The Book of Ancient Bastards (28 page)

Don’t Let the Name Fool Ya

(CA. A.D. 1160–1216)

Use against heretics the spiritual sword of excommunication, and if this does not prove effective, use the material sword.
—Pope Innocent III

Notwithstanding the name he took as pope, there was nothing innocent about the man born Lotario dei Conti. A powerbroker in church circles for a decade before he assumed the shoes of the fisherman at age thirty-eight in A.D. 1198, Innocent III proved one of the most ruthless and effective of medieval popes, a far cry from such bumblers and dilettantes as Stephen VI and Benedict IX. And yet in his treatment of heretics and in his efforts to launch the Fourth Crusade, Innocent showed himself to be an unmitigated bastard.

To begin with, Innocent was one of those most dangerous of men: a religious zealot. And he was big on signs from God. As a result, he accepted his election as just such a sign from the guy upstairs that the Church needed protecting (from external enemies) and cleansing (to deal with internal enemies). In other words, Innocent III looked around him and saw nothing but foes.

The result was a couple of holy wars: the Fourth Crusade, launched in A.D. 1198 and intended to retrieve the Holy Land from Muslim nonbelievers (enemies without) and the Albigensian Crusade, launched against practitioners of the Cathar heresy (Christians who did not accept the rule of the papacy and had other dangerous ideas about Jesus, his mother, and, of course, God).

Innocent’s call for a crusade to free the Holy Land resulted in a bloody invasion of Palestine, and also led directly to the sack of Constantinople (whose residents were Orthodox Christians). Leaving out the havoc this crusade wreaked on the Muslim and Jewish occupants of Palestine (who didn’t count to Christians in that day and age), the pope was horrified by what happened next: the murder and rape of tens of thousands of the city’s Christian residents. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that some of the knights who answered his call to arms would regard Orthodox Christians as enemies.

Innocent’s conflict with the Cathars of southern France, on the other hand, left no such bad taste in his mouth. In A.D. 1208, a representative the pope had sent to negotiate with the nobles giving protection to these heretics wound up murdered. Innocent’s response was swift and brutal. Any person making war on these Cathars, he said, was entitled to their property; furthermore, he said, any Catholic allowing Cathars to live among them unmolested was no good Catholic, and their lives and property ought to also be forfeited.

The result?

Tens of thousands killed over the following twenty-year period, and the rich culture of southern France completely destroyed.

But Innocent didn’t live to see any of this. He died suddenly in A.D. 1216 , his last crusade still incomplete.

Bastard in His Own Words

[I]t grieves us most of all that, against the orthodox faith, there are now arising more . . . ministers of diabolical error who are ensnaring the souls of the simple and ruining them. . . . You shall exercise the rigor of the ecclesiastical power against them and all those who have made themselves suspected by associating with them. They may not appeal from your judgments, and if necessary, you may cause the princes and people to suppress them with the sword.

“That Son of Perdition”

( A.D. 1158–1186)

[O]verflowing with words, soft as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the seemingly indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite and a dissembler.
—Gerald of Wales, archdeacon of Brecon

If ever there was a prototypical schemer, it was Geoffrey Plantagenet, the fourth son of Henry II of England and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to our sources, this duke of Brittany’s only saving grace was his charm.

Henry II had the dubious distinction of inspiring very little loyalty in his sons—as denoted by the fact that all four of the ones who survived to adulthood seem to have been constantly either plotting against him or actually at war with him (and with each other). And the worst among this “Devil’s Brood” was his fourth son, Geoffrey.

Geoffrey started out his career as a bastard early, joining a rebellion against his father before his sixteenth birthday. It would not be the last time he intrigued against the old king, and his most frequent dance partner in this sort of treason was not one of his brothers but the duplicitous son of his mother’s first husband, Philip Augustus, the king of France.

In fact, the two men were so close that Philip appointed Geoffrey his seneschal, a court official of immense power, acting as the king’s personal representative in instances when the king himself was absent.

But it’s not as if either man was the other’s puppet. They were both constantly scheming (there’s that word again) for personal gain; in Geoffrey’s case, he was looking to expand his power base from the duchy of Brittany (he had received it as a wedding present when he married the heir of the previous duke in A.D. 1181), usually at the expense of either his father or his brothers. Geoffrey literally went to war with a relative no less than twenty times during the last ten years of his life.

In the end, all of his machinations served him not one whit. Geoffrey died young, aged just twenty-seven, at the court of his close friend and benefactor, Philip Augustus. Accounts vary as to the cause of his death, but he most likely died after being trampled during a joust.

According to several eyewitnesses, Philip was so grief-stricken by Geoffrey’s death that he tried to jump into the casket with Geoffrey at the duke’s funeral.

Whether anyone else mourned the arch-schemer’s passing is not recorded.

Irreligious Bastard

Truly one of the “Devil’s Brood,” Geoffrey had a novel way of covering his expenses when he found himself short of cash (which he often did). He would simply find and loot the closest church property, be it monastery, abbey, or simple parish church. It didn’t much matter to him whether the clerical establishment he was currently treating as the medieval equivalent of an ATM was on his land or on that of another lord. To Geoffrey, they were all fair game. Worst still, he seems to have truly relished the prospect of looting churches. Small wonder that his contemporaries among church chroniclers are unanimous in their disdain for this particular Plantagenet!

Short, Miserly, and Mean

( A.D. 1167–1216)

After King John had captured Arthur [duke of Brittany and John’s nephew] and kept him alive in prison for some time, at length, in the castle of Rouen, after dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he was drunk and possessed by the devil, he slew him with his own hand and, tying a heavy stone to the body, cast it into the Seine. It was discovered by a fisherman in his net and, being dragged to the shore and recognised, was taken for secret burial in fear of the tyrant, to the priory of Bec called Notre Dame des Pres.
—Annals of the Abbey of Margam

The youngest of the so-called “Devil’s Brood,” and certainly the least among the sons of Henry II, John Plantagenet has come down through history with a well-deserved reputation for venality, cowardice, treachery, and vanity. The legendary near-comic foil of the mythical outlaw Robin Hood, the truth about John Lackland (as he was called while still a young prince) is far darker than the legend. Because in the final accounting there was nothing comic about the vicious little bastard known to history as King John of England.

Despite his flaws, John was, for some strange reason, his father’s favorite, even after he joined Henry’s other sons in rebellion while still a teenager.

By all measures except one, John was a failure as a monarch and as a man. While ruling in his brother Richard’s name while Richard was on crusade, he stripped the kingdom bare, supposedly to pay Richard’s ransom after he’d been taken captive by the duke of Austria. (John kept the money.)

After Richard’s death, once he became king and ruler of the so-called “Angevin Empire,” which encompassed not just England and Ireland but all of western France, John found himself outmaneuvered time and again by the crafty King Philip Augustus of France, with the result that through a combination of war and diplomacy Philip stripped him of most of his French possessions, including the all-important duchy of Normandy. The result was that John died with far fewer French possessions than any English king since William the Conqueror crossed the Channel in A.D. 1066.

Cruel Bastard

John enjoyed seeing people suffer but lacked the fortitude to do it himself (except when dead drunk, as in the example quoted above). He favored starving those who displeased him to death, as was the case of Maud of Saint-Valery and her son, whom he locked up in the dungeon of their own castle. But his cruelty didn’t stop there: stories of the ingenious tortures he inflicted on his subjects and his enemies include tales of people roasted alive, blinded with vinegar, and hung by the thumbs. One old goat, a self-styled prophet named Peter of Wakefield, foolishly prophesied that John would not be king after the next anniversary of his ascension. When John got wind of this, he had the man thrown into prison until after Ascension Day had passed, then dragged him behind a horse for several miles and had him hanged. Then he turned around and did the same thing to Peter’s son!

The one area where John was successful where most of his brothers failed was in siring children. He had at least five legitimate children and twelve acknowledged bastards.

His greatest failure might also have been his greatest gift to future generations of subjects. In order to pay for his many pointless wars in France, John had bled the country dry. And since he had targeted the Church in these depredations as well, he had no backing when a group of nobles rose against him and forced the concessions that became known as the Magna Carta, an important step in the establishment of democracy, shortly before his death in A.D. 1215.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences!