My daughter brought this one to me. That matters. We both carry a long love of pirates and pirate history, and there is nothing like a good story about Jeanne de Belleville—Jeanne de Clisson if you meet her in the legal papers, the Lioness of Brittany if you meet her in the legend.[1] The book that set this off is the English handling of an older French telling: Ellen O’Brien’s work on Jeanne de Belleville, built on Émile Péhant’s great 1868 narrative poem from Nantes. People say 1890. The poem is 1868. The feeling is older than both.[2] I read it the way I read most history that still has blood in the floorboards, not as a museum label. As a problem the present has not solved.

The story takes place in the 1330s and 1340s, in the first storms of the Hundred Years’ War and the Breton War of Succession. A French aristocrat. A husband slaughtered by a king. A woman who sold the prosperous life she was born into, bought ships, painted them for terror, and spent about thirteen years teaching the crown of France what a widow can become when the state puts a head on a pike and calls it law.

I know what people tell me when I talk like this. They tell me it is not very Christian. They tell me forgiveness is the higher road. They tell me revenge is a poison you drink while waiting for the other man to die. I have heard all of that. I still like the way Jeanne conducted herself more. Not because killing is pretty. Because some injuries are not misunderstandings. They are messages. And a message that goes unanswered becomes the world’s new constitution.

This is the true story, as the records and the durable legend allow us to tell it. It is also my argument. When people do you a public wrong, you owe something to the world’s justice. Jeanne understood that. England understood that she was useful. History remembered her because she was too rich, too well-born, and too bloody to file under a footnote. I want her out of the footnote.

Who Was Jeanne de Belleville?

A Poitevin heiress, not a tavern myth

Jeanne was born around 1300 in Belleville-sur-Vie in Poitou, just south of the Breton border, the daughter of Maurice IV de Montaigu and Létice de Parthenay.[3] She was not born a pirate. She was born an heiress: salt, wine, islands, castles. The islands of Yeu and Noirmoutier sat in the family world like locked cabinets of money and wind. If you want to understand the later black fleet, start here. She already knew what a coast was worth.

The early life is the ordinary violence of high birth. Married about age twelve to Geoffroy de Châteaubriant. Children. Widowed in 1326. A second marriage to Guy de Penthièvre, annulled.[4][5] Then, in 1330, the marriage that detonates the rest of the century: Olivier IV de Clisson, a Breton lord with the castle at Clisson, a house in Nantes, and lands at Blain.[6]

The Clisson marriage was power with affection inside it.

Arranged marriages are supposed to be ledgers. This one seems to have been a ledger that caught fire. Even the cautious sources keep saying they loved each other. They had children. Maurice died young. Olivier V would live to become Constable of France. Guillaume would die in a boat. Their daughter, Jeanne, would carry the name forward.[7] For thirteen years they were a border empire: Brittany on one shoulder, Poitou on the other, the Loire-Atlantique of our maps still wet with their rents.

I like that she already knew how to sue. Before she ever painted a sail, she took Olivier to law over a marriage settlement he had not paid, and the case went to the king, and she won. That is not a fainting woman. That is a woman who understood that paper is a weapon until the day paper fails, and then you find another weapon.

The World That Made Her: France, England, and Brittany

The Hundred Years’ War was a lawyers’ war with arrows

In 1337 Edward III of England and Philip VI of France stopped pretending the old argument could stay in court. Edward claimed the French crown through his mother. Philip sat on it as a Valois. Gascony, Flanders, and the Channel were the real estate. Brittany was the hinge.[8]

The Breton War of Succession

Duke John III of Brittany died in 1341 without a clear heir. Charles de Blois claimed through Jeanne de Penthièvre, with Philip VI behind him. John of Montfort claimed through the male line, with Edward III behind him.[9] Every Breton lord had to pick a roof. Pick wrong, and you are a traitor. Pick right, and you are a patriot until the next campaign season. Loyalty in that world is not a hymn. It is a weather report.

Olivier de Clisson had spent years fighting English landings. That should have made him safe. It made him useful to ruin. After French setbacks, Charles de Blois—who wanted Clisson land and Clisson influence out of the way—had the king’s ear.[10][11] A king who feels illegitimate hears treason in every low ransom and every delayed sortie. Philip heard it in Olivier.

The Trap of 1343: Tournament, Prison, Scaffold

A truce, a feast, and a lie

In January 1343, the Truce of Malestroit gave men a reason to travel. Breton lords were invited toward the French court under the manners of chivalry—tournament, sport, the old fiction that armored men can play.[12] Olivier went. The invitation was the snare. They arrested him, hauled him to Paris, held him in the Châtelet, and tried him by his peers. Charles de Blois sat among the men judging a rival whose lands he coveted. That is not a court. That is a harvest.

The execution of Olivier IV de Clisson

On Saturday, 2 August 1343, Olivier, lord of Clisson, was drawn from the Châtelet to Les Halles and beheaded on a scaffold.[13] The judgment found him guilty of treason and alliance with the king of England. Olivier protested his innocence to the last. Later English correspondence suggests some Breton lords had in fact leaned toward Edward. I will not tidy that. History is allowed to be both a judicial murder and a political guess that happened to have a grain in it. The method was still a king using a tournament as a cage.

They did not stop at the neck. They treated the body like a common criminal’s. The head was sent west to Nantes and planted on a pike at the Porte Sauvetout so that Brittany could read the sermon in bone.[14] Froissart and the men of that age flinched at it. Even a century that liked spectacles thought this one had the stink of panic on it.[15]

The image she carried: a wife, two sons, a pike

The story that will not die is this. Jeanne took her boys, Olivier and Guillaume, to Nantes and made them look at their father’s head.[16] I believe the scene because it is the kind of thing a certain kind of mother does when she decides the children will not be raised on lullabies. She is not showing them a relic. She is showing them the state. She is teaching them that the crown is an enemy and that fear is the only currency left. That is a complete rejection of the feudal order she was born to serve.

She does not see herself as a widow asking for a pension. She sees a head on a wall and a lesson that has to be paid forward.

France then convicted her in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and seized the lands.[17] She ignored the summons. Of course she did. You do not answer a letter from the man who decorated a gate with your husband.

Selling a Life to Buy a War

The conversion of an estate into a fleet

Here is the part I love without apology. Jeanne sold the world that had made her safe. Lands, jewels, the pompous attire, the furniture that tells visitors you are still in the club. Later writers like to inventory the sacrifice because the sacrifice is the moral. She did not keep a townhouse in reserve. She converted a seigneurie into violence.

First she raised men—maybe a hundred, maybe four hundred—and hit French garrisons in Brittany.[18] When the land got too hot, she took the war to the only road the king could not garrison with a single castle: the sea.

Black hulls and blood-red sails

The legend says three ships, converted from merchant cogs, with hulls painted black and sails dyed red.[19] Some versions name the flagship My Revenge.[20] Historians who like clean footnotes will cough here, and they should. We do not have the shipwright’s receipt. What we have is a visual so exact that it has survived six centuries of retelling. I treat it as operational poetry, probably sitting on top of a real small squadron.

That paint job is not fashion in a world where news moved at the speed of a wet deck and a tired horse; a black ship with red canvas in the fog of the Channel is a broadcast. She wanted to be seen. She wanted the terror to arrive before the grappling hooks. Branding is not a modern invention. It is what you do when you intend to work for years and need the enemy’s imagination working the night shift for you.

Calculated grief, not a tantrum

People talk about revenge as if it were a sneeze. Jeanne’s war lasted on the order of thirteen years—one year, the storytellers like to say, for each year of the marriage.[21] That is not a burst of rage. That is a career. Rage does not provision biscuit and inspect standing rigging. Rage does not negotiate with England. Rage does not last until the king who started it is dead and then keep going.

I call it a calculated form of grief. Grief that has accepted a job. The widow becomes a sovereign of one: her own black navy, her own foreign policy, her own theory of the body. When she took French nobles, the tradition says she used an axe on them herself and put the corpses in the water. Leave a few sailors alive. Send them home. Make them talk.[22]

Psychological Warfare in the English Channel

Why leave witnesses?

Killing everyone is hygiene. Leaving two men alive is publishing. Jeanne understood the audience. The audience was Philip VI, the court, the next captain who had to decide whether a cargo was worth the fog. In slow communication, a survivor is a newspaper. The black ship did the headline. The neck did the editorial.

She was not living outside the system. She was hiring a rival system.

This is the point amateurs miss when they call her a pirate and stop. She allied with England and with the Montfort cause in Brittany. Edward III granted her income from lands in English-held Brittany in the same year France confiscated her life.[23] In 1347, the Truce of Calais lists her as an English ally.[24] That is not a woman in a cave. That is a woman changing employers.

I have said that she was a merchant of chaos and England was the primary buyer. I still like that sentence. Personal vengeance was the fuel. Geopolitics was the market. There is always a buyer for revenge against a shared enemy. A merchant will always take the payment and go to work. Jeanne was both the widow and the firm.

Crécy, 1346: When Vengeance Became Strategy

In 1346, Edward III landed the army that would win Crécy.[25] Modern tellings put Jeanne’s ships in the supply and screening work that kept French hulls from making the Channel a French lake. I cannot put her quarterdeck at a numbered buoy. The logic is clean. A hostile widow with local pilots and a grudge is exactly the asset a cross-Channel invasion wants.

So the question people love—was she a broken woman or a useful one?—is a false door. She was both. The English did not need her to be healthy. They needed her to be pointed at France. She did not need them to love her husband. She needed ports, cover, and a market for captured canvas.

Utility does not cancel the oath. It funds it.

Thirteen Years: The Inner Weather of a Long Revenge

What does a decade of this do to a mind?

I keep getting stuck on the duration. A night of murder is a story. Thirteen years of boarding actions, winter Channel weather, noble blood, and the knowledge that one lost fight ends with your own head over a different gate—that is a vocation. The chroniclers give her the heart of a lion. Of course they do. They have no other animal left.

Was she reclaiming power by performing an ultra-masculine, ultra-violent role? Or was she becoming the monster the execution had sketched on the wall? I do not treat those as opposites. Power, in her spot, looked like the thing that had destroyed her. She put it on like armor. Armor that fits long enough becomes skin.

She was not a pirate in the cheap sense.

A pirate in the cheap sense steals for the hold. Jeanne’s hold mattered. Her targeting mattered more. French shipping. French nobles. The men whose world had clapped when Olivier fell. This is why I say she was closer to a sovereign-in-exile than to a dockside thief. She had no letter of marque we can hold up to the light.[26] She had English money, English recognition, and a war that already refused to distinguish private grief from public policy.

Shipwreck, a Dead Son, and the Cost of the Oath

Luck thins. A French force, or a storm, or both, takes the flagship. Jeanne gets off with the boys in a small boat. Five days. No water worth drinking. Guillaume dies of exposure.[27] They come ashore toward Morlaix and the Montfort world of Hennebont. The legend needs that death. Without it, the woman is only terrible. With it, she is terrible and billed.

I will not pretty this up. If you dedicate a life to revenge, the invoice does not go only to the original king. It goes to the child in the boat. That is not an argument against her. It is the receipt. Justice at that voltage has collateral. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a saint’s card, not a history.

The Later Peace: Bentley, Hennebont, and a Death on Her Own Terms

Around 1356 she married again, this time Sir Walter Bentley, an English captain who had smashed a larger Franco-Breton force at Mauron.[28] Lands came back in the English manner: Beauvoir-sur-Mer, islands, fragments of the old Atlantic belt. By 1357 the barony of La Roche-Moisan is in the file. She settles at Hennebont, a castle that had already been a Montfort rock in the worst years, and dies there about 1359.[29]

That ending is rare in the pirate catalog. Most sea-kings finish on a rope, a reef, or a friend’s knife. Jeanne finishes in a castle, having outlived Philip VI, having kept enough status that the world could not pretend she had only ever been a criminal. From one angle she is an outlaw. From another, she is a noblewoman in exile who chose a different court. Perspective is not relativism here. It is the difference between the French indictment and the English household book.

The Shakespearean Afterlife of the Family

Olivier V, the Butcher, Constable of France

The boy she took to look at a head grows up in England beside John of Montfort, learns war as a native language, then does the unthinkable and goes back to the French side.[30] He becomes Constable of France in 1380, the highest military office in the kingdom that killed his father. They called him the Butcher because he would not give prisoners the courtesy his father’s executioners had not given Olivier IV. He inherited the velocity and pointed it at whoever was standing in front of him, which for a long time meant the English.

I do not call that betrayal of the mother. I call it the family trade. Alliances in that century were never hymns to a crown. They were instruments for survival and the restoration of honor. The Clissons go from betrayal to piracy to the summit of the hierarchy that tried to erase them. That is not irony for a dinner play. That is the operating system of late feudal politics. Honor is not loyalty to a logo. Honor is refusal to be deleted.

Pirate, Privateer, and the Henry Morgan Problem

My mind goes to Henry Morgan because the English later ran the same trick at industrial scale.[31] When they needed a blade in the Caribbean, they called him a privateer. When they needed to look like a government, they called him a pirate, then knighted him anyway. There is no clean moral difference in the work. Only who stamps the paper matters.

Jeanne stands at the beginning of that European habit. France called her traitor. England called her ally. The Channel called her weather. I understand her motives. I understand the English motives. I understand why a later respectability tries to sand her down into a “controversial noblewoman.” The sanding is the tell. If she had only been a nuisance, she would be gone. She survived in ink because she was too wealthy and too well-placed to ignore even when she was covered in other men’s blood.

Legend, Record, and What We Can Actually Swear To

The romantic surface—crimson sails, the personal axe, the flagship’s name—comes to us thickened by the nineteenth century, especially Péhant’s poem, and by every retelling that needed a heroine who looks like a painting.[32] Descendants and careful modern biographers have said the embroidery is real.[33][34]

What sits on the table without the embroidery is already enough:

•  A papal paper trail on the annulled second marriage.

•  A French judgment of 1343 branding her a traitor and stripping her of her lands.[35]

•  English grants of income from Breton lands the same year.[36]

•  Her name among English allies in the Truce of Calais, 1347.[37]

•  The execution record of Olivier IV at Les Halles, 2 August 1343.[38]

•  Later settlement with Walter Bentley and death at Hennebont around 1359.[39][40]

That file is a woman who broke with France, was paid by England, fought in the orbit of the Channel war, and did not crawl back. The black fleet may be a costume. The war is not.

Chivalry, Christianity, and the Argument I Will Not Drop

The age of knights was already an age of heads on gates.

People hear me talk in biblical language, then hear me praise Jeanne, and think I have lost the plot. The 1330s and 1340s are the high room of official chivalry. Edward is founding the Garter. French knighthood still talks like a sacrament. And in the middle of that talk, a king lures a vassal to a tournament and cuts off his head to keep the rest of the room quiet.[41] If that is Christendom, then Christendom had already hired a butcher and called him justice.

Revenge as a moral order

I will say it in the first person so nobody has to guess. I think revenge, when it becomes the arm of justice, is good and healthy. Not petty score-settling. Not a bar fight remembered for twenty years. The answer to a public, state-grade crime that the courts will not touch because the courts are the crime. Jeanne did not have a higher court. The higher court was the man who ordered the pike. So she built a court that floated.

A lot of people will disagree. They should say so with their full chest. I am tired of the sermon that tells the injured party to be the only adult in the room while the killer keeps the gate. Forgiveness without teeth is just a way to train the next king. Jeanne refused the training.

Is that “not very Christian”? It is not very polite. The older books are less polite than the modern pulpit. They are full of widows, oaths, blood avengers, and cities that fall because nobody wanted to be rude. I am not writing a homily. I am writing about a woman who treated injustice as a thing that must be made expensive.

A good wife, in a sense the age still understood

I love Jeanne. I love that she sold everything she had to get revenge for a husband whose head was used as political signage. That is a good wife in the only sense that still has voltage. Not good because she was mild. Good because she did not let the story end where the king placed the period.

Whether the person who does that work is a woman or a man is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that when justice is needed, someone has to enforce it. Jeanne enforced it for thirteen years with a paint scheme designed to make French crews pray before they died.

Why Has No One Made the Movie?

I keep asking this, and the answer is always costume-deep. The story has everything cinema says it wants. A high-born woman. A decapitation. Children at a gate. A fleet like a nightmare. A Channel war. A son who grows up to run the army of the enemy. A last marriage and a castle death. It is more exciting than most of the fiction that gets financed, and it has the unfair advantage of having happened in outline.

That may be why it stays a footnote. A widow who is right to be terrible is hard to merchandise. You cannot make her a girlboss mascot without lying. You cannot make her a simple villain without taking Philip VI’s word for it. You have to let a woman be the arm of justice and let the audience sit in the smell. Most rooms do not want the smell. I do. My daughter does. That is why we are here.

What Jeanne de Belleville Still Teaches

If you take only the romance, you get a pirate queen for a poster. If you take only the historians’ caution, you get a confiscation order and a truce list. Take both, and you get the thing I actually care about.

A political execution is not an argument. It is a display. Displays are meant to end conversation. Jeanne reopened the conversation with iron. She turned her husband’s death into a decade of consequences for the men who ordered it and the sailors who worked their trade. She proved that a widow could be the most dangerous person in the English Channel. She also proved that blood vengeance, during war, can be a career path if you are solvent enough and well-placed enough that the other crown will buy your grief.

The family was not erased. That was the real stake. Not the private satisfaction of watching Philip flinch. The refusal to let one king’s panic delete a house. Olivier V ends up Constable. The name climbs back through the same state that tried to cut it off. Cycle, restoration, mutation. Call it Shakespearean if you want a literary bow. Call it the reason she did it if you want the prose version.

I want more Jeannes in the moral imagination—not more corpses in the water for sport, but more people who will not accept the official narrative of their own injury. When bad people do bad things to you, I do not advise you to buy three cogs and dye the canvas. I do say this. Do not help them finish the story. Do not call it holiness when you swallow a pike. Jeanne looked at the pike and built a navy. That is why her name is still here.

Closing: Black Ships, Red Sails, and a Better Day

Remember the picture, because pictures outlive arguments. A noblewoman of France sells the furniture. She paints the hulls black so that you will see her in bad light. She dyes the sails the color of the thing done to her husband. She cuts; she leaves witnesses; she feeds an English war because the English will pay for French fear. She loses a son to the same water. She marries a soldier. She dies in a castle. The boy who saw the head becomes France’s sword.

That is the story my daughter brought me. That is the story Péhant sang in 1868, and O’Brien put back into English for readers who still have a stomach. I like it because it is not safe. I like it because it treats revenge as a serious adult project rather than a guilty snack. I like it because Jeanne de Belleville looked at the highest power in her world and did not kneel.

Revenge is part of the morality of the human race. Not the whole of it. Enough of it that when justice will not come down the official stairs, someone still has to walk into the Channel. Jeanne did. I understand her. I wanted this written so the search engines and the living both have to trip over her name.

Footnotes

[1] Jeanne de Clisson (c. 1300–1359) is also recorded as Jeanne de Belleville, Jeanne Louise de Belleville, and, in later tradition, the Lioness of Brittany, the Bloody Lioness, and the Breton Tigress. See the English Wikipedia entry compiled from French legal and English diplomatic notices: Jeanne de Clisson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_de_Clisson.

[2] Ellen O’Brien, Jeanne de Belleville: The Life of Jeanne de Clisson, an English Translation and Critical Introduction (translation of Émile Péhant’s 1868 narrative poem Jeanne de Belleville). Péhant’s original appeared in Nantes in 1868 with V. Forest & E. Grimaud; the English edition is the book my daughter put in my hands.

[3] Maurice IV de Montaigu, seigneur de Belleville-sur-Vie en Poitou, et Létice de Parthenay. Jeanne inherited Belleville, Palluau, and Montaigu and, through the family, an interest in the salt and wine islands of Yeu and Noirmoutier.

[4] Her first marriage, c. 1312–1314, was to Geoffroy VIII de Châteaubriant. Two children are commonly listed: Geoffroy IX and Louise. She was widowed in 1326.

[5] A brief second union with Guy de Penthièvre was annulled, almost certainly for political reasons, with papal involvement. The legal paper trail of that annulment is one of the firmer documents attached to her name.

[6] The marriage to Olivier IV de Clisson is dated 1330. Combined, the couple controlled a seigneurial bloc on the Brittany–Poitou frontier: Clisson, Blain, lands around Nantes, and Jeanne’s Poitevin inheritance.

[7] Children generally listed from the Clisson marriage: Maurice (d. infancy), Olivier V (1336–1407), Guillaume (c. 1338–1345), and Jeanne. Some genealogies include an older daughter, Isabeau.

[8] Philip VI of Valois (r. 1328–1350) came to the throne after the Capetian line failed in the male line. Edward III of England claimed the French crown through Isabella. That dynastic quarrel is the legal skin over a much older contest for the Channel, Gascony, and Flanders.

[9] The Breton War of Succession (1341–1365) followed the death of Duke John III. Charles de Blois, backed by Philip VI of France, claimed through Jeanne de Penthièvre. John of Montfort, backed by Edward III of England, claimed through the male line. The war sat inside the larger Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).

[10] Olivier IV had fought the English in Brittany. Suspicion fell on him after English successes, including the fighting around Vannes. Charles de Blois is widely named as the courtier who poisoned the king’s mind against him.

[11] Charles de Blois (c. 1319–1364), nephew of Philip VI by marriage into the Penthièvre claim, later canonized in popular devotion and killed at Auray in 1364. Jeanne’s oath names him beside the king.

[12] The Truce of Malestroit was agreed in January 1343. Under cover of that truce, Breton lords were drawn toward Paris. Arrest under a tournament invitation is the version preserved in later narrative and in the Order of Medieval Women summary of the case.

[13] Official execution record, 2 August 1343, Les Halles, Paris: Olivier, lord of Clisson, prisoner in the Châtelet, condemned for treason and for alliances with the king of England. Head struck off on a scaffold; body treated as a traitor’s—text reproduced in modern summaries of the judgment.

[14] The head was sent to Nantes and displayed on a pike at the Porte Sauvetout (also associated in popular accounts with the castle of Bouffay). Public exhibition of a noble head in his own country was meant as a sermon.

[15] Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Froissart and his contemporaries judged Olivier IV’s execution harshly. Froissart is a court reporter with a poet’s appetite, not a modern footnote machine, but he is the age’s weather system.

[16] The story that she took her young sons, Olivier and Guillaume, to look at their father’s head is standard in the later tradition (Péhant, popular biographies, Order of Medieval Women). It cannot be footnoted to a signed diary. It is the scene the culture refused to forget.

[17] French judgment of 1343 convicted Jeanne in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and confiscated the Clisson lands. That paper is one of the hardest proofs that she did not submit.

[18] Estimates of her land force run from about 100 men (Laure Buisson’s caution) to the 400 of the more theatrical retellings. She first struck French garrisons in Brittany, including places tied to the Clisson name such as Château-Thébaud.

[19] The Black Fleet of three converted cogs, hulls painted black and sails dyed red or crimson, is the image that made her immortal. Wikipedia and most modern popular accounts mark this as “said to have” rather than as a surviving naval inventory. The image is too consistent across the legend to ignore and too late in the sources to swear by as a carpenter’s fact.

[20] Many retellings name the flagship My Revenge. That name is legend-grade, not charter-grade.

[21] Philip VI died in 1350. Tradition says she kept hunting French shipping after his death. Revenge, once it becomes a craft, does not punch out when the original face disappears.

[22] The tactic of leaving two or three sailors alive to carry the story is the legend’s psychological heart. It is also good operational art: terror travels faster than a dispatch rider when the Channel is the road.

[23] English court records from 1343 show Edward III granting Jeanne income from lands in English-controlled Brittany. That same year, France calls her a traitor; England puts her on the payroll.

[24] Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347: Jeanne named as an English ally. This is the diplomatic receipt that the “pirate queen” was also a piece on the board.

[25] Battle of Crécy, 26 August 1346. Edward III’s longbow army broke the French chivalry in Ponthieu. Control of the Channel approaches was not a side issue. It was the road the army used.

[26] On the difference between pirate and privateer: a letter of marque is a hunting license issued by a crown. No surviving royal patent for Jeanne has been produced. English pay, English land income, and a truce listing are the next best thing to a license.

[27] The sinking of her flagship, five days adrift, and the death of Guillaume by exposure appear across the later biographies. Rescue toward Morlaix and then Hennebont is the usual sequel.

[28] Sir Walter Bentley, English captain and lieutenant of Edward III, victor at Mauron (1352) with an Anglo-Breton force. Marriage to Jeanne is usually placed in the mid-1350s. By January 1357 they were granted the barony of La Roche-Moisan.

[29] Jeanne settled at the castle of Hennebont, a Montfortist port on the Blavet, and died there about 1359. The cause of death is not recorded. She outlived Philip VI by nine years.

[30] Olivier V de Clisson (1336–1407), raised in part at the court of Edward III beside John IV de Montfort, later defected to the French crown, became Constable of France in 1380 after Bertrand du Guesclin, and earned the nickname “the Butcher” for refusing quarter. See John Bell Henneman, Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

[31] Henry Morgan (c. 1635–1688) is the later English and Welsh comparison: privateer when London needed Port Royal, pirate when London needed respectability. The legal name changes. The work does not.

[32] Émile Péhant, Jeanne de Belleville (Nantes: V. Forest & E. Grimaud, 1868). Péhant was conservateur of the public library at Nantes. The poem is a nineteenth-century chanson de geste built on a fourteenth-century core.

[33] Laure Buisson, Pour ce qu’il me plaît (Paris: Grasset, 2017). Buisson argues Jeanne is the first French woman pirate for whom traces and proofs exist, while warning that the axe-and-crimson-sail romance has been richly embroidered.

[34] Astrid de Belleville, descendant and medieval historian, has said the pirate story was embellished centuries after the fact. I take the warning. I do not take it as a command to flatten the woman into a widow with a lawyer.

[35] French judgment of 1343 convicted Jeanne in absentia of lèse-majesté, banished her, and confiscated the Clisson lands. That paper is one of the hardest proofs that she did not submit.

[36] English court records from 1343 show Edward III granting Jeanne income from lands in English-controlled Brittany. That same year, France calls her a traitor; England puts her on the payroll.

[37] Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347: Jeanne named as an English ally. This is the diplomatic receipt that the “pirate queen” was also a piece on the board.

[38] Official execution record, 2 August 1343, Les Halles, Paris: Olivier, lord of Clisson, prisoner in the Châtelet, condemned for treason and for alliances with the king of England. Head struck off on a scaffold; body treated as a traitor’s—text reproduced in modern summaries of the judgment.

[39] Sir Walter Bentley, English captain and lieutenant of Edward III, victor at Mauron (1352) with an Anglo-Breton force. Marriage to Jeanne is usually placed in the mid-1350s. By January 1357 they were granted the barony of La Roche-Moisan.

[40] Jeanne settled at the castle of Hennebont, a Montfortist port on the Blavet, and died there about 1359. The cause of death is not recorded. She outlived Philip VI by nine years.

[41] Chivalry in the 1330s and 1340s was already a costume draped over fiscal war. The Order of the Garter was founded in the 1340s. Olivier’s head is on a pike in the same decade. That is the age.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary and near-contemporary sources

Anselme de Sainte-Marie and M. Potier de Courcy. Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la Maison royale de France. Tome IX. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1879.

Chronique des quatre premiers Valois (1327–1393). Edited by Siméon Luce. Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 1862.

Chronographia Regum Francorum. Fifteenth-century compilation; modern references discuss its notices of the Clisson affair.

Froissart, Jean. Chroniques. Multiple manuscripts and editions; see especially the passages on the Breton war and the executions of 1343. English readers can begin with the older translations of Thomas Johnes and the modern selections in the Penguin and Yale series.

Grandes Chroniques de France, volume covering John II through Charles V.

Guillaume de Nangis, and continuators. Chronique latine, 1317–1368.

Jean le Bel. Chronique. Modern English translation: The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel, 1290–1360, translated by Nigel Bryant. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011.

Official judgment and execution notice of Olivier IV de Clisson, 2 August 1343, Paris, Les Halles, as reproduced in later legal and narrative compilations.

Truce of Calais, 28 September 1347. Diplomatic instrument listing Jeanne among English allies.

English exchequer and household notices, 1343 and after, recording grants of income to Jeanne from lands in English-influenced Brittany.

The book that started this essay

O’Brien, Ellen. Jeanne de Belleville: The Life of Jeanne de Clisson, an English Translation and Critical Introduction. English presentation of Émile Péhant’s 1868 poem, with historical and literary apparatus.

Péhant, Émile. Jeanne de Belleville. Nantes: V. Forest & E. Grimaud, 1868. Also issued in the cycle Olivier de Clisson ou la Bretagne au XIVe siècle.

Modern biographies and studies

Buisson, Laure. Pour ce qui me plaît. Paris: Grasset, 2017.

Henneman, John Bell. Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Jones, Michael. Ducal Brittany, 1364–1399. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Jones, Michael. The Creation of Brittany: A Late Medieval State. London: Hambledon, 1988.

Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War. Vol. 1, Trial by Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Vol. 2, Trial by Fire. 1999.

Allmand, Christopher. The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Fowler, Kenneth. The Age of Plantagenet and Valois. New York: Putnam, 1967.

Prestwich, Michael. The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.

Cuttler, S. H. The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Déprez, Eugène. Les préliminaires de la Guerre de Cent Ans. Paris: Fontemoing, 1902.

Brittany, succession, and the Montfort war

Le Patourel, John. Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet. London: Hambledon, 1984.

Morvan, Frédéric. La chevalerie bretonne et la formation de l’armée ducale, 1260–1341. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009.

Knowlson, George A. Jean V, duc de Bretagne, et l’Angleterre, 1399–1442. Cambridge: Heffer, 1964.

Piracy, privateering, and the Channel

Rodger, N. A. M. The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649. London: HarperCollins, 1997.

Rose, Susan. Medieval Naval Warfare, 1000–1500. London: Routledge, 2002.

Friel, Ian. The Good Ship: Ships, Shipbuilding and Technology in England, 1200–1520. London: British Museum Press, 1995.

Heebøll-Holm, Thomas K. Ports, Piracy and Maritime War: Piracy in the English Channel and the Atlantic, c. 1280–c. 1330. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Cawthorne, Nigel. A History of Pirates. London: Arcturus, 2003.

Earle, Peter. The Pirate Wars. London: Methuen, 2003.

Pope, Dudley. Harry Morgan’s Way. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.

Women, lordship, and violence

Erler, Mary C., and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds. Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Johns, Susan M. Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

McLaughlin, Megan. “The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare and Society in Medieval Europe.” Women’s Studies 17 (1990): 193–209.

Solterer, Helen. “Figures of Female Militancy in Medieval France.” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 522–549.

Wheeler, Bonnie, and Charles T. Wood, eds. Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc. New York: Garland, 1996.

Accessible essays and public history

“Jeanne de Belleville.” Order of Medieval Women. https://www.medievalwomen.org/jeanne-de-belleville.html.

Daly, Tom. “The Incredible Story of a 14th Century French Female Pirate: The Lioness of Brittany, Jeanne de Clisson.” History Is Now Magazine, 18 October 2020.

David, Samantha. “Jeanne de Belleville: The True Story of a Noblewoman Turned Pirate.” Connexion, 17 October 2024.

Williams, Terry. “Pirate Profile: Jeanne de Clisson.” Queen Anne’s Revenge Project, 20 January 2021.

“The Revenge of Pirate Jeanne de Clisson, The Lioness of Brittany.” Ancient Origins, 25 March 2020.

Ouest-France. “Pour venger son mari décapité, Jeanne de Belleville est devenue la première pirate de l’histoire.” 30 August 2025.

France Culture / Radio France. “Jeanne de Belleville, de dame de la seigneurie à pirate sanguinaire.”

WikiTree. “Jeanne (Belleville) de Clisson (bef. 1300–abt. 1359).”

On war, honor, and the ethics readers will argue with me about

The Holy Bible. Especially the historical books and the imprecatory psalms.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, on justice and reciprocity.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, II-II, questions on vengeance, war, and justice.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality.

Kelsen, Hans. General Theory of Law and State.

Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Suggested Search Topics

Jeanne de Belleville, Jeanne de Clisson, Lioness of Brittany, Lionne de Bretagne, Lionne sanglante, Tigresse bretonne, Veuve sanglante

Olivier IV de Clisson execution 1343, Les Halles, Porte Sauvetout, Nantes, Philip VI of France, Charles de Blois

Black Fleet red sails English Channel, My Revenge flagship, Breton privateer, Hundred Years’ War piracy

Battle of Crécy 1346, Channel supply, Truce of Calais 1347, Truce of Malestroit 1343

Olivier V de Clisson, Constable of France, the Butcher, Walter Bentley, Hennebont Castle, Battle of Mauron

Émile Péhant Jeanne de Belleville 1868, Ellen O’Brien translation, Laure Buisson Pour ce qu’il me plaît

War of Breton Succession, John of Montfort, Edward III of England, female pirate medieval France

Rich Hoffman

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Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.