The Claim and the Calamity

When the last Capetian king, Charles IV of France, died without a male heir in 1328, the succession question convulsed European politics. Philippe VI of the House of Valois was crowned king under the Salic Law, which barred women and their male descendants from the French succession. But Edward III of England — grandson of Philippe IV through his mother Isabella — believed the Salic Law was an illegal innovation and that he had the better claim. For nine years he nursed his grievance while consolidating power in England. In 1337, after Philippe confiscated the English-held Duchy of Gascony, Edward formally claimed the French crown and the war began.

The war's opening decade produced military shocks that reverberated across Europe. In 1340, Edward destroyed the French fleet at Sluys. In 1346, he landed in Normandy and marched south, living off the land in a chevauchée — a strategy of systematic devastation designed to undermine Philippe's authority and economy. The French king assembled a vast army and gave chase. On August 26, 1346, at Crécy, English longbowmen firing ten arrows a minute decimated successive charges of French knights. The battle was a revelation: massed disciplined ranged fire could destroy armored cavalry, the dominant military force of the age. Edward then besieged Calais for eleven months, winning the port that England would hold for over two centuries.

A decade after Crécy, Edward's son the Black Prince repeated the formula at Poitiers. Leading a chevauchée through southern France with 8,000 men, he was caught by a French army of 20,000 under King John II. Rather than flee, the Black Prince chose a strong defensive position and invited the French to attack uphill. Longbowmen tore apart every charge. When the French dismounted to advance on foot, the Black Prince launched a counterattack that shattered them. King John II himself was captured — a humiliation without precedent in French history. John was taken to London, treated with chivalric courtesy, and held for a ransom of three million gold crowns.

Between Crécy and Poitiers, the Black Death arrived in France and England, killing roughly a third of the population and disrupting the war's momentum as both sides lost the manpower and resources to sustain major campaigns. John II's capture while he was already impoverished by plague and military defeat forced France to sign the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360: England received Aquitaine, Poitou, Calais, and other territories in full sovereignty, while Edward renounced his claim to the French crown. It looked like an English triumph. In fact, the enormous ransom France could not fully pay, and the territories England could not effectively govern, sowed the seeds of the war's resumption.