A Song of Neither Ice nor Fire: Temperature Extremes had No Impact on Violent Conflict Among European Societies During the 2nd Millennium CE

The second millennium CE in Europe is known for both climatic extremes and bloody conflict. Europeans experienced the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, and they suffered history-defining violence like the Wars of the Roses, Hundred Years War, and both World Wars. In this paper, we describe a quantitative study in which we sought to determine whether the climatic extremes affected conflict levels in Europe between 1,005 and 1980 CE. The study involved comparing a well-known annual historical conflict record to four published temperature reconstructions for Central and Western Europe. We developed a Bayesian regression model that allows for potential threshold effects in the climate–conflict relationship and then tested it with simulated data to confirm its efficacy. Next, we ran four analyses, each one involving the historical conflict record as the dependent variable and one of the four temperature reconstructions as the sole covariate. Our results indicated that none of the temperature reconstructions could be used to explain variation in conflict levels. It seems that shifts to extreme climate conditions may have been largely irrelevant to the conflict generating process in Europe during the second millennium CE.

Diplomatic Preparation for the English Invasion of France in 1415

Introduction. According to the latest research, the managerial genius of Henry V was most fully manifested in the military, financial and diplomatic fields. The authors analyze in detail the royal diplomacy, which has not been the subject of special study. Diplomacy is analyzed as a space of political communication. Methods and materials. The basic methods of historical analysis were used to work with the material. The sources used in the work are diplomatic documents (treaties, “memorandums”, instructions to ambassadors and their correspondence with monarchs, decisions of royal councils, discussion of the course and results of negotiations in parliament) and chronicles. In historiography, the problem is traditionally considered within the framework of works devoted to the personality of Henry V or the history of the Hundred Years War. Analysis. The article analyzes three phases and three components of English diplomatic policy from the coming of Henry V of Lancaster to power to his invasion of Normandy: 1) negotiations with both sides of the intra-French conflict in order to prevent their reconciliation. 2) the territorial claims of Henry V in France (territory in exchange for giving up the “rights” of inheritance). 3) diplomatic activity as a disguise of preparation for war (territory in exchange for peace). Results. The authors concluded that the English in the years 1413–1415 are moving from military mercenarism on the side of one of the warring groups in the intra-French conflict to declaring themselves as one of the parties to the struggle for power in France with their rights and claims. The diplomacy of the English crown pursued the intentions of 1) demonstrating the impossibility of achieving the claims of the royal house of England on the continent peacefully; 2) maintaining schism and confrontation within the highest French nobility; 3) ensuring international recognition of the English monarch’s right to intervene in the intra-French conflict.

Marginal Performances by Late Medieval Pigs and Blind Men

In 1425, Parisians under Anglo-Burgundian rule during the Hundred Years War enjoyed the spectacle of blind men in armor attempting to club a pig to death, in the process clubbing one another. Marginal images in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, a Flemish Romance of Alexander copied and illuminated roughly eighty years earlier, closely resemble this so-called game, and a dozen cities recorded iterations beginning in the thirteenth century and continuing into the fifteenth. The repetition suggests the workings of a scenario, which performance studies theorist Diana Taylor defines as a condensation of embodied practice and knowledge reactivated in multiple times and places to transmit culture from person to living person. Reading through the Bodley 264 Romance of Alexander in order to clarify the scenario's specific function in its Parisian context, this article argues that the strategic battering of marginal beings served to transmit a hierarchically ordered culture while forcefully expelling the Armagnac faction from the hierarchy's highest rank. Within this stark example of public violence that performatively materialized political division, the bodies of pigs and blind men resonated with multiple identity categories, and the dominant group whose power and cohesion the entertainment reinforced both ignored and enjoyed their trauma.

Introduction

The Introduction frames the volume and summarizes both the structure of the book and its main themes. Of all the sub-periods in which European medieval history has been divided over time, the later Middle Ages is possibly the one on which the burden of past and current grand narratives weighs the most. Chronological and geographical boundaries are blurred, and models and narratives of decline and modernity have shaped our understanding of the centuries between c.1330 and c.1500. The introduction to a much-needed rewriting of the history of this period focuses on the main events (such as the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the Great Schism) and processes (such as the expansion of the Ottomans and the maritime journeys outside the Mediterranean), and the main features of the period (the nature and multiplicity of political agency, social variety, economic complexity, growth of literacy and cultural change), and highlights the new historiographical trends in study of these two centuries.

Complaints

This chapter opens with the background to the Hundred Years War preceding the French defeat and capture of King Jean II at the Battle of Poitiers in September 1356. The first section explains how that defeat fostered hatred of the nobility, and how that opprobrium was transmitted and amplified in learned and popular culture in the years preceding the Jacquerie. The next two sections follow the formation of Étienne Marcel and Robert le Coq’s reform party at the assembly of the Estates General in Paris, and the eventual triumph of their efforts with the Estates’ promulgation of a Grande ordonnance in March 1357. The reformers’ efforts to protect this victory from conservative Valois loyalists led them to make a dangerous alliance with King Charles II of Navarre, a sovereign king unamenable to outside control who possessed many soldiers and a claim to the French throne. Conflict over how to address military insecurity in the countryside to Paris’s west deepened the fissures between the reformers and the Dauphin’s noble councillors, leading Marcel to undertake a spectacularly violent solution.

Souls under Siege

This book explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, the book finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. The book draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years’ War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. The book illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that “healing” had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.

«The Peninsular War»: The Anglo-French confrontation in the Pyrenees during the Second Hundred Years’ War (1689–1815)

The article shows the Anglo-French confrontation on the Iberian Peninsula as an important stage of the Second Hundred years’ War. The example of remote action of the British expeditionary force demonstrates the «English style» of war: the operation of army troops with the active support of the Royal Navy. The author comes to the conclusion that the Pyrenean wars of the beginning of the XIX century have a certain significance in the system of Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.