The Book of Ancient Bastards (32 page)

Why Let Brotherhood Stand in the Way of Your Territorial Ambitions?

( A.D. 1323–1385)

The count de Vertus, whose name was John Galeas Visconti, and his uncle were the greatest personages in all Lombardy. Sir Galeas and sir Bernabo were brothers, and had peaceably reigned and governed that country. One of these lords possessed nine cities, and the other ten; the city of Milan was under their government alternately, one year each. When sir Galeas, the father of the count de Vertus, died, the affections of the uncle for his nephew were much weakened; and sir Galeas suspected, that now his father was dead, his uncle Bernabo would seize his lordships, in like manner as sir Galeas, his father, and uncle Bernabo had done to their brother sir Matthew, whom they had put to death.
—Jean Froissart, Chronicles

Scion of a family that had ruled Milan for well over one hundred years (off and on) by the time he was born, Bernabò Visconti was an energetic ruler, first with his two brothers, then with one, and finally by himself ( A.D. 1378–1385), until giving way to his nephew Gian Galeazzo, the greatest of the Visconti rulers of Milan. He was also a fratricidal despot who taxed the residents of Milan into poverty in order to bankroll the incessant wars he fought with a series of popes and rival cities such as Venice and Verona, all in an attempt to make himself master of northern Italy.

Capable of great charm when it suited him, Bernabò was also notorious for his ironic cruelty. At one point excommunicated by the pope, Bernabò received the two papal emissaries who brought the fancy order of excommunication (parchment embossed with a lead seal and tied with a silken cord), listened as they read the documents aloud, and when they tried to present the document, had them seized and held until they ate the order, parchment, seal, cord, and all!

Before his brother died, the two men devised a particularly sadistic form of torture that mimicked portions of the Bible, lasting up to forty days. Not surprisingly, most of their victims died within the first few days.

After his brother Galeazzo’s death in A.D. 1378 , Bernabò ruled alone, freezing out his nephew Gian Galeazzo. Fearing that Bernabò might poison him as he had his own elder brother (see sidebar), Gian Galeazzo caught Bernabò unsuspecting, traveling between cities with a light escort, seized his uncle, and threw him in prison. Then, in an ironic echo of Bernabò’s own actions with his brother Matteo, Gian Galeazzo had his uncle poisoned.

Bunch of poisonous bastards!

Bastard Brothers

Bernabò initially shared power with his two brothers, Matteo and Galeazzo. But where Galeazzo, a patron of the early Renaissance poet Petrarch, was intelligent, educated, and cultured, Matteo was another matter entirely. The eldest and roughest of the three brothers, Matteo possessed all the viciousness for which the Visconti were notorious, and none of the ability they also possessed (especially their talent for governing). Increasingly a liability to the two other brothers (they were supposed to alternate ruling Milan every year, in a three-year rotation), Matteo was murdered at a feast in A.D. 1355, poisoned by his own brothers. Ruthless bastards!

The Nickname Says It All, Redux

( A.D. 1332–1387)

In the year of the sea-battle off Winchelsea, Philip VI of France died and was succeeded by John II, ‘the Good’. Though there was a temporary lull in the war with England, the new King’s internal difficulties were soon increased by the intrigues of his cousin, Charles ‘the Bad’, King of Navarre, who had rival claims to the French throne. Early in 1356 Charles of Navarre was seized and put in prison, but his family and the vassals of his fiefs in Normandy continued to give trouble, in alliance with the English.
—Jean Froissart, Chronicles

The king of Navarre (a small kingdom in the Pyrenees Mountains split between modern-day southern France and northern Spain), Charles II (“le Mauvais”: “the Bad”) married the daughter of his rival John II (“le Bon”: “the Good”), king of France, and intrigued against him for the rest of his life. A schemer and malcontent, Charles changed sides in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France more times than an obsessive-compulsive changes socks. Using Navarre the way William the Conqueror used England (as a source of revenue), Charles plotted to kill the king of France, and succeeded in having his top government official murdered, then went on to suffer a gruesome death of his own.

Initially an enthusiastic supporter of John the Good (he served as his authorized lieutenant in several campaigns and married his daughter), Charles was livid when in A.D. 1353, John gave the fiefdoms of Angoulême, Brie, and Champagne to his constable Charles de la Cerda (known generally as “Charles of Spain”). Our Charles (the bad one) believed the territories belonged to him, as they had been taken from his mother by previous French kings, with very little in the way of compensation. He ended up picking a quarrel with Charles of Spain.

Death of a Bastard

Charles died in a grotesque manner later described in lurid detail by medieval chronicler Francis Blagdon: “Charles the Bad, having fallen into such a state of decay that he could not make use of his limbs, consulted his physician, who ordered him to be wrapped up from head to foot, in a linen cloth impregnated with brandy, so that he might be inclosed (sic) in it to the very neck as in a sack. It was night when this remedy was administered. One of the female attendants of the palace, charged to sew up the cloth that contained the patient, having come to the neck, the fixed point where she was to finish her seam, made a knot according to custom; but as there was still remaining an end of thread, instead of cutting it as usual with scissors, she had recourse to the candle, which immediately set fire to the whole cloth. Being terrified, she ran away, and abandoned the king, who was thus burnt alive in his own palace.”

Eventually the quarrel resulted in (our) Charles plotting to have (the other) Charles assassinated; setting his own brother Philip, count of Longueville, and a bunch of hired thugs on the man’s trail. Once they caught up with him, Philip said, “Charles of Spain, I am Philip, son of a king, whom you have foully slandered.”

And then they beat him to death.

Leveraging his good relations with the English king Edward III, Charles got John to explicitly pardon him and his men for the murder of his constable a few months later. By the terms of this treaty (the Peace of Mantes), Charles also received substantial tracts in Normandy as compensation for the territories his mother had lost.

Over the course of the next two decades, Charles would be at the center of no less than ten different plots to dispossess the French Valois rulers, with the disastrous result that by A.D. 1379 , Charles had been stripped of all of his French possessions, and barely held on to his crown.

Crazy Like a Pope

(CA. A.D. 1318–1389)

He lacked Christian gentleness and charity. He was naturally arbitrary and extremely violent and imprudent, and when he came to deal with the burning ecclesiastical question of the day, that of reform, the consequences were disastrous.
—Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes

An orphan from the back alleys of Naples who rose through the ranks of the Catholic Church through a combination of intelligence, hard work, austerity, and honesty, Bartolomeo Prignano became Pope Urban VI to the cheers of the Roman mob, who had called for a return to having Italian popes (“or else!”) after seventy years of French ones.

The only problem was that becoming Urban VI apparently drove the previously mild-mannered Bartolomeo Prignano nuts.

Urban immediately began scolding the very cardinals who had elected him about the need for reform, including discouraging them from accepting gifts, such as cash annuities, from foreign dignitaries (a common practice in the moldering swamp of corruption that was the late medieval church hierarchy). Needless to say, this went over about as well as a fart in church.

Part of the problem was that Urban had never been a cardinal, only an archbishop, and some of the cardinals who had been passed over were naturally prone to be resentful.

A number of these cardinals (all of them French) met at Anagni and invited the pope to meet with them to discuss their concerns. Smelling a rat—it was entirely possible the cardinals would kidnap him, cart him off to France, and force him to reign at Avignon—Urban stayed away. So these same French cardinals took the extraordinary step of excommunicating him and nominating one of their number (Robert of Geneva) as Clement VII, who came to be called the anti-pope. The church was broken apart in a schism and stayed that way until A.D. 1417.

Having helped to cause the rift, Urban would not live to see it healed. During the twelve years of his pontificate he attempted (mostly futilely) to reassert the secular authority of the pope in the Italian peninsula. Most of the nobles there had grown used to running their own shows with minimal church interference during the seventy years that the papacy had been centered at Avignon. They resented Urban’s attempt to turn back the clock.

By A.D. 1385, Urban found himself bottled up by opposing forces during a long siege in the Italian town of Nocera. While there, he imprisoned five of his cardinals for disloyalty. Dragging them along when he finally got clear of Nocera, Urban eventually sentenced these unfortunate men to death, having all but one of them either sewn up in burlap sacks and tossed into the sea or buried alive.

Four years later Urban joined these same men in death, leaving a divided Christendom and a chaotic situation in Italy.

Crazy bastard.

Golden Rule

Before becoming pope, Archbishop Prignano was in charge of the collection of tithes for most of Italy. So he knew where the gold was collected from, where it was taken, and how it was spent. In the course of doing this job, he developed an uncanny head for business, something rare in late medieval church officials.