Jean de Vienne

Bust in the Battle Gallery of the Palace of Versailles

Jean de Vienne (* 1341 in Dole ; † September 25, 1396 at Nikopolis ) was a French knight and admiral during the Hundred Years War .

Life

Jean de Vienne began his military training at the age of nine. He was knighted at twenty-one, and at twenty-four he was appointed captain-general of Franche-Comté .

In 1373, Vienne was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Naval Forces ( Amiral de France ) by King Charles V and, in the following years, achieved the same importance in the maritime theater of war that the Connétable du Guesclin had for land warfare. Vienne drove an extensive fleet building program and reorganized the coastal protection along the English Channel . In association with the Castilian fleet, France was able to take offensive action against England for the first time since the beginning of the Hundred Years War.

Together with the Castilian admiral Fernando Sánchez de Tovar , Vienne undertook several raids along the southern English coast between 1374 and 1380, during which they burned down cities such as Plymouth , Southampton , Portsmouth or Rye , as well as devastating the Isle of Wight . In 1380 he took part in the fight against the Earl of Buckingham and then accompanied King Charles VI. on the campaign in Flanders, where he fought in the Battle of Roosebeke in 1382 . As part of the Auld Alliance , Vienne transported an advance command of eighty knights and one thousand five hundred infantrymen on 180 ships to Scotland for the purpose of an invasion of northern England in 1385. He was supposed to be followed by the Connétable de Clisson , the Maréchal de Sancerre and the Sire de Coucy with larger contingents, but this was prevented by renewed uprisings in Flanders. In Scotland, Vienne, meanwhile, attracted the enmity of King Robert II , allegedly because he had seduced his favorite cousin. More likely, however, the dispute over the maintenance costs of the French army had broken out. Vienne took the cost and left Scotland soon afterwards without having achieved any military success against England.

The raids of the Amiral de Vienne on the English coast between 1374 and 1380.

King Charles VI. did not pay the same attention to warfare at sea as his father had, so Vienne no longer received the financial means to carry on an effective war against England. For example, in 1368 and 1387, two laboriously organized attempts to invade England from Normandy failed. Vienne worked as a crusader in the following years and took part in the crusade against Mahdia in 1389/90 . He also took part in the 1396 crusade of Count Johann Ohnefurcht von Neves and Emperor Sigismunds against the Ottomans , but fell in the battle of Nikopolis . His body was returned to France and buried in the family chapel in the church of the Cistercian monastery of Bellevaux in Franche-Comté.

Honors

The French Navy named several of its ships after Jean de Vienne throughout its history. Amongst other things:

• a La Galissonière-class cruiser commissioned in 1937 , which was sunk in the port of Toulon in 1942 (see: Self- sinking of the Vichy fleet )
• the Georges-Leygues-class frigate ( Jean de Vienne (D643) ) commissioned in 1984

literature

• Eleanor Searle, Robert Burghart: The Defense of England and the Peasants' Revolt . 1972.
• Barbara Tuchman : A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (German: The distant mirror. The dramatic 14th century , Claasen, Düsseldorf 1980, ISBN 3-546-49187-4 ).