The Good, the Bad and the Unready (50 page)

Casimir the
Peasants’ King
see
Casimir the
GREAT

 
Frederick the
Penniless

Frederick IV, duke of Austria, 1384–1439

The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund the
LIGHTOFTHE WORLD
threw Frederick in jail for supporting the antipope John XXIII. From behind bars, Frederick must have viewed his future with distinct unease. He had few supporters, fewer possessions and no money whatsoever.

‘The Penniless’ was an obvious nickname, and one that he desperately tried to shake off when he was freed and had regained power. Despite amassing an impressive treasury (much of the revenue coming from Austria’s new silver mines) and owning a considerable amount of land, the name frustratingly stuck until his dying day. The story that he built the magnificent ‘Goldenes Dachl’, or ‘Golden Roof, in Innsbruck purely to demonstrate his new, healthier financial situation is appealing but sadly has no basis in fact.

Diana the
People’s Princess

Diana, princess of Wales, 1961–97

In its coverage of the outpouring of grief that followed Diana’s death in 1997 the media frequently used two immediately recognizable nicknames to represent the princess’s character and popularity.

During a television interview Diana had once remarked that although she would never be the queen of England, she hoped she could become the queen of people’s hearts, and soon the nickname of‘the Queen of Hearts’ became common parlance. A frequent memento at the hundreds of makeshift memorials erected on the news of her death in France was the queen of hearts playing card. Myriad photographs, meanwhile, of Princess Diana among crowds, on her knees in front of children or sitting at the end of hospital beds revealed a princess who had the common touch, for which the media termed her ‘the People’s Princess’ –a phrase used by Prime Minister Tony Blair in an
informal interview on the morning after her death and embraced by a nation in mourning.

John the
Perfect

John II, king of Portugal, 1455–95

In 1481 John considered the gifts of land and cash that his father, ‘Alfonso the African’, had made to certain nobles to be over-generous. So, in a deliberate policy to limit the nobles’ control, he abolished several of the privileges that they had previously enjoyed. The third duke of Braganza objected vociferously to these restrictions. He was immediately arrested and, after a summary trial, beheaded, and overnight the considerable estates of Braganza became crown property. John then foiled another ‘conspiracy’ by stabbing to death his brother-in-law, Diego, the duke of Viseu, with his own hands. Perfect? Hardly.

His nickname of ‘the Perfect’ has its origins in an early sixteenth-century political treatise by Niccolo Machiavelli. In
Il Principe
, Machiavelli describes the qualities of a perfect prince, and some of his readers considered John to fit the model to a tee. But this was some twenty years after John had died. Many of his contemporaries, who knew him better, dubbed him ‘the Tyrant’.

Le
Petit Albert
see
Albert the
GREAT

Alfonso the
Philosopher
see
Alfonso the
ASTRONOMER

 
Louis the
Pious

Louis I, king of France and Holy Roman Emperor, 778–840

Piety was not top of the agenda for the teenage Louis, who by the age of sixteen had become the father of two children by two mistresses. But when his father Charles the GREAT died in 814, Louis, who had been crowned the year before without the benefit of clergy, saw one of his main tasks as the continued Christianization of the empire. Much of his early legislation therefore concentrated on the monastic and ecclesiastical reform of a vast territory that he considered a gift from God, and for which he was chiefly responsible.

Piety later played second fiddle to political necessity. When King Bernard of Italy challenged his authority, for instance, Louis had him blinded. Moreover, in order to prevent any dynastic challenges, he had his half-brothers tonsured and secured in monasteries. Such unchristian behaviour finally caught up with him when, in 833, a coalition of his sons, the pope and several leading clergy drove him to a monastery and only freed him after he acknowledged his sins and agreed to do penance for all eternity.

Piety also sometimes slipped into superstition. Bewildered and terrified by the sight of Halley’s Comet in 837, Louis asked his astronomer what the phenomenon meant. The courtier, who was a good Christian, answered that stars in the sky should not be trusted since ‘God was the final arbiter of the fates of both the stars and the Franks.’ Nevertheless, Louis stayed up all night and, when dawn finally arrived, commanded that alms should be distributed to the poor in celebration that the gods had been kind.

Louis’s nickname derives from his famed generosity. One of his biographers, Thegan, wrote that he gave away houses to faithful subjects, restored property that his father had confiscated from Frisians and Saxons and renounced all claims on Church lands. As a result of such piety, tension and instability in Frankish Gaul increased dramatically.

 
Robert the
Pious

Robert II, king of France, c.970–1031

Many of our perceptions of Robert emanate from his biography, written by his chaplain, Helgaud, monk of Fleury. Naive and semi-hagiographical it may be, but other contemporary chronicles support Helgaud’s depiction of Robert as a devout, virtuous and generous king who actively supported the Church and granted privileges to monasteries. Helgaud said that Robert could have been mistaken for a monk, while a fellow chronicler tells of how Robert threw his cloak over two lovers embracing each other a little too enthusiastically for his liking.

Not everything he did delighted the Church, however. Take, for instance, the time he burned down the monastery of Saint-Germain in Auxerre simply because it stood in the way of his soldiers. And then there were his marriages. After repudiating Rozala of Flanders (but keeping much of her land, much to the chagrin of her son ‘Baldwin Handsome-Beard’), he lived openly with one Bertha of Blois before marrying her in 997. A few years later he dumped Bertha – possibly through uncharacteristic religious scruples, probably because she had produced no children – and married Constance, daughter of the count of Arles. His new bride, however, turned out to be an unscrupulous battleaxe of a woman, and Robert, hoist by his own petard, had his Christian qualities of patience and endurance sorely tested for the rest of his days.