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Tales From the Long Twelfth Century: The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire
This intriguing book tells the story of England’s great medieval Angevin dynasty in an entirely new way. Departing from the usual king-centric narrative, Richard Huscroft instead centers each of his chapters on the experiences of a particular man or woman who contributed to the broad sweep of events. Whether noble and brave or flawed and fallible, each participant was struggling to survive in the face of uncontrollable forces. Princes, princesses, priests, heroes, relatives, friends, and others—some well known and others obscure—all were embroiled in the drama of historic events.
Under Henry II and his sons Richard I (the Lionheart) and John, the empire rose to encompass much of the British Isles and the greater part of modern France, yet it survived a mere fifty years. Huscroft deftly weaves together the stories of individual lives to illuminate the key themes of this exciting and formative era.
Under Henry II and his sons Richard I (the Lionheart) and John, the empire rose to encompass much of the British Isles and the greater part of modern France, yet it survived a mere fifty years. Huscroft deftly weaves together the stories of individual lives to illuminate the key themes of this exciting and formative era.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published April 26, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 28, 2019
Really enjoyed this book, especially the chapters on Strongbow, Stephen Langton and Nicola de la Haye. Takes you through all the key events of the period in a fresh way - definitely a broader scope and feel than some of the other things I've read on the same subject, and yet also precise without being finicky. I rate it.
December 2, 2024
Angevin history focusing on specific people rather than the kings. Even though I am familiar with the time period it has some interesting unexpected nuggets of info - hits the white ship disaster, the anarchy, Becket, the Norman invasion of Ireland, the devil's Brood and their interfamily rebellion, Richard's crusade, Prince Arthur's death, King John's tyranny/ birth of the Magna Carta, first baron rebellion.
1. The Princes Tale: William Atheling and the White Shio
2. The Earl's Tale: Hugh Bigod, Civil War and Royal Recovery
3. The Disciples Tale: Herbert of Bosham and the Becket Dispute
4. The Warrior's Tale: Strongbow and the Invasion of Ireland
5. The Young King's Tale: Henry Fitzroy and his Troublesome Family
6. The Princess's Tale: Joan, the Crusade and the Politics of Europe
7. The Nephew's Tale: Arthur of Brittany and the Collapse of Angevin Power
8. The Friend's Tale: William de Briouze and the Tyranny of King John
9. The Exile's Tale: Stephen Langton and the Road to Magna Carta
10. The Matron's Tale: Nicola de la Haye and the Defense of England
Contemporaries called Robert’s son William ‘Clito’, a Latin term that translates roughly as ‘prince’, but which really signified the boy’s status as a legitimate heir to a kingdom or principality. Its application to William underlines the fact that, as the only son of William the Conqueror’s eldest son, his right to succeed as king of England as well as duke of Normandy posed a grave danger to Henry I’s regime. The Old English equivalent of the Latin word ‘Clito’ was ‘Atheling’ and this word was used several times by Orderic Vitalis in the twelfth-century in relation to Henry I’s son, William.
It was ultimately the king’s job to manage these tensions and handle the relationships between his leading subjects. There were any number of ways of doing this – subtly, through tactful diplomacy and negotiation, or decisively through forceful leadership. But whichever way he chose, it was almost certain that someone would be unhappy with the result. And if what the loser wanted could not be obtained from one source of patronage, he would look for another. This is what happened after the death of Henry I in 1135, when the emergence of rival claimants to the throne, each urgently in need of support, provided an environment in which everyone with a competing claim to the same estate, heiress or position had somewhere to go to pursue
So Hugh Bigod is important, first because his career provides an entry point into an extraordinary series of turbulent events that defined England’s future. But over and above this, he is notable not because he represents the innately vicious and irrepressibly aggressive traits of the twelfth century English aristocracy, but because he represents that group’s conservatism and its instinct for self-preservation at a time of national crisis.
That no clear, definitive version of what was sworn in January 1127 survives is suggestive, on the one hand, of promises made provisionally and conditionally, of men hedging their bets and looking to avoid any kind of firm commitment; or, on the other, of writers later aiming to dilute the categorical nature of the oath sworn so as to justify its eventual abandonment by so many of those who took it.
But from 1138 onwards there is less evidence of his being in the king’s company and it may be that Stephen’s handling of local politics in East Anglia was beginning to drive a wedge between them. It must have been galling for Hugh when he failed to become sheriff of Suffolk on the death of the incumbent in March 1138. And as the political scene became more unstable nationally from around that time, Hugh must have been waiting for his chance to make a point.
Unnerved by the prospect of being ruled by a woman, many hesitated over their next step. But not Hugh Bigod. The empress refused to recognise the titles Stephen had bestowed since 1135, but at Oxford in April 1141 she granted the earldom of Norfolk to Hugh as a reward for his defection from the king’s side after the battle of Lincoln and in the hope that he could bolster her cause in eastern England.
Of course there were unscrupulous chancers amongst them, but, as a group, such men are more likely to be seen now as pragmatic and necessarily self-reliant, doing whatever they could to protect their own lands and rights and pass them on intact to their successors. For them the disappearance of a single, dominant, kingdom-wide authority presented many more problems than opportunities, and they simply had to make the best of things until normality was restored.
There was more to their rivalry than this, however, and here long-standing family grievances had a significant impact on political allegiances. The Bigods and the Warennes had vied for dominance in eastern England since the reign of William I, and as a result they had found themselves on opposite sides in succession disputes more than once before Stephen’s reign.
At stake, as far as Henry II was concerned, was control over an English kingdom so recently torn apart by civil war. For him, this meant not just control over the political systems and leading laymen of England, but control over the Church and clergy within the kingdom too. For Becket, however, Church and clergy were independent and autonomous, not subject to any kind of secular authority. These two points of view, when taken to their extremes, were irreconcilable.
were merely the representatives of a much wider struggle that was being played out across Europe during the twelfth century. Only a hundred years before, it had been largely taken for granted that secular rulers should exercise enormous amounts of power over the administration and personnel of the Church. From the 1050s onwards, however, this started to change as the principles of the so-called ‘Gregorian Reform’ movement began to spread.
English to Ireland as an ‘invasion’ and subsequent events as a ‘conquest’. Neither of these words really does justice to what happened after 1169 when a small number of Anglo-Norman barons and their followers crossed the Irish Sea, not to ‘conquer’ Ireland, but because they had been invited to come by a deposed Irish king who wanted their help to regain his throne.
The native Welsh recovery under Stephen had put pressure on the marcher lords, and Henry II was determined to rule all his subjects equally firmly and directly. These two forces combined to hem in the marchers and limit their prospects.
Rhys then consolidated these gains in 1171 by submitting to Henry II, who confirmed him in all his conquests in return for his cooperation. Rhys had become King Henry’s man with royally bestowed authority over all of south Wales. By this time, though, the marcher lords of the region had already realised that they would have to look elsewhere to further their fortunes. Ireland was the obvious place; and the invitation, when it came, was eagerly accepted.
In any event, what eventually prompted his departure was the assassination of Dermot’s ally, the high-king Murtough MacLoughlin. This event was followed by the launch of Rory O’Connor’s bid for the high kingship. Aided by Tiernan O’Rourke (who may still have felt some lingering resentment over the abduction of his wife), Rory managed to take Dublin from Dermot and turn enough of the men of Leinster, including his own brother, against him. At the start of August 1166, Dermot was forced to flee.
It seems likely, therefore, that, whether because Henry was fearful of what Strongbow might achieve there, or just because he could, the king sent Strongbow to Germany simply to stop him going to Ireland.
News of events in Ireland alarmed Henry II. The success of Strongbow, Fitz Stephen and the rest raised the prospect of Henry’s own men setting themselves up independently of him and out of his reach.
The king simply could not allow the growth of his barons’ power in Ireland to continue in this unfettered way and, in any event, there was money to be made if Henry could get his hands on thriving ports like Dublin, Waterford and Wexford.
There was a power vacuum within the Irish leadership and there were divisions within the ranks of the English barons too. Henry had acknowledged Strongbow as the leading English baron in Ireland, but he was keen to keep him in check. So in Meath and at Dublin, Henry installed Hugh de Lacy, the great lord of Weobley in Herefordshire and Ludlow in Shropshire, who had come with him from England. The appointment of a baron as grand as Lacy was no accident. He had the prestige and the resources to stop either Strongbow or any ambitious Irish leader expanding outwards from the lands the king had allowed them to keep.
But most importantly, the Young King’s story provides a reminder that, even at the highest level, national and international politics was also family politics. Henry II’s fraught and troubled relationship with his wife and their sons dictated the course of his reign to a significant extent;
That King Louis had been duped, outmanoeuvred, and left with a strong sense of grievance was probably regarded by King Henry as a price worth paying. In the longer term, however, Henry was storing up trouble: Margaret’s marriage, the status of the Vexin, and the way Henry handled his eldest son would all in future be skilfully exploited by Louis and his own heir. Henry II may have won the political and diplomatic battle in 1160, but the war was only just beginning.
He needed resources if he was to live like the king he was supposed to be: cash to meet his domestic expenses and support his lifestyle, and land from which to draw an income and with which to reward his followers. Just as importantly, for the sake of his image and his reputation, he needed to rule territory of his own and start making decisions that had an impact on the lives of subjects who acknowledged him, not
The members of the prince’s own household, too, were becoming frustrated at their lord’s lack of substantive power. The Young King’s surviving charters reveal a group of knights more or less permanently in his company; young men like their lord, and like him impatiently waiting for land of their own and the independent standing this would give them.
The official peace terms certainly left no doubt about who was still in charge of the family business: ‘King Henry, the king’s son, and his brothers, returned to their father, and to his service, as their lord.’ But this, indeed, was the problem. The Young King’s ambitions had been thwarted once again, and a couple of castles and a few thousand pounds were not likely to satisfy him for long.
Even allowing for some exaggeration, this startling description shows a young man living far beyond even his considerable means. However, there may have been another side to this. Open handed generosity was one of the hallmarks of a truly noble lord, and Henry’s spending served to
develop his image as the soul of knightly largesse. It is easy to assume that Henry II must have disapproved of his son’s conduct as frivolous and trivial, but he may actually have tolerated it as good public relations that gave outsiders the impression of a splendid and magnificent Angevin court.
So languages and beliefs were already and uniquely mixed together when adventurers from Normandy fixed their greedy stare on the riches of Sicily in the decades either side of 1100. These men originally came to southern Italy as pilgrims en route to and from the Holy Land. Having become mercenaries in the pay of the aspiring native rulers of southern Italy, they soon decided to take power into their own hands.
At the time of his death in 1154 the kingdom of Sicily comprised the island itself as well as most of mainland Italy south of Rome. It was Roger’s grandson William, who became king of Sicily in 1166 at the age of eleven, who asked for the hand of Princess Joan in 1176. If the marriage went ahead, Joan would become queen of one of the most dynamic, successful and wealthy kingdoms of the Middle Ages.
Richard certainly planned to marry Berengaria as soon as he could. As will be seen, this marriage was central to Richard’s plans for shoring up his defences in south-west France during his absence on crusade and against any attack by Count Raymond V of Toulouse.
The alternative claimant was Sibylla’s younger sister, Isabella, and, not surprisingly, Conrad thought that it would make sense for him to marry her. Undeterred by the fact that his own wife and Isabella’s husband were still alive, That this marriage was itself both bigamous and incestuous meant little when King Philip arrive at Acre and recognised Conrad as ‘king elect’. Inevitably, therefore (and because of his family connections with Sibylla and the Lusignans), this meant that Richard would support Guy.
At Rouen in Normandy in October 1196, around her thirty-first birthday, she married Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. He was approaching forty, and Joan was his fourth wife. This was a predictably political arrangement in which Joan, yet again, probably had little say; but it was no less striking for that and marked a clear change of direction in the policy of Joan’s family towards southern France. For nearly forty years since the late 1150s the rulers of Aquitaine had been at loggerheads with the counts of Toulouse over territory and status.
It is only in this context that Richard’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre can be understood. Richard knew Aquitaine intimately from his twenty years of campaigning there. He understood the wider political dynamics of the area, and he was well aware that, given the chance, Raymond of Toulouse would attempt to increase his own power and extend his territories at Richard’s expense.
The kings of Navarre made good allies, therefore, and Richard’s marriage to Berengaria was a price worth paying for security on his vulnerable southern frontier. The alliance proved its worth in 1192 and 1194 when Berengaria’s brother Sancho helped put down revolts in Aquitaine that might otherwise have allowed Count Raymond to intervene.
Joan’s marriage to Raymond and the end of the Navarrese alliance might well have driven a wedge between them. Richard had practically abandoned his wife already, but now he had abandoned her family, too, and in favour of an ally whom the Navarrese had been fighting to keep at bay for Richard only a few years before. By the end of 1196, Joan was remarried, Berengaria was more alone than ever, and Navarre was cut off as well: two queens and a kingdom, all three victims of Richard I’s ruthless diplomacy.
Some of Count Raymond’s subjects had rebelled and, rather than wait for him to return and deal with them, Joan took it upon herself to handle the situation and besiege the rebels in their castle of Les Cassés, about thirty miles south-east of Toulouse.
Joan was betrayed by some of her own men, who smuggled arms and equipment into the castle. Forced to abandon the siege, she had only just escaped when her camp was set on fire by the traitors in her own ranks.
None of the barons on either side of the Channel had any desire to be ruled by a Breton and support for John was widespread.
In other parts of Angevin France, though, things were less straightforward. On Easter Day in the city of Angers an assembly of barons from Anjou, Maine and Touraine, led by the most powerful lord in Anjou, William des Roches, had acknowledged Arthur as Richard’s lawful successor. What was more, an army of Bretons was on the march and King Philip had declared unequivocally for their prince.
John was deeply implicated in whatever happened to Arthur, and his treatment of his dead brother’s son served to loosen further the ties of loyalty and trust that bound together the king’s relationships with his leading subjects, and his territories. Arthur’s death also came to represent something rotten at the heart of John’s regime – a casual brutality and a contempt for accepted norms of aristocratic conduct and behaviour.
Boldly and defiantly, and perhaps with the encouragement and backing of the Breton nobility, Constance had associated her son directly with the legendary hero and symbol of Breton independence. The message to Henry II was clear: Brittany would not be dominated or subordinated,
Arthur had returned to the Breton court by early 1199 and was soon playing an active role in the government of the duchy alongside his mother. By then, after more than two years in King Philip’s company, and pumped full of French royal ideology, Arthur’s sympathies were surely more Capetian than Angevin. If he wanted a protector in the future, he would look to Philip not Richard.
The new crisis was entirely of John’s making. His talent for alienating people may have been hinted at after the Treaty of Le Goulet by his treatment of Aimeri de Thouars and by his alleged plan to imprison Arthur. These were relatively insignificant, however, compared with John’s inept and provocative behaviour in the year or so after the treaty was signed, when he bullied and victimised the Lusignans, one of the most important noble families in Poitou. In the process, John laid the foundation for the collapse of his continental empire and set the scene for Arthur’s death.
John’s decision to marry Isabelle, therefore, was calculated in part to bring Adhemar and his family more comfortably into the Angevin fold and to stabilise central Aquitaine: she was her father’s only surviving heir, and her husband would be the next count of Angoulême.
The marriage also served another plainly political purpose. When she married John, Isabelle was already betrothed to another man, Hugh le Brun, lord of Lusignan. The Lusignans were Count Adhemar’s neighbours and controlled the county of La Marche. If Hugh and Isabelle had been married, their families’ lands would together have extended across most of central Aquitaine. Such a concentration of territorial power would have jeopardised the duke’s overall control, and so John’s marriage to Isabelle was also designed to stop the Angoulême–Lusignan alliance in its tracks.
John should have tried to buy them off, with money, land or another attractive marriage. But he didn’t do anything like that. Indeed, his provocative conduct suggests that he planned to goad the family into doing something that would allow him to ruin them completely. Either this, or John miscalculated badly and turned a difficult but manageable diplomatic situation into a catastrophically disastrous one.
Central to William’s pre-eminence, though, were his achievements in Wales, where his main duty was to protect and strengthen England’s frontier against the native Welsh, a job he performed with energy and ruthlessness. This was a pitiless and freq
1. The Princes Tale: William Atheling and the White Shio
2. The Earl's Tale: Hugh Bigod, Civil War and Royal Recovery
3. The Disciples Tale: Herbert of Bosham and the Becket Dispute
4. The Warrior's Tale: Strongbow and the Invasion of Ireland
5. The Young King's Tale: Henry Fitzroy and his Troublesome Family
6. The Princess's Tale: Joan, the Crusade and the Politics of Europe
7. The Nephew's Tale: Arthur of Brittany and the Collapse of Angevin Power
8. The Friend's Tale: William de Briouze and the Tyranny of King John
9. The Exile's Tale: Stephen Langton and the Road to Magna Carta
10. The Matron's Tale: Nicola de la Haye and the Defense of England
Contemporaries called Robert’s son William ‘Clito’, a Latin term that translates roughly as ‘prince’, but which really signified the boy’s status as a legitimate heir to a kingdom or principality. Its application to William underlines the fact that, as the only son of William the Conqueror’s eldest son, his right to succeed as king of England as well as duke of Normandy posed a grave danger to Henry I’s regime. The Old English equivalent of the Latin word ‘Clito’ was ‘Atheling’ and this word was used several times by Orderic Vitalis in the twelfth-century in relation to Henry I’s son, William.
It was ultimately the king’s job to manage these tensions and handle the relationships between his leading subjects. There were any number of ways of doing this – subtly, through tactful diplomacy and negotiation, or decisively through forceful leadership. But whichever way he chose, it was almost certain that someone would be unhappy with the result. And if what the loser wanted could not be obtained from one source of patronage, he would look for another. This is what happened after the death of Henry I in 1135, when the emergence of rival claimants to the throne, each urgently in need of support, provided an environment in which everyone with a competing claim to the same estate, heiress or position had somewhere to go to pursue
So Hugh Bigod is important, first because his career provides an entry point into an extraordinary series of turbulent events that defined England’s future. But over and above this, he is notable not because he represents the innately vicious and irrepressibly aggressive traits of the twelfth century English aristocracy, but because he represents that group’s conservatism and its instinct for self-preservation at a time of national crisis.
That no clear, definitive version of what was sworn in January 1127 survives is suggestive, on the one hand, of promises made provisionally and conditionally, of men hedging their bets and looking to avoid any kind of firm commitment; or, on the other, of writers later aiming to dilute the categorical nature of the oath sworn so as to justify its eventual abandonment by so many of those who took it.
But from 1138 onwards there is less evidence of his being in the king’s company and it may be that Stephen’s handling of local politics in East Anglia was beginning to drive a wedge between them. It must have been galling for Hugh when he failed to become sheriff of Suffolk on the death of the incumbent in March 1138. And as the political scene became more unstable nationally from around that time, Hugh must have been waiting for his chance to make a point.
Unnerved by the prospect of being ruled by a woman, many hesitated over their next step. But not Hugh Bigod. The empress refused to recognise the titles Stephen had bestowed since 1135, but at Oxford in April 1141 she granted the earldom of Norfolk to Hugh as a reward for his defection from the king’s side after the battle of Lincoln and in the hope that he could bolster her cause in eastern England.
Of course there were unscrupulous chancers amongst them, but, as a group, such men are more likely to be seen now as pragmatic and necessarily self-reliant, doing whatever they could to protect their own lands and rights and pass them on intact to their successors. For them the disappearance of a single, dominant, kingdom-wide authority presented many more problems than opportunities, and they simply had to make the best of things until normality was restored.
There was more to their rivalry than this, however, and here long-standing family grievances had a significant impact on political allegiances. The Bigods and the Warennes had vied for dominance in eastern England since the reign of William I, and as a result they had found themselves on opposite sides in succession disputes more than once before Stephen’s reign.
At stake, as far as Henry II was concerned, was control over an English kingdom so recently torn apart by civil war. For him, this meant not just control over the political systems and leading laymen of England, but control over the Church and clergy within the kingdom too. For Becket, however, Church and clergy were independent and autonomous, not subject to any kind of secular authority. These two points of view, when taken to their extremes, were irreconcilable.
were merely the representatives of a much wider struggle that was being played out across Europe during the twelfth century. Only a hundred years before, it had been largely taken for granted that secular rulers should exercise enormous amounts of power over the administration and personnel of the Church. From the 1050s onwards, however, this started to change as the principles of the so-called ‘Gregorian Reform’ movement began to spread.
English to Ireland as an ‘invasion’ and subsequent events as a ‘conquest’. Neither of these words really does justice to what happened after 1169 when a small number of Anglo-Norman barons and their followers crossed the Irish Sea, not to ‘conquer’ Ireland, but because they had been invited to come by a deposed Irish king who wanted their help to regain his throne.
The native Welsh recovery under Stephen had put pressure on the marcher lords, and Henry II was determined to rule all his subjects equally firmly and directly. These two forces combined to hem in the marchers and limit their prospects.
Rhys then consolidated these gains in 1171 by submitting to Henry II, who confirmed him in all his conquests in return for his cooperation. Rhys had become King Henry’s man with royally bestowed authority over all of south Wales. By this time, though, the marcher lords of the region had already realised that they would have to look elsewhere to further their fortunes. Ireland was the obvious place; and the invitation, when it came, was eagerly accepted.
In any event, what eventually prompted his departure was the assassination of Dermot’s ally, the high-king Murtough MacLoughlin. This event was followed by the launch of Rory O’Connor’s bid for the high kingship. Aided by Tiernan O’Rourke (who may still have felt some lingering resentment over the abduction of his wife), Rory managed to take Dublin from Dermot and turn enough of the men of Leinster, including his own brother, against him. At the start of August 1166, Dermot was forced to flee.
It seems likely, therefore, that, whether because Henry was fearful of what Strongbow might achieve there, or just because he could, the king sent Strongbow to Germany simply to stop him going to Ireland.
News of events in Ireland alarmed Henry II. The success of Strongbow, Fitz Stephen and the rest raised the prospect of Henry’s own men setting themselves up independently of him and out of his reach.
The king simply could not allow the growth of his barons’ power in Ireland to continue in this unfettered way and, in any event, there was money to be made if Henry could get his hands on thriving ports like Dublin, Waterford and Wexford.
There was a power vacuum within the Irish leadership and there were divisions within the ranks of the English barons too. Henry had acknowledged Strongbow as the leading English baron in Ireland, but he was keen to keep him in check. So in Meath and at Dublin, Henry installed Hugh de Lacy, the great lord of Weobley in Herefordshire and Ludlow in Shropshire, who had come with him from England. The appointment of a baron as grand as Lacy was no accident. He had the prestige and the resources to stop either Strongbow or any ambitious Irish leader expanding outwards from the lands the king had allowed them to keep.
But most importantly, the Young King’s story provides a reminder that, even at the highest level, national and international politics was also family politics. Henry II’s fraught and troubled relationship with his wife and their sons dictated the course of his reign to a significant extent;
That King Louis had been duped, outmanoeuvred, and left with a strong sense of grievance was probably regarded by King Henry as a price worth paying. In the longer term, however, Henry was storing up trouble: Margaret’s marriage, the status of the Vexin, and the way Henry handled his eldest son would all in future be skilfully exploited by Louis and his own heir. Henry II may have won the political and diplomatic battle in 1160, but the war was only just beginning.
He needed resources if he was to live like the king he was supposed to be: cash to meet his domestic expenses and support his lifestyle, and land from which to draw an income and with which to reward his followers. Just as importantly, for the sake of his image and his reputation, he needed to rule territory of his own and start making decisions that had an impact on the lives of subjects who acknowledged him, not
The members of the prince’s own household, too, were becoming frustrated at their lord’s lack of substantive power. The Young King’s surviving charters reveal a group of knights more or less permanently in his company; young men like their lord, and like him impatiently waiting for land of their own and the independent standing this would give them.
The official peace terms certainly left no doubt about who was still in charge of the family business: ‘King Henry, the king’s son, and his brothers, returned to their father, and to his service, as their lord.’ But this, indeed, was the problem. The Young King’s ambitions had been thwarted once again, and a couple of castles and a few thousand pounds were not likely to satisfy him for long.
Even allowing for some exaggeration, this startling description shows a young man living far beyond even his considerable means. However, there may have been another side to this. Open handed generosity was one of the hallmarks of a truly noble lord, and Henry’s spending served to
develop his image as the soul of knightly largesse. It is easy to assume that Henry II must have disapproved of his son’s conduct as frivolous and trivial, but he may actually have tolerated it as good public relations that gave outsiders the impression of a splendid and magnificent Angevin court.
So languages and beliefs were already and uniquely mixed together when adventurers from Normandy fixed their greedy stare on the riches of Sicily in the decades either side of 1100. These men originally came to southern Italy as pilgrims en route to and from the Holy Land. Having become mercenaries in the pay of the aspiring native rulers of southern Italy, they soon decided to take power into their own hands.
At the time of his death in 1154 the kingdom of Sicily comprised the island itself as well as most of mainland Italy south of Rome. It was Roger’s grandson William, who became king of Sicily in 1166 at the age of eleven, who asked for the hand of Princess Joan in 1176. If the marriage went ahead, Joan would become queen of one of the most dynamic, successful and wealthy kingdoms of the Middle Ages.
Richard certainly planned to marry Berengaria as soon as he could. As will be seen, this marriage was central to Richard’s plans for shoring up his defences in south-west France during his absence on crusade and against any attack by Count Raymond V of Toulouse.
The alternative claimant was Sibylla’s younger sister, Isabella, and, not surprisingly, Conrad thought that it would make sense for him to marry her. Undeterred by the fact that his own wife and Isabella’s husband were still alive, That this marriage was itself both bigamous and incestuous meant little when King Philip arrive at Acre and recognised Conrad as ‘king elect’. Inevitably, therefore (and because of his family connections with Sibylla and the Lusignans), this meant that Richard would support Guy.
At Rouen in Normandy in October 1196, around her thirty-first birthday, she married Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. He was approaching forty, and Joan was his fourth wife. This was a predictably political arrangement in which Joan, yet again, probably had little say; but it was no less striking for that and marked a clear change of direction in the policy of Joan’s family towards southern France. For nearly forty years since the late 1150s the rulers of Aquitaine had been at loggerheads with the counts of Toulouse over territory and status.
It is only in this context that Richard’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre can be understood. Richard knew Aquitaine intimately from his twenty years of campaigning there. He understood the wider political dynamics of the area, and he was well aware that, given the chance, Raymond of Toulouse would attempt to increase his own power and extend his territories at Richard’s expense.
The kings of Navarre made good allies, therefore, and Richard’s marriage to Berengaria was a price worth paying for security on his vulnerable southern frontier. The alliance proved its worth in 1192 and 1194 when Berengaria’s brother Sancho helped put down revolts in Aquitaine that might otherwise have allowed Count Raymond to intervene.
Joan’s marriage to Raymond and the end of the Navarrese alliance might well have driven a wedge between them. Richard had practically abandoned his wife already, but now he had abandoned her family, too, and in favour of an ally whom the Navarrese had been fighting to keep at bay for Richard only a few years before. By the end of 1196, Joan was remarried, Berengaria was more alone than ever, and Navarre was cut off as well: two queens and a kingdom, all three victims of Richard I’s ruthless diplomacy.
Some of Count Raymond’s subjects had rebelled and, rather than wait for him to return and deal with them, Joan took it upon herself to handle the situation and besiege the rebels in their castle of Les Cassés, about thirty miles south-east of Toulouse.
Joan was betrayed by some of her own men, who smuggled arms and equipment into the castle. Forced to abandon the siege, she had only just escaped when her camp was set on fire by the traitors in her own ranks.
None of the barons on either side of the Channel had any desire to be ruled by a Breton and support for John was widespread.
In other parts of Angevin France, though, things were less straightforward. On Easter Day in the city of Angers an assembly of barons from Anjou, Maine and Touraine, led by the most powerful lord in Anjou, William des Roches, had acknowledged Arthur as Richard’s lawful successor. What was more, an army of Bretons was on the march and King Philip had declared unequivocally for their prince.
John was deeply implicated in whatever happened to Arthur, and his treatment of his dead brother’s son served to loosen further the ties of loyalty and trust that bound together the king’s relationships with his leading subjects, and his territories. Arthur’s death also came to represent something rotten at the heart of John’s regime – a casual brutality and a contempt for accepted norms of aristocratic conduct and behaviour.
Boldly and defiantly, and perhaps with the encouragement and backing of the Breton nobility, Constance had associated her son directly with the legendary hero and symbol of Breton independence. The message to Henry II was clear: Brittany would not be dominated or subordinated,
Arthur had returned to the Breton court by early 1199 and was soon playing an active role in the government of the duchy alongside his mother. By then, after more than two years in King Philip’s company, and pumped full of French royal ideology, Arthur’s sympathies were surely more Capetian than Angevin. If he wanted a protector in the future, he would look to Philip not Richard.
The new crisis was entirely of John’s making. His talent for alienating people may have been hinted at after the Treaty of Le Goulet by his treatment of Aimeri de Thouars and by his alleged plan to imprison Arthur. These were relatively insignificant, however, compared with John’s inept and provocative behaviour in the year or so after the treaty was signed, when he bullied and victimised the Lusignans, one of the most important noble families in Poitou. In the process, John laid the foundation for the collapse of his continental empire and set the scene for Arthur’s death.
John’s decision to marry Isabelle, therefore, was calculated in part to bring Adhemar and his family more comfortably into the Angevin fold and to stabilise central Aquitaine: she was her father’s only surviving heir, and her husband would be the next count of Angoulême.
The marriage also served another plainly political purpose. When she married John, Isabelle was already betrothed to another man, Hugh le Brun, lord of Lusignan. The Lusignans were Count Adhemar’s neighbours and controlled the county of La Marche. If Hugh and Isabelle had been married, their families’ lands would together have extended across most of central Aquitaine. Such a concentration of territorial power would have jeopardised the duke’s overall control, and so John’s marriage to Isabelle was also designed to stop the Angoulême–Lusignan alliance in its tracks.
John should have tried to buy them off, with money, land or another attractive marriage. But he didn’t do anything like that. Indeed, his provocative conduct suggests that he planned to goad the family into doing something that would allow him to ruin them completely. Either this, or John miscalculated badly and turned a difficult but manageable diplomatic situation into a catastrophically disastrous one.
Central to William’s pre-eminence, though, were his achievements in Wales, where his main duty was to protect and strengthen England’s frontier against the native Welsh, a job he performed with energy and ruthlessness. This was a pitiless and freq
November 26, 2018
Overall an enjoyable read. I found the chapter on Nicola de la Haye, and her appointment as Sheriff of Lincolnshire by King John especially intriguing. The chapters are arranged chronologically as far as possible and flow well from one to the next.
I am not very familiar with this historical period and cannot speak to the accuracy of the body text, however, the brief treatment of Gerald of Wales in the book's epilogue is somewhat misleading. Specifically, Gerald was offered the bishoprics of Bangor and Llandaff which he refused, likely holding out in the hopes of becoming bishop of St David's (and presumably be in the best position to argue for the independence of the Welsh church from Canterbury.)
See The autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis tr. H. E. Butler. London: Cape, 1937
I am not very familiar with this historical period and cannot speak to the accuracy of the body text, however, the brief treatment of Gerald of Wales in the book's epilogue is somewhat misleading. Specifically, Gerald was offered the bishoprics of Bangor and Llandaff which he refused, likely holding out in the hopes of becoming bishop of St David's (and presumably be in the best position to argue for the independence of the Welsh church from Canterbury.)
See The autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis tr. H. E. Butler. London: Cape, 1937
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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