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Introduction Introduction Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington ∵ 1 The Battle On April 3, 1367, as the sun rose over northern Spain, two of the century’s largest armies stood poised, facing one another across what one man present characterized as “a fair and beauteous plain, whereon was neither bush nor tree for a full league round.”1 Here, near a point where the borders of three medieval Iberian kingdoms—Castile, Navarre, and the Crown of Aragon— came together,2 thousands of men awaited a signal that would propel them into one of the century’s largest, albeit most lopsided battles. To the east stood 1 This description of the topography comes from one of two major accounts of the battle of Nájera, a late fourteenth century historical poem by an author known to us only as the Chandos Herald whom virtually all historians believe to have been present at the battle. Of the four printed editions of the poem, we have used the one published by Oxford in 1910 which is the best-known and most widely utilized by modern scholars. It supplies not only the editors’ transcription of the metered text found in Worcester College, but also exhaustive notes and a carefully compiled prose paraphrase which has greatly aided the authors of the present book. See: Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos, ed. Mildred K. Pope and Eleanor C. Lodge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910) [hereafter Chandos Herald]. Rare usage of another edition of the herald’s work will be signaled in the footnotes. For a detailed analysis of the Chandos Herald and his poem accompanied by the Pope-Lodge prose para- phrase, see Appendix C.2. 2 By the late fourteenth century, four Christian states—Castile, the Crown of Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal—controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula. (The Crown of Aragon is the correct designation applied to the political conglomerate made up of the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, the county of Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands, all of which had long ruled by a dynasty historians refer to as the House of Barcelona). Of the four, the largest was Castile. A fifth state—the sole remnant of Islamic Spain—was the Moorish kingdom of Granada nestled among the mountains in the far south of the peninsula. Three of the Christian king- doms—Castile, Aragon, and Navarre—shared a border at a point not far from the headwa- ters of the Ebro River. It was a few kilometers west of that tripartite frontier that the battle of Nájera took place. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004345805_00� 2 Introduction an Anglo-Gascon force, invaders from across the Pyrenees, battle-hardened in the Hundred Years War and commanded by England’s foremost soldier of the period, Edward of Woodstock (d. 1376), known to history as the Black Prince (d. 1376).3 Eldest son of King Edward III of England (r. 1327–1377),4 this talented war- rior bore not only the title prince of Wales,5 by which he is most often identified in the chronicles of the period, but also prince of Aquitaine, a title conferred upon him by his father shortly after the treaties of Brétigny and Calais in 1360 transferred control of most of southwestern France to the English. In that ca- pacity, Edward governed these extensive holdings on the continent in his fa- ther’s name. During the winter of 1367, the prince led a massive army south onto the Iberian Peninsula for the purpose of restoring to the Castilian throne his country’s controversial ally, Pedro I (r. 1350–1366/1367–1369), often referred to as Pedro “the Cruel.”6 3 Modern biographies of the prince include: Richard Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine: A Biography of the Black Prince (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1978); Henry Dwight Sedgwick, The Life of Edward the Black Prince, 1330–1376 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993); David Green, Edward, the Black Prince: Power in Western Europe (Harlow, England: Longman, 2007). Many historians attribute the prince’s sobriquet, not mentioned in histori- cal sources until well after his death, to a penchant for wearing black armor. See, for example: Sedgwick, p. 27. 4 All regnal dates in this book will be preceded by “r.” 5 The title which first developed during the thirteenth century distinguishing leading Welsh nobles was appropriated by the English monarchy during the closing decades of that century, following the conquest of much of Wales by Edward I (r. 1272–1307). In 1301, Edward bestowed the title on his own son, later Edward II (r. 1307–1327), who became the first English prince to hold it. Since then, it has been used to distinguish male heirs to the English throne. 6 The other leading account of the battle (aside from the Chandos Herald) can be found in the chronicle of Pedro I, written by the Spanish chronicler, Pedro López de Ayala (c. 1332–1407) who served as a royal official, military commander, and diplomat and in later life ranked among the most versatile of medieval authors. Despite some disagreement over the centu- ries, most historians working on this period agree that Ayala’s work was almost certainly the only chronicle written about this highly controversial monarch. The most widely-used edi- tion of the work—the one we shall cite throughout this book—was originally published dur- ing the latter half of the nineteenth century as part of a three-volume collection of Castilian royal chronicles compiled under the general editorship of Cayetano Rosell. These volumes were reprinted during the 1950s as volumes 66–68 in a massive collection of Spanish literary works known as the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde La Formacion del Lenguaje hasta Nuestros Dias [BAE]. See: Crónica del Rey Don Pedro Primero [hereafter Ayala, Pedro I], in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla desde don Alfonso el Sabio, hasta los Católicos don Fernando y doña Isabel [CRC], edited by Cayetano Rosell, 3 vols. (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1953), 1: 393– 614 contained in BAE, vol. 66. For readers wishing to consult more recent, though harder to .
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