[1328 - 1453] A Century of Fire: The Hundred Years' War

In the year 1328, the tapestry of French history frayed. King Charles IV, the last of the direct Capetian line, died without a son. The throne, for the first time in three centuries, was vacant. A question of law, seemingly dry and academic, would soon drench the fields of France in blood for over a century. The French nobility, citing an ancient Frankish code they called Salic Law, declared that the crown could not pass through a female line. They bypassed Charles's sister, Isabella, and crowned a cousin, Philip of Valois, who became King Philip VI. But Isabella had a son, a young, ambitious, and formidable monarch across the channel: King Edward III of England. In his veins ran the direct blood of the French kings, and in his heart, a claim that would ignite a firestorm. The initial decades of the war were not a constant clash of armies but a brutal campaign of attrition. Edward III unleashed what the French called the *chevauchée* – a mounted raid deep into enemy territory. This wasn't about conquering castles but about breaking the spirit of the land. English soldiers, a mix of knights and paid mercenaries, rode through the countryside with torch and sword, burning crops, slaughtering livestock, and terrorizing the peasantry. The goal was to destroy the French king's economic base and prove he was powerless to protect his own people. The air in Normandy and Gascony grew thick with the smoke of burning villages, a constant, acrid reminder of English power. This grim strategy culminated in 1346 on a gentle slope near the village of Crécy. The French army was the embodiment of medieval chivalry: a massive force of mounted knights, arrogant in their polished plate armor, confident in the power of their charge. They faced a smaller, more disciplined English force. Edward's secret weapon was not made of steel, but of yew: the English longbow. In the hands of a trained yeoman, this six-foot stave could unleash up to twelve arrows a minute, a rate of fire that utterly eclipsed the slow, cumbersome crossbow. When the French nobles charged, they rode not into glory, but into a hailstorm. Thousands of armor-piercing bodkin arrows darkened the sky. The relentless volleys shredded the French vanguard. Knights and horses fell, creating a gruesome barrier of tangled flesh and steel over which their comrades stumbled. The age of chivalry died that day, shot down by peasant archers who were paid a wage. The French losses were staggering, with over 1,500 lords and knights slain, while English casualties were in the low hundreds. Just as France reeled from this military catastrophe, a far more terrifying enemy arrived, one that no army could fight. In 1347, Genoese ships docked in Marseille carrying rats, and on those rats, fleas bearing the *Yersinia pestis* bacterium. The Black Death had come. It swept across the land with horrifying speed, an indiscriminate killer. In villages and cities, the death toll was unimaginable, with contemporary accounts describing carts piled high with bodies. Within four years, the plague wiped out between 30% and 50% of Europe's population. The very foundations of society cracked. With so many dead, labor became scarce, empowering the surviving peasantry to demand better wages and conditions, weakening the feudal bonds that had structured life for centuries. For those who survived, the world was a haunted place, a testament to God's wrath or, perhaps, His absence. The war, however, ground on. At the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, the French suffered a second, humiliating disaster. Not only was their army once again decimated by English longbows, but their king, John II, was captured on the field. The price for his return was a king's ransom indeed: three million gold écus, an astronomical sum that crippled the kingdom's finances and plunged it into chaos. In the king's absence, France fractured. Unemployed mercenary bands, the *routiers*, roamed the land, plundering and killing at will, creating a state of terror for the common folk whose wattle-and-daub huts offered little protection. Daily life became a struggle for survival against starvation and violence, with the local church bell offering the only reliable marker of time and community in a world turned upside down. A period of reprieve came under King Charles V, known as 'the Wise'. He was no warrior king; he was a shrewd administrator who understood that France could not win a direct fight. He avoided pitched battles, instead relying on Fabian tactics—harrying the English, capturing isolated garrisons, and slowly, patiently, winning back his kingdom town by town while the English forces were overstretched and exhausted. But this success was fleeting. Charles V's death was followed by the reign of his son, Charles VI, who tragically descended into madness, suffering from delusions that he was made of glass. His weakness created a power vacuum, and the French nobility split into warring factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, plunging the nation into a bitter civil war. It was the perfect opportunity for England to strike again. And strike they did. In 1415, the new English king, Henry V, a brilliant and ruthless commander, invaded France. He was cornered near the castle of Agincourt by a French army that outnumbered his exhausted, dysentery-ridden force by at least three to one. The story of Crécy repeated itself, but as a more terrible tragedy. The French, confident in their numbers, charged across a field that autumn rains had turned into a thick, sucking morass. Weighed down by their heavy plate armor, which could weigh over 25 kilograms, the knights slipped and floundered in the mud, becoming helpless, stationary targets for the relentless shower of English arrows. The slaughter was immense. An entire generation of the French military aristocracy was wiped out in a single afternoon. This victory was so absolute that it led to the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, a document of ultimate French humiliation. By its terms, Henry V would marry the French king's daughter and be named heir to the French throne, disinheriting the Dauphin, Charles. It seemed the war was finally over. England had won. France had reached its nadir. The kingdom was divided, its armies broken, its legitimate heir a fugitive. All hope seemed lost. And then, from the most unlikely of places, a miracle appeared. Her name was Joan, a teenage peasant girl from the village of Domrémy who claimed to hear the voices of saints commanding her to drive the English out and see the Dauphin crowned. In an age of deep faith and desperation, her message of divine deliverance resonated with a populace starved for hope. She convinced the beleaguered Dauphin of her mission, and in 1429, clad in white armor and carrying a banner, she rode to the besieged city of Orléans. Her arrival was electric. She didn't win through brilliant tactics, but through sheer inspiration. Her unwavering conviction transformed the demoralized French soldiers, who came to see her as a living saint, a sign that God was on their side. They attacked the English siege forts with a newfound ferocity, and in just nine days, the siege was broken. The psychological impact was immeasurable. The English, who had seemed invincible, were suddenly seen as vulnerable. Joan's next goal was symbolic, but essential. She led the Dauphin deep into enemy territory to the city of Reims, the traditional site of French coronations. There, he was crowned King Charles VII, an act that reaffirmed his legitimacy in the eyes of God and the people, directly repudiating the English claim. Joan's own story ended in tragedy; she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and burned at the stake as a heretic in 1431. But in death, she became a martyr and a national symbol. The peasant girl from Domrémy had reminded France of its own identity. Inspired by her memory, the French tide was now irreversible. Charles VII, no longer the weak Dauphin, proved to be an able king. He professionalized the French military, creating Europe's first standing army. And he embraced a new technology that would definitively end the age of the knight and the castle: gunpowder artillery. The French developed powerful cannons that could batter down the thick stone walls of English-held castles in a matter of days, not months. The final act came in 1453 at the Battle of Castillon. In a perfect reversal of Crécy, the English, under the famed commander John Talbot, charged a fortified French camp. This time, it was the English who were met with a storm—not of arrows, but of cannonballs. The English army was annihilated, and Talbot himself was slain. The war was over. After 116 years of fire and blood, England lost all its continental possessions save for the port of Calais. France, though scarred and depopulated, emerged from the crucible of war not as a feudal patchwork, but as a unified kingdom with a powerful central monarchy, on the cusp of the modern age.