The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (26 page)

With yet another slaughter of the French nobility complete, Henry was able to dictate the terms of peace. King Charles VI (the Mad) of France agreed that Henry should get the throne next, and to seal the deal, Henry married Charles’s daughter, Catherine.

Here ends Shakespeare’s patriotic drama of Henry V’s glorious crusade—on a high note with England triumphant.
Unfortunately, King Henry died before King Charles did, which left his baby son as the new king, Henry VI, of England. The treaty’s status was uncertain.

Burgundy Breaks with France

John the Fearless, the latest duke of Burgundy, had stayed out of the Agincourt campaign because his house was still feuding with the rest of the French royal family over who should get France after Charles the Mad died. In 1418, Burgundian forces seized Paris from King Charles’s garrison to show he was serious.

The next year, the king’s teenage son, the dauphin (crown prince), met John the Fearless on the bridge at Montereau to negotiate a settlement, but the prince sprung a trap and killed him instead. Annoyed by the betrayal, the next duke of Burgundy switched to the English side of the war, bringing Paris with him. The dauphin fled to the countryside, so when Charles the Mad died in 1422, the dauphin was not able to upgrade his title to king. The English held Paris for their claimant to the French throne, the baby King Henry.

Joan of Arc

About this time (1429), a teenage peasant girl heard the disembodied voices of saints commanding her to arm herself, saddle up, and save France. This being the Middle Ages, Joan of Arc was not sedated and wheeled into a hospital room by worried relatives. Instead, she obeyed the voices and sought out the fugitive French court. After convincing the dauphin that she really did have saints whispering in her ear, Joan led an army against the English forces besieging Orleans, a vital crossing of the Loire River that (you will recall) had stopped Attila the Hun’s rampage a thousand years earlier (see “Fall of the Western Roman Empire”).

Actually, the French situation at Orleans was not all that bad, nor did the English have an overwhelming adva
ntage. The siege probably could have been broken if anyone had bothered to try; however, the French had all but given up. Morale was shot, and they had passively accepted that the city would fall. Joan’s arrival revived the French spirits. The French attacked and drove away the English.

After the war moved into open country, Joan hounded the English army, waiting for a weakness to appear. Finally, at Patay, she caught the English before they had completely staked out their defensive line. The French attack slaughtered the English and captured most of their leaders. This opened the path to the city of Rheims, where new kings were traditionally crowned, so the dauphin became King Charles VII of France.
*

In 1430, the Burgundians captured Joan and sold her to the English, who then rounded up compliant churchmen from Paris to put her on trial. Joan was found guilty of wearing men’s clothes and burned alive as a witch.

Joan’s major contribution to the war had been to figure out that the French knights could beat the English hedgehog formation if they would stop being such idiots. The French code of chivalry demanded that they not back down from a fight, no matter how unfavorable their situation. The common theme running through the French defeats at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt was a French charge against a strong English defensive position. It never occurred to the French to wait until they caught the English at a disadvantage. Joan had the moral authority to convince the knights to modify their rigid rules and to put more thought into their attacks.
With divinely inspired encouragement, the French began to apply actual tactics to their war effort.
⁵

Endgame

In 1435, Burgundy dropped its alliance with England. The war continued for almost twenty more years, but as the English territory on the continent eroded, the battleground shrunk as well. These smaller English holdings resulted in lower tax payments, which supported smaller armies that avoided taking any risks. When taxes were raised in England, the peasants rose up in anger. When taxes were lowered, the foreign mercenaries in the English army went home.

Battles became fewer until the last battle was fought at Castillon in 1451, which also made history as the first battle in western Europe where guns made a difference. French cannon and muskets outfired the English longbows, opening a new era of warfare. Meanwhile, England got distracted by its own dynastic dispute (War of the Roses, 1455–85; death toll, 100,000), which kept the English too busy to invade France anymore.

Legacy

The Hundred Years War split France and England into two distinct countries, something that wasn’t always apparent before. On a map, the big change was that there were no longer huge bits of England in France.

The main cultural legacy was that the English people started to abandon the Frenchness that had been hangin
g around since the Norman Conquest. As the wars dragged on, the English kings learned to stir up the bloodlust of their people by appealing to their patriotism and exhalting English culture over French. In 1362, Parliament was opened in English for the first time. Court proceedings were conducted in English after this as well. In 1404, out of a growing sense of nationalism, England decreed that negotiations with the French would be in neutral Latin instead of the enemy’s French.

On the French side, the main result was political. The war had bled the French nobility white, and few were left alive to contest the power of the king. The final phase of the war had concentrated power in the Crown and made France about as close to a centralized monarchy as you would f
ind anywhere in Europe at the time. France became the most powerful nation in Europe, and would remain so for the next four hundred years.

Death Toll

In 1937, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin added and multiplied several variables to estimate that the English and French armies lost a combined total of 185,250 men on the battlefields of the Hundred Years War.
⁶
Others have estimated that 40 percent of the French nobility died in each of the battles of Agincourt and Crecy.
⁷
That’s only a small part of the suffering.

Wars of that era were not all chivalry and jousting tournaments. Rather than getting tied down besieging impregnable castles, medieval armies would often launch a
chevauchée
, a relentless and devastating raid through enemy territory
that left a path of bodies and desolation in its wake. Enough such raids would break morale, spread chaos, and deny resources to the enemy. An effective
chevauchée
might even provoke the defenders of the castle into coming out and fighting like men.

France began the war with a population of around 20 million and ended up with only half of that a hundred years later.
⁸
This was also the era of the Black Death, so there’s no easy way to determine how many of the 10 million or so missing people died from the war and not the plague; most authorities who mention this population collapse also acknowledge that chronic warfare was a contributing factor. As Robert S. Lopez put it, in
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe
from the Decline of the Roman Empire
, “In France war was perhaps an even worse calamity than the Black Death.”
⁹
Translating this into mathematics implies that war may have caused more than half of the population decline:

war loss > ½ (minimum population loss: 7 million) = at least 3.5 million

FALL OF THE YUAN DYNASTY

Death toll:
30 million missing

Rank:
17

Type:
native uprising

Broad dividing line:
Chinese vs. Mongols

Time frame:
ca. 1340–70

Location:
China

Who usually gets the most blame:
Mongols

Another damn:
Chinese dynasty collapsing

A
S THE GENERATIONS PASSED, THE MONGOLS GOT BETTER AT RULING
China—but let’s face it, they couldn’t have gotten any worse. Eventually peace and prosperity returned, and a century after Chinggis Khan’s initial conquest, the Chinese population had rebounded somewhat. The khans conquered southern China, settled into Beijing as the Yuan dynasty, and behaved like proper emperors rather than uncouth barbarians. Soon they learned to appreciate the luxuries of the civilized world and the taxes that paid for these.

Even so, the Mongols remained aliens in China and treated the native Chinese as a race of conquered servants.
All of the top jobs went to Mongols, who had less familiarity with what was necessary to run a civilization. The Mongols especially fell behind in maintaining the irrigation systems along the Yellow River. The river broke through the dykes in 1288, then again in 1332–33, killing 7 million. Another flood of the Yellow River in 1344 ruined the Grand Canal, which ran almost a thousand miles north to south and connected trade across China’s various west-to-east river networks. This meant that grain could no longer be shipped safely by barge from the rice fields of the south to the capital. Instead, grain shipments went over the open sea, where they were vulnerable to pirate attacks. When the coastal province of Zhejiang r
ebelled under Fang Kuo-chen in 1348, his pirate fleet began to interrupt these shipments in the waters alongside his territory.
¹

Red Turban Rebellion

In 1351, to fix these problems, the Mongol emperor Toghon Temur of China drafted 150,000 peasants and set them to work taming the Yellow River. He also stationed 20,000 soldiers to keep the peasants in line. Forced into slave labor, these disgruntled workers fell under the influence of the militant White Lotus sect of Buddhists and their military arm, the Red Turbans.
²
The White Lotus focused its worship on Maitreya, the Future Buddha, who would descend from heaven and create paradise after the King of Light had prepared the way. Soon after the leader of the Red Turbans, Han Shantong, launched a rebellion against the Mongols, the authorities caught and killed him, but not before he convinced his followers that his son, Han Liner, would make an excellent King of Light.
³

However, the man
who would turn out to be the next ruler of China was hiding elsewhere. Among the countless orphans left after the flood of 1344 was a sixteen-year-old peasant boy, Zhu Yuanzhang. The son of a tax evader and the grandson of a sorcerer, Zhu took refuge in a Buddhist monastery after gradually losing his family one by one to flood, famine, poverty, and plague.

Mongol field commanders putting down the Red Turban uprising had an unfortunate tendency to burn random Buddhist temples and report back to Beijing that they had just destroyed another rebel stronghold. After Zhu’s temple was destroyed, the twenty-three-year-old was left homeless, so he joined a nearby Red Turban force commanded by Kuo Tzu-hsing. Within a year, Zhu Yuanzhang was entrusted with an independent command. After Kuo Tzu-hsing died in 1354, his successors launched a couple of extremely unsuccessful attacks against the east-central city of Nanjing during which the rest of the Red Turban leaders in that part of the country were killed. Zhu was the last surviving commander and became the new leader of the war band.
⁴
When Nanjing finally fell in April 1356, Zhu made it his capital and proclaimed himself emperor of the new Ming (“Bright”) dynasty, ruling over middle China.

Zhu wasn’t the only claimant to the Chinese throne. In 1355, Han Liner, King of Light among the Red Turbans in the north, was strong enough to declare himself a legitimate successor to the long-gone Song dynasty. Meanwhile the leadership of the Red Turbans in the south went through a string of assassinations that eliminated several claimants and left Chen Youliang in charge. He proclaimed himself emperor of the restored Han dynasty and reached a deal with Zhu Yuanzhang to divide China so they could focus on consolidating control over their territories.

As the Red Turban commanders took over more and more of China, Mongol control shrank to Beijing and little else. The Mongols, however, were not totally out of the picture yet. In 1359, they raided south and broke Han Liner’s power base. Finally, in 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang chased
the last Mongols out of Beijing and back across the Great Wall, which allowed the native Chinese to turn to the important business of deciding which of them would be the new emperor of a united China. This required another civil war.

Ming-Han War

Because of the last Mongol attack, Han Liner of the pseudo-Song dynasty was no longer a viable candidate, but to finalize this state of affairs, Zhu arranged a fatal boating accident for him in 1367. This meant that the fate of China came down to either Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming dynasty) or Chen Youliang (Han dynasty), and the battle lines moved to the Yangtze River, where amphibious assaults were conducted up and down the river. For a while, Chen gained the upper hand by using the tall, fortified sterncastles of his massive three-story warships to attack over the walls of riverside cities. Then in 1363, Zhu Yuanzhang arrived with 200,000 men aboard an unknown number of small ships to break Chen’s siege of Nanchang. Chen withdrew his fleet of 300,000 men aboard 150 gigantic tower ships to the deeper, wider waters of Lake Poyang, where an important tributary flowed into the Yangtze River, and where he hoped to have more room (at the time, around 2,000 square miles, or the size of Delaware)
⁵
to maneuver.

The subsequent fi
ght on the lake, which stretched from late August to early October 1363, is usually considered the largest naval battle (in terms of personnel) in history. Throughout September, the heavy Han ships huddled in the center of the lake, chained together for added solidity, harassed on all sides by the smaller, more numerous Ming vessels, which looked for an opportunity to board or set fire to the enemy. At first the Han vessels inflicted more damage than their attackers, but under the late summer sun, water levels fell and the shallows turned to swamps, shifting the advantage from Chen’s giant ships to Zhu’s lighter vessels. Eventually, Zhu’s fleet moved upriver and got a favorable wind and current. They sent fireships packed with gunpowder downwind and downriver into Chen’s fleet, blowing up dozens of ships and killing 60,000 men. The fleets continued to skirmish until finally, a month later, Chen Youliang
tried again to break out of the lake. This time, he was killed by an arrow in the skull during the ensuing battle.

Zhu Yuanzhang soon mopped up all r
emaining opposition and established his undisputed control of China as the Hongwu (“Vastly Martial”) emperor.
⁶

Necrometry

According to
The
Cambridge History of China
, the post-Mongol recovery of China’s population peaked in 1340 at 19.9 million households and 90 million people, but was reduced by late Yuan warfare to 13 million households and 60 million people by the end of the dynasty in 1368.
⁷
In other words, 30 million people disappeared in the mayhem. Even though that source specifically blames the population crash on warfare, I still feel obliged to split the body count among floods, famine, bubonic plague, and war. Let’s assign one-fourth (7.5 million) of the total to each of these causes.