Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World. Justin Marozzi

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       2 Marlowe’s ‘Scourge of God’ 1370–1379

       ‘Our quivering lances shaking in the airAnd bullets like Jove’s dreadful thunderboltsEnrolled in flames and fiery smouldering mistsShall threat the gods more than Cyclopian wars;And with our sun-bright armour, as we march,We’ll chase the stars from heaven and dim their eyesThat stand and muse at our admired arms.’

      CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,

      Tamburlaine the Great

      While a ten-year-old Temur was learning the martial skills that would make him such an accomplished warrior, three thousand miles to the west one man bestrode the battlefields of Europe. For any child with a taste for romantic knights and heroic endeavours, his is a stirring story, his royal tomb an arresting sight.

      Edward the Black Prince lies in Canterbury Cathedral close to the top of Pilgrims’ Steps, their stones worn smooth by centuries of feet and bended knees. Boys and girls cling on to the protective bars which surround him, peering through for a better look at the recumbent figure of the prince in full armour. As a schoolboy in Canterbury, I used to do the same, hurrying through the echoing nave before assembly to snatch a few minutes in front of his tomb. How could this slim, neat little man have been such a champion of war six centuries earlier, I wondered, picturing the charge of knights on horseback, the volleys of arrows scything through the sky and the flashing sword-strokes that could hack a man to pieces. His head rests on a fabulous helmet, surmounted by a roaring lion, his hands clasped together on his chest in prayer, sword by his side. He gazes into the heavens, past his knightly achievements, his gauntlets and scabbard, the surcoat and shield emblazoned with the golden lions and fleurs de lys of England.

      The Black Prince is perhaps the most glamorous symbol of the European age of chivalry. His career dazzled as brightly as the bejewelled swords which won him such fame and glory in France. In 1346, at the age of sixteen, he led the right wing of his father King Edward III’s army to a brilliant victory at the battle of Crécy, where he won his spurs in style. A decade later, he routed the French again at Poitiers, capturing King John II and taking him back to England as his prisoner. He won England new lands in France as prince of Aquitaine, returned Pedro the Cruel, the deposed King of Castile, to his throne, and suppressed rebellions with brutal efficiency. Wherever he went his exploits resonated with the martial thunder of the Middle Ages.

      However impressive it may be to schoolboys with their colouring books, castle sets and computer games, the warfare of the fourteenth century spelt only misery and poverty for most of Europe. Historians have long referred to this period as ‘the calamitous century’, in which famine, war and disease cut swathes through the population. The evangelising glories of the Crusades were already a memory. Christendom had lost its possessions in the Holy Land by the close of the thirteenth century and Outremer, the cherished land overseas, had ceased to exist.

      Life was a trial for poor peasants and rich rulers alike, as hereditary monarchies struggled to maintain their royal lines and fend off rival dynasties. For most of the century, England and France, the two great powers of the continent, were locked in conflict, consumed by the Hundred Years’ War which emptied their coffers and depleted their chivalry. Both were perilously divided into feuding fiefdoms, their kings undermined by the machinations of the nobles. In France the struggle for the disputed throne allowed the dukes of Orléans, Bourbon, Brittany and Anjou, together with the counts of Foix and Armagnac, to wield power like princely states. The duchy of Burgundy grew steadily from a royal province into a dynasty and a prosperous empire with its own ambitions. For much of this period the French kings were toothless tigers, harried on all sides by disloyal nobles, wandering mercenaries and revolting peasants.

      Across the Channel, England faced her own difficulties. Edward III’s illustrious fifty-year reign, an exercise in military adventurism and repudiation of papal authority, came to an end with his death in 1377, a year after his son and heir the Black Prince had died. The premature demise of the knight who had twice humiliated the French meant that the throne passed to the king’s nine-year-old grandson, Richard II, who was poorly placed to continue Edward’s expansionist forays. War had impoverished the country, which was in no mood to countenance another huge demand on its resources. The deeply unpopular poll tax led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The century ended inauspiciously with the youthful king’s removal from the throne in 1399 and his murder a year later. It was all the usurper Henry IV could do to keep his kingdom together, beset by the rebellions of the Scots and the Welsh, supported, as ever, by the French.

      Nor was the fighting restricted to these northern kingdoms. Europe was awash with petty wars, in thrall to the vogue for military and dynastic adventure. In the quieter periods between the major campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War, ‘free companies’ or bands of mercenaries roamed the continent, torching towns and extorting the countryside, spreading misery and destruction wherever they rode. ‘Without war you cannot live and do not know how to,’ Sir John Chandos, the Black Prince’s lieutenant, reprimanded a group of their captains. Southern France, Italy and Germany teemed with these perennial soldiers who refused to go home. Italy herself was riven by conflict, spurred on by the famous condottieri, soldiers of fortune like Sir John Hawkwood, captain-general of Florence, and, later, Francesco Sforza, ruler of Milan. The protracted hostilities between Guelphs and Ghibellines degenerated into wider, equally ruinous, factionalism. Ruled by despots, the great cities scrambled to enlarge their dominions. Naples and Florence tore themselves apart, the trading city of Genoa sank into decline. To add to these economic woes, the once mighty banks of Bardi and Peruzzi collapsed in the 1340s, bankrupted by the defaulting English king, Edward III.

      The situation was hardly better in Spain and Portugal where, despite the reconquest of most of Muslim al-Andalus the previous century, disunity and disorder ruled. Aragon was prey to repeated civil wars in which the nobles competed for the crown while, to the west, the death of Alfonso XI of Castile in 1349 – carried off by the plague – triggered another European fight for the succession, this time between Pedro II and СКАЧАТЬ