Tag Archives: 1340s

1345: Arnaud Foucaud, jobbing trooper

Posted on by

The unmourned fate of Arnaud Foucaud, a peasant swept into the maelstrom of the Hundred Years’ War as a sword-arm for hire in English service, was excavated as an incidental microhistory in Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle.

[F]ighting fell to volunteers drawn from a growing military underworld of disparaged gentry, refugees, drifters, malcontents and petty criminals. The court records and letters of pardon of the period are filled with the stories of their lives. The tale of Arnaud Foucaud could stand for many of them.

He came from the small village of Clion in Saintonge. His family seem to have been rich peasants. He had learned how to fight on horseback and could handle a lance. When Foucaud was about fourteen or fifteen years old he got involved in a village feud and killed one of his antagonists in a fight. This was in 1337, the first year of the war, as the French were overrunning English-occupied Saintonge.

When the Seneschal‘s officers came to arrest him he fled to the nearest ‘English’ garrison, which was at Montendre, an enclave of the duchy about 15 miles from his home. The commander there, a louche petty nobleman from Bearn, hired him as a soldier.

His life at Montendre consisted in keeping watch and periodically pillaging and burning villages. When the castle was captured by the French in July 1338, Foucaud received a safe conduct as part of the terms of capitulation and returned home.

In 1340, after two relatively uneventful years, he went to Jonzac, the nearest market town, and met two relatives of the man whom he had killed. There was a fight. Foucaud himself was badly wounded, but both his antagonists were killed.

Five weeks after this incident, as he was still nursing his wounds, he was arrested. But he never stood trial. The Seneschal only wanted to be rid of him. So he allowed him to go free on condition that he leave the province for good.

Foucaud went to Bordeaux. Here, he took service in the household of Jean Colom, a rich urban knight who employed him as a cavalryman and took him on several expeditions with the army of Oliver Ingham.

In June 1341 another soldier in Colom’s pay persuaded him to join a small armed band which was being formed for some private purpose of the La Motte family. This turned out to be the daring capture of Bourg, by far the most brazen of the [English-allied -ed.] Bordeaux government’s breaches of the truce of Esplechin.

Foucaud fought gallantly in this enterprise and served in the garrison of the town after it had fallen. But his reward was meagre. His wages were unpaid and his share of the spoils amounted to no more than ten livres’ worth of equipment. Moreover, he quarrelled with the garrison commander, who suspected him of being a French sympathizer, and tried to extract a confession by torturing him.

By 1342 he was back in Bordeaux hiring out his services as a jobbing trooper. He joined a band of 100 men recruited by the lord of Pommiers* to carry out long-range raids in Saintonge, but the pillage of this enterprise was worth only fifty livres to be divided between all of them. He fought with Ingham’s army in the campaign of Saintonge and Angoumois in the autumn of 1342, taking part in the capture of Blanzac, and gaining ten livres in cash as his share of the spoil.

At some stage during 1343 he seems to have obtained a pardon from the French royal lieutenant in the south, the Bishop of Beauvais. [the younger brother of Enguerrand de Marigny -ed.] But by the autumn of 1344 he was back in Bordeaux. According to evidence which he gave under torture (and which he tried to retract) he was next hired in Bordeaux by a Bearnais nobleman to take part with twenty-five others in a raid on a small priory not far from the city. He and six men stood guard outside, while the rest went in, tied up the Prior and his servants and stripped the place of gold and silver, horses and everything of value. But the captain of the troop took most of the spoil for himself. Foucaud’s share was only twenty florins.

This incident was his undoing, for it was not covered by his pardon. It is not clear how he fell into French hands. He probably tried to go home. In May 1345 he was taken to Paris and held in the prison of the Chatelet to answer charges of treason, robbery and murder. He was convicted on the 27th and beheaded in Les Halles on the following day.

Foucaud was twenty-three years old when he died. Booty was an incidental bonus for men like him, but it was not booty that drew them to warfare and most of them got very little of it. They were drop-outs, desperados.

* This lord of Pommiers was Guillaume-Sanche III. Guillaume-Sanche IV was destined to end in a very beautiful Froissart chronicle illustration of his 1377 beheading.

On this day..

1345: Giovanni Martinozzi, missionary Franciscan

Posted on by

On this date in 1345, Giovanni Martinozzi died for the faith in Cairo.

Martinozzi was a Franciscan who hailed from one of the prominent families of Siena. Like the famous founder of his order, Martinozzi undertook to convert the Saracens: part of a missionary movement of Franciscans abroad from Europe which had been encouraged by the papacy as a means to discharge the troublesome ferment of the Franciscan movement. (As a reference point, Martinozzi would have died in the generation following the events of The Name of the Rose.)

Where Saint Francis found the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil mild and welcoming, Martinozzi attained from the Mamluks the laurels of “missionary martyrdom” that had eluded the master.

After re-converting a Genoese merchant who had apostatized to Islam, Martinozzi was tortured and on April 15, 1345, immolated along with the inconstant entrepreneur.

According to S. Maureen Burke (“The ‘Martyrdom of the Franciscans’ by Ambrogio Lorenzetti”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 65 Bd., H. 4 (2002)), a fresco of Beato Martinozzi’s martyrdom once adorned the Basilica of San Francesco in Siena; the fresco either does not survive or has eluded my online peregrinations. Giotto’s thematically topical 1320s Ordeal by Fire before the Sultan of Egypt will have to serve: it alludes to an episode (perhaps apocryphal) during Saint Francis’s travels in Egypt a century before.

On this day..

1343: A dozen Breton nobles

Posted on by

From The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France, concerning the rough handling the king deployed in an attempt to squelch the Breton War of Succession:

Not long after the executon of Olivier de Clisson a group of Breton nobles attacked Charles de Blois as he was on his way to Paris. Fourteen — among them the two Geoffroys de Malestroit, father and son, Alain de Cadillac, Jean de Montaubon, Fulk de Laval and Henri d’Avaugour — were captured and taken to Paris. Although Philippe VI formally turned the case over to the Parlement, he made sure that the court did as he wished. On 24 November 1343 he advised it that he was sending the prevot of Paris and Jean Richer, maitre de requetes de l’hotel, ‘for certain matters regarding the Breton prisoners. We instruct you accordingly,’ the king cautioned, ‘that you accept what they have to say on our behalf.’

On 29 November the accused appeared in the Parlement, confessed to their treason and were then sent back to the Chatelet without the court having passed sentence. In fact the decision in this case was taken away from the Parlement by the king. On that same day Philippe VI ordered the prevot of Paris to execute the prisoners forthwith, ‘because we condemn them as traitors’. Philippe’s determination in this matter was patent. In concluding his instructions he wrote: ‘take care that there is no slip-up if you do not want to incur our wrath’. Except for Laval and Avaugour, the Bretons were drawn and beheaded that same day; and their corpses were then drawn to the gibbet to be hanged there. These executions had the desired effect on at least some of Montfort‘s partisans: Jean, eldest son of the count of Vendome, for example, quickly made his peace with Philippe VI.

On this day..

1340: Nicholas Behuchet, Battle of Sluys naval commander

Posted on by

On this date in 1340, the English and French fought an early naval engagement of the Hundred Years’ War: the Battle of Sluys.

The English won the battle … and the French admiral wound up hanging from a mast.

At the outset of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337, the French bossed the Channel and inflicted devastating sea raids on the English coast. In the long war’s first major battle at sea, a French fleet in September 1338 overwhelmed an English flotilla carrying valuable English wool to the Low Countries.

Nicholas Behuchet, one of the French commanders at this earlier battle, did not hesitate to massacre his prisoners.

Thus conquering did these said mariners of the king of France in this winter take great pillage, and especially they conquered the handsome great nef called the Christophe, all charged with the goods and wool that the English were sending to Flanders, which nef had cost the English king much to build: but its crew were lost to these Normans, and were put to death.

England’s allies were in the Low Countries, so too many battles like this stood to strangle the English cause in the crib. For near two years, French privateers had leave to ravage the English coast, while French troops overran Flanders and made the English Queen Philippa* hostage.

Seeking a breakout, King Edward III requisitioned English merchant cogs — there was no standing navy at the time — into a fleet of perhaps 160 or 200 vessels, heavy with soldiers to invade Flanders.

On June 24, two days after setting out from the Orwell estuary at Ipswich, Edward’s armada boldly fell upon a larger French fleet anchored at the Flanders port of Sluys.

The medieval chronicler Froissart’s account makes for riveting reading.** This was no stately ballet of seamanship but a gory close-quarters melee: as was characteristic for the time, the “sea” battle was mostly just about coming together for the respective fleets’ marines to board one another’s ships and murder anyone on board who wasn’t worth a ransom. The French admiral Behuchet lashed his ships together across the mouth of the harbor, a sort of floating breastwork that would enable the French soldiery to shimmy up and down the entire line no matter where the English focused their attack.

To the sound of “scores of trumpets, horns and other instruments,”

Fierce fighting broke out on every side, archers and crossbowmen shooting arrows and bolts at each other pell-mell, and men-at-arms struggling and striking in hand-to-hand combat. In order to come to closer quarters, they had great iron grappling-hooks fixed to chains, and these they hurled into each others’ ships to draw them together and hold them fast while the men engaged. Many deadly blows were struck and gallant deeds performed, ships and men were battered, captured and recaptured. The great ship Christopher [a large English cog previously captured by the French and situated in the French front row -ed.] was recovered by the English at the beginning of the battle and all those on board were killed or taken prisoner …


An illustration of the Battle of Sluys from Froissart’s chronicle. Note the mast of the ship at far left: it displays the English arms quartered with the French, Edward III’s heraldic assertion of sovereignty over both realms.

It was indeed a bloody and murderous battle. Sea-fights are always fiercer than fights on land, because retreat and flight are impossible. Every man is obliged to hazard his life and hope for success, relying on his own personal bravery and skill … [it] rage[d] furiously from early morning until afternoon, during which time there were many notable feats of arms and the English were hard put to it to hold their own, since they were opposed by hardened soldiers and seamen, who outnumbered them by four to one.

Edward III took an arrow or crossbow bolt to the leg — great-man historical legend has it that it was fired by Nicholas Behuchet himself — but captained his flotilla to an overwhelming victory, capturing most of the French ships and destroying the French, their Genoese allies, “and all who were with them … [they were] killed or drowned, not a single one escaping in the general slaughter.” Poetic license aside, it was a spectacular triumph for the English — and a crushing defeat for the French.†

In the 1596 play Edward III, which might have been co-written by Shakespeare, imagined the scene in the report of an escaped mariner:

Purple the sea, whose channel filled as fast
With streaming gore that from the maimed fell
As did the gushing moisture break into
The crannied cleftures of the through-shot planks.
Here flew a head dissevered from the trunk,
There mangled arms and legs were tossed aloft
As when a whirlwind takes the summer dust
And scatters it in middle of the air.
Then might ye see the reeling vessels split
And tottering sink into the ruthless flood,
Until their lofty tops were seen no more.

Let it not be said that in this instance the commander escaped the consequences of his folly. Behuchet, who insisted against advice on lashing the boats together and thereby sacrificed all maneuverability, didn’t have much room for maneuver himself when the victorious English hanged him at battle’s end from the mast of his own ship.

* Seen elsewhere in these pages successfully begging her husband’s pardon of the famed Six Burghers of Calais later in the war. Philippa was a homegrown native of the Low Countries, and her marriage to Edward III reflects the alliance between their respective regions.

** For a snappy modern gloss on the battle, check this excerpt of Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England.

† It is said that no courtier dared give King Philip VI of France the horrifying news until a jester availing his station’s license for cheek informed him that “Our knights are much braver than the English.” Asked why, the fool replied, “The English do not dare jump into the sea in full armour.”

On this day..

1348: The Duke of Durazzo, all in the family

Posted on by

The Neapolitan King Robert “the Wise”* dominated Italian politics for his 34-year reign, but his death in 1343 left a disastrously disputed succession.

Robert, who hailed from the French House of Anjou, had had only two sons, and they both predeceased him. So Robert’s will designated his granddaughter Joanna as his successor, and her sister Maria as no. 2 in line should Joanna die without an heir.

But Joanna was 16 years old, and Robert had had three brothers whose lines each coveted a taste of Neapolitan for themselves. In particular, the family of Robert’s oldest brother, whose descendants had managed to establish an Angevin ruling dynasty in Hungary, arguably had a better claim that Robert himself. So in an effort to cement the Joanna-plus-Maria succession plan, Robert married Joanna off to a child of that branch, Andrew, Duke of Calabria.

Maria, for her part, had been intended for another dynastic marriage, but after Robert’s death she got abducted by the heirs to the youngest of Robert’s brothers and married off to Charles (or Carlo), Count of Gravina and Duke of Durazzo (English Wikipedia entry | Italian). This set their branch up to be a player for Robert’s patrimony, too; as one may infer from this character’s presence on this here execution blog, the play didn’t go to plan.

Dumas reckoned Charles an inveterate, and a sinister, schemer, “one of those men who to gain their end recoil at nothing; devoured by raging ambition and accustomed from his earliest years to conceal his most ardent desires beneath a mask of careless indifference, he marched ever onward, plot succeeding plot … His cheek grew pale with joy; when he hated most, he smiled; in all the emotions of his life, however strong, he was inscrutable.”

Now that we have the dramatis personae … to the action!

Nice knowin’ ya, Andrew. 1835 watercolor of his murder by Karl Briullov.

Robert was scarcely cold in his coffin when Joanna’s husband Andrew (supported by a faction within the Neapolitan court) began maneuvering for more power. Days before he was to capture a strategic hilltop in that campaign by becoming crowned in his own right in September 1345, a conspiracy of his rivals surprised Andrew on a hunting trip and murdered him — violently subduing the resisting teenager until they could strangle him to death and pitch him out a window. Joanna cowered in her bed as her shrieking husband was snuffed; the suspicion of her involvement in the plot would follow her all the 37 years she had left on this earth, although she defeated the charge when she was formally investigated.

With this stunning act, peninsular politics got almost as messy as the Angevin family tree.

Andrew’s murder, which was succeeded by no simulation of punishing any guilty parties, opened a power vacuum and simultaneously supplied all Andrew’s power-hungry kinsmen the ideal pretext for elbowing their respective ways into it. The Hungarian Angevins, led by the murdered Andrew’s big brother King Louis I swept into Naples, routing Joanna** who was forced in 1348 to flee to the pope at Avignon, maybe on the very ships that were at this very moment introducing the Black Death from Sicily to ports all over Europe.

Cousin Charles made an expedient alliance with cousin Louis and joined the fun, angling to add Naples to his own domains once the dust settled and Hungarian affairs pulled Louis away. But almost immediately after expelling Joanna, the Hungarian king turned on Charles, too. In Dumas’s dramatic rendering, he accuses Charles of complicity in Andrew’s murder and treachery against his own royal person.

Traitor! At length you are in my hands, and you shall die as you deserve; but before you are handed over to the executioner, confess with your own lips your deeds of treachery towards our royal majesty: so shall we need no other witness to condemn you to a punishment proportioned to your crimes. Between our two selves, Duke of Durazzo, tell me first why, by your infamous manoeuvring, you aided your uncle, the Cardinal of Perigord, to hinder the coronation of my brother, and so led him on, since he had no royal prerogative of his own, to his miserable end? Oh, make no attempt to deny it. Here is the letter sealed with your seal; in secret you wrote it, but it accuses you in public. Then why, after bringing us hither to avenge our brother’s death, of which you beyond all doubt were the cause,–why did you suddenly turn to the queen’s party and march against our town of Aquila, daring to raise an army against our faithful subjects? You hoped, traitor, to make use of us as a footstool to mount the throne withal, as soon as you were free from every other rival. Then you would but have awaited our departure to kill the viceroy we should have left in our place, and so seize the kingdom. But this time your foresight has been at fault. There is yet another crime worse than all the rest, a crime of high treason, which I shall remorselessly punish. You carried off the bride that our ancestor King Robert designed for me, as you knew, by his will. Answer, wretch what excuse can you make for the rape of the Princess Marie?

Charles was put to summary death upon this accusation on January 23, 1348.

As for the Princess Marie, who at this point was 18 years old and had already borne Charles five children in almost continuous succession, she wasn’t done being abducted: another nobleman, the Lord of Baux, snatched her from the Castel dell’Ovo later that same year and had four more children with her before Maria had him murdered in 1353. Then she married yet another cousin and had five more kids by him.

* Fruit of the Angevin dynasty that had dispossessed the Hohenstaufens the previous century.

** Joanna tried to shore herself up ahead of the invasion by remarrying another cousin, Louis of Taranto.

On this day..

1346: Simon Pouillet

Posted on by

From the Grandes Chroniques de France:

En celuy an, le samedi premier jour de juillet, fu fait à Paris une horrible justice, — né onques mais n’avoit esté faite semblable au royaume de France. Combien que nous lisons que l’empereur Henri en fist une autèle, et en Angleterre aussi, une autre fois en avint une autre semblable, toutes voies à Paris onques mais n’avoit esté telle , — d’un bourgois de Compiègne appellé Symon Pouilliet, assez riche, qui fu jugié à mort et mené aux halles de Paris; et fu estendu et lié sur un estal de bois, ainsi comme la char en la boucherie, et fu ylec copé et desmembré, premièrement les bras, puis les cuisses et après le chief ; et après pendu au gibet commun où l’en pent les larrons. Et tout pour ce qu’il avoit dit, si comme l’en luy imposoit, que le droit du royaume de France appartenoit mieux à Edouart, roy d’Angleterre, que à Phelippe de Valois. De laquelle mort tout honteuse, France pot bien dire la parole de Jhésucrist qui disoit : « Ci sont les commencemens des douleurs, » si comme il sera monstré par après.

The gist of the bolded bit:

a wealthy Compiègne bourgeois called Simon Pouilliet was broken and dismembered in Paris, and gibbeted on the common gallows. And all for saying that the right of the kingdom of France belonged more to Edward, king of England, that to Philippe of Valois.*

Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

There was cause, however, for the House of Valois to be oversensitive to Pouillet’s treasonable take on royal genealogy: it was at least plausibly true.

Edward’s interest in actualizing his nominal claim to the French throne had by this point precipitated the opening dynastic skirmishes of what would eventually (a hundred-plus years later) become remembered as the Hundred Years’ War.

And as the chronicle concludes on a note of melancholy, Simon Pouillet’s horrific butchery would be an omen of his realm’s coming sorrows.

Eight weeks later, the English sowed the battlefield of Crecy with the flower of French chivalry and established a foothold at Calais that would help sustain generations of bloodily inconclusive combat.

Then, from 1348, the Black Death ravaged Europe, bringing for its survivors the economic shock of a labor shortage, weird social movements like the flagellants, and a pervasive sense of fatalism that ate at humanity’s social bonds.

A few years after that, the French king, Philip’s successor John the Good, was actually captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers, and ransomed as a hostage for a ruinous sum.

There’s no record whether the wind whistling through the remains of Simon Pouillet dangling on Montfaucon whispered “I told you so.”

* Pouillet had not acted on this notion — he’d merely been popping off, possibly while sauced. The absence of any actual intent on the speaker’s part, however, did not lessen the treason, as explained in The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France:

The general royal position on treason by words was summed up in 1432 by Jean Barbin, king’s proctor in the Parlement of Poitiers, in the prosecution of the Fleming Hennequin Bize. ‘By word and by deed’, he began, ‘one commits the crime of lese-majesty: by deed when one makes an attempt on the person of the princeps; and by word when one speaks sinisterly of him or his acts.’ Barbin asserted furthermore that it was worse ‘to disparage by word than to injure by deed’, but he neglected to explain why.

On this day..