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 2024

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

Dragons

Medieval-themed fantasy often includes dragons (mine does).  But where did the dragons come from?  The fact that western Europe, India, and China all have dragons in their folklore has made some speculate that dinosaurs somehow survived in hiding until a few centuries ago, coming out just often enough to be seen and join the folklore.  This is of course wildly improbable, but it's fun to imagine.

But let's look at what dragons are supposed to look like.  They are now usually portrayed as having four legs plus wings, as in the above image from 1890.  (Does this mean they are a form of insect?  I'll say No.)  This makes them quite different from Chinese dragons, which while long and snaky and (usually) four-legged do not have wings.  They do however tend to have big floppy ears.  The image below shows the Chinese flag from the Qing dynasty (c. 1900).  Chinese dragons are not nearly as ferocious as western ones, but you still wouldn't want to tangle with one.

Medieval dragons in the west might have neither wings nor legs.  They were indeed often called Worms.  Twelfth- and thirteenth-century images of Saint George or Saint Michael overcoming a dragon (such as seen below) usually showed a long, scaly creature closer to a snake than anything else.  Our modern word dragon indeed comes from Latin draco, meaning a huge serpent or sea-serpent.

By the late Middle Ages distinctions were sometimes made between dragons, which had four legs, and wyverns, which had only two (plus wings), but really they were all dragons the whole time.  They became common in heraldry, and kings and armies adopted them as symbols of courage and might (as in stories of Arthur Pendragon).  For that matter, Roman legions had often used dragon-heads on their standards.

In medieval Norse culture, a common man's name was Orm, meaning literally worm (related to our modern English word) but really meaning dragon.  The Vikings put dragon-heads on their ships.  (You may recall that in The Hobbit Tolkien had Smaug called a worm as well as a dragon.)

Dragons appeared in occasional medieval stories, most notably in Beowulf, where the hero went out as an old king to defeat one and save his people, which he did but died in the process.  Siegfried/Sigurd, in both the Norse Saga of the Volsungs and the German Nibelungenlied, got his start by killing a dragon, who had originally been a human before greed for gold turned him into a dragon.

Dragons, you will notice, are bad in these accounts, deserving to be killed.  George RR Martin has kept the ferocity of medieval dragons in his Song of Ice and Fire (inspiration for "Game of Thrones"), even though they can be befriended.  But medieval dragons could take other forms as well.

One medieval monk said that he had seen a dragon (the only account we have of someone saying he really had seen one, rather than telling a story that included one).  His doesn't match any of the stories.  He described it as what we would think of as a blimp, hundreds of yards long, legless, floating in the air.  He was understandably surprised and observed it for an hour or more.  For him, its principal issue was as a sign or portent, and he had to figure out what it portended.  He ended up deciding it was like Leviathan in the Bible.  Leviathan, principally known from the Book of Job as a huge, horrible monster did breathe fire (as do modern depictions of dragons), though the monk's floating dragon did not.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval literature, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Castles in TV/movies

A challenge for American film makers and TV producers is getting good backdrops for costume dramas.  They can manage a story set in the 1950s or even 1930s.  There are plenty of small towns (and even neighborhoods in large cities) with streets where all the buildings were built before WW II, and thus all the producers really need to do is get the modern cars off the streets and make sure the people in the background aren't wearing jeans and hoodies.

But for pretty much any story set before the twentieth century, finding a good location is a challenge.  For a long time movies avoided the challenge by having everything take place on sets constructed for the purpose.  Need a trackless forest?  Paint a picture of it and stick it behind the actors.  Need a scene inside a castle's great hall?  Easy.  Build a plywood wall and paint a stone wall on it.  A little grey paint, and there you are.

This works for live drama.  People going to a play are perfectly aware that they are sitting in a theatre, watching people on a stage.  They can deal with painted plywood passed off as a stone wall.  But those watching movies or, these days, a lot of TV shows want things to look realistic.

European producers have it a lot easier because they have a lot of old buildings on hand already.  American producers will travel to Europe to find good locations.  Now, there's a lot of mix-and-match that producers use with their locations.  The hero may walk down a street in one village, walk up the front steps of a house not actually in that village, and go into an interior of still a different house.  The scenes are stitched together so it looks like the scene is all the same place, but the clever locations manager has found the best exteriors and interiors for the story, even if they aren't all actually together.

Dramatization of  Jane Austen novels, set in the early nineteenth century, can use real places like the city of Bath (a spa town then and now) and have a choice of British country houses for the homes of the heroines, either exterior or interior or both.  If one looks closely one may see the plastic plates on interior doors that are put on to keep a swinging door from being worn down by constant hands, or a sign by the front door that tells you the hours the house is open to tours, but they still do a good job of looking authentic.

Shows like "Downton Abbey" have the advantage that they can use both the exterior and the interior of Highclere castle (not actually a castle, a late eighteenth-century manor house that is in the south of England, not in Yorkshire where "Downton Abbey" is set).  But the old servants' quarters no longer exist, so those scenes at least are shot in a studio.  Highclere itself has benefited mightily from the show, and tours now go there, and you can have tours, enjoy a high tea, and buy souvenirs.

Some of the settings for the "Game of Thrones" show are hoping for a comparable tourist surge.  An example is the castle of Doune in Scotland (shown above), whose great hall was used for the great hall of the castle of Winterfell in the show.  It's smaller than the great, sprawling Winterfell of the story, and it's partly ruined, but it's still a very nice castle.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on castles and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

The War of the Roses

Many people with only minimal interest in late medieval British history have gained a new appreciation for the War of the Roses because George R. R. Martin has said that it inspired him.  His "Song of Ice and Fire" series of books has been made into a popular TV series as "Game of Thrones."  The real War of the Roses was between two branches of the royal family, called the Yorks and the Lancasters, whose names inspired Martin's Starks and Lannisters.  If you look at Martin's map of Westeros, you will see that it is the same shape as Great Britain (though flipped), with The Wall up around where Hadrian's Wall stretched across Britain during the late Roman Empire.

The name, "War of the Roses," sounds like something sweet.  It was not.  It was an extremely nasty civil war, fought with gunpowder, cannons, and conscripted foot soldiers.  At its most basic, it was a war between two related families, both of whom thought that the English crown should be theirs.  It started in 1455, only two years after the English had finished losing the Hundred Years' War with France, and lasted, with on-and-off fighting, for the next thirty years.  Let's just say that if you liked warfare, fifteenth-century England was the place to be.

We tend to think of the crown as descending in a tidy way from father to oldest son, but royal inheritance never was tidy in England.  The difficulties that led to the War of the Roses started innocuously enough with King Edward III (1327-1377) and his four sons, Edward, Lionel, John "of Gaunt," and Edmund.  So far, so good, heirs and back-up heirs.

Edward, called "the Black Prince" (he was proud of his special black armor), was a great war leader during the Hundred Years War but did not live long enough to succeed his long-lived father.  No problem--he had a son who succeeded as Richard II.

But Richard II died childless.  So the crown went to his first cousin, John of Gaunt's son Henry IV.  This is the line that became known as the Lancasters, whose emblem was the red rose.  But wait! you say.  How about Lionel and his heirs?  Well, that's exactly what Lionel's descendants wanted to know.  But Lionel had not had sons, only daughters, which is why his line was skipped over.

The Lancasters hung onto the throne for the next two generations, but Lionel's descendants remained grumpy.  Then, Lionel's great-granddaughter married the duke of York, a descendant of Edmund, who you will remember was King Edward III's youngest son, and whose emblem was the white rose.  The war was on.

Initially the Yorks won, but then they turned on each other.  Richard III (a York) became king in 1483 after the mysterious death in the Tower of London of his young nephews, his royal older brother's sons, who one would have thought were heirs to the throne.  Ever since then, Richard III has had a bad reputation, although there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate him.  Richard's bones were recently found in England under a parking lot.

The above is a simplified version of a very messy and complicated series of conflicts.  The point is that relatives can hate each other much more bitterly than they hate non-relatives.  The war did clear out an awful lot of England's aristocracy, especially branches of the royal family.  The eventual winner was neither a York nor a Lancaster, but Henry Tudor, who was Welsh, and who became Henry VII after he defeated Richard III in 1485.

On the one hand, this shows that winning battles is more important than being the "rightful heir," especially as no one had been able to agree for thirty years who was the "rightful heir."  But Henry VII did have connections to both Yorks and Lancasters, a detail he made sure everyone recognized.  His mother was a descendant of a younger son of John of Gaunt, and hence could be called a Lancaster, and his wife was a sister of the York "princes in the Tower."  At this point, everyone was so exhausted that no one tried to raise any more issues.


© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Game of Thrones

George Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series of books, dramatized as "Game of Thrones" on HBO, has gotten a lot of people interested in the Middle Ages.  Those of you who have been reading these posts know that there was a whole lot to the Middle Ages that did not involve knights whacking each other with enormous swords or people riding across an empty landscape, but the books (and the shows) have made a good-faith effort toward historical realism, at least in the look.

The Starks and the Lannisters, as Martin has said, are clearly rooted in origin in the Yorks and the Lancasters, two branches of the English royal family engaged in a debilitating war in the fifteenth century.  The real war, called the War of the Roses because one family had a red rose for their emblem and one a white, was fought with gunpowder and cannons, rather than knights, but like Martin's imagined wars, it killed off an awful lot of people, most of whom knew each other and had been cousins and allies, and was full of treachery and deceit.

The armor and weaponry in the show are based on real late medieval tournament armor and weapons.  It is rather ironic that these were perfected in the late Middle Ages just as their use in real battles became irrelevant.  Of course, real medieval people would not sleep in their armor--it would be far too uncomfortable.  One senses that the show has used aluminum rather than iron.

Martin made up his own religion (indeed religions) for the Seven Kingdoms, none of which look much like Christianity.  Probably the closest any of the depicted religions come to medieval Christianity is the Ironmen's faith in the Drowned God.  I have to commend Martin for including religion; a lot of modern fantasy pretends it's not there.  The dominant religion of Westeros is based on seven gods, and thus Martin has a church-equivalent called a sept, which makes sense as that is the Latin root for "seven," but it does also make one think "septic" in a disturbing way.

The cities in the show use some of Europe's oldest cities as backdrop, where there really are winding, narrow cobbled streets even today.  However, medieval Europe's cities never had nearly as many brothels.  The Free Cities are vaguely Mediterranean, some modeled fairly directly on Venice.  The cities of Slaver's Bay seem a combination of north Africa and central Asia.  That's the advantage of fantasy--you can mix and match.

People sometimes assume that as a medievalist I won't like the show.  I like it just fine, because it doesn't pretend to be historically-accurate medieval yet has a good pseudo-medieval feel.  My own stories, of course, are not nearly as dark and grim, but I really like Martin's characters.

I've enjoyed the books for the 20 or so years they've been out (come on, Martin, you need to pick up the pace a little).  And I think the writers of the show--including Martin himself--have done a good job of keeping true to the spirit of the books even while radically pruning characters and events and rearranging their order.

The danger with the new season is that they may catch up to the books.  Are next year's shows going to contain spoilers for those who are reading?  Starts April 12.

Click here for more of my thoughts on medieval-themed fantasy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015