3 ms·
Probably much more important than chivalry: you can't ransom off a captive who is dead. Ransoms were really, really large in that period. Five years after this
by telchior 4y ago
Probably much more important than chivalry: you can't ransom off a captive who is dead.
Ransoms were really, really large in that period. Five years after this battle, the English captured the French king at Poitiers. His ransom was 4 million gold coins plus, I think, various concessions. The French ended up having to pay a lot of ransoms through the whole war, and as a result, the nobility and crown were so poor they couldn't prevent banditry and famines.
Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is a very engaging account of this period.
- greesil 4y agoMy takeaway from reading that book was that if I was a time traveler I'd avoid that place and time. I thought the banditry may have served as inspiration for the middle books of Game of Thrones.
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoI think the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century were worse. Even high nobility was not immune from torture and gruesome executions. You can't bribe a fanatic.