From Edward III's claim to the crown of France and the confiscation of Gascony, through the longbow victories of Crécy and Poitiers, the capture of a French king and the triumph of Henry V at Agincourt, to the miraculous rising of Joan of Arc and the French recovery that ended at Castillon with the English driven from all of France but Calais. Slide across a century and more of siege, chevauchée, plague and dynasty, in which two crowns were contested and two nations were born.
On 24 May, Philip VI of France declares forfeit the Duchy of Aquitaine, held by the kings of England as vassals of the French crown. Edward III of England — grandson of Philip IV of France through his mother Isabella — answers by reviving his own claim to the throne of France itself. A quarrel over a great fief becomes a war over a crown.
On 24 May, Philip VI of France declares forfeit the Duchy of Aquitaine, held by the kings of England as vassals of the French crown. Edward III of England — grandson of Philip IV of France through his mother Isabella — answers by reviving his own claim to the throne of France itself. A quarrel over a great fief becomes a war over a crown.
On 24 May, Philip VI of France declares forfeit the Duchy of Aquitaine, held by the kings of England as vassals of the French crown. Edward III of England — grandson of Philip IV of France through his mother Isabella — answers by reviving his own claim to the throne of France itself. A quarrel over a great fief becomes a war over a crown.
Around 1337 AD
Hundred Years War begins
The collapse of the Ilkhanate
Río Salado and the end of African intervention
Beginning of the civil war
Petrarch Crowned Poet Laureate
Death of Charles IV and the Valois succession
From Edward III's claim to the crown of France and the confiscation of Gascony, through the longbow victories of Crécy and Poitiers, the capture of a French king and the triumph of Henry V at Agincourt, to the miraculous rising of Joan of Arc and the French recovery that ended at Castillon with the English driven from all of France but Calais. Slide across a century and more of siege, chevauchée, plague and dynasty, in which two crowns were contested and two nations were born.
On 24 May, Philip VI of France declares forfeit the Duchy of Aquitaine, held by the kings of England as vassals of the French crown. Edward III of England — grandson of Philip IV of France through his mother Isabella — answers by reviving his own claim to the throne of France itself. A quarrel over a great fief becomes a war over a crown.
On 24 June, in the crowded estuary of the Zwin off Sluys, Edward III destroys the French fleet, sinking or taking almost every ship. The victory gives England command of the Channel for a generation and ensures that the war will be fought on French, not English, soil. That same year Edward quarters the golden lilies of France with the leopards of England and styles himself King of France.
On 26 August, near Crécy in Ponthieu, Edward III's outnumbered army annihilates the flower of French chivalry. Massed English and Welsh longbowmen, shooting from prepared positions on a low ridge, cut down charge after charge of French knights. The blind King John of Bohemia is led into the fray to die; the Black Prince, aged sixteen, wins his spurs. It is a catastrophe for France and a revelation for Europe.
After an eleven-month siege, the starving port of Calais surrenders on 3 August. By tradition, six of its leading burghers walk out barefoot, ropes about their necks, to offer their lives for the town — spared only by the pleading of Queen Philippa. Calais becomes an English enclave and gateway into France, and will stay English for two hundred years. Within months the Black Death sweeps in, and the war pauses before a common death.
On 19 September, the Black Prince, raiding north out of Aquitaine, is brought to battle near Poitiers. Once again the longbow and the dismounted English line shatter a far larger French army — and this time King John II of France himself is captured and carried in triumph to London. Leaderless and humiliated, France dissolves into the peasant fury of the Jacquerie and the Parisian revolt of Étienne Marcel.
On 8 May, the Treaty of Brétigny grants Edward III an enlarged Aquitaine in full sovereignty and an immense ransom for King John, in return for renouncing his claim to the French crown. It is the high-water mark of English fortune. Yet the formal renunciations are never exchanged, and within a decade Charles V of France, served by his constable Bertrand du Guesclin, patiently wins back nearly all of it by refusing open battle.
On 25 October — Saint Crispin's Day — Henry V of England, his army sick and heavily outnumbered, meets a great French host on a narrow, rain-soaked field between Agincourt and Tramecourt. The French men-at-arms, packed together and floundering in deep mud, are cut down by the longbow and finished with mallet and dagger. Thousands die or are taken while English losses are trifling. The victory reopens the war and makes Henry the arbiter of France's fate.
On 21 May, with Paris and the north in the hands of Henry V and his Burgundian allies, the mad Charles VI sets his seal to the Treaty of Troyes. Henry marries Charles's daughter Catherine and is recognised as regent and heir to the throne of France, while the Dauphin Charles is disinherited as illegitimate. For a moment the two crowns seem destined to rest upon a single English brow.
Both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422, leaving the infant Henry VI proclaimed king of England and France while the disinherited Dauphin clung to the lands south of the Loire. By 1429 the English are besieging Orléans, the gateway to his realm, and his cause seems all but lost. Then Joan of Arc, a peasant girl of seventeen from Domrémy, comes to the Dauphin claiming a divine mission to save France. Given soldiers, she enters Orléans and on 8 May drives the English from their forts. The tide of the war turns.
Captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne in 1430 and sold to the English, Joan is tried for heresy by a Church court at Rouen. On 30 May she is burned at the stake in the market square, nineteen years old. Her enemies mean to discredit the king she crowned; instead they make a martyr. A quarter of a century later the Church annuls her condemnation, and Charles VII, whom she saved, reigns on. In 1920 she is canonised a saint.
On 17 July, at Castillon in Gascony, the veteran English commander John Talbot charges an entrenched French camp bristling with cannon and is killed as his army is torn apart by gunfire. Gascony, English since Eleanor of Aquitaine three centuries before, is lost. No treaty marks the ending; the war simply stops. Of all his French inheritance the king of England now holds only Calais, and France emerges unified, centralised, and armed with the first great royal artillery in Europe.