Book Review: The Greatest Knight, The Remarkable Tale of William Marshal, The Power Behind Five English thrones

By Thomas Asbridge

In 1861, a young French scholar named Paul Meyer attended an auction at Sotheby’s in London. On sale were a collection of rare medieval texts that had not been read for hundreds of years. Meyer, who was presumably feeling like a kid in a candy shop, was amazed by the rich scholarly material on offer. Of particular interest was an ancient tome which seemed unassuming at first but appeared to contain the biography of a previously unknown medieval knight. Unfortunately, it was sold to an eccentric collector and disappeared into the labyrinthine depths of his poorly catalogued collection. It wasn’t until two decades later that Meyer, by this time a distinguished academic, managed to recover the manuscript. The contents of its musty pages exceeded his wildest expectations, as it chronicled the highly eventful life of William Marshal, a legendary knight who served as the regent of England and helped issue the Magna Carta. The manuscript gave a fascinating glimpse into the life of a knight during a time where few historical sources existed, and has fascinated scholars ever since. The Greatest Knight is the tale of William Marshal’s life, a man who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most powerful knights of the realm and, during the course of his long life, served five English monarchs.

William was born into a tumultuous time, when the aristocracy had plunged the nation into civil war as the empress Matilda (she had previously been married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, thereby the title, England never had an emperor) led a revolt against the deeply unpopular King Stephen. The English people suffered great hardship as the war grew long and bitter. In fact, the whole thing could have been avoided if King Stephen had been more competent, but in the words of medieval scholar Walter Map he was “…of notable skill in arms, but in other things almost an idiot”.  Among those whose fortunes were laid low by the war was William’s father, John, a minor nobleman who backed Empress Matilda and drew King Stephen’s ire. He was forced to hand over his son as a hostage in order to guarantee his good behavior. This meekness turned out to be short lived, and when William’s father once more defied the king, he threatened to have his young son executed. This didn’t trouble John awfully much, as he let it be known that, should he lose one son, he had the anvils and hammers to forge even finer ones. By the standards of modern parenting, this might seem harsh, and Asbridge speculates that this could have had an adverse psychological impact on the young William, but luckily for him, the almost an idot king had a big heart. He could not bring himself to kill the young boy, and decided to let him live.

This royal clemency allowed a twelve-year-old William to travel to Normandy and learn a knight’s trade from his mother’s cousin, a renowned lord named William of Tancarville. Our William quickly showed an appetite for swordplay and jousting. When Flanders invaded upper Normandy, he got his first taste of action and was knighted during that same campaign. A few years later he left the Tancarville household he took up jousting full time, where he quickly made a name for himself. According to Asbridge, jousting matches during the early medieval period wasn’t as organized as they later came to be. When I mention jousting, you might picture the extravagant and chivalrous displays where one knight charges against another while assorted nobility regard the proceedings from a nearby stand. Back in the twelfth century, however, jousting mostly involved rivaling packs of armed and dangerous young men with some form of lineage meeting up on a dusty field and trying to take one another captive for ransom. In fact, a recurring theme in The Greatest Knight is that during Marshal’s lifetime the very notions of knighthood and chivalry were being defined for future generations of knights, who would look back upon this time as a lost golden age. Much like Marion Cotillard’s character in Midnight in Paris who looked back wistfully on la belle epoque. Success on the jousting fields of Europe earned William fame, practice in the ways of war, and money from the captives he ransomed.

After King Stephen died of natural causes, which in itself is miraculous when you consider how unpopular he was and how many would have wanted to murder him, he was succeeded by Henry II. His long reign was a time of relative peace and prosperity for England, and Henry is one of the key figures who came to determine many of the events in William’s life. When Henry II needed an accomplished knight who could tutor his young son, also named Henry, he chose William Marshal. William was only a few years younger than his ward, and the two of them soon started to become a regular fixture at the tournament field. They both enjoyed crossing lances and partying, and we are given the impression that their relationship was an amicable one. The relationship Henry the boy king had with his father was unfortunately a lot less amicable. After having crowned his son king while he himself was still alive, in order to avoid a messy succession after his death, Henry the younger was constantly frustrated with his father’s inability to share power and wealth. His extravagant living meant that he was often short of money, something which his father proved unwilling to lavish upon him in sufficient quantity. This festering antagonism eventually led to a revolt against his father, but Henry II moved with customary ruthlessness to check his son’s ambitions. Richard II came to outlive his son, who died suddenly of illness aged twenty-eight. 

After returning from a trip to the holy land, William served the old king during the final years before his death in 1189, when he was succeeded by his second son, Richard. The new sovereign honored the promises that Richard II had made to William, and allowed him to marry Isabel of Clare in the same year. He was 49, she was 17, but the marriage was by all accounts a happy one despite the age difference, which wasn’t in any way uncommon at the time. His marriage also granted him large estates in England, Wales, Normandy and Ireland.

When Richard, later to be known as The Lionheart, departed for the holy land in 1190 in order to wage a crusade, William was thrown into the thick end of politics, serving in the council of regency which looked after the realm in the king’s absence. William was by now one of the most influential men in the realm, and had to tread carefully around the king’s paranoid younger brother, John. When The Lionheart returned from his not very successful crusade, which had failed its chief objective of taking Jerusalem, he directed his considerable talent for waging war against the French instead. The Lionheart and William Marshal made a formidable team, and cut a bloody swathe through the French. The fact that Normandy doesn’t belong to England anymore can be attributed to Richard’s untimely death, killed by a stray crossbow bolt when besieging a castle in northern France.

When you realize that no English king since has been called John, it tells tells you all you need to know about the man who succeeded Richard I. If King John sounds familiar it is probably because he is the unpopular and cruel king who reigns when the saga of English highwayman bandit Robin Hood is said to have taken place. The Lionheart may not have had much time to spare for modernizing agricultural production or building new works of infrastructure, but as a general and commander in-chief he was only matched by the great Saladin. His successor, however, soon acquired the unfortunate nickname “Softsword”, as his brother’s hard won gains gradually slipped away and the great Angevin empire that Henry II and Richard I had built started to come apart. Palace intrigue during the time of King John was rife with suspicion and paranoia and William, although he was a shrewd diplomat most of the time, choose to turn most of his attention to the west, to his wife’s ancestral lands in Ireland. One might think that King John wouldn’t mind his adventures on the Emerald Isles, but the king had long eyed Ireland as his own sphere of influence and his natural suspicion towards anyone made him restless of William’s intentions. The rest of King John’s reign after William had headed west was quite similar to what had happened up to that point, that is, everything was a complete shambles. When the noblemen of the realm rose in revolt against their reviled king, John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Many western historians look to this “great charter” as one of the high points of western civilization, and it did have some good bits in it to be sure, but Asbridge downplays this document somewhat and points out the fact that it was soon broken by King John, who probably never intended to keep his word.

When the very unpopular and much reviled king died from dysentery in 1216, England was plunged into chaos once more and the Angevin empire that William had loyally served throughout his life teetered on the brink. He was named protector of John’s young heir, Henry III, and devoted considerable energy to stabilizing the realm. Despite the fact that he was now in his seventies, William was bestowed with the energy of a man half his age, and even took to the field of battle at the siege of Lincoln, where he defeated the forces of the French king and the nobles supporting his rival claim to the throne. After a subsequent peace accord was signed, William had saved the Angevin realm and his young charge, King Henry III, was to have a long and prosperous reign.

William Marshal lived a life that was far longer and more adventurous than most of his contemporaries, but in 1219, aged 72, his health failed him and he died from a sudden illness surrounded by his family. Not many knights died peacefully in bed, and fewer still served five monarchs during the course of their life. William’s legacy helped shape the England we know today and he remains the perfect representation of the medieval ideas of chivalry. He lies buried in London’s Temple Church, should you wish to pay a visit, and his statue stands next to the throne reserved for the royal sovereign in the house of lords.

The Greatest Knight offers a rich and nuanced glimpse of England during the early middle ages and the life of one of the greatest defenders of that realm. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in history. It was an act of great good fortune that Meyer, the French scholar, rescued that seemingly mundane manuscript that proved to contain such an interesting tale. Perhaps it can also be considered a touch ironic that it took the efforts of a diligent French scholar to preserve for posterity the tale of the greatest of all the knights of England.         

     

Book Review: The Silk Roads, A New History of the World

By Peter Frankopan

Mankind’s history is simple. After our ancestors climbed out of the primordial swamps, history progressed in a rapid succession of momentous occasions, much like the intro for the popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory Theory. Industrious men with beards set about constructing mighty cities like Athens and Corinth. The ancient Greeks were the forefathers of science and philosophy, and Roman engineering was the most advanced the world had ever known. Vasco Da Gama sailed around Africa, the steam engine was invented in England, and the Dutch sold tulips. After the Mayflower set sail for the new world, America was born, and the glorious history of Western civilization proceeded straight as an arrow from that moment onwards. Meanwhile the people at the edges of the map, Chinese, Indians, Russians, and many other, were busy doing whatever. Probably nothing of consequence. According to historian Peter Frankopan, most people in the west are at best a slightly ignorant and uninterested when it comes to the part of the world, Asia, where most people lives and has lived throughout history. Even in academia eastern history is a bit of a fringe subject whose scholars are forced to grab hold of whatever crumbs happen to fall of the table when looking for research funding. In writing The Silk Roads, Frankopan is determined to shift our mental models of the world and how we view history itself, a grand undertaking to be sure, and one could mean his latest book will be regarded as essential reading for anyone harboring intellectual curiosity.

Far from being a backwater of no consequence, the vast stretch of land between the Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean has for millennia been the nerve center and main highway of civilization. Great cities whose sublime splendor have been lost to time were strung out like the beads of a finely crafted pearl necklace along this route, where tradesmen and explorers travelled to find their fortunes. Not just people and goods, but also ideas and philosophies as well as all the major religions of our time, can thank what Frankopan calls the silk roads for having hundreds of millions of followers. Technological advances such as paper, the compass, gunpowder, mathematics, and countless others travelled along these trade routes to the west. This influx of wealth and ideas also had a darker side, as virulent diseases such as the black plague were also spread along the same trade routes.

Western historians have long thought that the death of Ögedei Khan saved the countries that Theresa May’s Brexit Team is preparing to do battle with from complete annihilation. According to Frankopan, this line of thinking shows how westerners are unable to place their history in the proper context. It has never really occurred to anyone in the west that the Mongols might not have been that interested in what we had to offer.

Having masterminded a campaign of breathtaking daring and complexity that smashed the combined armies of eastern Europe in a matter of days, Genghis Khan’s greatest general, Subotai the Valiant, was set to invade Western Europe when he was reached by the news of his Khan’s death. It was certainly true that the need to be present at the Khan’s funeral hindered his invasion plans, but Frankopan argues that one other good reason that the invasion of Western Europe never came about was that there wasn’t anything particularly valuable to plunder or steal east of Constantinople. Having seen the vast wealth of cities like Baghdad, Merv and Samarkand, overflowing with silks, gold, and precious gems, a smokehouse full of otter bladders situated on a bleak Flemish hillside was hardly a great prize. It might sound harsh but it is undeniably true that, at the time, the cities of Western Europe were lagging behind their eastern counterparts when it came to wealth and sophistication. Niall Fergusson said as much in Civilization, which I have previously reviewed on this blog.

Such was the importance of the east that when Columbus set out to sail around the world, he wasn’t looking for the Americas. Instead he sought to find a new route that could be used to transport spices to Western Europe. The continent that impeded his way, however, led to Europe rising from the mists of obscurity to seize a commanding role in global affairs for the next half century. The silver mines of South America bequeathed great wealth to the Spanish who, alongside the Portuguese, became incredibly powerful and influential. International trade and commerce were the underpinnings of the new age of empire, at the start of which a cash strapped England was left to gaze longingly at her southern rivals. This disillusionment proved to be short lived, for The British Empire that followed when Spain and Portugal were no longer in the ascendant was the largest empire the world had ever seen. Even during these heady days of colonialism, however, when the royal navy ruled the oceans and London was the nerve center of the world economy, mastery of the silk roads was crucial for the well-being of the empire. The rise of Russia in the nineteenth century was a cause of great concern to the British, since their vast lands constituted the gateway between east and west. The Crimean War is a conflict few people ever stop to think about, and the reasons why it was fought can often seem hard to grasp. When you consider the fact that Russian control of the black sea could jeopardize Britain’s access to its resource rich colonies, however, it all starts to get much clearer.   

The strategic and economic importance of these silk roads has remained undimmed even though the heydays of the British empire are long gone. When oil grew in importance and Western prospectors searched far and wide for hidden reserves of the black gold, the largest oil fields in the world were to be found in places like Russia, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Then as well as now, countries in the west are affected by what happens in oil producing countries and to this day great powers jealously guard their interests in that region. It is not just oil that they crave, countries in Central Asia that you might  associate with Borat’s rustic home village in Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 comedy film contains some of the world’s largest deposits of minerals such as gold, copper, lead and uranium. Far from having to make do with just one plasticy VCR recorder, like poor Borat did, the nouveu rich elite of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan frequently travel to places like London and Dubai to stock up on luxury goods.    

Frankopan’s great enthusiasm for telling Western audiences an alternative spin on the history they grew up with reading in musty textbooks is both admirable and infectious. He has obviously done a great deal of research and is passionate about the subject he writes about. Unfortunately, I sometimes felt that he treats the history of Western Europe in the cavalier fashion that he accuses its historians of having treated the east, although if you want to read a book about the Roman or British Empire there are quite a few other options available. Another annoying niggle was the unreasonably high amount of simple spelling and grammatical mistakes that I found when reading The Silk Roads. You usually don’t find this with books from reputable publishers, and you would have thought that Bloomsbury could afford to hire someone to read through the script a couple of times. My complaints notwithstanding, The Silk Roads is a very enjoyable read that offers a new and fresh, to Western audiences at least, perspective on history as well as the world we live in today