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To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle
 History of Warfare

Editors

Kelly DeVries (Loyola University Maryland)

John France (University of Wales, Swansea)
Michael S. Neiberg (United States Army War College, Pennsylvania)
Frederick Schneid (High Point University, North Carolina)

VOLUME 115

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hw

 To Win and Lose a
Medieval Battle
Nájera (April 3, 1367), a Pyrrhic Victory for the
Black Prince

By

L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: The Battle of Navaret (Nájera), Hague KB, 72 A 25, Froissart’s Chronicles, 282r. With
kind permission of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017014462

Brill Open Access options can be found at brill.com/brillopen.

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

issn 1385-7827
isbn 978-90-04-34317-7 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-34580-5 (e-book)

Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and
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that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,
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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Authors’ Academic Biographies xi
List of Maps, Tables and Genealogies xiv
Abbreviations XV

Introduction 1

Part 1
Background

1 Intersecting Conflicts 33
1 Introduction 33
2 The Reconquista 33
3 Hundred Years War 42

2 Three Who Ruled 58

1 Introduction 58
2 Pedro “the Cruel” 60
3 Pere “the Ceremonious” 69
4 Enrique “the Bastard” 74

3 A Clash of Kings 80
1 Introduction 80
2 The Spark 82
3 A War of Words 84
4 Aragon’s Attempt to Avoid Conflict 86
5 Opening Stages 87
6 Failure of Papal Diplomacy 89
7 Castilian Motives 91
8 Escalating Hostilities 92
9 The Castilian Exiles 94
10 Pedro’s Alliances and the Role of Granada 96
11 An Increasingly Brutal Conflict 98

4 Foreign Policy and Foreign Intervention (1365–1366) 103

1 Introduction 103
2 Collecting Foreign Enemies: France and the Papacy 104
vi contents

3 An English Alliance 108

4 The French Intervention That Wasn’t 110
5 The Rise of the Free Companies 113
6 The Companies Enter Iberia (1365–1366) 117
7 A Royal Loss of Nerve? (Spring, 1366) 128
8 Aragonese Reclamations 133
9 A Triumph and a Flight 135

PART 2
Campaign and Battle

5 Preparations for Invasion (1366–1367) 143

1 Introduction 143
2 Journey to Aquitaine 143
3 An English Welcome 150
4 Winning English Aid 153
5 Recruitment and Preparation 157
6 Events at Angoulême 160
7 The Diplomatic Chessboard: Trilateral Negotiations 162
8 Aragonese Indecision 165
9 The Muster at Dax 168
10 England’s Strategic Conundrum 170
11 Castilian Moves and Countermoves (1366–Spring, 1367) 172

6 The Campaign (February–April 2, 1367) 179

1 Introduction 179
2 A Mountain Crossing 181
3 Campaigning in “the Hungry Season” 184
4 Marching to Vitoria: Feint or Blunder? 187
5 A Royal Defection 196
6 England’s Hour of Discontent 199
7 Facing Starvation 204
8 To Fight or not to Fight: The Crucial Question 206
9 End Run to Logroño 211
10 The War of Words 218

7 The Battle of Nájera (April 3, 1367) 222

1 Introduction 222
2 The Castilian Army 223
3 English Advantages and an “English Bow” 231
contents vii

4 The Numbers Game 234

5 English March to the Battlefield 237
6 Chivalric Niceties and Knightly Housekeeping 240
7 The Battle Begins 243
8 The Wager of Battle 245
9 The Role of the Longbow 250
10 The Face of Battle 255
11 Learning from Discrepancies? 255
12 Defeat, Pursuit, and Massacre 257
13 The Reason Why 259

Part 3
Aftermath

8 Defeat from the Jaws of Victory 265

1 Introduction 265
2 An Unusual Court of Chivalry 266
3 The Initial Quarrel 269
4 Non-Payment of War Debts 272
5 Live to Fight Another Day 278
6 The King is Dead/Long Live the King 289
7 The Hundred Years War Renewed: The First Period of English
Defeat 292
8 The Turning Wheel of Fortune 296

Conclusion 301

Appendix A: Lists of Participants from Five Sources 305

A.1 Pedro López de Ayala, Crónica de Pedro I 305
A.2 The Chandos Herald 309
A.3 Jean Froissart’s Chronicle 313
A.4 John of Reading 318
A.5 Anonymous Canterbury Chronicle 320

Appendix B: Document Translations 323

B.1 Treaty of Alliance between Pedro I of Castile and the Crown of
England (June 22, 1362) 323
B.2 Pere III’s Secret Agreement at Monzón to Support Enrique de
Trastámara’s Bid for the Castilian Crown (March 31, 1363) 329
viii contents

B.3 Royal Letter of Pedro I Conferring upon Fernando de Castro the

Lands and Titles of Count of Castañeda, Lemos, and Sarria
(June, 1366) 331
B.4 Agreement between Pedro I of Castile, Edward, Prince of Wales
and Aquitaine, and King Charles II of Navarre Allowing an
Anglo-Gascon Army to Traverse Navarre (Fall, 1366) 334
B.5 Letters of Pedro I to the City of Murcia (Spring, 1367) 342
B.6 Letter of the Black Prince to His Wife, Joan of Kent, Concerning the
Victory at Nájera (April, 1367) 346
B.7 English Response to Pedro I’s Appeal for Renewed English Aid
(1368) 348

Appendix C: Chronicle Translations 351

C.1 Pedro López de Ayala’s Crónica de Pedro I 351
C.2 The Chandos Herald’s Life of the Black Prince 395
C.3 The Chronicles of Jean Froissart 423
C.4 Crónica of Pere III [Pedro IV] 485
C.5 The DuGuesclin Memoirs 492
C.6 Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois 515
C.7 The Anonymous Chronique Normande 526
C.8 Chronique des Regnes de Jean II et Charles V 536
C.9 Latin Poem by Walter of Peterborough 541
C.10 Latin Poem by an Anonymous pro-English Author 569
C.11 Chronicle of King Fernando by Fernão Lopes 572
C.12 Monastic Chronicles 587

Appendix D: Western European Royal Dynasties of the Fourteenth

Century 605
Kings of England 605
Kings of France 605
Kings of Castile 605
Kings of Crown of Aragon 606
Kings of Navarre 606
Kings of Portugal 606

Bibliography 608
Index 627
Acknowledgments

The authors must thank a number of people and institutions that helped make
this volume possible. First, we wish to thank the hard-working and highly-
competent people at Brill for their great efforts over the many years during
which this book has moved inexorably from conception to production. In par-
ticular, we would mention Julian Deahl, now retired, who encouraged the au-
thors throughout this process and with admirable patience awaited the results,
Marcella Mulder who undertook the painstaking task of coordinating with the
authors the submission of their manuscript, and Gert Jager whose patience
and high degree of professionalism was responsible for putting the text into its
final form for publication, a task that involved handling a thousand details.
Brill has, as always, been a pleasure to work with. We also owe a considerable
debt to Kelly DeVries, editor of Brill’s History of Warfare series, who, by his
extensive knowledge and publication experience, has been a stalwart suppor-
ter of this project. Nor can we forget Dr. Scott Brestian, the head of a scholarly
team whose archeological efforts in the region around Nájera has provided the
authors with invaluable information about the region in which “our” battle
was fought in 1367. In 2009, the The Program for Cultural Cooperation between
Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture and U.S. Universities provided a ge-
nerous grant that helped make it possible for the authors to travel to and ex-
plore the area of northeastern Spain over which the campaign was fought.
Then there are the anonymous readers who have supplied very valuable in-
sights for improving the work. We thank all the above as well as our future
readers for their patience and insight, earnestly hoping that the present vo-
lume will seem an adequate reward for their attention.

…
The generation of a book is a rare enough occasion to take the opportunity to
thank those who over the years have in some way or another helped make
possible its creation. This includes not only those with a direct role in shaping
the work, but also those with a role in shaping its author. Consequently, I shall
take a moment to express my thanks:
To my parents, Luis J.A. Villalon and Josephine Matthews Villalon, to whom I
owe so much, for a generous and mind-expanding upbringing that always placed
stress on the importance of education and scholarship. Also, to my sister and
greatest fan, Anne Villalon Speyer. And to my step-mother, June Megor Villalon.
To a cadre of teachers, mentors, and academic colleagues who over the
course of many decades have played a noteworthy role in my education and
x acknowledgments

without whom my career as a teacher and scholar would not exist. To name
only a few of the most important: J.H. “Jack” Hexter, C. Bradford Welles, Ursula
Lamb, John Boswell, and Harry Miskimin.
To two of my closest friends and colleagues who have helped shape my life
both as an academic and as a person: Norman Murdoch, one of the most loyal
people I have ever known, who always had my back and without whom I would
probably not have gotten a job in academe; and Donald Kagay, my co-editor,
co-author, close friend and collaborator for more than a quarter century.
To my colleagues in two academic organizations to which I feel most clo-
sely connected and where I have found my academic home: to wit, De Re
Militari: the Society for Medieval Military History (DRM), and the Texas Medieval
Association (TEMA). Among many others in those organizations, I would single
out for special mention Kelly DeVries and Clifford Rogers, both of whom have
played a role in the shaping of this book.
To various of my friends and colleagues in the now defunct University
College at the University of Cincinnati for their friendship and encourage-
ment; in particular, the most dedicated scholar I have ever met, Mark Lause.
To a long series of computers of various makes and models, starting in the
1980s with the Exxon 500 Word Processor, without which I would never have
completed my PhD. dissertation or, arguably, produced any publishable mate-
rial whatsoever.
To the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University
of Cincinnati and, in particular, to its former head, Lowanne Jones. At a critical
moment in my career, RLL “took me in from the cold” and then treated me with
a generosity rare in the academic world, one that is well beyond my ability to
repay except by reminding them that I have not forgotten.
To the librarians and archivists, photocopiers and microfilmers associated
with the many libraries and archives I have utilized in research for this and
other works including principally the University of Cincinnati Library System,
the Hamilton Public Library, the Spanish Archivo Histórico Nacional and
Biblioteca Nacional, the Hispanic Society of America, the University of Texas
Library System, and the Library of Washington University in St. Louis. Among
the people working for these institutions, the following stand out: Sally Moffitt,
Daniel Gottlieb, and Thomas White at Cincinnati; Consuelo Gutierrez del
Arroyo at the AHN, and Isabel Aguirre at Simancas.
(Saving the best for last) to my wife, fellow scholar, and fellow ailurophile,
Ann Twinam (Villalon), who has shared my life for almost five decades and
without whose love and encouragement my academic career would have gone
nowhere!

L.J. Andrew Villalon

Authors’ Academic Biographies

L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay

have been academic collaborators and fast friends for nearly thirty years. To
date, they have co-edited six collections of essays centering on medieval vio-
lence and warfare. This is their first joint monograph. The following are their
academic biographies.

L.J. Andrew Villalon

did his undergraduate work at Yale University where he earned honors in his-
tory and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received his Ph.D. from
Yale in 1984. After many years working at the University of Cincinnati, where
he currently holds the rank of professor emeritus, Villalon retired and moved
to Austin, Texas serving as senior lecturer at the University of Texas until his
“final’ retirement in 2016. A specialist in late medieval and early modern
European history, Villalon has delivered numerous papers on a variety of to-
pics, including Pedro “the Cruel” and Enrique “the Bastard,” Don Carlos “the
unhappy prince of Spain,” San Diego de Alcalá, Spanish involvement in the
Hundred Years War and the battle of Nájera, Sir Hugh Calveley, Archbishop of
Toledo Pedro González de Mendoza, the political ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli,
Spanish royal favorites, English military pardons, military influences on the
Great Schism, mayorazgo in late medieval and early modern Spain, and acade-
mic editing. His articles on these and other subjects have appeared in both
collections and a variety of academic journals including the Catholic Historical
Review, the Sixteenth Century Journal, Mediterranean Studies, the Journal of
Medieval Military History, the British Journal of Transport History, the Journal of
Automotive Historians, and the Proceedings of the Ohio Academy of History.
Currently, Villalon is working on two book length studies in the medieval/
early modern period, one on the canonization of San Diego, the other on the
life of Sir Hugh Calveley, an English knight and mercenary soldier in the
Hundred Years War. He has co-edited with Donald Kagay (also the co-author
of this book) six collections of medieval essays entitled—The Final Argument:
The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (The
Boydell Press, 1998); The Circle of War in the Middle Ages: Essays on Medieval
Military and Naval History (The Boydell Press, 1999); Crusaders, Condottieri,
and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Mediterranean (Brill,
2002); The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus (Brill, 2005); The Hundred Years
War, Part II: New Vistas (Brill, 2008) and The Hundred Years War, Part III:
xii authors ’ academic biographies

Further Considerations (Brill, 2013). In addition to work in his major field,

Villalon has published articles on automotive history and the history of World
War I. In this other area, he is working toward a book examining the powerful
war film, Paths of Glory, tracing its history from the real events of 1914–15 that
inspired its creation to its enshrinement as a cult classic during the Vietnam
Era. Villalon has held various grants for study in Spain, including a Fulbright;
received two awards from the American Association of University Professors
for defending academic freedom; and in 2001, was presented the Professional-
Scholarly Activity Award for the University College at the University of
Cincinnati. He was the vice president of the Texas Medieval Association
(TEMA) in 2007–2008 and president of that organization in 2008–2009 when
he organized (with great help from Natasha) TEMA’s annual conference held
that year in Austin. He is a founding member of De re militari: The Society for
Medieval Military History and was elected to a three-year term as its president
in 2014. Villalon was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare
and Military Technology published by Oxford in 2010. In 2014, the Verbruggen
Prize for the best book in medieval military history went to Villalon and Kagay
for their three volume collection with Brill on the Hundred Year’s War.

Donald J. Kagay
is an expert in medieval legal and military history, with a specialty in medieval
Spain, in particular, the Crown of Aragon. He earned his undergraduate degree
at Southern Methodist University and in 1981, received his Ph.D. from Fordham
University, working under one of the foremost historians of medieval Iberia,
Dr. Joseph O’Callaghan. From 1993 until his retirement in 2016, Kagay taught
history at Albany State University in Georgia where he held the rank of full
professor and was highly active in faculty affairs. His scholarship includes the
publication of three books and eight co-edited collections (six of them with his
co-author, Andrew Villalon, listed in the latter’s biography). He has also pro-
duced several dozen refereed articles in a number of different journals inclu-
ding the Journal of Medieval Military History, the Journal of Military History,
Mediterranean Studies, the Journal of Legal History, the Mediterranean History
Review, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, Mediaevistik, and the Journal of the
Georgia Association of Historians. In 1994, the University of Pennsylvania publi-
shed Kagay’s most significant scholarly contribution to date, a translation of a
major medieval law code under the title The Usatges of Barcelona: The
Fundamental Law of Catalonia. This book has since been published electroni-
cally in the Library of Iberian Resources Online (libro@uca.edu). Kagay put
out his second book, The Customs of Catalonia between Lords and Vassals of
authors ’ academic biographies xiii

Pere Albert, Barcelona Canon: A Practical Guide to Feudal Relations in Medieval

Spain, with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2002.
His third book, War, Government, and Society in the Medieval Crown of Aragon
is a collection of thirteen earlier articles that came out in 2007 as a volume in
Ashgate’s Variorum series. Kagay has also published articles on the history of
Texas where his family has lived since the 1850s. In 1991, he was the principal
founder of the Texas Medieval Association (TEMA), serving ever since as its
secretary-treasurer. In addition, he played a key role in organizing more than
half a dozen of TEMA’s earliest conference meetings. In the 1990s, Kagay was
one of the moving forces behind the establishment of De re militari: The
Society for Medieval Military History having called for and presided over its
first meeting. More recently, he played a similar role in helping to establish the
Georgia Medievalist Group. He served as an associate editor of the Oxford
Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology published in 2010
and in 2014, he and Villalon won the De re militari Verbruggen Prize for the
best book in medieval military history for their three volume collection on the
Hundred Year’s War published by Brill.
List of Maps, Tables and Genealogies

Maps

1 The realms of medieval Spain 34

2 The Muslim Conquest of Spain (711–718) 35
3 Spanish Reconquista (718–1492) 36
4 France at the beginning of the Hundred Years War 44
5 The Principality of Aquitane ceded by France to England in 1360 55
6 Theatres of conflict in the war of the two Pedros (1356–1366) 94
7 1366 Invasion of Castile by Enrique de Trastámara and Bertrand
DuGuesclin 122
8 The campaign and battle of Nájera (1367) 144
9 Advance of the English and Castilian Armies to Vitoria and the Felton
Party to Navarrete (mid-February–March, 1367) 180
10 End Run of the Black Prince from Vitoria to Logroño in late March–early
April, 1367: Three Possible Routes 211
11 English march to the battlefield occasioning a re-positioning of the
Castilian army 239
12 Battle of Nájera (April 3, 1367): Positioning of forces on the field 261
13 Enrique II’s escape route from Nájera to Southern France in the days
following his defeat 279

Tables

1 Non-Iberian sources 19
2 Periods of the Hundred Years War 49

Genealogies

1 The French succession in 1328 and conflicting claims to the French

crown 48
2 Rulers of late medieval Castile 59
3 Rulers of the late medieval Crown of Aragon 71
Abbreviations

ACA Archivo de la Corona de Aragón

AEM Anuario de Estudios Medievales
Articuli Articuli conventionum
Ayala, Enrique II Crónica del Rey Don Enrique Segundo
Ayala, Pedro I Crónica del Rey Don Pedro Primero
BAE Biblioteca de Autores Españoles
CHJZ Cuadernos de Historia “Jeronimo Zurita”
CQPV Chronique des Quatre Premiers Calois
CRC Crónica de los reyes de Castilla
Crónica de Alfonsi XI Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso el Onceno de Castilla
Documentos Documentos de Pedro I
EEMCA Estudios de la Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón
JMMH Journal of Medieval Military History
Knighton Knighton’s Chronicle
Memoires Memoires de du Guesclin
PRO Public Record Office
R. Registro
Rymer, Foedera Foedera, conventiones, litterae, et cujuscunque generis Acta
Publica
Introduction

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

∵
1 The Battle

On April 3, 1367, as the sun rose over northern Spain, two of the century’s
largest armies stood poised, facing one another across what one man present
characterized as “a fair and beauteous plain, whereon was neither bush nor
tree for a full league round.”1 Here, near a point where the borders of three
medieval Iberian kingdoms—Castile, Navarre, and the Crown of Aragon—
came together,2 thousands of men awaited a signal that would propel them
into one of the century’s largest, albeit most lopsided battles. To the east stood

1 This description of the topography comes from one of two major accounts of the battle
of Nájera, a late fourteenth century historical poem by an author known to us only as the
Chandos Herald whom virtually all historians believe to have been present at the battle. Of
the four printed editions of the poem, we have used the one published by Oxford in 1910
which is the best-known and most widely utilized by modern scholars. It supplies not only
the editors’ transcription of the metered text found in Worcester College, but also exhaustive
notes and a carefully compiled prose paraphrase which has greatly aided the authors of the
present book. See: Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos, ed. Mildred K.
Pope and Eleanor C. Lodge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910) [hereafter Chandos Herald]. Rare
usage of another edition of the herald’s work will be signaled in the footnotes. For a detailed
analysis of the Chandos Herald and his poem accompanied by the Pope-Lodge prose para-
phrase, see Appendix C.2.
2 By the late fourteenth century, four Christian states—Castile, the Crown of Aragon, Navarre,
and Portugal—controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula. (The Crown of Aragon is the correct
designation applied to the political conglomerate made up of the kingdoms of Aragon and
Valencia, the county of Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands, all of which had long ruled by a
dynasty historians refer to as the House of Barcelona). Of the four, the largest was Castile.
A fifth state—the sole remnant of Islamic Spain—was the Moorish kingdom of Granada
nestled among the mountains in the far south of the peninsula. Three of the Christian king-
doms—Castile, Aragon, and Navarre—shared a border at a point not far from the headwa-
ters of the Ebro River. It was a few kilometers west of that tripartite frontier that the battle of
Nájera took place.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004345805_002

2 Introduction

an Anglo-Gascon force, invaders from across the Pyrenees, battle-hardened in

the Hundred Years War and commanded by England’s foremost soldier of the
period, Edward of Woodstock (d. 1376), known to history as the Black Prince
(d. 1376).3
Eldest son of King Edward III of England (r. 1327–1377),4 this talented war-
rior bore not only the title prince of Wales,5 by which he is most often identified
in the chronicles of the period, but also prince of Aquitaine, a title conferred
upon him by his father shortly after the treaties of Brétigny and Calais in 1360
transferred control of most of southwestern France to the English. In that ca-
pacity, Edward governed these extensive holdings on the continent in his fa-
ther’s name. During the winter of 1367, the prince led a massive army south
onto the Iberian Peninsula for the purpose of restoring to the Castilian throne
his country’s controversial ally, Pedro I (r. 1350–1366/1367–1369), often referred
to as Pedro “the Cruel.”6

3 Modern biographies of the prince include: Richard Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and
Aquitaine: A Biography of the Black Prince (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1978); Henry
Dwight Sedgwick, The Life of Edward the Black Prince, 1330–1376 (New York: Barnes and Noble,
1993); David Green, Edward, the Black Prince: Power in Western Europe (Harlow, England:
Longman, 2007). Many historians attribute the prince’s sobriquet, not mentioned in histori-
cal sources until well after his death, to a penchant for wearing black armor. See, for example:
Sedgwick, p. 27.
4 All regnal dates in this book will be preceded by “r.”
5 The title which first developed during the thirteenth century distinguishing leading Welsh
nobles was appropriated by the English monarchy during the closing decades of that century,
following the conquest of much of Wales by Edward I (r. 1272–1307). In 1301, Edward bestowed
the title on his own son, later Edward II (r. 1307–1327), who became the first English prince to
hold it. Since then, it has been used to distinguish male heirs to the English throne.
6 The other leading account of the battle (aside from the Chandos Herald) can be found in the
chronicle of Pedro I, written by the Spanish chronicler, Pedro López de Ayala (c. 1332–1407)
who served as a royal official, military commander, and diplomat and in later life ranked
among the most versatile of medieval authors. Despite some disagreement over the centu-
ries, most historians working on this period agree that Ayala’s work was almost certainly the
only chronicle written about this highly controversial monarch. The most widely-used edi-
tion of the work—the one we shall cite throughout this book—was originally published dur-
ing the latter half of the nineteenth century as part of a three-volume collection of Castilian
royal chronicles compiled under the general editorship of Cayetano Rosell. These volumes
were reprinted during the 1950s as volumes 66–68 in a massive collection of Spanish literary
works known as the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde La Formacion del Lenguaje hasta
Nuestros Dias [BAE]. See: Crónica del Rey Don Pedro Primero [hereafter Ayala, Pedro I], in
Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla desde don Alfonso el Sabio, hasta los Católicos don Fernando y
doña Isabel [CRC], edited by Cayetano Rosell, 3 vols. (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1953), 1: 393–
614 contained in BAE, vol. 66. For readers wishing to consult more recent, though harder to
Introduction 3

Standing against these invaders was a Castilian army that fought in support
of a rival claimant to the throne, Pedro’s elder, but illegitimate half-brother,
Enrique de Trastámara, who had managed during the preceding year to seize
the crown with surprising ease and who now styled himself Enrique II (r. 1366–
1367/1369–1379).7 Enrique’s army included a considerable part of the kingdom’s
upper nobility whose members had progressively deserted Pedro over the
course of the preceding decade. Although composed in large part of ginetes,8
the light cavalry spawned by medieval Spanish warfare, this force also con-
tained a substantial number of heavy cavalry, what chronicles of the period
refer to as “barded” or armored horse, as well as thousands of native infantry,
largely drawn from the northeastern region of the kingdom where the cam-
paign was being conducted.
Fighting alongside the Castilians were several thousand Franco-Breton
mercenaries, who like their Anglo-Gascon opponents were hardened veterans
of the decades-long struggle raging north of the mountains. In the next sev-
eral hours, these hirelings would prove to be Enrique’s best troops. The army
also contained a sizeable contingent of Aragonese volunteers, led by several
of that kingdom’s lords who favored Enrique’s cause, including Alfonso, count
of Denia, a cousin of the king, Pere III “the Ceremonious” (r. 1336–1387). In

obtain editions, see: Pedro López de Ayala, Crónica del rey don Pedro, ed. by Constance L.
Wilkins and Heanon M. Wilkins (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1985);
and Pedro López de Ayala, Crónica del rey don Pedro y del rey don Enrique, su hermano, hijos
del rey don Alfonso Onceno, ed. German Orduna (Buenos Aires: SECRIT, 1994–1997). Our de-
tailed analysis of the chronicle can be found in Appendix C.1. Although no English transla-
tion of this critical work currently exists, the authors of this book are attempting to rectify
that situation. Our translation of sections dealing with the battle of Nájera also appear in
Appendix C.1.
7 Enrique II’s reign is the subject of Ayala’s second royal chronicle, a work which merely picks
up where Pedro’s chronicle leaves off. See: Pedro López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey Don Enrique
Segundo de Castilla in CRC, 2:1–55 [BAE, vol. 67]. Enrique dated his reign from his coronation
in Burgos in April, 1366; as a result, for the remainder of Pedro’s chronicle, Ayala refers to both
men as “king.” On the other hand, most later scholars have reckon the beginning of Enrique’s
reign as March, 1369, at which time he assassinated his royal half-brother, Pedro.
8 The term is rendered in English translations as geneteurs. The horses used by such troops are
known as jennets or Spanish barb mounts. Having originated in Africa, they were transport-
ed into the Peninsula during the Islamic invasions of the eighth century. See: Nicolás Agrait,
“Monarchy and Military Practice during the Reign of Alfonso XI of Castile (1312–1350),” (Ph.D.
diss., Fordham University, 2003), pp. 187–88. Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages,
trans. Michael Jones (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980), pp. 58–59; Thomas F. Glick, Islamic
and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 24–25.
4 Introduction

addition, at least according to several of the chroniclers, there were a substan-

tial number of crossbowmen hired from the Italian city of Genoa, a place that
trained and exported such men to serve in European armies. This multination-
al army served under another of the era’s foremost warriors, the future con-
stable of France, Bertrand du Gueslin (c. 1322–1380),9 who during the following
decade would drive the English from most of their continental holdings.
Today, the encounter that took place on this northern Spanish plain is
best-known as Nájera,10 a name given it by the losing side; though upon oc-
casion the alternate designation, Navarette (or Navaretta) still appears in the
literature, especially in works written by British scholars.11 Both names are
something of a misnomer, since the actual battlefield lay somewhere on open
ground between these two towns in which the opposing forces had encamped
on the eve of battle.

9 Referred to in Spanish chronicles as Beltran de Claquin or de Claquí, this minor Breton

noble, became one of the most famous and talented commanders of the Hundred Years War.
The exploits of the man who would become Constable of France under Charles V resound
throughout the chronicles of the period. In addition, his prominence made him the princi-
pal subject of several late fourteenth century accounts, all of them based largely upon an-
other lengthy poem, this one by a Picard troubadour alternatively referred to as Cuvelier or
Cunelier. See: Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin par Cuvelier, 2 vols. (Paris: Typ. De Firmin
Didot frères, 1839; facsimile edition by Ulan Press). For more information concerning me-
dieval works on DuGuesclin and their relationship see the “Notice sur Les Mémoires de Du
Guesclin,” in Collection Complete des Mémoires relatifs a l’histoire de France, ed. M. Petitot
et al., 42 vols. (Paris: Foucault Librarie, 1819–29), 4:4–23. Michael Jones, the leading histo-
rian of medieval Brittany, has meticulously compiled and edited an invaluable collection
of sources relevant to DuGuesclin. It includes a wide variety of documents and traces his
movements over nearly three decades ending at the time of his death. See: Letters, Orders,
and Musters of Bertrand du Guesclin (1357 and 1380), ed. Michael Jones (Woodbridge,
England: The Boydell Press, 2004). Pages 35–75 (entries 97–209) treat the years 1365–1367.
For a highly readable biography, see: Richard Vernier, The Flower of Chivalry: Bertrand
du Guesclin and the Hundred Years War (Woodbridge, England: The Boydell Press, 2003).
More about the bibliography surrounding this fascinating figure accompanied by an
English translation of a late medieval memoir detailing his activities during the period of
the battle can be found in Appendix C.5.
10 Although some sources use the variants “Najara” or “Nazare”, “Nájera” has long been and
remains the spelling for the town in northeastern Spain near which the battle was fought
and after which it was named.
11 An illustration of this English naming pattern can be seen in Harbottle’s entry for Nájera
which reads “see Navarrete” under which heading the author has placed his account of
the battle. Harbottle’s Dictionary of Battles, Third Edition revised by George Bruce (New
York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1981).
Introduction 5

During the morning hours of that early April day in 1367, Englishmen and
their Gascon allies serving the Black Prince inflicted upon the forces led by
Enrique II and DuGuesclin one of the most crushing defeats of the “calami-
tous fourteenth century.”12 Almost from its start, the battle proved to be an
enormously unequal contest. The better organized Anglo-Gascon forces, wear-
ing their state of the art armor and deploying numerous longbowmen (in the
words of one monkly chronicler, “sagittariis quasi sine numero” or “archers al-
most without number”13) soon drove their enemy from the field. Despite some
hard fighting in the center and out on the Castilian right, both wings of Castile’s
army fairly quickly collapsed in the face of a relentless foe, with thousands flee-
ing westward as best they could. This led to the encirclement and surrender
of the center, made up mainly of Frenchmen and Bretons, but also containing
the elite of the Castilian force on the field, members of the Order of the Sash
(orden de la banda). Despite holding their ground for as long as possible, these
troops, all of whom fought dismounted, were also ultimately overwhelmed.
The retreat of both wings quickly turned into a rout in which the victors
inflicted casualties vastly outnumbering those which they themselves suffered.
While one pocket of dead and wounded could be found in the center, where
the fighting had been fiercest, a considerable majority of victims fell during
their panicked flight westward toward the Rio Najarilla. The slaughter reached
its peak when the refugees ran out of ground upon reaching the swollen river
and its single bridge crossing to the western bank. According to several chroni-
clers, water here ran red with the blood of men and horses.
Nájera was a victory comparable in scope to England’s better-known tri-
umphs at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415). For the Black
Prince, this encounter in far-away Spain became the capstone of a glorious
military career, a career that would come to an unexpected end four years later
when chronic disease forced this consummate warrior to withdraw from the
field. For DuGuesclin, it ushered in yet another frustrating period of captivity.
It is, therefore, ironic that the battle of Nájera had an extremely negative im-
pact on the fortunes not of the vanquished, but of the victors, a fact that makes

12 This colorful characterization of that hundred year period, now widely employed by me-
dieval scholars, comes from the title of the modern era’s best-selling work on the Middle
Ages, Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New
York: Knopf, 1978).
13 Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396 [hereafter Knighton], ed. and trans. by
G.H. Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 194–96.
6 Introduction

it one of history’s strangest Pyrrhic victories.14 Among the great encounters

of that war-torn century,15 Nájera is undoubtedly one of if not the least well-
known and least widely-studied (except perhaps among Spanish historians).16
This book is an attempt to redress that imbalance. In writing it, the authors
have tried to provide not only a careful and readable narrative exploring the
battle of Nájera as well as the campaigns of 1366 and 1367 that led up to it, but
also extensive analyses of the principal sources, much of which is contained in
our appendices. In the longest of these, Appendix C, we have tried to lay out
detailed bibliographical synopses of each major chronicle source on which our
narrative has largely been based, accompanied by English translations of each
of these sources.17

14 Several detailed accounts of the battle of Nájera can be found in earlier articles by
one of the co-authors of the present study. See: L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Seeking Castles
in Spain: Sir Hugh Calveley and the Free Companies’ Intervention in Iberian Warfare
(1366–1369),” Crusaders, Condottierri, and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies around
the Mediterranean, L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay, eds. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003),
pp. 305–328; and “Spanish Involvement in the Hundred Years War and the Battle of
Nájera,” in Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J.
Kagay (E.J. Brill: Leiden, 2005), pp. 3–74. See also Villalon’s short account in the Oxford
Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, ed. Clifford J. Rogers, et. al.,
3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3:42–43.
15 The fourteenth century actually witnessed a number of quite significant encounters: to
name only the most prominent, in addition to Crécy and Poitiers, there were Courtrai
(1302), Bannockburn (1314), Mortgarten (1315), Auray (1364), Rossebeke (1382), Kossovo
(1389), and Nicopolis (1396). None had a less lasting effect than Nájera.
16 Treatments of the battle appearing in Spanish include: Ramón José Maldonado y Cocat,
“La Rioja en la guerra civil entre D. Pedro el Cruel y D. Enrique de Trastámara. Las batal-
las de Nájera,” Berceo 10 (1949): pp. 61–82; Fernando Castillo Cáceres, “Análisis de una
batalla: Nájera (1367),” Cuadernos de la Historia de España 73 (1991), pp. 105–46; Anthony
Goodman and Angus MacKay, “Logroño y la batalla de Nájera en la guerra civil castel-
lana,” in Historia de la ciudad de Logroño, 5 vols. (Logroño, 1994), 2: 379–89; Tomás Lerena
Guinea, “La batalla de Nájera (1367)” in La Guerra en la Edad Media. XVII Semana de
Estudios Medievales, Nájera, del 31 de Julio al 4 de Agosto de 2006 (Logroño: Instituto de
Estudios Riojanos, 2007), pp. 344–78.
17 The authors would like to extend special thanks to the general editor of the Brill series on
warfare, Kelly DeVries, who suggested that we provide translations of the sources used in
writing this book. Despite any and all difficulties in achieving this, our inclusion of these
has made it a more useful work for scholars. While most of the translations are our own,
there are several exceptions, only one of which is likely to raise a few scholarly eyebrows.
Introduction 7

2 Sources: Chronicles vs. Documents

For reasons we shall consider in a moment, when writing about Nájera, it is

first and foremost the chronicle accounts appearing within roughly a quar-
ter century after the battle to which historians must turn for understanding
what happened on that April day in 1367.18 While a majority of these are prose
accounts, several, including one of the two most important—the Chandos
Herald’s Life of the Black Prince—take the form of lengthy poems, what some
scholars refer to as verse or metrical chronicles.
Among these works, four are of paramount importance, including two by
men universally regarded as eye-witnesses to the events, both soldiers who ac-
tually participated in the battle they later chronicled. In the Castilian army,
fighting in the hard-pressed center just to the left of DuGuesclin and his mer-
cenaries, was the standard bearer for the Spanish Order of the Sash, Pedro
López de Ayala, the man who would later become his nation’s greatest me-
dieval chronicler.19 On the opposite side, probably also in the center close to

18 The need to rely upon chronicle sources that often confronts and sometimes confounds
medieval historians is explored by Kelly DeVries in his article “The Use of Chronicles
in Recreating Medieval Military History,” Journal of Medieval Military History [here-
after JMMH] 2 (2004): 1–15. An excellent treatment of the role of chronicles in writing
English history is a book by one of the foremost students of medieval chronicle litera-
ture, Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London:
Hambledon and London, 2004).
19 The first biographical treatment of Pedro López de Ayala appears in Fernán Pérez de
Guzmán’s Generaciones y Semblanzas, an early fourteenth century work in which the
author provided sketches of his contemporaries. See: Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones
y Semblanzas, ed. J. Dominguez Bodona (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1965), pp. 37–39. For a
modern, full-length account of the chronicler’s life and work, see Michel García, Obra
y personalidad del Canciller Ayala (Madrid: Editorial Alhambra, 1983). This work repro-
duces several of the contemporary sources that supply our information concerning the
author. Despite providing useful material on his political career, an earlier biography in
Spanish by a leading Spanish scholar, Luis Suárez Fernández, El Chanciller Ayala y su
Tiempo (Vitoria: Obra Cultural de la Caja de Ahorros Municipal de la Ciudad de Vitoria,
1962) exhibits several serious flaws, including an incomprehensible lack of pagination,
making citation difficult if not impossible. For a good introduction to Ayala English read-
ers should consult Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979). Nader’s third chapter, entitled
“Pedro López de Ayala and the Formation of Mendoza Attitudes,” provides a fine capsule
biography of the great chronicler, a penetrating analysis of his chronicle of Pedro I, and
valuable bibliography. See also: Clara Estow’s article, “Royal Madness in the Crónica del
Rey Don Pedro,” Mediterranean Studies, 6 (1996), 13–28. For another account in English,
8 Introduction

his lord, Sir John Chandos, stood the figure we know only as Chandos Herald,20
the man whose Life of the Black Prince provides our best picture of just what
happened on that field. A third major source, only part of which qualifies as an
eyewitness account, is the greatest chronicle of the age written by its foremost
chronicler, Jean Froissart.21 For although Froissart did not take part on the ex-
pedition into Spain, he was on hand in Guienne during the months before its
departure and therefore personally witnessed at least some of the preparation
undertaken by the Black Prince. What is more, in the aftermath of this unre-
warding venture, he had ample opportunity to interview many of the returning
veterans, possibly including the Chandos Herald. There is little if any doubt

one which emphasizes a literary approach to Ayala, see: Constance L. Wilkins, Pero López
de Ayala, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989). See in the present work: footnote 6 of this
Introduction and Appendix C.1. which provide not only more historical and bibliograph-
ical information on Ayala, but an English translation of the sections of his Crónica de
Pedro I that treat Nájera.
20 See footnote 1 and Appendix C.2.
21 As the foremost chronicler of his age, Froissart has generated a considerable bibliogra-
phy. A lengthy introduction to the author’s career and chronicle can be found in Thomas
Johnes’ two volume English-language version, reprinted several times in the nineteenth
century. The authors have made extensive use of this translation of the chronicle as well
as its article on the author. See: Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, and Spain
and the Adjoining Countries from the Latter Part of the Reign of Edward II to the Coronation
of Henry IV, trans. Thomas Johnes, 2 vols. (London: William Smith, 1857). (Material on
Froissart appears in volume 1, pp. vii–xlvii). A very brief, but somewhat helpful account
of the chronicler’s career appears in Charles W. Dunn’s introduction to the much ab-
breviated, but still substantial condensation of Johnes’ text undertaken by H.P. Dunster
in 1853 and published by E.P. Dutton as The Chronicles of England, France and Spain by
John Froissart (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961). A beautifully-illustrated popular account of
Froissart by a leading medievalist of the last century is G.G. Coulton’s The Chronicler of
European Chivalry (London: The Studio, Ltd., 1930). On a more scholarly level, there is
the invaluable collection of essays written by major twentieth century scholars who have
dealt extensively with the chronicler in the course of their own research. See: Froissart:
Historian, ed. J.J.N. Palmer (Woodbridge, England: The Boydell Press, 1981). In addition
to Palmer’s intriguing argument about the dating of Froissart manuscript, the collection
includes pieces by Richard Barber, John Bell Henneman, Michael Jones, P.E. Russell, and
Philippe Contamine. Peter F. Ainsworth has wrestled with the problem of historical truth
in medieval chronicle writing in Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and
Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). For relatively recent reflections
on the author and his chronicle, see the introduction to Jean Froissart, Chronique, Livre
I, Le Manuscrit D’Amiens, ed. George T. Diller, 4 vols., (Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., 1992),
1:i–lv. For a more extensive treatment of Froissart and his chronicle, see Appendix C.3.
Introduction 9

that Froissart had access to the herald’s account in some form or another.22
Rounding out the “big four” was the chronicle of the Aragonese monarch, Pere
III, in the writing of which he seems to have played not only a prominent,
but even a predominant role. While Pere’s chronicle has almost nothing to say
about what actually occurred on the battlefield, its importance lies in depict-
ing the events leading up to the encounter.23
Although these four are by far the most important accounts, none of them
is the earliest to have been committed to writing. This distinction probably
belongs to two brief relations written by monastic chroniclers, John of Reading
and the anonymous monk of Canterbury, both of whom lived in English
monasteries far removed from the scene of battle. Scholars believe that the
writings of both clerics ceased abruptly in 1367, the same year the battle was
fought, thus making them almost contemporaneous with the actual event.24
There is also a seemingly interminable poem, written in Latin by one Walter
of Peterborough, a minor cleric in the service of the duke of Lancaster, who
may well have accompanied his lord on the Spanish expedition. The wording
of this poem strongly suggests that it was composed while Pedro I still sat on
the throne of Castile he had regained at Nájera; in other words, before that
king’s spectacular demise in the spring of 1369.25
In contrast to these earliest accounts, there is a royal chronicle of the con-
temporary Portuguese monarch, Fernando I (r. 1367–1383) whose sobriquet
“the Inconstant” aptly sums up his character.26 This work by Portugal’s leading

22 The relationship between these two major accounts is explored in some detail in
Appendix C.3.
23 For more about this king and his chronicle, see Chapter 2 and Appendix C.4.
24 For both accounts, see: Chronica Johannis de Reading et Anonymi Cantuariensis 1346–1367,
ed. by James Tait (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1914). Tait’s edition
contains the Latin chronicles of John of Reading and the anonymous monk of Canterbury
without any English translation. Both works end abruptly in 1367, probably due to the
death of their authors. Among the final passages in each are those dealing with Nájera.
For more about these chronicles as well as our English translations of the passages treat-
ing Nájera, see Appendix C.12.
25 Peterborough’s poem in its entirety, but without any English translation, was printed
around the mid-nineteenth century under the title “Prince Edward’s Expedition into
Spain and the Battle of Najara,” in Political Poems and Songs relating to English History
composed during the Period from the Accession of Edward III to that of Richard III, ed.
Thomas Wright, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859), 1: 97–122.
In 2005, Elibron Classics brought out a facsimile reprint edition of the 1859 original. The
authors’ prose paraphrase and an analysis of Walter’s possible role in the events he re-
cords appears in Appendix C.9.
26 While sometimes dubbed “the handsome”, the actions of this Portuguese monarch up-
hold his less flattering sobriquet. See, for example: L.J. Andrew Villalon, “War and the
10 Introduction

medieval historian, Ferñao Lopes, was only drafted around 1440, placing it well
outside the period of a quarter century after the battle from which most of our
sources have been drawn.27 And while the work contributes little if any new in-
formation on Nájera, we have not only chosen to consult it, but to include sec-
tions dealing with the battle in the appendices. For although Lopes’ version
is entirely derivative (having been lifted, not infrequently verbatim, from the
Castilian account written decades earlier by Ayala), we are confronted with
the case of one great historian putting his imprimatur on the work of another.
After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
As is all-too-often true of medieval warfare, or, for that matter, medieval his-
tory in general, it is necessary to rely excessively on this chronicle literature
faut de mieux. To put it another way, the extent to which we must rely on such
sources, regardless of their short-comings, arises out of the lack of contempo-
raneous documentation, the sort that generally characterizes modern warfare,
but which is frequently absent when it comes to treating medieval military
matters. Unavailable for the campaign and the battle are such things as muster
rolls, detailed reports and dispatches from commanders in the field and their
subordinates, inventories of food and fodder, weapons and animals, summons
calling up vassals and their retainers, campaign diaries and letters from partici-
pants of all ranks, purveyance records, etc.
The closest thing we have to battlefield communiques are two royal letters
that appeared in its immediate aftermath. The first, probably drafted within
several days, is from the Black Prince to his beloved princess, Joan, “the fair
maid of Kent,” who was governing Aquitaine in his absence.28 While it tells
of the great victory he had just won, it does so with remarkable brevity.
Consequently, despite hype surrounding its recovery in the mid-1920s, it adds

Great Schism in the Iberian Peninsula: The Interrelated Cases of Castile and Portugal,”
JMMH, 12 (2014), pp. 217–37.
27 Fernão Lopes, Crónica de D. Fernando, ed. Giuliano Macchi (Lisboa: Impr. Nacional-
Casa da Moeda, 1975). The authors have made use of an abbreviated English transla-
tion of this work. See: Fernão Lopes, The English in Portugal, 1367–87: extracts from
the chronicles of Dom Fernando and Dom Joao, ed. and trans. by Derek W. Lomax and
R.J. Oakley (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1989). The introduction to this book supplies
considerable information concerning the Portuguese chronicler’s life and work. For a
more extensive description of Fernão Lopes and his “borrowing” from Pedro López de
Ayala, see Appendix C.11.
28 The document was found in Ancient Correspondence, Public Records Office [hereafter
PRO], vol. xlii, no. 133 by A.E. Prince who published it as part of a short article entitled
“A Letter of Edward the Black Prince describing the Battle of Nájera in 1367,” The English
Historical Review, vol. 41, n. 163 (July, 1926), pp. 415–18.
Introduction 11

very little to our knowledge of events. A few days later, on April 15, 1367, still
less than two weeks after the encounter, Pedro I wrote to the people of his
realm, informing them that he was once again their king and ordering them to
round up his opponent’s supporters.29 Sadly, the king’s letter tells us even less
about the battle than that of Prince Edward.30
Much of the problem with documentation results from the absence of
Castilian state papers dating to this period. One leading scholar, Peter Russell,
has accused Pedro I’s successor, Enrique de Trastámara, of having tried to “cull”
from both public and private archives any documentation generated during
his hated enemy’s reign that might have cast that enemy in a better light.31 But
while such intentional winnowing almost certainly did occur and had a pejora-
tive influence on our understanding of the reign, it is not the major reason for
the scarcity of sources. The principal fault lies not in any short term censorship,
but in the long term failure to retain documents manifested by late medieval
Castilians. Unlike their English counterparts during this period, inhabitants of
Castile took much less care to preserve a documentary record.
A useful comparison can made to the neighboring kingdom of Aragon. The
Aragonese began to compile their state papers well over a century before the
battle of Nájera was fought. Their efforts ultimately gave rise to one of the fin-
est repositories of late medieval documents to be found anywhere in Europe:
the Archivo de la Corona de Aragon (Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó), generally ab-
breviated as the ACA and located in Barcelona.32 Scores of document-filled reg-
isters survive there, shedding enormous light on the history of eastern Spain in
the later Middle Ages.

29 See: Documentos de Pedro I, [hereafter Documentos], ed. Angel Luis Molina Molina,
2 vols. (Murcia: Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, CSIC, 1978). Hereafter, citations to this
Murcian source will first give the volume and page number followed in brackets by the
number assigned to each document in the collection and the date when it was written.
Consequently, the king’s letter should be Documentos, 2:198–99 [Letter 144: April 15, 1367].
30 While the prince’s letter is not dated, its wording strongly suggests that it was written
almost immediately after the encounter. On the other hand, Pedro’s letter bears a spe-
cific date. Both are among the documents translated in the appendices; the prince’s in
Appendix B.5 and the king’s in Appendix B.6.
31 P.E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and
Richard II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). For Russell’s argument that Pedro’s successor
tried to censor him into oblivion, see esp. pp. 17–18 and note 1.
32 For information concerning the archives of the Crown of Aragon, see: Federico Udina
Martorell, Guia historica y descriptiva del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (Madrid:
Dirección General de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1986), esp. pp. 21–46.
12 Introduction

By contrast, when it came to establishing its own system of royal archives

charged with the conservation of similar material, Castile was very slow off the
mark. Throughout the fourteenth century and most of the fifteenth, Castilian
state papers continued to travel with a peripatetic court, necessitating a peri-
odic “lightening of the load,” either by destruction or abandonment of those
no longer considered worth carrying. Despite several fifteenth century at-
tempts, it would not be until early in the sixteenth century that Castile finally
established an Archivo General in the castle of Simancas (widely referred to by
scholars as the AGS) perched on a hilltop south of Valladolid overlooking the
vast meseta. Consequently, not until late in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs
(r. 1474/1479–1504/1516)33 did document preservation in Castile begin for the
first time to approach that of Aragon. Ironically, one of the first orders of busi-
ness in establishing the new archive was to destroy a number of the surviving
medieval papers deemed not to merit preservation!34
Largely due to this failing on the part of Castile to retain its governmental
records, much of the relatively scanty documentation from the reign of Pedro I
that has survived can now be gathered into just two printed collections, nei-
ther of them particularly extensive when compared to the literally thousands
of documents preserved from that same period in neighboring Aragon.
One small, but significant cache has survived in the municipal archives of
the city of Murcia. These papers have been gathered and published in two-
volumes containing what their principal editor, Angel Luis Molina Molina,
represents as being a complete run of all remaining Petrine material from that

33 The complex regnal dates given for the Catholic Monarchs reflect the different years in
which they came to their respective thrones as well as those in which they died. Isabel suc-
ceeded to the throne of Castile in 1474. In 1479, Ferdinand came into his own inheritance,
the crown of Aragon. Isabel died in 1504, designating Ferdinand as regent of Castile for their
unbalanced eldest surviving daughter, Juana la Loca. Despite her will, the Castilian nobles
backed Juana’s Flemish husband Philip “the Handsome” who ruled briefly as Philip I.
After his premature death in 1506, Ferdinand returned as regent for Castile, a position he
retained alongside his own crown of Aragon until 1516 when he was succeeded in both
realms by his grandson, Charles.
34 J.B. Sitges, Las mujeres del rey Don Pedro I de Castilla (Madrid: Est. Tipolitográfico
“Sucesores de Rivadeneyra”, 1910), p. 8. Russell, English Intervention, pp. vii–viii. For more
background on Castile’s oldest archive, including its establishment, see: Francisco Javier
Alvarez Pinedo and José Luis Rodríguez de Diego, Los Archivos Españoles: Simancas, in
Colección Archivos Europeos (Madrid: Lunwerg, 1993), esp. p. 16. The greatest irony lies
in the fact that starting around the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the
sixteenth, among European nations Castile achieved a reputation for document preserva-
tion second to none.
Introduction 13

city. It is by no means all that one would desire. Most of the regular cartularies
containing royal letters from 1354 to 1367, the period that witnessed the War
of the Two Pedros (1356–1366) and the battle of Nájera that grew out of that
conflict, have disappeared from the Archivo Municipal. Consequently, due to
the fortunate survival of just one Libro de Actas Capitulares, a disproportionate
number of the relevant royal letters we do have date to just two years—from
1364 through 1365.
Nevertheless, working from what does still exist, as well as things printed by
earlier scholars that have since disappeared, Molina has managed to compile
102 relevant items.35 In order to better understand Castile’s day-to-day conduct
of warfare, these documents are crucial, since nothing like them has survived
for any other site. They supply at least some idea of the wide-ranging demands
that must have been placed on any frontline city, in particular Murcia, but
also Molina, Alfaro, Gomara, Agreda, and Logroño, all of which are mentioned
prominently in Ayala’s chronicle as staging points for the Castilian attack on
Aragon.36
Among these documents, the only ones directly relevant to the battle of
Nájera are three that Pedro I sent to the city in February, 1367, during the Black
Prince’s invasion of Spain, all of which undoubtedly went to many other places
as well.37

35 The significance of these Murcian documents can be fully understood when the historian
makes several warranted assumptions about them. To begin with, we can assume that
they represent only a fraction of the total war-related correspondence between Murcia
and the king.
 After all, the war lasted for a decade; all of our letters date to just two years. All come
from a single Libro de Actas. The major repository—the collection of cartularies contain-
ing royal letters—is no longer extant. We can also safely assume that other major staging
points for the war effort all carried on a similar correspondence with the king. Each of
these frontline places contained royal garrisons and from several of them, repeated expe-
ditions against Aragon were launched. In short, the surviving Murcian documents must
represent just the tip of the iceberg.
36 Ayala, despite a fairly close involvement with Murcia, mentions other places along the
frontier at least as prominently, in particular, Molina. Interestingly, among the Murcian
documents are several that mention Ayala and his role in the conflict. For example, in
January, 1365, Pedro sent his recently-appointed frontero, the future chronicler, to Murcia
where the inhabitants were instructed to supply his cavalry and infantry with whatever
they might need to carry out their task. The king commanded that Ayala be obeyed “as
if he were my very body.” See: Documentos, 1:179–80 [document 121]; 1:182–83 [document
125]; 1:185–86 [document 128].
37 Translations of these three letters can be found in Appendix B.5.
14 Introduction

A second, more ambitious project to put together all of Pedro’s documents

that still survive in Castilian archives, including those from Murcia, was under-
taken in the 1990s by another Spanish scholar, Luis Vicente Diaz Martín. In a
herculean effort, Diaz Martín ransacked archives all over Spain belonging to the
state, the church, municipalities, and nobles. What he found in four volumes
containing in total almost 1400 pages.38 And while some of these documents
were only calendared, many if not most were reproduced in full. Unfortunately,
as extensive as it may seem at first sight, the collection is dwarfed by what sur-
vives in the ACA and other Aragonese archives.
Obviously, the Diaz Martín’s efforts were first and foremost limited by the
paucity of material surviving from Pedro’s reign. A second problem, however,
lay in that material’s chronological distribution. Two full volumes (695 pages)
are devoted to just the king’s first two years—1350–1351—with a majority of
the documents simply confirming grants made by the new king’s predecessors.
Documents from all the rest of the reign—the seventeen years between 1352
and 1369—take up only volumes three and four (704 pages). Nor is the uneven
distribution simply chronological. A substantial majority of the collection’s
contents are what might be characterized as private documents, i.e. grants of
land and privileges to nobles and municipalities as well as ecclesiastical and
secular institutions. Disappointingly few constitute what we would call state
papers, under which heading would fall those which involve military matters.
Given these circumstances, although we have employed contemporary doc-
uments wherever possible (most derived from French, English, and Aragonese
archives), a considerable majority of sources that contribute to our under-
standing of Nájera are chronicles written between the 1380s and the end of the
fourteenth century. It it is primarily to these slightly later narrative accounts
that modern scholars must turn to in order to reconstruct what happened on
that April day in 1367.

3 Sources: Spanish vs. Non-Spanish

As noted above, one of the two major descriptions of the battle appears in
Ayala’s Crónica de Pedro I, the author of which had fought on the losing side.
While there is some disagreement concerning the date of this work, internal
evidence suggests that the chronicler was hard at work drafting it during the

38 
Coleccíon Documental de Pedro I de Castilla (1350–1369), ed. Luis Vicente Diaz Martín,
4 vols. (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1999).
Introduction 15

mid-1380s.39 Unfortunately, this is the only Castilian chronicle from the pe-
riod that has survived, in all likelihood the only one that ever existed. By the
sixteenth century, rumors began to emerge concerning a second chronicle of
Pedro’s reign written by one of his supporters and portraying his activities in a
more favorable light. Sadly, such a work has never turned up and is, in all prob-
ability, apocryphal.40 What is more, there is no further information about the
battle to be had in the chronicle of the losing king, Enrique II, since this too
was composed by the same author and merely picks up where his earlier work
on Pedro leaves off.
As we have also noted, there was a second major Iberian writer at work
during this same period, not in Castile, but in its eastern neighbor, the Crown
of Aragon. Over the course of many decades, when not devoting himself to
the latest of his many wars, that kingdom’s monarch, Pere III,41 spent a fair
amount of time composing his chronicle, one of the great autobiographies of
the Middle Ages.42 Unfortunately, despite the chronicle’s extensive treatment

39 On the basis of internal evidence, Clara Estow, who has studied Pedro’s reign extensively
in writing her biography of the king, places composition of his chronicle around 1384.
This evidence strongly suggests that Helen Nader is wrong when she states “after [Ayala’s]
last visit to Avignon in 1396, he wrote chronicles of the reigns of the four kings he had
served” unless she means that during the closing years of his life, he put finishing touches
on works, some of which he had started to write considerably earlier. See: Estow, “Royal
Madness,” p. 16 n. 11. Nader, Mendoza Family, p. 61.
40 Late in the sixteenth century, the royal historian, Jerónimo Zurita, alluded to the belief on
the part of some contemporaries that a second chronicle had once existed. While Zurita
did not deny the possibility of such a work and even conceded that it might have con-
tained certain things not mentioned by Ayala, he argued persuasively that this would not
render Ayala’s work “false,” as some of Pedro I’s descendants were alleging. In fact, most of
Zurita’s prólogo is devoted to demonstrating why he accepts Ayala’s account as essentially
accurate. See: “Prólogo del Secretario Gerónimo Zurita, dando razon de las Crónicas de los
Reyes de Castilla Don Pedro, Don Enrique II, Don Juan I, y Don Enrique III, escritas por Don
Pedro López de Ayala, y de las enmiendas que hizo a ellas,” in Ayala, Pedro I, pp. 395–98.
For a fine modern treatment of this (alleged) second chronicle, see: Nancy Marino, “Two
Spurious Chronicles of Pedro el Cruel and the Ambitions of his Illegitimate Successors,”
in La Coronica 21:2 (1992–93): 1–22. See also: María Estela González de Fauve, “Apología
y Censura: Posibles Autores de las Crónicas Favorables a Pedro I de Castilla,” Anuario de
Estudios Medievales [hereafter AEM], vol. 36, n. 1 (enero–junio, 2006), pp. 111–144.
41 He was Pere III in Catalonia, but Pedro IV in Aragon. We have chosen to use his Catalan
name to avoid confusion, reserving Pedro for his great antagonist, Pedro I of Castile. See
below, chapter 2.
42 An excellent, two volume translation of this work has been published by the University
of Toronto Press. See: Pere III, Chronicle, trans. Mary Hillgarth, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1980).
16 Introduction

of most of the king’s conflicts, it peters out after 1366, following the victori-
ous conclusion of his struggle against Castile, later dubbed the War of the Two
Pedros. Although Pere devoted a highly-detailed chapter to the conflict with
Castile that led up to the battle of Nájera, following the war’s conclusion in
the spring of 1366, his treatment of Aragonese dealings with the neighboring
kingdom falls off precipitously. While The king’s later interaction with the man
he had helped place on the Castilian throne does receive some coverage, this
becomes increasingly sparse and idiosyncratic.
Not a few scholars believe that much of the chronicle postdating the War of
the Two Pedros was not directly overseen by Pere, but instead added at some
later date in an attempt to bring the story closer to the end of the reign.43 It
may indeed be a changing of the scribal guard or the king’s non-involvement in
writing the later sections of his chronicle that accounts for the work’s relative
silence on events surrounding Nájera. Whatever the reason, this silence comes
as a surprise given first, the extent to which Pere’s own actions had set the stage
for the battle; second, the fact that a sizeable contingent of Aragonese troops
participated under the command of a royal relative; and third, the subsequent
diplomatic negotiations Pere engaged in with the winners, not only the Black
Prince, but also his former enemy, Pedro I.44
While the lack of both Castilian state documents and other Iberian chroni-
cles written during these decades cannot help but impede our understanding
of the battle, scholars trying to reconstruct what occurred must count them-
selves fortunate in one respect: the list of participants reads like a who’s who
of western European warfare.45 Among those present were two of the most

Known as Pere III in Catalonia and Pedro IV in Aragon, the king’s fifty-one year reign
(r. 1336–1387) ranks among the longest as well as the most conflict-ridden in the histo-
ry of Spain. For more about the composition of Pere’s Crónica, see: Frederic Alchalabi,
“A Chronicler King: Rewriting History and the Quest for Image in the Catalan Chronicle of
Peter III (1319–1386/1387),” Imago Temporis: Medium Aevum 2 (2008): 177–89; Jaume Aurell,
Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94–98; Ramon Gubern i Domenech, “Notas sobre la
reducció de la Cronica de Pere el Cerimonios,” Estudis Romanics 2 (1949–50): 135–43.
43 Pere III, Chronicle, Hillgarth’s Introduction, 1: 52–53.
44 Commanding several thousand Aragonese volunteers serving in Enrique II’s army was
Pere’s cousin, Alfonso, count of Denia. As a result, during the 1366, invasion of Castile, the
new monarch conferred upon Denia the Castilian title marqués of Villena.
45 Short biographical articles on many of the major English players in the Spanish campaigns
of 1366–1367 can be found in the British Dictionary of National Biography. Another good
source is volume 2 of David Green’s unpublished dissertation: The Household and Military
Retinue of Edward the Black Prince, 2 vols., Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Nottingham,
Introduction 17

prominent military figures of the age—the English prince and his French ad-
versary, Bertrand DuGuesclin, both of whom became the subjects of major
literary works celebrating their deeds. At the same time, many other renowned
warriors were to be found on the battlefield including the prince’s younger
brother, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster whose son, Henry IV, would seize
the crown of England (1399) and whose grandson, Henry V, would win at
Agincourt (1415);46 Sir John Chandos, another of England’s leading generals
who had served the prince since Crécy, twenty-one years earlier, and in 1364,
had won the battle of Auray that decided the fate of Brittany; Jean de Grailly,
usually referred to in the chronicles as the captal de Buch, a Gascon noble who
would later be captured in the fight for La Rochelle (1374) and die in captivity
due to the French king’s refusal to ransom him; Hugh Calveley47 and Robert
Knollys, who had risen from relatively humble origins to become several of
England’s most famous “dogs of war,”48 both of whom were said to have fought
in the famous Combat of the Thirty (1351);49 Olivier de Clisson, the flamboyant

1998). Some of the biographical information presented in the dissertation has found its
way into the author’s subsequently published works. See: David Green, “The Late Retinue
of Edward the Black Prince,” Nottingham Medieval Studies, xliv (2000), pp. 141–51; “The
Military Personnel of Edward the Black Prince,” Medieval Prosopography, 21 (2000), pp.
133–52.
46 Scholarly biographies of this fascinating figure who played an extensive role in the sec-
ond half of the fourteenth century include Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, King
of Castile and León, Duke of Aquitaine and Lancaster, Earl of Derby, Lincoln and Leicester,
Seneschal of England (1904; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964); and Anthony
Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). There is a highly readable popular account of the
nobleman’s life by Norman F. Cantor, The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and
the Birth of the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 2004).
47 For detailed consideration of Calveley, in particular, his role in the Spanish expedition,
see an earlier article by Villalon, “Seeking Castles in Spain” in, Crusaders, Condotierri, and
Cannon, “Seeking Castles,” pp. 305–32.
48 Sedgwick, Black Prince, p. 267.
49 This bloody event was actually a carefully arranged duel to be conducted to the death
or surrender of one side. It pitted 30 Frenchmen supporting the French-backed claim-
ant to the duchy of Brittany against 30 Englishmen supporting his rival. Although the
French eventually won the contest, surviving participants on both sides achieved con-
siderable fame of the sort the Middle Ages accorded its great warriors. Once regarded
with skepticism by historians, the ancient tradition of the Combat was borne out by two
manuscripts found in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, a poem and a miss-
ing fragment of Froissart. English translations of both sources appear in W.H. Ainsworth,
Ballads: Romantic, Fantastical, and Humorous (New York, n. d. [1874]), pp. 275–326. See
18 Introduction

Breton nobleman who despite his appearance on the English side at Nájera
would later succeed Bertrand DuGuesclin as constable of France and help
drive his former allies from French soil;50 Arnoul d’Audenham, an aging vet-
eran of Poitiers and marshal of France who became DuGuesclin’s principal
lieutenant at Nájera and was captured fighting alongside him; the list goes on
and on.51
Without the presence of this star-studded cast from north of the Pyrenees,
an encounter in far-away Spain would almost certainly have drawn consider-
ably less attention from chroniclers with an essentially northern focus—if in-
deed they deigned to cover it at all. In all likelihood, it was the presence of
these ultramontane warriors that earmarked the battle for extensive treatment
in a fairly wide variety of non-Spanish writings; most notably in the work of
that principal chronicler and well-travelled Flemish author, Froissart. In fact, it
was one of these “outsiders”—the Chandos Herald—who supplies our single
best picture of what happened on the field that day.
Magnifying the coverage of Spanish events by northern chroniclers is the
fact that some of them in addition to Froissart seem to have developed a special
interest in one or another of the combatants. As just one example, the anony-
mous author of the Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois,52 thought to be an
inhabitant of the northern French city of Rouen, in the duchy of Normandy, re-
peatedly mentioned the Englishman, Sir Hugh Calveley, a man whose military
career not infrequently intersected that of Bertrand DuGuesclin, sometimes as

esp. Steven Muhlberger, “The Combat of the Thirty: An Example of Medieval Chivalry?,”
in The Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J.
Kagay (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008), pp. 285–94. See also: Villalon, “Seeking Castles,” pp. 305–07.
50 A 1996 biography of Clisson argues that he rather than DuGuesclin designed the Fabian
Policy that played such a significant role in driving back the English during the years
1369–1380. We address this view in our closing chapters. See: John Bell Henneman, Olivier
de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), see esp. pp. 56–57.
51 On the while, we know the names of more English, Gascons, and Bretons fighting under
the banner of the Black Prince than we know Frenchmen serving Enrique and DuGuesclin,
due largely to the disparity in listing names encountered in the two principal ultramon-
tane chroniclers of the Spanish expedition, the Chandos Herald and Jean Froissart.
52 Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois [hereafter CQPV], ed. Simeon Luce (Paris: Chez Mme
Ve Jules Renouard, 1862). An extensive preface by its editor, Simeon Luce, describes in
detail the nature of the manuscript. See: CQPV, pp. ix–xlv. The actual Chronique survives
in only a single copy, written in a fifteenth century hand, part of a much longer volume of
317 folios that contains sixteen separate documents, ranging in date from the early thir-
teenth century to the late 1430s. See Appendix C.6.
Introduction 19

a comrade, more often as an enemy.53 The fact that Sir Hugh played a signifi-
cant role not only in the events leading up to Nájera, but in the battle itself,
almost certainly inspired the anonymous writer from far away Normandy to
give greater attention to these events than might normally be the case in a
chronicle with a decidedly “northern outlook”.
Non-Iberian sources that contribute to our understanding of the battle,
translations of which appear in our appendices, are listed in Table 1.

Table 1 Non-Iberian sources

1 Poem by the Chandos Herald usually referred to as the Life of the Black
Prince (Old French) [Appendix C.2]
2 The first book of the chronicle of Jean Froissart (Old French)
[Appendix C.3]
3 Prose Memoires redacted from the poem, generally referred to as the
Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin, written by a Picard poet, known as
Cuvelier or Cunelier (Old French) [Appendix C.5]
4 Anonymous Chronique de Quatre Premiers Valois (Old French)
[Appendix C.6]
5 Anonymous Chronique Normande (Old French) [Appendix C.7]
6 Chronique des regnes de Jean II et Charles V, a fourteenth century
continuation of the Grandes Chroniques de France, often attributed to
Charles V’s chancellor, Pierre d’Orgemont (Old French) [Appendix C.8]
7 Poem by the English monk, Walter of Peterborough, who served John of
Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and who may have been present at the battle
(Latin) [Appendix C.9]
8 Extremely brief poem by an unknown English author, sometimes
attributed (probably mistakenly) to Walter of Peterborough (Latin)
[Appendix C.10]
9 English monastic chronicles (Latin) [Appendix C.12]
Henry Knighton’s chronicle
Sections of the Westminster Chronicle written by John of Reading
Anonymous monk of Canterbury’s chronicle
The Polychronicon Continuation attributed to John Malverne

53 The CQPV is one of if not the only source to place Calveley at the battle of Poitiers.
20 Introduction

In so far as possible, the authors of this book have tried to reconstruct the
campaign and battle on the basis of the near-contemporary sources that lie in
that murky realm between primary and secondary. As indicated earlier, not
all have been given equal weight. Fundamental to our narrative are Ayala’s
chronicle of Pedro I and the Chandos Herald’s Life of the Black Prince both dat-
ing to around the 1380s. Into a framework based on these two eyewitness ac-
counts, we have fitted pieces contributed by the other sources as we consider
appropriate.

4 Sources: Four Secondary Works

In respect to the campaigns of 1366 and 1367 as well as to the battle, secondary
sources have been cited mainly to emphasize where our account differs from
or goes beyond the existing literature. On the other hand, there are four later
works that we have used extensively enough to demand special mention.
Earliest among these is a monumental history produced by one of the
methodologically most advanced as well as most prolific historians of the early
modern period, the chronicler-royal of the Crown of Aragon, Jerónimo Zurita y
Castro (1512–1580). Born in Zaragoza, son of a royal physician, Zurita served
the Spanish crown in a number of important capacities during the reigns of
both Carlos V (r. 1516–1556) and Felipe II (r. 1556–1598). He first became the
official historian of Aragon in 1548, at which time he began work on his multi-
volume Anales de la Corona de Aragon that would trace that kingdom’s history
through the medieval centuries. In 1571, Zurita retired from his other duties to
devote himself fulltime to completing the Anales, accomplishing the task in
the year of his death (1580). No scholar involved in serious research into the
medieval history of Spain can afford to dispense with this source.54 The Anales
have been reprinted on a number of occasions over the centuries. For our part,
we have utilized the eight-volume Zaragoza edition published over a span of
eighteen years (1967–1985).55

54 Just one example of the work’s importance can be seen in Roland Delachanel’s definitive
history of the reign of the French king, Charles V. Whenever that scholar writes about
Iberian affairs, he makes extensive use of Zurita’s work, second only to his use of Ayala.
55 Jerónimo Zurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragon, ed. Angel Canellas López, 8 vols.
(Zaragoza: CSIC, 1967–85). The subjects of our study—the War of the Two Pedros (1356–
1366) and the battle of Nájera that emerged from that prolonged conflict—are treated in
Book 9 of Zurita, printed in volume 4 of the Zaragoza edition, pp. 287–576.
Introduction 21

Another secondary source that requires special acknowledgment is an ar-

ticle written at the beginning of the twentieth century by Joaquin Miret y Sans
(1858–1919), one of the early pioneers of Catalan studies. Although trained as
a lawyer, Miret y Sans spent most of his time researching the history of his na-
tive Catalonia, ultimately becoming a co-founder of the Institute of Catalan
Studies. In 1905, he produced the very useful “Negociations de Pierre IV
D’Aragon avec la Cour de France (1366–1367),” in which he not only analyzed,
but also printed for the first time much of the documentation casting light
upon Franco-Aragonese relations during these critical years.56
Also from the beginning of the twentieth century comes the magisterial
work of Roland Delachenel (1854–1923), a leading French scholar who dealt
primarily with the early Valois monarchs. His definitive 5-volume history of
Charles V (r. 1364–1380), a monarch widely known as “Charles the Wise,” makes
enormous use of archival documents, often quoting them extensively in his
footnotes.57
Our final indispensable secondary source is a rather more modern work
by Peter Russell (1913–2006), a historian born in New Zealand on the eve of
the First World War, but who spent most of his scholarly career on the other
side of the world at Oxford University. A specialist on medieval Iberia,58 in
1955, Russell wrote a masterful book entitled The English Intervention in Spain
& Portugal in the Time of Edward III & Richard II which remains more than a
half century later the best book on how foreign intervention, particularly the
intervention by England, shaped events in Spain during the second half of the
fourteenth century.59

56 Joaquin Miret y Sans, “Negociations de Pierre IV D’Aragon avec la Cour de France (1366–
1367),” Revue Hispanique 13 (1905). For a highly detailed treatment of the career of the his-
torian, see the lengthy article by a current leader in Catalan historical studies, M. Teresa
Ferrer i Mallol, “Joaquim Miret i Sans, Semblança Biografica,” Institut d’Estudis Catalans
(Barcelona, 2003).
57 R. Delachenel, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols. (Paris: A Picard & fils, 1909–1931). For infor-
mation concerning the life and academic career of this important turn-of-the-century
French historian, see: “Nécrologie,” in Bibliothèque de l’école des chartres, vol. 84 n. 1 (1923),
pp. 239–41; “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Roland Delachenal,” in Bibliothèque de
l’école des chartres, vol. 85 n. 1 (1924), pp. 233–50.
58 Late in his career, Russell produced another outstanding work on Iberian history, this
one dealing with Portugal—a biography of the first major figure in the European Age of
Expansion, Henry the Navigator. See: Peter Russell, Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 2000).
59 For a full citation, see fnt. 23, p. xii.
22 Introduction

Although the authors of the present study have found themselves in dis-
agreement with Russell on a number of key issues—for example, his virtual
dismissal of Froissart as a valid source and his having placed responsibility for
the war on the policies of Aragon’s monarch—he has made a valuable contri-
bution to our finding and understanding both surviving documents and earlier
literature; to the extent that we would have been very hard put to get as far as
we have without him. To give just one example of his bibliographical contribu-
tion, it was in reading Russell that we first encountered both Miret y Sans and
Delachenal.
What unites all four of these authors and makes their work indispensable
to our study is their heavy reliance on relevant archival documents that have
survived. In composing his monumental history of Aragon, Zurita pulled to-
gether a wealth of governmental and military papers that he unearthed in the
Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, most of which had never before been utilized
by scholars. A good deal of this material shed new light on Pere III and his war
with Castile, often filling gaps in the monarch’s own account. Largely as a result
of his archival work, this sixteenth century civil servant ranks among the finest
research historians of the early modern period. In a more recent age, Miret y
Sans, Delachanel, and Russell have all played similar roles, ransacking archives
not only in Spain, but in England and France, for documents that shed light on
what we know or that add new pieces to the puzzle.

5 New Avenues of Research

Two relatively recent innovations in information technology have made acquir-

ing access to both the primary and secondary sources a far easier task than has
ever before been the case. The first involves the web, which over the course of
writing this book has become an increasing important tool for scholars. Many
works that in the past might have been available only in a very good library or
through the time consuming referral to interlibrary loan are now available on
the web at numerous sites, only the most important of which are Google Books
and Google Scholar, Pares: Portal de Archivos Españoles, Libro: The Library of
Iberian Sources Online, and Gallica: Bibliothèque National de France. Many
informational websites, including the much maligned Wikipedia, have be-
come increasingly useful tools of research.
For those who prefer to work from hard copy, in addition to the web, there
are publishers like Elibron Classics and Ulan Press that print-on-demand fac-
simile editions of out-of-copyright works making a full volume available at rea-
sonable prices to replace worn and partial photocopies.
Introduction 23

6 Methodology and Organization

A battle can be successfully studied as a discreet event, with minimal attention

paid to the broader historical context. An excellent example of such treatment
can be seen in The Face of Battle where prominent British military historian,
John Keegan, closely examines three of history’s most famous encounters—
Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme—while supplying only the barest mini-
mum of context for each.60 As Keegan clearly indicates in his introduction, the
purpose of the book was to explore what it is like to participate in a great battle
and how human beings have reacted to such participation over the centuries,
a purpose perfectly suited to the non-contextual analysis which he presents.
On the other hand, a far less well-known encounter such as Nájera cries
out for extensive contextual treatment. On that remote field, conflict between
Castile and the crown of Aragon61 set in motion by their rivalry for territory
reconquered from Islam intersected with the great struggle being waged north
of the Pyrenees for control of France, a struggle which only much later became
known as the Hundred Years War. It was the intersection of these two major
medieval themes that produced one of the largest battles of the later Middle
Ages. It is this intersection that is the overriding theme of our book.
In order to apply this contextual treatment to the battle of Nájera, we have
divided our text into three parts each of which has been further sub-divided
into chapters:

Part 1 consists of four chapters devoted to exploring the background.

Chapter 1 is briefly summarizing both the Spanish Reconquista and the
course of the Hundred Years War up until the 1360s.
Chapter 2 introduces the three Spanish monarchs—Pedro I and Enrique II
of Castile and Pere III of Aragon/Catalonia—whose complex interaction set
the stage for the battle.
Chapter 3 outlines a decade of conflict that involved all three men—a con-
flict later named the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366).
Chapter 4 highlights a dramatic foreign intervention in 1366 by the so-called
Free Companies from north of the Pyrenees, one that reversed the course of
this war and led to an otherwise highly unlikely Aragonese victory.

60 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: The Viking Press, 1976).
61 The crown of Aragon is the collective designation for several political units which co-
alesced during the High Middle Ages to form a single kingdom, i.e. the County of Catalonia
(Cataluña in castellano) and the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, as well as the Balearic
Islands. (See accompanying maps).
24 Introduction

The three chapters in Part 2 trace the actual campaign and battle.
Chapter 5 details the preparations undertaken by both side.
Chapter 6 follows the actual campaign as the two armies maneuvered
around northeastern Spain for some seven weeks during the winter and early
spring of 1367, a period characterized only by skirmishing and one relatively
minor engagement.
Chapter 7 focuses in on the morning hours of April 3, 1367 when the two
armies clashed on that treeless plain east of the town of Nájera.

Part 3 examines the battle’s surprising aftermath and longterm results.

Chapter 8 considers how the victor’s managed to “seize defeat from the jaws
of victory” and the profound impact these events in Spain had on the following
stages of the Hundred Years War.

In the Conclusion, we argue that the great highly lopsided encounter that took
place on that April day was one of the leading Pyrrhic victories of the Middle
Ages, perhaps of all time.

5 Appendices and Translations

To accompany the text, the authors of this book have provided extensive ap-
pendices. In particular, we have gathered and provided translations of all major
accounts as well as a number of minor ones. Appendix A lists participants,
casualties, and prisoners as recorded in the three major chronicles (Chandos
Herald, Ayala, and Froissart) as well as two minor ones (John of Reading and
the anonymous Canterbury Chronicles). Appendices B and C contain English
translations of not only several available documents that shed light on the bat-
tle (for example, the letters written by the Black Prince and King Pedro), but
also relevant passages from more than a dozen chronicles.
Where no English translation currently exists, the authors have undertaken
the task. On the other hand, where translations are available, we have inserted
these rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel. For example, while we have
translated extensive segments of Ayala’s chronicle of Pedro I, we have simply
reproduced relevant segments of the English paraphrase included in the 1910
edition of the Chandos Herald. In a similar manner, we have also made use of
the English translation of Fernando I’s chronicle published by Derek Lomax
and R.J. Oakley.
Perhaps our only controversial decision comes in reproducing an ear-
lier translation of Jean Froissart’s chronicle, the most important such work
Introduction 25

produced in the fourteenth century, if not the entire Middle Ages. There
have been two extensive English translations (neither absolutely complete)
of this monumental work. The first, generally referred to by scholars as the
Berners translation, was undertaken early in the sixteenth century at the be-
hest of Henry VIII by a high-ranking official of the Tudor government, Sir John
Bourchier, Lord Berners.62
The second—better known, more easily available, and more widely em-
ployed—first made its appearance in 1797 with an expanded version in 1805
and was subsequently reprinted several times during the nineteenth century
in massive, 2-volume editions. The translator, Thomas Johnes, was a fasci-
nating figure—an Anglo-Welsh improving landlord, longstanding member
of Parliament, and fellow of the Royal Society with a penchant for the writ-
ten word, including translations of medieval chroniclers. At the Havod Press
that he founded, Johnes printed not only Froissart, but also his translations of
Joinville and Enguerrand de Monstrelet.63
Despite questions that some have raised concerning the accuracy of his
Froissart translation and its undeniably dated language (after all, what would
one expect of a work first published when the Napoleonic Wars were still rang-
ing), we believe it to be essentially accurate in its rendering of the fourteenth
century originals64 and have therefore chosen to reproduce in the appendices
the extensive section dealing with the Nájera campaign from its incipience to
its immediate aftermath. At the same time, to satisfy critics, in our numerous
citations to Thomas Johnes, we have also made reference to a relatively recent
scholarly edition of what is known as the Amiens Manuscript edited by George
Diller as part of Textes Littéraires Français and thought by some recent scholars

62 Jean Froissart, The Chronicle, trans. John Bourchier, 2nd Baron of Berners (New York: AMS
Press, 1967).
63 Thomas Johnes (1748–1816) was a noted landholder in Wales whose activities place
him among the ranks of improving landlords of the eighteenth century Agricultural
Revolution. On his family estate of Hafod, he established a thriving farm and dairy,
constructing a church and school for his tenants, while earning recognition as a pio-
neer of upland forestation. At the same time, he advocated improvement of roads and
bridges throughout his region of Wales. Between 1775 and 1812, Johnes served ten terms
in Parliament. His writing and translation earned him election as a fellow of the Royal
society in 1800. He founded his own printing establishment which he named Hafod Press
after his Welch estate and it was here that he first printed his various translations, includ-
ing that of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles of England, France, and Spain.
64 The fact that there exist a number of different versions of Froissart leads us to speak
of the originals in the plural. For more about the question of dating these versions, see
Appendix C.3.
26 Introduction

to be the earliest surviving manuscript of the chronicle.65 Inconsistencies be-

tween the two will be duly noted.

6 Citation

When referring to a work, the first part of our citation is always to the version
that we have utilized, supplying to the reader the necessary page reference.
On the other hand, in cases where traditional divisions of that work were es-
tablished by an author or by the original publisher, we have also done our best
to supply those alternative references. Although this procedure may seem to
some overly complex (it has certainly increased our workload), we have ad-
opted it to facilitate tracking down references in other editions.
Consider, for example, the case of Jerónimo Zurita. In our writing, we have
employed the modern Zaragoza edition that treats Pere III’s reign in volumes
3–4. On the other hand, Zurita himself divided his monumental history into
books and chapters—the reign of Pere III, second longest in Aragonese his-
tory, took up most of books VII through X. Consequently, throughout our work,
references to Zurita will be given in both forms: first, according to the volume
and page numbers in the Zaragoza edition; secondly (in brackets) to the cor-
responding book and chapter: e.g. Zurita, Anales, 4:306 [IX, 5].
Or again, take the case of Pedro López de Ayala’s Crónica del Rey Don Pedro
Primero edited by the nineteenth century scholar, Cayetano Rosell, and avail-
able in volume one of his Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla desde don Alfonso
el Sabio, hasta los Católicos don Fernando y doña Isabel which corresponds to
volume 66 in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde La Formacion del
Lenguaje hasta Nuestros Dias. In all subsequent citations, after the page refer-
ence to this volume, we have also given the year and the chapter within that
year. For example, Ayala, Pedro I, p. 425 [1352, chap. 2]. We hope that this will
make it far easier for readers using a different edition to track down a passage.
Special problems arise when citing the Chandos Herald. As noted briefly
in footnote 1 and at greater length in Appendix C.2, the French text has been
published on four separate occasions between 1842 and 1975. Although we
shall almost exclusively use the 1910 Pope-Lodge edition, one of the others—
the most recent edition by Diana B. Tyson published in Tübingen in 1975—
has been cited in this book. We distinguish between them by using the date of

65 See: Froissart, Chronique (Diller). The section of Book I of Froissart dealing with Nájera
falls within Diller’s Tome III subtitled “Depuis la bataille de Crécy jusqu’au mariage du
duc de Bourgogne avec Marguerite de Flandre (1346–1369).” For more about the “Froissart
Question,” see Appendix C.3.
Introduction 27

composition: for example, the Pope-Lodge edition is Chandos Herald (1910);

the Tyson edition is Chandos Herald (1975).
The work also poses a second problem. Whenever we cite the Pope-Lodge
edition, we need to refer not only the original French text, but also the edi-
tors’ English paraphrase that we have printed in Appendix C.2. Since these
appear on different pages of the volume, both sets of pages require citation.
Consequently, the first page citation will be to the French text, the second to
the English paraphrase. Finally, the lines in the original French version have
been assigned numbers by the editors and these numbers have been carried
over to the English paraphrase. These will also be given in the footnote.66
Consider the following example. In his poem, the herald makes one short
but critical statement that to all appearances identifies him as a witness to the
events in Spain.

French text:

Or n’est pas raisons que je faigne

D’un noble voiage d’Espaigne,
Mais bien est raisons qu’on l’emprise:
Car ce fu le plus noble emprise
Qu’onques cretiens empreist,
Car par force en son lieu remist
Un Roy, qu’avoit desherite
Son frere, bastart et mainsne,
Ensi com vous oir pourrez
S’un poy vos ascoulter volez.
Ore est bien temps de comencer
Ma matier | moy adresser
Au purpos ou ie voille venir
A ce q eue vts a venir
Apres la bataille en Britanie
Qe le duc ouescz sa compenie
Conquesta gaigna sa terre
P[or] la puissance dengleterre

66 Pope and Lodge point out in the Historical Introduction to their 1910 edition that “The
poem falls naturally into two parts: (A) the account of the French Campaigns, (B) the
Spanish episode.” See: Chandos Herald (1910), Historical Introduction, p. v. The passage
quoted in the text, indicating that the herald was present at Nájera, appears at the begin-
ning of the second part.
28 Introduction

English paraphrase:

Now it is not right that I should be backward in telling of a noble Spanish

expedition, but very right that he [the prince] should be esteemed there-
for; for it was the noblest enterprise that ever Christian undertook, for by
force he put back in his place a king whom his younger bastard brother
had disinherited, as you will be able to hear if you give ear a little.
Now it is full time to begin my matter and address myself to the pur-
pose to which I am minded to come, to what I saw befall after the battle in
Brittany, in which the Duke conquered and gained his land by the power
of England. [Our italics]

The French text appears on pages 49–50 of the 1910 Pope-Lodge edition. The
English paraphrase of this same passage is on page 149. The lines are num-
bered 1639–1656. Consequently, the footnote for this key passage would read:
Chandos Herald (1910), pp. 49–50, 149 [1639–1656].

7 Spelling

A problem encountered by most medievalists is the extreme variability dis-

played by contemporary writers in rendering the names of people, places, and,
in some cases, things. A good example can be found in the name of one individ-
ual mentioned earlier in the Introduction—Sir Hugh Calveley. The anonymous
author of the Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois refers to this fascinating
figure as Hue de Karvelley. On the other hand, Pedro López de Ayala calls him
Hugo de Caurelay. These are only two of more than a score of spellings found
in contemporary documents and chronicles, including Kerverley, Calverlee,
Calvyle, Kalvele, Calveley, Calviley, and Calvile. For use in this book, we have
adopted the spelling employed in the British Dictionary of National Biography,
but we could just as easily have gone with one of the many other variants.67
Finally, it should be mentioned that over the years, both of the authors of
this book have been repeatedly frustrated by translations they used that fail
to supply either a name or a word as it appears in the original work. This is

67 Interestingly, the medieval spellings do not seem to include one that is frequently used
by modern authors, i. e. “Calverley.” See, for example: Sedgwick, Life of the Black Prince,
p. 267.
Introduction 29

particularly the case if the way in which that name or word is being translated
into English may be open to question. As a result, throughout our own transla-
tions, we have tried to avoid this “dereliction” by supplying in parentheses the
original word when and wherever it seems appropriate to do so. This, of course,
includes the spelling of proper names as they appear in the texts we have used.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Municipal Edison. Municipal
Bernstein.

Various Series Bases in Use, 1892.

The above six bases have been superseded by the “Large Edison,” now
called the Mogul Screw base.
 THE EDISON “MUNICIPAL” STREET
LIGHTING SYSTEM

Edison “Municipal” System, 1885.

High voltage direct current was generated,
several circuits operating in multiple, three
ampere lamps burning in series on each circuit.
Photograph courtesy of Association of Edison
Illuminating Companies.

The arc lamp could not practically be made in a unit smaller than
the so-called “1200 candlepower” (6.6 ampere) or “half” size, which
really gave about 350 spherical candlepower. A demand therefore
arose for a small street lighting unit, and Edison designed his
“Municipal” street lighting system to fill this requirement. His
experience in the making of dynamos enabled him to make a direct
current bipolar constant potential machine that would deliver 1000
volts which later was increased to 1200 volts. They were first made
in two sizes having an output of 12 and 30 amperes respectively.
Incandescent lamps were made for 3 amperes in several sizes from
16 to 50 candlepower. These lamps were burned in series on the
1200-volt direct current system. Thus the 12-ampere machine had a
capacity for four series circuits, each taking 3 amperes, the series
circuits being connected in multiple across the 1200 volts. The
number of lamps on each series circuit depended upon their size, as
the voltage of each lamp was different for each size, being about 1½
volts per cp.
A popular size was the 32-candlepower unit, which therefore
required about 45 volts and hence at 3 amperes consumed about
135 watts. Allowing 5 per cent loss in the wires of each circuit, there
was therefore 1140 of the 1200 volts left for the lamps. Hence about
25 32-candlepower or 50 16-candlepower lamps could be put on
each series circuit. Different sizes of lamps could also be put on the
same circuit, the number depending upon the aggregate voltage of
the lamps.

Edison Municipal Lamp, 1885.

Inside the base was an arrangement by which
the lamp was automatically short circuited when
it burned out.
 A device was put in the base of each lamp to short circuit the
lamp when it burned out so as to prevent all the other lamps on that
circuit from going out. This device consisted of a piece of wire put
inside the lamp bulb between the two ends of the filament.
Connected to this wire was a very thin wire inside the base which
held a piece of metal compressed against a spring. The spring was
connected to one terminal of the base. Should the lamp burn out,
current would jump from the filament to the wire in the bulb, and the
current then flowed through the thin wire to the other terminal of the
base. The thin wire was melted by the current, and the spring
pushed the piece of metal up short circuiting the terminals of the
base. This scheme was later simplified by omitting the wire, spring,
etc., and substituting a piece of metal which was prevented from
short circuiting the terminals of the base by a thin piece of paper.
When the lamp burned out the entire 1200 volts was impressed
across this piece of paper, puncturing it and so short circuiting the
base terminals. Should one or more lamps go out on a circuit, the
increase in current above the normal 3 amperes was prevented by
an adjustable resistance, or an extra lot of lamps which could be
turned on one at a time, connected to each circuit and located in the
power station under the control of the operator. This system
disappeared from use with the advent of the constant current
transformer.
 THE SHUNT BOX SYSTEM FOR
SERIES INCANDESCENT LAMPS

Shunt Box System, 1887.

Lamps were burned in series on a high voltage
alternating current, and when a lamp burned
out all the current then went through its “shunt
box,” a reactance coil in multiple with each
lamp.

Soon after the commercial development of the alternating

current constant potential system, a scheme was developed to
permit the use of lamps in series on such circuits without the
necessity for short circuiting a lamp should it burn out. A reactance,
called a “shunt box” and consisting of a coil of wire wound on an iron
core, was connected across each lamp. The shunt box consumed
but little current while the lamp was burning. Should one lamp go
out, the entire current would flow through its shunt box and so
maintain the current approximately constant. It had the difficulty,
however, that if several lamps went out, the current would be
materially increased tending to burn out the remaining lamps on the
circuit. This system also disappeared from use with the development
of the constant current transformer.
 THE ENCLOSED ARC LAMP
Up to 1893 the carbons of an arc lamp operated in the open air,
so that they were rapidly consumed, lasting from eight to sixteen
hours depending on their length and thickness. Louis B. Marks, an
American, found that by placing a tight fitting globe about the arc, the
life of the carbons was increased ten to twelve times. This was due
to the restricted amount of oxygen of the air in the presence of the
hot carbon tips and thus retarded their consumption. The amount of
light was somewhat decreased, but this was more than offset by the
lesser expense of trimming which also justified the use of more
expensive better quality carbons. Satisfactory operation required that
the arc voltage be increased to about 80 volts.
 Enclosed Arc Lamp, 1893.
Enclosing the arc lengthened the life of the
carbons, thereby greatly reducing the cost of
maintenance.

This lamp rapidly displaced the series open arc. An enclosed arc
lamp for use on 110-volt constant potential circuits was also
developed. A resistance was put in series with the arc for use on
110-volt direct current circuits, to act as a ballast in order to prevent
the arc from taking too much current and also to use up the
difference between the arc voltage (80) and the line voltage (110).
On alternating current, a reactance was used in place of the
resistance.
The efficiencies in lumens per watt of these arcs (with clear
glassware), all of which have now disappeared from the market,
were about as follows:
6.6 ampere 510 watt direct current (D.C.) series arc, 8¼ l-p-w.
5.0 ampere 550 watt direct current multiple (110-volt) arc, 4½ l-p-w.
7.5 ampere 540 watt alternating current (A.C.) multiple (110-volt) arc,
4¼ l-p-w.
 Open Flame Arc Lamp, 1898.
Certain salts impregnated in the carbons
produced a brilliantly luminous flame in the arc
stream which enormously increased the
efficiency of the lamp.
 Enclosed Flame Arc Lamp, 1908.
By condensing the smoke from the arc in a
cooling chamber it was practical to enclose the
flame arc, thereby increasing the life of the
carbons.

The reason for the big difference in efficiency between the series
and multiple direct-current arc is that in the latter a large amount of
electrical energy (watts) is lost in the ballast resistance. While there
is a considerable difference between the inherent efficiencies of the
D. C. and A. C. arcs themselves, this difference is reduced in the
multiple D. C. and A. C. arc lamps as more watts are lost in the
resistance ballast of the multiple D. C. lamp than are lost in the
reactance ballast of the multiple A. C. lamp.
This reactance gives the A. C. lamp what is called a “power-
factor.” The product of the amperes (7.5) times the volts (110) does
not give the true wattage (540) of the lamp, so that the actual volt-
amperes (825) has to be multiplied by a power factor, in this case
about 65 per cent, to obtain the actual power (watts) consumed. The
reason is that the instantaneous varying values of the alternating
current and pressure, if multiplied and averaged throughout the
complete alternating cycle, do not equal the average amperes
(measured by an ammeter) multiplied by the average voltage
(measured by a volt-meter). That is, the maximum value of the
current flowing (amperes) does not occur at the same instant that the
maximum pressure (voltage) is on the circuit.
 THE FLAME ARC LAMP
About 1844 Bunsen investigated the effect of introducing various
chemicals in the carbon arc. Nothing was done, however, until
Bremer, a German, experimented with various salts impregnated in
the carbon electrodes. In 1898 he produced the so-called flame arc,
which consisted of carbons impregnated with calcium fluoride. This
gave a brilliant yellow light most of which came from the arc flame,
and practically none from the carbon tips. The arc operated in the
open air and produced smoke which condensed into a white powder.
The two carbons were inclined downward at about a 30-degree
angle with each other, and were of small diameter but long, 18 to 30
inches, having a life of about 12 to 15 hours. The tips of the carbons
projected through an inverted earthenware cup, called the
“economizer,” the white powder condensing on this and acting not
only as an excellent reflector but making a dead air space above the
arc. The arc was maintained at the tips of the carbons by an electro-
magnet whose magnetic field “blew” the arc down.
Two flame arc lamps were burned in series on 110-volt circuits.
They consumed 550 watts each, giving an efficiency of about 35
lumens per watt on direct current. On alternating current the
efficiency was about 30 l-p-w. By use of barium salts impregnated in
the carbons, a white light was obtained, giving an efficiency of about
18 l-p-w on direct current and about 15½ on alternating current.
These figures cover lamps equipped with clear glassware. Using
strontium salts in the carbons, a red light was obtained at a
considerably lower efficiency, such arcs on account of their color
being used only to a limited extent for advertising purposes.
 Constant Current Transformer, 1900.
This converted alternating current of constant
voltage into constant current, for use on series
circuits.

These arcs were remarkably efficient but their maintenance

expense was high. Later, about 1908, enclosed flame arcs with
vertical carbons were made which increased the life of the carbons,
the smoke being condensed in cooling chambers. However, their
maintenance expense was still high. They have now disappeared
from the market, having been displaced by the very efficient gas-
filled tungsten filament incandescent lamp which appeared in 1913.
 THE CONSTANT CURRENT
TRANSFORMER FOR SERIES
CIRCUITS
About 1900 the constant current transformer was developed by
Elihu Thomson. This transforms current taken from a constant
potential alternating current circuit into a constant alternating current
for series circuits, whose voltage varies with the load on the circuit.
The transformer has two separate coils; the primary being stationary
and connected to the constant potential circuit and the secondary
being movable and connected to the series circuit. The weight of the
secondary coil is slightly underbalanced by a counter weight. Current
flowing in the primary induces current in the secondary, the two coils
repelling each other. The strength of the repelling force depends
upon the amount of current flowing in the two coils. The core of the
transformer is so designed that the central part, which the two coils
surround, is magnetically more powerful close to the primary coil
than it is further away.
When the two coils are close together a higher voltage is
induced in the secondary than if the later were further away from the
primary coil. In starting, the two coils are pulled apart by hand to
prevent too large a current flowing in the series circuit. The
secondary coil is allowed to gradually fall and will come to rest at a
point where the voltage induced in it produces the normal current in
the series circuit, the repelling force between the two coils holding
the secondary at this point. Should the load in the series circuit
change for any reason, the current in the series circuit would also
change, thus changing the force repelling the two coils. The
secondary would therefore move until the current in the series circuit
again becomes normal. The action is therefore automatic, and the
actual current in the series circuit can be adjusted within limits to the
desired amount, by varying the counterweight. A dash pot is used to
prevent the secondary coil from oscillating (pumping) too much.
In the constant current transformer, the series circuit is insulated
from the constant potential circuit. This has many advantages. A
similar device, called an automatic regulating reactance was
developed which is slightly less expensive, but it does not have the
advantage of insulating the two circuits from each other.
 ENCLOSED SERIES ALTERNATING
CURRENT ARC LAMPS
The simplicity of the constant current transformer soon drove the
constant direct-current dynamo from the market. An enclosed arc
lamp was therefore developed for use on alternating constant
current. Two sizes of lamps were made; one for 6.6 amperes
consuming 450 watts and having an efficiency of about 4½ lumens
per watt, and the other 7.5 amperes, 480 watts and 5 l-p-w (clear
glassware). These lamps soon superseded the direct current series
arcs. They have now been superseded by the more efficient
magnetite arc and tungsten filament incandescent lamps.
SERIES INCANDESCENT LAMPS ON
CONSTANT CURRENT
TRANSFORMERS
Series incandescent lamps were made for use on constant
current transformers superseding the “Municipal” and “Shunt Box”
systems. The large Edison, now called the Mogul Screw base, was
adopted and the short circuiting film cut-out was removed from the
base and placed between prongs attached to the socket.
 Holder. Socket.

Holder and
socket.

Series Incandescent Lamp Socket with Film Cutout,

1900.
The “Large Edison,” now called Mogul Screw, base was standardized and
the short circuiting device put on the socket terminals.
 The transformers made for the two sizes of arc lamps, produced
6.6 and 7.5 amperes and incandescent lamps, in various sizes from
16 to 50 cp, were made for these currents so that the incandescent
lamps could be operated on the same circuit with the arc lamps. The
carbon series incandescent lamp, however, was more efficient if
made for lower currents, so 3½-, 4- and 5½-ampere constant current
transformers were made for incandescent lamps designed for these
amperes. Later, however, with the advent of the tungsten filament,
the 6.6-ampere series tungsten lamp was made the standard, as it
was slightly more efficient than the lower current lamps, and was
made in sizes from 32 to 400 cp. When the more efficient gas-filled
tungsten lamps were developed, the sizes were further increased;
the standard 6.6-ampere lamps now made are from 60 to 2500 cp.
 THE NERNST LAMP
Dr. Walther Nernst, of Germany, investigating the rare earths
used in the Welsbach mantle, developed an electric lamp having a
burner, or “glower” as it was called, consisting of a mixture of these
oxides. The main ingredient was zirconia, and the glower operated in
the open air. It is a non-conductor when cold, so had to be heated
before current would flow through it. This was accomplished by an
electric heating coil, made of platinum wire, located just above the
glower. As the glower became heated and current flowed through it,
the heater was automatically disconnected by an electro-magnet cut-
out.
 Nernst Lamp, 1900.
The burners consisted mainly of zirconium
oxide which had to be heated before current
could go through them.

The resistance of the glower decreases with increase in current,

so a steadying resistance was put in series with it. This consisted of
an iron wire mounted in a bulb filled with hydrogen gas and was
called a “ballast.” Iron has the property of increasing in resistance
with increase in current flowing through it, this increase being very
marked between certain temperatures at which the ballast was
operated. The lamp was put on the American market in 1900 for use
on 220-volt alternating current circuits. The glower consumed 0.4
ampere. One, two, three, four and six glower lamps were made,
consuming 88, 196, 274, 392 and 528 watts respectively. As most of
the light is thrown downward, their light output was generally given in
mean lower hemispherical candlepower. The multiple glower lamps
were more efficient than the single glower, owing to the heat radiated