El último duelo

In 1386, a few days after Christmas, a crowd, including the King of France himself, gathered at a Paris monastery to witness a trial by combat whose contenders, the Chevalier Jean de Carrouges and the Squire Jacques Le Gris, had met. made famous across the country. Only a few months earlier, on his return from a campaign in Scotland in the middle of the Hundred Years' War, Carrouges had received terrible news: his wife, the beautiful Marguerite, had been the victim of a brutal rape at the hands of the one who had been his friend, Le Gris, who denied the facts. Carrouges took his lawsuit to the Parliament of Paris, which decreed a trial by combat: the knight and the squire would fight to the death in an exciting fight that would demonstrate who was lying and who was telling the truth. But if Le Gris won, Marguerite would also be executed for having accused him. In this essay, based on primary sources and narrated with the pulse of a novel, Eric Jager, a specialist in medieval literature, brings to life a colorful and turbulent Middle Ages and three unforgettable characters who were caught in a triangle of intrigues, crimes, scandals and revenge. Without a doubt, The Last Duel is both an exciting story and an absorbing investigation into justice, honor and the situation of women in the Middle Ages.