1003 Boleslaus, the Blind

My name is Bolesalus, a Duke of Bohemina between 999-1003. I had lost power, having had to flee to Germany, from the Vršovci grandees. The Vršovci grandees, were a family of Czechs that were struggling to gain power through out the first and second century. 

In Germany, in 1002 A.D. I was kept under the guard of Henry I, of Austria. At first he had arrested my men and I, but later came to forgive me for the minor offense I had committed against him. When I look back, it would have probably been to my better advantage to have been punished by him for my minor offense.

Being too weak of heart and mind to return to gain power in Bohemia, my kinsman Vladivoj took the throne. He fell dead to alcohol poisoning soon after. Succeeding him my older brother, Jaromir, who I had emasculated to secure power, took the throne -- not for the Czechs but for the Holy roman empire.

On February 9, 1003, with the help of Boleslaw I the Brave of Poland, and I reconquered the throne of Bohemian, and my brothers fled to Germany, to hide under Henry II, from the HRE.
 
Having captured the throne again, I decided that it might be wise to kill of some more of my potential enemies. I begin by killing nobles at Vyšehrad. I had even cut my own son-in law into two, because of my fear that he might take over the kingdom. The people were not happy with this and sent messages to the Brave. The Brave came into my Kingdom, with fierceness, and before I could escape he took the throne from me, imprisoning me and ripping out my eyes.

 
From there, the Brave would capture Prague, and stay there for a little over the year, and make further invasions as I sat, Boleslaus, the Blind in prison for thirty years till my death.

1002 St. Brice's Day Massacre

Through out the years of 997 to 1001 A.D. England was constantly under attack by Vikings, and the Danish raiders. Even before those years, when King Ethelred was only 14 years old, in 980 the English were being attacked by the Danes. Pope John XV, started to dissolve the hostility between the people, arranging for a peace treaty in 991. However, in that same year, a sizable Danish fleet begin a campaign against south-east England. This beget the Battle of Maldon. The Church had lost its power over peace.

The Danish had become hostile because King Ethelred's father King Edgar and recaptured the land of Danelaw. The Danish wanted recompense, so Ethelred, came up with a payment of 10,000 pounds for peace. If the church wasn't going to gain peace the people thought maybe money could buy it, but the raids continued (Ethelred then 24). Accordingly, 22,000 pounds had been paid to Olaf and the Danish people altogether for the price of peace, by 1000 A.D. yet the attacks continued. The same fleet of Dane's that were attacking before the payment, were attacking after the payment.

Olaf, and the Danish kingdom had been suffering under famine. Olaf was trying to rebuild Trondheim and so would probably have sent his acclaimed starving fleets to gain some wealth from the king of England. Instead of begging, or coming to some other agreement, the Danish charged ahead killing people, till they received their "danegeld" the danish payment. In 1001 another Danish fleet attacked Sussex, probably under the guidance of King Olaf or the Danish King of England Forkbeard. Weakened again, and not willing to give up his land, Ethelred entered a truce with them, paying 24,000 pounds.

Finally England had enough of putting up with the Danish people, and gave up his attempt to create peace between them. Ethelred sent men into England on St. Brice's day ordering the death of all Danish men. This however was just a small hint at the constant disputes that Danish would have with the English. Swevyn Forkbeard, continued taking "danegeld," and with it revenge.

In 2010, the college of Oxford had plans to build college housing. To their horror, construction commissioned to the site, found the skeletons, what would be later shown to be 54 male skulls. Archaeologists proved through carbon dating, that these were the skulls of Danish men killed on St. Brice Day, 13th November, 1002 A.D.

1001 Robert II, Three Afflictions

I, King Robert II of France, born in 972, was appointed King in 987. The whole of France was ruthlessly looking for a secure rule, and pressured me into thinking about who would reign after me. They, especially my family, the house of Capet, from which I was the second ruling, had all feared my death, and loss of the throne of France. My father Hugh, was heavily wrought by such fears, and to make matters even more stressing had a desire to retake Spain, and wanted me of all people, to be the one to do it.

To immediately secure the throne's place under the house of Capet, my father, Hugh, went out and found me a wife. The daughter of Berengar of Ivera, whose name was Rozala, later deeming her self Susannah This was only in 995, I was merely a lad of twenty-three years old, and she, was nearly fifty, married twice and and had three children. Of course, my father's concerns were not whom I was married to, but rather who would have have the thrown in place of me.

My father died only a year after my marriage to Susanna, but at least his throne was secure under my reign and I was not going to disappoint him. I was not truly in love with the former Rozala, she had little to offer me. I repudiated her, and sent her to live in Flanders. She lived there till 1003, the year of her death. Till then, she was constantly trifling over the money she received from me. I had controlled her dowry, realizing her spending was a bit flippant; another reason for the divorce.

I sent myself to marry my cousin, Bertha. She was a widow, and so had been married before as Rozala had been. She had several children from her first marriage, and all were potential candidates from the thrown, but unlike my father I wasn't interested in security as I was with love. By 1,000 A.D. she had not given me any Children and at this the Pope Gregory would stand the marriage no longer, and excommunicated me from the Church. After negotiations with Gregory's successor Sylvester II, the marriage was annulled, and I was left a Bacholer once again.

My third and final marriage was to Constance of Arles, in the year 1001. With her I had seven children all born from our first years of marriage up to the year 1011. Of all these Children it was Henry the I, that would reign after my death in 1031. Constance was a wicked, and vile woman, or so my friend Beauvais was trying to convince me. He told me to divorce, and so I tried, but it wasn't till after Constance command knights to kill him, that I really realized how ill-tempered a woman she was. I went to Rome with my former wife Bertha to seek permission for divorce from Constance, and to remarry Bertha, my true love, who had never done anything to hurt me, expect not bare children. I had children, and had secured the throne of France for my father, now I wanted to return once again to the true love I had shared with my cousin.

I tried divorcing Constance, but the Church would not permit it. At the end of one trial, to come to terms with my desires for annulling the marriage, and the queens to keep it, Constance took her staff, and plucked the eye out of her confessor. He had something that hurt her emotionally, and she would not back away without out first wounding the man, exhibiting the ends of her potential rage.

There was a small dispute before my death between who would reign next, in my place. I wanted my son Henry to rule, and Constance wanted Robert to rule. Hugh Magnus, another son of mine was appointed co-king in 1017, but that was not a permit place for him, and he knew this well. My will would not give way, and I continued to want Henry to be sovereign ruler. Constance would not have this, and so told her sons to ransack the town of Burgundy, which I had become duke of. At hearing of this treachery, I listened to their arrangements and we agreed that Henry would be king, and Robert would reign duke.

I did not divorce Constance, and yet my love for Bertha did not fade away either. I died in 1031, and Constance in 1034, Constance buried next to me at Saint-Denis Basilica, a cathedral in Paris.

1000 The Ericks.

I, Lief Erickson, was born in 980, to my father, the glorious Viking explorer Erick the Red. My father had picked up this name, "the red," because of the dashing fire red color of his hair. This color, was not only reflected in his the color of his hair, but the color of his passion.

My grandparents had left their European home of Norway with an account of manslaughter. Europe had grown into a hostile environment, and many were looking for solutions. The slaves of my father, and of many farmers in Iceland had started a landslide, and were refusing to work for the wages, and food they were provided. Our neighbors had started to kill the slaves, and my father in turn killed them, returning the deed, eye for an eye.

In 982, my father was banished from Iceland for three years for numerous counts of manslaughter. A man by the name Throgest had possession of mystical ornaments that were apart of my family for centuries. When my father confronted Throgest about obtaining his rightful inheritance, Throgest sent him away. My father would not leave without his dues, no matter how much my mother Thorild cried out to him to leave them behind, and turn his love towards the safety of his family. He was obsessed!

My father had just finished building a new home, when he had decided that his family ornaments where too precious to just give up. In a craze, he snuck into Throgest's home, and held him captive there. He took his prized possessions, and retreated. Throgest was filled with envy, and was not forgiving. Taking a few men with him, Throgest lite a torch and threw it into the home where we had just settled, there in Oxney. Our closer neighbors woke up and took me and my brothers, and mother to safety, as battle ensued in front of the burning cottage during the beginning of a cold night.

My father took out his sword, with his fellows next to him and slaughtered Throgest, and other men, who had stood laughing and calling out with heated desire for what they thought belonged to them. Instead of leaving with riches they had come for, they had left with cries of wallowing death.

A general assembly of Germanic people of Oxney, called simply the "thing" gathered together and voted that my father, the Red, leave Iceland, and so he was band, in his exile for three years from Iceland.

During his exile, caused oddly by his own craze for some jeweled family beams, he founded a new territory, and in revulsion of the cold name of Ice land, named the island Greenland. He thought such a name would certainly lure settlers, and make people attracted to coming to the continent. There were many people going through a famine during this time in Ice Land. This famine was really the another cause of my father's fury. The people there had become convinced that my father had found a new hope for his Celtic brothers.

The poorest people from Iceland, and those whom heard of it in other Celtic regions, all begin to migrate to the Greenland, and built new settlements there. A dawn of richness of the land had risen for the European people.

The king of Norway, Olaf I, had put me in command of several men. With them I made a companion to undiscovered territories. Our family, the Thorvaldsson's, or the Ericks, discovery of the new world had put us back into accord with Norway. The alliance may not have existed if it weren't for good king Olaf's transition of his state to Christianity, making him obliged to forgiveness, as well as pay us handsomely for our service.

Olaf had even Baptized me in the River of Nid, where Olaf had set up his own Kingdom of Trondhiem. In the same year, in 1000 A.D. Sadly, and all too early, Olaf was killed when sailing home with 11 ships, by a band of seventy ships, pirated by the King of Sweden, and a Jarl of Lade (civilians of Lade, Norway). Olaf threw himself overboard, and was never seen again. After this the the Jarls of Lade took over Norway. This battle, the battle of Svolder, may have been caused by Olaf's conversion to Christianity, betraying Norse paganism.

I was thirty years old in 1000 A.D. when I landed on a corner of a land, I would call wineland, or vineland, because of the abundant existence of grape trees. Olaf had converted me and my family to Christianity, excluding my father who had honored Norse paganism. We spent most of our time settling there in wineland, my father had even died in Greenland and I had not heard of it till I was was very old. building farmers and Church's, establishing a lasting Christian country, we separated from the pagan Norway.

1352 The Black Prince

I was living on the other side of the country, far from my English homeland, when the first whispers of death began to drift across the continent like a foul wind. It started as rumors—scattered reports from trading vessels and wandering friars—of people from all corners of Europe suddenly breaking out in putrid black lesions that spread across their bodies like spilled ink on parchment. These weren't mere blemishes or boils that a skilled physician might lance and drain. No, these were harbingers of agony and death itself, swelling pustules that wept with corruption and marked the afflicted as doomed men walking.

The disease showed no mercy and no discrimination. It struck down peasants tilling their fields and nobles resting in their manor houses with equal ferocity. The lesions covered their bodies entirely—arms, legs, torsos, faces—transforming human beings into grotesque mockeries of their former selves. Some died within days, their bodies consumed by fever and pain. Others lingered for weeks, their suffering prolonged as the plague worked its way through their flesh. Those who survived the initial onslaught were often left disabled, their limbs withered or their minds broken by the trauma, unable to work, unable to provide for their families, unable to serve their lords.

This last consequence—the inability to work—was perhaps the most catastrophic for me personally, and for my Kingdom of England. What use is a king without subjects to rule? What power does a monarch wield when his fields lie fallow, his workshops sit silent, and his armies cannot be mustered because half his fighting men have been reduced to corpses or cripples?

At the time the plague began its inexorable march across Europe, we—my royal family of England and I, King Edward III, by the grace of God—had settled into a new home in Calais, France. It was a hard-won prize, that city, claimed not through negotiation or marriage alliance, but through force of arms and iron will. With a formidable band of fifteen thousand troops at my command, battle-hardened men who had proven their worth in blood and fire, I had laid claim to significant territories and taken them from the hands of the King of France and his military powers. Philip VI had underestimated English resolve, and we had made him pay dearly for that miscalculation.

Our campaign had been proceeding magnificently. Each month brought new victories, new lands folded into our growing dominion on the continent. The Hundred Years' War, as men would later call it, was going decidedly in our favor. French nobles bent their knees before English might, and the dream of reclaiming our ancestral holdings in France—lands that were rightfully ours by blood and ancient law—seemed within grasp.

But then came the reports from the south and east. Upon hearing about the outbreak in late 1348, as autumn's chill began to settle over our encampments, our ambitious campaign to reclaim France had to come to an abrupt and frustrating halt. Victory was within our reach, yet we had to turn aside from glory to face an enemy that could not be fought with sword or lance. We entered into an uneasy state of peace, a truce born not of respect or exhaustion but of naked fear—fear that this disease, this pestilence, would spread further through our ranks and render our army impotent, or worse, nonexistent.

The decision to cease hostilities was not made lightly. Every day we delayed was a day the French could regroup, could fortify their positions, could seek allies and reinforcements. But what choice did we have? An army plagued by disease is no army at all, merely a collection of dying men who spread contagion wherever they march. And so we took to combating the plague instead of combating our French enemies, though I confess we had precious little knowledge of how to fight such an invisible foe.

The scenes I witnessed during those dark months will haunt me until my dying day. The miserable souls who still drew breath, those who had been perverted and marked by what many called God's wrath, were tasked with the most grim of duties. They took those that had died—sometimes friends, sometimes family members, sometimes strangers they had never met—and carried them on crude wooden carts to massive pits dug at the edges of towns and military camps. There was no dignity in these burials, no priests offering final blessings, no family members weeping over shrouded bodies. There were simply too many dead for such niceties.

The corpses were dumped unceremoniously into these pits, bodies piling upon bodies, men and women and children all thrown together in death's democracy. And then, to prevent the spread of further contagion, they were burnt down to ashes—though in truth, many had almost already become ashes under the blackening plague, their flesh so corrupted and dessicated that they seemed more like charred wood than human remains. The smoke from these funeral pyres hung over our lands for months, a constant reminder of mortality and divine judgment. The stench was indescribable—a mixture of burning flesh, corruption, and despair that seeped into our clothing, our hair, our very souls.

I issued orders for quarantine, for the isolation of the sick, for prayer and penance. Physicians were consulted, though they proved largely useless with their theories of bad air and imbalanced humors. Some recommended carrying sweet-smelling herbs, others suggested bloodletting, still others advised the wearing of strange masks stuffed with flowers and spices. Nothing worked. The plague took whom it pleased, when it pleased, and no amount of medical knowledge or royal decree could stop it.

After what seemed like an eternity of suffering—though the chroniclers would measure it in mere years—the plague had finally wiped out more than fifty percent of Europe's population. Entire villages stood empty, fields returned to wilderness, and the very structure of society teetered on the brink of collapse. The survivors emerged from their homes like ghosts, scarred both physically and spiritually by what they had endured. The world had fundamentally changed, and we all knew that nothing would ever be quite the same again.

With the worst of the plague seemingly behind us, it was time to return to the business of conquering France and securing England's rightful dominion over the continent. However, our campaign was not brought back to life with the same vigor and ambition that had characterized it before the plague's devastating intervention. Too many good men had died, too many resources had been expended on fighting disease rather than French armies, and too much momentum had been lost during the long months of truce and quarantine.

The war limped forward in fits and starts. We won some minor victories, suffered some equally minor defeats, but the grand sweeping conquests of earlier years eluded us. The French had used the breathing space we'd given them wisely, consolidating their position and rebuilding their strength. It seemed that perhaps the plague had saved France from English domination, a cruel jest of fate that must have amused the French court to no end.

It wasn't until my son—my beloved son Edward, the Prince of Wales, a young man of remarkable courage and tactical brilliance—won a magnificent and decisive battle in 1356 at Poitiers that we had begun once again to take substantial ground in the Hundred Years' War. The Battle of Poitiers was a masterpiece of military strategy, and Edward's leadership that day secured his place in the annals of military history. Against superior numbers, he outmaneuvered and outfought the French forces, even capturing King John II of France himself—a prize beyond measure and a humiliation for the French crown that would echo through the ages.

But my pride in Edward's victory was forever tinged with sorrow and horror, for my son had paid a terrible price for his survival.

My son, my heir, the hope of my dynasty, Edward the Prince of Wales, had been corrupted and marked by the plague back in 1352, four years before his great triumph at Poitiers. I remember the day we received the news that he had fallen ill with absolute clarity—it was as if someone had driven a dagger into my heart. For days, I waited by his bedside when duties allowed, watching as the telltale lesions began to appear on his hands, then spread slowly up his arms and to his face, particularly concentrated around his jaw.

We thought we would lose him. I made offerings at every church and chapel, promised donations and endowments, prayed until my knees were raw and my voice hoarse. And by some miracle—or perhaps merely through the randomness of the disease—Edward survived the initial onslaught. By 1352, through bitter experience and countless deaths, physicians and learned men had figured out a way to arrest the plague's progress, to stop it from infecting and corrupting the rest of the body once it had taken hold in certain areas. The treatments were agonizing—involving cauterization, amputation of affected tissue, and concoctions of herbs and chemicals that I dare not describe in detail—but they worked, after a fashion.

Sadly, tragically, we could not reverse the effects that had already taken hold. The plague had eaten away at his flesh, and no medical art could restore what had been consumed. The damage was permanent, irreversible, a mark he would carry for the rest of his days.

Yet Edward did not let this disfigurement break his spirit or dim his martial ambitions. If anything, it seemed to harden his resolve, to sharpen his focus on the battlefield. When he rode into battle at Poitiers and subsequently conquered French territories with brilliant tactical precision, he did so not as the handsome prince he had once been, but as something else entirely—something that inspired fear and awe in equal measure.

His hands, once elegant and strong, had been eaten away by the black death, leaving twisted remnants of fingers that could barely grip a sword. His jaw, partially destroyed by the lesions, gave his face a skull-like appearance that no amount of fine clothing or royal bearing could disguise. His voice, affected by the damage to his mouth and throat, had taken on a harsh, rasping quality that made every command sound like a threat.

The French soldiers who faced him on the battlefield began to call him "The Black Prince"—a name that referred both to the color of the armor he took to wearing, armor as dark as night that covered his ravaged body, and to the mark of the plague that had claimed parts of him. Some say the name came from his fierce reputation and the black banner he carried. Others whisper that it was born from the terrifying sight of his plague-scarred visage emerging from the darkness of his helm.

But Edward embraced this title, this identity forged in suffering and survival. He became The Black Prince not merely in name but in essence—a living reminder of the plague's power and of the indomitable human will to endure and prevail despite even the worst that God and nature could inflict.

When I see him now, commanding troops with those ruined hands, speaking orders through that damaged jaw, I feel a complex mixture of emotions that no father should have to experience. Pride, certainly—pride in his courage, his skill, his refusal to be defined by his disabilities. Sorrow, for the beautiful child he was and the whole man he might have become had the plague never touched our shores. And fear, a cold deep fear that whispers in my heart during the quiet hours of the night, reminding me that the plague is never truly gone, that it might return at any moment to finish what it started, to take from me not just my son but my kingdom, my legacy, everything I have fought and bled to build.

The Black Prince rides still, a specter of death who deals death to England's enemies, a monument to human resilience and the cruel capriciousness of fate. And I, King Edward III, watch from my throne and wonder what price we will ultimately pay for our victories, and whether the plague's shadow will ever truly lift from this blood-soaked century.

The war continues. The dead molder in their pits. And the Black Prince, my son, my heir, my greatest triumph and deepest tragedy, rides on.