The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  Not above using her children to play politics, Eleanor was an independent landowner (Aquitaine and Poitou) who acted like one, and constantly played her quarrelsome sons off against each other and against their own father. Tossed into prison at Windsor Castle after supporting her sons in their uprising against her husband, Eleanor waited Henry out: outliving him and seeing her favorite child (Richard) crowned king in his succession after Henry’s death in A.D. 1189. She had been a prisoner for fifteen years at that point.

  Living well into the reign of her last son John, Eleanor never really stopped doing her best to influence court politics, and never really retired from public life. Still feisty into her seventies, she personally ruled Aquitaine and Poitou as her personal fiefs until shortly before her death in A.D. 1204.

  Bastard on Crusade

  Originally married to King Louis VII of France, Eleanor accompanied him when he went to the Holy Land on crusade in A.D. 1146. While there she supposedly went a little wild. A later chronicler dutifully said of her purported antics: “Some say King Lewis [sic] carried her into the Holy Land, where she carried herself not very holily, but led a licentious life; and, which is the worst kind of licentiousness, in carnal familiarity with a Turk.”

  Was this true? Probably not. Such behavior on the part of any medieval French noblewoman would likely have resulted in her either being killed outright or divorced, stripped of her titles and property, and slapped into a convent for her troubles. That said, the royal couple squabbled constantly, with the result that they left the Holy Land and returned home by separate routes, and agreed to annul their marriage soon afterward.

  77

  HENRY THE YOUNG

  KING OF ENGLAND

  Who Wants to Rule When There’s

  Jousting to Be Done?

  ( A.D. 1155–1183)

  Henry the son of the king of England, leaving the kingdom, passed three years in French contests and lavish expenditure.

  —Medieval chronicler Ralph of Diceto, archdeacon of Middlesex

  The subject of many troubadour songs idealizing the shining young knight in the golden age of chivalry, Henry the Young King, second son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, was tall, handsome, charismatic, an enthusiastic jouster, and generous to his followers. Raised up to be “junior king” to his father at the age of fifteen (a symbolic gesture intended to secure his succession), Henry the Young King was everything the troubadours sang of him and more: stupid, shallow, vain, profligate, and utterly unsuited to run a tennis tournament, let alone a kingdom.

  For all of his enthusiasm for jousting, Henry wasn’t really any good at that, either. His mediocrity in the lists was directly related to his short attention span and inability to focus on anything long enough to master it. Even having the most famous knight in Christendom assigned to mentor him did no good. Sir William Marshall, who went on to serve as regent for King John’s son Henry III, was a young knight of enormous repute whom Henry II set to teach his son how to fight in tournaments. Henry the Young King grew bored, though, never practiced, and wasn’t interested in the hard work associated with mastering the arts of war.

  In A.D. 1173, Henry joined his brothers (Richard, Geoffrey, and John) in rising in open revolt against their father. In this they were backed by their mother, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, who found herself under house arrest for the rest of her husband’s life for her trouble. At first it looked as if Henry was going to have to give away his kingdom piecemeal to his restive sons, but he had the money and the will to use it to pay mercenaries to fight in his name, and after a short time he prevailed.

  Bastard Shown Up By a Marshall

  Flanders (modern Belgium) during the late twelfth century was a hotbed of jousting tournaments, and Henry the Young King frequently deserted his duties as duke of neighboring Normandy to slip over to Flanders and enter a tournament or two. One particular time Henry and his entire retinue (including the by-then famous Sir William Marshall) stayed in a certain Flemish town where the king ran up enormous debts without having the money with him to make good. When the townspeople heard this, they locked their gates and guarded their town walls, determined not to allow the Young King to leave until he’d settled his accounts with them. His promises were not heeded. Apparently Henry the Young King was as free with his word as he was with other people’s money. In stepped William Marshall, who offered his own word, vouching for the repayment of the Young King’s debts. That was enough to satisfy the Flemings, who allowed the mortified Young King and his party to leave immediately.

  By A.D. 1183, the Young King had still learned nothing about the right and wrong way to get what you want. Constantly demanding more authority from his father, he never demonstrated the slightest interest in showing the accountability and work ethic to go with it. Henry turned on his brother Richard, and invaded his duchy of Aquitaine. Instead of taking Richard by surprise, Henry took a beating, having his mercenaries defeated in battle and coming down with dysentery himself shortly after looting a monastery in order to be able to pay his men. Quickly realizing he was dying, Henry sent word for his father to come to his deathbed to exchange forgiveness with him, as was accepted Christian practice.

  Henry II stayed away, afraid of a trap.

  Kinda says it all, doesn’t it?

  78

  RICHARD I THE LION-HEARTED

  A Talent for War

  ( A.D. 1157–1199)

  [Richard] cared for no success that was not reached by a path cut by his own sword and stained with the blood of his adversaries.

  —Medieval chronicler Gerald of Wales, archdeacon of Brecon

  The foremost example of what French troubadours called “le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche” (“the knight without fear and above reproach”), Richard Plantagenet, third son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, has gotten a bad rap from recent historians looking to balance the portrait of him painted by contemporary chroniclers and expanded upon in the millennium since his death. But there is no changing the fact that Richard was the greatest strategist and one of the most fearless warriors of the Middle Ages, while also being eminently more honorable and trustworthy than any of his brothers, his father, mother, or other royal contemporaries.

  His mother’s favorite, Richard spent barely a year total in England during his ten-year reign. And yet he was remembered as “good king Richard,” because he was a hell of a lot better ruler than anyone else looking to fill the job.

  That said, he really loved war. And when the situation called for it, he could be the most ruthless of bastards, as evidenced by his slaughter of thousands of captives at one fell stroke during a siege in the Holy Land.

  Having recently taken the city of Acre in the Holy Land, Richard found himself in a ticklish situation in late summer of A.D. 1191. While negotiating with the great Arab leader Saladin for surrender of various lands surrounding the city in exchange for the release of Muslim soldiers who had made up the garrison at Acre, the English king managed to alienate several allies, including his old rival King Philip Augustus of France and Archduke Leopold V of Austria (who later famously took revenge on Richard by holding him hostage for a huge ransom). Now facing an Arab army alone and eager to move his troops south to link up with other crusader forces in and around Jerusalem, Richard was growing impatient over the negotiations, while Saladin, hoping to neutralize Richard for the remainder of the campaign season, clearly dragged his feet.

  Gay Bastard?

  Everyone who has seen the play or the film The Lion in Winter knows of the rumors of Richard’s homosexuality: not much expressed interest in women, married only after becoming king, and never produced an heir, the medieval equivalent of the guy who’s a jock in part because he likes to hang out with guys just a little too much. But modern scholarship has pretty much put the lie to this tale, especially in light of the fact that a supposed secret such as this one would have spread like wildfire among such gossipy medieval chroniclers as the monk Geral
d of Wales had even a hint of it gotten out. In reality, Richard’s wife Berengaria was likely barren, where Richard himself produced at least one verifiable bastard (later lord of Cognac) and rumors of another named Fulk.

  In a move that modern readers find astonishing but which barely raised an eyebrow at the time, Richard marched all 2,700 members of the captured garrison of Acre outside the city gates and had them butchered by his troops in front of the eyes of the horrified Saladin and his soldiers. No longer tied by the need to guard his prisoners, Richard moved south and attacked Saladin’s troops again at the battle of Arsuf a month later. He followed up this success by seeing his own nephew crowned king of Jerusalem.

  While massacres of the type described above were fairly commonplace (Saladin had killed many more prisoners taken in the Arab victory over the crusaders at Hattin years earlier), the massacre at Acre has come down through history as a stain on the reputation of Richard the Lion-Hearted. People like their heroes to be clean morally, uncompromised, and decidedly unbastardly.

  79

  POPE INNOCENT III

  Don’t Let the Name Fool Ya

  (CA. A.D. 1160–1216)

  Use against heretics the spiritual sword of excommunication, and if this does not prove effective, use the material sword.

  —Pope Innocent III

  Notwithstanding the name he took as pope, there was nothing innocent about the man born Lotario dei Conti. A powerbroker in church circles for a decade before he assumed the shoes of the fisherman at age thirty-eight in A.D. 1198, Innocent III proved one of the most ruthless and effective of medieval popes, a far cry from such bumblers and dilettantes as Stephen VI and Benedict IX. And yet in his treatment of heretics and in his efforts to launch the Fourth Crusade, Innocent showed himself to be an unmitigated bastard.

  To begin with, Innocent was one of those most dangerous of men: a religious zealot. And he was big on signs from God. As a result, he accepted his election as just such a sign from the guy upstairs that the Church needed protecting (from external enemies) and cleansing (to deal with internal enemies). In other words, Innocent III looked around him and saw nothing but foes.

  The result was a couple of holy wars: the Fourth Crusade, launched in A.D. 1198 and intended to retrieve the Holy Land from Muslim nonbelievers (enemies without) and the Albigensian Crusade, launched against practitioners of the Cathar heresy (Christians who did not accept the rule of the papacy and had other dangerous ideas about Jesus, his mother, and, of course, God).

  Innocent’s call for a crusade to free the Holy Land resulted in a bloody invasion of Palestine, and also led directly to the sack of Constantinople (whose residents were Orthodox Christians). Leaving out the havoc this crusade wreaked on the Muslim and Jewish occupants of Palestine (who didn’t count to Christians in that day and age), the pope was horrified by what happened next: the murder and rape of tens of thousands of the city’s Christian residents. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that some of the knights who answered his call to arms would regard Orthodox Christians as enemies.

  Innocent’s conflict with the Cathars of southern France, on the other hand, left no such bad taste in his mouth. In A.D. 1208, a representative the pope had sent to negotiate with the nobles giving protection to these heretics wound up murdered. Innocent’s response was swift and brutal. Any person making war on these Cathars, he said, was entitled to their property; furthermore, he said, any Catholic allowing Cathars to live among them unmolested was no good Catholic, and their lives and property ought to also be forfeited.

  The result?

  Tens of thousands killed over the following twenty-year period, and the rich culture of southern France completely destroyed.

  But Innocent didn’t live to see any of this. He died suddenly in A.D. 1216 , his last crusade still incomplete.

  Bastard in His Own Words

  [I]t grieves us most of all that, against the orthodox faith, there are now arising more . . . ministers of diabolical error who are ensnaring the souls of the simple and ruining them. . . . You shall exercise the rigor of the ecclesiastical power against them and all those who have made themselves suspected by associating with them. They may not appeal from your judgments, and if necessary, you may cause the princes and people to suppress them with the sword.

  80

  GEOFFREY II OF BRITTANY

  “That Son of Perdition”

  ( A.D. 1158–1186)

  [O]verflowing with words, soft as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the seemingly indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite and a dissembler.

  —Gerald of Wales, archdeacon of Brecon

  If ever there was a prototypical schemer, it was Geoffrey Plantagenet, the fourth son of Henry II of England and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to our sources, this duke of Brittany’s only saving grace was his charm.

  Henry II had the dubious distinction of inspiring very little loyalty in his sons—as denoted by the fact that all four of the ones who survived to adulthood seem to have been constantly either plotting against him or actually at war with him (and with each other). And the worst among this “Devil’s Brood” was his fourth son, Geoffrey.

  Geoffrey started out his career as a bastard early, joining a rebellion against his father before his sixteenth birthday. It would not be the last time he intrigued against the old king, and his most frequent dance partner in this sort of treason was not one of his brothers but the duplicitous son of his mother’s first husband, Philip Augustus, the king of France.

  In fact, the two men were so close that Philip appointed Geoffrey his seneschal, a court official of immense power, acting as the king’s personal representative in instances when the king himself was absent.

  But it’s not as if either man was the other’s puppet. They were both constantly scheming (there’s that word again) for personal gain; in Geoffrey’s case, he was looking to expand his power base from the duchy of Brittany (he had received it as a wedding present when he married the heir of the previous duke in A.D. 1181), usually at the expense of either his father or his brothers. Geoffrey literally went to war with a relative no less than twenty times during the last ten years of his life.

  In the end, all of his machinations served him not one whit. Geoffrey died young, aged just twenty-seven, at the court of his close friend and benefactor, Philip Augustus. Accounts vary as to the cause of his death, but he most likely died after being trampled during a joust.

  According to several eyewitnesses, Philip was so grief-stricken by Geoffrey’s death that he tried to jump into the casket with Geoffrey at the duke’s funeral.

  Whether anyone else mourned the arch-schemer’s passing is not recorded.

  Irreligious Bastard

  Truly one of the “Devil’s Brood,” Geoffrey had a novel way of covering his expenses when he found himself short of cash (which he often did). He would simply find and loot the closest church property, be it monastery, abbey, or simple parish church. It didn’t much matter to him whether the clerical establishment he was currently treating as the medieval equivalent of an ATM was on his land or on that of another lord. To Geoffrey, they were all fair game. Worst still, he seems to have truly relished the prospect of looting churches. Small wonder that his contemporaries among church chroniclers are unanimous in their disdain for this particular Plantagenet!

  81

  JOHN I OF ENGLAND

  Short, Miserly, and Mean

  ( A.D. 1167–1216)

  After King John had captured Arthur [duke of Brittany and John’s nephew] and kept him alive in prison for some time, at length, in the castle of Rouen, after dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he was drunk and possessed by the devil, he slew him with his own hand and, tying a heavy stone to the body, cast it into the Seine. It was discovered by a fisherman in his net and, being dragged to the shore and recognised, was taken for secret burial in fear of the tyrant, to the
priory of Bec called Notre Dame des Pres.

  —Annals of the Abbey of Margam

  The youngest of the so-called “Devil’s Brood,” and certainly the least among the sons of Henry II, John Plantagenet has come down through history with a well-deserved reputation for venality, cowardice, treachery, and vanity. The legendary near-comic foil of the mythical outlaw Robin Hood, the truth about John Lackland (as he was called while still a young prince) is far darker than the legend. Because in the final accounting there was nothing comic about the vicious little bastard known to history as King John of England.

  Despite his flaws, John was, for some strange reason, his father’s favorite, even after he joined Henry’s other sons in rebellion while still a teenager.

  By all measures except one, John was a failure as a monarch and as a man. While ruling in his brother Richard’s name while Richard was on crusade, he stripped the kingdom bare, supposedly to pay Richard’s ransom after he’d been taken captive by the duke of Austria. (John kept the money.)

  After Richard’s death, once he became king and ruler of the so-called “Angevin Empire,” which encompassed not just England and Ireland but all of western France, John found himself outmaneuvered time and again by the crafty King Philip Augustus of France, with the result that through a combination of war and diplomacy Philip stripped him of most of his French possessions, including the all-important duchy of Normandy. The result was that John died with far fewer French possessions than any English king since William the Conqueror crossed the Channel in A.D. 1066.