Richard, Jean. Saint Louis: roi d’une France féodale, soutien de la Terre Sainte. Paris: Fayard,
1983.
Runciman, Steven. The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later
Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
CHARLES II THE BAD
(1332–1387). King of Navarre. The son of Philippe d’Évreux and Jeanne, daughter of
Louis X of France, Charles succeeded his father as count of Évreux in 1343 and became
king of Navarre (as Charles II) when his mother died in October 1349. Although he
became a bitter enemy of the royal house of Valois, whose propagandists accused him of
many nefarious deeds and plots, Charles was a popular young man who commanded a
considerable political following in the 1350s. Not until the 16th century did he appear as
“El Malo” in Navarrese historiography, but this sobriquet gained wide acceptance among
subsequent generations of royalist or nationalist historians in France.
The Évreux family had serious grievances against the Valois monarchy, which kept
possession of Jeanne’s inheritance of Champagne and Brie, never relinquished to her the
promised compensation, Angoulême, and remained dilatory in providing the revenues
that were to have replaced these territories. The northwestern nobles, disaffected for
much of Philip VI’s reign, had many connections to the house of Évreux, which had
cultivated clients among them. Other critics of the monarchy were genuine reform-ers
whose intellectual wing was based in the Collège de Navarre in Paris, a longtime
recipient of Évreux patronage.
The Valois rulers made efforts to cultivate their Évreux cousins. Philip VI, as an aging
widower, married Charles’s teenaged sister Blanche in 1349, and Charles himself married
Jeanne, the eldest daughter of John II, a few years later. These overtures, however, did
not defuse the grievances, and the delays in paying his wife’s large dowry embittered
Charles further. John II aggravated the bad royal relations with the northwestern nobility
by summarily executing the constable Raoul de Brienne in 1350. The new constable,
John’s inexperienced young favorite Charles of Spain, received lavish royal gifts,
including the county of Angoulême, which Charles the Bad considered to be rightfully
his own. With considerable sympathy from critics of the regime, Charles had the
constable murdered in January 1354, thus beginning a decade of rebellion against his
father-in-law.
To shield himself from royal wrath, Charles called on the English for aid, and John II
had to conclude the Treaty of Mantes (February 1354), which pardoned Charles and his
followers and granted him substantial new lands in lower Normandy in return for his
definitive renunciation of Champagne and Brie. Charles then proceeded to disrupt Anglo-
French negotiations at Avignon and bring troops to Normandy, where he hoped to
cooperate with an English invasion. When contrary winds kept Edward III from coming,
Charles had to conclude a less advantageous treaty with John II at Valognes (September
10, 1355). The king of Navarre remained a magnet for discontented elements in
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