[1337 - 1453] The Hundred Years' War

We begin in 1337, though the roots of the conflict run deeper. Imagine a France not as a single, unified nation, but a patchwork of powerful duchies and counties, all bound by a fragile loyalty to a king in Paris. The air in the court of King Philip VI is thick with tension. Across the channel, a young, ambitious English king, Edward III, has just laid claim to the French throne itself. His claim, through his mother Isabella, daughter of a past French king, is a spark in a powder keg. The French nobility, citing an old legal code known as Salic Law, declare that the crown cannot pass through a female line. For them, Edward is a foreign usurper. For Edward, he is the rightful heir being denied his inheritance. And so, the longest and most devastating war in European history begins not with a bang, but with a legal dispute between cousins. The first decades are a brutal education for the French. At the Battle of Crécy in 1346, the entire social and military order of France is shaken to its core. The French nobility, the pinnacle of society, arrive on the field clad in gleaming plate armor, some suits weighing over 50 pounds. They are the chivalric ideal, expecting a glorious clash of knights. What they meet is something new, something terrifyingly efficient. On a hillside, thousands of English and Welsh commoners stand with six-foot yew longbows. As the French charge, the sky darkens. It’s not with clouds, but with a storm of steel-tipped arrows, a sound like a monstrous canvas tearing. These arrows, fired at a rate of 10 to 12 per minute, punch through plate armor at close range. The flower of French chivalry is slaughtered not by their social equals, but by peasants. The age of the knight had begun to die in the mud of Crécy. Just two years later, a far more terrifying enemy arrives, one that no army could fight. The Black Death scours the continent, carried on fleas and rats aboard merchant ships. It does not distinguish between English and French, noble or peasant. In the cities, the stench of death is overwhelming; in the countryside, entire villages fall silent. The plague wipes out nearly half of France’s population. The social fabric unravels. With so many dead, labor becomes scarce, and surviving peasants, for the first time, have leverage. They demand better wages and freedoms, leading to violent uprisings known as *jacqueries*. The war, meanwhile, grinds on, but now through a landscape of ghost towns and overgrown fields. The English employ brutal raids called *chevauchées*, not to capture territory, but to terrorize and demoralize the populace, burning crops and villages in their path. For the common person, life is a grim lottery between plague, starvation, and the sword. By the early 15th century, France is on its knees. At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the disaster of Crécy repeats itself on an even grander scale. A tiny, exhausted English army under King Henry V annihilates a vast French force, once again bogged down in mud and riddled with arrows. The aftermath is a national trauma. A huge portion of the French leadership is either killed or captured, held for crippling ransoms. The English seize Paris. The French king, Charles VI, is plagued by bouts of madness, and his own wife signs a treaty disinheriting their son, the Dauphin Charles, in favor of the English king. France is effectively a conquered land, split in two. And then, from the depths of this despair, comes the miracle. In 1429, a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from a small village appears at the Dauphin's beleaguered court. Her name is Joan of Arc. She is illiterate, unkempt, and claims to hear the voices of saints commanding her to drive the English from France and see the Dauphin crowned. In any other time, she would have been dismissed as a heretic or a madwoman. But France was desperate. With nothing left to lose, Charles gives her a chance. Her effect is electric. Dressed in white armor and carrying a banner, her presence inspires the demoralized French soldiers. They see her not as a general, but as a vessel of God. She leads them to the besieged city of Orléans, and in a stunning series of assaults, they break the English siege in just nine days. It is a staggering, almost unbelievable victory. It proves to the French that God has not abandoned them. Joan’s next goal is a masterstroke of political theater: she convinces Charles to march deep into enemy territory to be crowned at Reims Cathedral, the traditional site for coronations. When Charles VII is officially crowned, it symbolically delegitimizes the English claim. Joan has not yet won the war, but she has reminded the French that they are a nation. Her eventual capture and execution by the English in 1431 only cements her status as a martyr, a symbol of French resilience. Inspired by Joan’s memory, the tide finally, irrevocably turns. The re-energized Charles VII proves to be a shrewd ruler. He professionalizes the French army, creating a standing, paid force loyal only to the crown, rather than to feudal lords. And he embraces a new, devastating technology: gunpowder. French cannon foundries, led by the innovative Bureau brothers, begin producing powerful artillery. The final act of the war is not a clash of knights, but a series of sieges where these new cannons methodically blast the walls of English-held castles into rubble. The end comes at the Battle of Castillon in 1453. The English, attempting one last invasion, are met by a fortified French camp bristling with over 300 cannons. The English commander, the great general John Talbot, is killed by a cannonball. His army is shattered. The war simply fizzles out. After 116 years of bloodshed, the English are left with only the port of Calais. France, though horrifically scarred and depopulated, emerges from the crucible as a changed nation. The power of the feudal nobility is broken, the authority of the king is supreme, and a shared sense of French identity, forged in a century of fire and suffering, has been born.