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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Robert Bruce the Sixth, onetime companion of Edward on the Sixth Crusade, had fought for the English since the beginning of the war for independence. Scottish accounts tell us that he had become disenchanted with the English administration of Scotland (“indignant at the cruel bondage of the kingdom and the ceaseless ill-treatment of the people,” says the contemporary Chronicle of Pluscarden), but there were more practical drawbacks to his English alliance: he had spent a good deal of his own money on the English campaign, he had not been reimbursed by the crown, and Edward I had neglected to reward his loyalty in any way. In March of 1306, he mounted a renewal of the Scottish rebellion, declaring himself King of the Scots and taking Edward completely by surprise.4

  Once again, English armies marched into Scotland. And, as had become the pattern for the Scottish rebellions, Bruce was almost at once driven into hiding. He was defeated twice in succession, the first time in June near Perth, the second time on August 11 at Dalry, much deeper into Scottish territory. His men were forced into hiding, and Bruce himself became a fugitive, living “a most wretched life in the wilderness,” as the Chronicle of Pluscarden tells us:

  He sometimes went a whole fortnight without taking any food but raw herbs, water and milk . . . now walking barefoot when his shoes were worn out with age; now left alone in the islands; now alone, unknown, fleeing from his enemies; now slighted and despised by his own servants, he remained utterly deserted, an outcast from all his acquaintances.5

  But he remained out of English hands, and while Bruce was at large, the Scots still hoped for victory.

  EDWARD I WAS ILL. He had been slow to arrive at the Scottish front, after Bruce’s coronation, because he was suffering from pains in his legs and his neck and could ride only two miles per day. He grew a little stronger over the winter, but the illness returned in the summer of 1307. He was on his way back to Scotland when he came down with dysentery; already weakened, he died suddenly on July 6, while his servants were getting him out of bed for breakfast. It was his thirty-fifth year as king of England.6

  The Prince of Wales was crowned Edward II of England, and almost at once Bruce emerged from the shadows and began to regather his armies. Scotland’s fortunes took a sharp turn towards the good; Edward II was less concerned with Robert Bruce than with arranging the royal household to suit himself. He was, says the contemporary Vita Edwardi Secundi, “a strong young man in about his twenty-third year . . . [who] did not fulfil his father’s ambition, but turned his mind to other things.”7

  One of his first acts as king was to call back, from exile, his close friend Piers Gaveston. Gaveston and Edward II had grown up together, and the two young men had become so inseparable that the older Edward grew annoyed: “He realized that his son, the prince of Wales, loved a certain Gascon knight well beyond measure,” remarks the fourteenth-century Annales Paulini. When the Prince of Wales demanded that Gaveston be given the title Count of Ponthieu (a Norman countship that had belonged to Edward I himself), the king flew into a fury and banished Gaveston to his ancestral lands in Gascony,* a southwestern French province controlled by the English crown.† Young Edward was forced to swear that he would “neither receive, nor keep with him nor about him” the banished knight, and on his deathbed Edward I asked the earls of Lincoln, Warwick and Pembroke “not to suffer Piers Gaveston to come again into England.”8

  Defying his barons, Edward II invited Gaveston back into England (“with the dead king not yet even buried,” notes the chronicler Walter of Guisborough with disapproval) and made him the Earl of Cornwall. When in 1308, Edward II traveled to France to celebrate his promised and long-delayed marriage to Isabella, daughter of Philip IV (the Fair), he left Gaveston as regent of the kingdom in his absence.9

  He returned to find the barons fed to the teeth with his favorite. Gaveston, says the Vita, was a tactless regent, “a man very proud and haughty in bearing.” Court gossip said that he and the king were lovers, but the resentment against Gaveston had less to do with a rumored and unproven sexual relationship and more to do with the young king’s willingness to treat his personal friends with such lavish and obvious favoritism: “The great men of the land hated him,” the Vita explains, “because he alone found favour in the king’s eyes and lorded it over them like a second king.”10

  With almost one voice, the barons demanded that Edward get rid of Gaveston. The king saved some face by sending Gaveston to Ireland to act as his lieutenant there; but the united hostility of his barons unsettled him, and he began unobtrusively to prepare for civil war. “When the king saw that his barons stood against him like a wall,” the Vita says, “. . . he tried to break up their alliance and draw the more powerful to his side . . . with gifts, promises, and blandishments.” In this way, he rounded up enough support to allow for Gaveston’s return, but the royal favorite was unable to fit himself back neatly into the court hierarchy. With his old importance restored, he “began to behave worse than before,” calling his enemies by insulting nicknames and using his power to grant offices and privileges to his own favorites.11

  Meanwhile, Edward II had finally gotten around to taking notice of Robert Bruce. In the fall of 1310, he marched into Scotland with an army; but Bruce and his freedom fighters evaded him, lurking in hiding, then emerging to plunder the English camps and pick off isolated reconnaissance parties before disappearing again. The unfruitful campaign dragged on for months, Bruce gaining in strength, the English losing horses, men, and confidence.12

  Early in 1312, with the English army in winter quarters near the border and Edward himself back in England, the English barons began to plan Gaveston’s murder. Their chance came in May, when the two men were briefly apart: Gaveston in Scarborough, Edward II in York. Led by the Earl of Lancaster, Gaveston’s enemies surrounded the castle where the young knight had spent the night and forced him to emerge. They had already decided, says the Vita Edwardi Secundi, that he should die “as a nobleman and a Roman citizen” rather than as a thief or traitor; so they led him out onto the Earl of Lancaster’s land and beheaded him.13

  They left him where he fell, but nearby Dominican friars gathered up the body and head, and buried them together.

  Edward, grieved and infuriated in equal measure, could not muster enough support to attack the offenders. He was forced to accept a mediated peace with them, in which they protested that they had acted only to preserve the king’s power, and with his good in mind; but he did not forget.

  He had now been on the throne for nearly seven years and had accomplished almost nothing. In the summer of 1314, he attempted to right this by marching into Scotland personally with additional reinforcements, hoping to bring the ongoing and exasperating war to an end. Like everything else he attempted, the invasion failed. The English army met the Scots at Bannockburn, where the Scots—fighting almost entirely on foot—managed to draw the heavier English cavalry forward, across pits that had been dug and covered over lightly. The horses floundered in the pits; the cavalry behind panicked and retreated; Edward himself, at the rear of the army, turned and rode to safety as fast as possible.

  62.1 The Battle of Bannockburn

  “From that day forward,” John of Fordun concludes, “the whole land of Scotland . . . rejoiced in victory over the English.” Robert Bruce was no longer a rebel: “After the victory,” says the Chronicle of Lanercost, “Robert Bruce was commonly called King of Scotland by all men.” Immediately he launched a war of conquest, sending ships to Ireland and marching over the border into northern England to raid, burn, and plunder.14

  Meanwhile, Edward was forced to return to London in humiliation. “If he had followed the advice of the barons,” remarks the Vita, “he would have humbled the Scots with ease.” This fact had not escaped the barons; and a full revolt was delayed only because England was now facing a new crisis.

  * * *

  *See map 59.1, p. 415.

  †Philip IV had given up claim to Gascony in the 1303 Treaty of Paris.

  Part Three<
br />
  CATASTROPHES

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The Great Famine

  Between 1310 and 1321,

  the countries of Europe suffer

  flood, tempest, drought, and starvation

  FOR AS LONG AS MEMORY STRETCHED—over five hundred years, we know in retrospect—Europe had been a few degrees warmer than in the millennia before. In France, planting began in March; summer began early in June and lasted until the early days of September. In England, villages spread across the high hills of Dartmoor, farms across the northern Pennine moors, and vineyards flourished as far north as York. Copper mines in the Alps, closed by ice during the later centuries of the Roman empire, were reopened. The ice pack in the northern oceans melted back, giving Leif Ericsson passage to the west, deluding his followers into believing that the shores of Greenland were habitable. (“The temperature never dropped below freezing,” one of them marveled, “and the grass only withered very slightly!”) And, as happens when mild weather extends the growing season, the population had mushroomed. In two centuries, the English population tripled. In France, 6.2 million men and women around 1100 had grown to at least 17 million by the beginning of the fourteenth century.1

  But in the vast span of millennia, the warmth was a blip. With the luxury of hindsight, climatologists have given the blip a name: the Medieval Warm Period, or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly.*

  The five-hundred-year summer of the Warm Period was not quite over. But beginning around 1310, Europe began to see dips in temperature that had never been experienced within living memory. This was accompanied by soaring highs, violent storms, deluges, flooding. Rain poured down in the spring. Grain rotted in the field. The French, trying to invade Flanders, sank deep into the mud and were forced to turn back. “About the year 1310,” says The Chronicle of Pluscarden, “there was so severe a famine and dearth of victuals in the kingdom of Scotland . . . that men fed on the flesh of horses and other unclean beasts.” “Hunger and dearth, on earth, the poor have undergone,” complains the political broadside “Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II,” “while beasts starve, while corne has been so dear.”

  There comes then another sorrow, that spreads over all the land,

  A winter sent, before which there was never one so strong . . .

  The cattle die, all together, and make suddenly the land so bare,

  that never came such wretchedness into England before,

  never men more aghast.2

  In England and northwest Europe, the summer of 1314 was one of the wettest in memory. The summer of 1315 was worse, filled with downpours, low-lying areas flooded everywhere. “The hay lay so long under water that it could neither be mown nor gathered,” noted the English monk John of Trokelowe, from his monastery in Northumberland, “[and] the grain could not ripen . . . it did not have the nourishment from the heat of the summer sun.” The German town of Salzburg saw “such an inundation of waters, it seemed as though it were the Flood.”3

  63.1 Miniature from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, showing March planting.

  Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

  The year 1316 was just as wet. Sheep and goats died of liver fluke and murrains, a blanket fourteenth-century term for epidemics of foot-and-mouth, streptococcus, and other damp-aggravated illnesses. In the south of England, the harvest weighed in at half its normal bulk, the lowest yield in fifty years. In Germany, the Neustadt vineyard gave only “a trifling quantity of wine.” The French city of Ypres lost one person in ten to famine; in Tournai, an observer wrote that so many “perished every day . . . men and women, rich and poor, young and old . . . that the very air stank.” To make matters even worse, a comet was visible throughout most of Europe for a good portion of those two years. Geoffrey de Meaux, royal physician to the king of France and amateur astronomer, noted that its brilliance was so great that the comet was visible day and night. Fourteenth-century scholars were in agreement that such a brilliant comet signified a coming time of bad crops, a time when robbery and mayhem would increase, truth and justice decline, and the sea rise to swallow many: “The whole world was troubled,” wrote a German chronicler, surveying the multiple reports of disaster from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean coast.4

  63.1 Flood and Famine

  Famine began. Everyone suffered, but the aristocrats, with their larger reserves, suffered less. The mass of peasants, living week to week, found themselves on the constant edge of starvation. They survived only by using up everything stored away for the future: seed grain, future stores. Draft animals, essential for the future cultivation of the now-bare fields, were slaughtered. Old people starved themselves to keep grandchildren alive; young parents were forced to choose between their children or their lives, knowing that their deaths would ultimately mean the starvation of their young ones.

  “There was great famine in the land,” begins the German folktale “Hansel and Gretel,” collected by the Grimm brothers in the nineteenth century from the days of desperation five centuries before. Unable to face voluntary starvation or infanticide, the parents lead their children into the woods to abandon them; at least, they will not then see the young ones die. (“Surely it would be better to share the last bite of food with one’s children!” thinks the father, the fatalist; it is the stepmother, perhaps clutching babies of her own, who still desperately hopes to live.)5

  The summer of 1317 was a little dryer, giving the battered and waterlogged peasants a glimmer of hope. But in August the rains returned, and between October 1317 and Easter 1318, temperatures sank to unheard-of lows. The North Sea froze; Cologne suffered from a snowstorm on June 30.6

  By fall 1318, the worst of the dip had ended; the long summer, now dying, had a few decades left in it. But the weather remained unpredictable. “This year,” says the 1319 entry in the Norman Chronicle of St. Evroult, “there was a prodigious disturbance of the elements, causing great damage. Many trees were thrown down by the violence of the winds.” And, five years later, “Great damage was done by thunder-storms . . . many houses and trees were levelled to the ground.” “In the year 1321, there was a very hard winter, which distressed men, and killed nearly all animals,” notes John of Fordun. The snow, records a Norman chronicle, was everywhere, deep and lasting: in mid-March, the middle of Lent, it was still “the thickest anywhere on earth.”7

  The Great Famine left a tenth of Europe’s men and women dead; in some places, as much as a quarter of the population died. And the children who survived the famine were, for the rest of their lives, weakened by scurvy, stunted growth, their immune systems compromised, their teeth poor—defenseless against the next catastrophe that would sweep down over them.

  * * *

  *Thanks to global warming, the existence of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly has been turned into a political football; opponents of legislation to reduce CO2 emissions point to it as proof that climate change happens independent of human action, while supporters have tended to downplay the warming period or deny that it happened at all. Actual measurements can be found in a number of academic texts, such as Richard W. Battarbee et al., eds., Past Climate Variability through Europe and Africa, Vol. 6 (Springer, 2004). A more popular and accessible survey of the evidence is in the first chapter of Brian Fagan’s The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (Basic Books, 2000), pp. 3–21.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  The Sultan and the Khan

  Between 1310 and 1335,

  the empire of Egypt grows in strength and wealth,

  but the Il-khanate collapses

  KHALIL, THE SULTAN OF EGYPT, had presided over the final end of the last Crusader kingdom: the goal of Muslim commanders since the days of Saladin.

  This did not make him a hero. Instead, he was assassinated in 1293, aged twenty-nine, by three of his own officers.

  In the seventeen anarchic years that followed, the sultanate changed hands four times. Self-made men, rising from slavery to sultanate, the mamluks of E
gypt had no tradition of father-to-son succession: the strongest man was the one who could lay hold of the sultan’s scepter. And although all of the would-be rulers were mamluk, none of them belonged to the Bahri Regiment, the onetime personal bodyguard of long-dead Ayyub. Even the Bahri who had been very young men at the time of the Regiment’s rise to power, were in their seventies; the next generation of mamluks was now agitating for its share of power.1

  Complicating the struggle for power at the top was the existence of Qalawun’s younger son, Khalil’s little brother al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun. Al-Nasir, only eight at the time of Khalil’s murder, was elevated to the sultanate twice between 1293 and 1310, both times as a figurehead; power had always remained in the hands of an ambitious regent, and al-Nasir had survived only by accepting his complete lack of authority and living in retirement.

  But in those years the submissive child had grown into a young man. He was nearly twenty-four; he had spent most of his life under house arrest, and for some time he had been quietly planning to emerge as sultan in fact as well as in name.

  Meanwhile, the people of Egypt had grown tired of the constant chaos and purges at the sultan’s palace. In 1310, the sudden failure of the Nile to rise pitched their discontent to a new high, and al-Nasir seized his chance. He left the castle of Kerak, where he had been living for some time in exile, and set out for Damascus, collecting followers as he went. By the time he arrived at the city, the governors of the mamluk-held cities of Aleppo and Jerusalem had decided to join his cause.

  As al-Nasir prepared to journey from Damascus to Cairo to claim his throne, most of the empire came over to his side. His current rival, an officer named Baybars who had proclaimed himself sultan two years earlier, found himself entirely deserted. He came out to meet his replacement on foot, carrying a grave cloth to show that he was ready to die; al-Nasir, who was already a clever politician, magnanimously forgave him in public, and then had him strangled in private a few hours later.2