Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (33 page)

Whatever the precise reason for the decision, what is clear is that Avignon refused passage to the army, and that it now presented both an obstacle to the crusaders and a direct challenge to the king’s authority. This was not to be borne, so the following day, 10 June 1226, Louis ordered his siege engines to be set up around the city. A temporary bridge made of boats was built to enable those who had already crossed the river to return and rejoin the main host.

Avignon was garrisoned not only by local citizens but also by a large troop of mercenaries who were willing to defend the city. A description from inside the city appears in the chronicle of Roger of Wendover: Roger, of course, was far away in England (unlike Nicholas de Bray, who was actually present at Avignon) and is occasionally confused in his accounts of events overseas, but sometimes his descriptions are so vivid and detailed that he appears to have based them on eyewitness accounts. This is plausible as he was based in the influential and well-situated abbey at St Albans, meaning he was able to talk to guests who had travelled all over Europe and so glean many valuable details for this writing. Of Avignon he says:

The city, until that time unattempted by hostile troops, was well defended by trenches, walls, turrets and ramparts outside, while within it was well garrisoned with knights and thousands of soldiers, and well supplied with horses, arms, collections of stones for missiles, engines and barriers, and was well stored with provisions, and did not therefore fear the assaults of the besiegers; for the defenders of the city bravely hurled on them stone for stone, weapon for weapon, spear for spear, and dart for dart, inflicting deadly wounds on the besieging French.

One of the casualties of the early stages of the siege was one of the rarely named common men in the host: Amaury Copeau, chief of the engineers and miners without whom no siege could succeed. He was replaced by another man promoted to chief, and the siege went on. The walls were high, and the French army was separated from the city by the river, but the king was determined in his course of action and so the siege continued all through the summer. The besiegers suffered all kinds of ills. Not only were they subject to missiles from inside the city, but the outlying parts of the host were attacked in raids by Raymond of Toulouse and his men, who also destroyed all nearby fields and crops so that the host had to travel further and further afield to find ever-dwindling supplies of food. As they remained there, exposed to the burning Provençal sun of June, July and August, many of the troops fell sick and died, and the difficulty of disposing safely of the corpses of men lost through illness or assault only added to their problems. Roger of Wendover is again descriptive as he notes:

At this siege the French were exposed to death in many ways, from the mortality which was raging dreadfully among their men and horses, from the deadly weapons and destructive stones of the besieged who bravely defended the city, and from the general famine which raged principally among the poorer classes, who had neither food nor money. In addition to the other miseries, which assailed the army without intermission, there arose from the corpses of the men and horses, which were dying in all directions, a number of large black flies, which made their way inside the tents, pavilions and awnings, and affected the provisions and liquor; and being unable to drive them away from their cups and plates, they caused sudden death among them.

By early August discussions were taking place about the best way forwards. It would not do to be stuck outside the walls of Avignon for too many more months; but on the other hand if the siege were abandoned then a hostile city would be left behind the host – always dangerous – and Louis’s army would have to find another place to cross the Rhône. The knights and nobles, as ever, had been chafing at the lack of direct engagement with the enemy, and now Guy the count of St Pol (presumably escaped from his captivity, if indeed he was ever taken prisoner) became animated and urged an all-out assault, as Nicholas de Bray tells us:

The illustrious count of St Pol responded in these words: ‘What madness to waste our time with words! While we have been talking, we could have been knocking down the walls and attacking a thousand breaches. The sun is already setting in the west, and we cannot call back the hours we have lost. Whatever may be the determination of others, I will be the first to make an attack with my forces against the enemy!’

The other nobles agreed, and Louis – possibly against his better judgement, given what we know of his tactical acumen – allowed the assault to go ahead. It proved a total disaster. In order to get close to the city walls the army had to cross the river; they attempted to surge over a secondary bridge which was not sturdy enough for their weight, while being bombarded from inside the city. Nicholas de Bray’s eyewitness account has him dodging the missiles himself, while describing what he sees around him:

Arrows are falling more heavily than rain, causing injury and death on all sides. Thousands of stones flying through the air cause similar carnage. One perishes under the stones, another falls, pierced through the side by an arrow; a third receives a leg wound. This man here has his brains scattered after his helmet has been broken; that man there, exhausted by the weight of his shield, can carry it no longer; another succumbs, burned by a substance made of fire and sulphur.

The bridge collapsed and hundreds of men were thrown into the river, where they drowned, screaming as they were dragged under the water by the weight of their armour and equipment. The missiles did their work, too, and Guy, the brave and impetuous count of St Pol, was killed when a stone hit him directly on the head, an incident mentioned by all chroniclers of the event. ‘His brains were completely knocked out,’ says the Minstrel of Reims, bluntly; and this was ‘a great shame’, says the
Life of Louis VIII
, as ‘he was a valiant man, courageous in arms and fervent in faith’. Louis was devastated by the loss of his lifelong friend, his companion since boyhood, but his sorrow soon turned to anger. ‘He does not weep,’ says Nicholas de Bray, ‘because the bitterness of his feelings has dried his tears’; the Minstrel confirms that ‘when the king saw his friend dead, he was so enraged that he was almost out of his mind’. Louis ‘swore that he would not leave the siege until the city had been conquered,’ says the
Life of Louis VIII
, but now he would try a different approach. He forbade any more frontal assaults and settled in for the long haul: Avignon would surrender or starve.

The body of Guy de Châtillon, count of St Pol, was embalmed and transported in a coffin to a convent which had been founded by his family, where he was given an honourable burial. He was a widower, his wife Agnes de Donzy having died the previous year when barely out of her teens; their two children, a son of three and a younger daughter, were taken into the care of their maternal grandmother, Matilda de Courtenay, dowager countess of Nevers and one of the great matriarchal figures of the thirteenth century. The power bloc which Guy’s loyalty to the crown had produced (following the death three years previously of Hervé de Donzy, Guy was count not only of St Pol but also of Nevers, Tonnere and Auxerre, in right of his wife) was split, his son receiving the maternal inheritance and the county of St Pol going to Guy’s younger brother Hugh. By strange coincidence, Hugh would also be killed at Avignon by a stone from a catapult, in the service of Louis IX in 1248.

Louis grieved and his army sat tight around Avignon, allowing no supplies in and no people out. His overall situation was improved by the submissions of other towns which came to him while he remained
in situ
– Carcassonne, Albi, Marseille, Beaucaire and Narbonne, among others. If only Avignon could be taken, the rest of Languedoc lay open.

Eventually the citizens bowed to the inevitable. Help would not be forthcoming: no doubt the news of other submissions was shouted to them over the walls in order to sap their morale, and Raymond, still at large in the surrounding countryside, did not have sufficient troops to attempt the full-scale attack which would be needed to break the siege. Sometime in late August or early September (we do not have the exact date) Avignon capitulated. After the surrender of hostages for good faith the inhabitants opened their gates to the king. There were immediate repercussions which were both religious – the legate entered the city, performed absolutions, purified the churches, established new priests in post and appointed a new bishop – and military in nature: the ramparts, along with any houses considered to be fortified, were razed and ditches filled in. The citizens handed over all their weapons, siege engines and 6,000 marks to Louis. There were to be no executions, no massacre of the population; however, as Louis had to leave again almost immediately, he needed to leave the city in the charge of someone who would rule strictly in his name. His choice fell on William, the young count of Orange, whose father had been captured and burned alive, the remains of his body cut to pieces, during the crusade of 1218. William could be relied upon not to develop any sympathy for the defeated southerners.

Avignon had been reputed to be invincible, and Louis had taken it in three months. The French army now headed for Toulouse with no other towns standing in their way.

However, it was a reduced army. Once more Theobald of Champagne had been more concerned about his statutory forty days of service than about the overall success of the campaign. He had arrived belatedly, only once the siege of Avignon was under way, and had sought an audience with Louis as soon as his forty days were up. It is possible that he was jealous of the success of the king’s campaign, which brought glory to Louis and no particular gain to Theobald, all the more aggravating because things could have been so different. After all, if Philip Augustus had not acted as he did in 1218, Theobald could have been at the head of a crusade himself, his wealth and his prospects in the south being considerably enhanced thereby. He had not put his name to the act of January 1226 in which the nobles of France affirmed their support for Louis and his crusade, and he was not prepared to continue there any longer. We do not know exactly what was said, but there seems to be agreement among the chroniclers that there was a blazing row, and Theobald certainly left the army to return north. The author of the
Chronicle of Tours
, normally dispassionate in his writing and therefore considered a reliable source, is on this occasion scathing:

The count of Champagne, relative of the king, brought up in the palace of Philip Augustus, whom Louis defended with all his might … forgetting all honour and all affection, abandoned his lord and king in the middle of his enemies, in pressing peril, returned to France to the dishonour and ignominy of his name.

And so Louis marched on without one of his greatest vassals. The summer was over; by the time the army arrived at Toulouse it was mid-October. A siege of Toulouse would take many months, and winter, as we have already noted, was not a good time for campaigning. Louis was an eager knight and soldier, but he was also a leader, a strategist and a pragmatist. His army was tired. Many of the knights and men were sick. They were still being harried by Raymond’s forces and were sustaining losses. The only realistic decision was not to launch a siege of Toulouse at this point; instead Louis would lay the groundwork for another expedition the following spring to finish the crusade once and for all. He appointed seneschals and placed loyal garrisons in the towns which had submitted. Orthodox churchmen were placed in positions of clerical authority. While this was taking place he suffered more losses from illness, the great men being no less susceptible than the commoners: among the dead were William de Joinville, the archbishop of Reims who had crowned Louis, and Philip, count of Namur. Dysentery ravaged the army and they set off for home in late October.

* * *

It was not long after they turned back that Louis was first struck by severe stomach pains. As an experienced campaigner he can have been under no illusions as to the cause, and the danger it presented. Various rumours flew around – mentioned in passing by some chroniclers and even aired in public some years later by Philip Hurepel – that the king had been poisoned by Theobald, but as the count had been gone over a month and Louis had spent that time sharing a camp with an army packed with diseased men living in cramped and unsanitary conditions, there can be little doubt that he was suffering from dysentery. He tried to hide it as long as he could, riding on in grim determination so as not to affect the morale of the host, but by the time they arrived at the castle of Montpensier on 3 November 1226 he was suffering greatly and was taken to a bed to rest. Doctors were summoned, but everyone knew there was little they could do.

As the days went by it became clear that Louis was unlikely to recover. There were urgent matters to attend to: the king needed to make a last testament in front of as many high-ranking witnesses as possible. The archbishop of Reims was dead and Guérin, the elderly chancellor, had already returned to Paris ahead of Louis. It was too late to summon anyone else, so decisions would have to be made by those who were on the spot: Philip Hurepel, Amaury de Montfort, the chamberlain Ours de la Chapelle, the marshal John Clément and the archbishop of Sens were among those who swore that they would crown as soon as possible Louis’s eldest son Louis, or if he had died – for who knew what had happened in Paris since the last communication from the capital? – then his second son Robert. They affirmed that they had sworn this oath in Louis’s presence. Young Louis was only twelve, so a regent would need to be named: by custom this would have been the nearest male relative to the child king – in this case Philip Hurepel – but Louis, ‘in agony but still of sound mind’, according to the testimony of three bishops, named Blanche.