A Distant Mirror (24 page)

In 1350 pilgrims thronged the roads to Rome, camping around fires at night. Five thousand people were said to enter or leave the city every day, enriching the householders, who gave them lodging despite shortages of food and forage and the dismal state of the city’s resources. Without its pontiff the Eternal City was destitute, the three chief basilicas in ruins, San Paolo toppled by the earthquake, the Lateran half-collapsed. Rubble and ruin filled the streets, the seven hills were silent and deserted, goats nibbled in the weed-grown cloisters of deserted convents. The sight of roofless churches exposed to wind and rain, lamented Petrarch, “would excite pity in a heart of stone.” Nevertheless, famous saints’ relics raked in lavish offerings, and Cardinal Anibaldo Ceccano, Legate for the Jubilee, administered an immense program of absolutions and indulgences to the crowds craving remission
of sin. During Lent, according to Villani, who took a special interest in figures, as many as a million were in Rome at one time. The inpouring suggests either extraordinary recklessness and vigor so soon after the plague or a great need for salvation—or possibly that conditions did not seem as bad to participants as they seem in report.

The Church emerged from the plague richer if not more unpopular. When sudden death threatened everyone with the prospect of being carried off in a state of sin, the result was a flood of bequests to religious institutions. St. Germain l’Auxerrois in Paris received 49 legacies in nine months, compared to 78 in the previous eight years. As early as October 1348 the Council of Siena suspended its annual appropriations for religious charities for two years because these were so “immensely enriched and indeed fattened” by bequests. In Florence the Company of Or San Michele received 350,000 florins intended as alms for the poor, although in this case the directors of the company were accused of using the money for their own purposes on the grounds that the very poor and needy were dead.

While the Church garnered money, personal attacks on the clergy increased, stimulated partly by the flagellants, and partly by the failure of priests during the plague to live up to their responsibilities. That they died like other men was doubtless forgiven, but that they let Christians die without the sacraments or charged more for their services in the crisis, as many did, was violently resented. Even during the Jubilee the Roman populace, moved by some mysterious tremor of local hostility, jeered and harassed the Cardinal-Legate. On one occasion, as he was riding in a procession, he was shot at by a sniper and returned pale and trembling with an arrow through his red hat. Venturing out thereafter only with a helmet under his hat and a coat of mail under his gown, he departed for Naples as soon as he could, and died on the way—poisoned, it was said, by wine.

In England, where anti-clericalism was endemic, citizens of Worcester in 1349 broke down the gates of the Priory of St. Mary attached to the cathedral, attacked the monks, “chased the Prior with bows and arrows and other offensive weapons,” and tried to set fire to the buildings. At Yeovil in the same year, when the Bishop of Bath and Wells held a thanksgiving service to mark the passing of the plague, it was interrupted by “certain sons of perdition” who kept the Bishop and congregation besieged in the church all night until rescue came.

Enriched by legacies, the friars’ orders too reaped animus on top of that already felt for them. When Knighton reported the total demise of 150 Franciscans at Marseille, he added:
“bene quidem”
(a good thing), and of the seven friars who survived out of 160 at Maguelonne,
he wrote: “and that was enough.” The mendicant orders could not be forgiven for embracing Mammon and “seeking after earthly and carnal things.”

The plague accelerated discontent with the Church at the very moment when people felt a greater need of spiritual reassurance. There had to be some meaning in the terrorizing experience God had inflicted. If the purpose had been to shake man from his sinful ways, it had failed. Human conduct was found to be “
wickeder than before,” more avaricious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the Church itself. Clement VI, though hardly a spiritual man, was sufficiently shaken by the plague to burst out against his prelates in a tirade of anger and shame when they petitioned him in 1351 to abolish the mendicant orders. And if he did, the Pope replied, “What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity—but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts.” In this sad view of his fellow clerics the head of the Church died a year later.

“When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves,” said Lothar of Saxony, “heresy grows in the garden of the Church.” While the majority of people doubtless plodded on as before, dissatisfaction with the Church gave impetus to heresy and dissent, to all those seeking God through the mystical sects, to all the movements for reform which were ultimately to break apart the empire of Catholic unity.

Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

Meantime it left apprehension, tension, and gloom. It accelerated
the commutation of labor services on the land and in so doing unfastened old ties. It deepened antagonism between rich and poor and raised the level of human hostility. An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914–18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. In creating a climate for pessimism, the Black Death was the equivalent of the First World War, although it took fifty years for the psychological effects to develop. These were the fifty-odd years of the youth and adult life of Enguerrand de Coucy.

A strange personification of Death emerged from the plague years on the painted walls of the Camposanto in Pisa. The figure is not the conventional skeleton, but a black-cloaked old woman with streaming hair and wild eyes, carrying a broad-bladed murderous scythe. Her feet end in claws instead of toes. Depicting the Triumph of Death, the fresco was painted in or about 1350 by Francesco Traini as part of a series that included scenes of the Last Judgment and the Tortures of Hell. The same subject, painted at the same time by Traini’s master, Andrea Orcagna, in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, has since been lost except for a fragment. Together the frescoes marked the start of a pervasive presence of Death in art, not yet the cult it was to become by the end of the century, but its beginning.

Usually Death was personified as a skeleton with hourglass and scythe, in a white shroud or bare-boned, grinning at the irony of man’s fate reflected in his image: that all men, from beggar to emperor, from harlot to queen, from ragged clerk to Pope, must come to this. No matter what their poverty or power in life, all is vanity, equalized by death. The temporal is nothing; what matters is the after-life of the soul.

In Traini’s fresco, Death swoops through the air toward a group of carefree, young, and beautiful noblemen and ladies who, like models for Boccaccio’s storytellers, converse and flirt and entertain each other with books and music in a fragrant grove of orange trees. A scroll warns that “no shield of wisdom or riches, nobility or prowess” can protect them from the blows of the Approaching One. “They have taken more pleasure in the world than in things of God.” In a heap of corpses nearby lie crowned rulers, a Pope in tiara, a knight, tumbled together with the bodies of the poor, while angels and devils in the sky contend for the miniature naked figures that represent their souls. A wretched group of lepers, cripples, and beggars (duplicated in the surviving fragment of Orcagna), one with nose eaten away, others legless or blind or holding out a cloth-covered stump instead of a hand,
implore Death for deliverance. Above on a mountain, hermits leading a religious contemplative life await death peaceably.

Below in a scene of extraordinary verve a hunting party of princes and elegant ladies on horseback comes with sudden horror upon three open coffins containing corpses in different stages of decomposition, one still clothed, one half-rotted, one a skeleton. Vipers crawl over their bones. The scene illustrates “The Three Living and Three Dead,” a 13th century legend which tells of a meeting between three young nobles and three decomposing corpses who tell them, “What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.” In Traini’s fresco, a horse catching the stench of death stiffens in fright with outstretched neck and flaring nostrils; his rider clutches a handkerchief to his nose. The hunting dogs recoil, growling in repulsion. In their silks and curls and fashionable hats, the party of vital handsome men and women stare appalled at what they will become.

Chapter 6

H
ardly emerged from the plague, France moved toward a military debacle that was to release a flood of disruptive consequences and become a determining event in the life of Enguerrand de Coucy. The external agent was England, but the cause lay in the unsubdued autonomies of the seigneurial class, acted on by a King with a genius for misgovernment.

Jean II, who succeeded his father, Philip VI, in August 1350, could have served Machiavelli as model for Anti-Prince. Impolitic and impetuous, he never made a wise choice between alternatives and seemed incapable of considering consequences of an action in advance. Though brave in battle, he was anything but a great captain. Without evil intent, he was to foster disaffection to the point of revolt and lose half his kingdom and his person to the enemy, thereby leaving his country leaderless to meet its darkest hour of the age. His subjects with surprising forbearance named him Jean le Bon (John the Good), using the surname, it has been supposed, in the sense of “prodigal” or “careless” or being a good fellow. Or it may have referred to Jean’s devotion to chivalric honor or to his alleged generosity to the poor, as illustrated by his once giving a purse to a servingmaid whose milk pails were knocked over by his greyhounds.

He came to the throne bent on taking the field to erase his father’s defeats of the past decade, and on the first day of his reign notified all the principal lords of the realm to hold themselves ready to appear at his summons when “the time should come.” The truce arranged after the fall of Calais and renewed during the Black Death was due to expire in April 1351. Inheriting an empty treasury, Jean had no money with which to pay an army, and could not move without first replenishing his funds and adapting his military resources. The need to learn something from the failures of Crécy and Calais was not lost on him, and he was groping with certain ideas for military reform.

His first act, however, within three months of becoming King, was to execute the Constable of France, Comte d’Eu, and sixteenth Comte de Guîns, a second cousin of Enguerrand VII, a man of powerful connections and “so courteous and amiable in every way that he was beloved and admired by great lords, knights, ladies and damsels.” Captured by the English at Caen in 1345, D’Eu had been unable to raise the ransom fixed by King Edward. When it came to important captives, Edward never let himself be limited by the principle of chivalry that a knight’s ransom should not be placed at a figure that would ruin him or exceed his revenue for one year. After four years of captivity, Comte d’Eu regained his liberty, supposedly in exchange for ceding to Edward his strategic castle and county of Guînes, adjoining Calais. On this suspicion, Jean had him beheaded upon his return to France without trial or public procedure of any kind. The King listened in silence to the pleas of D’Eu’s friends for his life, offering no reply except to swear that “he would never sleep so long as the Comte de Guînes lived”; or according to another version replying in tears, “You shall have his body and we his head.”

Jean could have chosen no better way to alienate the nobility whose support he needed than to execute a noble of D’Eu’s rank and many friends without public explanation or trial by his peers. If D’Eu had indeed acted treasonably (the truth remains obscure), the King had every need to make plain the reasons for his act, but Jean was either too willful or too wooden-headed to understand the advisability of good public relations.

His next act made matters worse. He gave the office of Constable to his relative and favorite, Charles d’Espagne, who was said to be the object of the King’s “dishonest affection,” and to have persuaded Jean to murder Comte d’Eu so that he himself might have his office. Besides the prestige of military command second to the King, the Constableship had lucrative perquisites attached to the business of assembling the armed forces. Bestowal of the post on Charles d’Espagne, who was unpopular in the usual way of kings’ favorites, added fury to the nobles’ dismay at a time when the King had reason enough to fear their separatist tendencies. The episode was a divisive opening of the reign at a time when it most needed unity.

Jean’s father, too, had been
“ung bien hastif homs”
(a very hasty man), and intermarriage for centuries with first cousins had left the Valois unstable. Jean retained Philip’s uneasiness about the legitimacy of his claim to the crown and Philip’s readiness, not without cause, to suspect treachery. In his capacity for sudden vindictiveness, he took after his mother, the lame Queen, who, despite her piety and good
works, was called “
a very cruel lady, for whomever she held in hate, he was dead without mercy.” She was credited with having prodded her husband to the act that so appalled his time—the execution in 1343 of fifteen Breton lords who were his prisoners.