The Knight in History (26 page)

In the winter of 1365 Du Guesclin’s strange army wound through southern France to the passes of the Pyrenees, its appearance made the stranger by the adoption of the Crusader cross, in honor of a scarcely serious intention of fighting the Moors. The pope at Avignon, who had had no success in trying to get rid of the brigands by excommunicating them, gave the expedition not only his blessing but a large sum in cash, though voicing to Du Guesclin the sarcastic complaint that normally sinners paid for their absolution rather than getting paid for it.
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Du Guesclin is credited with a speech to his recruits that mixed the penitential with the profit-sharing motive:

“If we search our hearts, we have done enough to damn our souls.… We have ravished women, burned houses, slain children, exacted ransom from everyone, eaten their cows, oxen, sheep, stolen their geese, pigs, capons, drunk their wines, violated churches…. For God’s sake, let us march on the pagans!…I will make you all rich if you [follow me]!”
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Hugh of Calveley, the giant Englishman, is said to have replied, “Bertrand, fair brother and comrade, mirror of chivalry, because of your loyalty and your valor, I am yours, I and all these here.”
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Notwithstanding the crosses, all the towns shut their gates as the army approached, the citizens prudently observing its passage from the ramparts.

The campaign proved easy. The long war in France had seasoned its combatants and tested their equipment. Companies were composed either of men-at-arms
(hommes d’armes)
or of bowmen. All were mounted.
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The men-at-arms, typically a few knights and eighty to a hundred squires, were almost equally armed and armored, carrying lance, sword, dagger, and commonly axe or mace. Plate and mail were worn in combination, mail still predominating, with breastplate and the variety of smaller pieces reinforcing.

Unlike the men-at-arms, bowmen fought on foot, but they needed horses to march, since their equipment, though lighter than that of the knights and squires, was heavy to carry long distances on foot: open helmet or iron hat, short-sleeved mail shirt (brigandine or jack) of iron disks sewn on leather, sword, dagger, and either English longbow and arrows, or French crossbow and quarrels.

Confronted by the heavily armed invaders, the weakly garrisoned Castilian towns often surrendered on demand, preferring to take their chances on relatively peaceable looting to the threat of massacre and pillage. Pedro the Cruel fled his capital of Burgos and Henry of Trastamare had himself crowned. Du Guesclin was made count of Borja and Magallon.

Most of the companies drifted back to France, where they presently found a new paymaster. Taking a leaf from his brother’s book, Pedro the Cruel sought foreign help in the person of the Black Prince, who governed the ancient English province of Aquitaine, recently enlarged by his own conquests. Pedro offered a valuable accretion in the form of the Spanish ports on the Bay of Biscay. He also glibly promised to pay all the costs of an expedition. The Prince accepted and in the spring of 1367 led a powerful army, made up in good part of the same companies that had crossed the Pyrenees two years before. Du Guesclin urged guerrilla resistance, but Henry of Trastamare overruled him in favor of a pitched battle, at Najera, which he lost. Du Guesclin once more led the last resistance, covering the escape of Henry and falling prisoner to the Black Prince. Some of the Prince’s aides advised him to refuse ransom, warning, “Do not loose the mastiff of Brittany,” but Hugh of Calveley, Sir John Chandos, and others insisted on honoring the chivalric tradition and the Prince told Du Guesclin to name his own ransom. Du Guesclin fixed it at 100,000 gold doubloons,
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an unheard-of sum for a nonroyal personage. He counted on the help of his great patrons but boasted that if need be, “There is not a woman at her spinning wheel in France who will not earn money to get me out of your hands.”
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THE BLACK PRINCE:
EFFIGY IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. BOTH PLATE AND MAIL ARE VISIBLE.
(DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT)

Charles V and Jeanne, widow of Charles de Blois, came to the rescue, Du Guesclin again sold lands, and in January 1368 he was able to quit Bordeaux. Cuvelier tells a pleasing anecdote: A party of Du Guesclin’s Bretons, taken prisoner at Najera and sent to find ransoms for themselves and comrades, stopped at an inn. The innkeeper was at first hostile to his rough-looking customers, but hearing them talk of Du Guesclin, turned friendly, produced roast meat and wine, and cited their chief as “the least covetous, the most courteous, the least proud, the best spoken of all the knights of the good God.” Just then Du Guesclin himself appeared and gave the men enough florins for their ransom money and for horses and equipment. The Black Prince, hearing of the incident, is credited with saying, “I believe he will make us curse the hour when I freed him.”
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Indeed, from this point on, success never ceased to crown Du Guesclin’s enterprises in both Spain and France. Henry of Trastamare had refused to abandon his hopes of the Castilian crown and saw them rise once more when Pedro the Cruel failed to make good his openhanded promises to the Black Prince. Du Guesclin recruited a fresh army, smaller than that of 1365, but sufficient, and recrossed the Pyrenees. Again the shameless ruffians wore crosses, this time on the grounds that Pedro the Cruel was under papal ban, and despite their own fresh excommunication for unseemly behavior while crossing papal territory. At Montiel, Du Guesclin defeated Pedro’s army, and Henry of Trastamare either fortuitously or deliberately killed his half-brother in a scuffle during a parley. Du Guesclin, already awarded the grandly empty title of duke of Molina, received a grander, emptier one of “king of Granada,” a land entirely in Moorish possession. In 1370 he returned to France, rich in Spanish titles but poor in property.
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Charles V had repeatedly summoned, or rather importuned, him. He was also sought by Pedro the Ceremonious of Aragon to lead an expedition to Sardinia, but decided in favor of France, telling his companions, “When the king sent me off with the Great Companies, he would doubtless have liked to see us all hanged, but times have changed….
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Let us go. I have a Spanish coat of mail but a French shirt, and my shirt is closer to me than my coat of mail.”
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The Castilian adventure had itself supplied the cause for resumption of the Hundred Years War. Pedro the Cruel’s default on his promises had created serious financial embarrassment for the Black Prince, who found no recourse but an extraordinary five-year tax levy on his Aquitaine subjects.
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The count of Armagnac, one of the great Gascon lords and pro-French to begin with, forbade the collection of the tax in his domains and appealed to Edward III. Getting no satisfaction, he turned to Charles V. By the treaty of Bretigny of 1360, Charles’s father had conceded full sovereignty over Aquitaine to Edward, but Charles now coolly reneged and agreed to hear the complaint as the count of Armagnac’s overlord.

Both Edward III and the Black Prince were sick and willing to compromise, but Charles was ready for war. His father and grandfather had been knightly kings who donned armor and fought in person but had never prepared for or begun a war. Charles, too frail to wear armor, had prepared for a war and was eager to begin it. He had studied the past campaigns and had reached conclusions that ran very contrary to the chivalric concepts of his father and grandfather. Battles he perceived as chancy and little productive, except through such accident as the capture or killing of a principal. That costly outcome Charles avoided by keeping his own valuable person safely in Paris. Against the other possible loss resulting from battle, that of a large part of his army, Charles guarded by forbidding his commanders in the field to fight unless they had clear numerical superiority. This decision left the enemy free to pursue the favorite English tactic of the
chevauchée
, or large-scale raid through the countryside, but despite pillaged churches and burning villages, the
chevauchée
was an essentially sterile form of warfare. In the end, provided the castles and walled towns held out, the raiding army had to return to one of its coastal bases without any lasting gain. To ensure that castle and town held, Charles had carried out a reform in the royal tax system to produce a dependable stream of revenue and a reform in the military system to repair battlements and train soldiers (including plenty of crossbowmen).
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Nor was the king’s strategy purely defensive. He contemplated an offensive against both the enemy’s recent conquests and his old inherited lands. Rather than a spectacular
chevauchée
, Charles’s offensive would consist of a succession of sieges designed methodically to wrest one district after another from its Anglo-Gascon defenders and their local allies. Some of the precious financial resource was expended on costly gunpowder for the new bronze and brass cannon capable of hurling stone projectiles against enemy walls.

Thus the historic roles in the war were reversed. The English, who had begun with innovative military organization and concepts, were now wedded to a futile (and characteristically knightly) policy of transitory destruction, while the French, who had begun with the feudal levy and the cavalry charge, had now adopted the unknightly and even anti-knightly policy of refusing battle and concentrating on permanent military gains.

Charles’s strategy was immediately tested in 1369 when in response to the French invasion of Aquitaine a powerful English expedition under a new duke of Lancaster, Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, a younger son of Edward III, landed at Calais and swept inland through Artois and Picardy. It left the usual devastation in its wake but all towns and castles held and the duke was not even able to take Harfleur (medieval predecessor of Le Havre), which he had intended as his point of egress on the Norman coast. Instead he had to return to Calais, where the next year a new expedition landed under Du Guesclin’s old antagonist Robert Knowles. Besides being a veteran brigand, Knowles was under extra pressure to plunder because Edward III, short of funds, paid his men only until their arrival in France. Knowles levied tribute on the villages and monasteries, pillaging and burning those that did not submit, up to within sight of Paris.

Charles stubbornly held out against the expostulations of his councillors, partly out of necessity, since his available revenues were already committed to the fighting in Aquitaine. To appease protest, however, he made a momentous decision: the appointment of Bertrand du Guesclin as constable of France (October 2, 1370).
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This office, which had evolved from minor officialdom to supreme military command, was normally reserved for the high nobility. Du Guesclin, who had just captured the towns of St. Yrieix and Brantôme in Aquitaine, left his small army in command of his nephew Olivier de Mauny and hastened to Paris. There he demonstrated political shrewdness by at first protesting that he did not deserve the honor: “Dear sire and noble king… I am a poor man of low birth. The office of constable is so great and noble…and involves commanding even more the great than the small. And here are your brothers, your nephews, your cousins—how can I command over them?”
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The royal dukes joined the king in providing the necessary reassurance on this point. Du Guesclin had one more stipulation: the king must promise to credit no hostile reports until the constable had the opportunity to reply in person.
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Then he accepted the insignia of office, which consisted of the king’s own gold-hilted sword, and which carried with it the constable’s right to a valuable share of booty taken by the army. More important to Du Guesclin, according to a believable passage in Cuvelier, was that the pay of his men be assured.
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Knowles was slowly withdrawing westward toward Brittany. Du Guesclin obtained permission to pursue him with a small force raised by the expedient of a loan exacted from the citizens of Paris and nearby towns. Du Guesclin himself contributed a set of plate he had brought from Spain, to which Tiphaine added her jewels and silver, meeting her husband in Caen for a last dinner off the plate before he set out in pursuit of the English. Knowles had experienced some of the difficulties Du Guesclin had foreseen for himself in commanding subordinates of nobler status than his own, and as a result his army had separated into two parts, a van under Knowles and a rear under Thomas of Granson. Du Guesclin overtook and surprised Granson at Pontvallain, south of Le Mans, killing or capturing his whole force, and followed up the victory by taking two towns and a fortified abbey, whose capitulation was negotiated by Du Guesclin’s old friend-and-enemy Hugh of Calveley. On New Year’s Day he was back in Paris to present his prisoners to the king.
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