only English success was the capture of Limoges in 1370 by the Black Prince, who blackened his own reputation by ordering an indiscriminate massacre of the inhabitants. Soon afterwards he was compelled by illness to return to England, and to resign his duchy of Aquitaine, which he never revisited. In 1372 the English fleet, which was carrying an army under the Earl of Pembroke to Bordeaux, was destroyed off La Rochelle by the combined naval forces of France and Castile. A new and larger force was prepared in 1373 under John of Gaunt, but in consequence of this maritime disaster it was necessary to land the troops at Calais. Thence John of Gaunt marched right across France, but he found no enemy to beat in the field, and he could not take a single fortress. Meanwhile his troops melted away through desertion, disease, and famine. A defeated army could hardly have been in a more lamentable condition than that of which a scanty and impoverished remnant succeeded in reaching Bordeaux. The failure of this great effort on the part of England was decisive. Already several provinces had been practically lost, and by 1374, of all the vast possessions which had been gained at Bretigni, there remained only Calais in the north, and the strip of land stretching from Bordeaux to Bayonne. In 1375 the Pope succeeded in negotiating a truce for two years, and before its expiry both the Black Prince and Edward III. had died, and England, bitterly chagrined at such complete and unexpected disasters, had passed under the rule of a child.