The Book of Ancient Bastards (30 page)

When the Only Tool You Have Is a Hammer, Use It on the Scots

( A.D. 1239–1307)

Hic est Edwardvs Primus Scottorum Malleus (Latin for: “Here is Edward I, Hammer of the Scots”).
—Edward I’s epitaph, carved on his tomb in Westminster

Psychologist Abraham Maslow once famously remarked, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” He might easily have been talking about Edward I, king of England from A.D. 1273 to 1307. In Edward’s case, the hammer was the employment of ruthless, overwhelming, all-consuming violence in order to solve his political problems.

Born in A.D. 1239, Edward was hobbled from early age with ill health. But where his father, Henry III, was weak-willed and vacillating, young Edward possessed deep resources of both will and fire (he had the so-called “Plantagenet temper”), and managed to make a full recovery.

His father’s inability to rule coupled with his favoring foreign-born (in other words, French) sycophants over his “natural subjects” led to repeated clashes with his barons. Ironically enough, these nobles were led by the king’s own brother-in-law, the foreign-born (yep, you guessed it, French) earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort.

Forced by these circumstances to grow up quick (and at 62 he towered over most of his contemporaries, earning the nickname “Longshanks” because of his long legs), Edward quickly developed a reputation as a great warrior.

During the resulting civil war, Edward fought mostly on his father’s side, and was even briefly a royal captive of Montfort and his allies. In A.D. 1265, A.D , the now twenty-six-year-old Edward, in command of his father’s forces, trapped and killed Montfort and crushed his rebellion at the Battle of Lewes (in Sussex).

After securing victory at home, he went on crusade to the Holy Land (where he survived an assassination attempt in his tent by whacking his would-be killer in the head with a stool, then wresting the fellow’s dagger from his grasp and using it on him). While there, he learned of his father’s death and returned to England in A.D. 1273.

Bastard of Wales

When Edward took the throne in A.D. 1273, he immediately inherited a conflict with the semi-independent principality of Wales on England’s western border. Llewellyn Ap Gryffudd (pronounced “Griffith”), the hereditary prince of Wales, clashed with Edward many times over the years before the prince was finally defeated and killed in battle in A.D. 1282. Afterward, his severed head was sent to Edward as a grim trophy of the successful pacification of Wales. The heir to the English throne has borne the title “Prince of Wales” ever since.

As king, Edward set about pacifying neighboring Wales, England’s Irish possessions, and pressing his own claim to the Scottish throne. For the next three decades, he was continually at war with his neighbors: building a line of castles on the Welsh marches; invading Scotland time and again; and everywhere Edward went, blood, pestilence, and famine followed him. In one instance, at Berwick-Upon-Tweed, Edward was so enraged by the resistance of the townspeople that when his forces finally took the city, he ordered the entire population slaughtered.

He didn’t limit his bloodlust to conquered neighbors. Before he expelled the Jews from his kingdom in A.D. 1290, he imprisoned their leaders, hanging 300 of them for no other offense than being Jewish!

Edward even seized the legendary Stone of Scone, an ancient chunk of rock on which Scottish kings had been crowned since prehistoric times (the Scots would not get the stone back until the twentieth century). By this time, the Scottish king was nothing more than the English king’s puppet. Under Edward’s reign, Wales and Ireland were also completely subjugated for the first time.

No wonder when the great man died, his son had carved on his funeral slab “The Hammer of the Scots.” What the Scots thought of this is not exactly printable.

Don’t Let The Name Fool Ya, Redux

( A.D. 1268–1314)

The current occupant is unfit to sit on the throne of Peter.
—Philip IV of France

Philip IV inherited a kingdom beyond broke: his father and grandfather had bankrupted the realm with a series of expensive wars of conquest (including crusades to the Holy Land, for which effort and expenditure the French had exactly nothing to show).

In short order, he turned on those to whom he owed the most money (Jewish moneylenders and the banking house of the Order of the Knights Templar), driving out the Jews and destroying the Templars. Then he insisted on taxing those who had previously enjoyed tax-exempt status—the French possessions of the Catholic Church. This in turn brought the French king into conflict with the papacy, with a surprising result.

Coming to the throne at the age of seventeen in A.D. 1285, Philip tallied what he owed and what was owed him, realized he was in hock to a lot of different people, and promptly set about wringing as much money as he could out of the kingdom’s Jewish residents. After forcing a ruinous special tax on them from A.D. 1291 until 1303, by which time he’d bankrupted most of the Jews still living in France, he expelled them from the kingdom.

Then he turned on the Templars.

These crusader knights had paid the massive ransom that got Philip’s grandfather Louis IX released from Egyptian captivity in A.D. 1254. In the decades since, the interest on this loan had continued to accrue. Exempt from taxation and in position to lend and pass along money (like a medieval Western Union), the Templars were loaded and ripe for the picking.

Rather than make even interest payments on this loan, Philip laid plans, then in A.D. 1307 , seized Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master, and most of the leadership of the order, accusing them of heresy, and torturing confessions out of most of them.

The result? These proceedings gave Philip legal cover to seize the holdings of the Templar bank and use them to pay his debts. Plus, with the order itself destroyed, there was no one to enforce payment of his own massive debt to the Templars!

And then there was the papacy.

Philip insisted on taxing the Church, a move that pissed off the current pope, Boniface VIII, who issued instructions in A.D. 1302 forbidding the French church from paying the tax. When Philip got hold of these instructions, he publicly burned them. Trying the pope in absentia, he questioned his fitness to be pontiff. Moving quickly, he sent French troops to arrest the pope, who died shortly afterward (partly of humiliation). Then he insisted on getting one of his close associates in the French church elected pope, as Clement V. (More on him in Chapter 87.)

Philip IV died in a hunting accident in A.D. 1314, leaving a far more balanced budget than the one he’d inherited. But at what cost in blood and good will?

What’s in a Name?

A very handsome, light-haired, blue-eyed man, Philip was known as “le Bel” during his lifetime. This translated as “the Fair,” but as in “fair-skinned,” not as in “fair-minded.” No one who know him would have called Philip a fair-minded person.

The Man Who Hijacked the Papacy

( A.D. 1264–1314)

for after him will come, in deeds more foul, a lawless shepherd from the west, to trim the two of us and move us down this hole. Another Jason will he be, like him We read of in the book of Maccabees, Who’ll bend the king of France to suit his whim.
—Dante Alleghieri, The Inferno

Raymond Bertrand de Gouth was bought and paid for by the king of France long before he became pope, and he remained the king’s man after being elevated to the papacy in A.D. 1303. He helped Philip IV suppress the order of the Knights Templar and steal their wealth, then agreed to hijack the papacy and move it from Rome (where the mob was rioting daily calling for an Italian pope) to Avignon, where no one would dare riot against either the French pope or the French king!

The reason there was an opening in the papacy was because the previous pope (Benedict IX, for those keeping score at home) had been poisoned by agents of the French king. And before him, Pope Boniface VIII had also been murdered (beaten and left to die of his injuries) by the very same thugs, led by Philip IV’s ruthless hatchet man, William of Nogaret.

In debt to Philip IV of France (who had backed him in his bid for the papacy) who was in turn in debt to the Knights Templar, Clement played ball from the day he was crowned pontiff in Lyon (afraid to go to Rome to be crowned because of the threat of murder at the hands of an increasingly anti-French Roman mob).

Within two years, the Templars had been charged with heresy; their order disbanded by papal decree; their leaders tortured into confessions of bizarre, heretical rituals; their lands, cash, and other property seized—all with Clement’s blessing. In fact, only the pope could have so thoroughly destroyed a holy order such as the Templars, because they served at the pleasure of the pope.

With the Templar corpse barely cold, Clement, still fearful of setting foot in Italy, set up shop in a couple of different locations in southern France, eventually settling on Avignon as the perfect place for his new court. He never returned to Rome during his lifetime, and the papacy stayed in Avignon for seventy years.

In A.D. 1314, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake as a heretic, after nearly seven years in prison. He is alleged to have died with a curse on his lips intended for the two men most responsible for the recent reversal of fortune for himself and his order: Clement V and Philip IV. If this is true, then he got his dying wish. Both men were dead within months of his own expiration, an interesting riff on the whole notion of damnatio memoriae (“damnation of memory”).

Packing the College

One of the first things Clement V did after being confirmed as pontiff was to create nine new cardinal seats and fill them all with Frenchmen. By doing this he not only outraged many of the other cardinals but also ensured that the papacy would stay both in French hands and in France itself for the next seventy years.