Righting wrongs

Finding a new book on the Battle of Crécy seemed like heaven.  It was brand new, untouched, unopened, and best of all it was in a charity shop for a fraction of its cover price.  I was thrilled.  Once home, and without the time to start reading it cover to cover, I decided to see what was said about my fave Emperor, who fought at Crécy.  I wish I hadn't bothered.  What I found there left me feeling very grumpy and unsure if I want to read the rest.

Few things annoy me more than lax research.  I'm not talking about the things that were thought to be correct at time of publication, or that hard-to-track-down detail that you only find when it is too late - these are unavoidable. I'm talking about the things that could have been checked, should have been checked, or those details that have been misunderstood, or taken as truth without corroboration.

This happens, and it annoys me no end.  Along with the above mentioned book, I found similar research 'fails' in another book, a novel, so I think it is time to respond. 

The young Charles

I have already spoken about the person in question - Charles IV of Bohemia, Holy Roman Emperor, and you can read more about him here.

In the text book I leafed through (then tossed aside in bemusement) Charles was scandalously portrayed as being a puppet to his father and a coward who not only arrived late to the battle but then left the field as soon as the going got tough, and then refused to speak about it afterwards.  These opinions appear to be based on English sources which consistently use the phrases 'I know not' and 'so men say' which suggests to me that they hadn't actually got a clue what Charles was up to during the battle and smacks of gossip.  Where the idea that he never mentioned it again came from I have no idea.

However, Czech sources are not so devoid of detail and Charles is recorded as having played an important role in the whole campaign.  He was in Paris and saw the campfires of the English army as it paused at Poissy to repair the bridge.  He was at Saigneville and Blanchetaque on the heels of the English as they forded the Somme to escape the French trap.  He was with the King of France at Crécy itself to advise.

In the battle he charged, possibly even as soon as in the first wave alongside the count of Alençon, the French king's brother who was one of the many high ranking casualties on the French side, and we are told he only left the field again by being dragged away by his men after his father was dead.  He had been injured in the arm twice.  On the demise of his father he became a count and a king twice over so one can understand why his men were so fearful for him - he'd just become the most powerful man in Europe bar the pope.

So we have two groups of sources, English and Czech.  The English sources got their information, well, who knows where.  It is not recorded.  'Men' is as close as we can get, though as one chronicler is Jean Froissart it is assumed that someone close to King Edward gave him the information.  But had this been the case surely Froissart could give names to these eye-witnesses.  So maybe he was not as close to the king's inner circle as has been assumed.  The Czech source is actually two, one derived from the other.  The earlier is by one František Pražský who wrote about Crécy but he fell out of favour with Charles and a new chronicler was appointed, Beneš Krabice z. Weitmile.  We can assume that as Charles appointed him particularly, he had some input over what was written about him.  And Krabice based his account on František's existing work and the account of Crécy was retained, thus, we have to assume, was approved by Charles.  Two chronicles discussing the same event is not what you expect from someone who doesn't want to talk about it.

When examining sources a good researcher will ask various questions - who wrote this? For whom? What was his aim? With what authority did he write? There are others but these are good ones to start with and allow you to build up an idea of the bias, and there is always a bias.  We can say with some certainty that regardless of what happened, Charles approved of the record of events written by František to allow his own chronicler to use it as a base.  Whether František was as much the king's man as Krabice really doesn't matter because what he said was accepted by Charles personally for Krabice to be allowed to continue to use it.  Does this mean it is gospel truth? No, it doesn't, but contains input from a named someone who was indisputably there, unlike the main English source Froissart.

But what of those English sources?  We already know without doubt that Froissart 'made things up' - he gives an account of a conversation between John of Bohemia and his knights that Froissart and no Englishman could possibly have overheard.  The English sources have no particular authority given, no names, unlike the Czech chronicles, but what would the English have to gain by maligning the Emperor?  Plenty actually.  Charles had been elected Holy Roman Emperor just weeks before the battle.  There was, however, already an Emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria, the same Ludwig who was Edward III of England's ally in Europe, and was also his brother-in-law.  Charles also had the ear of the pope, Clement VI who had been Charles' childhood tutor and was no friend to England and who exercised a definite French bias.  Defaming Charles and suggesting he was a coward would have been something of a cheap shot but one that, had it caught on, would have been difficult to dispute in the confusion of battle.  However, there is less out there to suggest the negative view is more true than the positive, that he was an admired, possibly sought-after, warrior and an astute statesman.

Comparing sources is just part of the problem here.  Yes, you can compare and contrast and find the bias, but they are still just a snapshot of an event.  To get a better idea of whether the allegations are believable or just absurd, looking at Charles himself sheds more light.  Was he a coward? What had he done before?  Who was Charles?

The Battle of Crécy from a
French manuscript

And if you look at Charles' life up to 1346 you find a man who was anything but a coward.  Charles fought in his first battle aged fifteen, fighting the forces of several Italian city states whilst protecting his father's interests in Italy.  He was young, even for the times, to lead a force, but he did.  And he nearly lost, having his horse killed under him and yet he stayed, facing certain failure.  But he didn't lose.  He won, and he was knighted there and then.  (I must here point out that this was a year younger than Edward, the Prince of Wales who became known as the Black Prince, the flower of English chivalry and famous warrior who was knighted at sixteen years of age.)  He chose to fight on the side of the Venetians in Italy when he had absolutely no reason to do so.  He fought alongside his father in Lithuania.  He had suffered injuries in his first battle, and went on to fight again.  He rode to war against his rival Ludwig after the events of Crécy.  These are not the actions of a man who was afraid of a battle or of losing his life.  And one must remember that dynastically speaking his survival was not essential - he had a full brother to inherit Bohemia and a half brother destined to take control of Luxembourg.

Two other allegations that are levelled at Charles in the same tome are that he was a puppet of his father and that somehow his youth went against him, referred to several times, rather disparagingly as 'young Charles'.  The first of these is just not true. Charles was his own man.  He changed his name, when only seven years old, not to honour his father but the man who was in reality bringing him up, King Charles IV of France.  Charles did go to Italy when required, at the tender age of fourteen, and began to govern his father's lands.  But he founded a town and called it Montecarlo after himself, not Montegiovanni for his father.  He chose to leave Italy to return to Bohemia, his father only agreeing once it was a fait accompli, where he began to re-establish the monarchy after years of neglect by his father, and that included an army that answered to him.  Raising it to come to the aid of his brother in Tyrol, and thereby proving his own personal power, caused a major rift between him and his father that took years to resolve.  His activities for the Venetians were entirely by his choice - he was keeping out of the way of his father because of the issue with the Bohemian army at the time.

And so to his supposed 'youth' at the battle of Crécy.  Let's have a closer look at the major combatants, from both sides.  Charles was thirty.  King Philip VI of France was fifty-three.  John of Bohemia was fifty. Charles count of Alençon was forty-nine.  Edward III of England was thirty-three.  William Bohun, earl of Northampton was thirty-four.  Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick was thirty-two.  John de Vere, earl of Oxford was thirty-four.  Sir Thomas Holland was thirty-two.  Lord Bartholomew Burghersh was around 26.  Edward, Prince of Wales was sixteen.  Enough said.

It is certainly worth noting how Charles is viewed by the Czech people when examining him and his supposed cowardice and weakness.  My Czech friend's expression of confusion and disbelief when I put this version to her told me pretty much all I needed to know.  However, she explained that Czech children are taught that Charles' survival at Crécy was 'miraculous'.  In 2005 he was voted the greatest Czech to have ever lived and you can read a little more about that here.  There is no suggestion in the national consciousness of a man who fled a battlefield a coward.  Today Czech children learn about Crécy because of Charles and his father, whereas in England, the side who actually won, school children have no idea what it is.

Charles with the crown of the 
Holy Roman Empire

The second book is a work of fiction which left me more deeply disappointed as it was written by an author I had trusted and liked.  Poor fact checking was one sin - stating more than once that the river Seine could be followed from Rennes to Paris was unforgivable.  I mean, how hard is it to check a map? And did no one think to verify this at the editing stage?  Similarly the writer did not check the date of birth of Edward III, referring to him as being thirty-four at Crécy.  Edward was born on 13th November 1312 so he did not turn thirty four for another two and a half months.

But what really rubbed me up the wrong way was how the writer killed off Charles, stating that he bled to death on his father's body.  It is such a bizarre thing to do.  His 'death' wasn't a plot twist, a device to further the story, and there was no tension created by it, no conflict.  It served no purpose except to be wrong.  Surely it would have been better to leave Charles out of it altogether than to go so disastrously astray.  

And as if to underline the inaccuracies in the novel, the author also kills off King Jaume III of Mallorca who, like Charles, fought for the French.  Jaume did die in battle, but not this battle.  He perished in the battle of Llucmajor, Mallorca, on 25th October 1349.  His input into the battle of Crécy is sketchy at best and he certainly didn't distinguish himself, but he survived it.  There is one more high profile victim of this author - the Count of St Pol was also slain at this fictional version of Crécy.  Guy de Chatillon, who became Count of St Pol in 1344, died in London in 1360 serving as a hostage following the Treaty of Brétigny. The treaty allowed for the release of King John of France, who had been captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, in exchange for other hostages and Guy was one of those.

So that is three very high ranking people who were erroneously killed off at Crécy who in reality went on to live for years, thirty-two more years in the case of Charles.  Did the author know?  Did he care?

I am staggered to discover how little-known Charles is in England - and I was just as guilty until last year, but then I'm not a professional historian nor serious novelist - still more that such things as his supposed death at Crécy can be accepted so readily and without question, and can be written by someone without a stab of guilt.  One day, maybe, I will contact the author and simply ask why he did it, but until then I will sit and fume to myself and continue to write about what an extraordinary man Charles really was.