The Real Hundred Years (plus) War

As a student I was fascinated by history and geography. Being a mathematical dunce I easily gravitated to our collective past and devoured hundreds of books on the history of our world. I became relatively famous in my neck of the woods for being able to enunciate the names and the functions of all the Greek Gods and their Roman counterparts, was an avid reader of the near conquest of Western Europe by the Saracens, an expert on the rise of the Mongol empire, the battles fought by Attila the Hun, the Napoleonic wars, but the one war that I could not properly understand was our own war, the 100 Years War between the French and the English.

One hundred years! Actually, it lasted 116 years.

That’s about the time McCain proposes to stay in Iraq, the same McCain who predicted a quick and easy victory, not an intractable insurgency back in 2002.
From which parallel universe does he hail from? He doesn’t seem able to understand that you cannot solve a political problem with military force, and that is truly frightening as he really believes that the U.S. military is a stabilizing force in the Middle East. Let me tell you about what happens during a war that lasts 100 years.

History books reveal the general reasons for war such as freedom from adversity or freedom from religion. But as any general will tell you, the real issue for any war is the thirst for power and control and the accompanying means to finance them. The Hundred Years War was bloody, very bloody, due, in the main, to the efficiency and ferocity of the Anglo-Welsh fighting man deployed by the English Kings. France and England fought each other for more than a hundred years to gain control of the Channel trade routes (Gulf war I and II, control of the Strait of Hormuz?), and sparked the longest war in record history. It began in 1337 when King Edward III invaded Normandy and ended in 1453 when France won the Battle of Bordeaux. Edward III badly wanted to be the King of France, though he didn’t succeed it did successfully bankrupt the first generation of international Florentine bankers (a little known fact), as well as producing large bands of mercenaries who pillaged France before moving on to the northern Italian republics.

Edward’s army was the first large mercenary (Blackwater, anyone?) army of medieval Europe. Its members were paid by the day and in the loot they could plunder. The land along the Channel and Atlantic coasts was England’s first line of defense against an invasion. England held claim to this territory from the twelfth century through the marriage of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. King Edward III was determined to gain control of the French coastline while providing himself with a bridgehead for future expeditions into France and the road to the French throne.

Let me say at this junction that it was not a hundred years of constant battles as there were some periods interspersed with truces and uneasy peace.

Beside wanting to control the coastline, the other cause, possibly the main one for the Hundred Years’ War was the claim to the French throne. The conflict began with the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings (Charles IV) and with no male in line for the throne the two primary contenders were France represented by the House of Valois, and England, represented by the House of Plantagenet. The French nobles decided to pass the crown to the first cousin, Philip of Valois. But this left the other two male cousins equally claiming the crown: Charles, King of Navarre and Edward III, King of England. Edward III claimed that he himself was deserving of the throne because his mother was the sister of the late French king, while Philip de Valois was only a cousin. To make matters worse, under the French law then, no women could inherit the throne, nor could the crown be inherited through a woman. That did not stop King Edward III. Wasting no time he invaded Normandy with an army of 10,000 men.

However it turned out that the real major cause of this prolonged war was, you guessed it, certain economic interests and the vast revenues to be gained from this rich territory. Wines from the Bordeaux region (not oil) was Gascony’s largest export product and its major source of income as wool was England’s largest export product and the source of its own wealth. Additionally the Bordeaux harbor was within the borders of English Gascony and was at the time the center of the shipping and trading industry. Commodities such as grains, dairy products, dyes and salt would be shipped into Bordeaux via the Dordogne and Garonne rivers.
Bordeaux would receive duties on wine, whether shipped-in or grown on Gascon soil. Consequently, the profits from the tolls and customs made Bordeaux the economic capital of Gascony as its shipped and traded produce to and from Spain, Portugal and Brittany.

At this point in time, France was the richest country in Europe and its army was much larger than England’s but it chiefly consisted of heavily armored knights who were less mobile against the agile English swordsmen and archers. They had perfected the fighting technique of the longbow drawn by free swordsmen (read mercenary). Even though the archers were below the knight on the social ladder, they were not ashamed to fight side by side and as a result the archers could destroy the effectiveness of a French calvary charge.

King Edward III would fight beside his troops and his sixteen year old son, the Black Prince, was a superb military leader. One of their great victories was the battle at Crecy, the first great land battle of the long war.

For the next ten years, fighting was slowed. This was due mainly to the Black Death which killed more than a third of the population. From the beginning of the war (1337) until the battle of Orleans (1428-29), the English won many victories including the decisive battles of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. In 1429, at the siege of Orleans the French eventually gained the upper hand. Joan of Arc led a relief force which successfully defeated the English. The next 25 years of engagements saw continued French victories and the English retreat from all of France save Calais.

To cut a story short, the Hundred Years War proved a monumental catastrophe. The old Florentine bankers who had foolishly bankrolled Edward III had long gone and been replaced by the new bankers of the Renaissance: the powerful Medici family.

The Hundred Years’ War is seen by many scholars as a chapter in the seemingly perpetual conflict between the English and French nations, as disputes and open war were frequent, which continued as late as the Napoleonic era, and which extended well beyond Europe as the two battled for global empires.

It should be noted that the 11 March 2007 marks the 90th anniversary of the British Army’s capture of Baghdad from Turkish forces in 1917. The often overlooked Mesopotamia campaign of World War One (1914-18) therefore has a resonance for us as today, British forces are once again engaged in a fierce conflict in Iraq alongside Americans. As Bob Fisk noted last week, “the only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn.”

Only a fool of great magnitude would consider a long, wasteful war. What say you, John McCain?