Bluebeard (eBook)

Brave Warrior, Brutal Psychopath

Valerie Ogden (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
278 Seiten
History Publishing Company, LLC (Verlag)
978-1-940773-08-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A fabulously wealthy 15th-century French aristocrat, A Marshal of France, a celebrated war hero, a true Renaissance man, and an overt homosexual turned into a mass murderer. Gilles de Rais became known as 'Bluebeard' with his ghastly dabbling in the Black Arts, extreme depravity, shocking fall from grace, and explosive end reading like a blockbuster movie.

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Enshrouded within the annals of French history, a tale of unimaginable horror and perversion emerges. It is the story of Gilles de Rais, an aristocratic warrior revered as one of France's wealthiest and most respected men, and known as a close companion to none other than Joan of Arc herself on the battlefield. Yet, beyond the chivalrous facade, he devolved into a monstrous serial killer, acquiring the macabre moniker of Bluebeard. His horrifyingly extensive record of bizarre sexual rituals, ghastly mutilations, and the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of children stands in stark contrast to his celebrated military career. This chilling transformation begs the question - how could such a fall from grace occur? How could a figure as eminent as Baron Gilles de Rais, a Marshal of France, a luminous intellectual, and a paragon of the high medieval prince whose talents and accomplishments echoed those of the Renaissance, descend into such extreme depravity? The explanations remain elusive and mired in speculation. However, historical evidence strongly suggests that de Rais, like many a returning soldier, bore the invisible wounds of severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It's conceivable that the psychological aftermath of war might have ignited his latent psychopathy, pulling him into a vortex of violence and insanity. His journey from celebrated hero to infamous monster is a chilling testament to the cruel and corrosive power of war. It adds credence to the notion that warfare's inhumanity has the potential to radically alter even the most heroic of individuals, transforming them beyond recognition. The tale of Gilles de Rais's descent into madness serves as a disconcerting reminder of the darkness lurking within the human psyche, ready to surface under the right (or wrong) circumstances.

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CHAPTER TWO
A COUNTRY OF THIEVES / A BANQUET FOR KINGS

France remained paralyzed during the early part of the fifteenth century. It faced a series of crises that stretched its resources and society to their limits. Treachery and cruelty knew no bounds. Savagery became an acceptable part of life. The Monfort-Penthievres battle was just one of the local vendettas, and with epidemics and burning rage resulting from the Hundred Years’ War, it all combined to weigh down the realm. The nobility cared only about its own enrichment, and displayed no social or national conscience. Expediency outbalanced morality. Loyalty was for sale to the highest bidder. Duke Jean V of Brittany, the Dauphin’s brother-in-law, was not the only lord to change sides during the struggle with England; de Craon was not the only thievish member of the gentry. Gilles de Rais lived and fought battles in that tumultuous time. The events he witnessed or knew about could conceivably have stoked his smoldering lust for blood. Eventually, his own demented sexual rituals, his sadistic massacres, his unthinkable acts, reflected the worst of France’s deep pathologies.

The weak but beloved King Charles VI could not prevent his subjects’ faithlessness. He had sporadic attacks of insanity, passing in and out of reality for many years. Neglected at times by all but his mistress, he wandered about in rags, reportedly stank like rotten eggs, and lived in his own filth. Sometimes he had hallucinations, believing he was made of glass. At other times he believed thousands of steel points were pricking him. Because of his condition, today diagnosed as schizophrenia, he was helpless to end the Hundred Years’ War. Seizing upon Charles VI’s frail mental state, Henry V of England landed on French soil determined to snatch the French Crown. His men plundered the countryside for two months, leading up to the great battle of Agincourt.

During Charles’s bouts with insanity, his nephew, John of Burgundy, married to the wealthy heiress of the Kingdom of Flanders, served as Regent of France. Along with the vast lands he acquired from his wife, the position of regent made him very strong politically. However, when Charles was more lucid, his younger brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans, attempted to fill the political vacuum left by the demented king. John and Louis each profited financially when in power; for example, their territories were exempt from taxation during their tenures as de facto ruler. Chaos reigned at court and throughout France while these two self-interested nobles vied to govern the country.

A few years before the bitter French defeat at Agincourt, the Duke of Burgundy, called John the Fearless (a nickname he earned after fighting against the Ottoman Empire with great bravery), staged a civil war against the faction led by the Duke of Orleans, who ruled France at that moment. One of Louis’s acts had been to exclude the Dukedom of Burgundy from receiving money from the French court. Infuriated, John ordered the brutal assassination of the Duke of Orleans. The attack on the king’s brother (also the queen’s lover) took place at night as Orleans left the queen’s house, the Hotel Montaigu, after the two had made love to lute music. As Orleans mounted his horse on a dimly lit Parisian street, seventeen assassins hired by Burgundy closed in around him. They toppled him from his mount and amputated his arms, leaving him defenseless. In his book on de Rais, Wyndham Lewis (who co-wrote the first version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much), imagined how the scene played out:

“At the Duke’s scream, a window opened in the house of a bourgeois down the street and a woman shrieked ‘Murder!’ It was soon over. When the gang had vanished, a tall cloaked figure with a hat pulled over its face was seen to issue with a torch from the Duke of Burgundy’s town house, higher up the street, and to inspect the body lying sprawled in the kennel. The job had been efficiently done, shipshape and Chicago-fashion; Orleans had been hacked almost in pieces.”18

John then mercilessly massacred Orleans’s followers, called Armagnacs. An ardent English sympathizer, John unleashed this struggle not only out of revenge, but also to take control of Parisian politics and the debilitated king. The Sorbonne dons, on the side of the English, justified Orleans’s murder, insisting he wanted to become king himself. Gibbets were strung up all over the French capital. Carpenters were commissioned to make more gallows. When these were full, trees were used. So many bodies were thrown into the Seine that it was said to be impassable in many places. Wolves roamed the suburbs of this devastated city, devouring the numerous carcasses of victims who clashed with the Duke of Burgundy. Although the Duke of Burgundy talked of helping Charles VI at Agincourt, his troops never engaged in the fight (nor did those of Jean V of Brittany). Instead, when Henry V of England overran northern France after Agincourt, he formed a powerful alliance with John the Fearless. This Duke schemed with Henry V to take the Crown of France from the children of Charles VI and bestow it upon England. The French queen, Isabelle of Bavaria, sided with the Duke of Burgundy and betrayed the French, consenting to have her offspring renounce the French throne. Within twelve months of this agreement between the queen and the Duke of Burgundy, her oldest son was dead. A year later, her second son, then Dauphin of France, perished. Both brothers had been in the Duke of Burgundy’s care.

These deaths led to the involvement of the House of Anjou and Yolande of Aragon, Duchesse of Anjou (well-known to Gilles de Rais and Jean de Craon), in the struggle for the survival of the Valois royal dynasty in France. Before these suspicious deaths occurred, Yolande of Aragon had arranged for her daughter to marry Charles, third son of King Charles VI and Queen Isabelle of France. At his birth, he became the Count of Ponthieu, a small province in northern France under the suzerainty of the dukes of Normandy, located near the English Channel. Yolande took her prospective son-in-law to her court in Angers, and raised him with her own family, acting as a substitute mother.

After the deaths of his older brothers, Queen Isabelle ordered that Charles de Ponthieu, then fourteen and married, should be brought back to the French court. Yolande refused. Determined to keep Charles from his treacherous mother and her dangerous Burgundian allies, she replied to Isabelle, “We have not nurtured and cherished this one for you to make him die like his brothers, or go mad like his father, or to become English like you. I keep him for my own. Come and take him if you dare.”19 Rumors began to circulate that Charles VI’s surviving son, Charles de Ponthieu, might be a bastard. Believing her future lay with the English claim to the French throne, and living under the protection of the Duke of Burgundy, Isabelle started to refer to her child as the “so-called Dauphin.” Queen Isabelle’s extramarital activities were a regular feature of Parisian gossip, and her sexual escapades lent credence to the rumors.

The gossip did not stop with her dalliances. Foreign-born, she was an unpopular queen, and many considered her reprehensible. She was thought to be unstable, and known to be petrified of thunder; she had a special apparatus built to keep her safe during storms. She also feared crossing bridges, and would only do so after a balustrade had been erected. She was psychosomatic and insisted on taking pilgrimages to cure her menstrual problems. Stories spread that the queen applied a mixture of boars’ brains, wolves’ blood, and crocodile glands to her face regularly during the day to retain a youthful, alluring image. She suffered from gout, possibly because of her rich diet, and toward the end of her life she became so obese she needed to be pushed around in a wheelchair.20 While Isabelle was more interested in maintaining her fading beauty than helping French citizens or her son, whom they saw as the true successor to Charles VI, she was not without her virtues. To her credit, she patronized Christine de Pizan, the first woman in Western literature to make a living from her writing. An avid collector of jewels, Isabelle also commissioned some of the most splendid objects of goldsmiths’ art from the late Middle Ages. And while ill-equipped to do so, before she became aligned with the English she dutifully attempted to rule France as the queen consort during her husband’s episodes of insanity.

The scandal the queen created over the question of her son’s birth unnerved both him and the nation. Charles de Ponthieu was tortured by doubts about his legitimacy, his right to the Crown. Groups allied to the English at the French court played upon de Ponthieu’s misgivings until Yolande of Aragon put an end to the insinuations. She met with Charles VI in one of his more lucid moments and prevailed upon him to sign a decree making Charles de Ponthieu lieutenant general of the kingdom. By acknowledging that the young Dauphin was his child, and appointing him to defend his land, Charles VI removed any question that his only remaining son was the rightful heir to the French Crown. The act also removed Queen Isabelle from any claim to be regent.

Contemporaries greatly admired Yolande of Aragon. The notable chronicler, Jean Juvenal de Ursins, one of the main sources of information on the Battle of Agincourt, described her as “the prettiest woman in the kingdom.’’ An...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.10.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Mittelalter
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-940773-08-3 / 1940773083
• ISBN-13: 978-1-940773-08-7 / 9781940773087