Edward the Black Prince

Edward of Woodstock commanded the right wing at the Battle of Crécy as a teenager, a coolness that belied his age. At Poitiers a decade later, his heavily outnumbered forces captured the French King John II, a prize of incalculable political and financial value. The wealth from his French campaigns funded his court in Aquitaine, a center of chivalric extravagance. His rule there marked by severe taxation and military harshness. He died from illness in 1376, before his father King Edward III, plunging England into the turbulent reign of his young son, Richard II. His complex legacy of martial brilliance was shadowed by the grim realities of the war he waged.