it meant getting his hands on whatever money they might possibly have. It was about this time that Philippe was himself struck with a wasting disease in August. He lingered on, despised by his subjects for his avarice 3 until January, when he died, not quite thirty.
Ironically, his imposition of Salic law meant that his own daughters were ineligible for the throne. The last surviving Capetian of the main branch, his brother Charles, now became king.
Footnotes:
- Only a few decades earlier, Ludwig II of Bavaria beheaded his wife Marie of Brabant (an aunt of Philippe III’s second queen, Marie of Brabant) in 1256 on *suspicion *of adultery.
- Yet another Jeanne.
- According to Jean de St-Victor, in Recueil de historiens 21:674-675, some of his subjects openly cursed him and prayed for his death.
SOURCES:
Burrow, John, and Wei, Ian.* Medieval futures: attitudes to the future in the Middle Ages*, 2000.
Nirenberg, David.* Communities of violence: persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages*, 1998.
Thanks, Mississippienne. I need to review prior to further comments, but as I recall, we’re coming up on the Black Plague and the Avignon papacy, so please don’t stop here. I mean, you can stop for today, but please don’t end the thread here permanently.
Yes! It’s more addicting than a soap opera, because it’s all TRUE!
** praises MSenne **
Wonderful work! This is definitely the way history should be taught, complete with the snarky commentary. (Ex. “… on the basis of being a girl and having cooties.” Ex2. “Hell no!”)
And so it was that Charles, the third son, needed neither as heir or spare, became king of France.
Charles was a handsome (he was known as “le Bel”, like his father), straight-laced young man in his late twenties. Very early in his reign he had to deal with a hellraising Southern nobleman, Bernard-Jourdain de l’Isle, a kinsman of Pope John XXII. Bernard-Jourdain behaved like a petty king, solved all his problems with duels, hanged people left and right, waged private wars against anyone that looked at him funny, robbed priests of their wine, and once took a mace engraved with the royal fleur-de-lys from a royal serjeant and beat the man to death with it. He was arrested and condemned to death by hanging in 1323 (beheading being too good for him) and on his way to the gallows Bernard-Jourdain confessed to his many crimes, but expressed puzzlement at being punished for them because “it was war.”
Charles’ first wife, Blanche of Burgundy, if you may remember, had been imprisoned in the Chateau Gaillard for the crime of humping knights like she had a disease and the cure was penis. The ink was barely dry on their divorce decree before he married the teenaged Marie of Luxembourg, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich VII.
Charles, Marie, and Marie’s brother Johann 1 spent the winter of 1323 and the spring of 1324 traveling around southern France being merry, rocking out to awesome troubadour music, and conceiving royal heirs. It was on the way back to Paris that pregnant Queen Marie’s carriage overturned. Injured and in shock, she went into premature labor, gave birth to a short-lived son, hastily christened Louis, and then died on March 25, 1324.
Charles was left queenless and heirless. He and his first wife Blanche had had three children – one unnamed, buried at the abbey of Pont-aux-Dames, and a son, Philippe, and a daughter, Jeanne. But Jeanne died in 1320, followed by Philippe before March 1322. In his quest for a new wife, Charles shook the family tree and out fell a cousin, Jeanne of Evreux, daughter of his half-uncle Louis of Evreux.
His homie Pope John XXII gave Charles a dispensation saying it was all good for him to bonk his cousin, and so Charles and Jeanne walked down the aisle. Their coronation in 1326 was so extravagant that payments were still being made on it by Charles’ successor, Philippe VI, in 1329. Over 400 royal and titled guests squeezed into the Sainte Chapelle of Paris. Jeanne of Evreux wore a wedding dress made of vermilion velvet and her crown was so blingin’ that it was still being used in royal coronations up to the seventeenth century.
But even as Charles settled into married life with his wife/cousin, his sister Isabella’s marriage to King Edward II of England was falling apart. I’d like to pause here and address some misconceptions about Isabella and Edward. First of all, Edward and Isabella actually had what was considered a successful and happy marriage until Hugh le Despenser arrived on the scene. There’s no indication that Edward was a neglectful or cruel husband, so please banish this image of Isabella as the Braveheart princess quietly enduring her flaming queer husband’s affairs. That being said, it should be acknowledged that when Hugh le Despenser attached himself to Edward like a parasite, that Isabella seems to have feared for her life, as all right-thinking people did when they got in Despenser’s way, or had something Despenser wanted, or sometimes just if he happened to be nearby and in a bad mood.
Hugh le Despenser was a mean little snake. He had actually been a loyal crony of his maternal uncle, Guy de Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick, one of the barons who captured and executed Piers Gaveston, Edward II’s favorite, in 1312. The barons then made Hugh a chamberlain, basically so he could keep an eye on Edward II for them, and by this they inadvertantly allowed a much more vicious and dangerous creature to get his claws into Edward II. Despenser worked his black magic, probably sacrificing many virgins in the process, and soon had Edward II so enraptured that the guy couldn’t see straight. Despenser proved so nasty that the barons forced him out in 1321; he played pirate in the English Channel for awhile before Edward was able to recall him.
One victim of Despenser’s tyranny was Roger Mortimer. Despenser hated him, but that was just genetic memory – Roger’s grandfather, inevitably named Roger Mortimer, had killed Despenser’s grandfather, named (yep) Hugh le Despenser, at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. Interestingly, Roger had been an old friend of Edward and Piers Gaveston from way back in the day. He had to have felt awfully betrayed when Edward shacked up with Hugh le Despenser, especially when Darth Hugh had Roger’s family captured and Roger himself imprisoned and scheduled for execution, and Edward did fuck-all to stop him. After a daring escape from the Tower of London, Roger Mortimer made his way to France and hid out at Charles IV’s court.
After a few years of this Isabella had reached her breaking point. She convinced Edward to send her to France to negotiate with her brother Charles over Gascony. Despenser, seeing an opportunity to get Isabella out of the way for awhile, said, “Sure, that sounds like a great idea,” and allowed Edward II to nod his consent before ramming his head back down into his crotch.
Isabella arrived in France and joyfully reunited with her brother Charles IV. Froissart tells us of the sweet scene of them meeting again; Charles “kissed her and said ‘Welcome, my fair sister!’” Isabella “tried to kneel down two or three times at his feet, but the king would not allow her…”
It was at the French court that Isabella reconnected with Roger Mortimer, who she surely knew already through Edward but probably hadn’t seen in a long time. Roger Mortimer by this time was a ruined, desperate man, hungry for revenge. He and Isabella had a common enemy in Roger Mortimer, and resentment towards Edward II, the friend of one and husband to the other, who had failed to protect either. Did they love each other? Maybe, but they also served each other’s purposes. Together, they would create a war machine. Together, they would be revenged on Hugh le Despenser. Together, they would be as tyrannical as Despenser and all his ilk.
The scandal of their affair exploded. Despenser tried to bribe French courtiers with barrels of silver to assassinate Isabella and Roger. Edward II demanded that Charles return his wife to him, but Charles refused, stating that Isabella was his sister and he would not expel her. She and Roger departed the French court to raise a military force and invade England. Charles was pleased at the anarchy in England; it meant milder days for France.
The burning ambition of Charles IV’s life was to become Holy Roman Emperor. Had he the time, after he achieved that goal he probably planned to be crowned Byzantine emperor, Grand Poombah of India, Second Coming of the Messiah, and the Lizard King. His chief rival for the position of HRE was Ludwig of Bavaria, so he got the Pope John XXII (born Jacques Duèze to a French shoemaker) to excommunicate Ludwig. Ludwig gave them both a big middle finger and responded by invading Italy, marching into Rome, crowning himself emperor, and installing his own goddamn pope, anti-pope Nicholas V 2.
Jeanne, meantime, gave birth to two daughters, one of whom died young. The second, Marie, would survive to 1341. Jeanne was pregnant again when Charles IV died on February 1, 1318. A regency was established under Charles’ cousin, Philippe of Valois, in ancipation of a son’s birth. Jeanne gave birth to another daughter, Blanche, and so ended the senior line of the Capetians. The throne now descended to the Valois, although that was contested by Edward III of England (son of Isabella and Edward II), and so would begin the Hundred Year’s War.
Dark days were ahead. But let’s close our book here, with the death of Charles IV, the last of the senior line of Capetians. R.I.P.
Footnotes:
- Better known as John the Blind, later king of Bohemia, who is best known for dying in battle against the English at the Battle of Crecy, fighting bravely despite having been totally blind for a decade.
- In 1329, Nicholas V presided over a bizarre mock trial of Pope John XXII, in which a straw puppet of John XXII was dressed in pontifical regalia, condemned, and ‘executed’.
SOURCES:
Kaeuper, Richard. Chivalry and violence in medieval Europe, 1999.
Lord, Carla. “Queen Isabella at the court of France”, Fourteenth century England, Volume 2, ed. Nigel Saul & Chris Given-Wilson, 2002.
Williams, George. Papal Genealogy: The Families And Descendants Of The Popes, 2004.
You know, if you taught it this way in high school, you would have to pry the kids out of class with a crowbar…
But if you turn it into rap, I’ll have to come kill you.
Thanks again, Mississippienne!
I truly enjoyed this entire series. What’s next??!!
If you start a new history thread please post and link to it here. I would hate to miss it.
Thank you so much!
“Into the Valois of Death”?
Win!
Rap? I am so white I am almost transparent …
Thanks everyone for the good vibes! I hope y’all will stick around for my next series, As The Komnenoi World Turns, all about the absolutely Shakespearean drama of the fall of the Komnenoi and Angeloi dynasties of Byzantium. I hope to have the first episode up soon!