What Roman Generals Did to Defeated Kings Was W*rse Than DE*TH

In a spring morning in 1358, inside the Alcalaza of Seville, a 24year-old knight walked into a courtyard believing his half-brother had finally forgiven him. His name was Fedri. He was the master of the Order of Santiago, one of the most powerful military positions in Castile, and he had just finished paying his respects to the king.”

“He was on his way out when the gates closed behind him. A voice from a window above ordered the guards to seize him. Fedri ran. He got tangled in his own sword belt trying to draw his weapon. And while he fumbled with it, a man came up behind him with a mace and brought it down on his skull. He went down onto the tiles, still moving, still breathing.”

“And the king, his own half-brother, watched all of it happen, then noticed the body was still twitching, handed a dagger to a young page, and told the boy to finish the job. When it was done, Pedro of Castile sat down to eat his dinner in the same room where Fedri lay dead on the floor. The chronicler who recorded that scene knew Pedro personally.”

“He had served him and he wanted every person who ever heard the story to understand exactly what that meal meant. Today we’re going through seven rulers from the medieval world whose names became shorthand for cruelty. Pedro of Castile who murdered his way through his own family. Andronicos Comnos, the Bzantine Emperor whose death was so horrific that the man who wrote it down could barely get through describing it.”

“King John of England, who starved a mother and her son to death in a dungeon. Galato Maria Forza of Milan whose punishments were so grotesque that people struggled to believe them even at the time. Satapulk of Kiev called the accursed for a thousand years. Vlad the Impaler who turned an entire plane outside his capital into something that made a sultan turn his army around.”

“And Charles of Navar called Charles the Bad, whose death might be the single most horrifying accident in royal history. Seven men spanning four centuries and the whole width of the medieval world from the Atlantic coast of Castile to the rivers of Kiev. Different languages, different churches, different centuries.”

“And yet, as you’re going to notice, the same handful of moves recurring like a family curse. The reconciliation feast that ends in blood. The invited guest who never leaves. The child in custody, the brother in the way.”

“All right, get comfortable because this one is long and it is dark. One small thing before the first body drops because it applies to everything you’re about to hear.”

“Every man in this video comes down to us through hostile pens. Pedro’s chronicle was written by a man who deserted him. Andronicos’s historian watched the mob tear him apart and went home to write about it. Jon’s biographers were monks he had taxed and locked out of their own churches.”

“Vlad’s stories were printed by the merchants he impaled and sold across Europe as some of the first true best sellers of the printing press. So, as we go, I’ll keep telling you who’s holding the pen, and you can keep your own scales. And here’s what makes these seven worth 5 hours of your evening anyway. Even after you shave away every exaggeration a grudge can buy, what remains documented, dated, and witnessed is worse than most fiction would dare. We start in Castile.”

“Pedro was born on the 30th of August 1334 in the city of Burgos, the only surviving legitimate son of King Alonso X 11th and his queen Maria of Portugal. And I want to sit with that word legitimate for a moment because Pedro’s entire life was shaped by the fact that his father barely acknowledged his mother’s existence.”

“Alonso had a mistress. Her name was Leonor De Guzman. She was widely considered one of the most beautiful women in Castile. And the king loved her openly, publicly, without shame. He gave her lands, titles, influence, and 10 children. 10. While Queen Maria and young Pedro lived in something close to internal exile in Seville, pushed to the edge of court life, Leonor’s sons grew up rich, favored, and confident.”

“The eldest surviving one was named Enrique. Hold on to that name because Enrique is going to be standing over Pedro’s body at the end of this story with a bloody dagger in his hand. So Pedro grows up watching his mother humiliated daily by a woman who has everything his mother should have had.”

“The court treats the mistress’s children like princes and the actual prince like an afterthought. Whatever Pedro became later, that was the soil it grew in. We even know what he looked like because Ayala, the chronicler, and we’ll get to him properly in a minute, left a physical portrait, and it’s oddly vivid across six and a half centuries.”

“Pedro was big, tall, strongly built, pale skinned, and fair-haired with light eyes, and he spoke with a slight lisp, a small human detail the chronicler didn’t need to include and did anyway. He barely slept. He hunted obsessively, loved his birds of prey, ate and drank moderately by royal standards, dressed without much ceremony, and pursued women his whole life with an appetite the chronicle records in a tone somewhere between disapproval and exhaustion.”

“A restless, physically formidable, slightly lisping insomniac who was happiest on horseback with a hawk on his fist. Hold that image against everything that follows. And hold this one, too, because I think it matters. Pedro built the most beautiful palace in Spain. The core of the Alcazar of Seville as it stands today.”

“The palace tourists queue for, the one that stands in for exotic royal splendor in about half the television produced this century, is substantially Pedro’s work, raised in the 1360s by Muslim craftsmen. Many sent by his ally, the Amir of Granada, in the full glory of the Mudja style. Walk through it and you move under ceilings of carved and gilded wood, past walls of plaster lace.”

“And if you can decode the Arabic inscriptions running along those walls, some of them offer glory to the Sultan Don Pedro, a Christian king of Castile styled Sultan in Arabic on his own walls. His enemies made hay of exactly this: the king who kept Moish guards and Jewish bankers and built like an amir. He murdered Fedri in that building.”

“The dinner beside the corpse happened inside that jewel box. Beauty and Butchery shared a floor plan, and Pedro apparently felt no tension between them whatsoever. In 1350, Alonso X 11th died of plague while besieging Gibraltar. And suddenly, 15-year-old Pedro was king of Castile. And within about a year, the settling of scores began.”

“Leonor De Guzman, the mistress who had overshadowed his mother for two decades, was arrested. She was moved from castle to castle. And in 1351 at Tala on the orders of Queen Maria with her son the king’s knowledge, Leonor was put to death. Some accounts describe her being killed by a crossbowman in her cell. Her sons, Enrique and his brothers, were young men by then, old enough to understand exactly what had been done to their mother and exactly who had done it.”

“From that moment forward, the war inside this family only ever moved in one direction. Now, before we go further, I have to tell you something about how we know any of this. Because with Pedro, it matters more than with almost any other medieval king. Nearly everything we know about his reign comes through one man.”

“Perro Lopeyala. Ayala was a Castellian nobleman who served in Pedro’s own court, watched him rule up close for years, and then in 1366 switched sides and joined Enrique’s rebellion. After Enrique won, Ayala wrote the official chronicle of Pedro’s reign for the new dynasty. So the main record of this king’s life was written by a man who abandoned him working for the family that killed him.”

“Ayala doesn’t invent things out of thin air. As far as anyone can tell, the events he describes are anchored to real dates, real places, real named people, but every scene is framed to justify what Enrique did at the end. Castellians at the time actually split on what to call this king.”

“His enemies called him Pedro El Cruel. His supporters, and he had many among the towns and the merchant classes, called him El Hustichiro, the enforcer of justice, the man who made the roads safe and hanged the nobles who robbed people. Both nicknames survived. The Tstamura family, the winners, made sure only one of them stuck.”

“I’ll give you the events as the sources describe them, and you can decide for yourself where justice ended and something darker began. The first years of the reign were chaos, a teenage king, a scheming court, and a favorite named Huan Alonso de Alberke pulling the strings. And into this mess came a marriage. In 1353, the French sent Pedro a bride, Blanch of Borbong, a princess of the royal blood of France, about 14 years old.”

“By all accounts, gentle and completely unprepared for what was waiting for her in Castile, because Pedro was already in love with someone else. Her name was Maria Deadia, a Castellian noble woman he had met the year before, and by every description, he was devoted to her in a way he never managed with anyone else in his life.”

“He married Blanch in Valadel on the 3rd of June 1353. Stood through the ceremony, stayed with his new bride for somewhere between 2 days and in some tellings a single night, and then simply got on a horse and rode back to Maria de Padilla. He never lived with Blanch again. What happened to Blanch after that is one of the quiet horrors of this whole story.”

“And I mean quiet in the worst possible way. She was 14, alone in a foreign country, unable to go home because her marriage was a diplomatic treaty and her husband treated her as a political inconvenience to be warehoused. Pedro had her confined. First in Avalo, then in the Alcazar of Toledo, then as the years passed and his war with his half brothers escalated, in the fortress of Medina Sidonia in the far south, about as distant from France as Castile could put her.”

“She spent roughly 8 years as a prisoner. The people of Toledo actually rose up at one point, partly in her defense. The sight of a blameless young queen locked away offended even a public used to royal ugliness. It changed nothing. And in August of 1361 at Medina, Sidonia, Blanch of Bourbon died at the age of 25. Ayala’s chronicles states what he believed happened plainly.”

“The king wanted her dead. According to the account, a physician named Alonso Dearosa was ordered to poison her and refused, saying he would not destroy his soul that way. So the task passed to a man named Juan Perez de Rebelo, a crossbowman of the king, and he killed her. A young woman who had done absolutely nothing in her entire life except be married to the wrong man, dying in a fortress at the edge of the world, on the order of a husband who had spent perhaps one night under the same roof as her. The French court never forgave it.”

“Neither, as it turned out, did the Pope. The paper trail on Blanch, by the way, runs right through the Vatican, and it makes the ending harder to explain away. For years before her death, Pope Innocent V 6th wrote to Pedro letter after letter, some surviving to this day, pleading then demanding that the king restore his lawful wife to her position, warning him of the scandal spreading through Christendom, threatening Sensure.”

“The king of France pressed the same case through every diplomatic channel he had. So this was never a private domestic sadness quietly unfolding in the south of Castile. Half of Europe spent 8 years formally asking Pedro to stop imprisoning his wife in writing and he ignored all of it. And then she died in his custody at 25 with his crossbowman in the building.”

“You can construct innocent explanations for a young woman dying in a 14th century fortress. Fever carried people off constantly. Ayala didn’t believe the innocent explanation. The French didn’t. The papal court didn’t. And the timing with Pedro’s war going badly and Blanch a live rallying point for his enemies didn’t ask anyone to.”

“Maria Deadia, for what this detail is worth, had died a few months before Blanch of natural causes, and Pedro was reportedly shattered by it. She is the one person in this entire story Pedro seems never to have turned on. Small, dark, and by the chronicler’s account, both beautiful and notably kind. Even Ayala, who has no reason to flatter anything Pedro loved, allows that she was goodnatured and often tried to soften the king’s rages, sometimes talking men out of the grave that had already been dug for them.”

“She gave him four children, kept clear of politics as much as the position allowed, and died in her late 20s, and Pedro buried her in the end in the royal chapel at Seville among the kings. After his death, when his daughter’s legitimacy became a matter of international politics, Pedro’s supporters swore he had secretly married Maria before Blanch ever arrived, making Maria the true queen and Blanch the bigous mistake.”

“The Cortez of Castile was even assembled in 1362 to hear witnesses solemnly attest the secret wedding. Ayala treats the claim with visible skepticism. The English, who needed those daughters legitimate for their own dynastic reasons, embraced it warmly. Medieval marriage law had a wonderful way of bending toward whoever had the largest army.”

“But the murders people remembered, the ones that built the name Pedro the Cruel brick by brick, were the family killings and the court killings, and they have a rhythm to them that becomes genuinely unsettling once you notice it. Pedro’s preferred method was the invitation, the reconciliation, the safe conduct. He would summon a man he had quarreled with, offer warmth, offer forgiveness, sometimes offer a meal, and the man would relax and then the guards would come.”

“Fadri in the Alcazar in 1358 is the famous one. The scene we opened with the mace and the dagger and the dinner beside the corpse. Ayala adds a detail to that day which somehow makes it worse. After Fadri was struck down, Pedro moved through the palace hunting members of his half-brother’s entourage. And one night of Fadri’s household, fled through the chambers until he ran into the apartments where Maria de Padilla was sitting with the king’s small daughters.”

“The man grabbed one of the little girls, Pedro’s own daughter, and held her in front of himself as a shield. Pedro reached them, pulled the child aside, and killed the man where he stood in front of his daughters, and then the chronicle says went back and ate. That same year, and in the years around it, the list grows.”

“His cousin, Juan of Aragon, summoned and killed. Another half-brother, also named Juan, imprisoned and later put to death. And their mother, Leonor of Aragon, Pedro’s own aunt, killed in her confinement as well. The queen mother of Aragon, his aunt. Ayala records these deaths in an almost bookkeeping tone, one after another, and the accumulation is the point.”

“Individually, a medieval king executing a treasonous relative was Tuesday. Pedro’s pattern, the lured guest, the broken guarantee, the corpse at the banquet, was something the nobility of Castile started to recognize as a personal signature. And it terrified them because the entire aristocratic world ran on safe conducts and sworn oaths and Pedro had demonstrated repeatedly that his oath meant nothing the moment you were inside his walls.”

“Even the dead campaigned against Pedro, and I mean that literally. Juan Alonso de Albocerke, the Portuguese magnate who had dominated the king’s first years and arranged the French marriage, broke with Pedro over the Padilla affair and fled to the rebel league. And in the autumn of 1354, he died suddenly, conveniently, and the accounts passed down the belief that a physician in Pedro’s pay had poisoned him.”

“What his partisans did next belongs in opera. Albuquerque had reportedly sworn or his followers swore for him that his body would not be buried until his death was avenged and his cause won. So the league had him embarmed and carried the corpse with them on campaign to meetings. The chronicle describes the dead man’s council seat maintained, his banner over the coffin, decisions taken in the presence of the body, as though the great lord were merely quiet that day.”

“For months, part of the opposition to the king of Castile was, administratively speaking, a corpse. You can call that Macabra political theater, and it was. And notice what it tells you about the atmosphere Pedro generated. His enemies found a dead man a perfectly credible standard to rally around because the dead were the one constituency Pedro could not summon to a reconciliation dinner.”

“One scene from 1356 deserves telling in full because it involves his own mother and because Ayala clearly meant it to be unbearable. In the early years of the reign, Queen Maria, the humiliated wife of Alonso, the woman who had waited two decades for her revenge on Leonor de Guusman, had aligned herself with a league of nobles trying to control her son.”

“And the League’s strongholds included the city of Toro, where the queen mother herself was living, surrounded by knights of her party. Pedro besieged the city, his mother inside it. When Toro fell in January 1356, the queen came out to meet her son with her ladies and the noblemen of her household around her.”

“Presumably believing that her presence, her body, her motherhood was itself a shield for the men beside her. Pedro’s soldiers cut those men down on the spot. In front of her, within reach of her, the blood, Ayala says, actually splashing across the queen’s garments. Her chief officers were butchered around her while she screamed and the chronicle records that Maria fainted and was carried away senseless from among the bodies of her own household.”

“She left Castile not long afterward back to her native Portugal where she died within the year of grief. The sympathetic accounts say Pedro had at that point avenged her against Leonor, seized her enemies, and then slaughtered her friends in her lap, all before his 22nd birthday. Family for this man was simply the nearest battlefield.”

“Even loyal service brought no safety, and one execution from 1360 makes the point better than any speech. Gutierre Fernandez Detoledo was one of Pedro’s oldest servants: a man who had fought for him, negotiated for him, stood by him through every crisis since the king was a boy. Suspicion touched him as suspicion at this court eventually touched everyone and Pedro ordered him killed and Gutier facing the executioner asked for time to dictate a letter to the king.”

“And the letter survives in Ayala’s chronicle and whether or not Ayala polished it, it stands as one of the most extraordinary documents of the Spanish Middle Ages. In it, the condemned man tells his master in effect, ‘I die guiltless, and I thank you for the honors you gave my house, and I owe you a last piece of counsel in payment. My lord, soften your hand, for I fear that all this killing will one day cost you the kingdom you are trying to secure with it.’”

“A dying man’s political forecast, dictated on the block, addressed to the friend who was killing him. Pedro had him beheaded anyway and exiled the man’s brother, the Archbishop of Toledo, for good measure. Nine years later, in a tent at Montiel, the forecast came due to the last syllable.”

“Seville, Pedro’s favorite city, kept its own grim tradition about him, and I’ll pass one piece of it along with the warning that it lives closer to legend than to record. The story concerns a noble woman, Oraka Deosorio, of the great Guzman clan, whose family stood with Enrique. And it says that Pedro had her burned alive in Seville.”

“Some tellings add that the offense was personal, a refusal of the king’s advances, and that as the flames rose around her, her waiting woman, Leonor Davalos, broke free, ran to the P, and threw herself into the fire onto her mistress’s body, so that the wind whipped flames could not strip and expose the dying woman before the crowd.”

“A servant burning to death voluntarily to guard her lady’s modesty for the last 30 seconds of both their lives. Civilian tradition planted the tale deep. A monument in the city’s gardens remembers the two women to this day. And whatever a documents and charters historian can or can’t certify about it, the story tells you exactly what the people of Andalucia believed their king was capable of.”

“And they had watched him at closer range than anyone. Running underneath all the family killing and feeding it was a war. The war of the two Pedro against Pedro IVth of Aragon. And even the war started with an insult taken personally. In the summer of 1356, Pedro of Castile was at San Lucar at the mouth of the Guadalia watching the tuna fishing.”

“Kings did this. It was an event when a squadron of Araggonese war gs sailed in and in full view of the king on the shore attacked and seized two Italian merchant ships anchored in what Pedro considered his own waters. He sent out demands for restitution. The Araggonese admiral sailed off with his prizes, and Pedro, treating the incident roughly the way he treated dinner guest etiquette violations, declared war on Aragon.”

“The war ran on and off for 9 years, chewed up the frontier provinces of both kingdoms, and gave Pedro a stage for the other great passion of his life besides Maria de Padilla, ships. He built and assembled war fleets with real obsession. And in 1359, he took the sea personally, commanding from his own galley and brought the fleet up the coast to bombard Barcelona itself.”

“The king of Castile lobbing stones at Aragon’s capital from the deck of his flagship, close enough for the citizens on the beach to see him. As naval strategy, it achieved almost nothing. As theater, coming from a king whose enemies called him half more and all tyrant, it was unforgettable. And that was usually the point with Pedro.”

“The war also handed him the excuse for one of his coldest killings, and this one involves children of his own blood. Among Leonor de Guzman’s many sons, Enrique’s younger brothers, Pedro’s half-bros, two of the youngest, Juan and another Pedro, had been in the king’s power since they were small boys, held for years as guarantees, growing up in comfortable custody at Carmona, while their older brothers fought the king from exile.”

“In 1359, with the Araggones war on and Enrique raiding into Castile under Aragon’s flag, the king decided the two hostages had appreciated into liabilities. On his order, they were put to death at Carmona. Juan was around 19. The younger Pedro was around 14. They had spent most of their lives as prisoners.”

“Their offense was their surname and their brother’s politics. And Ayala records the killing of the two young men in his usual ledgereping voice and lets the ages do the work. Add them to Fedri, to the cousin, to the aunt, to the other half brother, Juan. And the family accounting by 1359 stood at this.”

“Of the household of Leonor de Guzman and its allies, Pedro had now killed the mother and at least three of the sons, plus assorted cousins: a methodical decadelong harvesting of his father’s other family conducted between state banquetss in the loveliest palace in Spain.”

“Seville, meanwhile, went on manufacturing legends about its resident king, and the best of them has a street named after it that you can stand in tonight. The Cal Kabetza del Rey, Don Pedro, the street of the head of King Pedro. The story goes that the king liked to prowl the city at night alone or nearly incognito and that on one of these prowls he fought a street duel and killed a man and the only witness was an old woman who glimpsed the killer’s face by lamplight or in the better version couldn’t see the face at all and identified the killer by the sound a distinctive crack because Pedro’s knees clicked when he walked and all Seville knew the king’s knees clicked.”

“The city demanded justice for the murder. The king, as chief magistrate, was obliged to display the killer’s head in a box at the scene of the crime, and Pedro complied. He had a sculpted head of himself placed in the box, sealed and mounted on the wall, satisfying the letter of his own law with a stone confession nobody could open.”

“Pure legend almost certainly embroidered over centuries. And notice the assumption doing the loadbearing work inside the joke. That of course the king was out killing men in alleys at night personally. That was simply what Seville found plausible about its Pedro. The way other cities legends have their kings healing the sick.”

“Even the killings with solid political logic came wrapped in this same theatrical betrayal. Ayala at intervals stops narrating and simply counts. And the counting passages are the coldest things in the chronicle. Stretches where the pros becomes a necrology. Name after name after name. This master of a military order killed on the king’s command.”

“This nobleman killed. This royal official killed these citizens of this town killed. The ladies of such and such families imprisoned or dead. Recite a run of them aloud and it takes minutes. Castile’s governing class was not large. A few hundred families who all knew each other, intermarried, godparented each other’s children.”

“And Pedro moved through that intimate world for 19 years like a slow fire through a village, so that by the end there was scarcely a great house in the kingdom that hadn’t buried someone on his account or fled abroad to avoid it. That more than any single atrocity is what El Kruell finally meant.”

“Not a monster of exceptional imagination like some men in this video, but a king who made dying at court so routine that the chronicler had to invent a bookkeeping style to hold it all. In 1358 or 59, a claimant to the throne of Granada known as Muhammad the Red or the Red King came to Seville to negotiate trusting in the protection owed to a royal guest.”

“Pedro received him, entertained him, and then had him and his amirs seized at court. The Red King was taken out to a field dressed in scarlet, mounted on a donkey, and executed. And the accounts say Pedro struck the first blow himself with a lance, reportedly saying something to the effect of, ‘Take that for making me sign a bad treaty.’”

“The Granard’s companions, dozens of them, were killed alongside him. Even in an age that expected kings to be ruthless with rivals, killing an invited royal guest under safe conduct made courts across the peninsula flinch. It was the sort of act men remembered when they later had to decide whether Pedro deserved rescuing.”

“His own officials weren’t safe either, and one case in particular says a great deal about how fear worked at this court. Samuel Hale Levi was Pedro’s treasurer, a Jewish financier of enormous ability who had served the crown loyally for years and built with his fortune the synagogue in Toledo that still stands today. You can walk into it right now, the Senogga del Transito, and see the plasterwork his money paid for with inscriptions praising Pedro carved into the walls.”

“In 1360 or 61, Pedro had him arrested on suspicion of enriching himself, and Samuel was taken to Seville and tortured to make him reveal where his wealth was hidden. He died under that torture. The accounts describe his body simply giving out on the rack. The man whose wolves praised the king in carved Hebrew letters died screaming in the king’s dungeon so the king could locate his money faster.”

“Pedro seized everything, and the fortune turned out to be vast. And I suppose from the crown’s perspective, the operation was a complete success. The church got its turn as well. In 1366, as his throne was collapsing, Pedro passed through Galacia in flight. And while he was in Santiago de Compostella, the Archbishop of that city, Suero, and his dean, a man named Peralvarez, were cut down, murdered in circumstances that pointed straight back at the king near the holiest shrine in Spain.”

“Killing an archbishop at Compostella was roughly the Castellian equivalent of what had happened to Thomas Beckett at Canterbury two centuries earlier and the papacy reacted accordingly. Pope Urban V exccommunicated Pedro and the propaganda war was effectively over. His enemies could now say with the church’s blessing that the king of Castile was a tyrant, a murderer of queens and archbishops, a friend of Jews and Muslims.”

“That last accusation, revolting as it is, did real work in the 14th century, and that removing him was not treason at all. It was practically a crusade. The man doing the removing was of course Enrique Leonor de Guzman’s son, the boy whose mother Pedro’s family had executed at Tala 15 years earlier.”

“Enrique had spent years in exile in France and in 1366 he came back over the mountains at the head of the so-called free companies. Thousands of professional mercenaries left unemployed by a truce in the war between England and France. Hard men who fought for pay and plunder commanded by the most famous soldier in Europe. A squat famously ugly brilliant Breton named Bertron Dugesclan.”

“Castile’s nobility, having spent a decade watching Pedro murder his dinner guests, went over to Enrique in waves. Pedro fled his own kingdom almost without a battle, which tells you how thoroughly the aristocracy had abandoned him and went looking for help from the one power that had reasons to want him back on his throne, England.”

“Specifically, he went to Edward the Black Prince, son of the king of England, then ruling English Gaskani from Bordeaux. And the Black Prince, for a staggering price in promised gold and territory, agreed to put Pedro back. In April 1367 at Niera, the English longbows did to Enrique’s army what they had done to the French at Cressy and Poatier and Enrique’s cause collapsed in an afternoon and Dugescan himself was captured.”

“So incidentally was our chronicler. Pero Lopez deayala fought at Niera on Enrique’s side. He carried by his own telling the banner of the order of the sash in the front of the fight and was taken prisoner in the route and spent time in captivity contemplating we may assume both ransom arrangements and the strange career of his former master now victorious.”

“So when Ayala describes the terror of these years understand the fullness of his position. This is a man who served Pedro at court, deserted him, faced him across a battlefield, was captured under his brother’s banner, and then outlived everybody and wrote the minutes. Historians have been arguing about how to discount that testimony for six centuries.”

“And the honest answer is that we can’t do without it and can’t fully trust it. And every telling of Pedro, this one included, is a negotiation with Ayala’s ghost. Pedro rode back into his kingdom victorious. And then almost immediately, he showed the Black Prince exactly who he was. Because Pedro’s first instinct after the battle was to execute the captured Castellian nobles who had sided with his brother.”

“And the Black Prince, a man who had ordered his own share of massacres, no gentle soul himself, was reportedly appalled at the scale of vengeance Pedro had in mind and had to physically restrain his ally from butchering the prisoners. The alliance rotted fast after that. Pedro couldn’t pay what he’d promised, wouldn’t hand over the territories, and the English army, riddled with dissentry, went home disgusted.”