John the Blind at Crécy

JAN 01 1346 · 12:00

The Battle of Crécy, where John of Luxembourg charged blind into the English line, in a Froissart manuscript illumination. Place: A wheatfield east of the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu, Picardy Figures: John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, blind ten years · Edward the Black Prince, sixteen, his opposite number · Philip VI of France, his brother-in-law and host John has been blind since 1336, ten years before the battle. The cause is uncertain; chroniclers blame an ophthalmia caught on a Lithuanian crusade, surgeons blame each other, modern medicine guesses a syphilitic lesion or chronic uveitis. He continues, blind, to fight everywhere. He has spent the spring of 1346 in Prague arranging the election of his son Charles as King of the Romans against the deposed Wittelsbach. By July he is in northern France, leading three hundred Bohemian and Luxembourg knights for his French brother-in-law. The English have crossed the Somme. The French host is twice their size and undisciplined. The Genoese crossbowmen go in first, their bowstrings wet from a sudden storm, and are cut down by Welsh longbowmen on the rise. The French chivalry charges them from behind in confusion. Toward evening, with the line breaking, the fifty-year-old blind king has his closest knights tie the reins of their horses to his, so that he may ride straight, and they ride into the English line.