The History of the Renaissance World (42 page)

34.1 The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa

Meanwhile, the people of Toulouse suffered from hunger and disease, lost crops and slaughtered livestock, burned homes and fields.

By fall, Pedro and Raymond had decided to mount a direct attack on Montfort’s most central fortification, the castle at Muret: “a garrison,” writes William of Puylaurens, “which was causing great difficulties for the city of Toulouse.” They were joined by a “great many men” from the neighboring territories. Simon de Montfort’s violent and unceasing campaigning had increasingly seemed less for the church than for himself, and the local nobility wanted him gone, crusade or no crusade.
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On September 12, a sizable army of knights from Aragon and Toulouse attacked Muret. With only fifteen hundred men at his disposal, the badly outnumbered Simon de Montfort managed to rout them. The king of Aragon was “so severely wounded,” says the anonymous conclusion to William of Tudela’s account, “that his blood spilled out on the ground and he fell his full length dead.” His men scattered, many of them drowning as they tried to flee back across the Garonne.

Raymond too was forced to flee. Simon de Montfort marched into Toulouse and claimed it as his own. He had won control now of all of Languedoc; and Pedro II, victor over the Muslim enemy, had fallen at the hands of his Christian brothers.
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Young James, his heir, was still in the hands of Montfort. The people of Aragon pled with Innocent III to order his release, and Montfort reluctantly obeyed. But with a five-year-old king on the throne, Aragon remained in chaos. “Happy would Pedro have been,” a Castilian account lamented, “had he concluded his life immediately after the noble triumph in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.”
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Chapter Thirty-Five

From Bouvines to Magna Carta

Between 1213 and 1217,
John of England fails to regain his French lands,
forfeits control of England,
and loses his life

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
1213, Innocent III decided that the interdict on England was clearly not going to resolve the quarrel over Stephen Langton’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Once again, he reached for his weapon.

“Being deeply grieved,” writes Roger of Wendover, “he decreed that John king of England should be deposed from the throne of that kingdom.” And then he went one step further.

[He] wrote to the most potent Philip, king of the French, ordering him, in remission of all his faults, to undertake this business, and declaring that, after he had expelled the English king . . . he and his successors should hold possession of the kingdom of England for ever. Besides this, he wrote to all the noble knights, and other warlike men throughout the different countries, ordering them to assume the sign of the cross and to follow the king of the French as their leader, to dethrone the English king, and thus to revenge the insult which had been cast on the universal church.

Anyone who provided either money or his own sword to help overthrow John, promised Innocent, would receive the benefits of crusade, exactly “like those who went to visit the Lord’s sepulchre.”
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The ideal of crusade had become so diffused that it had lost any form or definition. Now crusade could be declared against a Christian king who held to the Nicene Creed: a king who ruled an ancient part of Christendom and was himself the son and brother of Crusaders.

Philip was not one to turn down such an opportunity. He immediately put his oldest son Louis—now twenty-five—at the head of an invasion force, promising him the crown of England should the war succeed (and also extracting from him a series of oaths promising that he would govern England only under his father’s direction). A number of the Western Frankish nobles joined him, with the notable exception of the Count of Flanders, who had fallen out with Philip and refused to be part of the campaign.

At this, John (not unlike Raymond of Toulouse, four years earlier) decided that it was time to get right with God. In May, before Philip could launch his fleet from the French coast, John was “roused to repentance.” He met with the pope’s legate in London, agreed to Stephen Langton’s appointment, and publicly acknowledged the pope as his spiritual head (accompanied, to sweeten the deal, with a thousand pounds of silver as tribute to Rome). The legate then went straight to Paris and forbade Philip to attack his newly restored brother in Christ.
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Philip was greatly put out. He had, he complained, already spent sixty thousand pounds putting his invasion force together, in obedience to the pope’s command, and he had been counting on “the remission of his sins.” But both the legate and Innocent III were unmoved. If Philip attacked John, he would now find himself on the wrong side of crusade.

Fortunately for John, Philip found another object of wrath: the Count of Flanders, who had broken his vassal’s oaths by refusing to attack England. French ships and soldiers had already assembled for crusade; Philip decided to use them to firm up his control over Flanders. He ordered the fleet to sail out of the mouth of the Seine and turn east, making its way along the coast to the Flanders coastline, while he invaded from the south of the county.

The count, “much alarmed at this attack,” immediately sent word to his two most natural allies: John of England, who was Philip’s enemy; and the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV.

Otto, who had struggled with Philip of Germany for the right to be called emperor, had finally gained the title when his rival was murdered in 1208, by a distant half-drunk cousin who had some personal grievance with him. (The cousin was then decapitated, so a full explanation was never gotten.) He was crowned in 1209 and promptly fell out both with Philip of France, his rival for power on the continent, and with Innocent III, who excommunicated him the year after his coronation, when Otto refused to hand over the control of Italian lands to the papacy.
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John, meanwhile, could not turn down the chance to recover Normandy from France. He too agreed to join the fight. Tens of thousands of soldiers
*
—German, Flemish, Dutch, Frankish, and English—assembled at Valenciennes, under the personal command of Otto IV. John himself, no battlefield general, stayed in Poitou, but sent his bastard brother William Longsword to command the English archers.

Philip II of France, grateful now that he was not in Languedoc fighting heretics, called his own royal forces to muster at Tournai. With him stood another pretender to the German throne: Frederick, king of Sicily, who hoped to seize both the German throne and the title of emperor.

On July 27, 1214, as Philip was leading his troops towards Lille—intending to find advantageous territory on which to fight—the English and German allies intercepted the French army on the river plain near the bridge of Bouvines. It was Sunday, a day on which Christian kings were not supposed to wage war, and Otto IV was inclined to delay the inevitable battle. It seemed to him, says Roger of Wendover, “improper . . . to profane such a day by slaughter and the effusion of human blood.” But after consultation with the English barons, he decided to seize the opportunity.
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Seeing that the enemy was preparing to fight, Philip drew up his own troops, their backs to the river, and ordered the bridge itself at the rear broken down so that, should they decide to flee, they would be able to do so only through the opposing line. Even more usefully, he assured them that the war against the excommunicated Otto and his allies fell firmly into the category of crusade. He took steps to play this drama out: first arming himself, and then taking the time to celebrate Mass at a nearby chapel with his own barons. When they emerged from the chapel, they carried with them the
oriflamme
, the red silk banner that represented the presence of Saint Denis, patron saint of France, and thus of divine favor.
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In the blinding heat of the July afternoon, the French began the fight with a cavalry charge against the Flemish mounted knights. Violent fighting followed, but ultimately the greater experience (and better equipment) of the French soldiers began to pay off. The English and German allies were slowly driven back, until the lines broke. The English baron Hugues de Boves, who had insisted on the Sunday engagements, fled with his men. Several Flemish dukes followed him. Otto IV continued to fight, remounting three times after his horses were killed beneath him. But soon it became clear that the battle was lost, and he fled, leaving his imperial banner behind him.

Young Frederick drove Otto back to his family lands and claimed his title; he was crowned Frederick II, king of the Germans (although not yet emperor), in Aachen on July 25. The Count of Flanders and William Longsword, both taken prisoner during the battle, were hauled to Paris. Philip agreed to exchange William for a French nobleman taken captive by the English, but the Count of Flanders was not so lucky. He was imprisoned in the Louvre, where he remained for the next twelve years.
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When news of the defeat reached John, he exclaimed, “Since I became reconciled to God, woe is me; nothing has gone prosperously with me!”

35.1 The World of the Magna Carta

O
N SEPTEMBER
18, at the great castle of Chinon in the Loire river valley, John and Philip agreed to a five-year truce that confirmed Philip’s control over all the lands lost in 1206. After the humiliating treaty was signed, John retreated over the English Channel. He would never leave England again.

But his homecoming was not a happy one.

“About this time,” says Roger of Wendover, “the earls and barons of England assembled at St. Edmonds . . . [and] after they had discoursed together secretly for a time, there was placed before them the charter of king Henry the First. . . . [A]nd finally it was unanimously agreed that, after Christmas, they should all go together to the king and demand the confirmation of the aforesaid liberties to them.” Henry I’s Charter of Liberties, used to shore up support for his claim to the throne, had listed fourteen rights of church and barons that the king pledged not to violate. But more importantly, it began, “All the evil customs by which the realm of England was unjustly oppressed will I take away, which evil customs I partly set down here.”

This made the Charter an instrument by which the barons could keep on enumerating evil customs. And chief among those was John’s continuing taxation. He had demanded yet another scutage to pay for the failed campaign in Western Francia; most of the barons had refused to pay it, but the demand still hovered over them.
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When John arrived back in England, he furiously insisted that the scutage be paid at once. At this, the boldest of the English barons gathered and demanded that John affirm the Charter or prepare for war.

John stalled, sending Stephen Langton to negotiate with the barons, promising to hear them as long as they would write out exactly what they meant by “evil customs.” In January of 1215, three months after his return to England, he met the leaders of the opposition and received the twelve-item list they had appended to the Charter of Liberties. First on the list was a demand that the king concede his right to “take a man without judgment.” Eight was a provision limiting scutage to “one mark of silver” per baron (John’s most recent demand had been for three), an amount that could be raised only with the consent of the barons themselves.
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