WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Ceaseless
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◈ The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing ◈
Chapter 86: The Death of Two Kings
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August 1422, Vincennes Castle, France.
The French summer was brutal. Stifling heat and humidity clung to the castle walls, while the stagnant water in the moat reeked of rot.
Yet no stench could overcome the smell of death drifting from the king's bedchamber.
"Ugh...!"
A beastlike groan burst from the bed.
The man lying there was Henry V, King of England, Regent of France, and the hero of Agincourt.
He was only thirty-five. He held the French succession in his grasp and stood on the verge of becoming the ruler of a dual kingdom through his union with the House of Valois.
But there was no trace left of the Lion King who had once commanded the battlefield.
Sunken eyes, skin flushed red like a lobster, limbs reduced to skin and bone.
It was dysentery.
The disease born from the filth of war made no distinction between a king and a common soldier.
"Your Majesty, some water..."
A servant offered him a cup with trembling hands, but Henry swept it away.
Crash!
"Get out... all of you, get out!"
He writhed as agony twisted through his intestines.
The bed sheets were soaked in blood, urine, and feces. His lower body had long since betrayed his will.
The conqueror who had commanded the world was dying as he rolled in his own filth.
"...Bedford. John."
His voice was as rough as split firewood.
His younger brother, John, Duke of Bedford, who had remained at his bedside, knelt and clasped his cold hand.
"Yes, Your Majesty. I'm here."
"Take care of my son... Henry. He's still only an infant..."
"Don't worry. I'll devote my life to serving my nephew."
Henry drew ragged breaths.
The pain of his burning insides came in waves, but he bit his lip and held back his groans.
It was the conqueror's last shred of pride.
"You will serve as Regent of France. Never fall out with the Duke of Burgundy. As long as he stands with us, France is ours."
"I will remember."
"And England... leave England to Gloucester. Keep a close watch so civil war doesn't break out."
Even at the brink of death, the king remained coldly rational.
Fearing that the empire he had built would collapse like a sandcastle, he used every remaining breath to draw a map of power.
"Don't worry, Your Majesty. Your will shall be carried out without the slightest deviation."
Only then did Henry seem to relax a little at his brother's words.
Still, an unfulfilled longing lingered in his eyes.
He gestured to the priests waiting by the bed.
"Recite the psalm..."
The priests knelt and began chanting a penitential psalm in Latin. Solemn, low prayers filled the room.
"Lord, by Your favor do good to Zion; build the walls of Jerusalem... (Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion, ut aedificentur muri Jerusalem...)"
The king's eyes wandered through the air.
Before him flickered the battlefield of Agincourt.
Arrows falling like rain, French knights collapsing, and Catherine of Valois, King Charles VI of France's daughter, kneeling at his feet.
Everything had been perfect.
If he could just hold on a little longer, he would become the master of an empire unlike any in history, one that united England and France.
And yet he was dying of diarrhea.
Drowning in his own filth.
"Lord... do You not know...?"
Thick tears rolled from Henry's eyes and seeped into his pillow.
"I did not desire only the crown of France. My true wish... was to end this war and go to Jerusalem. I wanted to rebuild Your walls there and reclaim the Holy Land from the infidels..."
It was the conqueror's final confession, and his regret for a dream left unrealized.
The Holy Roman Empire could not even bring a single Bohemian heretic to heel, and the authority of the papacy, which had endured for a thousand years, was faltering.
Henry had dreamed of reclaiming Jerusalem with France as his foothold and becoming the true protector of Christendom.
It ended as nothing more than a dream.
"Into the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ... I commend my soul..."
Pffft-
The king's sphincter gave way, and watery stool poured onto the sheets again.
The foul stench filled the room. John, Duke of Bedford, squeezed his eyes shut and turned away.
For England's great conquering king, it was a death far too empty and foul.
* * *
News of Henry V's death spread across France on the wind.
South of the Loire River, cheers erupted from the camp of Dauphin Charles in Bourges.
"God has helped us!"
"The devil is dead! England's butcher drowned in his own filth!"
Those who supported the Dauphin embraced one another, danced, and sensed victory ahead.
The Lion King they had feared so deeply was gone. They believed it would only be a matter of time before they retook Paris and drove out the invaders.
But their joy did not last long.
The conqueror was dead, but the system he had left behind remained intact.
Henry's brother, John, Duke of Bedford, was an administrator as capable as Henry himself, and the English-Burgundian alliance remained strong.
Henry V's death was not the end of the Hundred Years' War. It was only the beginning of a longer, more tedious struggle in the mud.
Two months later, in October, funeral bells rang over the skies of Paris once more.
* * *
Paris, the Hôtel Saint-Pol.
Autumn rain drizzled over Paris's dreary streets.
Deep within the manor, where the air stank of rotting leaves, an old man crouched like a beast.
King Charles VI of France.
His people had called him the Beloved King, but history would remember him as the Mad King.
His chamber was far too shabby and filthy for a king's bedchamber.
The once-splendid tapestries were covered in mold and dust. Afraid of the king's fits, the servants often shoved food through the gap beneath the door before fleeing.
"Don't come near me! I said don't come near me!"
The white-haired old man screamed from the corner, wearing a nightgown little better than rags.
"Your Majesty, please calm yourself. It's me, Your Majesty's confessor."
"Lies! You came to break me!"
Charles glared at the priest with terrified eyes.
"I'm glass... I'm made of glass! If you touch me, I'll shatter into pieces! My arms will break, and my heart will scatter like shards of glass!"
Glass delusion.
The king believed himself to be a transparent, fragile man of glass.
Fearing that his body would break, he had refused even to wash his face or change his burial shroud for months. Even when he sat down, he braced himself with iron rods beneath his clothes, afraid his bottom would shatter.
His body carried a different sort of stench from Henry V's dysentery. It was an unpleasant smell of ingrained grime, mold, and decaying madness.
Not even Queen Isabeau of Bavaria was in the room.
She had long since grown to hate her husband and begun living apart from him. His once-loyal servants had also abandoned him rather than tend to a mad king.
"Your Majesty..."
The priest made the sign of the cross in pity.
Once, he had been beloved as a strikingly handsome man and the very image of chivalry.
But England's invasion, endless civil war, and inherited madness had slowly destroyed him from within.
To protect his country, he had married his daughter Catherine off to Henry, the king of an enemy nation, as though selling her. He had even been forced to disown his own son, Dauphin Charles, and brand him a bastard.
After those cruel years of humiliation, the king had finally lost his mind.
"I'm cold... so cold..."
Charles muttered as he hugged his knees.
"Is anyone there? Jean? Louis? Where has everyone gone?"
The names he called belonged to his younger brother and retainers, who had long ago been assassinated or fallen in battle.
For the last time, the king softly spoke the name of the daughter he had personally pushed into the invader's bed.
"Catherine..."
The king's hand, weakly reaching toward the silent darkness, fell with a thud.
October 21, 1422.
The king who believed himself to be glass quietly crumbled away without making even the sound of breaking.
Time passed, and the day of the king's funeral came.
The chief mourner walking behind the coffin was not his own son, Dauphin Charles, but the English Regent, John, Duke of Bedford.
As he led the funeral procession as the representative of the victorious nation, the citizens of Paris wept whenever the king's coffin passed.
It was not so much respect for the king as pity for their own wretched state, having failed to protect even their mad king.
Now the crown of France would be placed upon the head of Henry VI, a nine-month-old infant.
Yet Dauphin Charles, south of the Loire River, would never accept it.
It was the moment when the fates of England and France once again plunged into great chaos.
And this news rode the wind, far to the east and south.
* * *
Anatolia, Bursa Bey Palace.
Murad II, the young Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, had just turned his army from Europe to Asia to suppress the rebellion of his brother Mustafa.
Elite Janissaries stood in formation behind him, while reports from the west lay piled across the table.
"Your Majesty."
Çandarlı Ibrahim Pasha, the Grand Vizier, bowed respectfully.
"Urgent reports have arrived from our spies in the west. It appears that two Frankish kings have fallen one after the other."
"Which two kings?"
"Henry, England's conqueror, and Charles, France's mad king. Within only two months, the west's two most powerful kingdoms have become empty houses without masters."
A deep smile spread across Murad II's lips.
"It is Allah's will."
Only a few months earlier, he had besieged Constantinople, intending to cut off the Eastern Roman Empire's last breath.
But when his own brother Mustafa rebelled, he had no choice but to turn his army back.
Besides, the walls of Constantinople had been far sturdier than the Sultan expected. The old Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos had held out stubbornly, and the siege dragged on.
If crusaders from the west had come to support them under those circumstances, things would have become uncontrollable.
And now those westerners had lost their kings and fallen into chaos among themselves.
"England has made an infant its king, France is divided and locked in civil war, and Sigismund of Hungary is struggling because he can't even handle a single Bohemian heretic."
Murad II was utterly certain.
"For the time being, no crusader banners will rise in the west."
Murad also knew that it had all begun with the heretic war in Bohemia.
"That King of Bohemia grows more to my liking by the day. Once I take Constantinople, perhaps I should send him a Byzantine princess as a gift."
The west had suffered one setback after another. Now no one could stand in the way of the Ottoman invasion.
Ambition burned in the young Sultan's eyes.
"Inform the entire army. This time, we will see it through. After crushing my brother's rebellion... we will cut off Rome's last breath."
* * *
Constantinople's mood, on the other hand, was more somber than a funeral hall.
The terrace of the Palace of Blachernae.
Manuel II Palaiologos, the old Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, stood leaning on his cane and stared endlessly across the western sea.
But the sea breeze carried only the fishy scent of salt.
There was no sign of the banners of the relief force he had awaited so desperately.
"Your Majesty..."
John VIII Palaiologos, his son and co-emperor, approached with a grim expression.
"Venetian merchants have brought news. The King of England... has died."
"...Ah."
Manuel staggered and gripped the railing.
He had placed his final hope in Henry V.
He had clung to the faint expectation that, once England's Lion King subdued France, he would come with all that strength to save his brothers in the east.
When Manuel II had personally traveled through Western Europe, begging for aid, Henry IV, Henry V's father, had seemed the friendliest and most powerful ruler he had encountered.
And now Henry V was dead.
"What of France? What has become of King Charles?"
"He has also passed away. Paris has fallen into the hands of the English Regent, and the Dauphin has fled south in defeat. France is now effectively a kingdom without a king."
Manuel lowered his head in despair.
"It is over."
The west was divided, the Pope was occupied with the Bohemian heretics, and Sigismund, who should have been Catholicism's shield, had ruined the crusaders and now sat beneath a mountain of debt.
There was no one left anywhere in Europe to help this old, sick empire.
'No, perhaps...'
His gaze briefly passed over the western sky, toward Bohemia, but he eventually shook his head.
One could not call upon heretics to stop infidels.
For an emperor who had devoted his entire life to the unity of the Church, that was the last piece of pride he could never abandon.
"Lord... why have You forsaken Rome?"
Tears streamed down the old emperor's face.
Beyond the Bosporus Strait before him, the Ottoman crescent banners seemed to be drawing ever closer.
* * *
Venice, the Doge's Palace.
Doge Tommaso Mocenigo stood by the window of his office, watching the waves of the Adriatic Sea.
"Are the accounts settled?"
Behind him, the chief clerk carried an armful of documents. They were not parchment, but the finest Sternberg white paper imported from Bohemia.
"Yes, Your Excellency. Urgent reports have arrived from London and Paris. Since King Henry's death, the value of the English pound has been fluctuating, and the wool trade in Flanders has also slowed."
Mocenigo nodded coolly.
"What about France?"
"With King Charles's death, it is unclear whether we can recover the loans made to the House of Valois. The council is fiercely debating whether to side with Dauphin Charles or John, Duke of Bedford."
Mocenigo stroked his chin.
A king's death might be a tragedy to some, but to Venice, it was only volatility. And volatility meant an opportunity to make money.
"Bet on both sides."
"Pardon?"
"Send Bedford our finest velvet with an embassy of congratulations, and discreetly offer Dauphin Charles a military loan. Set the interest higher than usual."
A ruthless merchant's smile touched the Doge's lips.
"Both sides will need money the longer the war continues. Swords may rust, but gold coins last forever."
The chaos in Western Europe.
The fall of the Eastern Roman Empire.
And the strange changes taking place in Bohemia.
There was only one way for Venice to survive amid all this disorder.
Take no one's side, and trade with them all.
"The wind is changing."
The Doge opened the shutters and drew in the sea breeze deeply.
"A storm is coming. A very great storm."
In the autumn of 1422, when two kings vanished in the west, Europe was being pulled into a whirlpool of upheaval.
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