Family Drama, Middle-Ages Style

Everything is made into a reality series for television, it seems.  From following folks who catch massive fish barehanded, to the family squabbles of a pawnshop owner, to the foibles of a juvenile would-be beauty queen, a sort of public voyeurism seems to be all the rage.

I can only imagine the eagerness with which people would flock to the tablets, smartphones, or DVRs for the drama that surrounded King Alfonso XI of Castile.

King Alfonso XI.  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Source: "Chroniques" Vol I by Jean Froissart
Illumination by Virgil Master, c. 1410

King Alfonso's marriage to Maria of Portugal in 1328 was no doubt arranged for its political and/or material benefits.  Unfortunately for Maria, he was not especially fond of his wife, and showed a marked preference for a lady by the name of Leonor de Guzman.  In fact, once Queen Maria produced the required son, Pedro, 1334, she and the boy were sent away from the Royal Court to essentially live in exile.  She supposedly requested that King Alfonso stop making a public display of his preference for his mistress, which he ignored.  Leonor was presented with considerable property, and was installed in Seville, where it's believed that she even was allowed to involve herself in political matters.

Leonor de Guzman was a widow of Juan de Velasco, who had died in 1328.  She was the daughter of a nobleman, Pedro de Guzman, and her mother, Beatriz Ponce de Leon, was a great-granddaughter of King Alfonso IX of Leon.  She and King Alfonso had ten children.

When King Alfonso XI died in 1350, Pedro, as the legitimate son, became the new King of Castile.  He had a long memory, and now that his exile was over, he had scores to settle.  He wasn't nicknamed Pedro the Cruel without reason.  Coming into the throne with a Court that had for years been under the influence of Leonor and her sons meant that Pedro was stepping into the midst of intrigue.

Physical descriptions give him as being blond-haired and blue-eyed, thin, and with a slight speech impediment.  His personality was said to be manipulative and vindictive.  Several members of the aristocracy were assassinated or executed even after they had thought they had made peace with him.  One of his first targets was Leonor herself.  He had her imprisoned, and she was executed upon the orders of Pedro's mother--the slighted Queen Maria--in 1351.

The treatment of his mother doesn't seem to have curbed a similar tendency in Pedro, for he preferred his mistress to his wife.  He married Blanche de Bourbon, daughter of the Duke of Bourbon, to solidify the alliance with France, and which also brought a massive dowry.  They were married in 1353, and two days after the ceremony, he abandoned his new bride for his mistress.  The resulting scandal strained the alliance with France, and caused Pedro to fall afoul of the Papacy.  He tried to obtain an annulment, but ultimately had her imprisoned, and then murdered in 1361.

Pedro wasn't done causing problems.  Castile had historically directed its martial energies toward the Moors in the south in Granada.  Pedro ended the hostilities with them, instead allying with them to invade his fellow-Christian kingdom of Aragon because he had decided he wanted to control the Iberian peninsula.

Having successfully stirred up trouble away from home, Pedro now concentrated on home.  In 1358 he invited his illegitimate yet powerful half-brother, Fadrique, to have dinner with him at the palace in Seville.  Fadrique was escorted to the dinner table by Pedro's guards, where an execution order was given, and Fadrique's head was smashed in from behind by a mace.  Pedro then went through the castle murdering members of the contingent that had traveled to the castle with Fadrique.  The story is that he then returned to his table, only to find the unfortunate Fadrique still alive.  He gave a dagger to a page and told him to finish the job.  According to chronicles, Pedro then sat down and finished his meal.

This proved to be too much.  Fadrique's twin brother, Enrique, approached the ruler of Aragon, Pere III, with whom Pedro had gone to war.  When the Aragonese King agreed to support Enrique, many of Castile's nobles also sided with Enrique.  The war that resulted ultimately drew in England and France, making Iberia a part of The Hundred Years War.

Image from Froissart's "Chroniques" Pedro the Cruel killing a prisoner after
the Battle of Najera.  If the image here is a true and accurate portrayal of the
 event, the location of the wound being inflicted could indicate either practicality (the armor
 would be hard to penetrate anywhere other than the articulations) or the illustrator's attempt to
show Pedro's cruelty, as such a wound results in a miserable, sometimes lingering death.

By 1366, after ten years of warfare with Aragon, Enrique succeeded in forcing Pedro to abandon his kingdom.  In return, Pedro reached an agreement with Edward, the Black Prince and the English invaded the Iberian peninsula.  The English army numbered 28,000.  They defeated a combined force of Castilian and French at the Battle of Najera on April 3, 1367.  Enrique escaped, but many of his followers were captured.  Pedro saw one of his former followers among the prisoners and, in a fit of rage, stabbed him to death.  The Black Prince was appalled at both the dishonor of the conduct, and the disregard for potential ransom.  Pedro then offered to pay the ransom for every captive.  Prince Edward refused, saying he wouldn't let Pedro pay the ransom, even if he payed more than the prisoners were worth, because he believed that Pedro would murder them all.

The alliance with England was over shortly afterward, when Pedro delayed sending the money he had promised to Prince Edward.  With the departure of the English, the Castilians again threw their support behind Enrique.  He also succeeded in getting a defector from the French--Bertrand du Guesclin, a knight and one of the commanders of the Free Company mercenaries.  Two years after the defeat at Najera, Pedro was ambushed and found himself under siege in the castle of Montiel.

Pedro's intrigues were not over yet.  He sent a knight who knew the French knight to offer him a huge bribe if Bertrand would let Pedro escape.  The next day Pedro got word that Bertrand had accepted the offer, and he and a few of his followers sneaked out of the castle and went to the French camp.  He was delayed there by Bertrand until Enrique arrived.

That was when Pedro realized that Bertrand had set him up.  The events that happened next aren't entirely clear, as they differ slightly depending on what chronicle is read.  Regardless of precisely what insults they hurled at each other, they both drew weapons and wound up on the ground, grappling with each other.  It seems that Pedro was on the verge of winning, but someone pulled him off of Enrique.  According to Froissart's chronicle, Enrique then killed Pedro with a sword-thrust to the stomach.  Enrique thus became the undisputed King of Castile.  Bertrand was rewarded with six towns and 200,000 gold doubloons.  He was summoned back to France by the king in 1370 and became commander of the military there, where he helped France to regain much of the territory it had lost to England.

It sounds to me like there's enough material here to cover at least two or three television seasons.  Move over, Kardashians.