A Distant Mirror (48 page)

Twelve months after the Visconti wedding, Enguerrand de Coucy was an envoy of the King at a wedding of greater political significance and no less splendor. Charles V had outmaneuvered the King of England to win for his brother Philip of Burgundy the same heiress that King Edward wanted for his son Edmund. She was Marguerite of Flanders, daughter and heir of Louis de Male, Count of Flanders, he who had once run away from union with Isabella. Edward had been negotiating for this lady of large expectations for five years, even to the point of pledging Calais and 170,000 livres to her father. But since the principals were related within the fourth degree of consanguinity, as hardly any two royal persons in Europe were not, a papal dispensation was needed. Determined to keep England and Flanders apart, Charles exploited the utility of a French Pope. Urban V refused the dispensation to Edmund and Marguerite and, after a decent interval, granted it to Philip and Marguerite, who were related in the same degree. The uniting of Burgundy and Flanders, so great a coup for France, carried the seed of a monstrous birth, for it created a state that was to contend
with the parent and in the next century give England revenge in the darkest stage of the war.

To please Marguerite’s passion for jewels, the Duke of Burgundy sent throughout Europe for diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, and bought, as the prize of the collection, a pearl necklace from Enguerrand de Coucy for 11,000 livres.

Three enormous coffers of precious objects preceded Philip’s arrival in Ghent for the wedding. Through gifts and feasts to both nobles and burghers, processions and tournaments, escorting and meeting guests at the frontiers, and liveries made especially for the occasion, the Duke made every effort to win over and impress the Flemish. Ostentation for Philip was political, part of the process of building a state by prestige. He himself was always gorgeously dressed, affecting a hat with plumes of ostrich, pheasant, and “bird of India,” and another of gold ribbons and damask imported from Italy. A man of strenuous temperament, he spent days at a time hunting, often sleeping outdoors in the forest, played energetic tennis, and was the most restless traveler of the day, moving from place to place as often as one hundred times a year. Many of his journeys were pilgrimages, with a portable reliquary and rosary carried wherever he went. He attended mass almost as assiduously as the King, meditated alone like the King in a private oratory, and did not fail to make his religious offerings conspicuous. After his marriage, he presented the Virgin’s statue in the Cathedral of Tournai with a robe and mantle of cloth of gold lined with miniver and brilliantly embroidered with his and his wife’s coats-of-arms.

Riding into Ghent resplendent in color and bells and richly draped horses, the nobility gathered for the wedding. “Especially,” reports Froissart, “the good Sire de Coucy was there, who made the finest showing at a festivity and knew better than any other how to conduct himself, and for that the King sent him.” Bit by bit the picture builds of a striking figure, one who stood out in manners and appearance among his peers.

The amount the rich could squander on occasions like these in a period of repeated disasters appears inexplicable, not so much with regard to motive as with regard to means. Where, in the midst of ruin and decline and lowered revenues from depopulated estates and towns, did all the money come from to endow the luxury? For one thing, money in coin was not vulnerable to plague like human life; it did not disappear, and if stolen by brigands it re-entered circulation. In a reduced population the amount of hard cash available was proportionately
greater. Probably too, in spite of the plague’s heavy mortality, the capacity to produce goods and services was not reduced, because so much of the population at the beginning of the century had been surplus. In proportion to the surviving rich, goods and services may have actually increased.

Ostentation and pageantry to raise the ruler’s image above his peers and excite the admiration and awe of the populace was traditionally the habit of princes. But now in the second half of the 14th century it went to extremes, as if to defy the increased uncertainty of life. Conspicuous consumption became a frenzied excess, a gilded shroud over the Black Death and lost battles, a desperate desire to show oneself fortunate in a time of advancing misfortune.

The sense of living in a time of affliction was expressing itself in art in a greater emphasis on human drama and human emotion. The Virgin becomes more anguished in sorrow for her dead son; in the Narbonne Altarpiece painted at this time, she is pictured swooning in the arms of her supporters. In another version by the Rohan Master, all humanity’s bewildered suffering is concentrated in the face of John the Apostle, who, as he supports the swooning mother at the foot of the cross, turns grief-stricken eyes to God as if to ask, “How could you let this happen?”

Boccaccio felt the shadows closing in and turned from the good-humored, life-loving
Decameron
to a sour satire on women called
Il Corbaccio (The Crow)
. Once the delight of his earlier tales, woman now appears as a greedy harpy, concerned only with clothes and lovers, ready to consort in her lechery with servant or black Ethiopian. Following
The Crow
, he chose another dispiriting theme on the fall from fortune of great figures in history who through pride and folly were reduced from happiness and splendor to misery.

“Such are the times, my friend, on which we are fallen,” agreed Petrarch in a letter to Boccaccio of 1366. The earth, he wrote, “is perhaps depopulated of true men but was never more densely populated with vice and the creatures of vice.”

Pessimism was a normal tone of the Middle Ages, because man was understood to be born doomed and requiring salvation, but it became more pervasive, and speculation about the coming of Anti-Christ more intense, in the second half of the century.
Speculatores
or scouts existed, it was believed, who watched for signs that would tell of the coming of “last things.” The end was awaited both in dread and in hope, for Anti-Christ would finally be defeated at Armageddon, ushering in the reign of Christ and a new age.

Chapter 12

A
s events moved toward the re-opening of war between France and England, Enguerrand was caught by his English marriage on the prongs of a forked allegiance. He could neither take up arms against his father-in-law, to whom he owed fealty for his English lands, nor, on the other hand, fight against his natural liege lord, the King of France.

King Charles was pressing hard on the issue of sovereignty raised by the Gascon lords. Taking pains to prepare an elaborate justification for resuming hostilities, the King asked for legal opinions from eminent jurists of the universities of Bologna, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orléans, who not surprisingly returned favorable replies. Draped in the law, Charles summoned the Black Prince to Paris to answer the complaints against him. “Fiercely beholding” the messengers, the Prince fittingly replied that he would gladly come, “but I assure you that it will be with helmet on our head and 60,000 men in our company.” Thereupon Charles promptly proclaimed him a disloyal vassal, pronounced the Treaty of Brétigny void, and declared war as of May 1369.

As this situation developed, lords who held lands of both kings “were
sore troubled in their myndes … and specially the lorde of Coucy, for it touched him gretly.” In the awkward predicament of owing allegiance to two lords at war with each other, a vassal, according to Bonet, should render his military service to the lord of his first oath and send a substitute to fight for the other—an ingenious but expensive solution. Coucy could not be compelled by King Edward to fight against his natural liege, but it was clear enough that if he fought for France, his great holdings as Earl of Bedford, and possibly Isabella’s too, would be confiscated.

His first plan was to leave in pursuit of a Hapsburg inheritance from his mother which lay across the Jura on the Swiss side of Alsace and
had been withheld from him by his cousins Albert III and Leopold III, Dukes of Austria. Although Coucy’s claim has been disputed and the circumstances are confused, he himself clearly had no doubts of his right. His seal of 1369 bears a shield quartered with the arms of Austria in the same fashion that Edward quartered his arms with those of France to represent his claim to the French crown. Faceless and barely two inches high, the tiny figure on the seal expressed by its unusual stance the same haughtiness as the Coucy motto. Unlike the typical noble’s seal of a galloping knight with upraised sword, the Coucy figure stands erect, in mail with closed visor, austere and stern, holding in its right hand a lance planted on the ground and in its left the shield. Such a standing figure, rarely used, implied regency or royal descent, and appeared in Coucy’s time on the arms of the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Bourbon. In one form or another, sometimes with a crest of plumes descending upon the shoulders, the upright immobile figure remained on Coucy’s seals throughout his lifetime.

With a small body of knights and mixed Picard-Breton-Norman men-at-arms, Coucy entered Alsace in imperial territory in September 1369. At about this time Isabella returned to England with her daughters, either to protect her revenues or because her mother was dying at Windsor, or both. The death of good Queen Philippa in August 1369 had historic effect in that it turned Froissart back to France and French patrons—of whom Coucy was to be one—and to a French point of view in the unfolding chronicle.

In Alsace, Coucy had contracted with the Count of Montbéliard, at a price of 21,000 francs, for his aid against the Hapsburg Dukes. In a manifesto to the towns of Strasbourg and Colmar, he disclaimed any hostile intention against them and stated the case of his inheritance. Thereafter, as the evidence dims, it is clear only that the project aborted. Some say that the Dukes of Austria recruited a powerful enemy of Montbéliard to immobilize his forces, others that Coucy was recalled by an urgent message from Charles V on September 30 requiring his service in the war against England. Forced to a decision, he was evidently able to make an acceptable case for his neutrality to the King, for at that point he vanishes, and for the next two years, except for a single reference, his history is blank.

The single reference places him in Prague, from where he dated a legal document of January 14, 1370, endowing an annuity of 40 marks sterling drawn from his English revenues on his senseschal, the Chanoine de Robersart. A journey to Prague would have been a natural effort to enlist the Emperor’s influence upon the Hapsburgs in behalf of his inheritance. Froissart was later to say that Coucy had “oftentimes”
complained of his rights to the Emperor, who acknowledged their justice but professed inability to “constrain them of Austria, for they were strong in his country with many good men of war.”

After a documentary hiatus of 22 months, the next piece of evidence places Coucy in Savoy, where from November 1371 he was actively engaged with his cousin the Green Count against that nobleman’s inexhaustible supply of antagonists. In 1372–73 both together fought in Italy in the service of the Pope against the Visconti.

Since the fall of the Roman Empire, power had moved out of Italy, leaving political chaos in a land of cultural wealth. Italy’s cities throve in art and commerce, her agriculture developed greater skills than elsewhere, her bankers accumulated capital and a monopoly of finance in Europe, but the incessant strife of factions and the rending struggle for control between papacy and empire, Guelf and Ghibelline, brought Italy to the age of despots out of a craving for order. City-states, once the parents of republican autonomy, succumbed to Can Grandes, Malatestas, Visconti, who ruled by no title but force. Servile to tyrants—except for Venice, which kept its independent oligarchy, and Florence its Signoria—Italy was compared by Dante to both a slave and a brothel. No people talked more about unity and nationhood, and had less, than the Italians.

Partly as a result of these conditions foreign
condottieri
found a ready foothold in Italy. Bound by no loyalties, serving for gain rather than fealty, they nourished wars for their own benefit and protracted them as long as they could, while the hapless population suffered the effects. Merchants and pilgrims had to engage armed escorts. City gates were shut at night. The prior of a monastery near Siena moved all his possessions two or three times a year into the walled town “for fear of these companies.” A merchant of Florence, passing by a mountain village taken over by brigands, was set upon and though he cried aloud for help and the whole village heard him, no one dared come to his aid.

Yet even when roads are lawless and assault is normal, ordinary life has the same persistence as the growth of weeds. The great maritime republics of Venice and Genoa still brought to Europe the cargoes of the East, the Italian network of banking and credit still buzzed with invisible business, the weavers of Florence, the armorers of Milan, the glassblowers of Venice, the artisans of Tuscany still pursued their crafts under red-tiled roofs.

In mid-14th century the central political fact of Italy was the desperate effort of the Avignon papacy to maintain control of its temporal
base in the Papal States. To govern this great band of middle Italy from outside the country was in fact impossible. The cost of the attempt was a series of ferocious wars, blood and massacre, oppressive taxation, alien and hated governors, and steadily increasing hostility to the papacy within its homeland.

Inevitably the effort to reconquer the Papal States collided with the expansion of Milan under the Visconti who had seized Bologna, a papal fief, in 1350 and threatened to become the dominant power of Italy. When the papal forces succeeded in regaining Bologna, Bernabò Visconti in an epic rage forced a priest to pronounce anathema upon the Pope from the top of a tower. Rejecting papal authority altogether, he seized ecclesiastical property, forced the Archbishop of Milan to kneel to him, forbade his subjects to pay tithes, seek pardons, or have any other dealings with the Curia, refused to accept papal appointees to benefices in his domain, tore up and trampled on papal missives. When he ignored a summons to Avignon to be sentenced for debaucheries, cruelties, and “diabolic hatred” of the Church, Urban V excommunicated him as a heretic in 1363 and, in one of the century’s more futile gestures, preached crusade against him. Hostile to the Avignon papacy for its worldliness, rapacity, and its very existence in the French orbit, Italians regarded Urban as no better than a French tool, and paid no attention to his call.