Thursday Things is here! This week we sail for revenge with the bloody Lioness of Brittany.
It’s quiet in Clisson. Too quiet. Photo by L Moisao on Unsplash
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Jeanne de Clisson, Lioness of Brittany. Don’t make her angry. Image: Elsa Millet https://elsa-millet.com/
How it started
Just a small town girl, living in a Medieval world, Jeanne de Belleville was born in 1300 to noble parents in the town of Belleville-sur-Vie in Brittany, then a self-governing duchy in western France and soon to be one of the battlegrounds of the upcoming Hundred Years War. But no one knew that yet.
Young Jeanne started out living the typical life of a noblewoman of the day:
Her parents were wealthy nobles, and she most likely enjoyed a bucolic childhood on the grounds of the castle, which she would eventually inherit. She was called “one of the most beautiful women of her day” by historian Richard Bentley.1
Jeanne was married at an early age, 12, to 19-year-old Geoffrey de Châteaubriant VIII a Breton noble. Aged 14 she bore Geoffrey a child, Geoffrey who became Count of Châteaubriant upon his fathers death in 1326. Jeanne and Geoffrey also had a daughter, Louise, who went on to inherit her father and brother’s estates.2
Her first husband died when she was 16. Her second marriage was annulled by the Church due to political machinations of rivals. Like I said, typical stuff of the time.
Then she met Olivier.
Marriage to Olivier de Clisson
In 1330, Jeanne married Olivier IV de Clisson, a wealthy Breton, holding a castle at Clisson, a manor house in Nantes, and lands at Blain. It was from this marriage that she became Jeanne de Clisson and started her transformation from obscure minor medieval noblewoman to bloodstained legend.
Jeanne controlled substantial lands of her own, as heir to Belleville, and in Poitou as the widow of the Lord of Chateaubriant (whose estates her son by him would inherit). The combined holdings of Jeanne and Olivier made the de Clissons the senior nobles in the border region of Brittany.
She wasn’t shy about asserting her rights either:
Despite the couples happiness, Jeanne was determined to ensure that the rights of herself and her children were maintained. In what may appear unusual, she took her husband to court with regards earnings from Oliver’s estates as had been agreed in the marriage contract. The case was heard by King Philip VI and found in Jeanne’s favour, as witnesses of the marriage attested to such promises having been made.3
Lawsuit aside, this was a true love match. Jeanne and Olivier were the same age and by all accounts, deeply devoted to each other. They had five children together (the first born out of wedlock five years before their marriage. So make of that what you will).
All was well for the Breton power couple. Until the war started. There’s always a war.
War of the Breton Succession
We need not delve too much into the details of the Hundred Years War, which no one even knew was going to be called that. It broke out in 1337, with the English king, Edward III invading to assert his claim to the French throne. The reigning French king, Philip VI took exception. Much warring followed.
In Brittany there was a war within the war when the Duke of Brittany died without an heir. The English backed John de Monfort. The French king supported Charles de Blois. Due to personal friendship and familial ties, the de Clissons were #TeamdeBlois.
Olivier became one of Charles de Blois’ military commanders and was placed in charge of defending the city of Vannes. Unfortunately, in 1342 the English captured Vannes and took Olivier de Clisson prisoner. He was later freed in a prisoner exchange, but the ransom the English demanded for Olivier was suspiciously low, at least in the mind of his good buddy Charles de Blois:
Some legends claim that when de Clisson was captured by the English at Vannes in 1342, the ransom demanded for his return was, to de Blois, suspiciously low. This led him to conclude that de Clisson had not fought as valiantly as he could have and was perhaps not as loyal to the House of Blois as he claimed to be. Other versions of the story say that de Clisson actually did switch sides, although these accounts are much rarer. In any case, de Blois was no longer certain that his old friend had his best interests at heart.4
Nothing good would come of this.
Tournament of Tears
Rightly or wrongly, his overlord suspected Olivier de Clisson of treason and he conspired with King Philip to do something about it. In 1343 there was a truce in the war. To celebrate, a tournament was held in France:
Olivier de Clisson and 15 other Breton nobles were invited to the tournament. Whilst the men were on their way to the tournament they were arrested by French soldiers and taken to Paris. In the capital, the men were placed on trial for treason. Little evidence was presented in the trial, the suggestion seems to be that they were accused and then found guilty of having conspired with the English to enable the town of Vannes to fall.5
Oliver was charged and tried without receiving any of the privileges at trial due a noble of his rank, and with apparently no evidence but a coerced confession. They did him wrong.
Jeanne soon made her way to Paris and tried to jailbreak her husband by bribing a guard. That didn’t work out and Jeanne “was summoned to answer charges of having conspired to have ‘rebellions, disobediences and excesses against the king, public welfare and the king’s royal majesty’.6 She ignored the summons and was now was a fugitive herself.
On August 2, 1343, Olivier de Clisson was beheaded. But it got worse:
From there, his corpse was drawn to the gibbet of Paris and there hanged on the highest level, and his head was sent to Nantes in Brittany to be put on a lance over the Sauvetout gate as a warning to others.7
They literally put his head on a pike.
Execution of Olivier IV de Clisson. Painting attributed to Loyset Liédet, Flemish illuminator (v.1420-v.1483) in the Chronicles of Lord Jehan Froissart Via: Wikipedia
The Lioness Wakes Up
Things are about to get real.
King Philip’s actions shocked the public. Olivier’s trial did not present any public evidence of his guilt; it only claimed that he had confessed to being a traitor. Furthermore, displaying of a corpse was usually done only when the criminal was common or lower class. People felt that King Philip had gone too far and possibly murdered an innocent man. And nobody was madder than de Clisson’s widow, Jeanne de Clisson.8
They got that right.
First, Jeanne took her sons to Nantes to show them their father’s head and make them swear vengeance on King Philip and Charles de Blois.
Her husband’s lands had been confiscated, so she sold off her jewelry, furniture, and whatever else was left, used the cash to raise a force of 400 men, and got to work.
Knock Knock
The first stop was the castle of Galois de la Heuse.
Galois was a loyal supporter of Charles de Blois, but news had not reached him of Oliver’s execution. He welcomed Jeanne in, and then she and her men turned on him. They slaughtered almost the entire garrison leaving only a few survivors to pass on the story.9
That was a nice touch, I thought.
I can just see our girl pointing her sword at some traumatized stable hand and saying, “Tell them what happened here. Tell them who did it. Tell them I’m coming for them.”
The Lioness was not messing around.
This became her standard procedure — raiding castles, slaughtering all but a few survivors left to tell the tale, stealing everything of value, and vanishing into the night:
Soon, the French were in fear of Jeanne de Clissons and they began rallying forces to track her down and put an end to her destructive campaign.10
Jeanne was just getting warmed up.
Red Sails
Realizing that her relatively small force would sooner or later be hunted down and cornered, Jeanne sailed to England. There she used her funds from looting Breton castles (and possibly some contributions from the English) to buy three ships, paint them black, dye the sails red, and become, at age 43, a pirate.
Just in case there was any doubt about her mission, she named her flagship My Revenge.
The ships of this Black Fleet are said to initially attack shipping in the Bay of Biscay, but then moved into the English Channel hunting down French commerce ships, whereupon her force would kill entire crews, leaving only a few witnesses to transmit the news to the French King.11
At least she was consistent.
Soon, legends of her brutality spread all over Europe, and the “Lioness of Brittany” became a feared pirate. Some accounts claim that she was officially a privateer for England, but the English would have had to overlook her personal penchant for beheading every French nobleman she captured, since that was not exactly privateer protocol.
It is said she personally did the beheading with an axe. I think the English were a little scared of her too, but glad she was more or less on their side. The English granted her lands in the part of Brittany they controlled, probably to keep her out of England.
Jeanne de Clisson was the terror of the English Channel for thirteen years — the same number of years her marriage to Olivier lasted.12 She sank ships, massacred crews, beheaded French nobles, raided coastal towns, and sometimes aided the English with transporting supplies to France.
By 1356, the Jeanne de Clisson ended her pirating and married Sir Walter Bentley, a commander in Edward III’s armies whom the king had appointed Lieutenant of Brittany in 1350 (i.e. the guy in charge of all English held lands there). Both died in 1359.
But the legend of the Lioness of Brittany lived on.13
Elsa Millet
The image of Jeanne de Clisson at the top is the modern work of a French illuminator, Elsa Millet, who lives and works in Nantes. From her bio:
I am committed to making illumination shine beyond the borders of the Middle Ages, by transposing its traditional techniques onto Art Nouveau, Steampunk, Antique style creations, as well as onto resolutely contemporary creations. Freed from medieval conventions, I adapt to the tastes of the day.
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Jeanne de Clisson, The Lioness of Brittany https://thehundredyearswar.co.uk/jeanne-de-clisson-the-lioness-of-brittany/
Pirates — Jeanne de Clisson https://oceanwavesail.com/explore-sailing/pirates/pirates-jeanne-de-clisson/
“War of the Three Jeannes” https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2020/12/02/war-of-the-three-jeannes/
Coincidence? I think not. Our girl was sending a message and she didn’t even stop sending it when King Philip died in 1350. And what man wouldn’t want to know that if he were wrongfully executed, his wife would take up arms and wage a bloody personal war of vengeance on land and sea for more than a decade to make them pay? That’s love.
Jeanne may have died, but her family legacy lived on. Her son Olivier, who had been raised in the English court, went to war in Brittany against her old foe Charles de Blois. In the Battle of Auray, where Charles finally met his end, Olivier lost an eye and gained a name – “the Butcher”, for like his mother he took no prisoners. With Charles dead and his blood feud over, Olivier eventually reconciled with France, and in 1380 he became Constable of France, an unassuming title that meant that he was the premier noble in the kingdom, second only to the King in authority and power. Olivier was reputedly the richest man in France when he died, and Francis I (who took the throne in 1515) was a descendant of his. In fact, from then until the 1848 Revolution finally put an end to kings in France, the blood of the Lioness of Brittany and her beloved Oliver de Clisson flowed in the veins of every French king. One suspects she’d have been pleased. (https://headstuff.org/culture/history/jeanne-de-clisson-bloody-lioness-brittany/)
Sometimes having your descendants rule the very kingdom that wronged you is the best revenge of all.