Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500

by Jeffrey Anderson

  THE ANGEVIN DYNASTIES OF EUROPE 900–1500

  THE ANGEVIN DYNASTIES OF EUROPE 900–1500

  Lords of the Greatest Part of the World

  Jeffrey Anderson

  First published in 2019

  by Robert Hale, an imprint of

  The Crowood Press Ltd,

  Ramsbury, Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.crowood.com

  This e-book first published in 2019

  © Jeffrey Anderson 2019

  All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 7198 2925 3

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 71982 926 0

  The right of Jeffrey Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Genealogies

  Introduction

  Chapter 1The Origins of Anjou

  Chapter 2Angevins and Normans

  Chapter 3Angevin Kings

  Chapter 4The Angevin Empire I: Creating the Empire

  Chapter 5The Angevin Empire II: The Arbiter of Europe

  Chapter 6The Fall of Empires

  Chapter 7Charles of Anjou: Lord of the Greatest Part of the World

  Chapter 8The Wheel of Fortune: The Sicilian Vespers and the New Angevin Kingdoms

  Chapter 9The Angevins of Naples and Hungary: The King of Sermons and the Harlot Queen

  Chapter 10Plantagenets and Angevins

  Chapter 11The Second House of Anjou and the Angevins of Naples/Hungary

  Chapter 12King René and Queen Margaret

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  IN THE 15TH CENTURY, when Richard Duke of York wanted to emphasize his claim to the English throne in opposition to King Henry VI, he took a new name for himself: Plantagenet. This resonant name, which referred to a 12th-century ancestor, became – with a little help from Shakespeare – the family name historians use for the monarchs that ruled England from Henry II (1154–1189) until the accession of the first Tudor king in 1485. On Bosworth Field the defeat of Richard III ended the line of Plantagenet kings, but this name remains the most evocative in medieval English history. The greatest exterminatrix in the Plantagenet ‘Wars of the Roses’, at least according to Shakespeare’s plays about Henry VI, was Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England, who not only led troops against her rivals but also murdered Richard Plantagenet with her own hands.

  Far away from the civil war in England, Margaret’s father, King René of Anjou, presided over one of the most sophisticated courts in Europe. Through genealogy and good fortune, René had become Duke of Anjou, Lorraine and Bar, Count of Provence and titular King of Sicily, Jerusalem and Aragon, and despite military reversals and a chronic lack of funds he had established peerless intellectual and cultural credentials. René held pageants and classically inspired processions in Naples and Lorraine, corresponded with the humanists credited with initiating the Renaissance, wrote (and possibly illustrated) chivalric romances and treatises that are amongst the most sumptuous manuscripts of the 15th century, and founded a chivalric order dedicated to dressing up and telling fabulous stories. Nothing could seem further from the vicious battles of the Wars of the Roses than René’s choreographed jousts and his obsession with elaborate costumes. The Plantagenets, who included some of the most effective kings in English history and were now locked in a desperate struggle for supremacy in England, seem to have little in common with the rulers of Anjou – the Angevins – like King René, who amused themselves with literature and learned displays of chivalry.

  Yet the Plantagenets were Angevins. King René and Queen Margaret united two Angevin lines, one of which ruled England as the Plantagenets, and another that between the 12th and 15th centuries at one time or another ruled Anjou, Lorraine, Bar, Provence, Catalonia, Piedmont, Florence, Rome, Naples, Sicily, Albania, Greece, Hungary, Croatia, Poland and Jerusalem. Their line included conquerors, saints, philosopher kings, reigning queens, usurpers, reformers and patrons of the greatest art of the Middle Ages.

  This is the Angevin story. It encompasses all the major events of European history from the 9th to the 15th centuries, and demonstrates the international sweep and cultural dynamism of Europe’s most compelling dynasty.

  GENEALOGIES

  The Counts of Anjou / Plantagenets

  The Angevins of Naples (simplified)

  The Angevins of Naples, Hungary and Poland (simplified)

  The ‘Second House’ of Anjou

  INTRODUCTION

  DIGESTING THE COMPLETE HISTORY of medieval Europe from 900 to 1500 in one volume is perhaps not appealing to everyone, but that is not the purpose here. This book will focus narrowly on the international and cultural connections of the Angevins, albeit over a long period and an extraordinary geographical range, and how they interacted with each other and the other ruling houses of Europe.

  It is important to set the parameters of the story first, and that will involve a blizzard of dates, names and places, but we can then move on as quickly as possible. Firstly, Anjou. This was the French province centred on the Loire between Tours and Nantes with its capital at Angers, today probably best known for being the westernmost edge of the great parade of chateaux along the Loire, with Saumur perhaps being its most famous. Anjou corresponds roughly to the current, confusingly named, département of Maine et Loire – confusing since Maine is another historic province with its capital at Le Mans, a region just north of Anjou that would be taken by the Angevins. For reasons best known to the French authorities, historic Maine forms the current départements of Sarthe and Mayenne. Three historic provinces critical to early Angevin history – Anjou, Maine and Blois – have names referring to their pre-Roman tribal history, giving people from them these designations: Angevins from Anjou, Cenomannians from Maine and Blésois from Blois.

  There were three Angevin dynasties in the period 900–1500: the original dynasty founded in the 9th century, which ultimately became kings of Jerusalem, took control of England and lost Anjou in 1204, after which historians refer to them as Plantagenets; next, Charles of Anjou and his descendants who in the 13th and 14th centuries became kings of Sicily, Jerusalem, Hungary and Poland; and finally the ‘Second House of Anjou’, which was founded by Louis I when he received Anjou in 1350 and essentially ended with King René who died in 1480, after which Anjou reverted to the French Crown.

  The initial Angevin line, who were first called counts, began in the 9th and 10th centuries with near-legendary figures like Ingelgarius, Fulk the Red and Fulk the Good, who, although we know they existed, largely figure in fanciful tales. In this period, Anjou was a dynamic county that was one of the main political units in what would become France. After the anarchy of the later 9th century, Viking raiders had settled down to create the ‘land of the Northmen’ – Normandy – and established what became the most acquisitive and successful power of the 11th and early 12th centuries, while the French kings became so imbecilic that the
ir throne was usurped by a new line that ruled a tiny province centred on Paris. Anjou too emerged as a compact and well governed territory ruled by a series of colourful, ruthless and successful leaders who would ultimately become kings themselves.

  Angevin history leaps into focus in 987 with Fulk Nerra, a well-documented figure of European significance because of his multiple pilgrimages to Jerusalem, his pioneering construction of castles and his annexation of territory that would become a permanent part of Anjou. Fulk Nerra’s successors in the mid- and late 11th century, Geoffrey Martel and Fulk Réchin, had the misfortune to have as a neighbour Duke William the Bastard of Normandy who would become King William the Conqueror of England, and both were repeatedly bested by the Normans.

  Anjou itself seemed to be in peril by the end of Fulk Réchin’s reign, but it was from this nadir that Angevin fortunes had an astonishing reversal. Fulk Réchin’s son, Fulk V, arranged not one but two historic marriages: his son Geoffrey, the first to adopt the nickname ‘Plantagenet’, married Matilda, heiress to the English throne, and Fulk himself married Melisende, heiress to the kingdom of Jerusalem that had been established by the First Crusade. The kingdom of Jerusalem was an embattled Christian outpost that needed both clear succession rules and a king to lead the army, so it accepted female succession but gave full royal recognition to the queen’s husband, and Fulk became king of Jerusalem. Geoffrey Plantagenet and Matilda had to fight for Normandy and England, and although Matilda’s cousin Stephen of Blois usurped the English throne and held it for nearly twenty years, ultimately in 1154 Matilda and Geoffrey’s son succeeded as Henry II King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. Moreover, he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress to most of southwestern France, and together they ruled an ‘Angevin Empire’ that stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees.

  This initiated an Angevin dynasty in England that provided three of the most famous (or in one case, notorious) names in English history: Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and King John. These kings presided over developments that still shape the modern world, and this was a direct result of the methods needed to rule an enormous empire. Although they did move around their domains constantly, they could not possibly visit everywhere frequently, and so were forced to use written documents to send their authority impersonally throughout their dominions, initiating, for better or worse, much of the bureaucracy that is still with us. This also necessitated a more permanent household establishment, and London emerged as the capital of England with its administrative centre at Westminster.

  In Jerusalem, the Angevin dynasty ended when the leper king Baldwin IV died without heirs and his sister’s husband became the new king, only to lose the kingdom to the great Muslim hero Saladin in 1187. The Crusades continued, most notably for our purposes with the Third Crusade of Richard the Lionheart, but they evolved from religiously motivated wars against Muslims to religiously sanctioned wars against a variety of people – other Christians, such as heretics and political opponents, as well as Muslims and Turks. Most notoriously, in 1204 the Fourth Crusade was diverted to conquer the Christian city of Constantinople and established a Latin Empire there, and the popes began to use Crusades as a routine means of attacking their political enemies.

  From the peak of the Angevin Empire, the Angevins nearly lost everything. Richard’s successor, King John, lost Normandy and Anjou to the French king, and the English royal line after John is called ‘Plantagenet’ to distinguish it from subsequent rulers of Anjou. John’s loss of his Empire initiated a complex series of responses. The formalization of royal authority begun by Henry II easily slipped into despotism, and this, joined to the need for vast sums of money to defend the Angevin Empire plus King John’s inflexible character, culminated in 1215 with revolt and the drafting of Magna Carta, the first document formally curbing royal power, and establishing the principles of limited government and the ultimate responsibility of the king to his subjects. Magna Carta was a consequence of first Richard’s, then John’s, rapacious behaviour in England to raise sufficient funds to defend the Angevin Empire, and then to attempt to recapture it when it had been lost. The total failure of these schemes despite their vast expense stimulated the barons of England to rise up and demand that the king respect their wishes, the first step on the road to English constitutional monarchy and democracy.

  In the 13th century the political entities and struggles that would define Europe for centuries become more clearly defined. France, England, the Holy Roman Empire, Aragon and the papacy came into direct competition, and the focal point of this struggle was Charles of Anjou. Charles was the younger brother of the French king – and future saint – Louis IX, although France and England were so intertwined that Charles was also the great-grandson of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Although he had gained Provence by marriage and been given Anjou by Louis, Charles became involved in the great Crusade of the papacy against its enemies in Italy, and at the pope’s request he conquered southern Italy and Sicily in 1266.

  Charles, more than almost any other medieval figure, had a conscious plan of empire building. He extended his rule over Albania and Greece, and gained the throne of Jerusalem – now an empty title, as the Christians held only one last outpost in the Holy Land – and an interest in the Latin Empire of Constantinople, and prepared for an invasion of the eastern Mediterranean. His great ambition collapsed in 1282 with the revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers, when the people of Sicily, supported by Aragon, rose up against the Angevins. Sicily fell to Aragon, the new great power of the Mediterranean, and the Angevin kingdom of Naples was confined to southern Italy, now ruled by Charles’s son, Charles II.

  Angevin Naples initially prospered. Charles II’s eldest surviving son Louis was a Franciscan who renounced his inheritance and was so renowned for piety in his lifetime that he was recognized as a saint, leaving the next son, Robert, to become king of Naples. Robert ‘the Wise’ embodied all the qualities of the philosopher king, composing numerous sermons in Latin, publicly examining the poet and humanist Petrarch on his classical learning before proclaiming him the first poet laureate since Roman times, and patronizing two towering artists of the 14th century, Giotto and Simone Martine.

  Naples in the 14th century was the greatest metropolis of medieval Europe excepting only Paris, and is brought to vivid life by Giovanni Boccaccio in the Decameron, whose stories describe in detail the rise of the merchant and banking class at the expense of the old feudal order, prefiguring the course of modern economic and political history. However, the 14th century was also a time of disasters: the reason the narrators in the Decameron were staying at an estate in the country and telling stories to pass the time was that they had fled Florence to escape the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe’s population between 1348 and 1351.

  The Golden Age under Robert the Wise proved short-lived. Charles II had married a Hungarian princess, and the throne of Hungary passed to the Angevins through Charles II’s grandson Carobert, who considered Robert a usurper. Robert’s granddaughter, Johanna I, married her Hungarian cousin Andrew to heal the breach, but despite – or because of – the fact that they had grown up together, the couple disliked each other, and this, added to Hungarian annoyance that Johanna would inherit the throne in her own right and Andrew would not be king, meant the marriage was termed a disaster. Or so it seemed, until a true disaster struck: Andrew was murdered and Johanna was widely blamed for the crime. Andrew’s brother, King Louis the Great of Hungary, invaded Italy and Johanna fled to Avignon, where she appeared before the pope in an attempt to clear her name. She succeeded, but the rest of her reign was blighted by further unhappy marriages and Hungarian invasions, until finally she was captured by a rival, deposed and murdered.

  The Hungarian Angevins can only appear as villains in Naples, yet in Hungarian history the 14th century under Angevin rule is also considered a golden age. The warrior king Louis the Great used literal mountains of gold to make Hungary a major European power and extended his do
minion (intermittently) over Naples, as well as inheriting the throne of Poland. Yet like his ancestor Henry II of England, Louis also presided over profound political, economic, social and cultural developments that transformed Hungarian society. His two daughters had the distinction of becoming kings (not queens, an interesting response to the issue of female succession) in their own right – Maria became king of Hungary and Hedwig/Jadwiga became king of Poland – and it is no exaggeration to talk of yet another Angevin ‘empire’ for a short time in central Europe.

  The Black Death was not the only crisis of the 14th century. The involvement of the papacy in decades of Italian wars and its complete identification with Angevin political goals, plus extensive use of the Crusade for these political ends, changed the nature of the papacy and led to more than a century and a half of disruption. This included the residence of the popes in Avignon rather than Rome for nearly seventy years, and then the Western Great Schism, when rival popes reigned in Avignon and Rome, which was only resolved in 1415.

  In the 14th century the long conflict between France and England also resumed, this time in the spectacular form of the Hundred Years War. In addition to the remnant of the Angevin Empire they retained in Gascony and their old claims to Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, the Plantagenets of England now had a claim to the throne of France, and after a series of spectacular victories they nearly made it good. France was crippled first by a dynastic crisis and change of the ruling line, and then by the madness of King Charles VI.