Hundred Years War
The Hundred Years' War (French: Guerre de Cent Ans; English: Hundred Years' War) was an armed conflict between the kingdoms of France and England that lasted 116 years, from May 24, 1337 to October 19, 1453. The conflict was feudal in origin, as its purpose was to decide who would control the additional lands that English monarchs had accumulated since 1154 in French territories, after the accession to the English throne of Henry II Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. The war finally ended with the defeat of England and the consequent withdrawal of English troops from French lands (except for the city of Calais).
Origin of name
At the end of the XIV century, contemporaries perceived the exceptional duration of the conflict, but the name by which it was You know, the Hundred Years War, arose much later, in the 19th century. The medievalist Philippe Contamine searched for the first occurrences of the expression: it appeared for the first time in the work Tableau chronologique de l'Histoire du Moyen Âge (Chronological Table of the History of the Middle Ages ) by Chrysanthe Des Michels, published in Paris in 1823. The first textbook to use it was that of M. Boreau, which was published in 1839 under the title L'Histoire de France à l'usage des classes. The first work to use the expression in its title was Théodore Bachelet's La guerre de Cent Ans of 1852.
Fighting sides
Kingdom of France
The kingdom of France at the beginning of the XIV century enjoyed a flourishing agriculture, thanks to the abundant rivers that ran through its territory and its favorable climate for this activity; At that time, it had a population of between sixteen and seventeen million inhabitants, which made it the most populous country in Europe. Both the countryside and the cities showed clear signs of prosperity compared to France in the XI and XII, largely due to the relative peace the kingdom had enjoyed during the XIII and the first part of XIV. The increase in population it had been general throughout Europe, but especially intense in France. The household census of 1328, which included about three-quarters of the population, allows us to know approximately the situation of the kingdom at that time. This had 2,469,987 homes, which was equivalent to some twelve million inhabitants framed in 32,500 parishes. Paris alone had between eighty and two hundred thousand inhabitants, according to the census or 1328, Amiens, between twenty and thirty thousand and Rouen, about seventy thousand by mid-century. The urban population density was greater than in England, the Iberian Peninsula or central Germany. the population determined the felling of a large part of the country's forests to extend the glebas, which were exploited through a very hierarchical feudal system. The increase in agricultural production and the great development of hydraulic energy made it possible to feed the population (famines stopped in the XII century). The growth in the use of iron, the application of new work techniques and the substitution of the ox for the horse as a draft animal allowed cultivating lands that were not very fertile or difficult to access, whose crops allowed feeding a population already dense. Some of this unproductive land was later abandoned in the war and no longer cultivated. The situation of the peasantry had improved, although they were still subjected in many cases to heavy obligations towards the nobility, obligations that were more troublesome than The appearance of the countryside was similar to that of France in the 19th century before the start of mechanization, with small rate changes of crops. The defense of the land remained an essential task of the nobility.
To the strength of the countryside was added that of the only industry in medieval Western Europe: textiles, dominated by the Flemish cities (first Arras, then Douai and later Ypres, Ghent and Bruges, Lille and Tournai), by then part of France, to which other places (Ruan, Amiens, Troyes or Paris) were added. Flemish producers used to sell their rich cloth to Italian merchants at the Champagne fairs, in exchange mainly for luxury products from Muslim countries (spices, silk, leather, jewelry...), although these were in decline at the end of the 13th century Other fairs in various parts of the kingdom also flourished before the start of the war.
The kingdom was not only impressive for its large population, but also for its size: at the time of the advent of Philip VI of Valois, France stretched from north to south of the Scheldt to the Pyrenees, and from west to east of the Atlantic Ocean to the Rhône, the Saône and the Meuse. It took twenty-two days to cross the country from north to south and sixteen to do it from east to west, according to Gilles Le Bouvier in the XV. In total, the kingdom covered some 424,000 km². It had some sixty regions, very different in language, culture, history and even, in some moments, religion (an example of this had been the southern Cathars). In the north of the kingdom, lengua de oïl was used. the bailiwicks of Senlis and Valois, although the average was 7.9) made it clearly different from the southern part of the kingdom. In the south, on the contrary, the language of Oc or Occitan was spoken, and the culture of the region was influenced by the ancient Roman presence. The area was poorer in agriculture than the north, but richer in livestock, and had a lower population density than the north (about four homes per square kilometer in the counties of Bigorre and Béarn, for example). It was a more autonomous area with respect to royal power, which in the region was exercised by some powerful vassals whose opinions the sovereign had to count on. This did not prevent the monarch from meddling in the internal affairs of his vassals, since his powers had grown since the XII century . It was by then the top of the feudal pyramidal system to which the lower levels owed allegiance.
The clergy played a major role in the social organization of the time. The clergy knew how to read and write and were the ones who administered the institutions; they managed charity works and schools. Religious festivals made one hundred and forty days a year non-working days. Also from the religious point of view there were differences between the north and the south: in this the Carolingian renaissance and the religious orders They had had less weight and some sciences such as medicine stood out more than philosophy and theology, unlike in the north. Two cities embodied this contrast: Paris and Montpellier; The former had one of the most respected universities in the Christian world in terms of theological studies, while the latter had one of the most prestigious medical schools in Western Europe, attended by even students from the Near East and North Africa.
The nobility combined wealth, power and gallantry on the battlefield: they lived off peasant labor, which they had to compensate with their bravery in war and loyalty. The Church had tried to put an end to knights given over to banditry since the late X century: as early as the Council of Charroux in 989, warriors had been asked to give themselves up to the service of the poor and of the Church and were milites Christi («soldiers of Christ») From the 13th century, the king had managed to get it recognized that his power, based on divine right, empowered him to create nobles. protect the people and deliver justice, in exchange for which he enjoyed a privileged material situation. Her social situation had to justify her on the battlefield, where she had to defeat the enemy in heroic combat. The royal army was structured around the cavalry, which was the most powerful in Europe at the time; it was a heavy cavalry that attacked frontally and fought in single combat with the enemy. Added to the desire to stand out on the battlefields was the custom of taking captives, who were later released in exchange for a ransom, which made wars lucrative business for good warriors, while the possibility of receiving a ransom made capturing enemies more interesting than killing them. In reality, and despite the claim of the knights to have a monopoly on weapons, the reality was very different and the style of chivalrous combat was increasingly unsuited to actual warfare.
The Capetian kings had tried to consolidate their power against the great nobility and the papacy by relying on the common people, through the creation of towns, the granting of charters and the meeting of the General Estates of France. The social balance it depended on the acceptance of a strong royal power by the common people that would compensate for the arbitrariness of the feudal lords, and on an increasingly centralized administration that would improve their living conditions. This system was entering a crisis on the eve of the start of the Hundred Years War, as the population growth since the X span> was leading to overpopulation in the countryside and calls for greater autonomy in the cities. Plot sizes dwindled, farm prices fell, and nobility revenues dwindled; The reduction in the income of the nobles made them try to excel in combat to obtain favors with which to increase income.
In three centuries, the Capetian kings managed to consolidate their authority and expand their lands at the expense of the Plantagenets. The royal lands covered almost half the kingdom, the infantados in the hands of the king's relatives were large, and of the former great fiefs at the beginning of the century XIV only four remained, at the ends of the kingdom: the county of Flanders and the duchies of Burgundy, Guyenne and Brittany. The prestige of the French monarchy was immense and in the time of Philip IV the alliances of the kingdom extended to Russia. He also had the support of the papacy at least since the election, precisely in Lyon, a French city, of Pope John XXII, former bishop of Avignon who established his residence there and who clearly favored Felipe VI so much politically as well as economically. He was the second in a long series of French popes. However, despite the confiscations of lands from successive English sovereigns by Philip II, Louis IX and Philip IV, they had retained the duchy of the Guyenne and the peq own County of Ponthieu, which made them vassals of the King of France.
Royal authority spanned the kingdom thanks to a relatively specialized Public Administration. Two aspects were, however, weak in the event that the kingdom waged war: the scarcity of the king's income, which even in times of peace barely covered ordinary expenses and depended essentially on the lands it administered directly, and the lack of a good army. of subsidies) that were obtained haphazardly, with notable reluctance from the taxpayers, and required the granting of extensive concessions and promises by the sovereign. The kingdom lacked a system for procuring the copious means necessary to wage a long war. The king did not have a regular army either: he depended on the arms service owed to him by his vassals, which was limited in space and time and it was not suitable for long-term disputes. From Philip IV, the king had the right to levy, in which all free men between the ages of fifteen and sixty had to participate, both nobles and peasants, regardless of their wealth, in case the kingdom was invaded. This new royal power meant that around 1340 Felipe VI could count on some thirty thousand men-at-arms and as many pawns. These were huge numbers for the time and the cost of assembling such an army was very high, but it had an added drawback: it was a heterogeneous and undisciplined army.
Kingdom of England
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The kingdom of England had a much smaller population than France: four million inhabitants; was then suffering from the so-called European «Little Ice Age», which had begun in the XIII century and ended with some products kingdom's agricultural crops, such as wine, which had previously been produced in the south and was from then on only made in Guyenne. Its extent was also smaller than that of the French kingdom, even with Wales, which it had just completely conquered. Edward I of England. It only had one large city: London, with about forty thousand inhabitants around 1340; York and Bristol barely numbered 10,000. The rest of the main towns were merely large towns, generally independent of the nobility having bought the exemption from services.
The peasantry in general enjoyed a position as good as that of France and there was even a group of free peasants under seigneurial tutelage. The country had to specialize its economy and promote trade, which at the beginning of the century XIII remained mainly in the hands of foreign merchants (Flemish, German and northern French). The rainy climate and abundant pastures favored the development of livestock, especially sheep, which in turn increased the production of wool that favored the textile industry (the wool of English sheep is especially fine and of high quality and is easily spun). strength of trade and cities, whose inhabitants needed freedom to set up businesses and limited taxation (much of the state income came from taxes on wool) For their part, the landowners (barons and clergy) were opposed to the increase in taxes, destined to finance the war against Felipe Augusto, especially when this, as was the case during the reign of Juan sin Tierra, resulted in a series of defeats and territorial losses. John had to grant Magna Carta in 1215 which gave Parliament some fiscal control.
Trade made England highly dependent on Guyenne, where a large part and the best English wine was produced, from Flanders, whose clothiers bought English wool, and from Brittany, the source of salt essential for food preservation There was also another large city: Bordeaux, which must have had between twenty and thirty thousand inhabitants. From Guyenne, large canned squadrons with merchandise for Great Britain left on certain fixed dates, sometimes gathering up to two hundred ships. Trade links between Guyenne and Great Britain were close and ancient. Guyenne had almost no wool and grain and had specialized in the production of wine, dyes (indigo) and iron, all of which were imported by Great Britain from the province. mainland, to which it sold cloth and food. Guyenne was the second largest destination for English textile exports, after Germany.
The unity of the kingdom was, however, greater than that of France. Great principalities had not arisen as in the neighboring kingdom and the temporary weakness that the Crown had suffered from Richard I to Henry III had vanished during the subsequent reign of Eduardo I. The rights and possessions of the Crown were clear from the time of this last king, justice was well organized and the local Administration, very different from that of France, counted on the participation of the population, which gave cohesion and strength to the kingdom. The imposition of new taxes depended on the approval of the subjects, whose representation was growing in the embryonic Parliament, which precisely at the beginning of the Hundred Years War acquired its final form of two Chambers: the Upper, which brought together the bishops and great feudal lords, and the Lower, which brought together the knights and the attorneys of the cities and boroughs. As in the case of France, the king of England did not count either. It had the means to fight a long war, it depended on parliamentary approval to impose new taxes and resorted, as Edward I had already done in his campaigns, to various sources of income, from loans - from the "Lombard" bankers, who dominated in return trade in silver—to the contribution or even confiscation of wool.
For two centuries the suzerainty of western France, from the duchy of Aquitaine to the rich and powerful county of Flanders, had spawned conflicts and intrigues between the rival Capetian and Plantagenet dynasties. The dispute had begun in the middle of the XII century and by then the Plantagenet had a wide advantage over their opponents, as they dominated Anjou, Normandy, Maine, Poitou, Aquitaine and Limousin; these territories were confiscated by the King of France during the early part of the 13th century. The vast Plantagenêt empire was reduced to a part of Aquitaine: the Gascon coast with Bordeaux, Guyenne, by virtue of the peace of Paris in 1259. This peace, which was to have put an end to the long disagreements between Plantagenêt and Capet, was the source of subsequent conflicts due to the different interpretation of the situation in the region by the two Crowns: one more king's fief for the French and a quasi-independent territory for the English, which relied on both the loyalty of the population as with close economic ties to it. The long war was a reflection of English interests in France and the continuation of earlier conflicts between the Plantagenets and Capetians that had begun in the mid-century XII. The English kings enjoyed notable support on the continent for their territorial and dynastic claims, among which that of Bordeaux stood out.
The English privileged classes spoke Anglo-Norman, essentially Old Norman with influences from the Angevin dialect, in Plantagenet times and, to a much lesser extent, Anglo-Saxon; this continued until the 1361 decree of Edward III. The common people, for their part, continued to use Anglo-Saxon. The war with France accelerated the governmental adoption of English, which began to be used normally in parliamentary sessions in 1362 and by 1413 was considered the language of the court. French began to be considered the language of the enemy.
Military service was dependent on income and divided men from sixteen to sixty into groups with different weapons depending on their income. Those who did not wish to participate in the expeditions to the mainland could do so by paying a certain amount of money. Royal commissars roamed the kingdom to complete the army with the recruits they considered the best. The main change in the feudal armies of the 1310s-1330s was the reduction in the ratio of knights, especially heavy cavalry, to other combatants. The main cause was the decrease in the number of landowners who could afford the expensive knight's equipment. For this reason, the number of recruits from less affluent social classes was increased, who were armed with less cost; these formed the infantry, which included archers and crossbowmen. Each parish had to provide a certain number of men, trained and equipped, who were only paid one soldier if they had to fight abroad; the king could require any landowner with an income of more than forty pounds sterling to come to serve in the military and, as in France, he had the power to mobilize the entire population. The infantry was essentially fed by men with incomes of less than fifteen pounds, who served as archers or armed with swords. The peons came from the upper layers of the peasantry, since they had to equip themselves and also provide the pony they used to move: it was a mounted infantry, very mobile. The light cavalry was also generally made up of landowners; its members wore leather breastplates, a helmet and iron gauntlets, sword, dagger and spear. The horse archers also used to be landlords, they carried a long bow, two meters long, very effective and deadly in the battles of the Hundred Years War. They used to be placed in tight ranks on the flanks of the army, protected by palisades of stakes, carts or other obstacles; they were capable of firing six arrows per minute, which often decimated enemy cavalry. Between 1320 and 1330 these groups of archers replaced the crossbowmen, who also fought on foot, but could only fire one bolt for every three arrows the archer shot. The other social classes provided the bulk of foot archers, spearmen and swordsmen. The English army was better prepared for defense than for attack.
As for the fleets, they were necessary both for fighting at sea and for transporting soldiers to France. The king had the right to require shipowners to use their ships for military use, without paying for it. the embarked soldiers, who used to be equal in number to the sailors, were generally paid volunteers, the sailors participated in the operations obliged by the royal right to claim their service. The king had his own ships and the obligation to serve others, but most of those who served in the French war were requisitioned merchantmen for operations. Foreign ships were also used, hired for special operations, such as moving large armies to the Continent.
Origins of the conflict
The rivalry between France and England stemmed from the Battle of Hastings (1066), when Duke William of Normandy's victory allowed him to take over England. Now the Normans were kings of a great nation and they would demand that the French king be treated as such, but the point of view of France was not the same: the duchy of Normandy had always been a vassal, and the fact that the Normans had risen to the The throne of England did not have to change the duchy's traditional submission to the crown of Paris.
Cultural, demographic, economic and social causes of the conflict
Medieval European economic progress came to a halt at the beginning of the XIV century. Technical advances and clearing of forests allowed the population to grow since the X century in western Europe, but in some regions production was no longer enough to feed their populations from the end of the XIII century. The division of the plots led to smallholdings: the average area of the estates decreased by two thirds between 1240 and 1310. Some regions such as Flanders were overpopulated, especially due to the low food productivity; in this case, they tried to win arable land to the sea, while a commercial economy developed that allowed food not produced there to be imported. In 1,279 English peasants, 46% had less than five hectares of land, which was considered the minimum area to feed a family of five members. The situation was very similar in France: in Garges, a town near Paris, in 1311 two thirds of the inhabitants had less than thirty-four areas, including the floor plan of the house, which occupied almost twenty. In this situation, any natural catastrophe could ruin families. The rural population became impoverished, the price of agricultural products dwindled and the income of the nobility decreased, while the tax burden grew, which fueled tension among the agricultural population.
Many peasants sought seasonal jobs in the cities, for miserable wages, which in turn led to tensions in urban areas. The Little Ice Age also damaged crops which, given population pressure, caused famines the likes of which had not been seen since the 12th century in northern Europe in 1314, 1315 and 1316: Ypres lost 10% of the population and Bruges 5% in 1316.. The growth of cities exacerbated the lack of food; the supply depended on trade. On the other hand, consumers who had become accustomed to a higher standard of living than before due to the general prosperity, demanded more varied and abundant food; the nobility became accustomed to the consumption of wine and all social classes became accustomed to a more varied and rich companagium (food that accompanied bread). The enrichment of society and the new demands for more expensive made peasants diversify agricultural production. Vineyards grew with the demand for wine, especially in the north and east of France. The English sovereigns, who only had Guyenne left in France, also increased the cultivation of this plant in the duchy, while the Dukes of Burgundy favored the production and export of Beaune wines. But the diversification of production also had a deleterious effect: it reduced the production of agricultural commodities.
The inability of the State to impose taxes in the face of the opposition of the territorial assemblies and to obtain credits made it use the change in the currency law to balance the budget, which meant reducing the state debt in exchange for devaluing the currency The Crown applied devaluations on various occasions during the war with England: 1318-1329, 1337-1343, 1346-1360, 1418-1423 and 1426-1429; the English currency, on the other hand, remained quite stable. The penultimate devaluation was very intense: the Dauphin Charles increased the value of the currency by three thousand five hundred percent. the landowners, fixed by contract. The war was presented as a means for the nobility to compensate for the decrease in their income: the collection of ransoms of captives, pillage and the increase in taxes with the justification of paying for the war supposed additional income. This made the nobility in general and the English in particular, more affected by the decline in income obtained from the peasants, adopt a warmongering attitude. For his part, a conflict also seemed to the French King Felipe VI a good means to improve the situation of the treasury, since it allowed the collection of extraordinary taxes.
French and English cultural and economic influence areas
The modernization of the legal system that had begun in the reign of Louis IX attracted numerous neighboring territories into the French cultural orbit. The influence was due both to linguistic closeness and to the weakness of the emperors who succeeded Frederick II Hohenstaufen in the second half of the XIIIth century and the munificence of the French kings, willing to grant pensions to certain neighboring lords of the empire. In the neighboring Holy Roman Empire, the cities of Dauphiné or the county of Burgundy resorted to the French royal justice to resolve disputes; thus, the king sent the ball of Mâcon to Lyon to settle certain differences and the seneschal of Beaucaire to Vivier and Valence on similar missions. French kings attracted the nobility of these regions by granting them rents and linking them to the kingdom through skillful marriages. The homage that the counts of Savoy paid to the King of France in exchange for the granting of pensions, the heroic death in Crécy of the King of Bohemia Juan de Luxemburg, father-in-law of Juan the Good, and the sale of Dauphiné to the grandson of Felipe VI by Count Umberto II, ruined for being unable to collect taxes and without heirs after the death of his only son are paradigms of this phenomenon. On the contrary, English kings had a problem being vassals of sovereigns French by virtue of their possession of Guyenne, since any disagreement with them was settled in Paris and, therefore, generally against them.
Economic growth caused certain regions to become dependent on some of the two kingdoms. At that time the main way of transporting goods was the fluvial or maritime. The County of Champagne and Burgundy supplied Paris by the Seine and its tributaries and were therefore pro-French. Normandy was divided, as it was the edge of the Parisian economic region and the one bordering the English Channel, an increasingly important commercial area thanks to the naval technical improvements that allowed Italian ships to circumnavigate the Iberian Peninsula with increasing ease.. The Duchy of Aquitaine, which exported wine to England, Brittany, which exported salt, and Flanders, which imported English wool, were consequently in the zone of English influence.
The Flemings, who wanted to get rid of the French tax burden, rebelled several times against the King of France, which led to a series of battles: Courtrai (1302), Mons-en-Pévèle (1304) and Cassel (1328). They collaborated with the King of England and in 1340 recognized Edward III as the legitimate King of France.
Both France and England sought to expand their territories to increase tax revenue and improve the state of their treasuries. The intrigues of the corresponding monarchs to gain control of Guyenne, Brittany and Flanders sparked the long war between the two kingdoms, which lasted one hundred and sixteen years.
The dynastic question
The dynastic problem that arose in 1328 actually originated a decade earlier: Louis X of France died in 1316, just eighteen months after his father Philip the Fair; his death marked the end of the long so-called age of "Capean miracle", which had lasted from 987 to 1316 and during which successive kings had always had a male child to whom they would inherit the kingdom. State management during his father's lifetime had given great stability to French politics for three centuries. Tradition had established the succession of the Capetians to the throne, from male to male, although there was no defined system of succession. The kings they had not legally defined the system of transmission of the crown nor were there precedents for kings who only left daughters to succeed them. On the contrary, Louis X had only one daughter with his first wife, Margaret a from Burgundy, convicted of infidelity: Juana de Navarra.The king was deceased, his second wife had had a son (November 13, 1316): Juan the Posthumous, who barely survived childbirth four days.
For the first time, the heir to the French crown was a woman, Juana de Navarra. The decision that was made then served as a precedent for the later one in 1328: the infidelity of Queen Margarita served as a mere pretext to deprive Juana of the right of succession and hand over the throne to the brother of the deceased Luis, Felipe V, who had been regent during the pregnancy of his sister-in-law and carried out a coup that, despite the protest of some nobles, was approved by an assembly of barons, bourgeois and professors from the University of Paris. The usurpation and the break with tradition The feudal power that would have made Joan queen displeased powerful lords of the kingdom, who were absent from Philip's coronation at Reims (January 9, 1317), but not enough to encourage them to take up arms against him; Little by little, Felipe managed to silence his adversaries.In reality, the choice of Felipe and the abandonment of her niece were due to the fear that she would end up marrying a foreigner who could end up seizing power in the kingdom. The Capetians had increased their possessions by making those of their dead vassals without male heirs pass to the Crown. Felipe IV had precisely included a "masculinity clause" shortly before he died, which meant that the infantry of Poitou could return to the Crown in the event that his lord did not have a male heir. It was not the Salic law that was applied to choose the new king; this appeared as a justification thirty years later, around 1350, in the work of a Benedictine friar from the Saint-Denis abbey who wrote the official chronicle of the kingdom and who mentioned it as a justification for the advent of Philip V, in the midst of the propaganda struggle which he was then waging with Edward III of England. The law dated from Frankish times and excluded women from the "salt land", an adjective that comes from the river Sala, the modern IJssel in the Netherlands, a place settlement of the Salian Franks. It was recovered and used as a weighty argument in favor of the king's legitimacy in the disputes of the time, although the female inheritance of fiefs had been applied without problems for some time. of the Crown that made it elective in the style of the imperial or papal actually broke with the feudal tradition that allowed female inheritance and caused great scandal.
Philip V reigned for a short time and also died without a male heir, so his younger brother, the youngest of the family, Carlos IV, inherited the throne, taking advantage of the precedent set by Philip in 1316; he was crowned in 1322. He had been one of the staunchest defenders of his niece Juana, but this time he removed not only Juana from the throne, but also the daughters of her recently deceased brother Felipe. His transfer of power aroused no complaints. His reign was also brief, six years, and before he died, since his third wife was pregnant, he commissioned the nobility to make his son king if he turned out to be a boy and to choose the new sovereign for herself if she was a woman. The newborn turned out to be a woman, so she was removed from the succession.
Carlos, the third son of Felipe el Hermoso who had attached the French crown, also died without leaving a male heir on February 1, 1328, leaving the succession situation as follows: Isabella of France, last daughter of Felipe el Hermoso, had a son, Edward III, King of England and French feudal lord as Duke of Guyenne and Count of Ponthieu, who ran for the title, despite the fact that the precedents of recent years made it unclear whether the rights that the mother could not exercise could pass to the son; another applicant was a first cousin of the last three kings, Felipe de Évreux, king of Navarre and husband in addition to Juana, the daughter of Louis X who was rejected in 1316; the nobility, however, preferred Philip VI of Valois, another cousin of the last three kings. He was the son of Charles of Valois, younger brother of Philip the Fair and therefore heir through the male line of the Capetians, although in a less direct way than Eduardo. The three pretenders had firm rights to the throne, but the first two had the disadvantage of being much younger than the third, who was also a native of the kingdom and already held the regency. The peers of France refused to hand over the crown to a foreign king, following the same criteria that they had already used ten years before, or perhaps they feared that if they chose Edward, the government would remain in the hands of his intriguing mother, hated in France. and that at that time that of England dominated; Edward was, in addition, a Plantagenet, and therefore suspected of being a rebellious vassal and prone to conflict with the Crown. Philip, who had first been made regent by the nobles, was recognized as king after birth. of Charles's posthumous daughter on 1 April. The election aroused no complaints in France: the new king had some experience, enjoyed the support of the nobility, and was known to the court. The coronation took place on 29 May. Philip compensated Joan of Évreux with the kingdom of Navarre, whose crown had been held by the three French kings who had preceded him, although he kept for himself Champagne, which had the same origin and in exchange ceded the counties of Angoulême and Mortain —of lower value— and certain rents; In fact, given that both in Navarre and in Champagne, the inheritance of a woman was something firmly established, the two territories should have passed to Juana. This was then a minor, but when she reached the majority in 1336, she endorsed the agreement made on his behalf years ago.
Edward III paid homage to Philip, although with notable reluctance and delay, after various pressures, for his duchy of Guyenne and for Ponthieu, after he was threatened with a new confiscation of the duchy. King of England had recognized himself as a vassal of Felipe VI in June 1329 and had even made concessions in Guyenne, while reserving the right to claim the territories arbitrarily confiscated by the French monarchs. Philip did not meddle in the Anglo-Scottish conflict, but that was not the case. Felipe confirmed French aid to David Bruce. Faced with this attitude, Edward III once again proclaimed his rights to the French crown, which served as a pretext to unleash the war against Felipe. In reality, the dynastic dispute was a secondary reason for the contention until the times of Henry V of England, a mere argument by Edward III to reinforce his position, since the real objective was not the crown of France, but sovereignty over certain French territories.
The dispute over Guyenne: the problem of sovereignty
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The dispute over Guyenne had a more relevant role than the dynastic issue as a trigger for the war. The region was a notable problem for the kings of England and France: the former was a vassal of the latter by virtue of possession of this territory, in principle of French sovereignty. This allowed, in theory, to appeal against a decision given in the region before the court in Paris and not in London, something that the vassals of the duchy did when they received rulings with which they they were not satisfied and that the agents of the king of France encouraged. This allowed the French king to annul the legal decisions that his English counterpart made in Aquitaine, something totally unacceptable for the English, who sought to administer the territory without French interference. The sovereignty of the territory remained in dispute between the two Crowns for several generations and was the main reason for the war.
The first French confiscation of the territory from the English king occurred as early as 1294, when Philip IV seized it temporarily from Edward I, to whom it was returned in 1297. Philip VI's father had occupied an English bastide in 1323 in Saint-Sardos during an expedition undertaken by order of the then King Charles IV; the place was in the middle of the duchy of Guyenne, which had aroused unsuccessful but vehement complaints and resources from Edward II of England and the feudal lord of the area, Raymond-Bernard de Montpezat. The latter decided to take up arms on October 16 of that year, while the French sovereign's attorney was in Saint-Sardos to sign an alliance. He appeared at the head of his hosts and reinforced by English soldiers before the castle, which he attacked, and razed the annexed town. He put the garrison to arms and hanged the representative of Charles IV.The attack served as a pretext for the Parisian Parliament to confiscate the duchy of Guyenne in July 1324, arguing that his lord had not paid due homage to the king. The French monarch then easily invaded almost all of Aquitaine, as had happened the previous time, although he reluctantly returned it in May 1325, at the request of Pope John XXII and his own sister, Queen of England. Edward II he had had to compromise to get the dukedom back to him: he had had to send his son, the future Edward III, to pay homage and despite this Charles intended to amputate the Agenais and the Bazadais from the restored Guyenne. The evacuation of the duchy had been delayed first by English dynastic problems and then by the non-payment of the amounts agreed upon both for the change of lord of the duchy and the war indemnity. The two temporary confiscations had served to subdue obedience to a vassal considered by the French court too autonomous, but the ease of the conquest gave the mistaken impression that the gesture could be repeated when necessary.
The situation seemed to ease in 1327 with the accession to the English throne of Edward III, who recovered the dukedom in exchange for promising to pay war compensation. The French nevertheless resisted returning the seized lands, in order to force to the new English king to pay homage, which he agreed to do on June 6, 1329. Felipe VI stated during the ceremony that the act of vassalage did not include the lands separated from the duchy by Charles IV (especially the Agenais). Eduardo, for his part, considered that the tribute lawsuit did not deprive him of claiming the lost lands, as he did in the following years. By then, Guyenne had been reduced to a coastal strip where the French royal agents they did not stop acting.
Edward found himself in a weak position during the early years of his reign, until a conspiracy of disgruntled barons enabled him in November 1330 to execute Mortimer, banish his mother to a remote castle, and seize power. This forced him to maintain a conciliatory attitude with Felipe VI, to whom on March 9, 1331 he confirmed that the homage he had paid for his French possessions was legitimate. The two kings met secretly a few weeks later to resolve the pending problems (drawing of the borders of Guyenne, treatment of the exiled nobles for remaining faithful to Eduardo during the confiscation of the duchy, fixing of possible war indemnities...), which were not resolved despite the long negotiations that followed.
The peripheral fronts
Scotland
England had to face the Second Scottish War of Independence, fought between 1332 and 1357. Wars between the two neighboring kingdoms had been continuous since the end of the century XIII. The neighboring kingdom had been subjected to vassalage in 1296, taking advantage of the death without male heirs of Alexander III, through marriage. Scotland was linked to France by the "old alliance » from October 23, 1295 and Robert the Bruce crushed the English cavalry at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), far superior in number to the hosts of the Scotsman, at the head of an army of dismounted men-at-arms protected from the charges pikemen. The English copied this combat system: they decreased the size of the cavalry and increased the number of archers and men-at-arms who fought on foot, who protected themselves from cavalry charges with spiked stakes. soil; soldiers rode on horseback for faster travel, but fought primarily on foot. The Scottish Wars also allowed the English army to gain experience and strength.
Edward III used this new way of fighting in the Scottish wars in which he supported Edward Balliol against David II, son of Robert the Bruce. He died in 1329 when his son David was still a child of seven, making it who encouraged Edward III to intervene in Scotland with his own candidate, Balliol, first indirectly, with money and soldiers, and then, in 1333, openly. The new tactic allowed the English to win several major battles, including including that of Dupplin Moor in 1332 and that of Halidon Hill in 1333. David II was defeated, fled Scotland and took refuge in France, where Philip VI gave him protection. Edward Balliol was crowned King of Scotland, as a vassal of England, to which he ceded the lands south of the Firth of Forth, with little popular support. Pope Benedict XII tried to reconcile the English and French kings, but could not prevent Philip from helping David II financially and militarily to recover the Scottish throne, to whom he dispatched in the spring of 1336 some of the troops he had gathered to undertake a crusade that ultimately did not take place. French preparations to support David II's embattled supporters worried England, which even feared a French invasion of Britain. Fighting resumed again in the Anglo-Scottish border in 1342, fanned by the French monarch.
The Scottish campaign allowed Edward III to form a modern army accustomed to new military tactics, also those used by cavalry: the looting cavalcade in which a contingent traveled great distances dedicated to devastating enemy territory it had also been used in Scotland.
Artois
In the county of Artois one of the usual succession crises of that time arose: Count Robert II died in 1302 without leaving any male heirs. His daughter Matilde, wife of Otto IV of Burgundy and mother-in-law, inherited the fief of Felipe V and Carlos IV of France. However, the grandson of the deceased Roberto, felt neglected and poorly compensated and claimed several times, although in vain, that the county be given to him. Matilde died unexpectedly in November 1329 when the Parliament of Paris was reviewing a new claim by Roberto and some accused Roberto of having poisoned her. Within weeks Matilde's daughter and heiress also died and the county passed to the queen's brother, the Duke of Burgundy. The documentation Robert presented to support his claims was false and Parliament finally ruled against him in 1331. Investigations began on Robert, who fled to his lands and then disappeared, refusing to appear before his investigators. gadores. He was finally dispossessed of his property in April 1332, the year in which he fled to take refuge with the Duke of Brabant, who took him in for three years until the other nobles of the region forced him to expel him. He fled and took refuge in England, whose king he also recognized as sovereign of France. This submission made the English court hope that other great French lords would follow his example and recognize Edward III as king.
Flanders
Flanders was at the beginning of the XIV century in great tension, in an unstable balance between the power of the count and autonomy of the great industrial cities such as Bruges, Ghent or Ypres and between the political dependency of France, to which the county belonged, and the economic dependency of England, whose wool supplied the textile industry. A socio-political revolt had broken out in Bruges in June 1323, which spread along the entire coast of the county, attracting above all the well-to-do peasantry, who banded together in units with their own captains, drove out the earl's tax collectors and destroyed some houses of the nobility. Burgomaster of Bruges requested the help of Edward III.
The count did not have his own army since he could not put down the uprising by himself. He went to pay homage to Felipe VI for the county in 1328 and took advantage of the trip to request immediate help from the new king against the rebels. Social conflicts made the French Crown intervene militarily, which in August 1328 crushed the rebellious peasants and artisans at the Battle of Cassel, in which eleven thousand of them perished at the hands of the French cavalry. The intervention The military strengthened ties between Felipe VI of France and Count Luis de Nevers, who had recovered the county thanks to the king's intervention and preserved it through terror, and undermined English influence.
First disagreements
In the mid-12th century 12th century, the Norman dukes were succeeded by the Anjou dynasty, powerful counts who held territories in the west from France. The Angevin duke Henry Plantagenet, married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, acceded to the English throne as Henry II of England, thus bringing his possessions and those of his wife, the duchy of Aquitaine, to the British kingdom.
Philip II of France, in his struggle to limit the power of the English sovereigns, supported the rebellion of some of the sons of Henry II and their mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, although the rebellion ended up unsuccessful. Richard the Lionheart, one of the sons who participated in the failed rebellion, succeeded his father to the throne in 1189.
Treaty of Paris
Henry III of England (1207-1272) inherited the throne at just nine years old, bringing with him a period of anxiety and fear that led to the unfavorable Treaty of Paris in 1259. Henry formally abdicated to French King Louis IX all the possessions of his Norman ancestors and all the rights that may correspond to him. This included the loss of Normandy, Anjou, and all his other possessions except Gascony and Aquitaine, which he had inherited through his mother's line. These two regions were subject to homage, a kind of payment, rent or tribute that Enrique would grant to the French king to preserve them.
Edward I
Edward I of England, son of Henry III, was not satisfied with this situation of submission: he built a base of military and economic power far superior to that of his father and wanted to place his crown once again in a position of strength In the continent. He began hostilities against the France of Philip III (which lasted four years: 1294 to 1298) but, more dedicated to consolidating his power within England itself, he did nothing more with respect to France.
When he passed away, another period of convulsions struck England. A strong, motivated and organized Scotland, led by Robert the Bruce, defeated the English on several occasions, defeating Edward's successor, Edward II, and achieving the long-awaited independence.
The War of San Sardos and Edward III
Between 1324 and 1325 a new war broke out between England and France, known by historians as the War of San Sardos because of the town where the main actions took place. The English crown soon passed into the hands of Edward III, who was only a child, but despite everything he was not willing to let himself be defeated so easily. The King of France, Charles IV, died, like his predecessors, without leaving a male heir.
The Capetian Curse
The death of Charles IV marked the end of the powerful and long Capetian dynasty. It had been founded by Hugh Capet in 987, and had produced a long series of powerful monarchs including Louis VI, Louis VII and Louis VIII, all of whom were commanders in the Crusades. After the death of the next king, Saint Louis, guide and captain of the crusade against the Cathars, the Capetian dynasty had yet another powerful king: Philip the Fair. With him began the decline: Felipe destroyed the ancient and noble Order of the Temple, taking many of its leaders to trial and burning, especially its last Grand Master Jacques de Molay. Tradition has it that De Molay, standing on the flames that would consume him, cursed Philip the Fair, the Pope and the Capetian family, prophesying his soon extinction and oblivion.
In fact, Felipe IV died in 1314, during the same year as the execution of the Templars. He had three children. The eldest, Louis X the Obstinate, was crowned in August 1315 and died a few months later, while his wife was pregnant. The newborn child was to be crowned with the name of Juan I; Due to his young age, the middle brother of his father, Felipe, was named regent. The little boy died as a baby, which is why he is known as John the Posthumous. Thus, his uncle Felipe must have been crowned immediately under the name of Felipe V el Largo. This king, though energetic and intelligent, was in poor health and died only five years later, leaving behind four daughters who could not inherit under the Salic Law that he himself invoked in order to succeed his nephew. He was then succeeded by the third son of Felipe el Hermoso (and therefore little brother of Luis X and Felipe V): Carlos Capeto, who reigned under the name of Carlos IV.
The supposed curse of the Templars ended on February 1, 1328 when this king died, leaving only two daughters (one posthumous) and no male to inherit. In just fourteen years, and after four brief reigns, the Capetian dynasty had been extinguished.
Intrigues and declaration of war (1330-1337)
The tension between the two sovereigns increased, fueled by the bellicose attitude of the nobility of both kingdoms, and ended up unleashing war in 1337.
The king of France collaborated with the Scots in their fight against England, an attitude with a long tradition of the Capetian kings, embodied in the so-called "old alliance" (Auld Alliance). Edward III had expelled David Bruce of Scotland in 1333; Felipe VI had welcomed him in the Gaillard castle and rearmed his supporters, preparing the return of the Scotsman to his kingdom. In 1334 Felipe summoned the English ambassadors, among whom was the Archbishop of Canterbury, to inform them that Scotland should also to be included in the general peace that France and England were negotiating and seemed about to be signed. In 1335, David the Bruce attacked the Channel Islands with a fleet paid for by the French king. The offensive failed, but it made Edward III fear that it was a mere prelude to the invasion of his kingdom.
The French intervention in Scotland, small as it was, convinced Edward that war with France was inevitable. Parliament met in Nottingham in September 1336 to condemn the French monarch's actions and approve subsidies to defray expenses of the coming new war. The Government then left York, where it had spent the previous four years because of the Scottish Wars, and returned to London, where preparations for war began. Troops were dispatched to Guyenne and a station was posted. squadron in the English Channel, while Felipe did the same in Normandy and Flanders.
The resumption of the Aquitanian conflict, which negotiations failed to resolve, and the support of the Valois for Edward III's Scottish adversaries made him once again assert his succession rights to the French throne. Philip VI had confiscated him Guyenne on May 24, 1337, accusing him of felony. This third confiscation was intolerable to Edward III, who reacted in turn by claiming the French crown for himself: he dispatched the Bishop of Lincoln to Paris on May 7. October of that year to throw down the gauntlet as a challenge to Felipe, a gesture with which the contest began, although there had already been clashes in the previous months. The two sides had been preparing for war for a long time, seeking allies and preparing armies. The third confiscation of Guyenne was the trigger for open warfare.
Main phases of the conflict
The Hundred Years' War had a symmetrical structure in which a sequence of stages was repeated: between 1337 and 1380 the three stages occurred for the first time and were repeated later. These were a collapse of the power of the French monarchy, followed by a period of crisis and then another of recovery. These same stages were repeated between 1415 and 1453. Between both time periods there was a long truce due to the internal conflicts suffered by both sides.
Each of the two great periods of combat can be further subdivided into two:
- From 1337 to 1364, the tactical genius of Edward III of England allowed him to obtain a series of victories on the enemy cavalry. The French nobility was completely discredited by the successive defeats and the country plunged into the civil war. The English took over much of the French kingdom under the Brétigny Treaty.
- From 1364 to 1380, Carlos V carried out a slow recovery of territories, hoping to overcome the national feeling of the population. It allowed the English to devastate the fields in their cages and avoided the dismantling of the Great companies against the population by sending them to fight Castile. He avoided the camp battles, which had been disastrous for the French at the previous stage of the conflict and devoted himself to regaining strong positions through sieges. Thus, Eduardo III was left on the continent more than Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bordeaux, Bayonne and some castles of the Central Massif in 1375.
- From 1380 to 1429, the minority and then the madness of Charles VI of France allowed the great lords of the kingdom to do with power, which unleashed the rivalry between the successive Dukes of Burgundy and that of Orleans, finally transformed the civil war. Henry V of England took advantage of it to regain territories. The French were beaten overwhelmingly in the battle of Azincourt. The murder in 1419 of Juan I of Burgundy made the Borgoñones collid with the English and the armañac party collapsed. Henry V espoused the daughter of Charles VI by virtue of the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, he became the heir of this and he coined in himself the titles of king of England and regent of France. Dolphin Carlos was undone. Henry VI of England succeeded his father, who died unnoticedly, when he was still a few months old, but he was granted the titles of King of England and France.
- From 1429 to 1453, the English were expelled from France gradually. Juana de Arco represented the national feeling and made Charles VII crown despite the agreement in Troyes. The English, without great support among the population, were gradually losing territories. The 1435 Arras Treaty put an end to the Anglo-British League and inclined the fate of the conflict definitively for France. The English only retained Calais in 1453, after the defeat they suffered in Castillon, although peace still took place: it was signed in 1475, already in the times of Louis XI of France and Edward IV of England.
The war
Among the children of Philip IV the Fair was Elizabeth (called the "Wolf of France"), who was the mother of Edward III of England. The young king, only sixteen years old, tried to claim his right to the throne of France, he considered that the French crown should pass to his mother. Even so, if the English thesis were accepted, the daughters of Louis X, Felipe V and Carlos IV would have a greater right to transmit the crown, over their aunt Elizabeth of France.
France did not agree, therefore they invoked the Salic law, which prevented the transmission of the crown through the female line, and therefore decided that the crown recently abandoned by the Capetians would pass to the younger brother of Philip the Beautiful (and uncle of Luis X, Felipe V and Carlos IV): Carlos de Valois. But it was 1328, and Carlos had died three years before. In this way, it corresponded according to the French theory to crown his son, Felipe de Valois, under the real name of Felipe VI. This was the first monarch of the Valois dynasty, who reigned in France without Edward III being able to do anything to prevent it. Now, it was up to Edward to pay (and pay) homage to the proud Philip for his meager possessions, the few he still had in France.
The victories of Edward III (1337-1364)
Indirect warfare
At the beginning of the conflict, Edward's objective was to claim the crown of France for himself as the grandson of Felipe el Hermoso, while for Felipe VI the goal was the recovery of Guyenne and the defeat of the royal claims of his English enemy.
The fighting did not begin immediately after the declaration of war in 1337 due to the financial hardship of the two kings, which forced them to request the approval of the taxes necessary to cover the conflict to the respective parliaments and local assemblies, often in exchange for the confirmation of privileges, the granting of new ones or exemptions. It was then that Estates arose in France, still loosely organized assemblies in which taxpayers haggled over their financial support to royal representatives. of money made the suspension of hostilities proposed by the pope for the first six months of 1338 accepted. de Blois, a relative of Felipe VI in the War of the British Succession. For his part, Felipe supported the Scots in the war they were waging c against the English.
Naval Operations
The first years of the war were favorable to France at sea. French ships and those of their Italian mercenaries sailed the English Channel, seized the Channel Islands and even sacked some enemy ports both in Great Britain as in France. The Normans even prepared an invasion of England in 1339, which finally did not take place, although the preparations made allowed a large fleet to be sent to Flanders in 1340, which was to prevent Edward from crossing to the continent.
Eduardo's German alliances and fighting in Flanders (1336-1345)
The English sovereign was intriguing while in Flanders: his marriage to Philippe of Hainaut allowed him to establish links with northern France and the Holy Roman Empire. In addition, Robert of Artois had been a refugee in London since 1336. Edward He had bought the alliance of the Count of Hainaut - Count of Holland and Zeeland also, and Edward's father-in-law - and that of Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria (August 26, 1337) for three hundred thousand guilders and both the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Gelderland were favorable to him.
Edward III reacted by prohibiting the export of wool in August 1336 and the import of cloth in February 1337, which left a large part of the workers in the cloth industry unemployed, many of whom emigrated. Luis de Nevers arrested the English merchants in Flanders, and Eduardo the Flemings who were then in England. The economic crisis that unleashed the wool embargo caused the bourgeoisie to seek English collaboration in exchange for recognizing the authority of Edward III. The economic threat caused the region to revolt against the French in 1337. At the same time, the English king supported the new textile industry in Brabant, a territory with which it was allied, and invited weavers unemployed Flemings to England to help develop an English industry. Thus, if Flanders remained neutral or sided with Philip VI, England could ruin its economy by cutting off its wool supply. He intensely affected the Flemish drapers, who rebelled against their count Louis I of Flanders, led by Jacob van Artevelde, a wealthy bourgeois from Ghent, who, after seizing power in the region, sided with the English king. Philip tried unsuccessfully to contain the rebellion in Flanders, even allowing the county to remain neutral in the war with England. The rebel leader was extending his control over the county from Ghent during the first months of 1338; the commission of representatives of cities that he chaired had authority from Bailleul in the south to Termonde in the north. Count Luis, for his part, considered having van Artevelde assassinated and attempted to take several of the main cities by surprise with the collaboration of of the nobility of the region, without success; Frustrated, he took refuge at the French court in February 1339. The rebels agreed with England to resume the wool trade and signed a commercial agreement in June 1338; in July there was a first limited shipment of wool. However, the rebels, more antagonistic to their earl's mismanagement than staunch supporters of the English king, for two years avoided becoming too closely attached to Edward. Edward visited Antwerp and his The Duke of Brabant allied in July 1338 to try to get the Flemish cities to go from the neutrality agreed in the months before to the alliance with England, but he did not succeed. For the moment, the Flemish rebels limited themselves to adopting a neutrality favorable to the English monarch. The trip served, however, to strengthen ties with the emperor: Edward visited Emperor Louis of Bavaria in Koblenz on September 5 and he appointed him imperial vicar and recognized his rights to the French crown, to money exchange. The charge transferred to the English sovereign the imperial powers in the north of former Lotharingia. The emperor made the German lords of the region promise to help Edu ardo in his war with Felipe, to which he himself committed himself for seven years. Edward had all the lords of the Netherlands come to pay homage to him - only the Bishop of Liège was absent from the successive ceremonies -, which served to to increase his apparent power, but also to prevent military operations before the winter of 1338-1339 arrived. Edward's financial difficulties in sustaining the onerous German and Dutch alliances were increasing.
The two belligerents had trouble raising troops, so the campaign of 1339 began late in the fall. The English king had spent from July to late September waiting in vain for the arrival of his would-be troops. German allies. He tried in vain to seize Cambrai, which was defended by a French garrison. He pushed into Picardy and tried to fight a pitched battle with the enemy, but the enemy prevented him and the English ruler eventually withdrew north in late October. The fifteen months of stay in the Netherlands, the alliance of numerous princes of the region and the obtaining of the imperial vicarage had resulted in a campaign of meager results.
Edward came to deal with the Flemish after being deserted by the German princes in the campaign of 1339. Until then, he had refused to make any substantial financial concessions to the Flemish insurgents so as not to harm his Brabant allies. The league between Count Louis I of Flanders and the French king outraged and frightened the Flemings, who were also displeased with the increase in fiscal pressure and fearful that the nearby French army would again serve to crush their uprising against the count, as had happened in 1328. The French threat made Van Artevelde more willing to agree with Eduardo, whose troops he needed to protect himself. The resumption of the conflict with France would have meant, however, the payment of a heavy compensation to the pope, who could excommunicate the count or even launch the interdict against the Flemish cities. To circumvent the refusal of the Flemish cities to rescind their oath of allegiance to the King of France, Edward hesitantly agreed to present himself as such, so that the rebels could bind themselves more closely to him without apparently breaking their allegiance to the French King, who from then on it would be him. The final alliance was reached on December 3, 1339, at great cost for the English: transfer of the wool export center from Antwerp to Bruges, return of the southern castles delivered to the French king in times of Felipe IV, granting a subsidy of one hundred and forty thousand pounds to improve the defense and naval and land aid in the event of a French attack. The Flemings promised to help Edward militarily, whom they recognized as King of France. Edward III appeared in Ghent in January 1340, where he swore to respect the privileges of the cities and signed three fundamentally commercial treaties with the Flemings. The English monarch raffled off the t Flemish fear of excommunication by promising to send English priests, who would say Mass despite the papal prohibition. He then returned to England to raise funds to pay his Dutch creditors, to whom he left his wife and his children as pledges. minor children. It was then that their third son (called "John of Gaunt"), John, later Duke of Lancaster, was born in Ghent.
The Flemings resumed traffic with England, so the French sent the fleet to La Esclusa, at the mouth of the channel that connects Bruges with the North Sea and the only good port in the Flemish county, in order to impose a naval blockade of the region. Edward arrived in the area with the English fleet in June 1340, after four months of preparations; it was somewhat larger than the enemy and was much better commanded. The disaster of the fleet at the Battle of the Lock on June 24, 1340, which had been reinforced by Breton navies, put an end to French naval dominance and began the war. English, which lasted several years. The severe defeat derailed plans to send French troops to Scotland and allowed Edward III to resume the wool trade with Flanders. Edward then headed directly for Tournai, the first point of royal rule. French in the area, on the banks of the Scheldt, at the head of some thirty thousand soldiers, their own and their Flemish allies.
He failed to seize Tournai, which he besieged for two months with Artevelde and the Duke of Brabant, so he ended up agreeing to a truce (September 1340) which lasted until June 1342. The lack of a victory clear on either side, the arrival of winter and the financial difficulties that afflicted both prompted them to sign the truce, proposed by the pope's emissaries. Eduardo secretly fled the area, where he was harassed by creditors, and he returned to England. His debts ruined several Italian banks that had helped pay for his two failed campaigns of 1339 and 1340. Shortage of English subsidies subsequently unraveled Edward's costly alliances in the Holy Roman Empire. Edward lost support of the Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria and the German lords, little interested in a contest that had not brought them income as they had hoped. The Emperor stripped Edward of his position as imperial vicar and reconciled with Philip VI during the spring of 1341. The archbishops of Mainz and Trier followed his example and the dukes of Brabant and Gelderland renewed the truces they had agreed with the French sovereign. The sharpening of the confrontation between the emperor and the new Pope Clement VI (elected in 1342), from then on made him disengage from the Anglo-French conflict to concentrate on the one that opposed him to the pope.
The resumption of the wool trade was not enough, however, to end the crisis in Flanders, which gradually undermined the authority of Jacob van Artevelde. The county plunged into a series of continuous internal disputes between supporters and opponents of Van Artevelde, between cities and even between trades. In addition, Pope Clement VI had excommunicated the Flemings, accused of perjuring their lord, which it facilitated Louis II's return to the earldom in 1342 and forced Jacob van Artevelde to radicalize his position. He refused to recognize Louis's authority and offered the earldom to Edward of Woodstock, son of the King of England, later nicknamed the " Black Prince". The project did not come to fruition: Van Artevelde was assassinated during a revolt on July 17 or 24, 1345, shortly after Eduardo had appeared with a fleet, which sailed after learning of the murder of his ally. Flanders left the league with England to resume the one they had with France.
Succession of Brittany
The Duchy of Brittany was a French territory that retained distinct features, including the Celtic language brought by immigrants from Great Britain. Duke John III died on April 30, 1341 without a direct heir. The inheritance was disputed by a niece of the deceased, Juana de Penthièvre, and Juan's brother, Juan de Montfort, who denied the possibility of the dukedom remaining in the hands of a woman, despite Breton custom allowing it. Fundamentally, Celtic Brittany favored John while French Britain (the south and east of the duchy) preferred Juana and her husband. Felipe VI had to settle the matter by accepting the homage of the new lord of the fief, but Juan feared that he would do so favor of her rival, who was at the time the wife of Charles of Blois, the French sovereign's nephew. Consequently, she tried to seize the duchy by force: she occupied the main strongholds by surprise between May and July 1341, but did not obtain the support of the high clergy nor of a large part of the nobility, who called King Philip to his aid. John had marched with a retinue to England, where he met Edward III in July, who promised to help him. On his return he went to Paris, where the court of peers judged the Breton inheritance, but, seeing that the king was hostile to him, he fled the city in disguise and returned to Brittany. The court ruled against John on 7 September. Philip, after receiving the homage of the new Duke Charles, he dispatched the dauphin at the head of an army that appeared before Nantes and arrested Juan in November, after a siege of the square. The dispute seemed settled, but in reality it lasted almost twenty-five years, partly due to the almost continuous absence of the pretenders to the ducal crown, who left the fighting in the hands of their supporters, who delayed the war, which was both their way of life and their pastime.
Juan had the support of the cities, part of the small nobility and a section of the peasantry, in addition to the vigor of his wife Juana de Flandes, who became the head of his party. Juana recognized Edward as king of France to obtain his support. The succession dispute turned into a civil conflict, which the English joined in 1342, when they came to the aid of Joan of Flanders, surrounded by Charles of Blois in Hennebont, where she had fled. defended with great verve. Two more English contingents landed during the summer of 1342; Robert of Artois arrived in one of them, who was mortally wounded in combat. Edward arrived in October, after having fought with the Scots, and surrounded Vannes, where Charles had taken refuge after abandoning the siege of Hennebont. The Duke of Normandy came to his aid in mid-December and then Felipe VI himself joined the campaign. Bad weather made the two sides accept the mediation of two cardinals, papal legates, who managed to sign a new truce of two years on January 19, 1343, the Truce of Malestroit. John de Monfort was released in exchange for not returning to Brittany, although he did, and his wife and son evacuated the duchy with the English. Eduardo occupied different strategic points in the name of Monfort, while obtaining guardianship of his son and that of Juana de Flandes, who had gone mad. Eduardo practically dominated the affairs of the duchy at the end of 1345. The duchy was divided in two: Charles of Blois dominated to the French zone, Upper Brittany and Nantes, while the Monforts held Léon, Cornwall and almost all of Lower Brittany, positions each side held essentially throughout the succession war. This was fought through a series of sieges, single combat and disorganized skirmishes.
The truce of 1343 was renewed several times, but the failure of the parliaments of Avignon, in which the positions of the belligerents became clear (the English demand for an independent and grown Guyenne and the French refusal to cede the sovereignty of any territory of the kingdom) caused it to lapse in March 1345. Thomas Dagworth immediately launched an offensive into Brittany, seizing several cities. John de Monfort died in 1345, leaving Charles of Blois as the sole claimant to the ducal crown of Brittany. This fell into the hands of the enemy when he was trying to recapture the place of La Roche-Derrien in June 1347.
The French had naval superiority, thanks in part to Genoese mercenaries, which allowed the French fleet to repeatedly attack English ports. The French considered cutting off shipping connections between the Continent and Great Britain, in order to deprive England of wine from Guyenne and salt from Brittany and Poitou, of great importance to the enemy. They effectively interrupted the wool trade with Flanders and that of Bordeaux wine, which seriously damaged English finances.
Situation in Navarra
Philip IV and Carlos IV had been kings of Navarre as well as being kings of France; they administered the small Iberian kingdom through governors with wide powers. However, the assembly of rich men, knights and villains decided in 1328 to choose an heir different from the one chosen in Paris: it was unanimously decided to recognize Juana, the daughter of Luis, as queen. X postponed from the French succession in 1316, who was the wife of Felipe de Évreux, the frustrated claimant to the French throne. The proclamation was made on March 5, 1329 in Pamplona. The two kingdoms were formally separated as their sovereigns (they were cousins), but the Navarrese continued to be very interested in French politics. Felipe perished fighting the Algeciras in favor of Alfonso XI of Castile and Juana remained sovereign for the six years she survived her husband. Then the crown passed to Charles II of Navarre.
Scottish flop
Philip VI began to fear an English invasion of the kingdom, so he convinced the Scottish allies to attack England from the north, trusting that the concentration of the English armies in the south of the kingdom would have left the border almost defenseless northern. The Scottish offensive was also to serve to weaken the narrow siege to which Edward III was then subjecting Calais. David II undertook the invasion on 7 October 1346 at the head of twelve thousand men, surrounded Durham and reached a small nearby town, Neville's Cross. The Archbishop of York, in charge of the border defense, defeated and captured David at the Battle of Neville's Cross (17 October), imitating Crécy for the skilful use of of the archers. The Scottish king spent the next eleven years imprisoned in the Tower of London. The victory over the Scots left Edward III free to invade France without concern for the safety of the kingdom.
English riding and ineffective French defense
Main battles Eduardo III cabin of 1339 Eduardo III cabin of 1346 Crown of the Black Prince of 1355 Cabalgada de Lancaster de 1356 Crown of the Black Prince of 1356 Eduardo III cabin of 1359-1360Eduardo III needed the support of the powerful and with it that of Parliament to sustain the contest. To earn it, he opted to undertake a series of vigorous offensives in France, despite the obvious population disadvantage between the two kingdoms (France had at that time about twenty million inhabitants, five times more than those that populated England). Faced with the power of the French cavalry, the English sovereign ruled out permanent conquests on the continent, which he would have had to defend against the enemy, thereby risking his reputation and perhaps his life. The various battles of the time were due fundamentally to the circumstances of the campaigns and not to a desire of the English monarch to confront the enemy so directly. Edward's strategy was, on the contrary, that of looting, which also allowed him to finance the expeditions. One of the most famous cavalcades of the time, the one that Eduardo embarked on in 1346, exemplifies this type of incursions: an army of small size, but capable of moving quickly, marched devastating everything in its path, without regard for the population of which it Edward claimed to be a legitimate sovereign.
Philip VI had some fifty thousand soldiers in 1347, just before the Black Death spread through the area, an army much larger than the enemy, partly due to the larger population of the kingdom. However, the English war strategy forced the French monarch to bear expensive defenses. For its part, the English army was mobilized for just a few months, and paid for its expenses thanks to looting. The capacity of the English fleet also limited the number of soldiers that could be sent to the Continent: Edward had between twenty and thirty thousand soldiers, but he took only half, albeit the best, with him to France. Felipe VI experimented with two defensive strategies unsuccessfully: the defense of castles and walled cities and the pursuit of the enemy. The first allowed the English to verify their raids while the French limited themselves to defending strongholds, cities or fortresses. This entailed considerable expenses in garrisons that were added to what was lost due to the English havoc in the fields and to the discredit that the king incurred for being passive. The second required the slow mobilization of a large army to pursue a swift enemy, who could choose when and where to meet the French and who often had time to clear the countryside before the pursuing army could rally.
Edward III's raids had several goals, not including taking over the neighboring kingdom. They had to undermine the authority of Felipe VI, evidencing his inability to defend the people and, in the long term, achieve full sovereignty of Guyenne, if possible expanded in territory; the relinquishment of the claim to the French crown in the Treaty of Brétigny demonstrated that Edward's interest lay more in the domain of Guyenne than in the entire kingdom.
First English rides (1339-1347): Crécy and Calais
Eduardo III's first cavalcade in France was made in 1339 with between ten thousand and fifteen thousand soldiers, of whom about one thousand six hundred were men-at-arms (heavy cavalry), one thousand five hundred mounted archers, one thousand six hundred and fifty horse archers. foot and eight hundred Dutch and Germans. The army advanced in three columns, covering between ten and twenty kilometers a day on a front about twenty kilometers wide, looking for the least protected cities. The army conscientiously cleared the territory it crossed, killing the cattle and destroyed production facilities such as mills and ovens. The ride that year devastated more than two hundred towns.
French raids on Bordeaux led Edward III to send the Earl of Derby and Walter de Mauny to defend it in 1345. They launched a swift campaign that took them to Angoulême. Another cavalcade penetrated into Languedoc. The heir of the French crown, John, Duke of Normandy, counterattacked in the spring of 1346 and, although he recovered some lost places, got bogged down before Aiguillon, which he failed to take before having to withdraw in August when news of the disaster suffered by his father in Crécy.
The English ride of 1346 was more productive for the English and more destructive for the French; it culminated in the Crécy of August 26, 1346, which pitted the two armies against each other. Edward landed on the Cotentin peninsula in July with the help of a Norman nobleman at odds with the French king. He crossed Normandy with almost no resistance and making copious booty and approached Paris, which he did not dare to besiege as he did not have with the means to do so, at a time when the enemy was gathering a large army to face it. the one the English army had posted. The French were larger, had more cavalry, and attacked the enemy's copious archers and pawns. The tactics of the two armies were a reflection of the social organizations of the two kingdoms. The French feudal nobility, needing to prove their chivalrous courage on the battlefield to justify their privileges of supposed divine origin, sought frontal combat and the capture of nobles, from whom they could later demand ransom to free them. The English, for their part, increasingly dedicated to trade and crafts and hardened in Scottish wars, adopted a different tactic, in which knights were less important than in the enemy camp. The numerical advantage made the French confident of victory and the nobles hoped to obtain copious hostages from the battle for which they could collect ransom at a time when their agricultural income had dwindled. Eager to capture as soon as possible the largest number of captives possible, the nobles disobeyed the king's orders and lashed out at the enemy. The Genoese mercenary crossbowmen, already beaten by the enemy archers, and the pawns hindered the charge of the French knights. The successive attacks of the French cavalry up the hill ended in disaster and evidenced the military incompetence of Felipe VI, dragged into combat by the disobedient nobility; English darts easily wounded the then poorly protected French mounts, while the archers decimating the French cavalry remained well protected by the stockades. The knights were left almost defenseless against the infantry once they were knocked from their horses by their heavy weapons., which hindered their movements. The clash decimated the French army and deprived it of the initiative for a long time.
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Edward III continued the march after having annihilated the enemy cavalry at Crécy: he headed north, to encircle Calais, which was to serve as a port from which to embark back to England. The place had strong defenses and determined to resist, but in September it was closely surrounded. Philip VI came to the rescue of the place with a new army in July 1347, but finally did not dare to give battle to Edward again. The burgesses of Calais finally handed over the keys of the city to the English monarch in August due to the famine that gripped the city and the lack of relief; with this began the long period of English domination of the city, which lasted until the XVI. From then on, the port served as an excellent landing point for troops and supplies for the English. Felipe VI agreed to sign a truce with the enemy, which granted Eduardo full possession of the recently conquered city. The English king returned to Britain victorious, laden with booty and unexpectedly in possession of Calais, which had not been an original objective of the expedition. His French enemy, by contrast, was humiliated by his proven inability to defend his kingdom.
For his part, the Black Prince had launched a lightning offensive in the southwest almost simultaneously.
Forced truce: the great black plague (1348-1349)
The Black Death of 1349 forced the sides to temporarily suspend fighting, until 1355; the epidemic was interpreted as divine retribution. The disease reached France via the Languedoc in late 1347, spreading rapidly along the trade routes. It peaked in 1348, then abated, but re-emerged several times during the rest of the year. century. In both England and France, it is estimated that between one-eighth and one-third of the population perished. of labor. The payment of rents to the lords was also reduced and the States reacted to defend their interests in the face of the growing demands of the survivors, who demanded higher payments for their work. servitude, to obtain greater benefits from peasants who had survived the plague. Laws were passed to fix workers to their trades and prevent them from changing to others with better conditions.
The main combat of these years was fought at sea and between the English and the Castilians: the battle of Winchelsea, in which Edward destroyed half of a Castilian squadron that was returning from Flanders and strengthened the naval superiority he had enjoyed since the French defeat at La Esclusa.
The crisis of the Valois
Philip VI owed the crown to the votes of the peers of France, who had preferred him to Edward III and Philippe of Évreux, but his shameful defeat and flight from Crécy before a clearly outnumbered army called into question his divine right to reign. The disaster significantly undermined the authority of the Valois. The kingdom was plunged into disorder, which Philip's successor, John the Good,—Philip died in 1350—could not end. The economy worsened and, to avoid increasing taxes, which were increasingly unpopular and rejected by the States, the Government preferred to reduce the currency law, which caused it to lose a large part of its value (70% in six years).. Trade declined drastically, which made merchants and artisans demand greater autonomy for cities and a stable currency. The fired mercenaries, widely used during the long war, formed gangs, known as the "big companies", dedicated to looting and terrorizing the rural population. Insecurity afflicted the fields and roads, without the nobility ending it as it was supposed to be their job in the feudal social system.
The reform attempts of Juan II, a mediocre politician, stubborn and punctilious defender of the rules of chivalry, failed due to the economic weakness of the kingdom and the ravages caused by the plague. The first years of the reign were relatively Calm in terms of the contest with England, since neither side undertook major offensives, and the main problem for the new French king was the threat of Charles II of Navarre.
Influence of the King of Navarre
King Carlos II of Navarre, nicknamed "el Malo", was the grandson of Louis X. His mother was Juana, who had been deprived of the French crown by her uncles, which had later passed to the Valois; she retained, however, the crown of Navarre. He had lost other of his lands, Brie and Champagne, and had transmitted his great resentment to his son Carlos, who inherited the Navarrese kingdom when his mother died in 1349. Carlos considered himself the legitimate heir to the French throne and from 1353 he faced the king In addition to the Navarrese lands, he owned the counties of Mortain and Évreux, and several enclaves in the Seine valley and in Normandy. He had hoped that the county of Angoulême would also be given to him by virtue of his marriage to one of the daughters of the French sovereign, but he granted it to his new favorite and constable, Carlos de la Cerda. It was one more reason that increased the resentment of the Navarrese king towards his father-in-law.
Charles II had the king's favorite assassinated in January 1354 and took refuge in the protection of Edward III, as Robert of Artois had done years before. John II did not wish to terminate the truce with the English and agreed to sign the Treaty of Mantes on February 22, 1354, by virtue of which the Navarrese king expanded his lands in Normandy thanks to the obtaining of several vizcounties and other fiefs, those of Beaumont-le-Roger, Breteuil, Conches, Pont -Audemer, Orbec, Valognes, Coutances and Carentan. In return, he agreed to abandon his claims on Champagne and publicly proclaim his repentance for the assassination of the constable. But John II delayed the application of the treaty and tried while assassinating Charles and his brothers at a dinner. Charles II returned to Pamplona, gathered an army and joined forces with the Duke of Lancaster. The two agreed to a division of the French kingdom: the Navarrese would obtain large regions, while Edward III would stay with the rest of he territory and with the crown. Charles II returned to Cherbourg in August 1355 with a large army, while the English threat forced John II to finally comply with what was agreed in Mantes. Juan signed the new Treaty of Valognes on September 10 and handed over to the Navarrese sovereign the lands that had been promised to him in the previous one.
By then, the draft peace agreed in April 1354 between the French and the English had failed. Although the signing of peace in Avignon was planned, the large territorial concessions to England, which amounted to the revival of the Plantagenet empire, made that finally the French refused to sign the agreement. The failure of the negotiations determined the resumption of fighting in 1355.
Incursion of the Black Prince in the south, convocation of the States General and imprisonment of Carlos de Navarra (1355-1356)
The English took advantage of the situation to intervene in France. The first expedition was by Edward III from Calais to Amiens, who withdrew before the great army John II had assembled. However, the main campaign was made by his son in the south-west in the autumn of 1355: he ravaged unimpeded the Languedoc and arrived at the gates of Montpellier. The Black Prince had brutally crushed the rebellion in the county of Chester, which earned him paternal confidence and the lieutenancy of Gascogne, in which he prepared the first ride of those he undertook in France. He set out from Bordeaux in 1355 at the head of a contingent of Gascon knights, including Amanieu de Albret, Lord of Langoiran, and crossed the counties of Julliac, Armagnac, and Astarac, plundering the territory as he went. He avoided Toulouse, where his adversary the Count of Armagnac had taken refuge, and reached Carcassonne on November 2. His soldiers committed atrocities in the region. The vanguard even reached Beziers and alarmed the entire region. The army began its return to Guyenne on November 10, by another route, and concluded the raid in December. On the way, the prince signed an alliance with Gaston Febo, Count of Foix, and Viscount of Bearne, an enemy of the Valois. The long expedition exposed the French defensive system.
The persistence of the English threat made Juan II convene the General States of Languedoil in October of that same year, in order to gather an army of thirty thousand soldiers with the subsidies that he hoped the assemblies would approve. Juan demanded money to the States to face the campaign of 1356, since preparations had not been made for the resumption of the war and the Crown lacked the means to pay the soldiers. The representatives of the states distrusted the management of the treasury, disappointed by the currency devaluation that the law's reductions in currency had entailed, they did not accept the imposition of a tax on salt unless they could control the use of the funds it produced. The Estates of Languedoil met in Paris in October 1355 and they managed to get the sovereign to agree to entrust them with both the collection of the subsidy that would be collected and the payment of the troops; however, the population remained reluctant to pay, both to the agents of the Crown and to the representatives of the States. In addition, the officials in charge of the collection had to be appointed by the states and ten deputies of these had to enter the royal council to oversee the treasury of the kingdom.
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Normandy, a rebellious region, refused to pay the tribute: the dauphin Charles, who had just been named duke of the region, reunited the Norman states. Carlos II saw in the collection of this new tax, very unpopular, an opportunity to destabilize Juan, whose authority seemed to be faltering, gathering around him the discontents. He was present at the meetings of the estates as Count of Évreux and tried to attract the dauphin, his brother-in-law, stating that John II wanted to disinherit him (the dauphin was weak and, according to some sources, his right hand was deformed, which made him prevented him from showing off on the battlefields, a major setback given King John's chivalrous ideals). Norman lords to their castle in Rouen on April 5, 1356. In the middle of the party, Juan II appeared, who had just had the Navarrese king arrested. His opposition, King Juan's son-in-law —Charles II had been married since 1352 with the daughter of Juana de Francia—), and the rumors that he was consorting with the English had exhausted the patience of the French king, already very displeased with him since the assassination of his favorite Constable Carlos de la Cerda. Juan decapi to immediately attack the companions of the Navarrese king and imprisoned him. Felipe de Navarra, the captive's brother, challenged Juan II on April 17, 1356 and sought English help. consequences. The Navarrese and Norman nobles went over en bloc to the English side and in June 1356, Felipe de Navarra undertook a fearsome ride through Normandy, before paying homage to Edward III.
Defeat and imprisonment of John II: the disaster at Poitiers
Henry of Lancaster had just embarked on a cavalcade with a small army that left Brittany and entered Normandy, with the collaboration of the followers of Charles of Navarre. For his part, in the southwest the Prince of Wales He rode from Guyenne in July 1356: he entered Poitou after several clashes between the French English that left no clear winner and tried to cross the Loire to join forces with the Lancastrian. He failed to seize Bourges, but from Vierzon, whose garrison was put to arms. None of the English armies were large enough to battle King John's, which pursued the Anglo-Gascon army, which began to retreat, hampered by the great booty it was carrying. The royal army overtook the enemy in September near Maupertuis, west of Poitiers. Three days of fighting culminated in the French defeat on September 19. Initially, the prince's cavalcade was intended to alleviate Guyenne's harassment by John of Armagnac, but it turned out one of the most brilliant raids of the war. The confusion discouraged the bulk of the French troops, who fled; both the king and one of his younger sons, Felipe, were arrested in what resulted in a new cataclysm of French arms, tracing Crécy.
The battle did not improve the English military situation, but it did bring political advantages: the capture of the French king left the kingdom headless, as John's eldest son, the young dauphin Charles, was unable to seize the reins of power. The disorganization of the central power of the kingdom forced to transfer the defense to the regions. The capture of Juan II unleashed all the discontent contained up to that moment, which plunged the kingdom into a serious crisis, although the revolt against those who had As guilty of the defeat, it was limited to two sources: Paris and the cities of the Isle of France and the farmers of Beauvesis. Edward III enjoyed such an advantage at that time that he could demand large territorial and financial concessions from the enemy.
Turbulent Regency of the Dauphin Charles (1356-1360)
Attempts at reform
The defeats at Crécy and Poitiers had discredited the nobility, which was accused of serious military defeats. Also the king's advisers and the royal administration as a whole, which was believed incapable of shaping in victory the economic sacrifices of the population. The defeat at Poitiers marked the beginning of two years of constitutional crisis in which the monarchical administration was threatened by discontents.
The defeat of Poitiers and the capture of King John II left the government to his son Charles, a sickly young man of eighteen with little political experience, who, unlike his father, had fled the catastrophe at Poitiers. Dauphin Charles assembled the Estates General on October 15, 1356 because of the need to raise funds to avoid bankruptcy. Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris and scion of a rich family of cloth merchants, believed that the meeting could serve to implement an administrative reform and a supervisory council of the dolphin; he represented the bourgeoisie, concerned about the collapse of trade and what he considered mismanagement by the government. He joined forces with the Navarrese party, led in sessions by the Bishop of Laon Robert Le Coq, a good orator like himself, and managed to get On November 7, 1356, the creation of a committee of eighty members of the States was approved, which was to facilitate the study of the issues raised and, in addition, support the claims of the allies. The States General proclaimed the dauphin lieutenant of the king and defender of the kingdom in the absence of his father and created an advisory council with representatives of the different estates (four bishops, twelve knights and as many bourgeois). The dauphin, close to the reformist currents, did not oppose the proposals, which fundamentally implied the removal of the most discredited characters due to military defeats and the imposition of a certain control in government management. But serious disputes soon arose. compromises between him and the new council; The prince refused to prosecute his father's advisers who had participated in the successive and brutal reductions of the coinage law to improve the situation of the royal treasury, nor to release Carlos II, who enjoyed notable wealth. supports that could even allow him to take the crown. The dauphin tried to gain time by finding himself unable to refuse Marcel and Robert Le Coq's demand to release Carlos de Navarra, using the pretext that emissaries from his imprisoned father had arrived; then he dismissed the States General and left Paris, while his brother the Duke of Anjou was in charge of managing current affairs. On December 10, he published an ordinance giving legal tender to a new coin. The population reacted by protesting what he understood as a risk of new currency devaluation and rising inflation. There were quarrels and Marcel went first to the Duke of Anjou and then to the Dauphin himself to have the ordinance revoked and the Estates General reunited. Meanwhile, Charles traveled to the empire to try unsuccessfully to receive the support of his uncle the emperor, if Officially, the trip was justified by the need to pay homage to the Dauphiné.
The Estates General convened again in February 1357 and the Dauphin accepted a new ordinance that was promulgated on March 3, in which it was provided that finances be controlled by the Estates General, that the Public Administration be purged (especially, tax collectors) and that the royal council be replaced by another of the guardianship of the dauphin to which twelve deputies from each estate of the States would belong, although he managed to abandon the claim to release Carlos II, which supposed a threat to the Valois dynasty. The new ordinance not only implied an administrative reform aimed at supervising state finances, but also an attempt by the capital's bourgeoisie to strengthen its role in the government of the kingdom, to the detriment of the regional assemblies. The reform attempts failed, both due to the lack of political experience and control structures of the States and due to the reluctance of the dauphin, determined to fru tax collection needs and the population's hostility to payment, as well as a new devaluation were also undermining the initial prestige of the States. The king tried to regain power, suspend the March ordinance and return their posts to the councilors dismissed in the administrative purges in July, but Esteban Marcel prevented it.
Speech by Carlos de Navarra
For his part, Charles II of Navarre had gained supporters during his imprisonment. His supporters demanded his release. Normandy was restive and many of its barons had switched sides, swearing allegiance to Edward III. For these nobles, King John had overstepped their prerogatives by arresting a prince with whom he had made peace. For the supporters of the Navarrese, it had even been an attempt by an illegitimate king to get rid of an adversary with more rights than he to the crown of France. Jean de Picquigny released Charles II on November 9, 1357 from the prison of Arleux, instigated by Étienne Marcel and Robert Le Coq. The newly released man was received with royal honors in the successive cities through which he passed, organized by the States, from Amiens to Paris; he entered this with a magnificent escort and was received with a procession by both the clergy and the bourgeoisie. He then harangued a crowd that was already favorable to him, to which he pointed out that Juan he had unjustly dispossessed and imprisoned him, despite being of royal lineage. of the prisoner while he slowly and triumphantly returned to Paris. He returned to Paris on November 29 and addressed ten thousand people, assembled by Étienne Marcel, a considerable crowd for the time. The next day, he delivered a new speech to as many people, assembled once more by Étienne Marcel in Pré-aux -Clercs. Marcel and a large group of bourgeois appeared on December 3 at the council that was to decide the rehabilitation of Carlos de Navarra, under the pretext of announcing that the General Estates meeting in the Franciscan convent had consented to the collection of the tax that the dauphin had requested and that it only remained for the nobility to also agree, since this estate met separately from the others. The dauphin had to agree to reconcile with the Navarrese king and return his Norman possessions to him before Marcel's show of force. Carlos also claimed other provinces such as Champagne, which King Juan had deprived him of. The dauphin had to agree to return them and rehabilitate him. An even more serious threat to the Valois was the intention of the Estates-General to settle the dynastic question at their session on 14 January 1358, which could be resolved against them. Charles II spent the month remaining before the session was held reinforcing his position as claimant to the throne.
Parisian riot
France was on the verge of chaos in January 1358: Charles II once again rallied his supporters, who considered him more fit to face the English than the puny dauphin, as well as a more legitimate sovereign. At the same time, Étienne Marcel was agitating Paris. Juan II had to hastily agree to his release to end the various threats to the dynasty and therefore had to accept the conditions of the Treaty of London, which involved the recovery by England of its former possessions in Aquitaine and the payment of four million of escudos in ransom by the king. Edward III also maintained his claim to the French throne. The English sought to further weaken John's position, fuel civil war, and ultimately ensure that Edward would take the French throne as the grandson of Philip the Fair. In addition, Juan prohibited from his London prison the application of the great ordinance of 1357, which unleashed the conflict between Étienne Marcel and the dauphin. It was around this time that the first coin with the name of "franc" was minted, at that time in the sense of free, for the freedom of the king. English revenue from the victory at Poitiers allowed many castles to be rebuilt or refurbished. The first part of the war thus ended in near-total French defeat.
The guardianship council convened the Estates General again on January 13, 1358, by then constituted solely by supporters of Étienne Marcel. He decided to overcome the Dauphin's opposition by forcibly imposing his reform and called on his support to the merchants of Paris. He created a militia under the pretext of using it against possible English attacks, despite the fact that the enemy had already withdrawn to Bordeaux, and had the Parisian defenses reinforced. He invaded the royal palace of the Cité, residence of the Dauphin, on 22 February, at the head of numerous men-at-arms and an angry mob. Marshal of Champagne Jean de Conflans and Marshal of Normandy Robert de Clermont tried to interpose and were They were assassinated before their lord, who believed they were going to kill him as well. Marcel forced him to put on the red and blue hood, the colors of the capital's bourgeoisie, and to confirm the order of 1357. Marcel's supporters then left to the persecution of his adversaries; Attorney General Renaud de Acy, who had taken refuge in a pastry shop, was seized and had his throat cut. The Parisian coup generally displeased the cities of the kingdom, of which only Arras was favorable.
Marcel then forced the dauphin to approve the murder of his advisers. The prince had to accept the institutional change that was imposed on him: the council was purged, four bourgeois joined it; In addition, both the government and the financial management remained in the hands of the States. Carlos II received command of the Army and money to gather a host of a thousand men; The dauphin remained as regent of the kingdom, which allowed him to act without the consent of his father while he remained captive and to reject his actions, including possible peace agreements with the English that were unacceptable to him.
Peasant revolt and reaction of the dolphin
The dauphin preferred to avoid the Parisian furor, he left the city on March 25, eleven days after being named regent, and settled in Compiègne, where the nobility came to meet, leaving the other two estates in Paris; he had to approve the new ordinance, and he wished to do it away from the turmoil of the capital.The Champagne and Burgundy had been shocked by the assassination of their marshals and joined the Dauphin's party. He assembled the Estates of Languedoil on May 4, without the presence of Parisian delegates, He had the noble deputies solemnly condemn Étienne Marcel. He also seized the castles of Montereau-Fault-Yonne and Meaux thanks to the support of the nobility. He thereby blocked access to Paris from the east.The companies plundered the south and west, so Étienne Marcel had to maintain communications with the Flemish cities at all costs and therefore had to end the dauphin blockade.
The Grande Jacquerie broke out at the end of May 1358: peasants, mainly smallholders, very unhappy about the increase in seigneurial taxes at a time when the price of land was falling. wheat, they rebelled against the nobility. This, discredited by the great military defeats, had lost its function of protecting the people. The chroniclers of the time described the revolt as extremely violent, although they possibly exaggerated in their narratives; in the chronicles the rebels seek the death of the nobles and loot and burn their castles. The rebels quickly assembled an army of five thousand men, led by a charismatic leader, Guillaume Carl, who soon received reinforcements from Étienne Marcel, who wished to liberate Paris from the siege to which the Dauphin was subjecting it and regain control of the road to the powerful Flemish cities.
Men of the Parisian provost and peasant rebels tried in vain to seize the dauphin's wife at Meaux on June 9. The peasants were dispersed by a cavalry charge as they headed for the fortress's access bridge of the population. The main clash with the forces of Guillaume Carl occurred the next day in Mello. Charles II took the lead of the nobility to crush the peasant revolt, urged by the aristocrats and especially by the Picquigny to those who owed their freedom and one of whom the jacques had just killed; the dauphin, for his part, left the peasant repression in the hands of the Navarrese sovereign, without intervening. Carlos hired English mercenaries, gathered the nobility around him, and arrested Guillaume Carl when he came to negotiate with him; then he attacked the rebels, deprived of their leader, the onslaught ended the peasant revolt, drowned in a bloodbath.
Charles II strengthened ties with Étienne Marcel after the crushing of the rebellious peasants, hoping at the same time to retain the support of the nobility whom he had just led on the battlefield. He supported and advised the Dauphin from the beginning of 1358 and even secretly negotiated with the English.The moment of his greatest popularity was the summer of 1358; after delivering a speech before a crowd in Paris, they named him "captain of Paris", hoping that he would seize power in the entire kingdom. But the nobility already accused him of getting too close to the people, who had not forgiven the murder of the marshals, and took sides with the Dauphin. His troops were also joined by large companies, who hoped to be able to sack Paris. The military weakness of Carlos II made him seek English military support, but the Parisians loyal to the Dauphin saw it as a betrayal and rebelled against the Navarrese and against Marcel. He was executed on July 31 after trying to gain access to the city to English mercenaries; the dauphin regained control of the city, which Carlos II decided to encircle after a few days.
Treaties of London, Brétigny and Guérande
The dauphin had managed to sign a truce with Eduardo III, in force from March 1357 to April 1359, while he was facing the serious internal crisis formed by the threat to the dynasty represented by Carlos de Navarra, the Parisian reformist movements and the revolts While the crisis was taking place, the principle of agreement had been reached, embodied in the Treaty of London of 1358, in which the English king had claimed total sovereignty over Guyenne, Poitou, the Limousinate, Quercy, Saintonge and Bigorre, in addition to Calais and Ponthieu; together, a third of the kingdom of France. In addition, he demanded four million to ransom John II. The dauphin's plight caused Edward to increase his demands, which were reflected in the second Treaty of London, that of 1359, in the which claimed, in addition to the territories already mentioned, Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Normandy and authority over Brittany. The Estates General of France refused to ratify the Treaties of London, considered humiliating and catastrophic. The Dauphin prepared to fight again, as did also Edward III.
The English sovereign disembarked in Calais on October 28, 1359 and began a new ride in the direction of Reims, a French city where the coronations of kings took place. Carlos had foreseen the operation and had razed the lands that he had to cross. He ordered that the inhabitants of the countryside take refuge with their food and tools, in the fortified cities, which deprived Eduardo's army of supplies in its advance. The English sovereign reached Reims, which did not open the gates to him; he had to besiege the city, which refused to surrender despite Eduardo's exhortations. The city remained faithful to the dauphin and the English army did not have siege engines, so after a month they had to abandon the encirclement.
The setback enraged Eduardo, who tried to fight with the enemy in a pitched battle; this he avoided, limiting himself to harassing the English army, whose scouts and stragglers he continually ambushed. Eduardo arrived before Paris, where the dolphin had taken refuge with the population of the region. The English tried to provoke the enemy, but the dauphin forbade his knights to accept the enemy's challenges, wishing to avoid a new battle of Poitiers at all times.
Eduardo III had to withdraw after twelve days, retreating hastily due to the lack of food and fodder, which caused him to lose most of his mounts, as well as many men. In addition, a Norman squadron had attacked Winchelsea in March 1360, sparking panic in England. As they withdrew, a great storm struck the English army at the Beauce, an event then considered miraculous and served to strengthen the position of the Valois, greatly weakened after the military disasters of Crécy and Poitiers. The cavalcade of 1359 was a failure, although the fact that he still had King John in his power strengthened his negotiating position.
This stage of the conflict concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Brétigny-Calais, which stipulated:
- the payment of a ransom of three million pounds to free John II, which represented two years of income from the kingdom era;
- the assignment to the king of England of the total sovereignty of the Guyena, Gascuña, Calais, Ponthieu, of the county of Guines, Poitou, Périgord, the Lemosinado, Angoumois, Saintonge, Agenais, Quercy, Rouergue, Bigorra and the county of Gaure.
The treaty had to resolve the different grievances that had triggered the conflict: Edward III therefore renounced the duchies of Normandy and Touraine, the counties of Maine and Anjou and his authority over Brittany and Flanders and, above all, over his claim to the French crown.
The pact did not end the succession war in Brittany: Edward continued to support his former ward, John IV, and Charles his namesake in Blois. John IV returned to Brittany in the summer of 1362 and they soon resumed the fighting in the duchy. The outcome of the war remained in suspense until John IV of Brittany and John Chandos defeated Charles of Blois and Bertrand du Guesclin at the Battle of Auray on 29 September 1364. The resumption The War of the Breton Succession had been detrimental to the French, but Edward's decision not to take advantage of John IV's victory limited the negative consequences for the Valois. The battle led to the signing of the Treaty of Guérande, who gave the Breton ducal title to John IV and allowed the English to keep Brest and its region, but kept the duchy as a fief of the French king, something unexpected given the disaster of his party.
The treaties allowed the English to seize a third of the kingdom of France, while the duchy of Brittany was left in the hands of his ally John IV, married first to a sister and later to a daughter-in-law of the Black Prince). However, peace gave Carlos V, who inherited the crown on the death of his father on April 8, 1364, time to prepare to reconquer the ceded territories.
War Ravage
The first phase of the long war left France weakened; the political authority of the Valois was severely broken and the kingdom as a whole subjected to looting by the enemy and by bandits. Even if successful in combat, the contest entailed great expenditures for both sides. The need for revenue pushed kings to try to increase resources both through conquest and by improving the fiscal apparatus. Both indirect and direct taxes were imposed., clergy resources were confiscated and loans were requested, which in some cases were not repaid.
The war was also costly to the English sovereign: the maintenance of the Calais garrison alone accounted for a fifth of the royal income, although a large part of the war expenses were paid for with the loot from the cavalcades. The budget from the Crown went from forty or seventy thousand pounds around 1300 to two hundred thousand in the 1330s. The imposition of an export tax on wool (the staple) contributed notable income to the king.
For France, the conflict meant economic ruin, especially in the north, the country's "barn" thanks to its large wheat production and an area of important trade due to the Champagne fairs. The English raids are also especially devastating because of the care taken by the invading armies to destroy the tools, kill the cattle and cut down the fields to harm the enemy's economy. If in 1343 the war was costing France almost three million pounds, in 1345 it had already reached five million pounds. One of the ways to try to increase state revenue was to replace military service with the payment of monetary compensation. Another was to reduce the coinage law: the sou tornés went from having to be minted with four grams of precious metal in 1330 to containing just two hundred milligrams in 1360. This change in the coinage law proved highly unpopular. The attempts of Felipe VI and Juan II to approve the imposition of new taxes were not enough to end the lack of funds. The tax on salt, which was extended to the entire kingdom despite its unpopularity in 1341, was reinstated in 1356, as were other tributes. This tax was the main indirect tax, which was levied on an article of general consumption. These collection measures were added to military defeats to sink the prestige of the kings.
The English mercenaries dismissed after the victory at Poitiers longed for the resumption of the rides, which entailed obtaining booty; the gentry especially feared a return to the pre-war situation. The Treaty of Brétigny left many of them, on both sides, without work and dedicated to banditry, especially in the Valois domains, which were less controlled than the English territories. They used to operate in bands of a few hundred men, which were they seized some castles from which to deplete the surrounding lands through raids, sales of "safe-conduct" or requisitions to the peasant population. Thousands of them sometimes grouped together for larger operations in the so-called "great companies", actually groups of looting that took advantage of the weakness of public authority to engage in looting, which fueled the discontent of the population. One of these large companies even obtained a ransom payment from the pope at the end of 1361, after felling Las Vegas of the Saône and the Rhône. Their outrages were concentrated in the provinces least affected by the war, where they could sustain themselves more easily: Burgundy, Languedoc and the Massif Central. The companies of former mercenaries had no political or military objectives, but the simple enrichment of their members. France was subjected to its excesses between 1360 and 1390 and the peasants forced to pay to preserve their lives. The companies' ability to traverse great distances spread the scourge of their presence over vast parts of the kingdom. In the winter of 1360, one of the companies even tried to seize John II's ransom money in Avignon; the royal army sent against it was defeated at Pont-Saint-Esprit months later. So was the army of knights that the Duke of Bourbon sent against another great company, that of Seguin de Badefol, in 1363. Various plans were tried to eliminate them: sending them to the service of the great Italian noble families, dispatching them to Hungary to fight to the Turks to send them to the Iberian Peninsula to participate in the "Reconquista" and even excommunicate them, without success. The lack of action of the royal government, lack of funds to cover the costly operations against the bandits, meant that the defense fell to the bailiwicks or the fiefs that suffered their excesses, which often simply limited themselves to paying for this scourge to be moved to another region. The situation worsened at the beginning of the reign of Carlos V due to the end of the war in Britain and the conflict with Carlos II of Navarre, which left more warriors without activity.
The reconquest of Charles V (1364-1380)
Internal reforms and neutralization of Carlos II of Navarre
The military defeat had left the power discredited and without economic means. The treasury was short of funds. The popular uprisings, known as jacquerie, made Charles V understand, who had even witnessed the murder in his presence of two marshals by the unruly Parisians, that the maintenance of sovereignty depended on popular support, that he tried to garner. He slowly and painstakingly prepared the reconquest from his library. The Treaty of Brétigny also served to limit English options, since the resumption of fighting would have left it without effect; The treaty also provided, by idea of the Dauphin, that the sovereignty of the King of England over what was acquired in the treaty would only begin when the French handed over the lands to him. Then the resignation of Eduardo III to the French crown would also be verified. In practice, the dauphin could indefinitely delay the delivery of the territories promised to Edward, which he did. He also delayed the payment of his father's ransom, of which he only paid a third. He also put an end to the currency crisis. putting the franc into circulation, which marked the end of the hated changes in the law, one more measure to reinforce the position of the Crown. In addition, he imposed a tax system managed by royal officials that should serve to raise both the funds to cover war expenses such as the ransom of his father. In addition, he elevated certain characters of the lower nobility who held prominent positions and who collaborated in the recovery of the lost territories. In the military, the king hardly made reforms: he limited himself to to systematize the provisions of his father and his grandfather and to take advantage of his almost regular income due to the impositions of the ransom that he maintained throughout the reign and the monetary stabilization they allowed him to pay the troops more regularly. He did improve, despite everything, the organization of the infantry and emphasis was placed on the practice of the bow and the improvement of the fortifications. The ordinance of 1367 provided that the castles without possibility defense were demolished to prevent them from serving as a refuge for bandits and that the rest were renovated and garrisoned in a timely manner.
John died in captivity, in London, in 1364; he had returned voluntarily after the escape of his son Louis of Anjou, a hostage who had to guarantee compliance with the provisions in Brétigny. Charles II, deprived of the succession to the Duchy of Burgundy in favor of Philip the Bold in 1353, wished to prevent the coronation of the Dauphin Charles at Reims. He took up arms after King John's march to England and nearly encircled Paris completely. Bertrand du Guesclin —one of the members of the lower nobility exalted by Charles V—, in command of the army assembled thanks to the taxes approved by the States General in 1363, defeated him at the battle of Cocherel on May 16, victory that put an end to the civil war, reestablished royal authority in the eyes of the population (the military victory demonstrated that tributary sacrifices were reflected in war triumphs) and allowed the coronation of Carlos V. The defeat of the Navarrese in Cocherel allowed Du Guesclin to wrest several places from him in the Cotentin, although not Evreux, due to the passivity of Edward III. The peace treaty between the two parties was finally signed in March 1365: it marked the end of the threat that Charles II had posed to the there were the Valois; The Navarrese king lost his possessions in the lower Seine and received in exchange part of the lordship of the distant barony of Montpellier.
Charles V commissioned du Guesclin to lead the large companies —groups of fired mercenaries who devastated the provinces— to defend in Castile the claims of Enrique de Trastámara, who was disputing the throne with his brother Pedro I. Popular sympathies for the Crown grew with the pacification of the kingdom and the reduction of the most onerous taxes.
For his part, Edward III imposed English as the national language in 1361; until then the courtly language had been French; the measure accentuated Anglophobia in the territories conquered in France.
Flanders and Burgundy
Charles managed to transform the previous hostility of the Holy Roman Empire into benevolent neutrality towards France. The new king had close ties to his maternal uncle Emperor Charles IV, to whom he paid homage for Dauphiné in 1357. This Friendship had enabled John II, then temporarily returned to English captivity, to hand over the Duchy of Burgundy to Philip the Bold in infantage in 1363, which had been vacant since the death of Philippe de Rouvre in 1361, and to expel Charles from the territory. II of Navarre.
The successor of Louis de Nevers, when Crécy fell, at the head of the county of Flanders was his son Louis de Male, who adopted a hostile policy towards the Valois, unlike his father. He was aware of the important economic link that his lands held with England and he wished to avoid the hostility of the partner cities, whose rebellions he had suffered as a young man. He had only one heir, his daughter Marguerite, widow of Philippe de Rouvre, Duke of Burgundy. He agreed to marry her to the fourth son of Edward III, Edmund of Langley, later Duke of York and origin of the homonymous dynasty, which would have granted the spouses extensive fiefs from which to dominate, together with those of the Prince of Wales, all the warlike whims of the Valois. V hurried to eliminate the threat with the help of the widow countess, wife of Luis de Nevers, and Pope Urban V, who broke up the dangerous marriage on December 18, 1364. Edward III's protests were unsuccessful and the sovereign frank és even managed to marry his brother Felipe the Bold, to whom Juan II had granted the duchy of Burgundy, with Margarita, despite the fierce opposition of the Count of Flanders, who demanded to give his consent the three castles of Walloon Flanders (Lille, Douai and Orchies). The papal dispensation was obtained without problems in 1367, but the marriage could not take place until 1369, when Louis de Male finally relented. Charles V had made his brother Philip sign a secret agreement, for the which he promised to return the territory given to Flanders, but the duke promised his father-in-law not to do so. Despite this, the French king had managed to neutralize the Anglo-Flemish threat and that a Valois inherited the strategic northeastern territory.
Charles V also negotiated with David II of Scotland and the King of Denmark, both hostile to England, and established good relations with Owain of Wales, claimant to the lordship of Wales.
New fighting and territorial recovery
Charles felt strong enough in 1368 to defy Edward III, though he hesitated to do so. He accepted the appeal made to him by the Count of Armagnac, then in conflict with the Black Prince; Edward III had dismissed the earlier complaint of the count. By then, the Black Prince had imposed considerable contributions on his Aquitanian subjects in order to pay for the Castilian campaign: five years of extraordinary taxes that led to a complaint from Juan I of Armagnac to Carlos V. The ambitions The policy of the English prince had already forced him to impose new taxes on his Aquitanian infantry in 1364, 1365 and 1366, but the costly campaign in Castile, Pedro I's non-payment and the need to satisfy the mercenaries to avoid looting in Aquitaine they made him have to ask for new contributions in 1368. The Aquitanian States approved them, shockingly more easily the new territories ceded by France than the old ones of the Gascu In English, where the Lord of Armagnac and the Lord of Albret refused to have it collected on their lands. They first appealed to Edward III, but, without waiting for his response, they then marched to present their claim in Paris before Charles V. The acceptance of their appeal meant the breach of what was agreed in Brétigny and the resumption of the war with England. The French court promoted through bribes, privileges and threats the number of litigants against the Black Prince: the two Gascon lords of 1368 was passed for the spring of 1369 to between eight hundred and nine hundred; the appeals should serve to reinforce the position of Carlos V when he decided to act openly.
Guyenne once again served as a pretext for the resumption of the Anglo-French war, which was again confiscated by the French king, at the time that Edward III re-titled himself king of France. The Treaty of Brétigny had granted full sovereignty of the duchy to England, but the agreed double resignation of Edward to the French crown and that of John to Guyenne—— had not been verified, nor had the expected delivery of lands. Thus, legally Edward III could not judge a tax dispute over land not yet delivered to him that Charles V confiscated. Edward's attempts to keep the peace were rebuffed by Charles. Edward re-proclaimed himself King of France on 3 June 1369, and Charles proclaimed the confiscation of the duchy of Aquitaine on November 30. The war was resumed, but with the right in favor of the capable French sovereign. The contest sharpened the division between the two nations.
Charles avoided pitched battles, dependent on an undisciplined nobility and which in his father's time had proven ineffective in fighting the English. He handed over command of the army to a series of experienced and faithful commanders: Bertrand du Guesclin, his cousin Olivier de Mauny and Guillaume Boitel. The army was divided into groups of one hundred men who were called routes and who submitted to captains who only answered to the king. The soldiers also received their pay regularly and had renovated castles to defend themselves from the attacks. English incursions. The army waged a war of skirmishes, harassment and sieges that allowed the gradual recovery of the territory held by the enemy. For his part, Carlos was careful to curry favor with the recovered lands by granting large privileges and the frequent use of ennoblement; the French nobility had dwindled because of the plague and the losses suffered at Crécy and Poitiers. Much of the reconquest was due, however, to the change of sides of the Aquitaine cities, attracted by the promises of less onerous taxation than the English one. Diplomacy and not military victories were what also allowed the recovery of Ponthieu and Abbeville, in the north.
The scant forces of the Duke of Anjou seized Rouergue, Quercy, the Agenais and the Perigord in 1369. The following year the conquest of the Agenais was completed and the French also seized almost all of the Limousinate and Bazas. Du Guesclin beat the rear of the Robert Knolles at the Battle of Pontvallain in December 1370, a minor clash but the first English defeat in the open. By then the French had recaptured eastern Aquitaine without much attrition. military. There were no major battles in 1371, which Carlos V took advantage of to agree with Carlos II of Navarre, by then already neutralized, the fate of some Norman squares.
International diplomacy was added to military operations: Carlos's league with Enrique de Trastámara allowed him to have the Castilian fleet, which annihilated the English in the battle of La Rochela on June 22, 1372. The defeat left Guyenne without the army that the squadron brought, but also without the money necessary to pay for military operations. The lack of logistical support meant that the strongholds ceded to England in Brétigny gradually fell into French hands: La Rochelle on September 8, 1372, Poitiers that same year and Bergerac in 1377. In 1372 Charles already recovered Poitou, Saintonge and Angumois. Edward III tried to counterattack by reactivating the war in Brittany in July and sending troops to Duke John IV, but in the summer of 1373 Du Guesclin invaded the territory and almost completely occupied it, except for some four places, including Brest. The French took possession of La Réole at the beginning of 1374, a position from which they ame Bordeaux was born. By then, Guyenne had been reduced to the four dioceses of Bordeaux, Dax, Aire and Bayonne.
The English maintained their strategy of the rides, much loved by the English Parliament for financing themselves, but very detrimental to the image of the kingdom among the population affected by the looting of the armies; they served little more than fueling hatred of the English and reinforcing loyalty to Charles V. That of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and youngest son of Edward III, through the Artois and Normandy at the end of 1369 was a failure. It was followed the following year by the Knolles, who advanced from Calais towards Paris before retreating to Brittany harassed by the newly appointed constable Du Guesclin, who annihilated his rearguard at Pontvallain, near Le Mans. The most ambitious was that of the Duke of Lancaster in the summer of 1373, with which he tried to subjugate the French king by crossing his kingdom from end to end and then penetrating Castile and crowning himself king. The well-planned campaign set out from Calais in June and at the end of the year achieved reach Guyenne, but it was a disappointment: Du Guesclin avoided directly confronting the duke, he limited himself to harassing him, encasing himself in the fortresses and hindering the enemy's march by devastating the lands he had to cross. The duke reached or Bordeaux in 1374 at the head of a decimated and exhausted army. Charles V preferred to bear the English looting than to cede ground, despite the havoc they caused the population. The king ordered the peasants to take refuge in the cities with their reserves before each enemy incursion, leaving the fields barren. This made the English advance complicate the supply of the army through abandoned lands; In addition, the French harassed the enemy with ambushes, decimating their armies and finally forcing them to abandon the campaign. This strategy effectively thwarted incursions by great English captains such as Juan de Gante, the Black Prince, Robert Knolles or Eduardo III himself.
The fatigue of both sides led to the signing of a truce, that of Bruges, which was to last from July 1375 to June 1377. Between 1369 and 1375 the French had recovered almost all the ceded territories in Brétigny and even the English possessions prior to the war, except for Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bordeaux, Bayonne and some castles in the Massif Central.
The negotiations that followed the signing of the Truce of Bruges between 1375 and 1377 failed due to the impossibility of the two sides reaching an agreement on Aquitaine, which the English wanted to obtain full sovereignty, a claim that the French rejected. Thus, the fighting resumed in the summer of 1377, both Edward III (June 1377) and his son the Black Prince (June 1376) having died the previous year. The English crown passed to a ten-year-old boy. years, Richard II, so the government was left in the hands of one of his uncles, the Duke of Lancaster. The English continued to undertake cavalcades, to which the French responded with raids against the English coast, which made even fear an invasion, which Charles V in effect ordered Juan de Vienne, the new admiral of the reconstituted fleet, to prepare. There was even a frustrated Castilian attempt to take Bayonne, which was repelled by the new English lieutenant of Gascony, Baron de Neville. re he fought the new French offensives and even reconquered some places lost in previous years.
Charles V confiscated Brittany from John IV in 1378 for having colluded with the English, whom he had already helped in the cavalcade of 1370 and with whom he had participated in that of the Duke of Lancaster in 1373; This was a reckless move: the duke had strong support among the Breton barons and the general populace and forced du Guesclin's French troops to withdraw from the western part of the duchy. John IV then signed the second Treaty of Guérande (April 1381), by virtue of which the French renounced their seizure of Brittany in exchange for the duke's theoretical vassal submission to the French king. He also bought Brest from the English in 1397. If in Brittany the war had favored the English, their attempts to stir Charles II of Navarre against the French monarch were counterproductive: Castile and France reacted vigorously; In Normandy, all of his possessions were taken from him, with the exception of Cherbourg —sold to England by the King of Navarre— and in Navarre itself, important places remained in the hands of Castile as a guarantee of compliance with the Treaty of Briones.
The visit of Emperor Charles IV, uncle of Charles V of France, to his nephew in 1378, rounded off his victory. The first phase of the war ended with the victory of the skillful Carlos, who had counted on the collaboration of military veterans such as Bertrand du Guesclin, over an increasingly elderly Eduardo III. Raising funds to pay King John's ransom had also served, paradoxically, to improve the state of French royal finances. The collection of a royal ransom was the only case in which the Crown could collect a tax without the approval of the Estates General; Carlos had used the situation to impose a centralized collection system that he maintained even after he stopped paying his father's ransom, and that he dedicated to defraying military expenses. The war thus served to create a royal collection system independent of the acquiescence of the nobility and the Estates General and with it an army directly submitted to the Crown, two characteristics of the modern State. The needs of the war led to the emergence in France of a body of royal officials specialized in finance. Charles V left an almost unified kingdom and a consolidated Crown, more autonomous from the nobility and better financed. However, in recent years the depletion of resources was already noticeable, exhausted by military operations and the hostility of the people grew due to the overwhelming taxation that they had to bear to pay for the war. Carlos's reign was later missed as a period of good government, but in his time the king was little liked by the people, depleted of tributes. One of his last acts (September 16, 1380) to calm things down was to abolish the tax on homes, which reduced the income of his successor.
Extension of the conflict to the Iberian Peninsula
Castilian civil war: the new Francophile Trastámara dynasty
The Anglo-French conflict had important repercussions in the Iberian Peninsula. Carlos V of France intervened decisively to replace a Castilian king in principle anglophile like Pedro I by his bastard brother Enrique de Trastámara, representative of the interests of the nobility. To do this, he assembled a large army in the south of France at the end of 1356, nourished by the abundant veterans who had been left unemployed and whose command was taken jointly by Du Guesclin and Trastámara. The army penetrated Castile, attracted the support of almost all the nobility and took control of the kingdom in the face of zero opposition from Pedro, who fled to take refuge with the Black Prince in Guyenne. The Black Prince agreed to help Pedro recover the throne in exchange for large monetary and territorial compensation (the lordship of Vizcaya); On April 3, he defeated the Francophiles of Trastámara in Nájera. Pedro recovered the throne, but could not pay what he had promised and the English withdrew. Charles V took advantage of the situation, rescued Du Guesclin —captured in Nájera— and renewed his He helped Enrique de Trastámara, a refugee in France. He returned to Castile and signed an alliance with the French king in Toledo in November 1368. The Castilian war ended in March 1369 with the death of Pedro: Enrique's victory meant that Carlos V could count on a new and important ally from then on, although this new support took shape after a few years, necessary for Enrique to consolidate his position in Castile.
War of the Portuguese Succession: the new Anglophile dynasty of Avis
The succession crisis that arose in Portugal was also influenced by the long-running Anglo-French contest. England tried to use it to weaken the powerful Franco-Castilian league. Ferdinand I of Portugal died in October 1383 and his widow, with With little support, he was unable to control the situation, which allowed Juan I of Castile, son of Enrique II and husband of Beatriz, daughter of the late King Ferdinand, to meddle in Portuguese affairs, despite the fact that the marriage agreements vetoed the union of the two kingdoms.
The great Portuguese nobles sided with the Castilian king, but the bourgeoisie of the cities, the rich peasantry and the proletariat of the cities opposed him. This party against Juan I was led by a bastard of Pedro I, Juan de Avis. The Castilian sovereign seized a large part of the kingdom and surrounded Lisbon, which suffered from famine, but could not take it because the Castilian army had to withdraw, decimated by the plague. The de Avis gathered the Cortes The Portuguese kings in April 1385, who were initially divided among three candidates, but after paradoxically ruling out two as bastards, had Avis crowned on the 11th of the month, despite also being a bastard. Immediately, the new king joined with England and encouraged the Duke of Lancaster to try to seize the crown of Castile. He dedicated the spring to expelling the Castilian garrisons that his rival had left when he retired stricken by the plague. In the summer there were several clashes that They concluded with the definitive victory of Juan de Avis in Aljubarrota, a new battle in the style of Crecy in which the attacks of the Castilian cavalry were partly thwarted by the English archers. The battle marked the consolidation of the new dynasty of Avis, Anglophile, in Portugal.
Schism of the West
The papal seat at the beginning of the conflict was in Avignon and the popes at the time were French. This favored French diplomacy. However, Gregory XI returned to settle in Rome in 1377 to end the disagreements with Florence, with the mediation of Catherine of Siena. The later pope, Urban VI, an Italian and former Bishop of Bari, was especially hostile to the French cardinals who, for their part, accused him of having been elected under pressure from the Roman population and chose an antipope Clement VII, a Frenchman., who settled in Avignon. The ecclesiastical division frustrated the possibility of resorting to the papacy as a mediator in the war, as it had been until then, having sometimes obtained the postponement of the fighting or the signing of truces. The papacy went from being a supporter of peace to a fan of war: each pontiff hoped to use the victory of his supporters to impose himself on his opponent.
The belligerents in the Hundred Years' War sought papal support: England and the Holy Roman Empire recognized the authority of Urban VI, while France and its allies Castile and Scotland preferred Clement VII. The various opponents used the ecclesiastical dispute against their enemies, inevitably branded as schismatics for recognizing the opposite pope. In fact, Charles V had chosen Clement VII for being French and England for Urban VI for not being one.
In more than a century of war, famine and plague, the Church did not seem capable of calming the anguish of the parishioners at times. The terror of hell made the rich pay hundreds or thousands of masses to try to ensure the salvation of their souls. Rich and poor participated in processions of penitents, in theatrical representations of the passion in the atriums of the churches; The coronation of the Virgin, a protective figure as the mother of Jesus, was a very frequent artistic motif. She also increased the number of faithful and ecclesiastical reformers who demanded direct access to the source of salvation, to reading the Bible in the vernacular at a time when only ecclesiastics could read or comment on the Scriptures. In these claims is the origin of the later Protestant Reformation, a sign of the end of the Middle Ages and the strengthening of the bourgeois class.
The division of the Church in the Great Western Schism facilitated criticism. Theories such as that of John Wyclif could be spread, at a time when the ecclesiastics who were supporters of one pontiff or the other were mutually invective, discrediting each other. The situation facilitated the later rise of the Protestant Reformation, of which Wyclif was a precursor.
The Council of Constance in 1415 ended the schism by abdicating the two rival popes and electing a new one (Martin V). The Church had to resort to conciliarism to resolve the crisis: the councils (meetings of all the bishops) held greater power than the pope himself and had to meet periodically. The papacy was weakened, which allowed Charles VII of France to proclaim himself natural head of the Church in France in 1438, with the support of the French episcopate, giving rise to Gallicanism.
Regency and civil war (1380-1429)
The government of the dukes. uncles of Charles VI (1380-1388)
Charles, who had always been infirm, prepared the succession. In 1374 he set the age of majority for the kings of France at thirteen years and ordered the creation of a great junta that would hold the bulk of power for the minority of the new king, a provision that was not fulfilled. He also ordered the renovation of the kingdom's castles, by then already vulnerable to artillery, both in the border areas and in those exposed to English landings (Normandy in particular). His reign ended in peace, but with a heavy tax burden, which had been imposed on a provisional basis, but had been maintained, causing growing displeasure both in the cities and in the countryside.
Charles V finally died in September 1380, at forty-two years of age. His son and his namesake inherited the throne at just twelve years old; As he was a minor, his uncles took him under his wing. They formed a regency council that replaced the royal council, while preventing the creation of the great board planned by Carlos V. The regents progressively got rid of the king's advisers deceased, although not all lost their positions and others who did recovered them later. The king's uncles, brothers of his late father, Luis de Anjou, Juan de Berry and Felipe de Borgoña, monopolized power along with his cousin, Luis II Duke of Bourbon, despite what Carlos V had ordered. The previous reign had been characterized by the affirmation of royal power against the nobility. In fact, it has already been bled dry by the effects of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers or the great plague and its regular reminiscences, but it is also facing a significant drop in its income from the land, the countryside has been depopulated by plague and lastingly devastated by looting resulting from the deserted lands strategy and the action of mercenary companies: peasants fled and their lands were often left fallow, abandoned (particularly serious were the vines destroyed, leading to lasting difficulties in wine production, and which was essential at a time when water was rarely safe). Obviously with the return of order, things improved, the lands were recolonized, but many lords gave up their lands for rent or sharecropping, which was less profitable, but provided more regular income and allowed them to be present at court to benefit from the generosity of his overlord. The royal treasury had accumulated funds at the mercy of which taxes had become permanent, allowing the Crown to buy the fidelity of feudal lords. The uncles of the new king took advantage of this circumstance to use the money from the Crown for their own benefit, maintaining large groups of supporters and true principalities at the expense of the royal treasury. The Duke of Anjou ended up setting out to conquer the kingdom of Naples, which he had claimed for himself since 1382, but paid for the expedition at the expense of the treasury. the territory as his predecessor in office, his brother the Duke of Anjou, had done before. The brothers' departure left Philip the Bold as a leading figure in the council, along with his cousin the Duke of Bourbon.
As for the Anglo-French war, the early 1380s were characterized by the maintenance of Franco-Castilian superiority and rebellions in the two warring kingdoms. The Castilian fleet burned Gravesend in 1380 and the imposition of a new tribute to improve the defenses of the kingdom, raise funds for an incursion into France and pay for the king's wedding triggered the rebellion of the peasants of the southeast, supported by part of the London population, who put the country in a bind. English Government. There were also several rebellions in France, mainly anti-fiscal, in various parts of the kingdom: in Rouen, Paris and in Flanders. In this, Felipe de Artevelde, son of the assassinated Jacobo, rose up in the spring of 1381 and he requested English support. The Anglophile attitude of the count, Luis de Male, had not been enough to prevent the new revolt in Ghent and that he requested English help, forcing the duke to ask for that of his son-in-law, the duke of Burgundy, which made the French royal council decide to send an expedition to put down the uprising. The French defeated the rebels at Roosebeke on November 27, 1382, but in May 1383 the rebels received English reinforcements (a supposed crusade led by Bishop of Norwich with the approval of the Roman pope), which the French checked in August, after having seized Dunkirk and having besieged Ypres in vain.
On the return of the Flemish expedition, the king's uncles decided to intimidate the kingdom and put an end to the anti-fiscal protests, with which they had had to be conciliatory before the expedition to obtain the necessary funds to pay for it. They imposed large fines on some cities such as Paris, Rouen, Orleans, Laon or Reims, and the Languedoc and reestablished the taxes on merchandise and the tax on households. Taxes returned to being permanent and very onerous.
In Brittany the second treaty of Guérande was signed, which ensured the duke's submission to the French Crown, but allowed England to retain possession of Brest.
The Duke of Lancaster tried to seize the crown of Castile after the Castilian disaster at Aljubarrota in August 1385, which, however, had not undermined the position of Juan I of Castile. The duke landed in Galicia in July 1385. 1386, hoping to attract the supporters of the late Pedro I, although he did not achieve great support. He agreed to the invasion of Castile with Juan I of Portugal, which was carried out in an uncoordinated manner. The Duke of Lancaster's offensive was halted before Valencia de Don Juan and Benavente and the two sides negotiated the English evacuation in exchange for the payment of the expedition and a pension for the duke; peace was sealed by the marriage of the daughter of the duke and granddaughter of Pedro I, Catalina, and of the infant Enrique, grandson in turn of his enemy and brother Enrique II. The great expense that the expedition entailed for the English treasury of the duke was not enough for Castile to stop being affiliated with France and recognize the authority of the pope of Avignon.
Philip II of Burgundy, uncle of the French king, assembled a Franco-Burgundian army and a fleet of 1,200 ships during the summer and autumn of 1386 near the Zealand town of The Lock to invade England, but the company failed. However, Juan de Berry, Felipe's brother, was deliberately late for the army meeting, which delayed the preparations until the autumn, when it was already impossible to address the invasion and both the fleet and had to disband. the army. There was another French military expedition in the area, mainly for the benefit of the Duke of Burgundy: the one to punish the Duke of Gelderland in the autumn of 1388, who had defied Charles VI and made himself a vassal of Richard II.
Charles' coming of age and rule by his father's advisers (1388-1392)
Charles VI seized power in Reims on the return of the easy expedition, on November 3. The countryside and the cities supported the taxes provisionally granted to pay for the war expenses; the diversion of funds to pay for lavish parties did not make it easier to accept a tax either, it had become permanent. Charles VI, who was already twenty years old at that time, decided in 1388 to take the reins of government and end the regency of his uncles, discredited and considered wasteful. Her uncles were removed from power in a conspiracy led by the king's ambitious brother, Louis, Duke of Touraine (later Orléans), who surrounded himself with his late father's former advisers, exasperated by the looting the treasury of the dukes and their favorites. The weak king left the Government in the hands of his father's men, who tried to recover the administrative system of Carlos V. His program was not reformist, but simply to correct abuses of the years of power of the king's uncles. The two groups, that of the advisers of Carlos V and that of the dukes, created two courtly parties: the reformist formed by the advisers of Carlos V, generally of bourgeois extraction, and the king's relative dukes, as well as Queen Elizabeth of Bavaria.
The military operations gave way to new Anglo-French negotiations, which led to the signing of a new quite general truce (June 18, 1389), signed by England, France, Castile, Scotland and the Duke of Burgundy, and which gave way to a long period of appeasement. The three-year truce, the longest in the last twenty years, was to serve to agree on the final peace.
Peace was maintained during this period as England was engulfed in civil war. The cessation of the trade in salt, wine and wool, the onerous taxes necessary to cover the expenses of the army and the discredit of the nobility due to the defeats they had suffered in France ended up unleashing a peasant revolt. The Lollards coordinated the troublemakers, who attracted them with their preaching of egalitarianism. The insurgents seized London, but were later defeated by Richard II.
Madness of Charles VI and return of his uncles
The reign looked as if it would be as positive as that of Charles V, but the much-loved king suffered a fit of dementia (August 5, 1392) while participating in a punitive expedition against the Duke of Brittany, accused of protecting the instigator of an attack against a prominent royal official. Someone had told him that he was surrounded by traitors who wanted to kill him, and he attacked his grooms with sword in hand until they managed to subdue him. The accident of the Bal des Ardents, which occurred a few months later, ended up unhinging the monarch.
Charles VI began to suffer periods of madness from 1392, interspersed with others of normality. The crises worsened with age, becoming more violent and long, with increasingly lucid lapses. brief. The king's lack of direction in public affairs allowed his uncles to retake power in a new regency council chaired by Queen Elizabeth of Bavaria; Carlos V's main advisers were fired again, although others continued in their posts, although subject to the supremacy of the king's uncles. The queen was a bad politician, so power was held in practice by the Duke of Burgundy, although it had to rely more and more on the powerful Luis de Orleans, younger brother of the king, opposed to the influence of the duke at court and who had been the main political figure during the four years of preponderance of Carlos' advisers V. The Anjou were focused on taking over Naples, the Duke of Bourbon was already old and only wanted to round out his possessions through inheritances and purchases, and the Duke of Berry was more interested in his patronage activities than in power. Thus, It was the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy who were left vying for power, each time in more confrontational positions, although the rivalry did not lead to open struggle while Philip the Bold lived.
The weakness of the king allowed various dukes of the royal family to embark on a series of military adventures at the cost of the royal treasury, with little fruit: the unsuccessful incursion into Barbary by the Duke of Bourbon (1390), the defeat against the Turks of Burgundy (1396) or the Italian campaign of Anjou, which allowed them to temporarily dominate Genoa (1401-1409). Administrative chaos, corruption and looting of the treasury also grew at this time in which the royal Treasury had to satisfy the ambitions of the various notables who tried to dominate the politics of the kingdom.
Armagnac and Burgundians (1392-1429)
The resumption of the conflict was due to different factors:
In both France and England there were various parties vying for power. In England, the change of dynasty was due to the defeats suffered in France: Henry IV of Lancaster obtained the throne after a long conflict.
In France, the madness of Charles VI led to the formation of a regency council chaired by the queen, although power was actually shared by the greats of the kingdom: Louis of Orleans, head of the Armagnac party, Philip the Daredevil, Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Berry, who actually acted primarily as a mediator for the former two. The rivalry became more acute from 1404, when Philip the Bold died and his nephew Juan Fearless inherited his vast territories, who soon fell out with the Duke of Orleans. be ruining the finances of the kingdom. Louis of Orleans was gaining influence with the queen, contrary to the attempt of the Duke of Burgundy to dominate the court, and his Burgundian adversaries came to accuse him of being her lover and the dauphin's father. The Queen and Orléans tried to drive the Dauphin Louis away from Paris in 1405, but were overtaken by their opponents at Juvisy and forced to return to the capital. John the Fearless had his rival the Duke of Orleans assassinated in November 1407 as he was leaving to visit the queen, which sparked civil war. In principle, however, the duke's supporters Orleans did not dare to try to punish the assassin, as this meant unleashing the war. The Armagnacs' hesitations and the king's desire for reconciliation in the few moments when he regained lucidity allowed the Duke of Burgundy to return to the court from Lille, where he had originally taken refuge. The sovereign imposed a false reconciliation on 9 March 1409.
Facing the Duke of Burgundy, important feudal lords met in the opposing party: the Dukes of Berry, Bourbon and Orleans, Constable Carlos d'Albret and the father-in-law of the late Duke of Orleans, Count Bernard VII of Armagnac, which gave the party its name. An ambitious mercenary, he contributed his fearsome Gascon troops, took command of the enemy side of the Duke of Burgundy in 1410, and was named constable of the kingdom in 1416. Religion also separated the Two French parties: the English and the Burgundians recognized the authority of the Pope in Rome, while the Armagnacs sided with Avignon.
The two parties actually represented two rival economic, social, and religious systems: France, with its flourishing agriculture and strong feudal and religious system, and England, primarily cattle farmers and supplier of the wool that was woven in Flanders, with a artisans and a thriving bourgeoisie. The Armagnacs defended the French model; John the Fearless, on the other hand, advocated English: he promised to keep taxes low and the Estates General to control the government. He enjoyed the support of Parisian artisans and university students. The duke became a champion of reforms and He became a persecutor of corruption and embezzlement, thereby gaining the favor of the Parisian population. He justified the murder of the Duke of Orleans by skillfully presenting it as a tyrannicide. He placed his supporters in key positions in the administration and he expelled the dukes from the royal council. He called Henry IV on his behalf to curb the broad opposition of the princes, who had surrounded Paris; the arrival at Calais of a small English contingent of 2,000 men, the first to arrive in France in twenty-eight years, was enough to end the siege, although the English did not penetrate French territory and soon withdrew.
Their adversaries also requested English help and in May 1412 they agreed to cede almost all of Charles V's conquests in exchange for an army of four thousand soldiers being sent to serve them for three months. The Burgundian occupation del Berry and the threat of the Bourbons made the opponents of the Duke of Burgundy agree to stage a new and temporary reconciliation in August, which limited the scope of the English campaign to a raid through Anjou and Poitou. The Duke of Burgundy left strengthened from the confrontation and the subsequent reconciliation and brought together the Estates of Languedoil on January 30, 1413, which was to serve to finish off the purge of the Administration and obtain subsidies. The princes, humiliated, left Paris and took refuge in their infantados and sessions were dominated by supporters of the Duke of Burgundy.
Juan seized power in the capital and with the person of the king in 1413. The city was left in the hands of the Cabochians (cabochiens), followers of the butcher Simon Caboche, who They revolted at the head of the bourgeoisie and unleashed a massacre of Armagnac on April 27. They promulgated the Cabochian ordinance on May 27, which followed in the wake of the great ordinance of 1357 and tried to drastically clean up finances, put an end to abuses, encourage savings and improve administration. Their exactions against the Parisian gentry made them lose support, and part of the population demanded the help of the Armagnacs, to whom they opened the doors on September 1. Juan Fearless had to abandon the city and strengthened ties with the English, whose help was also sought by the rival party. In Paris, the terror of the Armagnacs replaced that of the Cabochians. The bands of the Count of Armagnac, future constable after the death in the battle of Azincourt of Carlos de Albr et, dominated the capital.
The Duke of Burgundy had taken refuge in Flanders in September 1413. He sent an army to try to recapture Paris in February 1414, but failed. His rivals then marched to Arras, intending to dispossess it of his possessions. To avoid this, Juan entered into negotiations with the English, which failed due to their claims, excessive in the opinion of the duke.
Change of dynasty in England: the Lancasters (1397-1413)
Edward III had left the throne to a minor, Richard II, in whose name one of his numerous uncles ruled at first —Edward III had had twelve children—, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was in charge of signing several truces. Richard was an ardent admirer of the French court and married a daughter of Charles VI when he was widowed by his first wife in 1394. Richard's conciliatory attitude took the form of attempts to transform the truce into final peace, which failed due to the great difference in positions, and in a series of Francophile gestures: the evacuation of the Breton squares in 1391, that of Brest in 1397 or the return of Cherbourg to Carlos III of Navarre in 1393 -that this exchange of the French king for the Duchy of Nemours in 1404. Despite the failure of the first negotiations, Ricardo insisted and obtained an interview with Carlos VI in Ardres (September 1396), which also did not serve to end the war; in any case, in March it had been agreed to extend the truce until 1423 and Richard married Elizabeth of Valois, daughter of Charles VI by proxy. Richard's Francophile policy had hardly any prominent supporters in England, only his elderly uncle., John of Gaunt, who died in 1399.
The patient preparations of Richard, who had been appointed bishops' affinity, his appeal to the civil service and recruiting loyal forces in Cheshire, and his wife's generous dowry finally enabled him in 1397 to throw off the tutelage of the barons in July. The ringleaders of this party were assassinated or banished, and Richard temporarily restored royal absolutism. by the heir of John of Gaunt, Henry. He, expelled by Richard, arrived in France in 1398, organized the discontents and took advantage of the king's march to campaign in Ireland in the spring of 1399 to return to Great Britain and strip him of the power. Richard was dethroned and then assassinated a few months later, while Henry sat on the English throne as Henry IV. The rebellion had been an attempt by the n nobles for limiting royal power, as in the contemporary case of the Castilian Trastámara, but Enrique soon asserted his position against the powerful noble families that tried to limit his power (Percy, Mortimer or Arundel). The new king spent the rest of his reign, until his death in March 1413, establishing his power and disrupting various offensives both internally, by discontented nobles, and by the Welsh and Scottish and did not undertake major offensives against France, despite having presented himself before Ricardo as the champion of English rights in the neighboring kingdom. Scotland was neutralized by the death of Robert II, the capture of his heir by the English in 1406, and the continuous internal dissensions of the small kingdom. Wales, by contrast, required constant expeditions between 1400 and 1409 to come under the new dynasty. From 1411, the two French sides in the civil war tried to win their military support. The Armagnacs they allowed a first English incursion that crossed from Cherbourg to Bordeaux in 1412 and caused a temporary reconciliation of the sides due to the alarm it aroused.
Henry V, son of Henry IV, understood the need to unite the nobility against a common enemy, and to attack France. To justify it, he claimed the inheritance of William the Conqueror and the Plantagenets: Normandy and Aquitaine, half of France. He dealt with the two opposing sides in France. The Armagnacs proposed to give him Aquitaine and the hand of Catherine, daughter of the French king that she would have brought with her a rich dowry, but they refused to cede Normandy to her. English.
Resumption of the war: the campaigns of Henry V (1415-1422)
Henry proclaimed himself King of France in 1415 as a grandson of Edward III and a direct descendant of Philip the Fair, while the Valois descended from a younger brother of the latter; He landed at Chef-de-Caux on August 13, near the future city of Le Havre at the head of an army of thirteen thousand soldiers. Thus ended a phase of thirty-five years of relative peace. For once, the English monarch did not want to limit himself to a ride through Normandy, but to take over the region. He took Harfleur after five weeks of siege, whose inhabitants he expelled to install English settlers in the city.However, dysentery began to wreak havoc among the troops and the king had to abandon the conquest and decided to return to England from Calais.
Armagnac and the Burgundians put aside their differences with some difficulty to face the English invasion. They agreed to the Peace of Arras between September 1414 and February 1415, which annulled the exile of the Duke of Burgundy; the situation between the two French sides remained tense despite everything. The French army caught up with Henry V as he crossed Picardy on his way to Calais. However, the Armagnacs opposed the Duke of Burgundy's taking overall command of the army. and he withdrew with his men, which reduced the army to about twenty thousand soldiers. The result was a new repetition of Crecy: French tactical poverty and mediocrity of command allowed the English to finish off a good part of the French nobility at the battle of Azincourt on October 25, 1415. The English victory allowed the victorious army to embark safely for England on November 16, aggravated the dissensions between the French factions and paved the way for way to new campaigns of Enrique V in France. The Armagnacs tried unsuccessfully to recapture Harfleur with the help of the Castilian fleet in August 1416. The defense of the kingdom was completely in their hands after the agreement that Henry V reached with the Duke of Burgundy, who promised to become a vassal of the English king when he managed to take over France.
The English king raised funds to undertake the conquest by siege of fortified French castles in the time of Charles V. He returned to Normandy two years after the victory at Azincourt with an army of between ten and twelve thousand soldiers and powerful artillery. The objective was the same as in 1415: the conquest of the Norman duchy. Caen was taken after staunch resistance on September 20 and its population expelled, as Calais had once been. Argentan and Alençon fell the following month. The French Civil War facilitated Henry V of England's conquests: he seized all the Norman castles and cities in less than two years. Rouen had surrendered by starvation on 19 February 1419. Only Mont-Saint-Michel resisted the English monarch in the spring of 1419.
Armagnac and the Burgundians were locked in a civil war that this time prevented them from facing the new English expedition; the king was by then incapacitated and the Dauphin Charles—later Charles VII—was too young to act on his behalf.Paris and the king were in the hands of the former from 1413 to 1418; Elizabeth of Bavaria fled from her exile in Tours on November 8, 1417 and received the protection of Juan Fearless in Troyes. May 29, 1418 with the complicity of the queen; the Burgundian policy of low taxes in the cities they dominated had once again attracted the Parisian population, after having given them control of others in Picardy and Champagne. The new change of owner unleashed another massacre: the Armagnacs were put to death in a new slaughter in June. The Dauphin fled the city and tried to recapture it after a few days, but his mercenaries, although they entered it, they scattered in search of booty and were finally defeated; Charles withdrew his infantry from the Berry, leaving the kingdom's northern territories in the hands of the Burgundians. The dauphin Charles, whom his father had named lieutenant of the kingdom in June 1417, proclaimed himself regent in December. He took over the leadership of the Armagnac party and settled in Bourges. In reality, it was the Constable of Armagnac who held power in this faction.
The English were already in a position to seize Paris in 1419, prompting Armagnac and Burgundians to finally try to join forces; the Duke of Burgundy and the dauphin met on the Montereau bridge on September 10, after various and unsuccessful negotiations in the previous months. The duke was assassinated during the interview by supporters of the dauphin; He refused to agree with his opponents. The dauphin was accused of being the instigator of the assassination, which was catastrophic for his party: Philip the Good, son of the murdered man, openly colluded with England in December and forced Charles VI to sign the Treaty of Troyes on May 21, 1420, by then completely insane. The treaty had been promoted by the Parisian power groups (bourgeoisie, University, Crown advisers) given the impossibility of facing the English offensive. It provided that Charles VI retained the crown until his death, that his daughter Catherine would marry the English king and that he would inherit France, which would be separated from England and with its own laws, but with a common sovereign. The dauphin was disinherited and his own mother declared him an illegitimate son. Henry married Catherine on June 2. The English king was also regent from 1421. The Armagnacs denounced the treaty and argued in its favor the precedent of the succession of Charles IV and the Salic law to try to to veto the succession to any son that Catalina had. France was divided into three: the territories south of the Loire except Guyenne were loyal to the Dauphin, the northwest was held by the English and the rest by the Burgundians.
Insulated squares faithful to Carlos VII (1429) Carlos found himself with the need to rebuild the Public Administration and pay troops after having lost control of the north of the kingdom. He opted to change the currency law to obtain funds quickly, since the usual income of the Crown was they collected only once a year or even every three years, he lacked the credit to apply for new loans, and the Valois was in dire straits for funds. The return of money was also due to the continuing decline in royal revenues, which had been declining since the 1390s., partly due to the French political crisis. This reduction was added to the loss of Normandy revenues and royal lands in the Île-de-France and surrounding territories.
The Three Frances
Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422. Charles VI, who died on October 22, had maintained popular sympathies until his death, despite thirty years of madness. Henry VI, son of Henry V, he remained king of both England and France, but he was still a minor—barely eight months old when his father died on August 31—which delayed the conflict with his French enemies. Two of the late king's brothers divided up power: the Duke of Gloucester remained as protector of England, while in France the regent was theoretically the Duke of Burgundy, but in practice it was the Duke of Bedford, the military chief in charge of the occupied areas, an excellent administrator, and who in practice April 1423 strengthened ties with Burgundy and Brittany. By then the English financial situation was much worse than in previous years, which made it difficult to undertake new military campaigns to subdue the French territories that had rejected the provisions of Troyes. Henry had demanded excessive efforts from England for his French campaigns, which were maintained with increasing difficulty. Furthermore, the contribution dwindled markedly after Henry's attainment of the French crown: England considered that, from then on, the burden of subduing the rebellious provinces was the province of French subjects. The few English troops that went over to France after the death of Henry V had to be paid for with French money.
Henry—and later his brother the Duke of Bedford—could count on the traditional loyalty of Guyenne, the iron dominance of Normandy despite bands of peasants opposed to English authority, and much weaker control of the area Parisian, Maine, Champagne and Picardy. The shortage of troops and the need to continue military operations to completely subdue the kingdom made it impossible to closely dominate the supposedly subdued provinces and forced to concentrate the bulk of the available men in some garrisons and in the army that tried to dominate Maine and Anjou. Burgundy, for its part, slowly distanced itself from England, dealing with the Charles and frustrating the military operations of its supposed ally. The English could not completely trust the fidelity of the garrisons loyal to the Duke of Burgundy, who acted on his own, nor in the lands that admitted his authority, in which they exercised a vague and weak influence. English control was especially tenuous in the countryside, where territories and groups loyal to the Dauphin Charles subsisted, although their strength and status changed over time. On the whole, the English never came to firmly hold sway over northern France.
The dauphin's supporters recognized him as a rival king (Charles VII). Charles had the support of important noble families, such as the Orleans, Bourbon, Anjou, Foix and Comminges. He had the advantage of dominating a compact territory, without areas loyal to the adversary and without enemy bands, contrary to what happened in the north of the kingdom. A territory as a whole larger and richer than that administered by the Lancasters. In addition to enjoying the support of the majority of the great noble families of the country, it also had that of the civil service purged by the Duke of Burgundy, which allowed it to organize a Public Administration parallel to the Anglo-Burgundian one. It joined forces with Scotland, which provided it with archers that allowed it to balance the military situation in the absence of of the Duke of Burgundy, dedicated to increasing his possessions in Hainaut and Holland. He also maintained the alliance with Castile and the sympathy of Savoy. His main weakness was the lack of a team of effective collaborators z, the continuous intrigues of his court and his own indolence. The maladministration also impaired the management of income, probably squandered by the courtiers during the first years of his reign and which led to new currency devaluations to obtain funds. The disorganization of the "kingdom of Bourges" was also reflected in the chaotic military operations, dependent mainly on the undisciplined and looting Armagnac gangs, and on mercenaries, more effective but also rapacious.
Strengthening of Burgundy: the faithful of the scales
Duke Philip III of Burgundy dedicated himself to consolidating the vast inherited territories. He influenced Brabant from 1406 and later subjected other nearby territories to his authority: Namur (1421), Hainaut and Holland (1428). In addition, he narrowed ties with England and Britain through marriages, as their ancestors had already done with Austria (1378), Bavaria (1385), Savoy (1386) and Luxembourg (1393). Burgundy, a growing power, had favored the option of the double in Troyes. Anglo-French monarchy with a common king, but over time differences of interest with England surfaced.
The Duke of Bedford ceded Champagne and Brie to Philip in 1430 to try to maintain league with him, although by then these regions had significant enemy-held places. Philip's change of sides began with the signing of a six-year truce that was signed in 1431 thanks to papal mediation.
The fighting of the 1420s
The confrontations of the time, a series of horseback rides and battles including those of Baugé, Cravant, La Brossinière and Verneuil or the siege of Montargis, which did not change the situation. The early 1420s were marked by the Anglo-Burgundian advance into Maine. The Allies defeated an army of the Dauphin at Cravant in July 1423 as it attempted to break into Champagne, but lost weeks later at La Brossinière. The Duke of Burgundy had a hard time securing the eastern front on the Loire. La Brossinière's modest victory encouraged Charles VII's supporters to try to wrest Normandy from the enemy, but they were soundly defeated at Verneuil on 17 August 1424. The population had made a great useless effort to raise the money to pay the Scottish mercenaries of Constable Buchan and the Lombards, who were annihilated in a new repetition of Poitiers or Azincourt. Paradoxically, the population received as a liberation the extermination of the mercenaries, despite being a severe defeat for the Valois. The Duke of Bedford was unable to profit from this victory as his allies began to abandon him. Duke of Brittany was temporarily reconciled with Charles VII and his brother Arthur de Richemont was made constable, a position in which he played a prominent role in the following years.He fell from grace in 1427, when he had to take refuge in Brittany.
Charles VII found himself weaker than ever in 1428: the enemy finally had the lands between the Seine and the Loire and was preparing to attack Charles in the nucleus of the territories that were faithful to him, the Berry, and for that it prepared the crossing of the Loire. The English resumed the offensive in 1428, besieging Orleans from October 12, after slow summer preparations. The place had strategic importance as a key to the Loire and was considered a symbol of Charles's legitimacy. In reality, it was never completely isolated, but simply surrounded by a series of fortifications that hindered access to it, although it would have ended up capitulating if it had not been rescued. The first attempts to help it failed miserably. Orleans withdrew. agreed to surrender to the Duke of Burgundy in February 1429, but the English refused not to seize it as the Treaty of Troyes had arranged, which upset the Burgundians, who withdrew from the siege io. At that moment, when the city was about to capitulate, Joan of Arc intervened.
Gradual loss of English territories in France
Joan of Arc
Charles VII agreed to send Joan of Arc, a young peasant girl from Lorraine with no military experience, to help Orleans, which was loosely surrounded by the English. Winter, supply difficulties, and disease had by then weakened the four thousand besiegers. Juana managed to penetrate the city on April 29, 1429, accompanying the great supply caravan that had been prepared to supply the square. On May 4, the French took one of the bastions that surrounded the city and in the following days they seized two others. The English abandoned the encirclement on 8 May, after trying in vain to fight a pitched battle with the enemy. The liberation of the city was the first triumph in a long time of the supporters of Charles VII, although it had more psychological than military significance. Subsequently, the other English positions along the Loire fell into the hands of Charles' supporters.
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Campaigns and battles Cabalgada de Enrique V en 1415 Horse of the coronation and campaign of Joan of Arc (1429) Journey of Joan of Arc to Chinon (1429)
Battle, French victory
Battle, English victory Juana wanted to go on to Reims, despite the apparent difficulty of the operation given that the city was in the middle of the Burgundian area. In reality, some of the cities surrendered without resisting Carlos's army. Carlos VII could have been crowned in Orléans as Louis VI had already been in the past, but being crowned in Reims would notably strengthen his prestige and legitimacy. The French victory at the Battle of Patay (June 18, 1429) in which the Dauphin's troops were commanded by the new constable Arturo de Richemont despite the fact that Carlos attributed the victory to Juana, allowed the coronation. The act, Despite the austereness —only three bishops attended, none of the kingdom's peers and the royal symbols could not be used because they were in Paris—, it reinforced the prestige of Carlos against his opponent. The conquests of his supporters continued throughout throughout the summer (Laon, Senlis, Soissons, and finally Saint-Denis), but slowed down in the autumn, with defeat by Paris on 8 September, still staunchly Burgundian and fearful of further slaughter if taken by Charles VII. Joan's prestige, despite recent setbacks, caused envy among the king's collaborators, who dispatched her with scant means to camp in an expedition with an ambiguous result (defeat at La Charité-sur-Loire, but victory at Louviers and Château-Gaillard). Ju Ana lost influence after the coronation of Carlos, who stopped supporting her. The lack of funds and the arrival of winter made Carlos VII order a withdrawal towards the Loire and the discharge of half of the troops. The fraction Courtesan supporter of diplomacy convinced him to enter into talks with the Duke of Burgundy. The court planned for 1430 to consolidate what had been conquered and not to acquire new territories, so Juana marched on campaign with some of her followers, without royal support. The royal treasury had been exhausted by the coronation expedition and did not have the money to raise an army that year, so only the mercenary bands that robbed the population operated in 1430. Juana was arrested on May 23 when Juan de Luxemburg, who sold it to the English, tried to save Compiègne, which had gone over to Charles VII. war to the death. For the English, the prisoner's trial was a way of discrediting her and, indirectly, Charles VII. She was tried, impeccably for the time, by an ecclesiastical court presided over by the bishop de Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, a supporter of the Burgundian party. Condemned as heretical and relapsed for having confessed her errors and then having reneged on temporary repentance, she was burned in Rouen on May 30, 1431. Joan's death did not end with the project of expelling the English from France, directed among others by some of his close collaborators in his short military career, but this lasted for more than twenty years and required both military operations and diplomatic maneuvers to be concluded.
Worsening of the English position
The coronation maneuver upset Henry VI, who had been crowned King of England at Westminster in 1429, but not yet of France; It had to be held in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Paris on December 17, 1431, in a ceremony lackluster due to the absence of a large part of the French bishops. The continuous enemy incursions in the Parisian region made Enrique leave the last city Christmas. Neither the execution of Joan of Arc nor the coronation in Paris substantially improved the English situation, increasingly weaker due to the gradual loss of support from the bourgeoisie and the common people in general, although the Administration and the University continued faithful to Enrique; the discontent was reflected in the increase in the number of uprisings.
The political and military situation of England began to worsen from 1431. It had never been able to firmly occupy the territories obtained in the Treaty of Troyes: Picardy and Champagne were only partially occupied and in the Ile de France there were supporters of Carlos VII who kept some strongholds and others who took refuge in the woods of Hurepoix. The territories between the Saône and the Loire were divided as to which king they recognized as lord. The French captains Dunois, La Hire, Barbazan and the mercenary Rodrigo de Villandrando repeatedly attacked both Champagne and the Île-de-France with their bands of looters. nicknamed by the population "flayers" (écorcheurs). Paradoxically, the population did not blame Carlos, in whose name they felled the northern provinces, for their excesses, but rather the English, unable to put an end to them and ensure order. In addition, the hatred that the English had aroused among part of the population led to numerous uprisings, which made, for example, the situation in Normandy increasingly difficult for them. The French nearly seized Rouen Castle in 1432. In 1434, Normandy was almost totally in rebellion after the English administration increased taxes, despite the bloody repression ordered by the Duke of Bedford. John the Fearless had promised tax cuts that the English could not keep. Even the founding of the University of Caen in 1432 brought complications: for the teachers of the University of Paris, it meant the appearance of competition and made them at odds with the English. In Paris sympathy for the English was also waning as difficulties and harassment from Charles VII's gangs grew.
La Hire and Saintrailles crushed the Earl of Arundel's English army at the Battle of Gerberoy.
Burgundy change sides
The defeat and pressure from the Flemish cities and from Paris, which wanted peace for economic reasons, made the Duke of Burgundy agree to deal with the enemy. For Carlos, indolent and more prone to diplomacy than to war, conciliation with the duke was also advisable, the best way to submit the north of the country to his authority, since he also did not have the resources to impose himself by force of arms. Contacts between the two had never completely ceased and they became they intensified as early as 1432. The talks began in Arras in August 1435, and representatives of the Duke of Burgundy as well as the two feuding kings attended. The English peace offer was soon discarded and at the end of the month the papal legate criticized his position harshly, while admitting the legitimacy of Charles VII. The English delegates withdrew a week later, in theory to consult with their lord, although the march was final and settled the negotiations. iations between Carlos VII and Felipe de Borgoña.
Charles VII apologized in 1435 for the murder of his father, which led to the signing of the Treaty of Arras between Armagnac and the Burgundians. The treaty expanded the territories of the Duke of Burgundy, who received the counties of Auxerre, of Mâcon, Ponthieu and Boulogne, the lordships of Péronne, Royes and Montdidier and as guarantee of compliance with the pact cities of Picardy (Amiens, San Quentin, Corbie and Abbeville, among others). Felipe was exempted from paying homage to Carlos during the rest of his reign and also to provide him with military aid. The treaty ended the balance between the two contenders, giving the French side a clear advantage over the English; only one great French lord recognized Henry's authority: the Duke of Brittany. All the territories dominated by the Duke of Burgundy came under the authority of Charles. Uprisings broke out almost immediately in the Caux region and in the Vire valley. Almost immediately, the French seized Dieppe, Montivilliers, and Harfleur. The Isle-de-France fell into the hands of Charles VII during the winter of 1435. Paris, exhausted and besieged, opened the gates to the constable Arthur de Richemont on April 13, 1436. He proclaimed the king's general pardon. Meanwhile, he reordered the kingdom and prepared to continue the reconquest of territories. By then Henry VI only kept part of France in Guyenne, most of Normandy and a section of Maine. The agreement between Charles and the Duke of Burgundy brought about the near complete reunification of the kingdom, but for the population it marked the beginning of another era of atrocities by the licensed troops. The leaders of these gangs operated with near impunity and sometimes even claimed to be acting in the king's name.
Charles' military advantage was partly offset by the Burgundian defeat when Flemish militias tried to recapture Calais from the English in 1438. The severe setback and subsequent felling of the duke's Flemish territory forced the duke to sign a truce with the English.
Vain attempts to make peace, Truce of Tours (1439-1449) and French military reforms
The peace conference at Gravelines in 1439 failed for the same reasons as the previous one at Arras: the great differences between the positions of the two rival kings. The following year Charles VII had to crush a dangerous conspiracy, that of the Praguerie, in which both the Duke of Burgundy and prominent members of the nobility (the dukes of Anjou, Bourbon, Brittany and Alençon, as well as the dauphin himself) participated. The conspiracy sought to limit royal power, it had already had a minor precedent in 1337 and asked for help from the English, which did not prevent it from being crushed by the king's army throughout 1440 and 1441. The king's military superiority over the rebels and the lack of participation of the Duke of Burgundy made the rebellion fail. The suppression of the uprising allowed Charles VII to definitively expel the English from the Isle of France, seize Dax and Tartas and even threaten Bordeaux. There was a new alliance of princes between f end of 1440 and 1442 that culminated in a meeting in Nevers and in which the Duke of Burgundy did participate, who tried to seize the main role in the kingdom; the king and his advisers disrupted it, attracting some of the conspirators.
The last phase of the war was long and marked by the end of English superiority in field battles; the supremacy of the archers and the infantry gradually gave way to the hegemony of the French field artillery, organized by Jean Bureau, which allowed the enemy ranks to be disorganized before attacking them with the heavy cavalry. Henry VI, whose mother was French, he was disinclined to war, and his council was divided over the advisability of continuing the conflict after the Duke of Bedford had died. The two sides signed a new truce, that of Tours in 1444, which Charles VII took advantage of to reorganize the army. The truce was to last ten months, but it was successively renewed until it lasted five years. 1438 and 1443 collect taxes without having to collect them annually to approve them, as did those of Languedoc in 1439; thus the permanent tax was born. This allowed the king to form a permanent army and avoid the license of mercenaries, who ended up looting the kingdom. He got rid of twenty thousand of these sending them under the orders of the Dauphin Louis to fight the Swiss cantons risen against the Duke of Austria. Many of them perished in the combats against the Swiss and Alsatians. Others were included in the new army in small groups and a third contingent was discharged and returned to their places of origin - many of these were Castilians.
Altogether, Charles VII only kept half of the soldiers, which he organized into new units called "lances". These consisted of a man-at-arms, two horse archers, a cutler armed with a sword and a long dagger, a page and a footman, although the latter two did not usually fight. One hundred lances made a company and fifteen companies, with about nine thousand men, six thousand of them combatants, an army (grande ordonnance). First, three companies were formed, permanent and destined at the beginning to garrison cities, which had to cover their expenses, which saved these expenses to the royal treasury. To these units he added by means of the ordinance of 1448 (petite ordonnance) others that met in case of general mobilization: each parish (made up of fifty households) had to provide the king with an expert and equipped archer. This was exempt from paying the size and received the name of "free archer" (of the payment of the tax). The royal agents chose these archers, who came to be about eight thousand, which finally allowed the kingdom to measure itself with some equality to the archers of the English king. This new organization did not exclude, however, that the king continued to hire mercenaries when he considered it appropriate: There was, for example, a permanent Scottish guard, while the artillery was organized in parks, groups of twenty pieces. At the beginning, it was used in sieges, and then it was also used in the open field. In total, Carlos had an army of fifteen thousand trained soldiers, who could move on horseback and, therefore, quickly.
The English archers, whose formation was very slow, were dwindling in number with the successive battles. Those captured by the enemy had their middle fingers amputated to prevent them from using the bow. Not only did their number decrease, but also their effectiveness, because the French horses were already marching into combat protected and the cavalry already tended to avoid frontal assaults and to attack. attack the archers from the flanks, as in the battle of Patay, in which many of them perished.
New fighting: French conquest of Normandy and Guyenne
Charles' excuse for breaking the truce with England was the capture of Fougères on March 24, 1449 by François de Surienne, who seized it from the Breton duke in league with the French king; the conquest had been carried out on behalf of the Duke of Somerset, Henry VI's lieutenant in Normandy. He maintained negotiations with England for a few months, while he was preparing to intervene in Normandy and his captains were already fighting, although they were officially doing so at the service of the Duke of Brittany. Charles attacked Normandy from three directions. The population already considered the English as mere occupiers, so that in a single campaign, that of 1449-1450 was enough for the French to seize the duchy. The campaign of conquest began with a series of sieges in which the importance of artillery stood out: in a few weeks the French seized Lisieux, Argentan, Saint-Lô and Coutances. The Rouen inhabitants opened the city gates to Charles VII, who reached it on November 10. Somerset could not even hold its own in the citadel. The conquest of Honfleur also meant regaining control of the Seine estuary. The English dispatched a small relief army with great effort given the bad situation of the treasury, which landed in Normandy but was defeated in the battle of Formigny on April 15, 1450, a clash in which the artillery disrupted the English ranks; the archers charged to try to silence two culverins, but they were swept away by Constable de Richemont's Breton cavalry, whose intervention was decisive in ensuring the French victory. This victory facilitated the seizure of the places still in English hands and Cherbourg it fell to the French four months later, on August 12, ending the English presence in the duchy.
The loss of Normandy unleashed a crisis in England, where a rebellion broke out that prevented the reinforcement of the defenses of Guyenne, the enemy's next objective. The revolt was due to the conjunction of defeats in France, the crushing taxation and the excesses of the soldiers who had returned from the Continent. The rebels eventually took control of London, but were defeated by a royal army on 5 July. Guyenne, a major exporter of wine to England, was not pro-French. Charles VII's army nevertheless took possession of the region between October 1450 and August 1451 due to a lack of relief from Great Britain. The conduct of the Valois administrators and the old loyalty to the English king sparked a pro-English uprising, fueled by the opposition of the natives to the onerous taxation imposed by Charles VII. An English expedition under the command of the elderly Talbot recaptured Bordeaux in October 1452. The population of the area rose up in their favor and expelled The French garrisons were used. they assaulted the French defences, but were destroyed by the volley of enemy artillery, made up of three hundred pieces loaded with grapeshot from the flank. The volley butchered the English ranks; the survivors had to face the charge of the Breton cavalry, which finished off the massacre, in which some four thousand English perished. The French victory was decisive and put an end to the English reconquest attempt, although the last operations lasted several years. more months.
The siege of Bordeaux began after the clash of Castillon and included the naval blockade. The population of the area was determined to resist the French army, but they did not have the help of England, so at the end of September they they began negotiations to capitulate. The city finally surrendered on October 19. According to the agreement, Bordeaux lost its privileges: the right to coin money, the right to approve taxes, its Parliament, etc. It was also fined and the most prominent bourgeois of the Anglophile party were exiled. Many Gascon lords were handed over to Charles VII or had to go into exile, as was the case of Pierre de Montferrand, lord of Langoiran. England only kept Calais on the continent, which Philip the Good had insisted that it keep so as not to affect the importation of English wool, which was essential to the economy of Flanders. The long-running conflict did not end with the signing of any peace, but the war The civil war that England suffered for thirty years prevented further fighting with France on the Continent and for this reason these events in Guyenne are often considered the end of the war.
Post-war tension (1453-1477)
Minor crashes
There was no truce signed after the Battle of Castillon. There were no more pitched battles between the two kingdoms, but there was the possibility that the conflict could resume at any time. The two countries were limited, however, to a series of raids: the French attacked Sandwich (1457) and the Isle of Wight and the English the Isle of Ré.
Dynastic crisis in England
The difficulties of the English monarchy due to the dispute for power began immediately after the revolt of Cade was put down in 1450 and were the consequence of the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399. The new dynasty had not suffered major blows while the victories had lasted military in France, but the defeats put it into question.
Henry VI was falling into madness from 1453, as had happened to his grandfather Charles VI. This revived the question of power in England (Henry VI belonged to the house of Lancaster that had wrested power from the of York in 1399). The royal council was dominated by Queen Margaret of Anjou, who advocated conciliation with France. This position was contrary to that defended by most of the English nobility; Duke Ricardo de York, very loved by the bourgeoisie and the London people, made her responsible for her defeat before the French and demanded her regency for himself; he was the head of the warmongering party. The two factions disputed the crown from 1455 in the so-called War of the Two Roses. Richard won the first battle of Saint Albans, which allowed him to rule England for the next four years, with King Henry VI in semi-captivity. The Lancasters had been weakened, but prepared their revenge led by Queen Margaret, who retained her royal title. The opportunity arose when Henry VI unexpectedly recovered his reason. The king was informed of the activities of Richard, who was expelled from court in 1459. The Yorkists suffered several defeats and the Lancastrians freed the king in 1461. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, took a decisive step: after the victory of Towton March 1461, he took Edward of York to London to proclaim him King on June 28, 1461 under the name of Edward IV. England then had two kings: Henry VI, supported by the Lancastrians, and Edward IV, supported by Warwick and the Yorks.
Anglo-Burgundian New League
The dukes of Burgundy had amassed vast possessions during the second part of the war, since the time of Philip the Bold, including Burgundy proper as well as Franche-Comté, Picardy, Artois, Hainaut, Brabant, Holland and Luxembourg, among other lands. The Treaty of Arras of 1435 made Burgundy independent of Felipe III the Good. His son, Charles the Bold, succeeded him in 1467; Ambitious, he hoped to communicate the lands to him by annexing part of Alsace and Lorraine and to have himself crowned king, thus attaining the title of his rival, the French monarch.
Marguerite fled to Scotland and then to France, where she signed a truce with Charles. Edward IV fell out with Warwick, by then a great friend of the French King Louis XI, by adopting a policy too favorable to the Burgundians of Duke Charles and hostile to peace with Charles VII. However, Warwick, nicknamed the "throner of kings", had been the main architect of Edward's accession to the English throne. The king removed him in 1464 and later did the same to the Neville family. Warwick had to take refuge in France in 1470 and was reconciled with the Lancastrians through Charles VII. Louis XI kept the Yorkists immobilized by a series of diversionary maneuvers: he assembled a fleet in Normandy in 1468, which seemed to be preparing to land in England, although in reality no army had been assembled for the supposed offensive. The Lancastrians did raise mercenary troops, with monetary contributions from the French sovereign who, however, was simultaneously negotiating the end of the long contest with Edward IV; the Lancastrian army landed in England in September 1470. Henry VI regained his freedom and the throne, but Edward IV counterattacked with the help of Charles the Bold: he defeated Warwick at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471 and the Lancasters themselves in that of Tewkesbury on May 4, in which the son of their rival Henry VI perished; Edward regained power and had Henry VI killed. The York victory strengthened the league between England and Burgundy and the most Charles VII could do to prevent an offensive was to agree a truce with England in September 1471 and another in March. 1473. Meanwhile, Edward IV signed a treaty with Charles the Bold in 1474 and Parliament approved the necessary subsidies for the king to undertake a new campaign in France.
On the Continent, Louis XI waged a proxy war against Charles the Bold, trying at all times to avoid direct clashes with the duke while turning the Swiss and the Holy Empire against him. Carlos needed to seize imperial territories to unite his domains and his expansionism and power worried the Swiss. Louis and the Swiss were strongly opposed to the Burgundian candidate obtaining the archiepiscopal miter of Cologne. The French king then financed, in 1474, the revolt of Alsatian cities supported by the Swiss cantons, whose fearsome army was partly paid for by the French sovereign. Edward IV disembarked in Calais in July 1475, at the request of Duke Charles and headed for Reims at the head of between twenty and thirty thousand soldiers to have himself crowned King of France. The Duke of Burgundy joined his brother-in-law, the English sovereign, late and with little force. The allies received no help from the French princes, which they agreed to negotiate with Carlos VII.
Treaty of Picquigny
The two kings met in late August at Picquigny on the Somme. Louis XI offered Edward three hundred wagons of wine. His army became drunk on the wine and the English king agreed to withdraw in exchange for an immediate payment of 75,000 escudos and a lifetime pension of another 60,000. These revenues allowed the English sovereign to dispense with Parliament and the French to neutralize Edward's league with the Duke of Burgundy. The pact included a seven-year truce. Louis XI may have promised the English sovereign to stop meddling in English affairs and that Edward IV wanted to avoid a clash that could end in defeat and endanger his crown at a time when his ally the Duke of Burgundy was also in difficulties with the Swiss (he had to abandon the siege of Neuss before the arrival of an imperial relief army) and would not have been able to help him if he had needed it. The Treaty of Picquigny marked the end of the Hundred Years' War, although the tension continued and the French kings had to avoid a resumption of hostilities with continuous deliveries of money. The English king indefinitely postponed his claim to the French throne In addition, Louis XI's alcoholic maneuver discredited the English, who had preferred to get drunk rather than fight and which led to the breakdown of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. Charles the Bold, defeated by the Swiss, perished at the Battle of Nancy in 1477; His corpse was devoured by wild beasts. Calais remained English until the French conquest in 1558.
Consequences
Demographic consequences
Mengua of the European population According to Mitre Fernández (1990), pp. 22, 24. |
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| Note: Europe is classified in various regions: Italy, Iberia, France and the Netherlands, the British islands, Germany-Scandy, Poland-Lithuania and Hungary. |
The fighting caused few deaths. There were few battles in the long contest, rarely involving more than ten thousand men, and the custom of taking captives for ransom for their release reduced the number of casualties in combat. Some battles, such as Poitiers or Azincourt, did reduce the ranks of the French nobility, due to the English decision to decimate the enemy cavalry and give no quarter. Some scholars estimate that the French cavalry lost 40% of its members in the Battle of Poitiers alone (1356) and 70% in that of Azincourt. This led to a considerable weakening of the lower nobility; in Beauce, for example, in 1500 only 19% of nobles held a title before the 14th century.
The second great catastrophe that depleted the population of the time was the Black Death of 1349, much more deadly than war, which reappeared on several occasions: between the beginning of the century XIV and mid-XV, Western Europe lost 30% of the population. The disease had disappeared from the region since 767. The spread of the pandemic followed trade routes: the disease reached Marseilles, then spread through the Rhône Valley and Languedoc in February 1348. It reached Toulouse in April and Bordeaux in May; from there it passed to England. The lethal outbreak of 1349 was followed by many others. These outbreaks of the disease afflicted populations weakened by the cavalcades, the razing of lands to defend themselves against them, and the looting of companies of licensed soldiers, very detrimental to agriculture; the combination left abandoned lands, famines (1345-1348, 1351, 1361, 1368, 1373-1375) and increased mortality. If in the territory of modern France there were some twenty-one million inhabitants in 1310-1320, in 1430 It is estimated that it barely had eight or ten million: it had lost around 60% of the population and returned to figures of the year one thousand. The war hindered and slowed down the recovery of the population, notable in some cities, but not in others. Tolosa, for example, went from having some thirty thousand inhabitants in 1335 to just eight thousand a century later.
For its part, England had gone from having about four million inhabitants at the beginning of the conflict to having no more than two million one hundred thousand approximately by 1400. Some regions, such as the once rich lands between the Seine and the Canal of La Mancha, were left almost depopulated. The English countryside was partly depopulated and the transition to a more mercantile society with great city power was accelerated, in contrast to France, whose population remained 90% rural. Measures to try to stop the spread of the disease, such as the quarantine of ships that docked in Marseille in 1383 or the prohibition in Lille to bury the infected in the city's churches, were generally completely ineffective. The reaction of the population before the disease was very varied, from those who gave themselves up to desperate enjoyment to those who sought scapegoats (chosen for their religion, their origin or their illness), passing through the who interpreted the plague as a divine punishment, which increased religious fervor.
Economic consequences
The reduction of the population due to war and plague epidemics and the maintenance of the money supply caused an increase in prices. This made the products of the Near East more competitive, whose trade grew, resulting in a trade deficit for Europe with that region. The promotion of long-distance trade favored the improvement of navigation, but reduced the available quantity of precious metals, which in turn encouraged a reduction in the law of currencies. This reduction led to a devaluation of the currency, which added to the insecurity of trade routes created by the war. Thus, the economy changed in some aspects:
- The technical advances that improved navigation, which had already begun in the century XIIIThey spread during the war. The ships gained maneuverability through the codast helm, grew in size, improved the use of the compass thanks to the studies of Pierre de Maricourt on magnetism (1269), which allowed to apply corrections due to magnetic decline and began to use the ballestilla to calculate latitude. These improvements allowed transoceanic navigation. The scarcity of precious metals and the growth of trade with the East favored the emergence of trade routes that united Europe with Asia and the search for new sources of precious metals.
- The insecurity of the roads severely prejudiced the economy of Flanders and France: the Flemish left the fairs of Champagne, which were losing importance in favor of Paris. The textile trade was made mainly by sea, surrounding the Iberian peninsula, which benefited the Italian merchants. The land routes between Italy and the Netherlands then passed through Switzerland and Germany. The commercial role of France, continental power, declined.
- The cessation of traffic through the La Mancha channel, which occurred several times during the conflict, intensely affected the Flemish textile industry, which at the beginning of the war imported English wool. England compensated for the loss of ties with Flanders by slowly creating its own industry of wool fabrics, of high quality, which prompted the Dutch competition to move to the production of smaller-quality cloths to continue producing. The Crown encouraged the transformation by reducing the taxation of the tissues regarding the wool, granting generous privileges to the foreign pañeros that were established in the kingdom (1337) and prohibiting both the export of wool to Flanders and the import of cloth. This situation caused many itinerant flamenco weavers to settle in England. Even before the great plague of 1349, Flanders had already suffered a demographic crisis that led to an abundant emigration. The Flemish Pañeros began to import the wool of Castile (which later facilitated economic integration into the Habsburg Empire when the ties with France had already been weakened by the decay of the fairs of Champagne) and to employ other raw materials such as the linen.
- The English competition reduced the benefits of the Flemish Pañeros, which determined the diversification of the region's economy, with the strengthening, for example, of banking activity.
- The financial sector grew, which started using letters of change to secure funds, which no longer needed to be transported at the corresponding risk. The postal service was also extended.
- Traders partnered in companies and societies to mutualize risks and created independent subsidiaries, which reduced the extension of bankruptcies.
The consequences of the war and the plague affected the different French regions and the countryside and cities differently. Brittany, the south and the regions subject to the Dukes of Burgundy were less affected and recovered before the ravages of war, unlike the core of the kingdom (the middle Loire, Normandy, Champagne or the Ile-de-France), which even at the end of the century XV were still in a state of prostration. The land also suffered much more than the cities. Some regions were left almost deserted by the action of combat, looting and disease. Attempts at reactivation, generals throughout the kingdom, were hampered by onerous royal taxation, which particularly affected poor laborers.
The conflict affected England less. The end of the conflict brought crushing taxation and military obligations for the working population and favored the acceleration of economic growth, perceptible for decades. The general situation of the peasantry improved and serfdom almost disappeared. The rise of the new textile industry also fostered trade, still largely in foreign hands, but with increasing participation by English merchants. Political tensions did not substantially impair the kingdom's economic growth during the second half of the century. 15th century.
Tributes and refugees
It did not seem logical to Edward III to pay Philip a tribute for lands that had belonged to his ancestors for centuries and that he himself had the right to be sovereign of France. He saw himself as an overthrown king in France who was also forced to pay tribute to the usurper for the use of his own territories. The situation could not last.
He finally found a way to harm Philip: one of the French king's relatives, Robert of Artois, had rebelled, and Edward welcomed him as a brother to his English court. Felipe VI's reaction was immediate: in a quick and perfect coup, he invaded and annexed the Gascony region, owned by Eduardo. Eduardo responded by claiming, for the umpteenth time, his right to occupy the throne of Paris.
The Endless War
Once the hostilities began (full-fledged, not as simple skirmishes), the fortunes of both sides fluctuated and pendulous. Early on, Edward's English carried out some very important land operations in 1339 and 1340, and also won a great naval victory at La Esclusa. Eduardo used a tactic copied from his enemies (the ride). He would attack the unprotected countryside where the French troops were weak or absent, and take it over. They savagely and cruelly killed men and women, adults and children, religious and secular men and women indiscriminately, raped women and girls, set fire to, looted and stole the peasants' possessions. Being part of a feudal-type society, it was understood that it was the responsibility and obligation of Philip of France to protect them against these savage foreign armies. In this way, in addition to seizing land, supplies, and prisoners, Eduardo undermined Felipe's authority in the eyes of his peasant people.
In 1346 the French engaged Edward in battle at Crecy and in 1356 with his son the Black Prince at Poitiers. Both battles ended in resounding English victories, in the second of which the English secured a better position of strength in subsequent negotiations by surprising and capturing King John II of France (who had succeeded his father Philip in 1350), and by a large number of nobles and knights. With the monarch imprisoned, the French were forced to cede and sign the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), which returned Eduardo III to all of his original possessions except Normandy.
The Counterattack
After the English victory at the Battle of the Lock, France decided to apply the same naval tactics. They then began, from 1360, to make swift and devastating raids against the southern coast of England, culminating in the looting and burning of Winchelsea. They soon became fond of this type of operation, and amphibious attacks would become the bane of English coastal garrisons and civilian populations until at least 1401. They also discovered that Edward was beginning to call his troops back to defend his islands, so they French peasants were beginning to see the ghastly British chevauchées dwindle. Thus, the few Englishmen who still roamed the French countryside were forced to gradually retreat into the middle of the dry and devastated lands that the French left behind. Many died of starvation and disease (mainly dysentery and scurvy), never becoming strong enough to hold their own against the defenders of France.
Despite the victory in its own country, France paid dearly for the expulsion of the invader at this stage of the war. The actions were commanded by the dauphin Carlos (later crowned as Carlos V). His constable, the ambitious and intelligent Bertrand du Guesclin, advised him not to confront, but to resort to a policy of harassing the retreating English columns, leaving only razed earth before them. This foreshadowing of von Clausewitz's tactic implied, then, that French peasants and civilians saw their lands, previously burned by the invaders, razed and destroyed again, this time by their own protectors, with the desire to to save them.
The war reaches its greatest extent at this time, when it exceeds the limits of France for the first time. Thus, in 1367, the English of the Black Prince helped Pedro I of Castile in the battle of Nájera, while his half-brother Enrique received the help of French knights led by Bertrand Du Guesclin himself. Enrique's final victory in the Castilian civil war will provide France with a powerful ally at the naval level (whose hegemony had corresponded undisputedly to England until then) which destroys the English fleet in La Rochela and loots or burns numerous English ports (Rye, Rotingdean, Lewes, Folkestone, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Wight, Hastings) between 1377 and 1380, the year in which the combined fleets of the Castilian admiral Fernando Sánchez de Tovar and his French counterpart Jean de Vienne even threatened London. English attempts to reverse the situation by helping the Portuguese against Castile in the Fernandina wars failed. In parallel, Du Guesclin carried out several raids on Brittany, whose duke had allied with England.
Luck changes sides
England wanted, between 1360 and 1375, to retake the initiative in a war that was devouring it, but luck had changed sides and now favored the French. The English strategists Sir Robert Knolles, in 1360, and John of Gaunt in 1363 formed expeditionary forces that attacked the continent, but were massacred by the French defenders.
King Edward was dead, and his successor, Richard II of England, suffered again the curse that had haunted all child kings: political tensions, social upheaval, a fierce struggle for the succession or at least the regency, all wrapped up in the frightful chaos of an international war that threatened to spread to the whole of Europe. Deposed Richard at the initiative of his cousin Henry of Lancaster in 1399, the winds of war rotated one hundred and eighty degrees once more. England had suffered only defeats against France for a whole generation, but suddenly the landings on the islands began to be repulsed and the English invaded France with moderate success on three occasions: in 1405, 1410 and 1412. Henry of Lancaster was crowned as Henry IV of England after the overthrow of Richard II, and his son, Henry V, would be in charge of taking the war back to the heart of France.
Henry V
Knighted twice, Enrique showed himself from a very young age as a reliable, determined leader, an expert in tactics and logistical organization and very cold and rational.
Considering that the French strategists were commanded by an unstable king, Charles VI, short-tempered, ill, disorganized and prone to frequent bouts of dementia, it is easy to understand the advantages enjoyed by Henry's troops.
The French nobles had divided into two factions that were fighting with each other and cornering Charles: the supporters of the House of Armagnac against those of the House of Burgundy. Henry's virtues as a general and ruler as well as this internal division of the French would lead the latter to the disaster of 1415.
At the age of twelve (in 1399), the future Henry V was first knighted on an Irish battlefield by Richard II, who had taken him hostage to ensure the good behavior of Henry's father. The mere fact that a rival king of his family, who would be assassinated by his father, knighted him on a battlefield and when he was only twelve years old, clearly demonstrates the courage and bravery that young Enrique showed from a very young age..
Later, with Richard dead and one day before Henry IV's coronation, the new monarch called his son, who would become Prince of Wales the next day, and knighted him for the second time. This brilliant young man would lead the war in France.
Henry vs. Scotland and Wales
Already during his father's lifetime, Enrique had to take charge of difficult military operations. In 1400 he saw service against the Scots and some months later was ordered to put down the rebellion of Owain Glyndwr, a Welsh nobleman who claimed the right to be Prince of Wales.
He was studying the Welsh enemies (in 1402) and Enrique learned to use the guerrilla tactics that would render such services to him later. He was, furthermore, under the supervision of his two master strategists, both military geniuses: Harry Hotspur and Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, related to each other. During that same year and the following, Enrique would be forced to face the two in combat, and he would prove capable of defeating them. In 1403 the two masters betrayed Young Henry and his royal father and allied with Glyndwr. In an epic forced march, Henry managed to prevent Hotspur and Percy from joining forces with the Welshman and defeated them at Shrewsbury. The prince himself commanded the left wing of his attack on that occasion. Shrewsbury was his real baptism of fire (where his mentor Hotspur died) and also his baptism of blood, as Henry was shot square in the face with an arrow. However, he continued to fight until the end of the match with the shaft protruding from his face.
The war against Wales lasted another five years, but the young man would not participate in any more battles. Field combat was not common in those times, and wars were fought mainly on the basis of sieges of cities, sieges of castles, and looting of productive areas inhabited only by the civilian population.
Henry V, crowned
Henry IV passed away in 1414, leaving the throne to his very capable eldest son. Thus a twenty-six-year-old Henry V came to the throne, a veteran of two internal campaigns, wounded in action, an expert tactician, a student of the best teachers, and extremely intelligent. The new king immediately understood that, with his enemies Scotland and Wales defeated, he had to turn his attention to France at once, or England would be crushed. Surrounding himself with addicted and capable men, he then prepared to wage war in the territory of the French king.
As soon as he was crowned, Enrique tried, despite everything, to avoid war with Carlos VI. He offered to marry his daughter and try to solve the problem of English possessions in France without bloodshed. While negotiating, both monarchs armed large armies in anticipation of a betrayal or breakdown of talks that would lead to a war. The attempts at peace finally broke down in the spring of 1415, and Henry decided to carry out his plan: a full-fledged invasion of the French kingdom.
His army consisted of 8,000 cavalry, 2,500 other rank soldiers, 200 specialist artillerymen, 1,000 service and support men, and 10,000 horses. To cross the English Channel, a large fleet of 1,500 ships was needed (although some authors mention only 300), which Enrique had ordered to be built, confiscated or bought. The English left Southampton on July 11 and landed in the Seine estuary two days later. After laying siege and conquering Harfleur, Henry marched on Calais, setting out from the former city on October 8, his army weakened by a serious epidemic of dysentery.
But the French were not idle: the elderly French Marshal, Duc de Berry, received the order to intercept Henry, while Charles VI's troops were establishing themselves in Saint-Denis and those of Marshal Boucicault were preparing in Caudebec, 48 km east of Harfleur. On the other side, Constable Carlos d'Albret watched over the Seine estuary. The English, who wanted to cross the Somme, discovered to their horror that they were running out of supplies, so Henry decided to head towards Pont St. Remy and spend the night in front of Amiens.
On October 21, the English marched towards the small village of Agincourt, where they clashed with the bulk of the French army at dawn on October 25, 1415.
The battle, momentous for the Hundred Years War, took place in three phases:
- Phase I
- The English advance, crossing the land of no one a mile away from the French. The English archers throw a rain of arrows over the French positions.
- The French whalers respond to the attack. The cavalry strikes on both sides, but many gentlemen do not arrive in time to occupy their positions. The mounts clash against the stakes that the English archers have placed to protect themselves, throwing down their riders, who are slaughtered.
- Phase II
- Defeated his cavalry, the infantry of Carlos tries to raid the English center.
- The English archers react “changing” to the enemy where the strongest units of their own infantry are found; the French fall into the trap.
- In the melée of infantry, the English archers kill many French, shooting them at a short distance.
- In the midst of intense combat, Enrique V receives a stroke of maza in the helmet, which abolishes the steel and pulls the ornaments. If he hadn't been placed, he would have lost his life.
- English infants and knights (now on foot) move faster than the French, prevented by their heavy armor. The French become easy victims and are forced to retreat.
- Phase III
- After a short half hour of combat, the English victory is total. Enrique's now possess countless prisoners, and calculate the succulent rescues they will receive.
In the early afternoon, however, Henry makes a decision that has been disputed by all subsequent historians. Upon receiving news that his camp had been attacked, he orders the slaughter of all the prisoners, who are attacked with axes by his guards and killed in a few minutes.
A useless success
Henry's incredible victory against an enemy twice his number could not, however, be taken advantage of by the English king. Henry had neither food nor supplies to continue the campaign immediately, so he fell back to Calais to embark for England. The troops landed at Dover on November 16. Had he been able to continue to Paris and crown himself king, it is likely that the Hundred Years' War would have ended before the end of winter. However, it would continue for another thirty-eight years.
In 1420, the defeated Charles VI was forced to accept the Treaty of Troyes, which undid the terms of the Treaty of Paris, married Henry V to Charles's daughter, and recognized the English monarch as heir to the French throne after the king's death
Last actions of Henry V
Displaced in this way from the line of succession, the dauphin Carlos, son of Carlos VI, everyone believed that Enrique V would bequeath both thrones to his son Enrique, who was only a few months old at the time. But by an irony of history, Henry V died unexpectedly in 1422, before Charles VI. Two months later he was followed to the grave by the King of France. The events precipitated then. Breaking the Treaty of Troyes, France decided to crown the dauphin Carlos instead of the boy Henry VI as agreed.
War again
The English response was to crown the baby King of England and France. Deciding to eliminate King Charles VII, whom English theory considered a usurper, they invaded France again and laid siege to Orleans, the last city in the kingdom that remained faithful to the French king. Everything seemed to indicate that Carlos VII would have to give in to the claims of the little King of England.
However, the story of the Hundred Years' War would take an unexpected turn here (1428), at the hands of a brave peasant girl.
Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans
An illiterate young woman born in Domrémy, named Joan of Arc, believed she had been chosen by God to rid her country of the English. At seventeen years of age, she managed to gather a group of soldiers and free Orleans from the English siege in 1429.
Joan's victory motivated and educated French soldiers and peasants, showed them a way to follow and a leader to imitate. This triumph of the Maid of Orleans (as she has since been known) was followed by others, such as those of Troyes, Châlons and Reims, where, in the presence of the young woman, Charles VII was formally crowned.
From this point, Joan's military campaign began to spiral downward: she was betrayed by her own king and finally, falling out of favor, was captured in 1430 by the troops of John II of Luxembourg-Ligny who served to the Duke of Burgundy, Philippe.
French military commanders, envious of the young woman's success, had been plotting behind her back. They feared the ascendancy that Joan was taking over King Charles and, above all, they were terrified of the fact that divine intervention (through Joan) was turning the feudal war that was the Hundred Years' War into a national and popular struggle..
She was handed over to the English, tried by the Inquisition on charges of witchcraft, sentenced to death and burned at the stake in Rouen (1431). Her death made her a martyr in the eyes of the French.
France gets stronger
Things were getting tough. France now had two kings. Crowned Charles VII in Reims, the English enthroned their own king, Henry VI, in Paris, supported only by Philip of Burgundy. This changed when, with intelligence, the French supporters of Carlos, strengthened by the martyrdom of Juana, reached an agreement with Felipe, who was intimidated by the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, further emphasizing the isolation in which Enrique found himself.. This episode happened in 1435 and is known as the Treaty of Arras.
England desperately needed Burgundy as a military ally. Lacking him, the Carolines attacked and occupied Paris the following year.
As a precaution in case the conflict was prolonged (a clairvoyant measure, because the end of the war still took twenty years to arrive), Charles VII learned from the mistakes of his predecessor and, profoundly restructuring the French army, managed to endow to his crown a standing army for the first time in history. France thus achieved a professional military force, trained, always ready for action and hardened, instead of the disorganized group of enthusiastic feudal knights and peasants who had gathered haphazardly at the most unexpected moments, and which had favored the enemy's success in so many opportunities.
Obviously, military reform would not be successful if it was not accompanied by profound changes in the economy, infrastructure, finances, and society itself. Having rebuilt the kingdom's finances, Charles had an impressive array of military fortifications, water pipelines, safe harbors, and a better and more consistent power base built for himself.
Infighting in France
The English were not Charles VII's only problem: famine and pestilence had been haunting his dynasty from the very beginning. The beginning of the 15th century had found the whole of Europe plunged into a deep economic crisis whose causes remain hidden even to the historians of the 18th century. XXI. This crisis had hit France particularly hard (the battlefield of long and furious wars and quarrels) and particularly affected agricultural production and trade, which in the 19th century XIII had meant so much to Europe.
Now, after centuries of looting and burning by the invaders, France was starving once more and, not surprisingly, the plague made its appearance again.
Thus, the nobles of the House of Anjou, seeing that the monarch intended to continue the war to the last consequences, began to conspire against him and convinced his son Louis (the future Louis XI of France) to join the conjures her up
Carlos managed to avoid the danger that threatened to isolate him and leave him powerless. To increase it, he established an advantageous alliance with Switzerland and with various kingdoms of Germany. Despite the respite that this support gave him, Carlos was nevertheless aware that he continued to govern an unstable country, starving, that no longer produced almost any cereals, surrounded by the plague and with the ever-present sword of Damocles represented by his powerful English neighbor who at any moment could decide to invade and attack again.
England's Troubles
Their enemy, however, was in no better shape: from the superb victory at Agincourt they had gone on to the humiliating defeat in Paris.
Henry VI was still a minor, and faced problems similar to those of Carlos: fights, suspicions and rivalries between the nobles and royal princes of his house.
Seeking to calm the international situation, the young king requested and obtained the hand of Marguerite of Anjou, niece of his rival Carlos VII, whom he married in 1444. Once married, the possibility of a compromise peace based on family ties loomed close.
However, of the two factions into which the English had divided, one was in favor of peace (led by John of Beaufort, Duke of Somerset). But the other advocated war and its pursuit until extermination. Their chiefs were Humbert, Duke of Gloucester, and Richard, Duke of York.
To make matters worse for the English, Henry VI began to follow in the footsteps of Charles VI, the father of his enemy. Little by little he began to show symptoms of insanity, which soon turned into a clear, permanent and disabling insanity.
The end of the war and the victory of France
The reforms and improvements carried out by Charles VII paid off: slowly the French pressure began to push back the enemy and he was besieging and reconquering, step by step, all the English possessions on French soil.
Without Burgundian support, the English had to hand over Normandy in 1450, after the Battle of Formigny, and with the Battle of Castillon the precious Aquitaine in 1453. That year, which today is considered the end of the war, the The only possession the English were allowed to keep was the seaside town of Calais.
Once the reasons for the conflict disappeared, the war ended quietly. Not even a treaty certifying the peace longed for but never achieved for more than a century was signed.
The Consequences
Sick Henry VI, England was left, after the end of the Hundred Years' War, in the hands of Lancaster and York, declared enemies and absolutely ideologically opposed (Gloucester was in prison). Guided by personal interests, they did not bother to consolidate the new peace, but embarked on their country in a bloody dynastic civil war that would be known as the War of the Two Roses.
In France, for its part, the authoritarian monarchy was consolidated by Louis XI, son of Charles VII. After great conquests (Burgundy and Picardy, for example), the House of Valois died out as the Capetians had done before.
These falls prefigured the end of feudal states and the beginning of Modern Europe that would come true in the following century.
Main battles of the Hundred Years War
- Battle of Sluys.
- Battle of Crecy.
- Site of Calais (decisive English).
- Battle of Calais.
- Battle of Saintes (English Victory).
- Battle of Ardres (French Victory).
- Battle of Poitiers.
- Battle of Cocherel (1364) (French Victory).
- Battle of Auray (combat corresponding to the war of Bretone Succession; English victory).
- Battle of Nájera (combat corresponding to the First Castellana Civil War; Anglo-Castro victory).
- Batalla de Montiel (combat corresponding to the Second Civil War Castellana; Franco-Spanish victory).
- Battle of La Rochelle (vitoria francocastellana decisive).
- Battle of Aljubarrota (combat corresponding to the Portuguese crisis of 1383-1385; Anglo-Portuguese victory).
- Battle of Agincourt (Critical English Victory).
- Battle of the Arenks (English victory during the site of Orleans).
- Orléans site (video french decisive).
- Battle of Jargeau (part of the Loire campaign; French victory).
- Battle of Beaugency (part of the Loire campaign; French victory).
- Battle of Patay (Critical French Victory).
- Batalla de Formigny (vital French decisive).
- Battle of Castillon (last battle of war; final French victory).
Featured Characters
Pre-war
- Charles IV of France
- Eduardo I of England
- Edward II of England
- Henry II of England
- Henry III of England
- Philip II of France
- Philip IV of France (the Beautiful)
- Philip V of France (the Long)
- Philip VI of France (Philipe de Valois)
- Guillermo the Conqueror
- Hugo Capeto
- Jacques de Molay
- Leonor de Aquitaine
- Luis VI de France
- Louis VII of France
- Louis VIII of France
- Luis IX de France (San Luis)
- Luis X de France (the Obstinate)
Contemporaries of the war
- Arturo, count of Richemont
- Bertrand du Guesclin
- Carlos V de Francia
- Carlos VI de France
- Carlos VII de France
- Carlos d ́Albret
- Count of Arundel
- Enrique II de Castilla
- Henry IV of England
- Henry V of England
- Henry VI of England
- Henry VII of England
- Enrique de Beaufort
- Felipe de Borgoña
- Gilles de Rais
- Humberto de Gloucester
- John II of France
- Juan de Gante
- Juana de Arco
- Mariscal Boucicault
- Juan Sin Miedo
- Peter the Cruel
- The Black Prince
- Ricardo II of England
- Ricardo de York
- Sir Juan de Cornwall
- Carlos el Malo
Post-war
- Louis XI of France
- Margarita de Anjou
- Ricardo III of England
Other satellite wars and campaigns of the Hundred Years War
- War of San Sardos
- Bretone Succession War
- First Civil War of Castile
- Fernandinas Wars
- Crisis of 1383-1385 in Portugal
- Loire Campaign
Timeline
- 1337: Philip VI confiscates the duke of Aquitaine as retaliation to the protection that Edward III gave to Roberto de Artois, the enemy of the French king. Eduardo claims his rights to the French throne and refuses to give vassals to Philip.
- 1339: Eduardo III starts ground operations against France.
- 1340: The English overcome in the naval battle of Sluys, which rejects the French invasion of England, and leads the war to develop in the territory of France. But the debts force Eduardo III to agree on a truce.
- 1346: Eduardo disembarks in France with an army, which on 26 August wins the victory of Crécy, where many French nobles die or become prisoners. The spoil is immense.
- 1346: The English overcome the Scots, allies of the French. Peace between England and Scotland is established in the Berwick Treaty.
- 1347: the English take Calais, who will remain in his power until 1558.
- 1348: The clashes are suspended due to the black plague.
- 1350: John II is crowned new king of France. The count of Armañac, a vassal of Aquitaine, proclaims his loyalty to John.
- 1355: the son of Edward, of the same name as his father, known as the Black Prince, devastated Armañac. He advances to the Mediterranean and returns dragging everything in his way.
- 1356: John II advances to the Loire. In Poitiers he gains a great victory over the French, even though his army is exhausted and in clear numerical disadvantage. John II is made prisoner, along with many nobles.
- 1358: France has a peasant uprising and a revolt in Paris.
- 1360: Eduardo III arrives in Paris and the Peace of Brétigny is signed, by which the ransom is reduced by John, the English pass to dominate a territory that includes from the Pyrenees to the Loire and Eduardo renounces their rights over the French crown. Sir Ricardo Knolles leads an expedition that attacks the French coast but is defeated.
- 1363: Juan de Ghent tries to succeed where Knolles failed. At the command of a great British expeditionary force strikes again the continental France and suffers a resonant setback.
- 1369: the accountant of France, Bertrand du Guesclin, attacks Aquitaine, avoiding an open confrontation.
- 1375: a truce is signed in Bruges for two years. The English retained only Calais and a narrow strip between Bayona and Bordeaux. However, fighting continues in a sporadic way.
- 1396: another truce is signed.
- 1399: the future Henry V, twelve, is armed knight by King Ricardo II. In a short time, the sovereign is killed by Henry IV, the father of the boy.
- 1400: the young prince is sent to fight against the rebellious Irish.
- 1402: beats the Welsh.
- 1403: Hotspur and Percy, Generals of Henry IV, rebel against him and Prince Henry defeats them both.
- 1405: England invades France.
- 1407: new truce.
- 1410: second invasion of France.
- 1412: Third attempt to invade France. The three expeditions end with a very moderate success.
- 1413: Henry IV dies and his son is crowned with the name of Henry V.
- 1415: Henry V of England reaffirms his rights to the French throne, against the pacifist policy of his father, Henry IV. He landed in Normandy with a great army. Allied with the Duke of Burgundy, he gets the victory of Agincourt, in front of a very superior army.
- 1417: The English take Caen, where Henry V commands the death of all male civilians.
- 1420: the Treaty of Troyes was signed, by which Henry V of England married Catherine of Valois, daughter of the king of France. Enrique is also recognized as heir to the French throne, provided that France maintained its independence.
- 1422: Enrique V dies before the French king Charles VI, thus triggering the struggle for succession to the French throne.
- 1428: a French peasant ignota, Juana de Arco, begins to take over military operations.
- 1429: The English occupy Paris and the north of France reaching Orlean. On May 4th, Joan of Arc, at the head of the French knights, raises the siege. Juana gets the victories of Troyes, Chálons and Reims. The French also win Patay and Charles VII was crowned king of France in Reims.
- 1430: Joan is captured by the Bourgons, allies of England, and given to the English.
- 1431: Joan dies in the bonfire in Rouen. Henry VI of England is crowned king of France in Paris.
- 1435: Peace of Arras.
- 1436: Burgundy is reconciled with France. The French take Paris.
- 1444: A truce is signed for five years. Enrique VI married his rival's niece.
- 1450: Carlos VII attacks Normandy and Gascony and annihilates the English army in Fromigny. The English begin to lose their territories.
- 1453: Charles VII takes Bordeaux and Aquitaine, recovering all France except Calais. End of the Hundred Years War.
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