Edward of Woodstock, prince of Wales, the Black Prince

Edward of Woodstock (1330 - 1376), prince of Wales from 1343 (aged 12), and from 1362 prince of Aquitaine; popularly known as the Black Prince. He was the eldest son of king Edward III of England and Philippa of Hainault. He was knighted by his father on the Crécy campaign, the day after the English army landed at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue. He married Joan of Kent on 10 October 1361. They had two sons, Edward, and Richard. His first son died young, in 1372. The Black Prince himself died on 8 June 1376, in Westminster. When king Edward III died the following year, he was succeded by Richard. The Black Prince was an effective, successful and popular military leader in the campaigns against France during the first part of the Hundred Years' War.

Joan of Kent

Joan, countess of Kent, princess of Wales (c. 1328 - 1385), daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, first earl of Kent, and Margaret Wake. She married Edward the Black Prince in 1361 and had her second son, the future king Richard II, with the prince, in 1367.

Gascony

Foix

France, southern; modern department of Ariège; bounded to the south by the Pyrenees, the west by Comminges, the north by the county of Toulouse and the east by Languedoc (France). Historic county established in 1050; in 1290 count Roger-Bernard III acquired Béarn by marriage, linking the two territories.

Beauvaisis

Bigorre

France, south-west; occupied most of the modern Hautes-Pyrénées; capital: Tarbes; other towns: Lourdes, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Tournay, Lannemezan; confiscated by Philip IV of France in 1292; ceded to the English crown in 1360 under the treaty of Brétigny; recaptured by the French with the aid of the count of Foix after 1370.

France

The kingdom of France, populated up until the Black Death of 1348-9 by 12-16 millions souls and including up to the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) the Ile-de-France together with the apanages of Normandy, Anjou, Bourbon, Champagne, Valois, Auvergne and Languedoc, plus a number of important fiefs such as the counties of Blois, Nevers and Foix, and (from 1349) Montpellier and the Dauphiné; diminished from 1354 by the growing activity and influence in the Cotentin and other parts of Normandy of the king of Navarre, Charles of Evreux, and by English conquests resulting in an enlarged duchy of Guyenne (essentially Gascony; will become the principality of Aquitaine) stretching from the borders of the great and at times pro-English duchy of Brittany to the Pyrenees (save for the neutral county of Béarn) and eastwards to embrace the Poitou, Limousin and Rouergue (on the border with the Languedoc); Ponthieu and Guines are also in English hands. The French re-conquest under Charles V and Du Guesclin progressively drives the English from the realm, leaving them (by 1370-80) the ports of Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bordeaux and Bayonne, and a much-reduced Aquitaine. Brittany returns to French allegiance from 1365 onwards (Treaty of Guérande).

Toulousain

Bigorre

France, south-west; occupied most of the modern Hautes-Pyrénées; capital: Tarbes; other towns: Lourdes, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Tournay, Lannemezan; confiscated by Philip IV of France in 1292; ceded to the English crown in 1360 under the treaty of Brétigny; recaptured by the French with the aid of the count of Foix after 1370.

Stronghold of Lourdes