The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  For an ordinary man, this would be the end of his story, but Robert Bruce had one more chapter to bequeath to his biographers. For years, if not decades, King Robert had regularly announced his desire to serve in a Crusade: to join the supranational effort to do battle against the enemies, not of Scotland, but of Christendom. As a practical matter, this meant that his last will and testament requested that, when his body was interred at Dunfermline, the traditional resting place for Scotland’s kings, his heart should be removed from his body, embalmed, and carried into battle against the heathen.

  There was little question, among the Scottish magnates hovering at King Robert’s deathbed, about the right man to discharge this duty; to be Little John one last time to his Robin Hood. Since, in 1329, there was no way to enlist in a traditional crusade—the only Crusader states still in existence were in Rhodes and Cyprus—James Douglas placed Robert Bruce’s heart in a carved casket of silver and sailed to Flanders, and from there to Spain, arriving in Seville sometime in June. He carried a safe-conduct from King Edward III, and letters to King Alfonso XI of Castile, then embroiled in a war with Muhammad IV, the sultan of Granada. The Reconquista that had, by then, been under way for centuries, had nothing to do with liberating the Holy Land, but it was a conflict between Christians and Muslims, and was the next best thing.

  On August 25, 1330, James Douglas rode into battle at the head of a division of Alfonso’s army besieging the Andalusian town of Teba, in the modern province of Malaga. Cut off, and apparently unfamiliar with the classic Moorish tactic of feigning a cavalry retreat only to turn and attack, Douglas was killed; a later legend has him throwing Bruce’s embalmed heart at his enemies, saying that he would, as always, follow. Douglas’s bones, and the casket containing Bruce’s heart, were recovered from the battlefield, and carried back to Scotland for burial, the latter in the parish church of Douglas, the former at Melrose Abbey.

  It was a suitable ending for the onetime tournament knight who became one of the greatest irregular warriors of all time; the Anglo-Norman who founded a Scottish nation in a Celtic country. The last act of Bruce’s overlarge life recapitulates in miniature the way in which his era pulled the loyalties and affections of its people in opposite directions: on the one hand, toward a nation made up of countrymen sharing a common history, language, and affection for a particular piece of territory; on the other, to a creed uniting all nations under the banner of Christendom. One direction pointed to the past, the other to the future. Robert Bruce’s dying wish was in conflict with his life, and his heart remains in Scotland to this day.

  EPILOGUE

  The Delicate Balance

  Nonfiction narratives generally end with a contrivance—an attempt to polish off the rough edges and give a neat resolution to the lives of real people and the course of real events. But the ends of most histories, and definitely one about the first decades of the fourteenth century, are inherently arbitrary. We choose the threads to follow closely, and which not: England, rather than Spain; farmers more than priests. And we choose where to cut those threads off. Scotland, for example, did not enjoy its independence very long after the Treaty of Edinburgh/Northampton. In 1332, Thomas Randolph, who had been named regent for David Bruce, the five-year-old son of King Robert and Queen Elizabeth, died. With the Bruce, the Black Douglas, and the earl of Moray all dead, Edward Balliol—the one invited by Edward II to return to England from his exile in Picardy—struck for the throne, and ruled Scotland as a vassal of Edward III until 1336, when the Scots threw him out and restored King David to the throne.

  David was the last of the Bruces. When he died without a son, Robert, the son of Walter Stewart and Marjorie Bruce, took the throne as Scotland’s first Stewart king.* Stewarts, or their regents, would rule Scotland for the next two and a half centuries, regularly intermarrying with Europe’s other royal families. So it was that, when Elizabeth I died in 1603, another Stewart, James VI of Scotland, a direct descendant of the man who first took up arms against England as part of the Wallace rebellion, became James I of England, ruling both nations. A little less than a century (and several civil wars, the execution of one English king, and the rise and fall of the Commonwealth in England and Scotland under the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell) later, Mary, the daughter of the last of the Stewart / Stuart kings, returned to Britain with her husband, William of Orange. And eighteen years after that, the two nations were united in the 1707 Acts of Union.

  In the end, geography trumped patria. An island the size of Britain would eventually be consolidated under a single sovereign, and both Scotland and England can argue which nation eventually “conquered” the other. Nor is that the end of the story; as of this writing, referenda on Scottish independence (and “devolution,” the reestablishment of a separate Scottish Parliament, which was approved in 1998, and seated the following year) have been debated and voted on half a dozen times, and seem certain to reappear. The third verse of Robert Burns’s “March to Bannockburn” calls on “Who, for Scotland’s King and Law / Freedom’s sword will strongly draw.” The passions that drew men to William Wallace and Robert Bruce continue to burn north of the Firth of Forth.

  As for England, Edward III overthrew his onetime guardian and regent in October 1330, arresting Roger Mortimer in Northampton Castle and trying him in London, where he was, in a repeat of the grim justice of the day, given a traitor’s death. Isabella was banished from court to a country manor in Norfolk and given an allowance of £3,000 a year, on which she kept what must have seemed to her an unnaturally modest court until her death in 1358. She had lived long enough to be the daughter of one king of France, the sister of three more—Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV, the latter of whom died a year to the day after his nephew had been crowned Edward III of England—wife to one king, and mother to another. She also lived long enough to see her son claim the throne of her father.

  When Charles IV died, he was survived by one living daughter and one pregnant wife; when she delivered yet another daughter, the Capetian dynasty, which had ruled France for four hundred years, ended. The reason was the Lex Salica, or Salic Law, a sixth-century judicial artifact that, in addition to promoting trial by combat, prohibited inheritance by a woman. But while this meant neither of Charles’s daughters could inherit his throne, Salic Law was ambiguous on whether inheritance could pass through a woman. This, indeed, was Edward III’s reading of the thing: that as the grandson of Philip IV, he was the rightful king of France.

  The result was the Hundred Years’ War, a series of wars between 1337 and 1453 that succeeded in accelerating the progress of European nationalism in its two great birthplaces—England and France—while continuing to undermine the military basis of feudalism. After the French disasters at Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), where English longbowmen turned the flower of French chivalry into pincushions, no one could doubt that the age of the mounted knight was at an end. Manorialism was not far behind.

  The Hundred Years’ War was a disaster by any measure, with estimates of its butcher’s bill as high as three million European lives. That number is more controversial than usual, however, because the years of the war overlapped with another disaster, even more terrifying: the Black Death.

  The “great mortality” that likely first appeared in the Black Sea port of Caffa in the spring of 1347 killed as many as 100 million people across Europe and the Mediterranean by the year 1400 and recurred steadily through the eighteenth century. The Black Death, which was triggered by a profoundly unlucky alignment of the density of rat populations, the susceptibility of fleas, and the bacterium known as Yersinia pestis, was the world’s second encounter with pandemic bubonic plague, and is such an overwhelming event in human history that the Great Famine that preceded it is frequently lost in its shadow.* As a case in point, for centuries, historians have believed that the fresco in the Camposanto of Pisa known as the Trionfo della Morte or Triumph of Death had been painted in 1350—three years after the
arrival of the plague. Barbara Tuchman, in her classic history of the fourteenth century, A Distant Mirror, even calls it “a strange personification of Death [that] emerged from the plague years.” The fresco, however, is now known to have been painted in 1338—eight years before the plague. Its subject is not disease, but hunger: a memory of the Great Famine.

  Those memories were still fresh in European minds in 1338. Though the famine had ended by 1322, the summer of 1335 was nearly as rainy as that of 1316. In 1338, major floods destroyed dozens of towns and villages in central Europe, to be followed by a swarm of locusts that devoured crops from Hungary to Austria to Bohemia, after which an early snowfall destroyed fruit trees and vineyards. In England, the autumn harvest of 1341 was so poor that the Crown granted relief from taxation. And in 1342, flooding was so widespread as to destroy some of the most important bridges in Europe: across the Danube at Regensburg, across the Main at Bamberg and Frankfurt, and across the Elbe at Dresden. A year later, Lake Constance burst its banks and flooded surrounding towns.

  Whatever the connections between famine, climate change, plague, and a century of war, they together added up to a demographic shock that upended the arithmetic of feudal manorialism. A population crash in a region that had spent hundreds of years increasing its farm acreage meant that, for the first time in centuries, labor was more valuable than land. For the survivors, at least, this represented a dramatic though temporary improvement in the lives of the rural peasantry as their labor became relatively more valuable. The long-term consequences of the end of the Medieval Warm Period, from the decline in the power of the papacy to the rise of national armies to the replacement of feudal manorialism by mercantilism—the doctrine that made control of foreign trade the most important economic responsibility of national governments—to even, in some readings, the Renaissance, were profound indeed.

  • • •

  Inevitably, a disaster story about the resonant forces set off by unexpected climate volatility multiplied by nations acting in what they saw as their own short-term interests resonates today, even without reference to the massive increase in atmospheric CO2 that followed humanity’s discovery of fossil fuels. With or without climate change, famines would be with us still, even more harmful in absolute terms than the Great Famine of the fourteenth century. Greater population densities (plus, to put it kindly, political volatility) in nineteenth-century Ireland or twentieth-century China resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. Malnutrition remains a daily fact of life for billions. And cereal monoculture—today maize rather than wheat—is even more fraught in the first decades of the twenty-first century than it was in the first decades of the fourteenth.

  The temptation to extract useful lessons from the history of the Great Famine, or the Scottish Wars of Independence, or the machinations of a French princess turned English queen, or even the Viking raids, is next to irresistible. The first decades of the fourteenth century have lessons to teach about economics, power politics, and, of course, the potent energies released during the complex dance between atmosphere and ocean.

  But the Great Famine was the product of a mechanism even more complex than climate. Famines occur because of a sudden disruption in the food supply, which is almost by definition a short-run proposition. Weather, if it’s bad enough, can disrupt harvests all by itself, but even the low-productivity farms of medieval Europe were generally robust enough that weather alone rarely caused widespread shortages. Real food crises, in the fourteenth century or the twenty-first, require human action—usually the sort of action taken with weapons in hand. When the two combine—drought plus rebellion; floods plus invasion—the mixture results in famine just as surely as combining yellow and blue produces green.

  Still, two years of bad weather didn’t kill a quarter of the city of Ypres, and neither did the knights of Philip IV. The conditions that destroyed millions of lives during the seven years of the Great Famine appeared during the four centuries of the Medieval Warm Period. From 900 to 1300, as ten million mouths grew to thirty million—and as the least productive acres in Europe were cultivated to feed them—the balance between producing food and consuming it grew more fragile every year. By the time the North Atlantic Oscillation shifted, and the weather started to change, that balance could be destroyed by a strong wind.

  At the Château d’Angers in France’s Loire Valley is the modern home of one of the greatest of all medieval artworks: the Apocalypse Tapestry, commissioned by the duke of Anjou fifty years after the Great Famine. In its original form, six huge weavings—each an incredible seventy-eight feet wide and twenty feet high—contained ninety different scenes from the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. Only seventy-one survive, depicting the fever-dream visions from the book—the seven seals, the destruction of Babylon, the archangels fighting the dragon, the Great Whore riding on the Scarlet Beast with seven heads and ten horns, and, of course, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  In the popular iconography of the day, the Third Horseman, riding the black horse, carries a set of scales, an admission that famine is really a measure of dearth: the cost of food. But it is also a reminder that famine is a matter of equilibrium: of the delicate balance between life and death. The seven years of the Great Famine, and the evil times that accompanied them, are powerful evidence of how sensitive the scales had become, after four centuries of growth, to a sudden shift in the weather.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  At the time of the events described in The Third Horseman, the root of the word that would enter the English language as “acknowledgment” two centuries later still had overtones of “confession”: an admission of sin. Expiation follows.

  Matthew “Sweetness and Light” Arnold described culture as the “pursuit . . . of the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Books like The Third Horseman, works of synthesis, would be impossible without the institutions whose duty it is to collect “the best.” I am, as always, forever grateful to Lara Moore and Margaret Sherry at Princeton University’s Firestone Library and to Leslie Burger and her staff at Princeton Public Library. Even if I never had a manuscript to show for it, I’d be thankful for the hundreds of hours I have been able to spend in the company of other, better, books.

  The authors of those books—and papers, journal articles, blog posts, and lectures—are owed thanks as well. I am indebted to hundreds of scholars, living and dead, whose works appear in the bibliography of The Third Horseman, but a few deserve special mention: A. A. M. Duncan, both for his translation of John Barbour and his works on Bannockburn and King Robert Bruce; Caroline Bingham and Seymour Phillips each wrote an indispensable biography of Edward II, as did Alison Weir for Queen Isabella. Brian Fagan’s works on historic climate change are extraordinary, and Robert Fogel’s calculation of food production and consumption provided a frightening insight into the fragile food economy of medieval Europe. I seem forever to be thanking Gregory Clark for his careful research into English economic history and the late Lynn White for helping me to understand medieval technological innovation. Most especially, I am grateful to William Chester Jordan of Princeton, who not only produced the most, and the best, scholarship on the Great Famine, but introduced me to Andrew Collings, who provided me with the best sort of research support: Finding and correcting a huge number of errors, but also proposing a dozen different lines of exploration. Any mistakes that remain in The Third Horseman were introduced by gremlins after he signed off on it.

  Though I have been observing the process for more than thirty years, the transformation of a manuscript into a book still awes me. As a onetime editor and publisher, I am more aware than most authors of the importance of the team that gets recruited for this exercise, and far more critical of its quality. So when I say how thankful I am to the people at Viking, I hope it carries the weight I intend. Thanks to Rick Kot, who first suggested the idea that became The Third Horseman; likewise thanks to Clare Ferrar
o and to Wendy Wolf, who invested in both the idea and in me. Most especially, I am grateful to Melanie Tortoroli, whose extraordinary editorial skills have left me gap-jawed in amazement. It is one thing to provide more than seven hundred (I counted) editorial comments, every one of them erudite and helpful; another to do so on a brutally tight schedule. To do both while never losing either enthusiasm or good humor is very special indeed. I envy every other author who is lucky enough to be placed in her hands.

  My envy doesn’t stop there: Carla Bolte designed the book’s interior, and recruited the amazing David Lindroth to provide the book’s maps and illustrations. Jaya Miceli, who designed the cover, marries an elegant sense of design to a ghoulish sensibility—clearly an asset to authors who write about famines and plagues for a living. Jennifer Tait shepherded the book through the production process with extraordinary skill and Rachelle Mandik is an extraordinary copyeditor who is talented enough to save me from a hundred different embarrassing errors, and kind enough to do so without ever giving offense.

  And, last but far from least, I thank the good luck that provided me with an extremely forgiving family, for reading such a macabre book in its earliest stages and putting up with my enthusiasm for sharing the most grotesque discoveries without—much—groaning. Thanks to Gary Rosen and Holly Goldberg Sloan, Quillan Rosen, Alex Rosen, and Emma Rosen. And, most of all, thanks to Jeanine, who challenged me to write my first book and has supported me uncomplainingly, and lovingly, through every one since.