King Carlos and Queen Eleanor

I mentioned yesterday how King Carlos III of Navarre brought in midwives from Toledo to help his wife. The reality is, of course, that wanting a successful and safe childbirth on the part of a king is more likely motivated by a desire to have a proper line of succession than it is his desire to keep his wife safe. Sorry: that's a rather cynical approach to the marriage of Carlos and Eleanor.

Or is it?

Carlos, called "the Noble," was born 22 July 1361 to King Carlos II "the Bad" of Navarre and Joan of Valois, whose father was King John II of France. His parents traveled frequently between Navarre and the French lands that came with Joan's dowry, often leaving the children behind. Joan died suddenly in 1373, when young Carlos was not yet a teenager. It is possible that he did not have a role model for how a husband and wife should interact.

Two years later, young Carlos was married to the two-years-younger Eleanor, daughter of King Henry II of Castile. The marriage was designed to make peace between Navarre and Castile, each of whom would have liked the other's lands.

Three years after that, in 1378, Carlos was sent by his father to meet with King Charles V of France, Carlos' mother's brother. Charles arrested Carlos, and interrogated him to prove the suspicion that Carlos II intended to seize a Castilian town that had once been part of Navarre. Carlos confessed his father's plans. Charles V then invaded his brother-in-law's Navarre and forced him to sign a treaty to promise peace between Navarre and Castile.

Carlos remained under arrest, until in 1381 Eleanor asked her brother John, now King of Castile, to appeal to France to release her husband. Carlos was released and joined her in Castile. A year later, they had their first child, Joan. The next few years saw two more daughters, Marie and Blanche. A year later Eleanor bore twin daughters, but one died young leaving Beatrice.

1387 saw the death of Carlos' father and Carlos' accession to the throne on 1 January; Eleanor and daughters moved to Navarre to be with him. Eleanor fell ill, however, and returned to Castile with their daughters. For the next seven years, she refused to return to Navarre, despite Carlos' wishes. Her brother the king tried to persuade her that she had royal obligations, but she claimed that Carlos did not treat her well, and that the Court did not like her; she even claimed suspicion that some wanted to poison her.

(To be fair, the fact that she bore only daughters would motivate some courtiers to want her out of the way for a new bride who might bear a son.)

When she did return to Navarre, things between the couple got worse: she found four mistresses and six illegitimate children living at Court, at least one of whom was male, a boy named Lanzarot.

We will now take a "side trip" and follow Lanzarot before coming back to Eleanor and the succession.

Tennis, Anyone?

The earliest version of the game now called "real tennis" (or court tennis or royal tennis) was jeu de paulme, literally "palm game," because a ball was hit back and forth with the hand. Paddles and racquets were introduced in the 16th century, and were standard by the late 17th century, but the original name stuck. "Tennis" derives from tenez, "hold," which a player would call to pause the game. The tennis that we normally think of is distinguished as "lawn tennis."

Believed to have been started by monks and villagers in the 12th century in northern France, it became the "sport of kings" when the French royalty took up the game. Louis X was an avid player, and died after a particularly vigorous game; he reportedly drank a large quantity of cooled wine and died of pneumonia or pleurisy (or poison, as is always suspected when a healthy king with potential claimants to the throne dies at 27).

Louis did not like playing outdoors, and constructed indoor courts, starting a trend for royal palaces across Europe. He is history's first tennis player known by name. King Charles V of France (1338 - 1380) had a tennis court created at the Louvre Palace. Henry VIII of England was also a fan.

The original court was very different from the modern one in use today. It had several different areas marked out. Let me give you a sense of the complexity of the game and the court:

The game is begun by a service which is always from the same end of the court (the service side). The opposite end of the court where the receiver stands is called the hazard side. The service does not alternate with each game as in lawn tennis. The server changes ends and ceases to serve only when a chase has been laid. The meaning of a chase will be explained below. To be a valid service the ball has to touch the penthouse roof at least once on the hazard side of the net and drop in the service court. If it does not touch the penthouse roof or if it hits a window or the roof it will be a fault. A second serve is available, as in lawn tennis. [Click this link if you want to be overwhelmed.]

The ball used would have been far less uniform than modern balls, and would have been prone (like Miss Climpson's eraser), to an eccentric bounce. Today's real tennis balls have cork centers, surrounded first by fabric and then string and then a hand-sewn layer of heavy woolen cloth. Traditionally white, the color has changed to the "optic yellow" of lawn tennis balls.

"Real tennis" is still played today; the century-old governing body is in France.

Poison has been mentioned in this and the previous post, as a rumor concerning the death of a king. Was poison that prevalent, or was it an "urban myth" of the time? How would someone in the Middle Ages go about poisoning someone? Let's take a look at that tomorrow.

Mirrors for Princes

Machiavelli's Il Principe (c.1513) was far from innovative. Writers since classical times had produced works that explained the proper behavior—or improper behavior—of rulers. The genre was called specula principum, or "mirrors for princes." These took the form of instruction books, often aimed at a young ruler who was just coming into power, or could be biographies of rulers who should (or should not) be emulated.

The reign of Charlemagne seems to have motivated the desire to "raise the bar" for rulers and inspired many writers to produce mirrors for their local rulers in the 9th century. Charlemagne's life was, of course, the example to be followed as far as Einhard's Vita Karolini (Life of Charles) was concerned. No one wanted to see the Carolingian empire suffer after Charlemagne's demise, and so his descendants had no lack of advice. His son Louis the Pious was the target of one speculum by Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel; Louis' son Pepin I of Aquitaine was the target of one by Jonas of Orléans; Louis' grandson Lothair II of Lotharingia was addressed by Sedulius Scottus in a work called "On Christian Rulers."

Alcuin of York, a prolific writer and famous teacher, wrote De virtutibus et vitiis (On virtues and vices, c.799) for Count Wido of Brittany. A friend of Alcuin's, whom he met at Charlemagne's school in Aachen, was Paulinus of Aquileia who wrote the Liber exhortationis (Book of exhortations, 795), for Count Heiric (Eric) of Friuli. Paulinus (c.730-802) had been born in the Friuli region of northeast Italy and he and Heiric were friends, so he felt entitled to tell Heiric a thing or two, including advising him to free his slaves. (Having slaves was common.) Paulinus also wrote an elegy when Heiric was killed in 799.

Mirrors for princes were popular right through the Renaissance by scholars who felt qualified to give advice to powerful men. We know of ones that were written for the future Henry VIII (by John Skelton; a copy exists in the British Museum), for King Charles V of Spain (1516, by Erasmus), for King Christian IV of Denmark-Norway (1597, by Johann Damgaard), and King James I of England wrote one for his eldest son, Henry, who died of typhoid at 18; maybe Charles I read it when he ascended the throne.