Process notes: Sieges then and now

I’m thinking a lot about sieges. Of course you are, Lombardi, you’re writing a novel that takes place during the Hundred Years’ War, an era all about sieges. But the current war in Gaza means we all need to brush up on the concept and its execution.

“Sieges are among the oldest of military operations,” writes Zoran Kusovac at . “ The attacker cuts off the communications and supplies of their enemy, hoping that deprivation, disease, and demoralisation will cause the besieged forces, and the civilians blockaded with them, to stop resisting and surrender.”

The Al-Jazeera report puts the Gaza agony into some historical context, from the Berlin blockade to those in the 1990s of Kabul and Sarajevo. Most sieges pair that isolation with heavy bombardment, to degrade buildings and minds: A casual search for “siege artillery” yields a list of heavy guns in use from 1775 France through both World Wars. The bombardment now comes from above, in airstrikes and missile launches. With Hamas rockets forcing Israeli families into bomb shelter, hundreds of hostages still pawns and Gaza’s agony piercing the veil, the siege feels international.

But this isn’t an essay about today’s wars, actually. I borrowed the name from the peerless

, deciding that some of these Substacks can be process notes: stuff I’ve come across and hope to include in my work. Meet the novel I hope to finish drafting by the end of National Novel Writing Month -and why I spent a lot of the last few weeks obsessed with yes, medieval siege warfare.

Which led to a speed-read of Juliet Barker’s Anglophile Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, 1417–1450. Barker’s book reads like a series of sieges, from Caen in 141 7 to Cherbourg to Rouen to Orleans to Compiegne and Mont St.-Michel, which has preserved some of its old defenses (see above, from Wikimedia Commons). I learned a lot from the book, which has three chapters on the figure most call Joan of Arc.

I’d found Barker while looking for sources on the 1419 siege of Rouen, the city where Jehanne Darc died a decade later. I’d put that siege into my story. But I hadn’t ome to terms with the omnipresence of sieges in 15th-century France: even that of Orleans, an early climax of Jehanne’s story, was almost routine . It was only part of the multi-volume poem someone called Martial d’Auvergne wrote about Charles VII, who Jehanne crowned after her forces liberated Orleans. The siege does appear in the illustrations to that poem as published in 1484:

Points to the artist who included Jehanne as just another soldier. I don’t remember mention of her with a bow instead of her standard, but as a symbol of how her forces breached the siege it works, I think. Conquest reminded me how crucial arrows still were in medieval warfare; the English began their empire in 1415 by breaking Agincourt with then- newfangled longbows. And crossbowmen to have been lethal assholes back then too: one taunted Jehanne “Shall we, you bloody tart?” after she predicted they’d lose Paris.

The English did not lose Paris then, of course, and Barker’s book provided lots of good detail about that and other battles right up to Jehanne’s capture. A few details I know I’ll use:

• Back to those arrows a second: In England, “every man between sixteen and sixty” had to practise archery every Sunday,” since the “great longbow” took a lot of strength and skill. Militarism, Lessons in masculinity also in militarism, since if you failed at the archery tests they sized you( up for “men at arms” (infantry).
• On July 15, 1429, when the Dauphin was crowned Charles VII, both of “the Pucelle’s parents” came to Reims for the event, staying in a nearby inn courtesy of the new king. “What they made of their daughter’s triumph can only be guessed,” Barker writes. I can do more than that and will.
• Speaking of proximity to kings, 18 months later Jehanne was a prisoner in Rouen, interrogated by church authorities for heresy-not on church property but in the castle that held the Norman government.ca That property was also hosting the newly crowned “King of England and France,” who was 10 years old at the time. That latter fact could itself be a movie, however unlikely the chance of any contact between a teenager in solitary confinement and the tween king who signed the order for her capture.
• Just before transfer to Rouen, in the months immediately after her capture, Jehanne was sexually assaulted by a knight at Beaurevoir, and had to fight him off lest pawing at her chest become rape. And now we’re back where I started this whole thing, first writing about Jehanne after years working on behalf of survivors of military sexual trauma.

What war-and preparations for war-does to the most vulnerable among us: I was going to say it’s my longtime obsession, but that feels almost beside the point. The hurt is almost over-documented, photos and stories rendering so many of us numb. And yes, I see the baroque irony of an anti-militarist writer choosing to write a novel about one of the most militarist women in history. To know why the hell I’m doing it, might have to wait till I get to the story’s end.

Originally published at https://chrislombardi.substack.com.