Women as Regents

 As I have noted previously, medieval aristocratic women had far more authority and ability to make major decisions than is often assumed.  One of the clearest examples of this is the role of powerful women as regents.

A regent is someone who rules, specifically in the name of someone else, awaiting the time when that person becomes an adult or comes back from far away.  If the lord of a castle headed off on Crusade, for example, his wife would normally act as regent until his return.  If the lord died and his children, his heirs or heiresses, were not yet old enough to rule in their own right, their mother would rule until they came of age.

The same was true of counts and dukes, even kings.  Marie de France, a French princess who married the count of Champagne, probably ruled longer than he did.  Adela of Blois, a member of the English royal family, similarly brought up her children and ran the county of Blois during her husband's repeated absences.  Sometimes powerful women ran the county for several generations, arranging the marriages of children and grandchildren.  Mathilda, countess of Nevers in the thirteenth century, guided her daughters. granddaughters, and great-granddaughters into advantageous marriages.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of Aquitaine, then queen of France, then queen of England during the final two-thirds of the twelfth century, did not keep having retired to a nunnery prevent her from emerging to make major decisions for her children or grandchildren or for that matter for England as a whole.

One of the most powerful regents was Blanche of Castile, queen of France (she was originally from Spain, hence called "of Castile").  Whe her husband Louis VIII died in 1226 after a short reign (you never hear much about Louis VIII, do you), she took over running the kingdom.  She proposed her oldest son as king of England (the English refused the offer), and kept busy for ten years as regent.  During this time, her oldest son, Louis IX, grew to adulthood and married.  Blanche was not at all happy about this, especially since it seemed to be a very happy marriage -- his wife was Marguerite, of the family of counts of Provence.  The story at the time was that Louis and Marguerite had to sneak around behind Blanche's back.  Finally after ten years she allowed him to start acting fully as king and husband.

Most of the women I mention above may barely have met their husbands before their wedding day, and often came from a different part of Europe, even speaking a different language.  But when they became regents they took a deep breath and did what needed to be done.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

 

Dysentery

 Dysentery, sometimes known as the "bloody flux," is a very unpleasant subject.  But it's important for medieval history because so many important people died of it.  It didn't kill millions within a short period as the Black Death did, but it was a constant concern.

Dysentery of course remains a concern today, especially in developing countries, although the most common (bacterial) form can be cleared up with antibiotics, as long as the sufferer is not too badly dehydrated.  (There is also a harder to treat amoebic version.)  It is spread through food and water that have been contaminated.  Today it remains a real threat in places like refugee camps, where people are crammed together without proper sanitation available.  In the Middle Ages, it was a constant concern in siege camps.

Think about it.  A siege involves a whole lot of men living in tents, close together, without easy access to clean drinking water or to proper latrines (no modern port-a-potties).  The people inside the castle being besieged certainly had problems, but at least they had their own well and their own "comforts" of home.

It was thus one of the reasons that powerful men, the type who would be in siege camps, often died at an age that we would consider very young (in their thirties or maybe forties).  Some notable English kings who died of what appears to have been dysentery include Young Henry, the heir to Henry II of England; King John of England (Young Henry's younger brother); and Edward I (John's grandson).  In France Louis VI probably died of dysentery (though not acquired in a siege), as did Louix IX (acquired in a siege in north Africa).

Medieval cities were acutely aware of the danger of dysentery.  Without modern urban sanitation and water processing, which are really twentieth-century developments, contaminated water was a constant concern.  You could do in your enemy by plausibly accusing him of poisoning the wells (this was one of the accusations made against Jews in the late Middle Ages).  City governments were accordingly extremely strict about anything that might lead to outbreaks of the "bloody flux."  One does not have to know about bacteria to know about infection and contamination.

We do mot know how lucky we are to be able to turn on the tap and get clean water.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

The late medieval Capetians

The Capetian dynasty ruled France from 987 until the French Revolution, when Louis XVI went to the guillotine in 1793 under the name of Citizen Louis Capet.  He was officially part of the Bourbon dynasty, which had succeeded the Valois dynasty, but they were male-line Capetians all the time, just descended from younger brothers.

As I discussed in an earlier post, the Capetian dynasty succeeded the Carolingian dynasty in France--the most famous Carolingian of course was Charlemagne, who had been crowned Roman emperor in 800.  Hugh Capet was not strictly speaking the first king of his family, because both his great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I had been kings (succeeded for a few years by the final hurrah of the Carolingians), but from 987 on there was an unbroken line of kings descended directly from Hugh.

The most famous medieval Capetian king was probably Louis IX, or Saint Louis, after whom the American city is named (pictured above).  He determinedly sought peace and justice in his kingdom, trying to impose what we would call chivalrous behavior on his knights (things like not killing someone without giving them a chance to fight back, or, best of all, not even killing them a little bit).  He went on Crusade twice, though both excursions were disasters.

On the first of his Crusades, they decided to set up a base camp in Egypt, then attack the Holy Land from there.  Instead he was captured and held for ransom.  On the second, they decided that Egypt was too dangerous to go right in, so they decided to set up a base camp in Libya from which to attack Egypt--with predictable results. When the old king and one of his sons were killed, the surviving French boiled him up so that they could get his bones to take home for burial.

His son, Philip IV, got Saint Louis declared a saint.  Philip also is responsible for starting the Avignon papacy by completely intimidating the popes (see more here).  He disbanded the Templars, in the hope of getting their treasure, but unfortunately for him they had no treasure.  Philip IV is called "the Fair" for his blond hair, not his personality.

The story goes that as the head of the Templars was dying under torture, he cursed Philip, that he would not have sons to succeed.  As Philip had three sons, he laughed this off.  But all three died in quick succession after their father, leading both to the Valois dynasty and to the Hundred Years War.  After a great deal of unpleasantness--the Hundred Years War actually lasted over a century--Joan of Arc inspired the French to finally defeat the English.

At this point, the French kings started down the road toward absolutism.  Louis XI (1461-1483) trusted no one, and filled his court with intrigue and spies.  He was known as "the Spider."  He was also intensely religious and always had at least a few dozen bits of saints' relics pinned to his clothing, for protection.  Although true absolutism really only came about in the seventeenth century, with Louis XIV, the trend was there.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015