The Western Schism began in 1378, dividing Christendom between rival popes in Rome and Avignon. In the book’s account, the division was more than a dispute within the Church: it entered the politics of the Hundred Years’ War when the pope in Rome blessed England’s war of conquest in France and English clerics preached a crusade against French heretics. The conflict thus placed religious authority amid a war already marked by political fracture, recurring plague, and violence against civilians.

A Divided and Exhausted France

The Schism emerged against a long crisis in France. The Hundred Years’ War had begun with an English invasion in 1339. French defeats at Crécy and Poitiers, the capture of King Jean at Poitiers, and the immense ransom and territorial concessions required for his release helped leave the kingdom reeling. After the king’s capture, noble rebellion, peasant revolt, and factional violence in Paris compounded the damage; drought, crop failures, and repeated outbreaks of the Great Plague deepened the hardship.

By 1378, when the Western Schism began, the war had already damaged France’s political and social order. The country was also a target for routiers, armed bands who looted settlements and extorted tribute. Communities responded by fortifying villages, farms, towns, monasteries, and even churches. These defenses register a crisis lived locally: insecurity reached beyond battlefields and made protection a concern of ordinary settlement and religious life.

Rival Papal Authority and the War

The immediate religious division was between rival papal camps based in Rome and Avignon. The book emphasizes how that division entered the Anglo-French conflict: the pope in Rome blessed England’s war of conquest in France, while English clerics called the campaign a crusade and sold indulgences to finance the fighting. Religious language therefore did not stand apart from military policy; it could lend sacred sanction to a campaign against French people presented as heretics.

This alignment sharpened the crisis of authority. Christendom was divided between competing popes, while a pope’s blessing and clerical preaching could be enlisted in support of a war against another Christian population. The account presents the Schism not simply as a split in allegiance but as part of the conditions in which political violence could be framed as religious duty.

Violence under Crusading Language

The book links the war’s bloodlust and the crusading spirit kindled by the Western Schism to atrocities. In July 1380, English troops raided Brittany, attacking a convent, abusing the nuns, and carrying some of them away. The episode gives concrete force to the contrast between religious language and conduct: a conflict presented as crusading did not spare religious communities.

The raid also belongs to a wider pattern of insecurity described in the account. Routiers plundered towns and villages, while civilians built walls, ditches, towers, and moats for protection. The convent attack is presented as part of wartime violence, not as the sole consequence of the Schism; its significance lies in showing how crusading rhetoric and military brutality could coexist.

Religious Judgment and Political Justice

The account also places the Schism-era conflict beside a separate dispute over who could claim religious authority in legal judgment. Judicial combat was understood by its defenders as a judgment of God, with the result believed to disclose the truth under divine will. Yet popes denounced the practice as tempting God, while kings opposed it in part because it challenged their authority over justice. These disputes are not described as consequences of the Western Schism, but they show the broader tension between religious sanction and political control that shaped the period.

In the trial by combat between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, the king presided in the name of royal and divine authority, while priests and sacred objects framed the fight as a judgment before God. The Parlement of Paris authorized the duel in the king’s name; it became the last judicial duel sanctioned by that court. Set beside the divided papacy and the blessing of war, this episode underscores the period’s competing claims to speak for divine judgment, without resolving the uncertainties surrounding either ecclesiastical or human verdicts.