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PaperclipPerfector
2d ago
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In the series: Chads living their best lives (translated and truncated from the french wiki, clarifications in parentheses):
Pierre de Craon (circa 1345-1409), nicknamed the Great, lord of La Ferté-Bernard, of Sablé and Précigné , Viscount of Châteaudun, etc, etc.
Craon became attached to the Duke of Anjou, who was marching to conquer the Kingdom of Naples in 1384. This prince (brother of the previous french King) had only been able to keep the multitude of warriors who formed his retinue, and followed his fortune, by exhausting his immense treasury, which he had gotten by despoiling the corpse of France (in the middle of the hundred years war).
The Duke sent Craon back to the duchess, where he received considerable sums from her, and instead of taking the money to his lord, spent them foolishly in Venice, on gambling and debauchery, while the French army was besieged by famine and disease. Craon's infidelity completed the Duke of Anjou's misfortunes, and he died of grief.
The expedition was one long disaster, and when leaders and soldiers returned from Italy, staff in hand and begging for alms, the Lord of Craon dared to reappear at court in magnificent attire. The Duke of Berry (another uncle of the king), seeing him enter the council, cried out, transported with fury: "Ah! false traitor, wicked and disloyal, you are the cause of my brother's death. Take him, and let justice be done." » But no one stepped forward to carry out this order, and Craon hastened to disappear.
His influence and wealth saved him. He had won the favor of Louis, Duke of Orléans, younger brother of Charles VI (King of France) and nephew of Louis I of Anjou and John I of Berry. With this support, he returned to court and filled it with intrigue. He maintained secret relations with John IV, Duke of Brittany, his relative, and sought to destroy the Constable of Clisson, having no other cause for hatred against him than his reputation and authority.
Suddenly, Craon was expelled from court (1391), without anyone even deigning to reveal the cause of his disgrace. It was Louis, the king's brother, who had requested the exile of this dangerous confidant, to punish him for having revealed to Valentine of Milan, his wife, a romantic affair he was having with another lady.
Craon retired to Brittany. The Duke of brittany, who hated the Constable, represented him as the sole cause of Craon's misfortune. Craon believed him and swore revenge. While the court was occupied only with festivities and pleasures, he secretly brought into Paris weapons and a troop of adventurers devoted to him. He himself mysteriously entered this city, and on June 14, 1392, when the constable was returning at one o'clock after midnight from the Hôtel Saint-Pol, where the king held his court, the Sire de Craon and his mounted troop awaited him in the rue de la Culture-Sainte-Catherine, mingled among his people, and extinguished the torches they were carrying.
Clisson at first believed that it was a joke of the Duke of Orleans; but Craon did not leave him long in this error, and cried out to him in a terrible voice: "to Death, to Death, Clisson, you must die." - Who are you, said the constable? - « I am Pierre de Craon, your enemy. You have irritated me so many times that you must make amends."
Clisson had only eight of his men with him, who were unarmed and who dispersed. He wore a coat of mail under his uniform and was defending himself like a hero when a mighty sword thrust, hurling him from his horse, caused him to fall against a baker's door, which was not quite closed and which his fall finally opened. Craon, seeing him unconscious and bathed in blood, believed him dead, and, without dismounting, thought only of escaping.
The provost of Paris was immediately summoned by the king and ordered to pursue him and his accomplices. Craon arrived in Chartres at eight o'clock in the morning. Twenty horses were waiting for him, and he reached his castle in Sablé. However, one of his squires and one of his pages were arrested, beheaded in the market hall and hanged on the gallows. The concierge of the Hôtel de Craon had his head cut off for not having denounced the arrival of his master in Paris, and a canon of Chartres, with whom Craon had lodged, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
All of Craon's property was confiscated. His private mansion, located on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, was razed and the site given to the parish of Saint-Jean-en-Grève, to be converted into a cemetery. The street that bordered his paris residence, and which bore the name of Craon, was renamed. His castle of Porchefontaine was also razed.
Craon, not believing himself safe in his fortress of Sablé, withdrew to the Duke of Brittany, who said to him: "You are a puny creature when you were unable to kill a man whom you were above. You committed two faults, the first of having attacked him; the second, of having missed." "That is truly diabolical," replied Craon. "I believe that all the devils of hell, to whom he belongs, guarded him and delivered him from the hands of me and my men, for more than sixty sword and knife blows were hurled and inflicted upon him; and when he fell from his horse, in all truth, I thought he was dead."
Charles VI, encouraged by the Constable and his supporters, decided to take the war to Brittany, because the Duke Jean IV of Brittany refused to hand Craon over to him, and protested that he neither knew nor wanted to know anything about where he was hiding. The rendezvous of the royal army was arranged at Le Mans. It is known that, while crossing a nearby forest, Charles VI fell into madness (August 1392) (killing 4 of his subjects/servants, but who’s counting) (The King’s insanity, brought on by Craon’s antics, lead to a fight over the regency by his uncles and brothers, plunging France into a civil war and a new, more horrible, phase of the hundred years war).
The Dukes of Berry and Burgundy took the reins of government, and the latter began by declaring himself against Olivier V de Clisson, even having the king sign the order to arrest him. Meanwhile, Pierre de Craon had taken refuge in Barcelona, in the hope of leaving for Jerusalem. He was imprisoned by the Queen of Aragon but probably escaped in December 1392, returned to Brittany where Duke Jean, in February 1393, "put him at the head of one of the army corps charged with besieging the stronghold of Josselin, belonging to Clisson".
Clisson subsequently signed (1395) a suspension of arms with the Duke of Brittany, and expressed himself in these terms: "We want all acts of violence to cease, except against this wicked man Pierre de Craon." Craon led a wandering life for several years, to hide his head from the severity of the law. He was secretly protected by the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, even though they despised him.
Fearing the consequences of his crime, he placed himself under the protection of Richard II, King of England, paid homage to this monarch, who assigned him a pension, and obtained a pardon in 1396. He then returned to court; but now safe from prosecution for the assassination of the Constable, he could not be protected from those pursued by the Queen of Sicily to obtain the restitution of the sums she had entrusted to him during the Naples expedition, and the Parliament of Paris sentenced him to pay 400,000 livres.
Craon was arrested and taken to the Louvre Tower, but he remained there for a short time; and, through the intervention of the Queen of England and the Duchess of Burgundy, the matter was settled.
Craon's misfortunes had brought him to his senses. After monks were sentenced to death as sorcerers and convicted of casting a spell on Charles VI, the Lord of Craon obtained that confessors would henceforth be granted to convicted criminals, something that had not previously been done. Craon then did voluntary penance for his crimes. He had a stone cross with his coat of arms erected near the gallows in Paris. It was at the foot of this cross that criminals confessed before their execution.
Craon bequeathed a sum of money to the Franciscan friars, charging them with this work of mercy in perpetuity. Historians of France and Brittany do not provide the date of Craon's death, which was probably in 1409.
Imagine if Count of Monte Cristo had ended with a botched assassination and getting thrown back in prison. Then Dantes slums it for years before a Crime and Punishment finale. Sequel hook, maybe, but surely infuriating to readers.
They should make it a movie. For once I think the social justice spin would hit the mark, netflix if you’re listening. All along the way, innocent poor people get publically executed like signposts while the 1 % indulges in highly entertaining madcap monstrous buffoonery with no consequence.
Meanwhile, the people were also getting raped and pillaged and starved by the english, and the entire aristocratic warrior class was even more delegitimized by getting its ass repeatedly handed to itself on the battlefield by the commoner english longbowman, and their own stupidity.
For another anecdote: At the first big battle of the hundred years war, Crecy, the french king had brought genoese crossbowmen. Partly because of the rain, they were outranged and outshot by the english longbowmen, so they retreated. The glistening french sons of the aristocracy on their horses, thought this was treason or cowardice and cut most of them down, before charging into the fray and losing horribly (usually ransomed if they survived the battle, unlike commoners). A few days later, the king signed an order that any surviving genoese crossbowmen found on his land should be executed.
I see Craon more as a barry lyndon / becky sharp type zany amoral protagonist, lost in a cruel world, crumbling into the absurd. I do love the end, when the valiant hero finds redemption by the ever-lasting good deed of providing a monk so he can listen to the confessions of a bunch of other monks before they get their heads chopped off for casting a spell on the murderous madman ruling the country by divine grace.
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