The History of the Renaissance World (35 page)

In Poitiers, John’s men took nearly two hundred French knights captive. Among them was Arthur himself. This was a blow to Philip’s cause; Roger of Wendover says that, getting word of the capture, he retreated “in vexation” back to Paris. But John had a talent for turning gold into mud. He sent Arthur to Rouen, with orders that he be guarded. “But shortly afterwards,” Roger of Wendover adds, “the said Arthur suddenly disappeared. . . . John was suspected by all of having slain him with his own hand; for which reason many turned their affections from the king from that time forward . . . and entertained the deepest enmity against him.”
³

Nothing was ever known for sure about the boy’s death. Certainly Philip, who had used Arthur against John just as he had used John against Richard, made no effort to find him. But the disappearance, joined with John’s complete inability either to finish the sieges he had begun or to relieve castles under French attack, spelled disaster for the English king. His English allies were losing enthusiasm both for the fight and for their king, and Gervase of Canterbury tells us that the French had begun to call him, mockingly,
Johannem Mollegladium
: John Softsword.
⁴

Late in 1203, John deserted Normandy—his last remaining possession in Western Francia—and retreated back across the English Channel. Richard had recovered almost all of the lands in Western Francia that had belonged to his father; John had lost them again.
⁵

F
OR THE NEXT EIGHT YEARS
, the French and English kings circled each other in a hostile holding pattern.

John, left only with England, Ireland, and his mother’s ancestral lands in the Duchy of Aquitaine, devoted himself to refilling his war-depleted treasury. At his coronation, he had accepted numerous bribes and payments from men who already held royal office and hoped to keep it under the new regime. The royal financial records known as the Chancellor’s Roll document scores of “presents” to the king, not only from officials but from towns and cities as well, accompanied with messages hoping for “goodwill,” “peace,” and “loving treatment.”
⁶

And he had taken full advantage of the royal custom, ongoing since the days of Henry, of collecting a fee called
scutage
from the English barons. Instead of going to war, a baron could buy the right to stay at home with a cash payment. Since John’s reign had begun with war, he had already leveled a demand of scutage every single year since 1199.
⁷

Neither of these methods had created much goodwill towards John, and the heavy scutage in particular had set his barons on edge. With the war over, he dared not continue to collect the fees. Instead, early in 1207 he called the bishops and abbots of England to a council in London and informed them that all of the priests and parsons in England would be required to pay taxes on the revenue from all church-held land. The bishops and abbots refused, indignantly: “The English Church,” they announced, “could by no means submit to a demand which had never been heard of in all previous ages.”
⁸

28.1 John’s Losses and Philip’s Gains

Undaunted, John used the consecration of the new Archbishop of Canterbury in June as an excuse to seize church property. Pope Innocent III had chosen, to fill the empty post, the English churchman Stephen Langton, who had been teaching in Paris for years and had just been made a cardinal in Rome. Innocent had not asked for John’s approval, and John flew into a convenient rage: He knew nothing of Langton, he told the pope, except that the man had “dwelt much among his enemies,” and he was incensed that Innocent had not bothered to ask for his consent to the appointment. “He added,” says Roger of Wendover, “that he would stand up for the rights of his crown, if necessary, even to death.” He then refused to allow Langton to enter England, and confiscated all of Canterbury’s estates—and their revenue—for himself.
⁹

Innocent at once put the entire country under interdict, which did not bother John in the slightest. Instead, he confiscated more church property, under the excuse that the clergy who held them only did so on condition that they perform their job, which they obviously could not do under current conditions.
¹⁰

The interdict dragged on, and the people of England suffered. “All church services ceased,” writes Roger of Wendover; “. . . the bodies of the dead too were carried out of cities and towns, and buried in roads and ditches without prayers or the attendance of priests.”
¹¹

Meanwhile, John went on refilling the royal coffers. His ongoing quarrel with Philip gave him another way to raise revenue: confiscation of the lands of those English nobles he suspected of divided loyalties. One such was Simon de Montfort, who inherited the English title Earl of Leicester from his uncle, but who was himself born near Paris, son of the Count of Montfort-l’Amaury. Under the excuse that de Montfort was bound to be a vassal of the king of France, John allowed him to inherit the title, but in late 1207, took the lands for himself; and de Montfort joined the growing rank of Englishmen who hated their king.

Over the next five years, John socked away an astonishing amount of tax money, confiscated treasure, and church funds. In 1210, he followed Philip’s example and ordered all the Jews in England imprisoned, “in order to do [his] will with their money.” Those who resisted were brutalized; a rabbi in Bristol, refusing to pay up, had one tooth knocked out by John’s men every morning for a week before he gave up and agreed to hand over his savings. “The corn of the clergy was every where locked up . . . for the benefit of the revenue,” Roger of Wendover tells us, and everywhere barons were forced to pay the king fines for trespasses as small as putting a fish weir into a river without John’s express permission. Resentment built, and built, and built. By 1213, it had hit a fever height and the king knew it.

He did not reform his financial policies, though. Instead, he “began to suspect everyone,” says the contemporary
Barnwell Chronicle
, “and went everywhere armed, with armed men.”
¹²

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Sundiata of the Mali

Between 1203 and 1240,
the clans of the Malinke fight over Ghana’s land,
and the slave trade north grows

G
HANA HAD FALLEN:
first to Almoravid invasion and then to the rebellion of the Sosso, a once-subject clan in the south. Around 1203, just a few years after claiming the kingship of the Sosso clan itself, the clan chief Sumanguru overran the capital city of Kumbi-Saleh. The last remnants of Ghanan power fell into his hands; the entire country was his.

This must have been a great military campaign, but the warriors who fought with Sumanguru did not, like the chroniclers of the West, record its battles. All that we know of Sumanguru comes from the
Epic of Sundiata
, a tale told orally, for centuries, by professional bards known as
griots
. “He was skilled in warfare,” the tale tells us,

His father was a
jinn
,

His mother was a human being. . . .

The authority of kingship was given to him;

His power as a king was great;

He used to make hats out of human skin,

He used to make sandals out of human skin.
¹

This is not a flattering depiction, but at the very least we can gather that Sumanguru was no more or less ruthless than Simon de Montfort, far to his north, or Genghis Khan, directing his operations far to the east.

The heartland of Ghana was much-coveted ground: watered by both rivers and sweet wells, says the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, with fish, elephants, giraffes, rice, and sorghum in abundance; so full of gold, writes the thirteenth-century cosmologist al-Qazwini, that it “grows in the sand of this country as carrots do in our land, and the people come out at sunrise to pluck the gold.” Sumanguru did not hold his conquests easily. Not long after his destruction of the old Ghana government, he faced a challenge to his authority from another clan in the Malinke tribe; the Keita, to his southeast.
²

The Keita, unlike the Sosso, were Muslim. They had traded up the Niger river valley, through the central trade route that led to Tunis, for generations, and Islamic beliefs had filtered back down to them along with the northern goods. They were also disinclined to submit to Sumanguru. Under their king Nare Fa Maghan, the Keita fought back. Before Nare Fa Maghan’s death, sometime around 1217, Sumanguru’s armies sacked the capital city of the Keita nine separate times. Each time, the Keita regathered themselves and again rebelled.
³

When Nare Fa Maghan died, his oldest son inherited the rule of the Keita. Instead of continuing to fight, he decided to make peace with the aggressive enemy. Peace meant submission, but the new king was willing to pay the price; in addition, he handed over his sister in marriage to Sumanguru. For a time, the Sosso controlled almost all of the old Ghana territory.
⁴

But the Keita remained restless, and it soon became apparent that the marriage treaty had been a ruse.

In the
Epic of Sundiata
, Sumanguru’s bride tries to wheedle out of him, on their wedding night, the secret of his invulnerability on the battlefield: “What is it that can kill you?” she says, before she allows him to lay a hand on her. “If you do not tell me, you will not know me as a wife.” (At this, Sumanguru’s mother—unexpectedly close to hand—remarks, “Why would you spill your secrets to a one-night woman?” Soothing the old lady, Sumanguru promises to tell his new wife the secret once his mother is safely asleep.)

The secret, it turns out, is witchcraft; Sumanguru is a practitioner of the dark arts. Once she has learned this, the princess tells her groom that she’s having her period and can’t sleep with him after all; and the next morning she escapes home to tell her brothers her discovery. Armed with the materials for a hastily assembled spell against the sorcerer, her brother Sundiata—younger brother of the king—sets off to destroy Sumanguru.
⁵

The
Epic of Sundiata
, told for hundreds of years before it was first written down early in the twentieth century, reflects the hostility of the Islamic Keita towards the non-Muslim Sosso. Sumanguru remained an implacable enemy of Islam, refusing to allow his people to observe its practices, executing Muslims who fell into his hands. But there was another edge to the hatred between the two clans as well. Sumanguru also resented the thriving trade in African slaves that the Keita carried on, selling their captives north to Muslim traders. No abolitionist, Sumanguru was prone to turn his own captives into slaves; but he fought against the custom of selling them into Islamic lands and drove Muslim merchants from every territory he conquered.
⁶

This did not improve his popularity, and Sundiata had little trouble gathering allies to fight against the autocratic ruler. “All the rebellious kings of the savanna country had gathered [with him],” the
Epic
tells us. “On all sides, villages opened their gates to Sundiata. In all these villages Sundiata recruited soldiers.” A long and catastrophic civil war began. By 1230, Sundiata had inherited his brother’s royal title of king; by 1235, his allies had driven Sumanguru’s army backwards to his capital city; and by 1240, Sumanguru had fled, his empire in fragments, and his palace burned to the ground by Sundiata’s men.