The Medieval Woman Who Went Medieval on All Things French
Early in the Hundred Years War, the French were terrorized by a bloodthirsty female pirate who went on a personal vendetta against France. She was Jeanne de Belleville (1300 – 1359), also known as the Lioness of Brittany. After the French accused her husband of treason and executed him, de Belleville went on the warpath. She turned pirate and preyed on French shipping in the English Channel, torturing and executing every French nobleman she came across.
De Belleville was a Breton noblewoman from the town of Belleville-sur-Vie, and hailed from a prominent family that had ruled the area for centuries. After two marriages, one which ended with her husband’s death and the other with an annulment, de Belleville married a wealthy Breton named Olivier Clisson in 1330. In 1342, during the Hundred Years War, Clisson was military commander of a town that was captured by the English, and he was taken prisoner. He was released soon thereafter in a prisoner exchange – the only Frenchman to be released. Between that and an unusually low ransom requested by the English, Clisson’s compatriots accused him of treason. He was tried and convicted by a court of French nobles, and beheaded in 1343.
De Belleville took her young sons to see their father’s head mounted on a spike, and vowed revenge. She sold her estates, and used the proceeds to raise a private force with which she began attacking the French, who did not take her seriously at first. That ended when she attacked and captured a French castle, and massacred its entire garrison, except for one man whom she let live to tell the tale. She was taken seriously from then on.
A determined French counterattack forced her to retreat across the Channel to England. There, she bought and outfitted three warships, and as a signal of her intent, painted them black and dyed their sails red. Then she led her black fleet into the English Channel, to fall upon French shipping. De Belleville and her pirate squadron soon gained a reputation for savagery, as they massacred nearly all who fell into their hands, except for a few survivors spared to spread the tale. French aristocrats in particular were in for a rough time if they were found aboard any ship captured by the pirate widow. There was serious money to be made ransoming them, as the was custom of the day, but de Belleville did not want their money. Instead, she tortured her aristocratic captives, then personally beheaded them with an ax, before tossing their corpses overboard.
De Belleville continued her murderous rampage against the French wherever she could find them, for thirteen years, before her bloodlust was finally sated. Eventually, in 1356, she gave up the life of piracy, and retired to her estates in Brittany. She remarried for a fourth time, and settled into a castle on Brittany’s southern coast, where she died peacefully in 1359.