The Bloody Lioness
How satisfying it must be to grow up with the knowledge that there is a remarkable woman among your forebears. When you come from a family with the lineage of Astrid de Belleville’s, it’s perhaps not surprising that she chose to become a medieval historian – the de Bellevilles can be traced back to at least the ninth century. Astrid was six when she discovered that her ancestor Jeanne de Belleville had been a pirate; that was it: her future course was set.
Needless to say, her research into the period has been an ongoing process of trying to disentangle the truth from all the legends about Jeanne.
What has been established as fact is that she was born around 1300 to a family that owned significant amounts of land in Poitou, in western France, and a fortune based on harvesting salt in Noirmoutier. In 1330 she married Olivier de Clisson, the lord of an independent duchy in in Brittany. It may have been a commercial and political alliance as much as a marriage, but two children followed fairly swiftly. Nevertheless, Jeanne didn’t hesitate to sue Olivier when he failed to stump up the annuity that had been promised to her as part of the marriage contract. Jeanne won the case, but there were no hard feelings, and two more children appeared soon after.
But it all came unstuck from 1341 onwards, when the Duke of Brittany died without leaving an heir, and Kings Edward III of England and Philippe IV of France began to scrap over the duchy via their proxies. To begin with Olivier de Clisson supported Phillipe, but the French king somehow managed to alienate his supporters in the west of France and Olivier switched sides. During a period of truce, he was foolish enough to go to Paris for a big tournament, whereupon Philippe had him arrested in front of the multitudes, shut up in the Chatelet prison for months, and then beheaded in August 1343. Olivier’s head was sent to Nantes to be displayed on a pike.
Jeanne was not going to take this lying down. After delivering a bloodcurdling speech to her children in front of Olivier’s head, she rallied 400 troops and attacked the castle of a French loyalist: she presented herself as a social caller, but as soon as the gates were thrown open, the warriors she had concealed in the bushes rushed in and massacred the 800 inhabitants of the castle.
Jeanne fled France to place herself and her children under the protection of Edward III – and this is where the piracy comes in. Over a number excursions on the high seas she apparently killed numerous French merchants – quite why she felt moved to do this is unclear. Was she defending her honour? Was she trying to seize their cargo so as to replenish the family coffers? Was it ‘commerce raiding’, designed to intimidate and to disrupt the enemy’s logistics and supply?
Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, for the bit players concerned – none of the most lurid events in the last two paragraphs can be verified. There are no references to them in any contemporaneous documents, and it’s not until the nineteenth century that these details emerge.
Whatever happened during the Channel crossings, it wasn’t enough to put off Edward III. He facilitated a mutually convenient marriage between Jeanne and one Walter Bentley, whom the king installed as governor of Brittany. It took another court case for Jeanne to get her lands back, but she liked litigation and was good at it.
The piracy, if it ever existed, seems to have been a bit of an improvised side-hustle, the ‘bloody lioness’ tag notwithstanding. Jeanne’s real metier was defending and restoring the family name and fortune. The present town hall of Belleville is built on the site of de Belleville castle.