The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  But in his late thirties he grew suddenly and violently ill, probably with some form of cancer. He died in 1125, just before his fortieth birthday. Matilda had given birth to a stillborn child, sometime before her husband’s death, but she had no living children; and with Henry V, the Salian dynasty of emperors came to an end. The aristocrats of Germany assembled to elect another emperor (eventually they settled on the Duke of Saxony, who became Lothair III), and Matilda went home.

  Henry I of England, despairing of a son, set himself to shore up his daughter’s claim to the English crown. Two years after her husband’s death, he arranged a new marriage for her, to the fifteen-year-old Geoffrey the Handsome; Matilda, in a reversal of her earlier fortunes, was twenty-five.

  The marriage was politically smart and personally disastrous.

  Geoffrey was the son of the Count of Anjou, and Anjou was a keystone in the power structure of Western Francia. Western Francia, like Germany, was a fragment of Charlemagne’s defunct eighth-century empire; unlike Germany, which had begun its journey towards a national identity under the guidance of Henry the Fowler in 919, Western Francia was a patchwork. Only the ring of territories right around Paris was known as France; the rest of Western Francia was governed by local noblemen, held loosely together by personal oaths of loyalty to the Capetian king.*

  The Count of Anjou was one of these noblemen: loyal in theory to the French throne, but a king in his own lands in all but name. He had inherited a massive estate that bordered Henry I’s Norman lands on one side, and the king of France’s royal holdings on the other. His power was due largely to the efforts of his great-grandfather Fulk the Black, a psychotically warlike aristocrat who had burned his wife, in her wedding dress, at the stake for adultery; fought a vicious war against his own son and then forced the defeated youth to put on a bridle and saddle and crawl on the ground in humiliation; and pillaged and robbed the surrounding lands at will. Fearing a justly deserved hell, he had in his old age made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he was rumored to have bitten off a piece of stone from the Holy Sepulchre with his own teeth so that he would have a relic to bring home.3

  The current Count of Anjou, Fulk V, was more moderate than his ancestor, but no less ambitious. The marriage of his young son to the future queen of England was good for Matilda, since it brought the resources of France’s most powerful region to her aid. It would also make Fulk’s grandchildren into royalty. And it would give Anjou, in return, the protection of the English king.

  Fulk V was in need of this protection for his son, because he was already planning to leave his home for another throne. In a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1120, he had befriended the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II. Baldwin II had four daughters but no sons; he wanted to assure the succession of his oldest daughter, Melisande, to the throne of Jerusalem, and Fulk was a widower. As soon as he had arranged for the marriage of Geoffrey and Matilda, Fulk relinquished the title of Count of Anjou to his son and departed for Jerusalem. “Within a few days after his arrival in the kingdom,” writes William of Tyre, who knew Fulk, “the king gave him his oldest daughter to wife.” When Baldwin II died, in 1131, Fulk and Melisande were crowned king and queen of Jerusalem.4

  Meanwhile, his son and new daughter-in-law had quarreled and separated.

  Geoffrey had risen in the world, becoming count at a ridiculously young age; Matilda had sunk from empress to countess. Matilda, once married to the most powerful man in the west, had ruled Italy in her husband’s absence; now she was tied to a teenager who had been knighted a bare week before the wedding. After a single year, she walked out on her child-groom and went home.

  The cause of the quarrel is unknown (Simeon of Durham says that Geoffrey “repudiated” Matilda “without respect”), but eventually Matilda’s father talked her into returning. The two must have worked out some way of coexisting; Matilda bore her young husband a son in 1133, when she was thirty-one and he was twenty, and then gave him two more in the next three years.5

  In 1135, Henry I of England was in Normandy, his own land, visiting his daughter just across the border in Anjou. He had “delayed” his return to England, writes the English chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, “by reason of his great delight in his grandchildren.” One day he returned from hunting and indulged himself in a dinner of lamprey eels: “of which he was fond,” Huntingdon remarks, “though they always disagreed with him. . . . This repast bringing on ill humours, and violently exciting similar symptoms, caused a sudden and extreme disturbance, under which his aged frame sunk into a deathly torpor.” He died on the first day of December, aged sixty-eight.6

  Before Matilda could cross the Channel and claim her crown, the noblemen of England—resistant both to the notion of a queen and to the French influence that would undoubtedly accompany her—banded together and proclaimed Matilda’s cousin Stephen, grandson of William the Conqueror, as king of England.

  For a time, Stephen ruled unopposed. But over the first four years of his reign, he grew slowly more unpopular. He lost land to the Welsh; descendants of Romans and Irish and native Britons, the Welsh had formed a distinct kingdom in the ninth century, had paid tribute to the English kings in the tenth, and had resisted the Norman influx in the eleventh. He struggled against the Scots, the Celts of the far north; the Scottish High King David I had sworn reluctant loyalty to Henry I but now repealed his alliance and marched into the north of England. Stephen drove back the Scottish invasion with startling ferocity (eleven thousand dead, says Henry of Huntingdon), arrested two powerful English bishops and confiscated their lands, and then fell out with the Archbishop of Canterbury. His reign disintegrated into calamity.7

  In 1139, four years after Stephen’s election, Matilda invaded England with troops from Anjou and Normandy. The armies of Matilda and Stephen laid the fields waste; neither king nor queen controlled the country, and the barons of England seized the opportunity to enrich themselves. “Every powerful man made his castles and held them,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  Then both by night and day they seized those men whom they imagined had any wealth, common men and women, and put them in prison to get their gold and silver, and tortured them. . . . Wretched men starved with hunger; some who were once powerful men went on alms; some fled out of the land. . . . [T]he earth bore no corn because the land was all done for by such doings.8

  This was the beginning of the Anarchy, a fifteen-year civil war that destroyed villages, killed thousands, wrecked the English countryside, and brought its people to despair: “And it was said openly,” concludes the Chronicle, “that Christ and His saints slept.”

  3.1 England and France during the Anarchy

  * * *

  *The Capetian dynasty ruled in Paris 987–1328; it was founded by Hugh Capet, grandson of Henry the Fowler. The Capetian king at the time of Matilda was Louis VI, nicknamed Louis the Fat (1108–1137).

  Chapter Four

  The Lost Homeland

  Between 1127 and 1150, the Song are exiled by the Jin,

  the Dai Viet adopt the Mandate of Heaven,

  and a Khmer king builds the biggest temple on earth

  IN 1127, the poet Li Qingzhao and her husband abandoned their home and fled from the advancing troops of the Jurchen. They traveled south with a cartful of rare manuscripts and antique bronzes, leaving behind them a lifetime’s collection of books and art. Before they reached the southern city of Nanjing, where they would settle as refugees, the Jurchen burned their home to the ground. The Song dynasty, which had been ruling from the Yellow river valley since 960, was driven from its capital city of Kaifeng; the Song emperor Qinzong was hauled north and imprisoned until his death; the dominance of the Song over China was broken.1

  “The long night passes slowly,” Li Qingzhao wrote, wistfully, of her vanished home, “with few happy thoughts / Then I dream of the capital and see the road back to it. . . .” But she never followed the road; Kaifeng was lost forever.2

  For the Song dynasty, the defeat was both
unexpected and embarrassing. The Song were heirs of the four-thousand-year-old Chinese imperial tradition, holders of the ancient Mandate of Heaven, heirs of the legendary Yellow Emperor.* The invading Jurchen, on the other hand, had been nomads less than a generation before. They had begun to move towards a national identity only twelve years earlier, when the brilliant and ambitious Akuta, leader of the Wanyan clan, had adopted a Chinese dynastic name for himself (the “Jin Emperor”)† and set his eyes on the conquest of the rich empire to his south.

  To the Song, the Jurchen were still merely barbarians: “Our vast land now smells of goat and sheep,” complained the poet Chen Liang, also driven south by the Jurchen. But despite the scorn the Song felt for the raw northerners, the Jurchen continued, inexorably, to advance. Gaozong, younger brother of the captured Song emperor, escaped south and proclaimed himself the next Song ruler; but he was forced to reestablish his court at Lin’an, on the far side of the Yangtze river, and even there he was constantly threatened by Jurchen raids. Jurchen horsemen pressed down farther and farther into the central plains, looting and burning the towns they passed. In 1129, Yangzhou fell to the invaders; in 1130, the Jurchen crossed the Yangtze and sacked Ningbo, on the southern coast.3

  The emperor Song Gaozong, who had just turned twenty when Kaifeng fell, was forced to move from hiding place to hiding place. He grew so desperate that he sent an embassy to the Jurchen generals, offering to become their vassal if the raids would only stop: “I have no one to defend me,” he wrote, “and no place to run.”4

  But the Jurchen did not want vassals. The Song scorn was not entirely undeserved; the Jurchen were mounted soldiers with no experience of running a state, no mechanism for administering a conquered country. They wanted to conquer China, not govern it as an occupied land.

  So Song Gaozong’s plea was rejected, and the battles continued. But this turned out to be the saving of the Song. As fighting dragged on, the northern warriors struggled with unfamiliar southern heat. The terrain, crosshatched with streams and canals, slowed their horses. They had no experience with water warfare, but they now faced the barrier of the Yangtze. The Jurchen troops, growing fatter with plunder and loot, were less inclined to ride hard and far. And the Song themselves, adjusting to their exile, were mounting an increasingly powerful resistance by ship.5

  The Song, like the dynasties before them, had always supplemented land armies with sea power. More and more warcraft were built to patrol the Yangtze. The river, noted one Song official, was the new Great Wall against the barbarians. In 1132, the emperor authorized the creation of a new government agency, the Imperial Commissioner’s Office for the Control and Organization of the Coastal Areas, to take charge of the fleet. The Song warships had now become the world’s first permanent, standing, government-run navy.6

  The navy tipped the struggle back towards the Song. For a decade, power teetered between the two sides, neither able to make much progress past the Yangtze. Slowly, the Song court began to accept the reality of its position: the north was, at least for the moment, lost. In 1141, the emperor Gaozong agreed to sign a peace treaty with the Jurchen. Thirteen years of war had given him no choice. He could no longer afford to mount endless expeditions into the north; the cropland in the south was untilled, the farmers drafted into the army; the only other road for the Song ended in poverty and famine.

  The Shaoxing treaty was a humiliation. It referred to the Jurchen as the “superior state” and the Song as an “insignificant fiefdom,” and Gaozong was forced to accept the status of Jurchen vassal, complete with a hefty annual tribute. But it halted the fighting for two decades, and the shrunken Song, battered and shamed by the nomads, slowly began to build a new existence for itself.7

  FAR SOUTH of the Yellow river, a cluster of smaller kingdoms had grown up in the shadow of the giant.

  The peoples of these southern lands were known to the Chinese simply as Yueh, a blanket name for all non-Chinese living below the Yangtze. A thousand years earlier, the most northern of these peoples had fallen under Chinese rule. Invaded by the armies of the Han dynasty, the lands around the Gulf of Tonkin became Annam, a Chinese province under the control of a Han governor.8

  But in the tenth century, Annam had broken away from its Chinese overlords and claimed the right to rule itself: not as Annam, a Chinese province, but as Dai Viet, an independent kingdom ruled by the Ly dynasty of kings.

  Border spats with the Song continued to trouble the northern provinces of Dai Viet. In 1076, one of these spats had escalated into full-scale war, culminating in a Song invasion. At the mouth of the Bach Dang river, the Song forces were repelled by the great general Ly Thuong Kiet. He celebrated his victory with the song Nam Quoc Son Ho, “Land of the Southern Kingdom”:

  Over the peaks and rivers of the South reigns our emperor.

  Such is the destiny fixed forever on the Celestial Book.

  How dare the Enemy invade our land?

  Their foolish audacity will witness their bloody rout!9

  The verse, still remembered as Vietnam’s first declaration of independence, was written in Chinese.

  Ten centuries of Chinese domination had woven Chinese ways into the fabric of Dai Viet, and neither Song weakness nor Dai Viet independence could unpick it. The 1076 invasion ended with a border agreement between the two courts; it drew a line between China and Dai Viet, north of the Dai Viet capital Thang Long, that still exists today. But the border did not wall the Dai Viet away from the influence of the Song. The Ly kings, like their Chinese counterparts, were builders of Buddhist pagodas and benefactors of Buddhist monasteries. Chinese was still used in all court business; would-be officials still had to pass the Chinese civil service examination, based on the teachings of Confucius. And even as the Song court fled from the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, the Ly dynasty adopted the Mandate of Heaven as its own. Their kings were “Southern Emperors,” ruling the “Southern Kingdoms” by virtue of their own, southern, celestial mandate; the mandate of the Song emperor ended north of Thang Long, and the powers of heaven protected the border between the two.10

  4.1 The Kingdoms of China and Southeast Asia

  Huddling at Kaifeng, beating off Jin raids, the Song could hardly push the point. For the next two centuries, the greatest threats to Dai Viet power would come from the south instead.

  Two kingdoms lay below Dai Viet: Khmer and Champa, both shaped more by trade with India across the Bay of Bengal than by Chinese pressure from the north. The king of Khmer, Suryavarman II, had come to the throne in 1113 by fighting off his relatives. His reign continued, as it had begun, with war.

  First he turned on his own kingdom. Under his predecessors, Khmer had begun to spiral down into anarchy and fragmentation; in a series of deadly internal battles, Suryavarman whipped his rebellious nobility into line. Then he turned his gaze outward. “He saw the kings of the other countries that he desired to subjugate,” a contemporary chronicle notes, “. . . [and] he himself went into the countries of his enemies.” It was his duty to subjugate the earth. Like his predecessors, Suryavarman followed the Hindu Devaraja, the god-king cult; as king of Khmer, he was an incarnation of the divine, one with the god. He was Chakravartin, ruler (on earth) of the universe.11

  His first target was the coastal kingdom of Champa, immediately to his east. A series of raids into Champa created a high level of anxiety among the Sanskrit-speaking Cham; many of them fled north into Dai Viet, which gave them refuge. In 1128, Suryavarman used this as the pretext for a new offensive, this time directly against Dai Viet. He marched twenty thousand men into the country, and was unceremoniously driven back.12

  Undaunted, he settled into a pattern of regular raids on his neighbors: sending armies in by land and fleets of warships around by water. But he made little headway against the Dai Viet. In Thang Long, a new king had just inherited the throne. His name was Ly Than Tong, and although he was only twelve, he was gifted with strong generals. Again and again, the Khmer forces were checked.


  Champa was less fortunate. The Dai Viet had been forced, in opposition to the Song, to unite themselves; the Champa had not. In name, the country was governed by a king who ruled from the city of Vijaya, but in actuality it was an unstable confederation of local rulers, isolated from each other in a series of river valleys that ran from west to east, as likely to fight one another as to stand up to the Khmer bully.13

  The Champa king, Jaya Indravarman III, had neither the army nor the resources to keep Suryavarman out. In 1132, in desperation, he agreed to join with Suryavarman as an ally against the Dai Viet. But the united Champa-Khmer army too was stampeded by the Dai Viet.14

  The Champa ruler Jaya Indravarman, who comes across in the contemporary chronicles as a mild and resourceless man with no idea of what to do next, decided that he’d picked the wrong side; he made peace overtures to the Dai Viet instead. The Khmer made their next foray into Dai Viet alone. Facing their armies, the Dai Viet general Do Anh Vu is said to have sniffed, “The soldiers of the Son of Heaven quell rebellion; they do not offer battle in contestation as equals.” He then clobbered the Khmer once again.15