The reason there was an opening in the papacy was because the previous pope (Benedict IX, for those keeping score at home) had been poisoned by agents of the French king. And before him, Pope Boniface VIII had also been murdered (beaten and left to die of his injuries) by the very same thugs, led by Philip IV’s ruthless hatchet man, William of Nogaret.
In debt to Philip IV of France (who had backed him in his bid for the papacy) who was in turn in debt to the Knights Templar, Clement played ball from the day he was crowned pontiff in Lyon (afraid to go to Rome to be crowned because of the threat of murder at the hands of an increasingly anti-French Roman mob).
Within two years, the Templars had been charged with heresy; their order disbanded by papal decree; their leaders tortured into confessions of bizarre, heretical rituals; their lands, cash, and other property seized—all with Clement’s blessing. In fact, only the pope could have so thoroughly destroyed a holy order such as the Templars, because they served at the pleasure of the pope.
With the Templar corpse barely cold, Clement, still fearful of setting foot in Italy, set up shop in a couple of different locations in southern France, eventually settling on Avignon as the perfect place for his new court. He never returned to Rome during his lifetime, and the papacy stayed in Avignon for seventy years.
In A.D. 1314, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake as a heretic, after nearly seven years in prison. He is alleged to have died with a curse on his lips intended for the two men most responsible for the recent reversal of fortune for himself and his order: Clement V and Philip IV. If this is true, then he got his dying wish. Both men were dead within months of his own expiration, an interesting riff on the whole notion of damnatio memoriae (“damnation of memory”).
Packing the College
One of the first things Clement V did after being confirmed as pontiff was to create nine new cardinal seats and fill them all with Frenchmen. By doing this he not only outraged many of the other cardinals but also ensured that the papacy would stay both in French hands and in France itself for the next seventy years.
88
KING EDWARD II
OF ENGLAND
Giving Away the Kingdom
to His Boyfriends
( A.D. 1284–1327)
You baseborn whoreson! Now you want to give lands away—you who have never gained any? As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance!
—King Edward I of England to his son, Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward II)
In the bit of conversation quoted above, the person being called a prostitute’s progeny (as much of an insult in the fourteenth century as it is today) was the king’s own progeny, his eldest son and later successor, Edward II.
When it came to both the character and fitness to rule of his son and heir, Edward Longshanks was not only colorful, he was accurate.
The elder Edward had come taken the throne with an act of signal violence and then employed violence as a catchall solution to any number of problems both foreign and domestic. The example he set for his son was fearsome, decisive, and warlike.
And his son Edward of Caernarvon was nothing like him.
Where Longshanks was grimly competent, plainspoken, and blunt, the younger Edward was flowery, handsome, well-groomed, and ineffectual. Where Longshanks valued no one’s counsel so much as his own, his son was easily influenced by his retinue of hangers-on.
Edward I had grown up in the shadow of a weak father who also was a bad king. In attempting to be a stronger father figure to his own son and heir, he wound up producing a successor with more in common with his incompetent grandfather (Henry III) than with his force-of-nature father.
Oh, and Edward II was gay.
Definitely a cross to bear in thirteenth-century England, Edward made the situation all the worse by not bothering to worry what his subjects might think of his publicly treating his closest friends more like lovers than as boon companions.
The genuine problem wasn’t the king’s predilection for other men. It was his predilection for other men on whom he spent lavishly, heaping titles and cash and lands on them as a sign of both his largesse and his favor. And for their part, pretty boys like Piers Gaveston and Hugh le Despenser eagerly soaked up what the king gave away.
It couldn’t last.
Within five years, Edward II had bankrupted the kingdom with his spending. His nobles restless, his queen completely fed up with him, something had to give. By A.D. 1326 , Edward’s time had run out. His wife, Isabella (daughter of the king of France), had gone to France ostensibly on a diplomatic mission, only to return at the head of a mercenary army. She challenged Edward for his throne, all in the name of their underage son.
A couple of quick battles later, and Edward was soundly defeated, captured, and thrown into prison. Within a month, he had been secretly executed in one of the most barbaric manners imaginable.
End of a Bastard
Because the killing of a king was seen as both a sin and an act of treason, Edward was murdered in a way that made it look as if he’d died of natural causes. His killers pushed a red-hot soldering iron into the king’s body through his anus. It left not a mark on him to show the agony in which he had died.
89
ROGER MORTIMER, EARL OF MARCH
Screwing the Queen
Doesn’t Make You King
( A.D. 1287–1330)
The King of Folly.
—Sir Geoffrey Mortimer, son of Roger Mortimer, about his father
Roger Mortimer came of age during a violent time in a violent place (the Anglo-Welsh borderlands), serving a prince (Edward II) who seemed in many ways his opposite: effete, capricious, soft. Fostered into the royal household while still in his teens after the death of his father, Mortimer saw firsthand how Edward indulged handsome favorites such as Piers Gaveston (who was briefly Mortimer’s guardian).
When Edward appropriated some of the Mortimer family lands in order to make a gift of them to another of his favorites (Edward le Despenser), Mortimer rose in opposition to the king, lost in battle, and was thrown into the Tower of London for a time. Escaping by drugging his jailer, he fled the kingdom and went into exile in France.
It was while in exile in France that Mortimer became first acquainted with, and then attached to, Isabella, princess of France, and Edward’s queen. Ostensibly in France on a diplomatic mission, but really there because she had grown fed up with her husband, Isabella made common cause with the energetic, forceful Mortimer. In no time the two were lovers, planning to take the kingdom from her husband.
Invading England in A.D. 1326 at the head of an army of Flemish mercenaries, the two were joined by locals, including the people of London and the earl of Lancaster. After a couple of minor battles, the deposed King Edward fled to the west, wandering in Wales before eventually surrendering to the two in return for his life being spared.
It turned out he got a bad deal.
De facto ruler of England for three years ( A.D. 1327–1330), Mortimer had honors heaped upon him, swaggered around, pissing off the wrong people, and alienating the young king Edward III, for whom he was ostensibly regent. It couldn’t last.
In A.D. 1330 , Edward seized power. While his own mother could expect mercy at his hands, Mortimer received none. He was hanged at Tyburn Hill that same year for treason and exercising royal power without authority.
Gruesome Bastard
It is widely believed to have been Roger Mortimer’s idea to kill Edward II by shoving a red-hot poker up his ass, thereby leaving no mark on his body to indicate foul play, while also making sly reference to the deposed king’s “buggery” with his favorites.
90
PEDRO THE CRUEL
OF CASTILE
The Nickname Says It All
( A.D. 1334–1369)
We must add likewise that this Don Pedro, king of Castile, who at present is driven out of his real
m, is a man of great pride, very cruel, and full of bad dispositions. The kingdom of Castile has suffered many grievances at his hands: many valiant men have been beheaded and murdered, without justice or reason, so that these wicked actions, which he ordered or consented to, he owes the loss of his kingdom.
—Medieval chronicler Jean Froissart, Chronicles
A bigamous, vicious monster, Pedro of Castile was king from A.D. 1350 to 1369. He probably wouldn’t have lasted that long had he not been propped up late in his reign by one of the great military minds of his age, his son-in-law, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
Neither much of a leader nor much of a soldier, the best that could be said of Pedro was that he wasn’t as anti-Semitic as the rest of the rulers of the Iberian Peninsula. In fact, his most consistent supporters during his years as king were the Jews of such large cities as Seville.
But Pedro was also capricious, destructive, and completely indifferent to human suffering. Even his generosity came at a price.
Pedro was very grateful to his son-in-law Edward the Black (prince of England) for working so hard to help him hold on to his crown. He showed his gratitude in many ways, including the bestowing of large gifts on his son-in-law. Among these was a huge jewel that eventually found its way into the crown of current English monarch Elizabeth II. He got the jewel from a guest in his palace the Alcazar—a guest he killed in order to steal it.
This wasn’t Pedro the Cruel’s last murder. Far from it. Once while walking the streets of Seville, he killed a man he didn’t even know simply because he didn’t like the way the man looked at him. When the time came for Pedro to pay for these murders (because hey, even the king isn’t above the law), he had an effigy of himself made in stone, then put it on trial before him, and then he (the king) passed sentence on himself (in effigy) and had himself (in effigy) beheaded, with the head (again, of the effigy) to be placed at the spot where the murder had taken place. It can be seen there to this day.
Fancying himself quite the womanizer, Pedro made molesting women something of a hobby. One woman who rejected him was burned alive on his orders for the transgression of saying no to a king. He even had his own wife murdered—by arrow shot. One woman burned her face with acid so that the rutting king wouldn’t find her so attractive.
Unlike other vicious bastards in this book, Pedro’s story doesn’t end with him dying of old age, unpunished for his many crimes. Instead, it ends with him being captured in battle by the forces of his rival, Henry of Trastamara. He was beheaded on the spot. Truly a fitting end for a deserving bastard!.
Bigamous Bastard
Pedro secretly married a noblewoman named Maria de Padilla in A.D. 1353. This became a problem when his family arranged for him to wed Blanche of Bourbon later that same year. When confronted with accusations that he had already married Padilla, Pedro did what any bastard would do: He lied. After three days, he abandoned his second wife and gave up all pretense of not being involved with Padilla. The couple eventually had four children together. As for the unfortunate Blanche, she was murdered by crossbow bolt (on Pedro’s command).
91
BERNABÒ VISCONTI, LORD OF MILAN
Why Let Brotherhood Stand in the Way of Your Territorial Ambitions?
( A.D. 1323–1385)
The count de Vertus, whose name was John Galeas Visconti, and his uncle were the greatest personages in all Lombardy. Sir Galeas and sir Bernabo were brothers, and had peaceably reigned and governed that country. One of these lords possessed nine cities, and the other ten; the city of Milan was under their government alternately, one year each. When sir Galeas, the father of the count de Vertus, died, the affections of the uncle for his nephew were much weakened; and sir Galeas suspected, that now his father was dead, his uncle Bernabo would seize his lordships, in like manner as sir Galeas, his father, and uncle Bernabo had done to their brother sir Matthew, whom they had put to death.
—Jean Froissart, Chronicles
Scion of a family that had ruled Milan for well over one hundred years (off and on) by the time he was born, Bernabò Visconti was an energetic ruler, first with his two brothers, then with one, and finally by himself ( A.D. 1378–1385), until giving way to his nephew Gian Galeazzo, the greatest of the Visconti rulers of Milan. He was also a fratricidal despot who taxed the residents of Milan into poverty in order to bankroll the incessant wars he fought with a series of popes and rival cities such as Venice and Verona, all in an attempt to make himself master of northern Italy.
Capable of great charm when it suited him, Bernabò was also notorious for his ironic cruelty. At one point excommunicated by the pope, Bernabò received the two papal emissaries who brought the fancy order of excommunication (parchment embossed with a lead seal and tied with a silken cord), listened as they read the documents aloud, and when they tried to present the document, had them seized and held until they ate the order, parchment, seal, cord, and all!
Before his brother died, the two men devised a particularly sadistic form of torture that mimicked portions of the Bible, lasting up to forty days. Not surprisingly, most of their victims died within the first few days.
After his brother Galeazzo’s death in A.D. 1378 , Bernabò ruled alone, freezing out his nephew Gian Galeazzo. Fearing that Bernabò might poison him as he had his own elder brother (see sidebar), Gian Galeazzo caught Bernabò unsuspecting, traveling between cities with a light escort, seized his uncle, and threw him in prison. Then, in an ironic echo of Bernabò’s own actions with his brother Matteo, Gian Galeazzo had his uncle poisoned.
Bunch of poisonous bastards!
Bastard Brothers
Bernabò initially shared power with his two brothers, Matteo and Galeazzo. But where Galeazzo, a patron of the early Renaissance poet Petrarch, was intelligent, educated, and cultured, Matteo was another matter entirely. The eldest and roughest of the three brothers, Matteo possessed all the viciousness for which the Visconti were notorious, and none of the ability they also possessed (especially their talent for governing). Increasingly a liability to the two other brothers (they were supposed to alternate ruling Milan every year, in a three-year rotation), Matteo was murdered at a feast in A.D. 1355, poisoned by his own brothers. Ruthless bastards!
92
CHARLES THE BAD, KING OF NAVARRE
The Nickname Says It All, Redux
( A.D. 1332–1387)
In the year of the sea-battle off Winchelsea, Philip VI of France died and was succeeded by John II, ‘the Good’. Though there was a temporary lull in the war with England, the new King’s internal difficulties were soon increased by the intrigues of his cousin, Charles ‘the Bad’, King of Navarre, who had rival claims to the French throne. Early in 1356 Charles of Navarre was seized and put in prison, but his family and the vassals of his fiefs in Normandy continued to give trouble, in alliance with the English.
—Jean Froissart, Chronicles
The king of Navarre (a small kingdom in the Pyrenees Mountains split between modern-day southern France and northern Spain), Charles II (“le Mauvais”: “the Bad”) married the daughter of his rival John II (“le Bon”: “the Good”), king of France, and intrigued against him for the rest of his life. A schemer and malcontent, Charles changed sides in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France more times than an obsessive-compulsive changes socks. Using Navarre the way William the Conqueror used England (as a source of revenue), Charles plotted to kill the king of France, and succeeded in having his top government official murdered, then went on to suffer a gruesome death of his own.
Initially an enthusiastic supporter of John the Good (he served as his authorized lieutenant in several campaigns and married his daughter), Charles was livid when in A.D. 1353, John gave the fiefdoms of Angoulême, Brie, and Champagne to his constable Charles de la Cerda (known generally as “Charles of Spain”). Our Charles (the bad one) believed the territories belonged to him, as they had been taken from his mother by previous French kings, with very little in the way of
compensation. He ended up picking a quarrel with Charles of Spain.
Death of a Bastard
Charles died in a grotesque manner later described in lurid detail by medieval chronicler Francis Blagdon: “Charles the Bad, having fallen into such a state of decay that he could not make use of his limbs, consulted his physician, who ordered him to be wrapped up from head to foot, in a linen cloth impregnated with brandy, so that he might be inclosed (sic) in it to the very neck as in a sack. It was night when this remedy was administered. One of the female attendants of the palace, charged to sew up the cloth that contained the patient, having come to the neck, the fixed point where she was to finish her seam, made a knot according to custom; but as there was still remaining an end of thread, instead of cutting it as usual with scissors, she had recourse to the candle, which immediately set fire to the whole cloth. Being terrified, she ran away, and abandoned the king, who was thus burnt alive in his own palace.”
Eventually the quarrel resulted in (our) Charles plotting to have (the other) Charles assassinated; setting his own brother Philip, count of Longueville, and a bunch of hired thugs on the man’s trail. Once they caught up with him, Philip said, “Charles of Spain, I am Philip, son of a king, whom you have foully slandered.”
And then they beat him to death.
Leveraging his good relations with the English king Edward III, Charles got John to explicitly pardon him and his men for the murder of his constable a few months later. By the terms of this treaty (the Peace of Mantes), Charles also received substantial tracts in Normandy as compensation for the territories his mother had lost.
The Book of Ancient Bastards Page 18