Jeanne de Clisson, Pirate Terror of France

In the 14th century, Jeanne de Clisson's husband was accused of being a traitor and beheaded by the king of France. In response, Jeanne decided to get her revenge.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
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(00:24):
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(00:52):
The summer of thirty had been a mild one in Brittany,
which is located in the northwest of France near the
Atlantic Ocean, and summers there were typically warm with heavy rain.
Back in the fourteenth century, Brittany was an independent feudal
state and its capital not sat three hundred or so

(01:12):
miles southwest of Paris. It served as a natural crossroads
between the rest of Brittany and the separate kingdom of France.
In early August thirty three, a woman named Jean de
Clissa and her two sons, seven year old Olivier fifth
and five year old Guillaume, arrived at the main gates

(01:32):
of Nantes. If you were imagining the scene, the three
of them would have stopped there for a moment there
at the stone archoy to the city, and gazed up
to see a horrific sight the rotting decapitated head of
Jean's husband, the boy's father. His head was impaled on

(01:53):
a pike and gently swaying in the salt breeze. And
because Olivier the Fourth's head had travel old there to
not from Paris, three d miles away, the head would
have been swollen, rotting foul. Olivier the Fourth's body remained
behind in Paris in a gibbet or barred cage, but

(02:13):
his head was here in Brittany to send a message.
Days earlier, on August second, forty three, Olivier the Fourth
had been tried and found guilty on several counts of treason.
He was executed at Leal by the King of France.
Despite Olivier the Fourth's rank, King Philip the sixth of France,

(02:37):
had humiliated him in death in an attempt to dissuade
other would be traders in his midst. But the king's
actions were shocking and unconventional to both Breton and French nobility.
After all, Olivia the fourth Decklessan had been a wealthy
Breton lord, and night after death his body had been

(02:58):
displayed in a public manner only reserved for low class criminals.
Olivier the Fourth's trial was also alarming, even suspicious. He
was accused of treason, but any evidence of his guilt
was not publicly demonstrated. Allegedly it had been privately confessed,

(03:18):
but no one had seen any evidence of that. Jean
and her two sons had traveled some twenty miles from
their castle, the Chateau de Clissan, to see Olivier the
Fourth's head. Why Jean brought two of her children from
the confines of the castle to see the rotting head
of their father is unclear. Perhaps to see his face,

(03:40):
however foul one last time, or perhaps knowing Jean's character
and what she would do next, It was to instill
a need for revenge. Do not forget this, her actions
might have said, do not forgive this. When Jean and
her two sons left the countryside that day, Jean cut

(04:04):
ties with proper noble society. With the Loire River flowing
just beyond, and the head of her husband of thirteen
years swaying in tandem with the breeze, Jean swore bloody
revenge on the King of France, and she kept her promise.
I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Jean de

(04:34):
Clisson was born in thirteen hundred into an aristocratic family.
Her parents were among the most powerful nobles in Brittany.
Their lands were extensive, stretching all across southern Brittany to
the Atlantic Ocean. Her family virtually controlled access to the sea,
and they had ruled the area for hundreds of years.

(04:54):
We know very little about Jean's early life. Most likely
she enjoyed a relatively bucolic aristocratic childhood at the castle
fortress on the western coast of France that she would
eventually inherit. But however adelic it might have been, her
childhood did not last long. In thirteen twelve, when Jean

(05:15):
was twelve years old, she was married off to a
Breton nobleman, Jeoffrey de chateaubriand the eighth, the nineteen year
old heir to one of the key estates in Brittany.
When Jean was fourteen and again at sixteen, she gave
birth to two surviving children, a son, Geoffrey and a daughter, Louise.
After over a decade of marriage, her first husband died

(05:39):
in thirteen twenty six, leaving Jean a twenty six year
old widow. A woman of high birth and wealth, Jean
was also a noted beauty. Historian Richard Bentley called her
quote one of the most beautiful women of her day,
and she had reddish brown hair and fair skin, which
was a symbol of status at the time. Still, unmarried

(06:01):
women in the fourteenth century, even women of noble standing,
had close to no power, and to insure the safety
and well being of herself and her children, Jean needed
to remarry. Two years later, in thirteen twenty eight, Jean
married the son of the Duke of Brittany, Guy of Penthief,

(06:22):
which should have been a coup. However, factions of Guy's
family opposed the union. On February tenth, thirteen thirty, within
two years of the relationship, the marriage was scandalously annulled
by Pope John the twenty second, allegedly because the marriage
was never consummated, but it's difficult to know the truth

(06:43):
of that. Jean was remarried once more, this time to
Olivier the Fourth de Clessent, a wealthy Breton nobleman, lord
and knight. Olivier the fourth was a widower as well,
and it seems like he was almost exactly the same
age as Jean. Upon their marria rich the pair became
one of the wealthiest and most influential couples in Brittany,

(07:05):
with control of a number of estates and vast properties.
Jean and Olivier the Fourth were married for thirteen years
and had five children. Their eldest child, Isabella, was born
in thirteen thirty one, and then came Maurice, Olivier the five, Guillaume,
and little baby Jean born thirteen forty. By the time

(07:26):
Jean was thirty years old, she was the mother to
seven children. Now for a little bit of geographical context,
Brittany was at the time an independent medieval feudal state
located in the western tip of modern France, south of England.
Parts of Brittany and some nobles at the time were

(07:46):
loyal to the English, while other parts and other people
were loyal to the French. But the majority of Breton's
considered themselves first and foremost Bretons loyal to the Duke
of Brittany over the kings of England or France. But
outside of Brittany, tensions between England and France continued to brew,

(08:07):
which finally set the stage for an all out war.
Was a succession crisis. Charles the Fourth of France died
childless in thirteen twenty eight, and his closest heir was
his nephew, the English king Edward the third. His claim
to the throne was his mother, Isabella of France. Yet
the French nobility at the time rejected Edward the Third's

(08:28):
claim in favor of a native French ruler. One of
the longest and bloodiest conflicts of the Middle Ages, this brutal,
epic turning struggle became known as the Hundred Years of War.
To complicate matters, in thirteen forty one, the Duke of
Brittany also died without an air. Both the French and

(08:50):
English claimed his lands in northwestern France. The War of
Breton succession officially became a proxy conflict of the Hundred
Years War. Jehan's husband, Olivier the Fourth, was a descendant
of English knights who were awarded estates in Brittany to
preserve the claim of the English crown on the province
by the thirteen forties. Olivier the Fourth was a loyal

(09:13):
vassal of the King of France, King Philip the Fourth.
That was at least in part a pragmatic decision. In
addition to their Breton lands, the de Clissons possessed extensive
lands in the Kingdom of France. If they sided with
the English in the Breton succession, it would immediately lead
to the seizure of their estates outside of Brittany. So,

(09:35):
despite ancestral ties to England, Olivier the Fourth loyally joined
the French in thirteen forty two to defend Brittany from
the English and to back the French claimant to the
Breton throne. Charles du Blois. Olivier the Fourth and a
man named Hervey the seventh a Lyon, were acting as
military commanders in defense of the French city of Vant

(09:57):
until the city fell to English control in November of
thirteen forty two. The two commanders were captured. Two months
went by until on January nine, thirteen forty three, a
new peace treaty between the English and the French was
mediated by Pope Clement the sixth, King Edward of England
and King Philippa France agreed to the truth. But while

(10:20):
Hervey the seventh day Leon remained in English custody, Olivier
the fourth was released in exchange for an English prisoner
and payment, but the ransom for Olivier the fourth was
surprisingly low. Suspiciously, according to Charles de Blois, who was
by then established as the Duke of Brittany, he became

(10:42):
convinced that Olivier the fourth was a trader and had
defected to the English. Exactly why he believed this is unclear.
Some versions of the story say that Olivier the Fourth
actually did switch sides, although those accounts are much rarer.
In the summer of thirteen forty three, Olivier the fourth

(11:03):
was invited to attend a tournament in the Kingdom of
France in celebration of the truce. However, when he arrived,
he was immediately arrested and taken to Paris, where he
was tried. Before fifteen noble peers, including his accuser Charles
du Bois, and the King himself. After her husband's arrest,

(11:23):
they said, Jean bribed a royal sergeant to try to
get Olivier released. Her plan failed, and the sergeant was arrested.
Olivier the Fourth's trial on August second, thirty three was
a quick matter with a foregone conclusion. It was followed
immediately by his beheading. Here's the part in the story

(11:44):
where we get to Jean and her kids taking that
family trip to the gates of Nantes to see their
father's decapitated head. After that, Jean was summoned to Paris
to face trial for her attempted bribery of the king's sergeant,
but she never went. Rather than report to Paris to
face continued punishment for her husband's trumped up charges, Jehan

(12:07):
sold jewelry, furniture, and, according to some accounts, even her
body to raise money for a small army. Jean and
her troops traveled throughout Brittany, rallying unhappy wealthy nobles supporters
of her husband. The couple had had plenty of powerful
friends and the friends and families of other executed nobles

(12:29):
or nobles who had been mistreated by the French king.
Jean rallied her troops with the common goal of ridding
Brittany of the French King. Philip the fourth declared Jean
de Cleissent a trader and confiscated her lands. They had
said the same thing about her husband. The forty three
year old widow was going to show the French the

(12:50):
meaning of the word trader and let fall carnage. The
Chateau de Toufu sat about twin dekilometers southeast of Nantes,
and it was under the command of a man named
Galois de Laharius, an officer loyal to Charles de Bois.
In one episode of the tale, Jean was invited to

(13:12):
the castle. Galois had not yet heard the news of
Olivier the Fourth's trial and execution, and so he was
just inviting a noble woman to enjoy his hospitality. In
another version of the story, Jean arrived seemingly in need,
with tears streaming down her cheeks. None the wiser Galwah
welcomed John inn and why not. The very garrison he

(13:35):
had commanded had once been a former post under the
control of her now decapitated husband. As soon as the
main gate was opened, Jean and her four hundred or
so men launched their guerrilla insurgency, storming the castle. Her
forces massacred almost the entire garrison. Jean engaged in the

(13:57):
slaughter right alongside her soldiers. As French historian Maurice Julesabelle
Lefranc described quote, the blood of all the other keepers
or inhabitants of the castle was mercilessly shed, like a
first exputory sacrifice offered in memory of Olivier de Clisson.
As you can imagine, the story of the vengeful widow

(14:19):
has veered into the apocryphal over the centuries. A version
of the story mentioned that gal Woas was the only
one to escape Gendrath, and thus inadvertently established what would
become her future modus operandi. A single person would be
left alive after a raid to tell the King of
France of the carnage. By the time Charles de Brans

(14:42):
and his army arrived at the castle, Jean's forces, along
with everything of value within the fortress, had disappeared. Pulling
together the rest of her money and whatever they had plundered,
Jean sailed to England with two of her sons, Olivier,
the fifth and Um in order to assemble a small
fleet of three massive warships. Where her other children were

(15:07):
during this time is unknown. John's priorities had shifted away
from the domestic. She had sworn revenge on the French king,
and so to the sea she went. She christened her
fleet fittingly enough, my Revenge. She hired the best captains
and crews, a mix of Breton's English and rogue French,

(15:30):
and she armed them well. Jean personally commanded the Black Fleet,
beginning her career as a pirate, taking refuge in the
fog enshrouded coves and inlets of the Brittany coast, raiding
coastal villages along Normandy, and plundering French supply ships and vessels.

(15:52):
Despite her pattern of leaving at least one personal live
to report her vengeance to the king, there are not
many reviving accounts of Jean's exploits. However, according to legend,
the survivors of her massacres always told a similar story.
The stories begin with these pitiful two or three survivors,

(16:14):
their close smelling of the briny sea air, and covered
in blood. They'd have already been stripped of their weapons, armor,
and French insignia, and they'd be bleeding from cuts and
heavily bruised altogether, just shaken from the massacre they had
witnessed and had at random survived. To whoever would listen,

(16:36):
these desperate souls would recount how three black ships on
the horizon had appeared in the fog. Three massive haunting
warships with pitch black wood crimson sails read as blood,
propelled the ships through the water. The friendships, being overtaken,

(16:56):
would try to defend themselves. They had launched fire, arrows,
fault with swords, spears, axes, but inevitably they would be
overrun in minutes, the invading forces proving too ferocious. Striding
along the conquered deck wielding a well worn axe behind her,

(17:18):
the captain, a woman, would appear and she would quickly
survey her captives. As the stories go, she would point,
seemingly at random to two or three men, the sole survivors.
She would need to leave two or three enough to
sail back to French soil to spread her tale of terror.

(17:40):
On her signal, her men would massacre the remaining crew.
She herself would raise her axe and behead every person
of nobility aboard the vessel. Remember, beheading a man was
something that even strong professional executioners had trouble doing in
a single stroke, and so we can imagine that Jean's

(18:02):
victims most likely endured several hacks before their heads were
dislodged from their bodies. The French historian Lefranc claims that
she quote mercilessly put to death all the French who
fell into her hands, despite the money that she could
have made ransoming nobles, Jean de Clisson severed the heads

(18:22):
of any and all French nobility. She saw a fitting
revenge for her husband's demise. She would then toss their
lifeless bodies overboard. From there, Genred had below deck to
plunder for valuables. Before leaving the conquered ship, she would
look the two to three survivors in the eyes with cold,

(18:43):
hateful stairs. You've been left alive, she'd say, to tell
your king that the Lioness of Brittany claimed another of
his ships. And thus the legend of the Lioness was born.
Among the common Breton people and the English allies of Brittany,
Jean's popularity grew. I do think it is important to

(19:06):
remember that you should probably take the sheer drama of
her story with a grain of sea salt. Remember this
is kind of exactly the sort of propaganda story that
would get exaggerated on both sides. Both her enemies and
supporters would want to play up how brutal she was,
her enemies to paint her as barbaric, and her allies

(19:28):
to make her seem scarier for future opponents. But even
if the details have probably been distorted over the centuries,
the spine of the story is true. After the death
of her husband, Jean had hatred in her heart for
the French king and in turn hatred for any noble
loyal to the king. And in the waters between France

(19:51):
and England, Jean de Clisson, a noble woman born in Brittany,
avenged the death of her husband one bloody French mass
her at a time. Two years into her pirate ng in,
the French finally managed to engage her fleet and sink
her flagship. Jean and her two sons, Olivier the fifth

(20:13):
and Guillaume, escaped the assault by rowboat, adrift on the
violent waves for five or six days without food or water.
Young Guillaume died of exposure. Jean and Olivier the Fifth
were ultimately rescued by allies, and years later young Olivier
would grow up into a soldier so brutal he would

(20:34):
be nicknamed the Butcher. But this is a story about
his mother arriving in England. It seems that from this
point the noblewoman turned bloody pirate transitioned into privateering, which
meant that she would be acting as a pirate, but
legally on behalf of a nation, in this case England,
who was eager to have as many vessels as possible

(20:57):
joining with them in the fight against the French and
the Hundred Years War. King Edward the third of England
granted John land in the areas of Brittany that the
English controlled, along with titles, and he supplied her with
money and ships as a thank you for clearing the
English channel of the French. In turn, Jean ferried supplies
and men from England to France in support of the English,

(21:21):
and of course, all the while she continued her carnage.
Jean continued for the next several years plundering and massacring
all ships owned by or allied with the French Crown.
And even when King Philip the six of France, her
bitter enemy, died in thirteen fifty, Jean continued privateering for

(21:41):
the English for an additional six years. Jean's pirate slash
privateer career lasted for thirteen blood soaked years, and there's
a coincidence there that seems too fitting to dismiss, whether
she did it purposefully or not. Jean massacred the French
by sea for one year for every year she had

(22:04):
been married to her beloved husband. In thirteen fifty six, Jean,
then fifty six years old, took refuge in England and
married Sir Walter Bentley, a lieutenant to King Edward the Third.
Like Jean, Bentley had served valiantly on the side of

(22:27):
the English during the Hundred Years War. The two retired
at the castle of Hennebont, a port town on the
Brittany coast, which was at the time controlled by the English,
and they remained there for the rest of Jean's life.
Jean passed away in thirteen fifty nine, fifty nine years old.
The cause of her death isn't known specifically, and so

(22:48):
it's most likely disease or natural causes. The story of
Jean de Clisson, noble woman turned pirate, is I admit,
almost unbelievable, and it has been argued frequently that such
a figure couldn't possibly have existed, and yet there are
several historical sources which confirm her existence, like a French

(23:11):
court document from thirteen forty three confirming the confiscation of
Jehan's lands due to her being labeled as a traitor
to France, and there's an English document that same year
indicating that she earned money from said land under the
English crown. Likewise, there's an English document from thirteen forty
seven listing her as an English ally. Other documents confirm

(23:33):
her marriage to Bentley as well, despite the relative dearth
of other primary sources. After all, the sea doesn't lend
itself to preserved paper artifacts or diaries, and legal piracy
was not an occupation in which people were fastidious about
record keeping. Jean de Clissan and the legend of the
Lioness of Brittany lives on in French folklore. Once again,

(23:57):
I want to flag, especially with this sort of store,
it's challenging to tease out what exactly was true and
what was legend. But we know that Jean de Cleisson
was a real person, while the truth of some of
the more dramatic flourishes of the tale remained nebulous. We
know that she grieved and mourned the beheading of her husband,

(24:18):
and then we know she decided to take revenge into
her own hands however she could. That's the story of
Jean de Clisson, the Lioness of Brittany. But stick around
after a brief sponsor break to hear how the woman
who so terrified France lives on today. Jean de Cleisson

(24:51):
survived seven childbirths without the aid of medicine. She lived
through the Black Death and spent thirteen dangerous years as
a pirate. She lived a very long, full life until
she was fifty nine years old, a fairly old age
given the dangerous life she lived, despite her relatively homey

(25:11):
and calm final years that she spent married in a
Brittany port town. Reportedly, after her death, Jean is not
resting in peace. It said that after her death, Jean
spirit traveled to the Chateau de Clisson. The ruins of
the castle, which was destroyed during the French Revolution, still
tower over the Severnantes River today within its stone walls.

(25:36):
Visitors have reported seeing Jean's restless ghost haunting the ruins.
Some say she's reunited with Olivia, the fourth de Clissons
spirit there, as well the tortured lovers walking the halls
side by side. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart

(26:03):
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is hosted by me Danish Wartz. Additional writing and researching
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(26:25):
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