Hundred Years' War

But the sheer physical devastation of the war was soon eclipsed by an even greater catastrophe. Between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death swept across Western Europe, arresting the march of armies and emptying kingdoms. In France, the plague claimed between six and twelve million lives—thirty to sixty percent of the population—inducing economic collapse, massive labor shortages, and widespread social dislocation. England fared only slightly better, losing two to three million people. The compounding miseries of war, taxation, and pestilence triggered violent domestic upheavals. In France, the capture of their king at Poitiers ignited the Jacquerie, a desperate peasant uprising, and fierce political conflicts in Paris between the Dauphin and the merchant leader Stephen Marcel. Though the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 briefly paused the war by granting Edward III vast territories in exchange for renouncing his claim to the throne, the peace was a fragile illusion. By 1369, the energetic Charles V the Wise of France declared the treaty void and renewed the struggle. Guided by his brilliant Constable, Bertrand du Guesclin, the French avoided disastrous set-piece battles, opting instead for a grinding war of attrition that gradually wore the English down, reducing their continental holdings to a few coastal enclaves by the time Charles and du Guesclin died in 1380.

The war’s final, most dramatic acts were set in motion by the internal collapse of France in the early fifteenth century. As King Charles VI descended into severe mental illness, the French court fractured into a bloody civil war between two rival factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. Sensing an opportunity to revive his dynasty’s claims, the ambitious Henry V of England invaded France in 1415. At Agincourt, his heavily outnumbered army achieved a legendary victory, paving the way for the conquest of Normandy. Allied with the powerful Duke of Burgundy, Henry forced the French to sign the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which disinherited the Dauphin and named Henry regent and heir to the French throne. Yet, at the very zenith of English power, the momentum vanished. In 1422, Henry V died unexpectedly, leaving his infant son, Henry VI, to inherit two crowns under the regency of the Duke of Bedford.

The tide turned not through the calculations of princes, but through the sudden, mystifying appearance of a peasant girl from Domrémy. In 1429, Joan of Arc arrived at the court of the embattled Dauphin, claiming divine voices had sent her to lift the siege of Orléans and see him crowned. Her presence galvanized a demoralized French nation. Orléans was saved in May 1429; the English were routed at Patay in June; and the Dauphin was crowned as Charles VII at Reims in July. Though Joan was captured by the Burgundians in 1430 and burned at the stake by the English in Rouen the following year, the spiritual and political revival she ignited was irreversible. In 1435, the Treaty of Arras reconciled Charles VII with Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, stripping England of its key ally. From that moment, the English slide was relentless. Paris fell to the French in 1436; Normandy was systematically reclaimed in the late 1440s; and the defeat of the veteran English captain Sir Thomas Kyriel at Formigny in 1450 signaled the end of English dominance in the north.

The final act of this century-long drama unfolded in the far south, in the very duchy where the war had begun. Guienne, having spent centuries under English rule, revolted against its new French masters, prompting the veteran English commander John Talbot to land with an army of five thousand men. But on July 17, 1453, at the Battle of Castillon, Talbot’s forces were destroyed by the superior, modernized artillery of the French army. Talbot was killed, and when Bordeaux capitulated on October 9, the war was effectively over. Of all the vast continental domains once held by the Plantagenets, only the pale of Calais remained under English control.

The world left behind in 1453 bore little resemblance to the one that had entered the war in 1337. The conflict had served as a crucible for the modern state. The old feudal levies, dominated by aristocratic heavy cavalry and bound by codes of chivalry, had been rendered obsolete by professional, paid infantry and the thunder of gunpowder artillery. To sustain such a prolonged struggle, both crowns had been forced to centralize their administrations, establish permanent taxation, and birth the first standing armies in Western Europe since the fall of Rome. But the deepest transformation was psychological. The shared elite culture of the Anglo-Norman world was dead; in its place stood a fierce, nascent nationalism. The English nobility, stripped of their ancestral lands in France and harboring deep resentment toward a bankrupt crown, turned their violent energies inward, plunging England into the decades of civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses. France, though scarred by decades of famine, banditry, and plague, emerged unified, powerful, and centralist—no longer a collection of warring fiefdoms, but a cohesive kingdom ready to assert itself as a dominant power on the European stage.