The Murder of Charles the Good

 Charles the Good, count of Flanders, was murdered in 1127.  The details of the plot, the murder, and the consequences are told in several contemporary accounts.  The events reveal much about twelfth-century attitudes and social expectations, starting with the fact that the complicated alliances, betrayals, and plots seen in Game of Throne are mild compared to the real Middle Ages.

To start, Charles was only half Flemish (we would say Belgian, except that Belgium only became a country in the nineteenth century) and half Danish.  Members of great noble and royal families married members of similarly powerful families, meaning that in the twelfth century family ties stretched across all of Europe, even into Russia.

Charles was the son of Cnut, king of Denmark, and of the daughter of Count Robert I of Flanders.  The name Charles was certainly chosen to evoke Charlemagne, emperor three centuries earlier and still alive in epic and story.  The counts of Flanders actually were descended from Charlemagne, as they were very proud to tell anyone who would listen, and in naming his son Charles, King Cnut may have been hoping to gain some imperial cachet for Denmark.  His assassination ended that hope, however.

Although born in Denmark, Charles went with his mother back to Flanders after his father was assassinated.  Noble widows at the time usually left their children with their dead husband's family if they left, but Charles's mother may have feared Cnut's assassins might be coming for her son (she did leave her daughters in Denmark).  He was a toddler at the time, so he probably grew up with few memories of his native country.

His mother settled back in Flanders with her father (Count Robert) and brothers but soon left again, this time to marry the count of Apulia (southern Italy), leaving her son behind this time.  Charles was principally raised by his grandfather, Count Robert, and by his uncle (Robert's successor), also named Robert.  After Robert II's death, his son Baldwin succeeded as count of Flanders, and Charles acted as chief advisor for his cousin.  (Keeping up so far?)

So far everything looks fine, other than nothing matching our idea of a child being raised by a loving two-parent family.  And when Count Baldwin died in 1119, after only a short reign as count, he designated Charles as his successor.  But now the plotting and betrayals begin.  Robert II's widow, Clementia, daughter of the count of Burgundy, wanted a different cousin to succeed, the son of a younger brother of Robert II.  (Thus Burgundy and its alliances enter the picture, and I'm simplifying a lot.)  Everybody went to war with everybody.

But Charles eventually prevailed and settled down to try to be a just count, trying to find food for his subjects during a famine, seeking to pass fair judgments in legal cases.  He also proved himself a generous patron of the church.  When he was murdered, it was not by all his relatives and in-laws, but by his serfs.

In this period, the first quarter of the twelfth century, serfdom was rapidly disappearing in western Europe, as peasants asserted their freedom.  Erembald, who led the conspiracy against Charles, was said by contemporaries to have been born a serf but to be trying to hide his origins, and he decided it was better to kill Charles than to have the count reveal his true status.  This sounds rather implausible, but that contemporaries would say it is an indication of how sensitive an issue servile status was at the time.

Charles was murdered in church, something contemporaries stressed as making an evil deed even worse.  In fact, one chronicler said he was simultaneously praying, singing psalms, and distributing pennies to the poor when he was stabbed.  (Quite the multi-tasker.)  Such a description made Charles's death a virtual martyrdom; someone would have to be killed for one's faith to be an actual martyr, but the chronicler seemed to think this was close enough.

The murder was considered terrible and shocking, sending shock waves throughout Europe.  The Scandinavian royal families had been trying to kill each other off for generations, but further south aristocrats liked to believe they lived in modern, peaceful times, when noble violence was restricted to killing Muslims in the Holy Land (it wasn't).

Charles never became a saint, in spite of being killed in a church and designated "the Good."  Without an heir, he left Flanders in turmoil.  First of course the murderers had to be caught and hung.  Then a successor had to be found.  King Louis VI of France decided he should make the decision as to who succeeded, as Flanders was considered part of the French kingdom.  He settled on William Clito, grandson of William the Conqueror of England, whose wife had been a sister of Robert I of Flanders.  But William Clito had little support, and the county was taken within a year by Thierry of Alsace, whose mother was a sister of Robert II of Flanders.

Can't ignore the role of women in medieval inheritance.

The principal scholar now working on Charles the Good is Jeff Rider of Wesleyan University.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval families, nobles, and inheritance, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

The Hussites

 As I have noted before, the majority culture of Europe's Middle Ages was Christianity, but there was often strong disagreement over what Christianity entailed and which version was the correct version.  We are used to varieties of Christianity in the US, Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Episcopalians, Baptists, Unitarians, Lutherans, and I'm just scratching the surface.  The difference is that for the most part people have a laissez-faire attitude these days toward other versions of religion, whereas for the most part medieval people found such variety deeply concerning.

(Though I should note that my mother, as a little girl in a nice Methodist household, was told rather triumphantly by her Catholic playmate that her parents weren't really married, that she was a bastard and not really baptized, and that she was going to Hell.)

The Hussites were a group of followers of John Hus in the late Middle Ages, labeled as heretics although, like all heretics, they asserted they were the true Christians and the others the actual heretics.  You can really only tell who was "really" the heretic by who ultimately won.  This isn't as cynical as you'd think.  Medieval Christians figured God would ultimately make sure the real Christians triumphed in the end.  It all made sense.

John Hus (1369-1415) was a theologian in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic.  He became a professor at the University of Prague, then recently established.  He was perfectly orthodox, that is considered to have correct religious beliefs, though like many theologians arguing over doctrine he periodically got into trouble with his archbishop.  But he started questioning the church's practice of having lay people receive Mass with the wafer only, rather than both wine and wafer.  This had been established in the early Middle Ages out of fear that lay people might either spill or chug-a-lug the wine, neither appropriate for the Blood of Christ.  (Indeed, this continued in Catholicism until the Vatican iI council in the 1960s.)

Hus argued that the Bible showed Jesus urging his disciples at the Last Supper to partake of both bread and wine.  Those who agreed with him were called Utraquists, from the Latin for "both" (utraque).  Though Hus had been a respected theologian, this contrary teaching was considered deeply troubling.  Europe's bishops were at the time trying to resolve the Great Schism, where there were three different men all claiming to be pope (one each in Rome and Avignon, plus a third left over from a failed earlier council), and they called a council at Constance in 1415 to resolve this, and figured they'd start the council with something easier, like deciding what to do with the Utraquists.

Hus was invited to the council to present his arguments.  The emperor Sigismund said he'd guarantee his safety.  If you check Hus's death date, you can tell where this is going.  He was ruled a heretic, the emperor said he couldn't honor the safe-conduct he'd given a heretic, and Hus went to the stake rather than renounce his beliefs.  Even today, you do not tell Sigismund jokes in Bohemia.

(As I've noted before, I'd have made a lousy heretic, as at the first sign of burning at the stake I'd have renounced my "false" beliefs so fast it would make your head spin.  But that's just me.)

Hus's followers, now called Hussites, immediately rebelled against the emperor.  They carried out guerrilla warfare, dragging cannons through the woods to blast imperial soldiers.  At a certain point the organized church, which had in the meantime managed to resolve the schism and settled on having the pope just be one more Renaissance tyrant, basically decided to let the Hussites be heretics if they wanted to endanger their souls so badly, "see if we care."  Utraquists were still around as the Protestant Reformation got underway a century later, further complicating things.  But that story takes us out of the Middle Ages.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval Christianity and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.