The Tour de Nesle Affair
In 1314, King Philip IV of France was feeling rather good about his dynasty. His daughter, Isabelle, was Queen of England, and his three sons were neatly married off to a trio of noblewomen who were related to one another and ready to produce the next generation of French princes. Queen Isabelle, eager to welcome her sisters-in-law to the family, made them each a present of distinctive and costly embroidered purses. To Isabelle’s surprise, during the next family reunion, she spotted the purses hanging from the belts of a pair of brothers, knights at her father’s court at a time when prowess at arms made rock stars out of men who knew how to handle a lance. Wise to what this royal regifting meant, Isabelle hurried off to tell her father, and the king promptly set spies to watch his daughters-in-law. Within weeks, the trio of princesses was caught in flagrante with their lovers at a decrepit old Parisian fortress called the Tour de Nesle.
The lovers were tortured in ways that would make any character on Game of Thrones shudder and finally executed—which must have come as a bit of a relief after all the castrating and flaying and oil-boiling. The princesses were imprisoned underground in dank, filthy dungeons, with their heads shaved and their children disinherited. The king himself passed shortly afterward. Within a generation, King Philip’s dynasty was destroyed, and the French throne passed to a distant cousin. The disagreement over who ought to inherit the crown sparked the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, plunging much of Western Europe into an armed conflict that would last for the better part of a century, and all because of a trio of misbehaving princesses. In a delicious twist, it is said that the wreckage of King Philip’s dynasty is due to a curse laid upon him by Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Templars, burned to death on bogus charges of heresy and witchcraft on the king’s orders earlier in 1314.