Speak to the Devil (40 page)

Jorgary is entirely imaginary. Outside its borders I used real place names, but you will not be able to fit them to any atlas, modern or historical.

The story takes place around 1475. The Middle Ages had ended. The Reformation was still almost fifty years in the future.

Michelangelo was born that year. His future patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent, ruled Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV was building the Sistine Chapel. England was embroiled in the Wars of the Roses. Ferdinand and Isabella had not yet driven the Moors from Spain. Louis XI (known as the Spider) was ruling France, while his archenemy, Charles the Bold—duke of Burgundy from 1467 to 1477, was changing the nature of warfare forever.

As late as the Battle of Agincourt, in 1415, the cream of French chivalry attempted cavalry charges against English bowmen, with results even more disastrous than those their ancestors had suffered doing the same thing at Crécy two generations earlier. In fact, the days of the armored knight on horseback had been waning since 1314, when lowly Scottish infantry clobbered English cavalry in the Battle of Bannockburn.

The fighting horse had become too vulnerable and too expensive. The whole concept of knighthood was fading, so that commoners and aristocrats became lumped together as men-at-arms. They were usually grouped in “lances,” consisting of two men in armor to wield the actual
lance and a youth to look after the horses. Both infantry and archers would ride to battle, but fight on foot. Cavalry could be used to raid the enemy’s baggage train or ride down the fugitives when his forces tried to flee the field.

The old feudal levies, where a vassal owed his liege forty days’ knight’s service a year, were already largely replaced by taxation, which the king could use to hire mercenaries. In the fifteenth century the mercenaries began to give way to full-time professional national armies with their own uniforms and insignia—the first standing armies since Roman times. The new system was largely introduced by Charles the Bold, but the changes did not happen at the same time everywhere. My fictional King Konrad employs regular cavalry troops but hires mercenaries as well. Out in the sticks, at Cardice, the landowners are still calling up feudal levies.

Pomerania was a duchy occupying parts of modern Poland and Germany. It was ruled by many successive dukes named Wartislaw, a name I could never invent. Wends was a name applied to various peoples of Slavic descent.

Guns were first used in battle in Europe in the fourteenth century, but they were primitive, and often more dangerous to the gunners than the targets. Only in the fifteenth century did they become effective. Henry V of England took several hundred guns with him when he invaded France in 1415. He used them in his siege of Harfleur, but they appear to have been of limited help. In 1453 French canons devastated English bowmen at the Battle of Castillon, and that same year the Ottoman Turks used guns to breach the ancient walls of Constantinople. Handguns followed later. In 1498 the senate of Venice decreed that in future its forces would be armed with firearms instead of crossbows. Modern warfare had arrived.

The “Dragon” gun in this book is based on the giant bombard Mons Meg, still on display in Edinburgh Castle, Scotland. According to Wikipedia, it was made in about 1452 and fired 400-pound, 22-inch stone balls for up to two miles. Notably, the barrel has no trunnions to fit it to a gun carriage. It would have been transported on a cart and then “emplaced” on the battlefield.

For an account of the change in warfare, see:
A Brief History of Medieval
Warfare: The Rise and Fall of English Supremacy at Arms, 1314–1485
by Peter Reid, Running Press, 2008.

And, finally: horses have to be trained to trot, and in those days they mostly ambled or ran.