My horrible loud music playing neighbor would have fit right into the post-plague late Middle Ages. Bet he tortures cats. But moving on, having wished a pox on neighbor. We resume our reading.
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Third estate assault on dauphin/regent loses support of nobility. So now it’s peasants plus third estate vs nobility and lame duck monarchy. Meanwhile king Jean is living luxuriously in England as captive waiting to be ransomed. French still trying to do so despite extreme terms
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Now into the Jacquerie rebellion of 1358. When nobility turn to vampiric brigandage, clearly peasantry must turn into zombie mobs. Am rooting for peasants here though. They were the less awful people. Seriously exploited. This is like Trumps vs Trumpies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie
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Ah shit. Clearly I backed the wrong conceptual horse here as Rick would say. The Jacques have been slaughtered by the knights. Bloodbath.
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This era in Europe is relentlessly stupid with no redeeming qualities. Just pointless slaughter, plague, and general shittiness. No wonder it triggered the age of exploration in the next century. Who would want to live like this?
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“...short of a fluke like the capture of a king at Poitiers, medieval armies had no means of achieving a decisive result, much less a surrender.” On Edwards’s weird campaign in France in the winter if 1958 trying to exactvthe biggest possible ransom for Jean
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The Treaty of Bretigny... this is some weird-ass shit. Large territorial claims insured by exchanging a king for a bunch of nobility? Apparently this was the occasion when the first franc was minted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brétigny …
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Our hero, Enguerrand de Coucy is among the nobles exchanged for the king. Eng is apparently going to end up as the son-in-law of Edward... this hostage/ransom shit among royalty was all very nominal. The royalty treated each other like royalty.
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Writer dude Jean Froissart is on the ship carrying noble hostages back to England. He’s gonna make Eng famous. Geoffrey Chaucer is also onboard. Eng is curiously lifeless so far in this long 7 chapter setup. Finally he’s getting foregrounded. I never read the Canterbury tales.
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It’s a be somebody or do something century. Tuchman says unless you were royalty nobody cared about your appearance or character. You were known only by your deeds. Curious kind of dehumanization. Much klout. Very karma.
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No live portraits of Eng exist, only one painted 200y after his death. He was apparently tall, dark, and handsome. And could sing and dance well. Basically a generic harlequin romance cover hero.
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1361, plague is back after 12 years. Everybody is gloom-and-doom. This is relentless shittiness. Including actual shit. London is awash in manure apparently. No wonder the rich lived a barbell life of death sports and nihilistic hedonism.
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“Between the happening of a historical process, and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretched, full of pitfalls” The rulers here are half-criminal brigands anyway. The poor really seem to need the monarch for hope.
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tfw the highlight of your day is half an hour of bedtime reading about the Black Death enjoying the schadenfreude. At least one group of people
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Now into the story of Eng and his spoiled bride-to-be, Isabella Kardashian-Hilton. Woman sounds awful.
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Chapter about women. Seems like the age had a theory of submission around women’s role in the works but in practice they had a lot more unofficial agency than anyone admitted. They ran things while the men were off fighting or being held ransom etc.
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Eng and Isabella now married, with 2 daughters. It’s 1367 and they’ve been given a lot of wealth, titles and territory in both England and France. Dude’s married up. Still not gone to life though. Isabella is better portrayed so far.
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Eng and Isabella now back to France, 3/4 of which is now overrun by brigand companies who are getting institutionalized. Description is a bit like gang-run Mexico or Afghanistan today. Except line between them and “legitimate” royalty/nobility is really just a matter of taste.
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The old king jean and pope innocent are now dead. Charles and the new pope urban try to export the brigand companies to Hungary for a crusade against Turks and fail, but succeed in exporting them to Spain where Anglo-French proxy wat is unfolding under excuse of fighting Moors.
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This is very confusing 4d chess. Also the brigands are weirdly religious enough to demand both loot and absolution when attacking the clergy. Everybody tries to pay off brigands to go away with other people’s money. Stationary bandits pay off roaming bandits with OPM.
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Brigands are zeroth estate really. Includes both fuckit knights and even destitute clergy. First and second estate are trying to get rid of them by taxing the third to the limit. Had anyone made up zeroth estate concept? If not I claim it. Hobbesian ground state of humanity.
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Adding this side readhttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-the-oldest-pub …
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Another side read: knights vs archers, contemporaneous Indian edition. https://twitter.com/mangozeus/status/1265843370624081920?s=21 …https://twitter.com/mangozeus/status/1265843370624081920 …
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Back to the story. It’s around 1368 now. Coucy frees serfs for rent. The nobility appears to be slowly healing after 2 decades of war and plague. The brigand companies have been foisted onto Spain. Life sucks for most people but nobility is doing ok.
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Long passage now about the Visconti family of Italy who sound like psycho gangsters. They are challenging papal forces. Brigand company called the White Company fights on all sides of all conflict. Hobbesian ergodicity goingbon here.
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End of conversation
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