by Ed West
With the strapedo, weights were sometimes added to the testicles to make the experience even more painful. Many others were strapped to the rack, and their ankles and wrists dislocated by a device that slowly pulled joints from sockets. By January 1308, 134 of the leading 138 Templers arrested in Paris had admitted their guilt to a range of charges, among them blasphemy, various sexual degredations, and a ceremony where they worshipped a demon who took the form of a cat. They were also accused of negotiating with the Muslims over the Holy Land, the Christian world being desperate for some explanation for their failure in war.
Grand Master Jacques de Molay eventually confessed to blasphemy but denied sodomy, and a month after this admission the reluctant Pope Clement V sent letters to all European rulers instructing them to arrest Templers in their countries. In Paris, some fifty-four knights were soon put in carts and taken out of the city and burned to death, and the finale came on March 18, 1314 when Molay and the other leading Knights were executed in dramatic style on Paris’s Island of Jews (now renamed the “Island of Templars”).5 They had spent seven years in dungeons suffering various tortures by that point.
The knights had built their first Temple in Paris the previous century, and by the time of their destruction it was a fortress in itself, a vast donjon, or keep, flanked by four towers just beyond the city walls, and rivalling the Palais Royal in its grandiosity.
Paris was home to as many as 210,000 people, the largest in the Christian West and perhaps four times as big as London (which did not overtake its rival until the eighteenth century). The city boasted six paved streets, including its main thoroughfare Le Grand Rue, as well as Les Halles, where farmers brought produce on Fridays, and St Jacques-la Boucherie, the butchers’ quarter, where “fierce Paris wind made little ripples in the pools of animal blood.”6 Nearby was the Champs-Dolet—the “field of suffering and cries,”7 where the animals were slaughtered, while the Parisian tradition of roasting stray cats alive on Place de Greve lasted until the seventeenth century.
Medieval Paris was a dangerous, noisy, and malodorous place, but the city now boasted its first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, where patients slept three or four to a bed and the clothes of the dead were sold at monthly auctions. Its great cathedral Notre-Dame had been completed on the site of a temple to Jupiter dating to the Roman city of Lutetia (although most of the interior today is a nineteenth century restoration, much of the original having been vandalized in the Revolution). Then there was the stunning Sainte-Chapelle, built by Philippe’s grandfather Louis IX and containing many of the most priceless relics in Christendom, taken from the Middle East by crusaders. The city’s Left Bank was already a student quarter, and home to the famed Paris University, the second oldest in Europe.
Toward the end of the early medieval period, around the turn of the millennium, the Italian cities of Venice, Naples, and Milan were the first to reach population levels seen in antiquity, followed by Florence and the Hanseatic port towns of Germany. But Paris was by now supreme, economically and culturally, and the flowering of what was later called Gothic architecture is testimony to the dominance of northern France, soon imitated across England, Germany, and the rest of Europe.8
English medieval history is impossible to understand without France, which exerted a huge cultural influence over its northern neighbor well into the modern era, and so the story of the Seven Kingdoms is not just that of England but rather Britain, France, and Spain in one. In Martin’s words, “Westeros is much much MUCH bigger than Britain. More the size (though not the shape, obviously) of South America.”9 Although the Seven Kingdoms all speak the same language, they are varied in their ancestry and racial appearance, while the geography varies hugely; so, while the five most northerly kingdoms correspond to Britain, the Reach strongly resembles France and Dorne is Moorish Spain. Paris is the model for King’s Landing, and in the books appears far less tropical than in the television series, which is filmed in Malta and Croatia.10
The Reach is:
a vast and fertile land, with a more pleasant climate than much of the rest of the country. It’s home to an island called The Arbor that, like the French regions of Burgundy and Bordeaux, makes what is widely considered the best wine in the world. The city of Oldtown is the biggest and most sophisticated in Westeros, much as Paris was for some time the biggest and most sophisticated city in Europe. And the inhabitants of The Reach are invested in chivalry, art and culture to a significantly greater extent than those in the rest of Westeros.11
France is big, roughly the area of Texas, while England is about the same as New York state, a quarter of its size. Before modern technology, it took twenty-two days to cross from the north of France to the south, and sixteen from east to west, making it extremely hard for one man to rule.12 Historically it had therefore been controlled by dukes and counts, with the king in Paris only as overlord.
The Reach is a highly fertile area that provides its neighbors with wheat and wine, just as France did; it is also the home of courtly love and courtly manners, and the trendsetter in fashion, as France was. Northern France, aside from Brittany and western Normandy, is a huge wheat-growing region, among the most fertile areas for this staple on earth, along with England and Denmark.13 Wheat is the best natural produce for state-formation, being easy to tax and record, so it aided the creation of strong centralized authorities with functioning revenue-raising powers. The Île-de-France, the region around Paris, became a state earlier than almost anywhere else in Europe, although as the country expanded it became harder to maintain control over its more Latin south and Celtic west. France’s castles were spoken of being held “in the hand of the crown of France,” and French writers specifically used the metaphor of a hand to describe the monarch’s power.14
According to Carolyne Larrington in Winter is Coming: “The Reach is a land of rolling hills and terraced vineyards; the huge river Mander runs through, watering its fertile fields and nurturing the fruit for which the region is renowned.”15 It is “the garden of the Seven Kingdoms, famous for its vines and the wine,” with the Sunset Sea to the west and Red Mountains of Dorne to the southeast, and it also produces numerous crops and flowers as well as supplying grain, wine, and livestock. France has eight wine producing regions, mostly in the south (although Champagne, its most northerly, is beyond Paris) and whereas in England wine was an expensive drink reserved for the aristocracy; in Paris even the low born might enjoy it.
The forefathers of the king resided at the royal mausoleum at St Denis, just outside Paris; Philippe’s grandfather Louis had had the tombs in the necropolis rearranged, and on one side resided his ancestors the Capetians and on the other his more distant forefathers, the Carolignian dynasty of Charlemagne and the even more ancient Merovignians, who dated all the way back to Clovis, the first of the Franks to abandon the old gods.
The Iron King had constructed a new assembly hall in the city, the Grande Salle, a cavernous room with a gilded ceiling on eight columns with windows colored with the fleur-de-lis, the arms of France, and several gigantic fireplaces with seating along the walls. Statues of previous kings looked down on the visitors who came to seek the king’s support.
Nearby was the Conciergerie prison, attached to the Palais de Justice and where witnesses were “put to the question,” that is brutally tortured; there they endured prolonged sleep deprivation, immersion in cold water, and having water forced down the throat to the point of suffocation. North of the city walls was Montfaucon Hill, where felons were hanged “by the dozen on great stone gallows nearly forty feet high, their rotting corpses left to dangle for weeks as a warning to others.”16 Witnesses and heretics condemned to be burned often wore black, as did the executioner, to mark the gravity of the situation.
Medieval Paris had been largely built by King Philippe Auguste in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, and much of it lasted until the 1860s and the age of photography. The Palais de la Cité had four great defensive towers, one of them known as the To
ur Bonbec, or Blabbing Tower, because that’s where people talked after they were put to the question. It was here that, in 1307, Philippe had twenty-eight rioters tortured and then hanged on the eve of Epiphany from elm trees at four entry points to Paris. Philippe also had counterfeiters boiled alive.
Nearby the Grand Chatelet had been founded to keep out the Norsemen and now it became the offices of the prevot, or governor, and later regarded as the most sinister of the city’s many prisons, the thick walls blocking out the screams of the tortured.
Philippe had put up a large donjon, complete with turrets, on the river, on the center of which was a great tower, forty-five meters in circumference and thirty meters high. It became known as the Louvre, perhaps from louve, a female wolf:17 rebuilt in the eighteenth century, it is today the largest and most visited museum on earth. Opposite the Louvre, on the Left Bank, was the Hôtel de Nesle, a fenced tower that later became a palace. The Iron King turned it into apartments for his three sons and their families, and it was here in the old towers that two of their wives took lovers, sparking a series of disastrous events that reverberated around the kingdom.
Medieval cities were, by our standards, grim. There was a famous story “told of the peasant in the city who, passing a lane of perfume shops, fainted at the unfamiliar scent and was revived by holding a shovel of excrement under his nose.”18 This is no doubt a joke, told by the early moderns to congratulate themselves, but many Parisian streets still testify to the large amounts of excrement once found there—rue Merdeux, rue Merdelet, rue Merdusson, Merdons, Merdiere—and the city reeked with the waste of tanneries and butchers. When he was twenty, Philippe Auguste had gone to the window of his palace and was so appalled by the stench, the roads being little better than open sewers, that he ordered for the first streets to be paved.
Having human fecal matter dropped on your head was an ever-present danger, and it was obligatory for city-dwellers to shout “look out below” three times before dumping the contents of their waste. At ground level there was barely any sunlight, each story of the surrounding buildings jutting out over the one below so that on the fifth-floor people might even shake hands with those on the other side of the street; this method, called jettying, was used to maximize space.
Violence was an ever-present concern for Parisians, and at night the town was sinister and frightening, “despite being patrolled by watchmen who, once clocks arrived, would call, ‘One o’clock and all’s well!’—and heavy chains were stretched across street entrances to foil the flight of thieves.”19 The area by Notre Dame was assigned as the red-light district, “the warren of mean hovels becoming a bastion of vice, bawds, whores and ponces.”20 Parisian street names such as L’Ecorcherie, or knacker’s yard, and Pute-y-Muce, “whore in hiding,” described their purpose before the development of modern niceties.
Entertainment came from the jongleurs who played a viele, a sort of triangle-shaped proto-violin; jongleurs would have travelled all around the known world at a time when most hardly left their village, telling fantastic tales of the east. Under Philippe’s grandfather, there had been a cultural flourishing, expressed most strongly in the poem Roman de la Rose, an allegorical story told in the form of a dreamy vision. It was the most widely read work of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and condemned by many for its carnal overtones, the rose symbolising female sexuality.
The poem concerned the “wheel of fortune,” an idea that fascinated the medieval mind, at a time when people were helpless in the face of catastrophes, whether from acts of God or princes: “The image of Fortune’s wheel took root in the collective consciousness, turning faster and faster as it raised some and secured the downfall of others. The key themes were destabilization and emulation, and ‘winning’ (gagner) became a watchword for the period.”21 The wheel of fortune became a theme obsessing the European mind as the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, talked of in men’s battles over trade, land—and war.
As the old knights were taken to the stake, there were shouts of “heretic” and “blasphemer,” and out of the crowd someone threw a stone at them. The wind from the river had aggravated the mob’s anger at the condemned men, but once the fire was lit there was only silence. Then, as the flames lapped up, Jacques de Molay issued a summons to King and Pope ordering them to join him within a year, and put a curse on the king’s house.22 Over the screams and burning embers, he shouted: “Pope Clement, iniquitous judge and cruel executioner, I adjure you to appear in forty days’ time before God’s tribunal. And you, King of France, will not live to see the end of this year, and Heaven’s retribution will strike down your accomplices and destroy your posterity.”23
The following month the pope died suddenly, aged just fifty; his body was taken to a church to lie in state when lightning struck the building, almost burning it down. In November, Philippe was hunting just outside Paris when he suffered a stroke; he was taken to bed to rest, but succumbed a few days later. Chancellor Guillaume de Nogaret, Philippe’s main minister, had expired the previous year of mysterious causes, his tongue thrust out, according to one story.
Philippe the Fair’s fateful decision to destroy the Templars and burn their leading men became linked in the popular mind with a period of disaster for the royal family and for France. This was the story behind the popular French historical series, Les Rois Maudits (The Accursed Kings) written in the 1950s by Maurice Druon, which Martin credits as a big influence.24 The books feature Philippe’s daughter Isabella, a beautiful, blonde princess commonly known in English history as the She-Wolf of France, a strong-willed and cunning queen who is forced to compete against cruel kings: in this case, her brother Louis and husband Edward, a weak man who is only in his position on account of his birth and sex. Isabella, who takes a lover and loathes her husband, is nevertheless loyal to her own blood relations and will do everything for her young son who must take the throne.
The Templar’s curse would also plunge France and England into a bitter, horrific conflict, which, in the Victorian age, became known as the Hundred Years’ War, costing three million lives. The century that followed was one of unmitigated tragedy, marked not just by war but by the Black Death, the schism in the Catholic Church, and the first international banking crisis. This Crisis of the Late Middle Ages would culminate, for the English, with defeat and destruction in France at the hands of explosive, terrifying new technology called gunpowder and the country’s descent into a dynastic conflict later called the War of the Roses.
But more immediately something more sinister threatened. In the spring following the Iron King’s death, temperatures plunged across the known world; in April the rains came down and would not stop, a downpour that lasted until August without pause. The crops failed, and France—and Europe—faced a long winter that would last centuries.
*The theory that this is the origin of the superstition was only first mentioned in the historic novel The Iron King, which was published in 1955, and further made popular by the Da Vinci Code. It’s probably not true.
3
THE LION OF ENGLAND
A lion does not concern himself with the opinions of sheep.
—TYWIN LANNISTER
The Iron King had another enemy more dangerous than the Knights Templar—his cousin Edward, King of England, Duke of Gascony, Hammer of the Scots, and one of the most brutally effective medieval monarchs. Game of Thrones is not history, and as historian Dan Jones put it: “It is alt-history, not a reconstruction of a known past. It is historically literate without ever claiming to be history.”1 And yet there are some clear and obvious historical parallels, and one that George R.R. Martin has spoken of is between Tywin Lannister and King Edward I.
Like Tywin Lannister, Edward “Longshanks” was the ultimate medieval warlord, unafraid to inflict any misery when pursuing a war, and using relatives in power games that would further his goal. And yet his cruelty always had a purpose, and though he used torture and murder to further his aims, drove bankers to extinc
tion, and caused misery for the small folk of Wales and Scotland, his violence was never mindless; indeed, he reprimanded those around him who committed atrocities for their own sake.
In the television series, Tywin is played by English actor Charles Dance, who specialises in portraying cold-hearted aristocratic types lacking in sympathy for the lower classes. King Edward was certainly in that bracket, and is probably best known in the popular imagination as the villain of the Mel Gibson historical epic Braveheart. In reality, both Edward and his Scottish enemy, Robert the Bruce, were French speakers, and the film is not exactly pedantic in its accuracy—but the king was every bit as brutal as it makes out.
Both Tywin and Edward were very tall; Edward was 6'3", a giant for a time when the average man was no more than 5'7", which is how he got the nickname Longshanks. He was one of the finest swordsmen of the age, and the earliest Robin Hood stories have him in single combat with the outlaw, such was his renown. Historian Michael Prestwich argued that his “long arms gave him an advantage as a swordsman, long thighs one as a horseman. In youth, his curly hair was blond; in maturity it darkened, and in old age it turned white. His speech, despite a lisp, was said to be persuasive.”2
The king was described as having “a sinking, or dip, between the chin and under-lip” which “was very conspicuous. Both the lips were prominent; the nose short, as if shrunk . . . there was an unusual fall, or cavity, on that part of the bridge of the nose which separates the orbits of the eyes.”3 He inherited the drooping eyelid of his weak father, King Henry III, although not his temperament.